AlexanderPorter

Styles and Customs of the 2020s

Four speculative worlds connected by a firelit cave.

Period
2017
Status
Complete / Archived
Form
Room-scale virtual-reality installation
installation documentation
A visitor wears a VR headset in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Architecture, followed by views of the project’s cave, artist worlds, and physical kiosk.

The project

You put on a headset in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Architecture and enter a firelit cave. From that central world, four science-fiction scenarios branch out: space-steading billionaires, sound-canceling isolation bubbles, water crises, and killer drones covered in artisanal Tuscan leather. Styles and Customs of the 2020s was a fifteen-minute anthology VR installation commissioned for the Hillman Photography Initiative’s Lightime and presented from March to September 2017.

Building the shared world

DIS’s fifty-page brief became a sourcebook for the installation. Kim Laughton, Rachel Rossin, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and Alan Warburton each took a passage into Unity and built a distinct version of the near future.

The firelit cave connected them. We rebuilt it from thousands of photographs captured by Silvain Yart in France. Visitors returned to the cave between scenes, so each world arrived by transformation rather than through a menu. The production problem was to make four very different visual languages feel coherent inside one room-scale experience without sanding away their differences.

What others saw

“The immersive VR presents the works in a novel and powerful way that functions both as a warning and a call to action.”— Carrie Mannino, Pittsburgh City Paper
Pittsburgh City PaperStyles and Customs of the 2020s at the Carnegie Museum of Art
Kim Laughton — full artist world
01 / 05

My role

Virtual Reality Director

Scatter

Co-Founder / Immersive Director

I was the virtual reality director. I selected the four artists, designed the cave, and directed how the individual worlds became one room-scale installation.

Supported by

Selected credits

Adrian Massey
Narration
Alan Warburton
Artist
Alexander Porter
Virtual Reality Director
Anna Henson
Associate Producer
Elliott Mitchell
Technical Director / Lead Developer
Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Artist
Jillian Morrow
3D Assistant
Kim Laughton
Artist
Malcolm Bowen
Narration
Mei-Ling Wong
Scatter Co-Founder / Lead Producer
Rachel Rossin
Artist
DIS
Creative Brief / Collaborating Collective
Scatter
Production / Collaborating Collective

Links & presentations