Eric Akoto: You’re a self-taught coder and game designer. How did you develop the programming skills to support your artistic practice?
Rachel Rossin: I’ve been coding and using command line since I was about five, it’s something I’ve always loved. Some of my first drawings were made on top of spooled dot-matrix printers.
There is this misconception that coding is something you have to learn in a structured setting, but the reality is that all programmers are self-taught because the sands are always shifting.
Eric Akoto: Why has immersion become so important to your work, e.g. in Stalking the Trace?
Rachel Rossin: Immersion felt salient for Stalking the Trace because that show is about control and agency. I wanted a space where I could overtake the viewer and pull back when I needed to.
“Immersion is about threading absence and presence.”
Experience Rachel Rossin’s vision with AR. Scan the QR code below:
Eric Akoto: Can you talk me through your process, inspirations – Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point is an inspiration, are there any others? – and what is that process from seeing Zabriskie Point and producing The Sky is a Gap.
Rachel Rossin: When I cite outside material, it’s because it ends up acting like a synecdoche. For example, with Zabriskie Point, Antonioni wanted to initially end the film with a plane skywriting “Fuck You, America,” but the producers didn’t want to pay for that. That was the message he wanted to send. He charged that high-spectacle explosion scene with that type of energy, but he gets lost in the beauty of it. That’s the type of intent I wanted to charge that piece with.
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Eric Akoto: What does the future hold for VR?
Rachel Rossin: Right now, we’re in a nice place because our devices are still separate from us. We’ve always used peripherals to extend what it means to be human…
Future of VR: Our devices will evolve from being separate peripherals to becoming intrinsic parts of us. Explore an AR vision of this future by scanning below:
Eric Akoto: What do you hope audiences will get from your work?
Rachel Rossin: Live laugh love :’)
