Discussion rooms were virtual reality rooms for participative audience discussions about art and professional life during pandemic. The project is initiated and funded by Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken (public art gallery of the city of Saarbrücken).
Curators: Katharina Ritter, Leonie Scheidt, Katja Pilisi, Saskia Riedel,
Visit the Discussion Rooms on Mozilla Hubs:
https://hubs.mozilla.com/rveVeNg/discussion-rooms-sb-stadtgalerie
Concept: Discussion Rooms was an accompanying program which was designed specially for an art exhibition of Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, the official art gallery of the city Saarbruecken, Germany. Four virtual discussion rooms, plus an entrance room, are created on Mozilla Hubs, resembling the architecture of the physical gallery building. The discussions in these four rooms concentrated on current issues of working life and process. Such as “ Am I pursuing a specific goal with my work?“ The discussions in two rooms were in German language, one in English and the other in French. The online event is visited by around 50 people in total.
The gallery, a former food market from 19th century, has a courtyard encircled by a row of arcades. In virtual architecture The arcade row is multiplied four times to create an illusion of being both inside in an endless building while having a glimpse to outside as there are no walls. The virtual architecture thus resembles the lock-down situation of being locked inside while keeping the hope and the contact to outside.
The project is realized only with free and libre open source tools, Blender and Mozilla Hubs.
According to data protection rules of the Saarbrücken city administration, avatars, nicknames and chat notifications on following screenshots had to be blurred out. Some scenes were re-rendered and avatars are replaced with placeholders.