SOPHIE HJERL
SOPHIE HJERL`S XR work is based on her background in video art, sculpture and dance.
- In her VR pieces she examines how the viewer can be placed 'inside' the art piece itself.
She works with what she calls: 'The body as consciousness in space' . She defines this as one of VR's strongest virtual and spatial possibilities.
In 2021 SH also started working with Augmented Reality. View AR works on seperate page
TORUS Tours, 2023
MUCO, Phenomenal
Dur: Loop 18 min.
Virtual Reality work, on 250 m2 floor. VR work on the MUCO (Multi-User Co-Location) platform Phenomenal, which allows up to 24 people to be in the same large virtual space simultaneously.
TORUS TOURS is a new Virtual Reality experience
in the world of the TORUS shape.
A spatial geometric shape that theoretically often originates from mathematical equations and goes all
the way from the apple to the electromagnetic field around the Earth, the new VR work aims to bring the geometric figure into a virtual space where we can
have the pleasure of seeing it and experience being
with it - relating to it physically albeit through a virtual experience.
The space itself refers to the ongoing struggle and power for energy. What may seem like a floor is related to the Chernobyl reactors. The UFO-like shape seen descending from above is a reference to ITER, the largest fusion experiment for new fossil-free energy, which also comes in the shape of a torus.
Parts of the VR work are interactive.
Credits
Sophie Hjerl (Artist, Director, 3d Scan, Sound)
Andreas Schönau (CG and programming)
Produced by Phenomenal Viborg / Hannibal Glaser and Sophie Hjerl
Prof. Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen & William Elbæk Mistegaard (Inspiration and Counciling – Mathematics)
TORUS (Act 1) - A Manifold Journey
TORUS is a virtual journey through the abstract universe of mathematics where the powerful Torus (the ring manifold) reigns. In this first of three acts, we start by entering an animated pulsating representation of the Torus’s infinite curves.
What is the shape of reality? Ring-shapes appear in many cultures and religions, life often being represented understood as an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, unifiying beginning and end.
Torus is the “ring of rings”, looping in multiple dimensions. The form plays a central role in topology, the mathematical study of continuous and connected spaces. Is also mirrors the shape of the geomagnetic field around the Earth.
In computer graphics, Torus is known as a primitive – a common shape used as a starting point for artists when designing virtual objects, and so TORUS (Act 1) fittingly marks the beginning of this new age of virtual experience rooms.
Experience Together
This piece is an exploration of multi-user VR named MUCO, which allows the ability to be in a shared virtual experience simultaneously. This gives a new dimension to the experience, and works as a new virtual museum.
This experience is taking place on a 250m2 area, making this a vast space for free exploration, larger than most other VR installations.
Torus is the first work in a series of three VR works, all of which work to explore the Torus form, which can seem both simple and complex at once. The first work, which is this, aims to unfold the form in a temporal and spatial course – and challenge the viewer’s encounter with it. As well as accessing the form from a scientific angle.
Thanks to Phenomenal Viborg, The Danish Arts Council, The Animation Workshop, University of Southern Denmark – Center for Quantum Mathematics.
Credits
Sophie Hjerl (Artist, Director, Sound)
Andreas Schönau (CG and programming)
Milan Grajetzki (Programming, Sound)
Storm Søndergaard (Programmer)
Produced by Phenomenal Viborg / Hannibal Glaser and Sophie Hjerl
Prof. Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen & William Elbæk Mistegaard (Inspiration and Counciling – Mathematics)
The VR piece Being is?, (2021), examines the condition of fleeing from an existential angle.
The title questions if there is a point, where being is tipped so much, that the perspective for being is absolutely displaced?
The VR piece takes place in a sensing dramatic landscape with texts from a person who had to leave the homecountry.
VR artpiece made by Sophie Hjerl.
Director, 3D scan, 360 degree film and sound:
Sophie Hjerl.
Cg artist: Johan Jæger
Text: Anonymous writer in exile
TEXT IN VR PIECE _ FROM ANONYMOUS WRITER IN EXILE
Are you a boy or girl? / Just a question. / Tell me, are you a terrorist? / What does 'home' mean?
I do understand but… Don`t you think you put too much emotions in it? / Breathe!
I can see your point but, aren`t you exaggerating? / Breathe!
Listen! We do not have a space for you here! / Is it possible to ask why?
Listen! We do not have a space for you here!
Questions!
EN SUITE, 2000/2021
SITE SPECIFIC MIXED REALITY / VIRTUAL REALITY (MR/VR) PIECE
MØSTINGS HUS, FREDERIKSBERG, CPH, DENMARK
21.04 - 30.05.2021
In the exhibition En suite, the visual artist Sophie Hjerl disturbs the physical reality using sculpture and Virtual Reality (VR). Through the two media, a total installation is experienced, which includes the concrete spaces of Møsting's House and a parallel universe manifesting itself, wearing the VR glasses.
In the exhibition spaces, the audience is centered in tubs, which give associations to bathtubs, sarcophagi or a kind of vessel for travel to distant galaxies.
It is from the tub that the VR work plays out itself, physically as well as virtually. The audience is taken on a virtual journey through time and space, where the surrounding Frederiksberg (the ares in CPH where the exhition space is) plays a vital role, and where the human body is examined as a container for memories and experiences.
On the journey that embraces sci-fi and antiquity, the audience's experience is transformed and manipulated of the surrounding space. In this way, Sophie Hjerl challenges the relationship between Place and Space - between a single geographical point and an infinite surface of places, memories and associations.
With the XR medias, Hjerl is interested in what she calls the body as consciousness in space. By combining the visitor's physical presence in the sculpture with Virtual Reality, you become part of the physical reality of the work and at the same time invited on a virtual sensual journey that goes far beyond the works concrete and spatial reality.
In ancient times, Frederiksberg was called Tulehøj, and the name refers to a priest or magician - a thul, who may have lived in the area a long time ago. He is the one who leads the way on a journey through the dimensions. The first time we meet him, he is in isolation in front of a bathtub and says a paraphrase Storm P. dialogue to a monologue with himself.
From here he leads the way further out of Møstings House.
The recordings with the thul, alone and isolated, were made in February 2020, and the work was since then woven in and out of the reality that the pandemic has created, and the old reality, everyone suddenly seemed to miss. For where is reality when it can no longer be maintained? Where does it go when it has first appeared to be fragile, staggered and distorted? Can it be recreated? And if so, in what image - in what form?
Art piece by Sophie Hjerl / Kinect, 360 degrees filming, video integrated: Sophie Hjerl / Programming and 3D: Lars Hemmingsen, Midtjysk 3D Service / Participating, Thul: Jonas Petri Megyessi / Monologues texts: Sophie Hjerl + én after Storm P. / Composers: Jesper Ørberg and Sophie Hjerl. The song Dreams, vocal and text by Agarfa George Atsu Amartey, produced and composed by Agarfa George Atsu Amartey (1957 - 2019) and Jesper Ørberg / Assistant: Karon Nilzén / Installation photos: Palle Bo Nielsen & Sophie Hjerl.
link to review:
link to interview:
Peperit 2.0, 2019
For the first time you can experience VR art at Heartland, when Sophie Hjerl's work “Peperit 2.0" will take you on a journey, where the goal is
to give an experience of being in a transitional phase between one place and another.
Graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts the artist Sophie Hjerl has a background in video art, sculpture and dance but today she also works with Virtual Reality. With her sculptural expression, she is trying to put the viewer in the center of the artwork, to become a part of it.
Heartland Festival takes place at Egeskov Slot, from the 30th of May to the 1st of June 2019.
Supported as part of Expanded Animation LAB - The Animation Workshop.
Stills from VR
Photo from Heartland: Kunsten.nu
VR artpiece by Sophie Hjerl
Director, video and sound: Sophie Hjerl
3d and programming: Midtjysk 3D Service / Lars Hemmingsen
Peperit 1.0, 2019
Dur: 5:00 min
VR by Sophie Hjerl, director and idea
3d and programming: Midtjysk 3D Service / Lars Hemmingsen
Sound: Sophie Hjerl
Peperit means birth in Latin. The VR piece examines the concept of birth, as a physics phenomenon and in transferred meaning. To give birth can be experienced as something primordial but also very spacy. As a movement that comes from both inside and outside, both tangible and abstract at the same time. The work of VR is between the concrete and the abstract, between something earthly or something from space and as a picture of transitions in life, as in birth or death.
The viewer finds himself or her-self in the middle of an egg like formation, bisected by a line continuing into eternity. Throughout the VR piece the lines, sticks moves in and out of hexagon patterns surrounding the viewer - contracting and releasing in a logical way of its own.
Supported by the Danish Arts Council and Expanded Animation / The Animation Workshop.
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Installation views from the group exhibition
Meanwhile in Denmark
by Maison du Danemark/ The Danish House in Paris
at Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris, nov- dec 2019.
Photo: Julien Mouffron-Gardner, Sophie Hjerl
Stills from the VR piece.
ROOM SERVICE
Carlsberg City Gallery and Art Center / Carlsberg Byens Galleri og Kunstsalon, CPH, DK
VR piece taking place in the old water tower of the former Carlsberg Brewery, Nov 2018 to Feb 2019.
Installations view + stills from the VR piece Dispatched/ Afsendt (2018)
Room Service is a solo exhibition by Sophie Hjerl created based on Carlsberg's former Machine Central, the Water Tower building, which is now listed and houses Carlsberg City's Gallery and Art Center.
The exhibition presents a central work using Virtual Reality (VR), as well as sculpture and light installations. The works open to a new spatial and temporal version of the actual physical spaces and at the same time offer a story that is also related to the former use of the rooms, of which the title:
Room Service.
The exhibition is physically located on the 7th floor in two mirrored spaces connected by two identical rooms.The rooms are to be found in the VR-work Dispatched / Afsendt where also sculptural elements from the exhibition's physical space will appear. Through the VR work, a transformation and manipulation of the actual surrounding space is experienced, and with the VR medium's ability to create 360-degree space, it is endeavored that both spaces meet with specific contrasts.
The work wants to challenge the perception of space: The actual physical, material versus the virtual and the intangible, the organic and the analog, versus the synthetic and the digital. The exhibition's space seems ideal for this study, as it has been patinated in a game-like aesthetic over time by much steam
The exhibition is curated by artist and curator
Simon Ganshorn
Programming and 3d Lars Hemmingsen / MIdtjysk 3d Service
Performer Jonas Petri Megyessi
Costume object Line Frank
Composer Jesper Ørberg
Assistant Helma Zeinali
Supported as part of Expanded Animation LAB - The Animation Workshop
Danish Arts Foundation, production support
Copenhagen Municipality Culture Committee, Visual Art
The exhibition Room Service has been awarded by the Danish Arts Foundation, 2019
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