VR-TERROIR

The project

VR TERROIR challenges the standardization of digital culture by creating hyperlocal avatars that absorb and are shaped by their environments, carrying their “lived experiences” like terroir. The project explores  how context (including data, textures, and local inputs) can alter a digital identity.
Often, virtual representations of users in digital contexts are treated as static assets and limited to predictable and controllable formal and behavioural parameters that fit within the rigid walled gardens of big tech.
VR Terroir proposes dynamic systems that are rooted in their specific location, history, and context.

The work is a video of a character going through an environment that is made by synthetic materials built with HLRS data and Stuttgart's physical environment.

With this vision and approach, a working prototype within the pipelines and constraints of HLRS has been developed, and opens a research direction for the creation of context-aware avatars.

The artist

Bernat Cuní is an artist who explores the digitization of objects and spaces by blending code, crafts, and robotics, focusing on emerging technologies through a post-capitalist lens. Although he began as an industrial designer in 1999, he later shifted toward research-based design focused on people, citing disillusionment with the consumerist nature of producing physical goods.