Recto VRso is launching its 5th call for digital art projects

The digital art festival Recto VRso is celebrating its 5th anniversary on April 12-17, 2022. For the occasion, two calls for digital art projects are launched to exhibit during the event. Recto VRso is looking for digital art projects and artworks on the theme: “Real environment / Virtual environment”.

2022 theme: “Real environment / Virtual environment”

“To walk, to breathe, to stop, to feel, to look, to move, to play. To adapt, to live with what is around us. Being there.”We live in the environment around us, and it influences us. An environment that we choose, that we test, that we create, or more often that is imposed on us. Paradox of this constrained freedom; it is at the same time rich, and constitutive. The spaces around us are shifting, malleable, unpredictable, confusing, while looking familiar. They are part of us and seem natural, and acquired. This body/environment link can then become blurred, enabling us to ignore our living spaces on different levels: private, collective, terrestrial.

The creation of virtual environments can allow us to question these sensations by opening a new gaze onto what we live, and thus, onto other spaces of reflection: it can invite us to reflect on our experience in a more conscious way. The virtual environment can imitate the real, but it can also draw away from its limits completely; the virtual has its own codes. So, what are these codes and how do they allow the emergence of new possible spaces? Then, how can we rethink these codes with regard to the different possible virtual spaces? How to imagine the possible passages between real and virtual environments? And how to consider the spectator who is present in immersion and in interaction inside these spaces, and the impacts perceived by him/her?

Two calls for digital art projects in 2022

Art&VR Gallery

Since its creation in 2018, the Recto VRso festival highlights international digital artists and artworks. The Art&VR Gallery is the official exhibition of Recto VRso which presents about fifteen artworks selected after an international call for applications. Each year, one of the artists also receives a Laval Virtual Award in the Art&VR category during the prize-giving ceremony of the Laval Virtual exhibition, held on April 12-14, 2022.

In Situ Experimentation

For its 5th edition, the Recto VRso festival is launching a new call for projects: IN SITU EXPERIMENTATION. This call aims to create a significant link between art practices and three emblematic places of Laval (Mayenne, France): the MANAS, the Bateau-Lavoir Saint-Julien and the Bain Douches. Artists, curators, art students or even institutions can take over one of these spaces to develop or create an art project. The residency will take place on April 4-12, 2022, and will be followed by an exhibition on April 12-17, 2022.

Many areas of artistic exploration

This call for applications offers the possibility to explore the link between real and virtual environments, by opening several axes of artistic explorations, such as:

• The representation of the realistic or imaginary environment
• The creation of abstract, mathematical, generative environments.
• Parallel, multi-faceted, complementary environments.
• The possible hybridizations between real and virtual environments
• The passage between the real and the virtual
• Presence in a virtual environment, and multi-user social presence.
• Illusionary effects between real and virtual environments
• The paradoxes and explorations specific to the virtual
• The relational aesthetics between the artwork and the spectator
• The questions of environments with regard to our society
• The sensitive relationships and the embodied conscience of one’s environment
• etc.

Recto VRso questions new immersive and interactive art forms, between the real and the virtual. The selected artworks have to resonate with the theme and invite the exploration of emerging expressions using virtual, augmented, or mixed reality, immersive devices, interactive interfaces, robotics, multidimensional spatialization, presence effects, etc. Hybrid and transdisciplinary approaches are particularly appreciated.