“These days you run into a whole lot of people asking: ‘Do you believe in stereo cinema?’ To my mind this question sounds about as absurd as if they were to say: do you believe that it will be night-time at midnight, that one day the snow in the streets of Moscow will melt away, that there will be green trees in the summer and apples in the fall?” (Sergei Eisenstein)
Virtual Reality
Media collisions as drivers of innovation for new approaches to cultural heritage
The Eisenstein apartment was a place of living history, where each object told a story. This experience will be revived in virtual space in a new way.
Through the reconstruction of the Eisenstein flat, the user will be able to access Sergei Eisenstein’s intellectual world as an immersive experience. In the virtual apartment, objects will tell us stories through various media. They will become bridges that lead to Eisenstein’s world.
The general public is mostly familiar with VR experiences in the form of games. The typical VR look is often associated with a digital aesthetic created by developers and computer designers. It does not address every target group and is not suitable for every content.
We will explore new aesthetic forms which correspond to the artistic world of Sergei Eisenstein. In this context, we will experiment with a combination of digital and analogue art forms. We will research the application of Eisenstein’s montage theory in the context of “media bridges”, i.e. to make a connection between VR and 3D sound and information visualization (InfoVis). We will work with narrative forms that merge realism, impressions and abstraction.
New forms of representation for cultural collections will be developed that have the potential to address also users, who are not used to the world of computer games. Our research aims to expand the use of VR as an instrument of scientific research and a means of visualizing digital cultural heritage.
