ARCAAN Collective — EMERSIVE
Reviewed by Chenoa Baker

EMERSIVE reminds me of my fond childhood memories of Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase (2001) where an anthropomorphized virus causes havoc in real life then an unknown villain transports the characters into a video game where they must defeat the virus by winning each level. It reminded me of being immersed into a computational plane through the interplay of lines and grids on screen, triangles and rectangles falling apart and shooting in every direction, zooming out and spinning (evoking a very meta feeling), spheres and cylindrical shapes that feel planetary and biological emerge like white blood cell animations in the body. 

Antoine Briot, sound designer, and Jeremy Oury, digital artist created ARCAAN Collective so that it “focuses on a feeling of virtual movements and about the temporality to disrupt the spectator's perception of space. Each building and immersive space becomes a visual and sound laboratory for the collective, conducive to the emergence of a new artistic grammar.”

After many perspective shifts, it ends fast and abruptly. The sound during the work is the familiar dial up noise and the calculation sound of cartoons like Dexter’s Laboratory. The audience is left with binary 01s abstracted into shapes and a feeling of dystopia. As we experience this rollercoaster ride of sounds, shapes, and lines on a black screen with neon green and purple, it questions how much technology takes over, is lost when it evolves, and simultaneously the portals to the otherworld that it opens up.