- Becoming Leeches:Episode1-Having Dinner
Project Description and Information_ Becoming Leeches: Episode 1 – Having Dinner, ver.1
Short Artwork description:
‘Becoming Leeches: episode 1 – Having Dinner’ is an introductory version of the ‘Leech Project’ series which explore the augmented senses of live leeches through a machine computer vision system. This system facilitates collaborations with a human performer in an experimental virtual reality (VR) performance. Human participants and virtual leeches have a symbiotic relationship and help each other to survive within the post-apocalypse scenario of the VR game. The human participant, wearing a VR headset, has a dinner party with live leeches in the real world. At the same time on the dining table, the human game player journeys to leech-islands and can find virtual leeches in the virtual world. The virtual leeches are avatars of other human participants, whose actual feeding of the live leeches on the dining table trigger the avatars’ behaviors and reactions to help the game player’s survivability in the VR game via interactions in computer vision system. The artist of the project plays a chef, serving catering dishes for the participants’ feeding of live leeches. ‘Becoming Leeches’ creates enjoyable interactive activities and entertainment that engage the interrelationship between human and non-human animal, promote public awareness about understandings of interspecies relationships, and convert unfamiliarity with what are seen as “disgusting” animals (leeches) into artistic beauty, within the art game and visual performance.