I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 2004), p.35.

Surisol: POVCR is a spinoff of a single-channel video At the Surisol Underwater Lab (2020) which was created for Busan Biennale 2020, Korea.

At the surface level, this project entitled Surisol: POVCR (Point of View Corrosive Reality) features three “characters”: Sohila, Surisol, and the Storyteller. In a sense, however, the world may contain more beings besides these—beings like the world’s creators, bystanders, players, and the ones trying to rectify the imperfect world riddled with holes and errors.
This project is a speculative narrative that simulates the situation of the near future—the post-pandemic era. It attempts to construct a “possible world,” which is accessible in reality by reflecting or distorting the present conditions. The project imagines a society where sustainable biofuel—marine algae fuel produced by fermenting macro-algae kelp—has become the primary energy source after human’s fossil fuel usage drove the world to climate change and accelerated resource depletion. The conversation between the character Sohaila and the AI Surisol hints at the symptoms generated by carbon credit, energy sustainability, and extreme weather.
Meanwhile, “montage,” one of the unique methodologies of moving image, can hardly exist in VR media. The distinctive magic of moving images—freely flowing into temporality through varied cameras that alter and stitch perspectives together—somehow does not work well in this medium, where the audience’s eyes become the camera and the subject’s movements equal the camera’s movement. Therefore, an active intervention of editing that transcends the subject’s motion only brings confusion in VR. But, then, where does a meaningful montage occur in this slick VR space with no montage? The project attempts to create a montage through the traverses and collisions between the external world and the VR—the conflicts and leakages of the overlapped worlds.

 
*The “AWAKE” that appears in the project is the first command, a promise to set in motion the world constructed inside the game engine. The information fragments that make up the world run by object-oriented language are programmed to lift their bodies at the sound like spirits shaking the earth’s surface and rising up. A tender voice starts reciting the spell towards the game objects and you: “Awake.” Only then does the world begin.

**POVCR can roughly denote “Point of View Corrosive Reality”.

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