• LEO SCARIN
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Future Dance of Nostalgia Otherworlds Fragments Volumetric Interviews Variations on a Remote Room Avalonia La Symphonie de l'Environnement Metaphysical Tastings STRP Scenario 15

Leo Scarin

Creative Technologist

Leo Scarin (b. 1997) is a Creative Technologist based in The Hague, NL, where he graduated at the Royal Academy of Arts β€πŸ‘¨β€πŸŽ¨

Researching the meeting points of computational and human technologies, Leo explores social, political, and increasingly environmental impacts of digital culture, by means of interactive and immersive installations πŸ•Έ

Among others, Leo Scarin's work has been featured at TodaysArt, FIBER, Rewire, iii, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, STRP, Eye Filmmuseum, and The Grey Space in the Middle πŸͺ

Drop an email at studio[at]leoscarin.com or follow [at]scarscarin 🐧

Future Dance of Nostalgia

iii @ Rewire Festival, 2022 | Kexin Hao (Leo Scarin, Ludmila Rodrigues, Rachwill Breidel, Pedro Gossler)

archive body choreography collaborative history social AI

β€” Game Design
β€” Interaction Design
β€” Installation
β€” Body Tracking
β€” Infrared Sensors
β€” TouchDesigner

Commissioned by iii and directed by Kexin Hao, 'Future Dance of Nostalgia' explores ancient human activities of production in the form of an interactive dance game and as an investigation into the human body as an archive.

'Future Dance of Nostalgia' premiered at Proximity Music: Sensing After Thought, a collaboration between iii and Rewire during Rewire Festival 2022, and has toured since. This work was chosen by Gonzo Circus as one of their Top 10 highlights of Rewire Festival.

Video by Tanja Busking

Otherworlds

FIBER Festival, 2022 | Sophia Bulgakova (Leo Scarin, Lucas Dewulf)

rituals VR XR AR Ukraine tradition technology proprioception maypole

β€” VR Design
β€” Interaction Design
β€” Installation
β€” 3D Animation
β€” Raycasting
β€” Augmented Reality
β€” Networked system

OTHERWORLDS is a multidimensional participatory performance within virtual and physical realities. Starting with Ukrainian traditions, Sophia Bulgakova is exploring and combining paganism from different cultures and other surrounding magical practices with contemporary discourse and technology. She is searching for common grounds to revive and reimagine relating and connecting to nature, technology, and each other by simultaneously creating a new communal and personal ritual. The performative ritual consists of verbal narrations, soundscapes, abstract colour, virtual environments and choreographic compositions through which participants can submerge themselves into otherworldly experiences.

Video by Tanja Busking

Fragments

V2_Lab for Unstable Media: Summer Sessions, 2021 | Leo Scarin (Miro Bollen)

VR XR volumetric haptic sound digital intimacy networks touch interactive immersive

β€” Virtual Reality
β€” Interaction Design
β€” Realtime 3D Scan
β€” Particles VFX
β€” Networked System
β€” Installation
β€” Haptic sensors
β€” Sound Design

The uncertainty around the promise of physical contact, boosted by the rise of human-spread epidemics, often limits us to digital communication means. The most intimate bodily senses are stuck in the gap between two worlds: one of sensorial reality and 1.5-meter distances, one of data streaming and rapid interconnection.

Fragments restores attention to the senses by converting body-tracking data from a human interaction into soundwaves, physical vibrations and immersive visual effects. Bodies and touch become alternative instruments of conversation in the digital realm.

Volumetric Interviews

RGBdog, 2021-2022 | RGBdog (Leo Scarin, Peter PflΓΌgler, Princess Camel, KREA.TODAY)

volumetric filmmaking design community technology interviews documentary XR

β€” Volumetric Capture
β€” Photogrammetry
β€” Particles VFX
β€” Shaders

RGBdog Presents: Volumetric Interviews introduces creatives based in The Netherlands working at the intersection of music, visual arts and technology, who are focused on developing supportive communities all over the world. The series aims to raise awareness of the creative possibilities of technology and to invite audiences in joining the ongoing broader debate about its benefits and pitfalls.

Seeking to push the boundaries of the disciplines of photography, design, and autonomous arts, Volumetric Interviews resorts to a combination of traditional filmmaking and volumetric image capturing techniques! With this experimentation, the series invites the audience to the virtual world where the story takes place.

Variations on a Remote Room

Royal Academy of Arts, 2021 | Leo Scarin

digital intimacy VR XR volumetric isolation remote

β€” VR Design
β€” Interaction Design
β€” Installation
β€” Archive
β€” Photogrammetry
β€” Particles VFX
β€” Sound Design

The advancement of digital technologies paved the way for new hyper-real experiences, allowing us to augment, or else escape our reality. However, in the design of our interaction with new technologies, we seem to be missing our own perception of tangibility.

Variations on a remote room is a series of digitized living spaces belonging to remote friends and loved ones who could not meet physically for a year. The work is composed by a number of photogrammetries made in remote collaboration and⁠ placed into a Virtual Reality environment where they can re-inhabit, intimately, their domestic spaces.⁠

Avalonia, Topographies of Impact

Royal Academy of Arts, 2022 | Camila Chebez (Leo Scarin)

Avalonia ecology tecnology motion body-tracking extraction UI interactivity film topography

β€” Body-tracking
β€” Interaction Design
β€” UI Design
β€” Realtime render
β€” Projection Mapping

Along the mining region of the Ruhr in Germany, Camila Chebez encounters Avalonia: an abandoned sandstone quarry that has turned into a popular climbing crag. Sharing its name with a micro-drifting continent from the Palaeozoic era, this site beckons for a closer look at its porous textures, which archive a deep history of impacting surfaces:

Building upon the haptic qualities of the embodied practice of rock climbing, this work is an invitation to (re)explore an Earth too often figured as mute and inert, a wasteland in waiting. By playing with surfaces as a point of contact and projections as a collective memory, "Avalonia Topographies of Impact" puzzles together a narrative where ruins can become playgrounds for more-than-human encounters.

La Symphonie de l'Environnement

Le Broc Festival, 2022 | Leo Scarin

environment symphony technology nature sustainability anthropocene 3D AI audiovisual RGBmath

β€” Photogrammetry
β€” Particles VFX
β€” Realtime render
β€” Audio reactivity
β€” Datascraping
β€” Photography
β€” Videography
β€” Post-production

Natural and technological worlds have been existing together for centuries. Only recently, however, we read an imbalance of powers between the two, leading to social crises and environmental catastrophes. Analysing and simulating natural, as well as mechanical, patterns in the French village of Le Broc, La Symphonie de l'Environnement speculates on the relationship between technology and nature of the future.

Premiered at the ThéÒtre de Verdure de Le Broc, La Symphonie de l'Environnement is a collaborative effort between the local villagers together with producers Andrew Bullen, Janine Huizenga, composer Romina Romay, harpist Helvia Briggen, and visual artist Leo Scarin.

Metaphysical Tastings

Trixie, 2022 | Leo Scarin, Sophia Bulgakova, Lucas Dewulf, Cemre Deniz Kara

VR XR food design experience immersive technology rituals sensorial social

A multidisciplinary experience that combines dining rituals and virtual reality. Initiated by Leo Scarin, Sophia Bulgakova, Lucas Dewulf (XRT) & Cemre Deniz Kara, the project explores the sensorial correlations that originate in the combination of participatory, immersive media and food design, as well as the experiential implications of social gatherings in virtual and physical realities.

Remote Embodiments: Ecologies of the Digital Body

STRP Scenario #15, 2021

STRP, 2021 | Leo Scarin

Talk Metaverse Intimacy Tangibility Digital Experience Technology Immersive Janet Murray Game Design

Hybridity, the mix of online and offline interactions in work, art and life, has become a real buzzword due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the last few years, artists and cultural institutions have been forced to move into the virtual world. But while festivals, art spaces and events explore these "new" ways of presenting online, digital artists have been experimenting with mixing the physical and the digital for many years.

Interactive Media Design studio researching the social impacts of technology