Biography

Sarah Rothberg (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) is an interactive media artist who aims to create idiosyncratic experiences that encourage new ways of thinking, understanding, and communicating. Rothberg uses embodied technologies (such as VR, AR, installation, interactive performance, worldbuilding) to invite participants to feel relationships between the personal and systemic, with a specific focus on the impact of new media on ways of being, understanding and interacting with the world.

Approach

Installation title: Water Without Wet

Water Without Wet (WWW) is an interactive installation featuring custom software, a VR headset, and real-time generative video.

The installation is a poetic invitation to contemplate your bodily connection to the water cycle, and the challenges of reconciling individual and ecosystem, action and impact. Water connects us to each other, to other animals, to the earth and atmosphere. It’s timeless, and not fixed in space. It might be inside of my body, then yours, then in the sky, then the ocean, then back around.

In WWW there are two audiences: the headset user and the spectators. The user is immersed in the virtual world, simulating interactions with water drinking a glass, flushing a toilet, watering a plant. The spectators see the virtual world rendered on two exterior canvases, affected by the user's actions, displaying ever evolving, unique compositions at various levels of abstraction.