In B.A.U. you enter uncharted artistic territory in the company of five artists from Germany and Russia. Using cardboard VR goggles your smartphone can be transformed into a gate to virtual reality, where you can move through five spaces, filled with animated deities, giant Lenin heads and spherical sounds, as well as interact with artistic objects created especially for this app. B.A.U. isn’t a virtual exhibition – as a user you dive into artistic worlds. B.A.U. also doesn’t try to simply translate literary and cultural mediation from analogue to digital. It specifically uses the possibilities of new media to open up a new field of experimentation.
At the initiative of the Goethe-Institute Novosibirsk and the Berlin house of literature Lettrétage three Berlin artists – Mara Genschel, Katia Sophia Ditzler and Tomomi Adachi – together with two Novosibirsk artists – Alexey Grishchenko and Evgenii Gavrilov – posed the question: How can international artistic co-operation look like in times of digitalization and a global pandemic? B.A.U. resulted as the answer, a virtual reality app that not only presents digital art but was also formed because of a digital co-operation. Without meeting one single time in person the five participants created five spaces, where they integrated the work of their partners, created for this occasion, adapted it and finally transformed it to a collaborative artistic synthesis.
Or to put it short:
B.A.U. is a virtual world.
B.A.U. is digital literature that doesn’t try to copy its analogue alternative.
B.A.U. is digital art, without wanting to be a digital exhibition.
B.A.U. opens spaces.
We are very proud to have been able to cooperate in this pioneering project in the area of digital literature and literary mediation.
B.A.U. can be downloaded for free from all relevant app stores:
There’s not much you need to use B.A.U. – a pair of simple cardboard VR goggles (can be purchased in stores starting from around 6 Euro) and a smartphone. Start the app, put on headphones, position the phone inside the goggles and you’re set.