By Christine Westwood
The New Frontier program, which runs as part of and concurrent with the Sundance Film Festival, features experimental forms of storytelling through to cutting-edge media art. Since it began 11 years ago, New Frontier has expanded its range to encompass installations, projections, digital paintings, and especially the technology explosion of virtual reality immersive experiences. At the forefront of the VR experience is the launch of Voyager, the world’s first cinematic full motion VR viewing chair, developed by the Los Angeles based technology studio, Positron.
One of two New Frontier artists employing Voyager in his VR piece Orbital Vanitas is Australian born Shaun Gladwell. Speaking to FilmInk before and during the Sundance Film Festival, Gladwell expressed his excitement at diverging his art onto more platforms, and his collaboration with Leo Faber and the Bad Faith Collective of artists, producers, animators and cinematographers.
“I was invited by the New Frontier’s curator to present some ideas I was working on, so I gave them this crazy one of animating an orbital perspective with a skull that you fly through. They liked the idea so we moved ahead knowing they were interested in the work. I was the artist and the creative lead but it was definitely the collective that brought the other skills to produce it.”
Trained in Australia and Goldsmith College in London, Gladwell’s first artistic successes came from his passion for skateboarding, a theme he has explored especially in video art. His work spans moving image, painting, photography, installation, performance, and text and is held in many museum collections throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and galleries in Australia and London.
He represented Australia at the Venice Biennale with a video installation of him driving a car and motorbike in the outback, referencing a diversity of images including Sidney Nolan to Mad Max. In 2009 the Australian War Memorial commissioned him to visit Afghanistan as their first video war artist.
With a notable lack of boundaries in his media and cultural references, it seems his strong focus on archetypal themes and motifs is the throughline that drives the energy in his work, an example being the skull that appears in Orbital Vanitas.
“I’ve always been obsessed with the skull image. It started when I was involved in surf and skate culture and street art, and the graphics that are associated with that culture, where the skull was always a prominent image. This notion of ‘vanitas’, of meditating on skulls and mortality, goes back to antiquity; then the formal presentation came in the renaissance.
“The sculpture I presented at the Venice biennale was looking inside the interior of the skull, and the Australian Centre of the Moving Image has another of my skull works in their collection. So, I’ve been obsessed with the theme for a long time and it was great to translate the idea into VR and 360 degree animation, trying to visualise a skull not just from the exterior but from the inside out. VR is a medium made to achieve that process.
“We assembled the animation in two and half weeks, we had no resources or budget but were passionate about the idea. The work is a conflation of a lot of different interests, like images of Saint Jerome and the Hubble space telescope and Star Wars. The image of the earth from space is also iconic. The skull, earth and sun are the three elements of the work.”
As demonstrated and experienced at New Frontier’s official launch, the resulting VR journey is beautiful, a poetic meditation on mortality and where we live in space and inside our own consciousness. The viewer hovers over the horizon of earth before entering a skull, depicted as another orbiting body in space.
“We wanted to find work that was imaginative, diverse, from all over the world and that really moved us,” explained New Frontier curator Hussein Currimbhoy. “VR is the most exciting medium there is right now. It really works on bringing the viewpoint back to us. In a traditional gallery you spend an average of a minute or two looking at a piece of work, here you have to engage with something that can take 6 minutes, 15 minutes, and VR storytelling isn’t just a cerebral thing, it involves the whole body.”
When asked to comment on the inclusion of Gladwell’s work, Currimbhoy adds, “I have been a fan of Shaun’s work for years. Orbital Vanitas is so cinematic. I recognised this as a powerful piece, a kind of masterpiece actually.”
Gladwell was on hand at the festival, happily encouraging viewers in the VR experience. He sees Orbital Vanitas as a continuation of his diverse yet systematic approach to his subjects. “A key of my work is to connect popular imagery with antiquity and art history, literature, philosophy, it all gets stirred up in a pot. I try not to make value judgements; the pop culture references are just as important as the historically celebrated images. The idea or concept is the thing, it just gets packaged in different ways, the medium is secondary. It’s not like I ever leave a medium, I keep everything running at the same time. The VR experience, for instance, is generating more paintings.
“Some curators love that diversity, others see it as drastically and desperately unfocused, which I probably am! But going forward, I’m interested in doing more VR with Bad Faith whose members are doing incredible work. And I’ll still be making a mess in the studio in the traditional way too.”
Check out Orbital Vanitas at Sydney Film Festival’s VR Hub and hear Shaun Gladwell In Conversation as part of Vivid.
