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A being you love is an art video game that explores the connection between the body’s biological processes and their representation in virtual space. The aim is to link bodily signals such as heartbeat, skin conductivity, neurofeedback, and other bio-data with the Unreal Engine game development platform in order to create a game that responds to the user’s psychophysical state.
The project investigates how the body reacts to virtual stimuli and to what extent these stimuli are “real” to our brain on an unconscious level. The inspiration comes from a personal experience of loss, which led to the theme of grief and emotional connectedness within virtual space. The game uses a 3D model of Jarun Lake in Zagreb, a place of symbolic meaning for the author, where the player moves alone and the environment changes depending on their inner reactions.
The installation is titled “A being you love”, playing with the notions of “being” and “existence,” while examining how emotions, memories, and imagined realities define us.
A Being You Love invites a quiet confrontation with oneself, offering an experience in which the digital becomes emotional, and the imagined becomes real.
The first prototype of the game will be presented at the summer cinema in Korčula.
Funding and curatorial support: KONTEJNER | bureau of contemporary art praxis
Created within the framework of the project Realities in Transition, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Technical collaborators:
Ana Vodanović Kosić, neurofeedback therapist
Igor Brkić, programming
Ognjen Kuharić, Unreal Engine
Ana Stražičić, collaboration in the initial phase of the project, Unreal Engine
About author
Vitar Drinković (b. 1983) received his master’s degree in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2008. During his studies, he spent a semester at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. In 2014, he completed his master’s degree in Animation and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where during his studies he participated in a student exchange at the London Metropolitan University in England. He has had more than twenty solo exhibitions, presented eight sculptures in public space, and participated in fourteen art workshops. He has had sixty group exhibitions in Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Austria, Czechia, United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, and France. He has won several awards, recognitions and scholarships, and was a finalist of the Radoslav Putar Award in 2021. He works at the intersection of technology, science and art through the creation of interactive devices, inventions and installations which often serve as mediators in interpersonal communication, with the aim of exploring and creating a new context, “conditions” for a different sensory and mental cognition of everyday life. He is a member of HDLU and HZSU.
www.vitardrinkovic.com
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