The VR Archive for Performance Art

Since we founded Liveart.dk in 2004, we have pondered how to best document performance art. We have studied photo, video and other digital media. We have conducted seminars, workshops and courses in performative writing, and we continue to investigate how the glow of a live performance can be preserved.

Virtual Reality can capture the room, the mood, the audience’s relationship with the work, and actions that take place in multiple locations in the room. When you (re)experience the works with VR glasses, you can look in all directions and focus on what you think is exciting. You can watch the recording again and focus on other details. Just like a live experience, the experience of the documentation can now be unique, too.

List of all recordings. Click here. Here!

The potential of VR documentation for performance art can hardly be overestimated. Performance art has always been limited by its special conditions. It’s difficult to experience the art form live, to document it, to compare and analyze works.

With our VR Archive, we are building a platform where researchers, artists, students and others can experience performance artworks as if they were present. It is our hope, this will be a starting point for the development of a literature and research in the field that will also affect the artists’ activities within the art form. Young performance artists need no longer to start from scratch or to miss out on works happening in other countries.

We have presented the archive as a pocket-sized festival in Europe, Africa and Canada. Since 2018, the archive is part of the permanent collection of Friisland.