Beholder VR Experience

Beholder, virtual reality experience

BOM commissioned and produced this stunning virtual reality experience with United Visual Artists and BOM Fellow Sonja Zelic.

Our Role: Commissioners, Producers

BOM commissioned and produced a beautiful virtual reality experience exploring autistic perspectives of beauty. We formed a collaboration between autistic, situational mute artist Sonia Zelic and United Visual Artists who worked collaboratively to develop the concept and experience, with BOM as producers and commissioners.

The Mission Objectives:

• Create an immersive experience that challenges the narratives of autism away from negatives to positives
• The experience needed to foreground autistic perception, wonder and detail
• Bring in the lived experience of an autistic situational mute person to translate and communicate the perception of an autistic, mute child at the centre of the work

The Execution:

We commissioned artist Sonja Zelic to work alongside UVA and communicate the fascination of bird in flight, helping UVA to define the concept and guide the experience.

The final VR piece is a simple, stunning visual and sonic representation of a bird in flight, where time slows and detail becomes magnified around the viewer.

Sonja also created an audio artwork, called Dream of a Safe Space which accompanied Beholder, and further shared her perspective.

The Triumph:

Beholder won a £20k Digital Catapult Creative XR prize, and was nominated for the prestigious ST+Arts European Media Arts Prize.

It has exhibited across the world, including Ars Electronica, Austria and the National Museum of Canada in Quebec.