UNESCO: Media Arts Creative Cities Forum 2021

2021 Net Play Beyond Network Performance: This is Not a Game is a real-time distributed digital experiment created to be showcased during the 2021 UNESCO Digital Arts Creative Cities Network Policy Forum. The Forum was held in Gwangju, South Korea on October 7. Both the performance and the Forum are organized by the Gwangju Cultural Foundation and hosted by the City of Gwangju.
The experiment involved the Korean musician Paul Bazooka, the Korean digital artist Inhwa Yeom, the actress Rocío Berenguer, the dancer Anna Macau, the Korean B-boy dancers Jinjo Crew and the Fundación Épica La Fura dels Baus. The experiment, which has culminated in the creation of a digital piece, reflects on the experiences lived during the pandemic era, specifically in the format of a performance-game (or game-performance). 
For the realization of the piece, 4 online workshops were held with the participants and their affiliated institutions. During the Workshops, the participants have discussed, devised and implemented their concepts of “performance-game (or game-performance)”, “network systems”, “real time”, “delays and latency”, “remote sensing and drivers” , and “experiences during and after the COVID-19 outbreak,” among others.

Épica’s contribution to this project focuses on the generation of a world that is born from the union between virtual space and physical space. All this is materialized through a dancer with an Oculus Quest 2 device that dances in the digital world and receives impacts from the physical world that, in turn, are transferred to the virtual world. A new paradigm in which a constant dialogue between the physical and the virtual is established. 
At a technical and technological level to materialize the proposal, the physical space has been differentiated from the virtual one. The virtual world has been developed using the Unity framework. This world allows the dancer, on the one hand, to move herself, on the other, the interaction with different objects, among others, the text that is introduced into the virtual world as a point of union between the physical and the conceptual. The signal from this virtual world has been captured thanks to Oculus’ real-time streaming functionality. In relation to the physical world, a space based on chroma has been built, which allows us to integrate the virtual world and the dancer. 2 cameras have been used (one for chroma and one for reality capture). These 3 video sources have been entered into production software, thanks to which they have been able to be combined and selected depending on the moment and the specific action.