We all have those days when we’re cleaning the house and get the sudden urge to dance. To go Risky Business with it, even. It’s the freedom we inhabit when no one else is around, where we’re free to embrace the goofiness of unsupervised dance. Or rather, flailing. When I watch “Scribbler,” a video of artist Danny Bittman dancing while within virtual reality, I’m brought back to all those times of dancing around the house, alone, probably listening to something Ed Banger Records related.
“Scribbler” is a video showcasing the art one can weave while dancing in VR, featuring the track “Crush” by Human Bloom. Using the art tool Tilt Brush, Bittman sashays and swings his arms about, each cut with a different brush in use. The end result is a visualization of his movements as they are made into digital art. It’s altogether a unique mixture: performance art mashed with digital art, and displayed seamlessly for viewers to behold both as they unfold.
But then the video cuts to the artlessness of it all: just Bittman alone and dancing, spinning and twirling without even Vive controllers in his hands. No Tilt Brush-beholden swirls or patterns left in his wake. The video cuts between these two visions: Bittman and the art birthed from him; and Bittman alone and dancing. The song winds down, alternating between the two jarring fields of shots, all until Bittman’s alone on the ground—the dancing has ceased.
This isn’t the first time Bittman’s utilized VR for art. The Chicago-based artist has tinkered with VR-bound art immensely in the past prior to “Scribbler,” from crafting abstract wonderlands in Anyland, to a stagnant island in the Tilt Brush-crafted work “Highland.” Once a filmmaker, Bittman has now pivoted wholly into the world of VR, even going as far as to crafting Tilt Brush works daily for a month. And “Scribbler” is only a small sliver of his ever-broadening catalogue of VR art.
(via Motherboard)
