A VR installation about sadness.
A Perfect Hole to Be Unhappy Forever In is inspired by the unfixable nature of sadness in tragic theater, particularly in Sophocles' "Theban Plays" and Sarah Kane's "Cleansed".
The viewer is rendered in a hole. There is only blackness around them, save for an aperture directly above their origin, which opens to the sky. Through it, clouds, and occasionally leaves drift. Wind is heard, sometimes birds. It is earth-cold and an indeterminate time of day and season. It will never get wet, they will never have to contend with worms and voles for control of their hole, the sun doesn't shift, nor does the moon. They are in an atemporal, digital space that anyone can access via their own device, but only and always alone.
A Perfect Hole... constructs a place, outside of time, geography, and other people, devoted solely to sadness. A place for Oedipus, between Thebes and Colonus, between blindness and death.
The Unity build only, to be run on HTC VIVE hardware. Headphones should be connected to the VIVE, and the viewer at all times.
Two scent atomizers (one produces the smell of grass pollen, the other dirt) should trigger to fill the room with ambient smell of loam. The room should be kept at 60° F at all times.
Find all code for this project (and a current Unity build) here.