Virtual Reality (VR) is a new world

Artists Eden and Andrew Kötting have a new film, The Tell-Tale Rooms, showing for free in the basement of the OB (Observer building) until Tuesday 18 March. The experience is immersive, like being Alice, unexpectedly in Wonderland. Bernard McGinley reports.

Strap on some unigoggles and you’re there: high in the French Pyrenees. Left-right vision is 360°. Up-down is the same. At first it’s slightly unnerving. Bubbles float by, and heads, and captions. Father and daughter Eden and Andrew Kötting have made The Tell-Tale Rooms to give a sense of her world, where art, memory and dreams collide. She is neurodivergent, with Joubert Syndrome: she communicates differently.

The film presents a version of an alternative reality, through several rooms of a mediaeval farmhouse repurposed regarding Memory, Nostalgia, Hope, Progress, Regrets, Forgetting, Confabulation, Make-Believe and other aspects of an exceptional life.

Blending animation, archive footage, and live action, the film takes viewers on a 12-minute playful and slightly hallucinogenic journey with inconsistent scale through Eden’s imagination. Additionally The Tell-Tale Rooms exhibition includes paintings, drawings, mementoes, other objects and costumes relating to the life and the project. There are also different books and objects for sale to illuminate what is going on: Edenic playing cards for instance. The exhibition offers an uplifting insight into her life, in a celebration of creativity and resilience.

Andrew Kötting (r) on the Hastings seafront with Iain Sinclair (Wikimedia Commons)

Other film work

Kötting’s work is well known and appreciated, at the British Film Institute (BFI) and elsewhere. Gallivant won a Channel 4 prize. Film critic Mark Kermode said, “When it comes to immersive cinema, few filmmakers can hold a candle to British maverick Andrew Kötting”. Swandown, like other films, was also acclaimed.

Eden Kötting is part of the Wednesday Mentoring Group at Project Art Works, Hastings, and shares a studio with Andrew in St Leonards.

At the first night, Andrew Kötting explained how the project arose from their residence in France, and how the new animation was realised with the help of friends and collaborators: the journey from Super8 and digital to the closeness of VR. As he didn’t believe in endings, the work didn’t end but kept spinning, from one project to another. An earlier film, This Our Still Life was also showing at this exceptional exhibition.

OBX

OBX is the creative technology hub run by Hastings Commons inside the Observer Building (OB). In The Tell-Tale Rooms, visitors are invited to walk among Eden’s artworks and to use their imagination. Other events are pending.

Exhibition

Also in: Visual Arts