Media Gallery: Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall

• Grand Prize of the IBM Innovation Award at the Boston Cyberarts Festival
• Reviews of exhibitions
• Photo of the virtual reality installation
• Screenshots from the VR artwork
• Sound collage: A collage of sounds taken from the VR artwork
  
• Demo video (with grateful thanks to www.architekturclips.de!)
  

DVD
We plan to produce and offer for sale a DVD documenting the VR project Virtuelle Mauer/ ReConstructing the Wall. This DVD will not contain the VR artwork itself - only the interactive, kinesthetic sense of navigating through the life-size, large-screen projection of the virtual world itself can give the user the desired immersive experience of "being there." The DVD will be a "making of" documentation of the virtual artwork and its presentations, explaining how we use dramatic techniques such as simulation, interactivity and time travel to go beyond a purely documentary reconstruction of the Berlin Wall to create a "living" environment.

In the VR installation, users walk along the Berlin Wall at street level on foot, encountering it as a disorienting, arbitrary barrier to their freedom of movement. The DVD, on the other hand, will contain texts, photos, panoramas, maps and videos in order to give users an analytical overview of the course and development of the Wall, and the effects its presense had on the urban environment of this site. This material will be complemented by a timeline showing the historical and political context of the Wall, an overview map showing the entire Berlin Wall and a skematic showing the construction of the various layers of the Death Strip. Using "machinima," animated recordings of of pathways through the virtual world, we will be able to take the viewer on a virtual walk through the site at the time of the Wall, contrasting it with video recordings of the current state of the site.