The Lacuna is a volatile room that keeps changing around its guest – shifting in scale and mutating its architectural features – while revealing traces of poetic narratives. Loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books The Lacuna shifts combines sound, text and imagery into an alternate surreality. Disembodied, the viewer’s gaze becomes the only instrument of connecting to this space - it leaves traces, activates and builds structures. Instead of travelling through a world the world shifts around the spectator, at times covertly behind the back, sometimes in plain sight. The Lacuna's architecture rejects its passive role as a trusted, immutable shelter and permits a physically impossible experience of poetic space and a reflection about the fragile relation of the beholder to her/his environment Through the procedural nature of The Lacuna shifts you cannot enter the same room twice. Each viewer will experience a different "journey", manifesting different aspects based on her/his behaviour and the world's own erratic character. Similar to current walking-simulators and narrative-exploration-games the virtual space becomes a mysteriously unpredictable parallel world in an area between deceiving spatial perception, acoustic hallucinations and hermetic wordplay.

It is programmed mostly in the software Unity, using programmed shaders and modelling, but of course also sound made with modular synthesizers and recorded sounds, and poetry we wrote to accompany the experience.

DEPART – The Lacuna Shifts Wooden Panel with applied mirror and vinyl stickers, Plywood (250x125x50cm) PC components: (these are the ones we use for the machine in exhibitions) graphics card: GTX1080Ti (Asus ROG) mainboard: ASUS Prime Z270-P RAM: G.Skill RipJaws 4 rot DIMM Kit 16GB harddisk: Samsung SSD PM961 128GB cpu cooler: Noctua NH-D14 power supply: Corsair VS Series VS650 , case: Corsair Carbide Series 100R , OS´: Windows 10 home 64bit VR gear: 1 x HTC VIVE (or VIVE PRO) 1 x Kopfhörer AKG K271 MkII VIVE sensors need to be mounted in a very stable position either on walls or on a rig. or with manfrotto stands plus magic arms with camera mount screws. we bring 1 HTC VIVE with AKG Headphones and one set of sensors with screws. wooden front (Portal/Panel) with a mirror according to our specs and schematics to be built and glazed on site. We bring the vinyl cuts for application. if the headgear shall be placed on a pedestal for the audience it needs to be aesthetically matching to the installation and in a position right next to the installation. We mostly prefer putting it on the floor though (unless the floor is really dirty or rough) lighting: 1 x dimm-able spot with focus to light the face of the person who uses the lacuna 1 x dimm-able spot with focus to light the portal sound (if possible): a proper sound system to provide viewers who do not use it with an acoustic impression which adds to the experience. ideal setup is a subwoofer plus two satellite speakers.