Room Service – Behind the scenarios of 24 Rooms

Book

The medium of 360° video arrived in the mainstream of audio-visual entertainment culture at the latest when YouTube first admitted 360° content in March 2015. The medium’s transition into the sphere of ubiquity was initially driven by technological development and, as one often sees in the history of mass media, it appeared in an ambiguous form: On the one hand, rowdy competition for commercial supremacy quickly reached such a volume that it drowned out the first delicate steps on the floor of format development and drew experts’ and consumers’ attention primarily to the technical aspects of this exciting new attraction. On the other hand, the rapid development of affordable and user-friendly software and hardware gave a crowd of curious and experimental artists and producers from all over the world virtually overnight access to this young medium. These people immediately began to cultivate this still largely unconventional field of design with great passion, and to explore the scope and boundaries of spherical audio-visions in full view of the digitally networked windows world. I wanted to use the 24 Rooms project to join this search for virtual reality and surreality as a spherical form of artistic expression.