The BADFAITH machine: The phantom point of view in VR

At the 2018 Melbourne International Film Festival BADFAITH, an Australian‑based virtual reality (VR) content creation collective, premiered its latest production — a twelve‑minute VR work titled Exquisite Corpse.As the title suggests, this is a twenty‑first century rebirth of the Surrealist parlour game in which a team of collaborating artists each renders a part of a body on a folded segment of paper, working from the head down, without seeing anything of the other contributions. It is only when the paper is finally unfurled that any of the collaborators see the completed body in its entirety; bizarre, disjointed and often monstrous. When the “Pope of Surrealism” André Breton created exquisite corpse drawings with poet Paul Eluard or artist Valentine Hugo, their aesthetic of disjuncture resonated with the Zeitgeist of Europe between the Wars — estranged, ruptured and, similar to Berthold Brecht’s photo‑epigrams and montages, “broken so that the space between things can appear.”