Virtual Reality Encounter CVTRAIN to Play PS122's COIL 2017

As part of the twelfth edition of PS122's Coil festival, Performance Space 122 presents CVRTAIN, a Virtual Reality (VR) experience by Yehuda Duenyas where the audience member is the star. CVRTAIN places the participant center stage in a beautiful theater where a curtain parts to reveal an audience of thousands teeming with adulation.

Emmy Award-winning experiential director Yehuda Duenyas digitally experiments with emotional states, and in CVRTAIN, he is trying to see if a feeling of adoration and love can be transmitted and felt inside of a digital environment. He is also simultaneously expressing his impish kink for subverting the audience / performer relationship by putting the spectator center stage. Using room-scale VR (HTC Vive), hand controllers, and new SkullcAndy Headphones that give haptic feedback, Duenyas draws on techniques of gaming and immersive theater to deliver a highly personalized, celebratory experience for one. There are several layers of reality playing at once: while you are standing in a theater in virtual digital space, you are also standing on a tiny set of a theater IRL in the gallery space where you are attending the experience. Our guests arrive as spectators and leave as celebrated performers.

The headset transforms a 2D theatrical installation into a 360-degree 3D onstage view of a beautiful theater or opera house. As the curtain parts, participants will just be able to make out the presence of an audience through the blinding lights, a packed house that is viscerally felt as the participant steps into the light to take a bow. Hand sensors and positional trackers located in the space mean that every action produces a different response in your audience. The more one moves and responds to the crowd, the more they react, leaving an entire audience's emotions at your virtual command, but only until the curtain closes.

Duenyas was the Experiential Director and Production Designer for the Ad Council's recent "Love Has No Labels" campaign, and his experiential entertainment company, Mindride, created the technology for the spot. Mindride won the 2016 Emmy for Outstanding Commercial for "Love Has No Labels", along with R/GA and Persuade. LHNL garnered over 1 billion media impressions, has been viewed over 150 million times online, and won 8 Cannes Lions, 11 Clio Awards, and 2 Facebook awards among others. . Crafted through inertial motion sensor data, virtual avatars, and real-time 3D animation, "Love Has No Labels" was the first ever Emmy win by a PSA.

The creative team for CVRTAIN includes members of Mindride's Emmy-Award winning personnel, as well as some exciting new collaborators. Christopher Romero (Lead Developer), Owen Bell (Game Designer), David Lobser (3D Artist) and Kristin Vallow (Production Designer), join the team, while representing Mindride is Ben Kato, (Designer, VR developer), Nick Suda, (R&D, Technical Advisor), Sara Pauley (Production Coordinator), and Jody Elff (Sound Designer).

Performances take place from January 3-15 at Wallplay's 151 Gallery located at 132 West 18th Street in Manhattan. Tickets are available online at ps122.org and by phone at 212.352.3101.

CVRTAIN was developed by Yehuda Duenyas, and is commissioned by Performance Space 122 with an implementation grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for the Building Demand for the Performing Arts Program.

ABOUT THE CREATIVE TEAM:

Yehuda Duenyas (also known as xxy) is an Experiential Director, and is the founder and CXO of the Emmy Award-winning Mindride, an experiential design company specializing in next-generation entertainment and technology. Bridging the gap between the physical and the virtual, Duenyas is a visionary artist who creates immersive encounters and interactive events, playful environments that sensuously evoke the mythic, the intimate, the ridiculous, and the sublime. His techniques emerge from his passion and experience working in the arenas of immersive theater, interactive technology, ride design, reality television, large-scale events, gaming, and physical computing.

Duenyas has created experiences and productions for Google/YouTube, Audi, the Ad Council, R/GA, Disney Imagineering, Mullen/Lowe, Logan & Sons, Alpine Labs, JetBlue, Weight Watchers, and MGM/UA among others. He consults on new forms of interactive experience design for the entertainment and advertising industries. Duenyas was the Production Designer and Experience Designer for the Ad Council's "Love Has No Labels" (LHNL) campaign. With over 1.5 billion media impressions, and over 150 million views online, LHNL was the most watched campaign of 2015, The campaign also won 8 Cannes Lions, 11 Clio Awards, 2 Facebook awards and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.

Duenyas and his team at Mindride also created The Ascent, the first mind-controlled ride/game, which was called the largest EEG bio-feedback machine in the world by the New York Times. Duenyas is also an Executive Producer of Mindcontrol, an EEG-driven reality game also Executive Produced by Mark Burnett and MGM/UA. The special aired in Canada in May of 2015. Currently online now, Duenyas is a Producer and Creative Director of a new format Zombie reality experience called Fight of the Living Dead created for YouTube Red. Presented nationally and internationally, and with an extensive background as a theater artist and director, Duenyas has custom-built numerous venues and mounted a range of award-winning productions and spectacles that re-envision how audiences engage and interact with live experiences.

His work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), The Drama Review (TDR), Theater magazine, New York Magazine, Interview magazine, Time Out NY (Top 10 Theater of 2008, 2007, 2005, 2002), the Village Voice, Paper magazine, NYPress, NPR, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Irish Times and many blogs and online publications, including Engadget, The Creators Project, Nerdist, and Kurzweil AI.

In addition, his work has been supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Greenwall Foundation, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the 9/11 Fund, the Downtown Theater Alliance, the Jerome Foundation, Arts International, Chashama, The Durst Organization, Two-Trees Realty, as well as private funders. He holds an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a BS cum laude in theater from Skidmore College, and is a founding member of the multi-award-winning underground New York Theater collaborative the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA).

Owen Bell (Game Designer) is a coder and digital artist working with games and virtual reality. His interests lie in the creative potential of human-computer interaction and collaboration, as well as the possibilities for theatrical performance in virtual reality. Over the last year, he has been developing the game Mendel, which explores using genetics to create surreal, procedural flora and is the first student game to receive funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. He holds an MFA in Game Design from NYU's Game Center.

Jody Elff (Sound Designer) is an audio engineer, sound artist, musician, and composer. Elff has had the pleasure of working in some of the most unusual musical and sonic environments imaginable. He has worked with Laurie Anderson, Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Winter, Hall & Oates, Paul Simon, and many others. He has engineering many albums, including the Grammy nominated "Sing Me Home" by the Silk Road Ensemble. His work with sonic environments has led him to develop a series of sound art works presented at museums and galleries internationally. He was commissioned to create a sound art installation - "Strata" - which is permanently on display in Lyon, France. Jody is also the founder of Little Dog Live, providing high-quality live-streamed broadcasts of concert events at littledoglive.com.

Ben Kato (VR Developer) is a Partner/Designer/Technologist at Mindride LLC. Previous projects include: The Ascent, Mind Control (TV), Love Has No Labels (Ad, Emmy Award 2016), Airflow: VR Human Flight Simulator (VR/ AWE Award 2015). Lighting Designer for National Theater of The United States of America (NYC/Obie Award). Programming & Effects Design for Full Scale Effects (LA).

David Lobser (3D Artist) is an internationally recognized, award winning animation director. He uses algorithmic, procedural generation techniques to create lush virtual worlds. He is interested in pushing computer animated effects into the realm of the intricate, messy and imperfect in order to articulate complex feelings and sensations. He has an extensive background in commercial animation and visual effects, has taught animation at Harvard University, and is presently the senior artist in residence at NYU's Media Research Lab.

Christopher Romero (Lead Developer) is COO of the new social VR platform, HolojamVR, led by Academy Award winning computer scientist Ken Perlin. In VR he developed code and UX for Flock, a HolojamVR experience that premiered at the Festival of Storytelling 2016; a demo for the CEO of Ikea; a model of an airport for a phobia reduction game; and is now lead developer on CVRTAIN. Christopher led the technical production teams at Nickelodeon Online (nick.com), Worldwide Biggies (Princess Bride Game, American Girl Virtual Word), FunGoPlay (connected online virtual world and offline physical activity product), and Adoptive (Bundoo, Yale Medicine website and application servers).

Christopher studied Poetics at New College of California with Robert Duncan and others. He plays Balinese Gamelan with Sekar Jaya in California and Dharma Swara in NYC and has performed at the Bali Arts Festival, Symphony Space, the U.N. and The Stone. His composition Uncertainty for gamelan and electronics premiered in Bali in 2006. He played and wrote songs for the bands Buddha Belly and Pellet in Toronto. He plays electronic percussion with Steve Horowitz's Code International on "Elevator Culture" and other words. As a solo artist he has created two albums of material - "Pretty Sketchy" and "Some Are". He produced two DVDs ("3 Films By Elias Romero" and "Ramayana") and conceived, produced and created projections for the shadow puppet play Wayang Jataka with I Gusti Sudarta and Andy McGraw. Sensitive Skin magazine has published two of his poems (2015-2016).

Sara Pauley (Production Coordinator) has worked extensively as a performer / creative collaborator with visual and theatrical artists and lives in Los Angeles and New York City. This is her third production coordinating events for Mindride. Most recently, she assisted on collaborations with the University of Houston and Zoukak Theater from Beirut and celebrated the west coast premiere of her choreography in Home/Sick with the Assembly at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a YA audiobook, manages a Pilates franchise in Los Angeles and is a Tavi Noir Solemate. Her devised movement has been performed at Joe's Pub, Ars Nova, The Ice Factory, The Living Theater, The Collapsable Hole, Dixon Place & the Obie Award winning Bushwick Starr.

Nick Suda (Technical Advisor / R&D) is an LA-based creative technologist. He has worked with Mindride since 2013, as part of the technical team behind the mechanics of Mind Control, the motion capture of Love Has No Labels, and the flying sensation of Airflow. He currently works in real-time music visualization in virtual reality for Red Pill VR. Nick is a graduate of Berklee College of Music (BM '11) and California Institute of the Arts (MFA '14) studying music technology. An obsessive musician by training, Nick's work is centered around the bespoke embodiment of digital processes, whether through hardware interfaces, virtual reality environments, site-specific installations, or sound design, music composition, and live performance.

Kristen Vallow (Production Designer) is one of the most daring, influential, and multidisciplinary production designers working in film, print, live shows, and advertising. Her iconic work with David LaChapelle created an aesthetic which has influenced a whole generation of photographers and directors. Kristen designed Elton John's Red Piano show at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and recently designed the much anticipated thriller for director McG and Warner Brothers. Kristen has established a sophisticated, textured and playful aesthetic that has been much copied throughout media and advertising. She collaborated with ad agency Peterson Milla Hooks on a range of campaigns for Target with directors including Floria Sigismondi and Mikon Van Gastel. Other collaborators include Mark Seliger, Ellen von Unwerth, Peggy Sirota, Todd Field, and Michael Haussman. She studied Art History at Columbia University and Historic Preservation at University of Pennsylvania.

Emmy Award-winning Mindride creates startlingly unique immersive experiences. They combine a deeply human creative vision with a bleeding edge technological perspective. An artist-driven company, Mindride's hybrid techniques for next-gen storytelling emerge from their passion and 20+ years of experience in the arenas of large-scale events, interactive technology, ride-design, gaming, virtual and augmented reality, neuroscience, physical computing, and creating visionary immersive theatrical experiences around the world. To conjure the most transcendent human experiences, Mindride ventures a step beyond the possible, into the impossible. Mindride won an Emmy for design, technology, and live experience, for the "Love Has No Labels" campaign, which went viral in March of 2015 with over 1.5 billion media impressions, over 150 million views online, and numerous awards. Mindride is also known for creating THE ASCENT, the first mind-controlled flying experience driven by a custom EEG bio-interface for a physical ride. Mindride's team has worked in collaboration with clients such as Google/YouTube, Walt Disney Imagineering, Audi, R/GA, The Ad Council, MGM/UA, and the Mark Burnett Company. For more information, visit www.mindride.co.

Wallplay is an open source creative agency powered by artists & technologists. Wallplay transforms virtual and physical spaces into storytelling channels for multimedia installations & exhibitions. Gallery 151's program is managed by Wallplay and sponsored by Alfa Development, New York's premier green building development company. Go to www.wallplay.com.

Performance Space 122 (PS122) provides incomparable experiences for audiences by presenting and commissioning artists whose work challenges boundaries of live performance. PS122 is dedicated to supporting the creative risks taken by artists from diverse genres, cultures and perspectives. We are an innovative local, national and international leader in contemporary performance.

Beginning in 2011, PS122 embarked on one of the most unusual and potentially radical shifts in its history, including a re-structuring of artist support, a business model overhaul, and the renovation of our building. As PS122's East Village home undergoes a much-needed interior renovation supported primarily by the City of New York, DCA and DDC, PS122's core activity continues to be providing audiences with contemporary live performance.

For over 3 decades, Performance Space 122 has been a hub for contemporary performance and an active member of the cultural community. Under the curatorial vision of Vallejo Gantner (Artistic Director 2005 - present) PS122 has developed a set of programs designed to re-establish the value of live performance, provide singular experiences for audiences that inspire critical thinking, and sustain the creative process for artists throughout their career. Largely in partnership with peer organizations, PS122 currently presents artists in all disciplines in spaces all over the city during an annual fall & spring season and the Coil festival in January.

In addition to the commissioning and presenting of artists from NYC across the US, and around the globe, PS122 has increased our activity off the stage to provide audiences with a variety of access points and context for the work on stage. These activities include both talkbacks with the artists as well as in depth conversations that bring together luminaries from non-arts disciplines to discuss a variety of topics including everything from religion, to migration, to queer real estate and cultural diplomacy. PS122 encourages the asking of questions and debate of contemporary society's issues in both artistic practice and audience experience. Visit ps122.org for more.

To post a comment, you must register and login.