Conservation case study: We were looking for ourselves in each other by Mélodie Mousset

This project was carried out as an annual case study by conservator Claudia Röck at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel and was inspired by the “Preservation of Immersive Media Group”.

In 2017, HEK acquired the Virtual Reality (VR) based artwork We were looking for ourselves in each other by Mélodie Mousset (2015), which is presented in the study in the short name “Organ Island”. The artwork was shown with a VR-headset and a controller in the past. The visitors moved in a virtual space that consists of a circular island with palm trees and beaches. In the beginning, about ten human organs such as liver and kidneys, larger than humans, are falling from the sky. The visitor can walk around the island, enter the organs, and explore them. It is possible to walk into the sea and continue the walk under the water surface and visit the organ that fell into the sea.

HEK acquired the work as an executable file. The game engine project files do not exist any longer. As a migration to newer or different soft- and hardware is not possible without the original game engine project and programs, it was decided to try to make a 360-degree video. This report documents the procedure and experiences when capturing the 360-degree video.