Utopia Speakers
Composer and songwriter Gareth Williams lives in Edinburgh, where he makes work that ranges from opera, theatre and songwriting to chamber and orchestral music. He is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, where he lectures in composition. He seeks to find new participants and audiences for opera and music theatre with his work, and to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, exploring ideas of identity and vulnerability in his vocal writing. His music is often site-specific and responsive, with performances happening in lighthouses, whisky distilleries, nuclear bunkers, and libraries. He creates award winning work for companies such as Scottish Opera, Red Note Ensemble, National Theatre of Scotland, Ulster Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Tapestry Opera, Theatre Passe Muraille, Bridge Theatre, Hebrides Ensemble, Chamber Music Scotland, and Noise Opera.
Sufee Yama is a Creative Technologist specialized in immersive media storytelling. Sufee works across Interactive AR, Interactive VR film and animation, 360 video, Mixed Reality Performance and Mixed Reality video. Her personal R&D experiments are brought to use for brands’ commercials, documentaries, movies, events and exhibitions with clients like Meta, Snap Inc., The Guardian US, The Japan Foundation, Goethe-Institut, FABLAB , Thailand Government Agencies and were mentioned on platforms like The Museum of Other Realities, Snap AR, FritzAI and Lenslist. Being an active member in the creative VR/AR community, Sufee hosts workshops and activities for cultural organizations and Universities. Passionate about the future of storytelling and new media, Sufee thinks major parts of current Fine art industries will unavoidably needed to transform their work format to thrive. She founded Utopia Lab Studio(www.utopialab.co), an experimental creative AR/VR studio focusing on the future of storytelling based on the intersection of Fine Art, Design and Business in the hope that she can help bring real world Fine Art including performing art into AR/VR space.
Virtual Utopia
Following the Utopia Lab, Sufee created a VR space populated with all the Utopian objects we created during the event.
You can access the space here. When you’ve opened the page, click ‘join room‘, ‘connect‘ and ‘enter room‘ and you’ll be in. Once you are in the room, you can walk around in VR by using the arrow keys or W/A/S/D. To increase walking speed, hold Shift. All of the objects in the room are 3D scans and their surface bumps might sometimes block your movement – you can avoid that by enabling the ‘fly’ mode by pressing G. Finally, if you happen to have a VR headset, you can explore the room that way too.
Besides all the 3D scanned objects, in the background you can hear the song that Gareth and the Utopians created during the lab – adjusting your volume should make that audible.
