The second FilmEU DOCTUS research seminar was dedicated to “Artistic Research in Virtual Reality” and took place in Lisbon at Lusófona University from 14 to 16 March 2023. For three days, 20 PhD students from the four institutions of the Filmeu consortium (Lusófona, LUCA, IADT and TLA) were invited to experience several VR art pieces and to prototype their research ideas with a technical-creative team. 

On the first day, participants could virtually visit Helsinki (Virtual Helsinki, 2019, Jonathan Medina); relate with mental health conditions expressed through the animated works Goliath (2020, Barry Gene Murphy) and Darkening (2021, Ondřej Moravec); admire the film collage Montegelato (Davide Rapp); get to know the poetry of Glad that I Came, Not Sorry to Depart (Azam Zadeh); dialogue with someone in an XR environment where painting and building with clay are literally on top of the table (Table Dialogues – Earth, by Robbert&Frank); and experience for the first time the Congo VR, a prototype of what the VR team of the Panorama du Congo project (Filmeu-RIT) is putting together. There was still time for an opportune presentation by Thiago Leitão de Souza regarding the project VR Panorama of Rio de Janeiro, which consists not only in digitising the landscape but also in turning it into a gaming experience.

The participants went on for the second day much inspired by the pieces and then had the opportunity to meet the authors Azam Zadeh, Robbert&Frank and Davide Rapp for a Q&A session. The first Masterclass of the day was a Gravity Sketch lesson taught by Gert Wastyn and the second one, by Lucas Dewulf, was an introduction to Mozilla Hubs exploring its social and artistic possibilities. By the end of the day, the participants presented some work topics and started brainstorming on the ideas to develop.

Finally, the third session was all about developing and implementing the ideas the four groups came up with regarding their chosen topics: 3D calligraphy, expanded drawing, 360 poetry and Congo VR. The groups were set up taking into account the participants’ skills and the projects were developed as pilots and with the help of the experts. The projects were presented and everyone got to experiment and give feedback that may be useful for future endeavours.

The event mastered the balance between practice-led and practice-based research while contributing to an efficient way to share knowledge and work collaboratively in order to achieve better and more relevant results.

The DOCTUS Artistic Research in VR was organized by Wim Forceville (LUCA) and Lusofona’s PhD in Media Arts and Communication with the collaboration of Carolina Martins, Rita Carvalho and Célia Quico.