VENICE.- Mat Collishaw will reveal a major new artwork at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in which immersive theatre meets extended reality.
BEDLAM is an entirely new type of experience in both its artistic content and the first-of-its-kind platform on which it is launched, which transports users to the wildest frontier of the metaverse. All produced at a level of humanism and realistic rendering that belies the fact that no additional software or hardware is required.
BEDLAM is hosted on a new platform GAIA, which allows new, creative possibilities for interacting in the metaverse. Produced to be equally impactful on a variety of devices, from a 5G smartphone to a VR headset, BEDLAM demonstrates GAIA's unique offering: combining expansive scriptwriting and reactive performance techniques with the latest movement capture and streaming technology to allow remote actors and participants to authentically interact in a virtual space, creating a bespoke storyline together, with an infinite number of unique experiences rendered in hyper-realistic audio visual detail.
Collishaw is a visual artist widely-recognised for his innovative use of new technologies in artworks that raise questions about the human compulsion towards shocking and illicit imagery. In a production that has taken over 4 years of in-depth historical research, writing and technological development, Collishaw has spawned almost infinite iterations of a story that unfolds in a virtual recreation of the world’s oldest hospital for the mentally ill, Bethlehem Hospital – or Bedlam as it became more widely known.
Participants in this extended reality (XR) experience see the asylum as visitors would have done in the 17th century: absurd, chaotic, grotesque and overwhelming. At a time when all UK healthcare was privately funded, the hospital sought to raise funds and encourage charitable giving by admitting the public for an entrance fee. However one of the side effects was that it became a form of cheap entertainment. Collishaw parallels this sinister chapter in the history of human conduct with our contemporary situation, reflecting our voyeuristic tendencies back at us in a dramatic plot twist at the climax of the BEDLAM experience.
The plight of Bedlam’s incarcerated residents, and alienation they experienced, resonates with the way that technology today threatens to isolate us from real life. The internet is a portal to an inexhaustible supply of all that is shocking and grotesque and that feeds the same base fascination as would have motivated people to visit Bedlam in the 17th century. So all the more poignant that BEDLAM was chosen by producers El-Gabal and Minky Productions to exemplify the pinnacle of how cultural experiences can be presented in a virtual space.
Immersive theatre is just one in a range of possibilities presented by GAIA, the platform that hosts BEDLAM that has been developed by El-Gabal. In GAIA the quality of graphic rendering and the actors’ performance (facial expression, body motion capture) offers a level of realistic intimacy unseen before in the virtual world. This provides opportunities for recreating images more faithfully than ever before as well as allowing entirely more human, real time and unique interactions between visitors and hosts. In the decentralised virtual space that has become known as the Metaverse, visitors can currently trade in investments such as property, interact via proto metaverses such as FB Horizon and games such as Roblox and Fortnite. They can even buy art from Sotheby’s auction house, yet through GAIA, BEDLAM now demonstrates a level of physical recreation and bespoke guided storytelling that has never been seen before at this new frontier of digital communication. As such BEDLAM is a model of best practice for the type of narrative content that will shape the nascent metaverse: universally accessible and defined by its social, role-playing, and serendipitous aspects.
