Experience “Encounters”: A VR Journey by Mathieu Pradat

“Encounters” is an immersive mixed reality experience. Participants enter the room equipped with a virtual reality headset and earphones. During their virtual exploration, they discover different worlds, generate characters through their own movements and interact with them.

Like a musical work, “Encounters” is composed in four movements: The Crowd, The Birds, The Colossus and the Epilogue. As they explore and interact with each other, spectators gradually saturate the worlds they successively discover. At first, they generate characters who turn away, then greedy birds who poison themselves, and finally transport ships that multiply. Each movement, or chapter, is punctuated by an interlude of rain, recalling both the birth of life on earth and the imminent, destructive rise of the waters.

The epilogue is then the scene of a unique encounter with a character, a virtual otherness of the spectators, another like themselves. A dialogue is established to glimpse another possible world.

“The aim of Encounters is to rediscover the thread of a simple, seemingly naïve idea, that of concerted collective action, emanating from dialogue and, above all, from listening. The disasters of the first three chapters of Encounters are those of non-hearing, pushed to the point of caricature, that is no longer ashamed of itself, no longer pretending and, beyond lying, arrogates to itself the right to indifference.”

Writer, director, architect and artist Mathieu Pradat creates immersive experiences that make us think about our relationship with space. Resident at M.I.T. in 2021, winner of the Taiwan XR residency and the Villa Albertine in 2022, his virtual reality experiences and films have been selected and awarded at numerous festivals, including Venice Virtual – La Mostra de Venise, the Geneva International Film Festival, the Frankfurt Biennale, and the Rotunda of the Locarno Film Festival. Mathieu Pradat is also the founder and director of La Prairie Productions.