Hyperrhiz 27

My Garland is Also Blue

Elizabeth Leister
California State University, Northridge

Citation: Leister, Elizabeth. “My Garland is Also Blue.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 27, 2024. doi:10.20415/hyp/027.a08

Abstract: My Garland is also Blue is a three-part VR collage. Drawings, textiles and 3D objects from my grandmother’s home were scanned to build a trilogy of patchworked rooms. Digitally collaging disparate objects and materials allowed for a re-stitching together of memories in 360 space, while a spoken poem maps connections across our shared experience. A blue garland acts as a portal for the audience to travel into each space.

Keywords: VR collage, VR poetry, Digital collage, Digital poetry, 3D scans.

View Project: My Garland is Also Blue

Instructions for navigation: best viewed on desktop, using Chrome browser. Use the WASD keys to navigate, and the mouse to point direction/look around. At the end of each poem, move through the blue garland to portal into the next chapter.

Artist Statement

My Garland is also Blue, a VR collage presented in three-parts, is an extension of my deep interest in merging analogue approaches into digital technologies and by extension, referencing and tracing the fragmented body in states of incomplete recollection. Like a familiar dollhouse that’s been rearranged or a dysfunctional memory palace, objects from past and present are referenced through voice-over. Shifts in scale and a re-positioning of domestic objects build architectural spaces with a surrealist quality. The 3D world is a poem, and the poem is the space of a body knotting and untangling itself. Various flaws such as the glitchy tattered edge of a 3D scan are like an unraveling hem, disintegrating time.

Screenshots