“Rebis” is an experimental poem co-written by Kylie Supski & ReVerse Butcher; & a Virtual Sculpture & Soundtrack by ReVerse Butcher, presented as a 7 minute videopoem cinematic. Virtual Sculpture & Soundtrack were made natively in VR using Open Brush & Virtuoso VR, & a HP Reverb G2 VR Headset. Featuring hand-made textures constructed using pen, acrylic ink, & vintage paper stock, then digitized into 3D substance materials using the Adobe Substance Suite. Cinematic made using Unreal Engine 5.1 & Adobe Premiere Pro. Human consciousness has always been forked. Duality is not the only way. Perfection & putrefaction, the double slit experiment, everything (un)seeable is both a wave & a particle. Alchemy hid historical scientific investigations behind metaphors lest the church of popular opinion crush the wonders of inquiry beneath its boot heel; in doing so a powerful visual language stuttered into the collective subconsciousness. Metaphor as visual assonance–looks like, sounds like, thinks like, links like. Apparate across time and arrive in the futurepresent nowever, where Rebis has evolved to represent brand-new forks in consciousness. Rebis revolves endlessly amongst the waves & the particles, where thunderstorms have become raves, & illuminated manuscripts have become ephemeral virtual immersions. In this age, and in this interpretation, Rebis is a symbolic meditation on art-official-intelligence. Made painstakingly by hand & sculpted natively in VR (with no AI used in the production of this artwork), Rebis symbolizes the fork between the organic and the algorithmic – & ponders our fear of; & lack of language for; ‘perfect balance’.
The video, VR art/Virtual Sculpture, & music composition appearing in this production was produced independently in 2023 by ReVerse Butcher. The text of this poem was written by Kylie Supski & ReVerse Butcher & completed in 2022 as part of the "Electric Cathedral" project. This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Special Thanks to Andrea Heinrichs for her assistance with the Spanish language subtitle translation.
