Stephanie Pan released her impressive album Have Robot Dog, Will Travel last year, a frightening and dystopian song cycle for the technological age, an ode to abstraction and ambiguity. The epic “Beast”, one of the songs from the album, is based on a text generated by a machine learning software in collaboration with artist Tivon Rice. Trained for the occasion in the voice of Italo Calvino to describe images related to the texts of the rest of the album, and edited by Pan to its current state, it is an abstraction of an abstraction. Inspired by the idea of this meta abstraction, Madhouse Heaven has created a 360 VR video for ‘Beast’, another interpretative layer of hallucination. The video premieres during Gaudeamus and can be experienced during Senses Working Overtime.
Using nothing more than VR glasses in combination with a smartphone (one’s own, or one provided by the artist), this presentation furthermore highlights the age of access in the digital age.