Description:

In this piece of work, I created a music video for Wellington-based musician Wiri Donna. In an interactive and immersive environment, I combine the themes of her new EP Release 'Being Alone' and the conceptual notions of my thesis work 'Into the Maw: a domain beyond.'

The brief set by Wiri Donna was to create an environment that answered her proposition: "What could my artistic world look like if I were freed from the restraints of our physical world?"

The music video was the perfect opportunity to test a non-binary rationale through a unique generative design process. I focused on how a virtual world might look and feel if Wiri Donna had full autonomy of her surroundings. This project acted as an influential development piece within my thesis studies, as it spoke to the notions of unlearning the way we interact with virtual spaces, through the conceptual framework of Wiri Donna's music. ‘Into the Maw: a domain beyond’ explores how a Non-Binary entity inhabits code-space. A Cyber-Non-Binary existence is often expressed behind the closed doors of social and architectural landscapes. It relies merely on the self-autonomy and agency that cyberspace and digital existence provides. We cannot change how existing software computes, but we can change how we use it. Treating a binary-coded system (in this case, Blender) as a 3-dimensional object, offered a new lens to explore the formal and spatial facets of video production. Set design, texturing, lighting, and filming take on new capabilities within virtual space.

The theory behind the virtual magic explores the notions of binary parameters applied in a way that personifies and exponentially expresses one's freeness in virtual space; thus, Wiri Donna's freeness is expressed within her own virtual landscape. Transportation by bubbles, empathy and connection by caricature, site by theme and time by feeling. The addition of physical artefacts, such as the contents of Wiri Donna's IRL room, provides a grounding attachment to the things we hold close, and inherently express ourselves with, in the physical world. These objects and environments are abstracted in a way that allows viewers to engage with a non-binary lens of experiential space ambiguously.

Within the music video, viewers can experience a world generated by experience and emotive parameters. Wiri Donna's world suggests sanctum within alternate platforms of existence, a platform where a non-binary entity prevails through the design and construction of virtual world existence, providing a means to explore, experiment and express oneself freely.