Wilhelm Scherübl

Virtual Festival Headquarter

Talk

The VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is opening a portal into another world!

VIENNA DESIGN WEEK

30.9.2020, 6pm–8pm

The VIENNA DESIGN WEEK is opening a portal into another world!

In architecture, portals constantly offer opportunities to access new spaces and discover new things. This is the function of the Festival Headquarters of the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, whose location changes every year: It welcomes the public and helps to find the way through the program. The fact that this central physical place now has a digital counterpart may well have been triggered by COVID-19, but this is far from being the only reason. The decision to create a setting that is specially designed for experiencing digital content is much more a result of the respective focuses of the festivals in 2018 (Virtual & Augmented Reality) and 2019 (Game Design).

Hence, together with a working group of experts and a wide range of external partners, the VIENNA DESIGN WEEK has created a virtual space that regards a digital presence not as an emergency solution but as an autonomous form of expression – an experiment full of immersive encounters, which visitors can experience on their own smartphones, computers, or VR glasses and the platform Mozilla Hubs, independent of their location. A portal to this virtual world, in which design tools are just as urgently needed as they are in our tangible reality, can also be found in the physical Festival Headquarters.

The Virtual Festival Headquarters has been developed in cooperation with Wilhelm Scherübl (Architect and artist), Martina Menegon (Artist) and Eva Fischer and Angie Pohl (sound:frame, Area for Virtual Art).