The Crystal Spirit
During the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell, the writer of Animal Farm and 1984, traveled to Catalonia to fight against Franco’s fascist Spain. The world in which he entered he would later document in his book, Homage to Catalonia. In it he speaks of how many of the communities in Catalonia transformed into actual working anarchist societies and how strange it was that Barcelona, “...was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist”. But upon returning only a few months later from the front this reality had vanished with the rise of the communist influence in the area. He concludes, "what had seemed on the surface and for a brief instant to be a workers’ State was changing before one's eyes into an ordinary bourgeois republic with the normal division into rich and poor. "
After the fall of Spain to fascism, the decades of totalitarian dictatorship that followed, and finally Franco’s death and return of democracy, it seems almost impossible to comprehend this utopian moment in which Orwell found himself. How could we feel what he felt? To see this moment in history from his vantage point of believing a socialist utopia was possible? The Crystal Spirit is an experimental journey tracing Orwell’s path through the Spanish Civil War, documenting his exact locations, then utilizing contemporary animation, visual effects, and virtual reality techniques to somehow try to get back to the zeitgeist of that phantom utopia on the Catalan countryside - a moment which will all too soon turn into myth.
Installation
This project is a transmedia installation mixing a surrealistic documentary film with a virtual reality experience. 10 sections of the film align with 10 virtual reality vignettes. The audience has complete control over how they experience the work, allowing them to forge their own path through each film section and vr vignette in any order they wish.
The VR installation enables a more abstract and immersive experience of the ideas explored in the film. It allows the viewer to step into the artwork itself, where they can activate, study, and explore each space at their own pace and interest. Via a novel “magic plinth” concept developed for the piece which utilizes the Leap Motion Sensor for spatialize hand tracking, the viewer can select each vignette from a menu system that matches that of each film in real life.
The Crystal Spirit (virtual reality)
The Crystal Spirit (film)
THE ITALIAN SOLDIER SHOOK MY HAND
by George Orwell
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
-
To meet within the sounds of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
-
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing that I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
-
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
-
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would hide your head?
-
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
-
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
-
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
-
Taken from
‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’,
published by New Road, 1943.
Poem written 1939