T_Visionarium was developed by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel for the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at The University of New South Wales in co-operation with ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
As opposed to conventional cinema which offers the viewer passive reception of a unique, linear story on a flat screen, TVisionarium allows viewers to explore and edit a variety of stories in three dimensions in a 360-degree environment. The panorama offers the audience complete immersion in a three-dimensional cinematic experience. The image contents are programmed in such a way that they interact with the viewer via control functions, which are available per tablet. Del Favero will be showing TVISIONARIUM at Galerie Brigitte Schenk during the DCOpen at the same time as his exhibition at ZKM, which will also take place in September 2017, where T_Visionarium can be seen in a 360 degree radius.
For T_Visionarium , 28 hours of television were captured over a period of one week. This footage was segmented and converted into a large database containing over 20 000 video clips. Each clip was then tagged with descriptors or metadata defining its properties. The information encoded includes the gender of the actors, the dominant emotions they are expressing, the pace of the scene, and specific actions such as standing up, lying down, and telephoning.
The viewer can use the correspondingly encoded terms, such as ‚love‘, ‚danger‘ or ‚yellow‘ (to name just a few), retrieve the correspondingly programmed sequences of the video clips, and is confronted with 250 ‚Love sequences‘ for example.
Dennis Del Favero, born in Sydney in 1953 as the son of Italian parents, began his video installations in the mid-1980s. During his time as a guest artist at the ZKM from 1998-2001, he developed interactive video installations and CD/DVD-ROMs, Cross-currents and Pentimento which examine the dynamic relationship between violence and memory. Together with Jeffrey Shaw, Del Favero released the DVD-ROM and the book dislocations, a research into new representations of refractions by using experimental forms of interactive narrative. In the Conversations project he develops algorithmic narrative forms to describe a world of suspicion and criminal intent.
His work has been widely exhibited in solo exhibitions at leading museums and galleries such as Neue Galerie Graz (1999), Sprengel Museum Hannover (2005) and ZKM Media Museum Karlsruhe (2002, 2008, 2009, 2015, 2017) and in major group exhibitions including the Videonale at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2005), the Seville Biennial (2008), the Biennale of Architecture Rotterdam (2009) and the Sydney Film Festival (2016). An important project was also the Battle of the Nations War Memorial, Leipzig in 1996 (a joint project with Jenny Holzer).
He is Chair Professor of Digital Innovation, Director of the iCinema Centre and Director of the Extended Perception Interaction Centre at UNSW, Visiting Professorial Fellow at ZKM, Germany, Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong and Visiting Professor at IUAV University of Venice.