V[R]ignettes
Originally titled A Million and Two, V[R]ignettes is a series comprised of Virtual Reality crafted microstories. Each individual microstory, or vignette, is designed to encourage a kind of ‘narrative smearing’ – where traditional story techniques are truncated and mutated into smears (kinetic actions and mechanics, collage-like layered building blocks, visual distortions, dual-tiered text annotations) which requires a reader to make active choices in order to navigate each microstory space (storybox).
The microstories presented below are part of the ongoing V[R]ignettes Series. When exploring each microstory, a reader will experience poetically dense language (such as letters bracketed in words – requiring rereading – that are designed to expand and enhance meaning potentials) and various visual, textual and technological elements that require direct audience input (such as: do you choose to view each microstory in a 3D or VR space – through a Virtual Reality headset or a mobile phone or computer monitor? Do you set each microstory to autopilot, or navigate the experience through manual annotation click-throughs and spatial manipulations? Do you choose to use the model inspector and view the microstories without any post-processing effects, or in wireframe? Do you choose to enable audio? Do you read only the title fields or entire paragraphs?) Such smears are also designed to be combined by the reader to create a story piecing system that’s circular in nature, where a reader/interactor is encouraged to experience each microstory multiple times, in multiple ways. For instance, when experiencing In the Skin of the Gloam, if a reader chooses to read only the title line of each annotation, they’ll experience a minimal poetic (title) text version: if they instead read the rest of the annotation accompanying teach title line, the narrative is accented differently. If you choose to manipulate (scale, rotate, zoom) the 3D models in the space (and/or if you engage autoplay, or in the case of Wracking in the Upper Bubble read the wall text only), a reader’s experience will be markedly different from those choosing to experience each microstory in a VR space (where teleportation is an option and the spatial dimension is crucial).
To load each microstory, please press the white arrow in the middle of each V[R]ignettes storybox below (and if viewing on a mobile device, please make sure to view each storybox in full screen mode). After clicking on the white arrow, to begin reading the text please click on the “Select an annotation” bar at the bottom of each storybox screen: from there, you get to choose how you experience all other narrative smearing possibilities. If you need help with navigation and controls, please click the “?” located in the bottom right side of each storybox.
Mez Breeze
Mez Breeze crafts experimental storytelling, Virtual Reality Literature, VR sculptures + paintings, XR experiences, games, and other genre-defying output. In 1994, Mez first started using the World Wide Web to author digital works and she hasn’t slowed since. Current and past tinkerings include the Inanimate Alice Virtual Reality Adventure Perpetual Nomads, musing about the rise of Augmented Reality at The Next Web, and exhibiting with the Third Faction Collective at World of Warcraft: Emergent Media Phenomenon.
In May 2020, two Virtual Reality works authored by Mez made the shortlists of the Fiction and Poetry Categories of the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, with Perpetual Nomads winning the Reader’s Choice Award. In November 2019, Mez’s Virtual Reality Microstories Series V[R]ignettes – previously titled A Million and Two – won the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Literature Award. In July 2019, Mez won the 2019 Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award which: “…honors a visionary artist and/or scholar who has brought excellence to the field of electronic literature and has inspired others to help create and build the field.” In January 2019, her VR Literature experience A Place Called Ormalcy was shortlisted for the 2018 If:book New Media Writing Prize.
In early 2018, Mez partnered with Microsoft, Samsung and MasterpieceVR for their VR Influencers Sustainability Initiative where VR Artists were invited to design models using a Windows Mixed Reality Headset. Also in 2018, Mez’s Virtual Reality Literature Experience Our Cupidity Coda made the finals of the 2018 EX Experimental New Media Art Awards, while also making both the 2018 Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition and the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards for Digital Literature Shortlists. In November 2017, This Golden Stance was showcased at the Las Ranetas International Festival of Virtual Reality (alongside the Oculus Story Studio produced Dear Angelica and Sony’s Snatch): as of May 2018, this VR Sculpture was acquired by the Museum of Other Realities.
In 2016, Mez took up an invite from the digital arts organisation Rhizome to have work memorialized in their Net Art Anthology: in January 2019, this Anthology also launched in print book form. Her co-developed narrative game All the Delicate Duplicates has won multiple awards, including the 2015 Tumblr International Arts and Media Prize, 2016 Best Overall Game at the Game City Festival, and the 2017 Dundee Game Design Award in the Best Experimental Game Category. #PRISOM, Mez’s co-developed 2013 Augmented Reality Game was commissioned for the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. Academic James O’Sullivan describes #PRISOM as: “…the digital equivalent of Orwell’s 1984“.
Mez’s projects are taught worldwide. Her works reside in Collections as diverse as The World Bank, Cornell’s Rose Goldsen Archive and the National Library of Australia. She is also in the process of developing a career archive with Duke University’s Curator Collection team: this archive is to be housed at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Mez currently serves as an Advisor to the Mixed Augmented Reality Art Research Organisation, an Editorial Board Member of the Digital Journal Thresholds, a co-founder of the XR Artists Collective, and is a Senior Research Affiliate of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab.