Boundless Blobbing

Take a virtual walk in the sculpture park of giant Blobs!

This VR experience is a digital recreation of a mind palace for me-- a space where art becomes immortal and mental images become tangible. A meditation on identity in 2022, on how we "assume and shed identities", as Jonah Peretti puts it. This piece reflects a "Digital Awakening" where ever-expanding and increasingly immersive digital media platforms bring new questions and resources about identity to the world at large.

I was reflecting on the theme of "connections" during the creation of this project: relationships, our sense of self, and identity. The Blobs are 3D scans of palm-sized ceramic sculptures meant to represent identities, modified in Blender scaled in Unity. After scanning my sculptures, I wanted to illustrate how abstract identities can be and how they can be tiny and really large at the same time.

Unlike most descriptions of identity on social media, Boundless Blobbing is simple, monochrome, and slightly eerie to be in, especially for first-time VR users. This is in part because of my physical state while creating it. I was in the midst of a painful ovarian torsion and needed surgery. I used creation as a distraction until my procedure. So, Boundless Blobbing always reminds me of how quickly the human body and mind adapt to new circumstances, assume different identities, and keep different identities within one person separate. It has an air of dissociation but is still grounded in the laws of reality, minus the teleportation feature.

I want to extend my thanks to Mark Briscoe, technician of the sculpture studio at Vassar College, Gordon Hall, my sculpture professor, and Chad Fust, manager of the Vassar Innovation Lab. None of this would have been possible without them!