Love & Seawater
STUDIO — All Seeing Eye
Directors— Lisa Harewood & Ewan Cass-Kavanagh
In the experience the user moves between two worlds - the ‘child world’, and the ‘adult world’. The adult world allows the user to explore the work places of migrated parents, where as the child world (above) allows the user to explore an abstract and surreal island designed to evoke feelings of loss and isolation that many children left behind by their parents may feel.
Love & Seawater is a virtual reality prototype which forms a part of a wider project – Barrel Stories. Barrel Stories is a multi-year, multi-platform art project that creatively amplifies migrant voices around a little-discussed aspect of Caribbean culture – stepwise migration – where parents migrate ahead of their children who they temporarily leave behind in the care of others.
The 15 minute experience was designed specifically for an audience who had personal experience of the themes of the work, and was built as a tool to facilitate and prompt conversations within the Caribbean community. In the experience the audience embodies both a child and a parent in order to further reflect on the themes in the experience.
The piece was part of Virtual Reality Documentary Encounters, exploring non-fiction virtual reality. It was directed by Lisa Harewood and Ewan Cass-Kavanagh with illustrations by Jasmine Thompson and was developed specifically for Oculus Go.
On the project I acted as creative director and producer for All Seeing Eye.
The experience was designed specifically for the Oculus Go, as it was the most appropriate and economical VR headset for use in workshops and focus groups with it’s intended audience.
The piece was successfully launched in June 2019 at a showcase in Bristol and went on to be selected for pitching at Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Alternate Realities Talent Market and IDFA DocLab Forum in 2019.
It received an emotional response from members of the Caribbean community at the 2020 Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami.