VR Immersive Music Video
Premiered at Cannes Film Festival 2024 - Cannes Next.
Additional Screenings: MANIFESTO:IO 2025

This project was sponsored by and made possible through the Tisch ProFunds Grant. Thank you to the Office of the Dean and the Tisch Undergraduate Student Council for their support.

PRINCESS OF THE HILLS (4m, 12s, directed  by SENAIDA and Ricky Kapoor) is a virtual-reality experience and music video that follows the artist, SENAIDA, who is a human trapped in the metaphysical manifestation of Plato’s Cave until they encounter a portal which transports them into a Post-Anthropocene Myth—“a time out of time, before objects and subjects became distinct” (Wark, 2020). In this digital realm, the rave emerges as a locus of resistance against binary constructs.

Through metaphysical landscapes, the work embodies a transformative journey toward freedom, and ultimately, a reclamation of our primal instinct for movement and connection. Participants are invited into this fantastical, utopian world where they can be free to explore the scenes alongside Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and step into the perspective of SENAIDA 2.0, the digital clone created by the artist to represent their transformation through their interactions in the digital and physical worlds.

Artists:
Senaida Ng (Clive Davis Institute, ‘24) - Creative Director, Co-Producer, Composer
Ricky Kapoor (Film & TV, ‘24) - Director, Co-Producer
Charlin Wu - UE Lead Designer
Vu Le - UE Environmental Artist
Krist Mai - UE Avatar Modeler
Anna Ren - VR Interactive Game Designer
Jason Snell (Interactive Media Arts, ‘23) - Sound Mixer & Production Assistant

Special thank you to our project coordinator, Tom Beaver, for helping us to make this possible. Thank you to 370J Media Commons team for providing us with the space, and to the MARL Lab sound technicians: Erik Bell, Mina Lee, Kaiwen Ding, Parth Pawar, Kai Banda, Mahavarshini Madhan, and Mark Frick, for helping us set up this installation. A special shoutout to everybody who helped us set up and troubleshoot the VR demo including GUMBO NYC, Roman Sharf, Adolfo Almonte, Jay Suong, Oliver-Rose Truxillo, and Robi Abera. 

PRINCESS OF THE HILLS was featured in UAAD's "Worlds Unfolding: Ideas and Prompts for Virtual World-Making" 2024 publication avaiiable here: https://www.uaad.art/product-page/worlds-unfolding-ideas-and-prompts-for-virtual-world-making

This is a beta-test version of the VR experience, which we are very excited to be bringing to Cannes Next at the Cannes Film Festival 2024. Thank you so much to Joshua Holtzman and Antonella Verdezoto at Fugitive Sisters for inviting us to present as part of their panel on Women in Virtual Production.

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