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.”
Pittsburgh City Paper · Review or critical responseStyles and Customs of the 2020s at the Carnegie Museum of Art
Kim Laughton — full artist world
01 / 05

My role

I selected the four artists and designed the cave as a shared starting point: visitors returned to it between the artists’ worlds.

Supported by

Selected credits

Scatter

Co-Founder / Immersive Director

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

Links & presentations