Shezad Dawood Presents Kalimpong: New VR Experience - FDUK 2016

Shezad Dawood is an artist and film-maker, who looks at the compiling, layering and editing of multiple narratives across his films, paintings and sculptural works. His collaborative film projects derive from extended periods of time investigating particular locales, involving their communities in fictions of place. These fictions often use genre as a fantastical prism by which to reflect on both lived and imagined ways of being, a kind of alter-documentary. He currently lives and works in London, where he is Senior Research Fellow in Experimental Media at the University of Westminster. Shezad Dawood is constantly looking for new ways to use modern technology to explore storytelling. Approaching VR from the narrative point of view, he travels back in time to add multi-layers to the stories he tells, give them more depth and improve the overall experience for viewers.
Shezad Dawood's exhibition

Shezad Dawood at his art exhibition.
Photo credit: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images Europe

This year Shezad Dawood was invited as keynote speaker to Fulldome UK 2016 to present his new digital creation: Kalimpong. The name of the film refers to a small region in the Himalayas. In fact, Shezad Dawood learnt about Kalimpong through the diaries written by the first Western woman who entered Tibet. When he came across the story of her expedition again in his 30's, Shezad Dawood got so inspired that he named the virtual world he created after it, a world where people can relive many stories.
Shezad Dawood presenting Kalimpong

Shezad Dawood as a keynote speaker introducing Kalimpong.
Photo credit: Fulldome Database

When talking about his exhibitions, Shezad Dawood describes this kind of experience as traveling through parallel spaces. That is exactly the sphere where VR exhibitions have the upper hand since they aim at destabilizing fix spaces – something that the attendees could try in person wearing the VIVE setup in the demo area.

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