The novel by Thomas More has turned 500 years this year, and that is why we show the VR film Diorama Utopia. This is a virtual art work, where public moves through the scenes from Thomas More’s fictive travel diary, in a free interpretation by several Bergen-based artists in late autumn 2015. The VR-format can be experienced as an extreme version of interactive theater. The experience would remind about a video game such as Grand Theft Auto or Alice in Wonderland. The public becomes a part of the action. Through 3D glasses and a headset the VR-film embrases the senses, in the similar way it does in the traditional museum Diorama. Thomas More constructed the word Utopia from the Greek outopia (a noplace) and eutopia (a good place). The new VR medium gives a possibility to create a strange diary of another place, built up on ambivalence and amazement the travelogue from Nowhere of More has been creating through the last 500 years.

Background:
Artist Margrethe Kolstad Brekke and curator Ekaterina Sharova have been working with the project devoted to the post-Utopian reality in the Northern Russia. In 2016, there is a 500 years anniversary of Thomas More’s novel Utopia. The collaboration resulted in participatory projects Utopia500 and The Beautiful Faraway.

Artist: Margrethe Kolstad Brekke.