The practice-based research that we will develop during this residency at Gazell.io is based on a video called Fools Feast. This artwork was awarded the Aspen Digital Art Award and commissioned for the private art collection of Aspen. The video will be published in Aspen’s online gallery: www.aspenart.co and available to the public this autumn.

This artwork’s main inspiration comes from the etching “Disparate de tontos” (Folly of Fools) by Francisco Goya. Using Goya’s depiction of the absurd, this video explores the appeal of the ludicrous and how it can change risk perception.

The scene portrays four hippos floating in a black void where these dangerous
mammals dance gracefully. Their enormous bodies are weightless, as these
charming beasts swim without water, as if there was no gravity, in slow motion.

Fools Feast reflects on the concept of risk and its perception. As John Adams states: “Risk is defined … as the product of the probability and utility of some future event. The future is uncertain and inescapably subjective; it does not exist except in the minds of the people attempting to anticipate it. Our anticipations are formed by projecting past experience into the future. Our behaviour is guided by our anticipations”. (Adams, 1995). Also, cultural theorists assert that these constructions and anticipations are conditioned by context and cultural filtering. Fools Feast plays with these ideas and the cultural construction of beliefs that alters risk perception.

Using all this background, we will iterate in our exploration of risk perception, but this time focusing not on the construction of images and scenes to manipulate it, but to deepen on the idea of control and more importantly, of the feeling of being under control. So in a Virtual Reality environment, will the audience feel less threatened if they feel they are in control of the situation? what if this feeling is just an illusion?