Resonant Spaces: Wastelands, a video game art work VR version

Created by Espacios Resonantes & Joan Lavandeira
Research by Sofía Balbontín & Mathias Klenner
Field Recordings by Sofía Balbontín & Mathias Klenner
Video Game Design and Code by Joan Lavandeira
Visual Art by Joan Lavandeira
Sound Mastering by Mathias Klenner

aural architecture, VR game, sound art, game art, sound space, architecture acoustics

Video game with binaural audio and convolution reverb developed in Unreal Engine 4 for Oculus

Oculus 2 VR glasses, headphones and video game controllers.

"Resonant Spaces #11: Wastelands" is part of the research and series of art pieces "Resonant Spaces" that explores the creation of aural architectures through the intervention, recording, and acoustic simulation of a series of abandoned infrastructures on the margins of memory and the urban environment, sublime architectures with strange geometric shapes, uninhabitable spaces with unique and exacerbated acoustics.
Using a VR video game, the viewer-player creates a virtual and sonic journey through reverberant spaces, liquid spaces for storing oil, water, and gas. The virtual space becomes a meta-instrument, where the viewer-player composes sonic atmospheres through interaction with the space.
Using algorithms to measure sound positions through binaural acoustics and convolutive reverberations, three spaces are reconstructed through simulation as a process of acoustic archeology: a Cooling Tower of an abandoned Thermal Power Plant in Charleroi, a Flood Tank in Barcelona, and a World War II Oil Tank in Scotland, with reverberations ranging from 15 to 75 seconds.
The work marks a break between the human and the post-human, forging a narrative that transcends from human spaces to non-human spaces, raising issues around urban entropy and the current geological era of the Anthropocene.
The sonic exploration becomes a process of denunciation and sound becomes the evidence that reveals the rhythm of anthropogenic impact on the planet. We are presented with a territory of waste accumulation from production. A useless, petrified landscape that appears sterile. This entropic action of residual territorialities is inhabited and transformed by the video game, constructing a new dialogue that links humanity with dehumanization, the natural and the artificial, to the point that the first becomes the second and vice versa, until merging into the same concept. A landscape frozen in time by the forgetfulness of a humanity in the eternal process of production.