Immersive body narratives through VR

Margherita Bergamo Meneghini has been dedicated to contemporary dance and completed studies in Choreography in Barcelona after a professional career with the Italian rhythmic gymnastics team. Her way of representing dance seeks unconventional lines, alternative contexts and experiences, always with the participation of the audience. She worked with the dance company Erre que erre from 2005 to 2010, and she was the artistic co-director of Les filles Follen from 2010 to 2015. In 2017, she founded Compagnie Voix, and in this framework she began a research creation on dance and technological applications. Her piece “Eve, dance is an unplaceable place”, co-created with Daniel González, won the Laval Virtual Award Recto VRso, the Grand Prix VR at the Kaohsiung Film Festival, and it is selected in the Catalog of the Digital Department of the Institut Français. She currently creates choreographies in 3D, VR and XR for Trizz Studio, Atelier Daruma, Digital Rise, Tamanoir and is enrolled in a research creation dissertation at Edesta Université Paris 8 & Università di Bologna.

Daniel González-Franco is a digital artist born in Colombia and based in Barcelona (Spain). He obtained a Master’s degree in Digital Arts at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Daniel is an interdisciplinary researcher, artist and entrepreneur. He considers himself an explorer of electronic art and a designer of interactions, with a special interest in VR, telepresence and social innovation. He is one of the founders of the BeAnotherLab collective, creators of “The Machine to Be Another”, an embodied virtual reality system that explores the relationship between identity and empathy from an embodied point of view, which received an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2014 (Linz, Austria). He has participated in several residencies and projects at international art and new media festivals, including Tribeca Film Festival in New York, IDFA (Amsterdam), Musrara MIX (Jerusalem), Print Screen (Tel Aviv), Artport (Tel Aviv), as well as collaborations with the United Nations and a fellowship at MIT in Cambridge (USA). Daniel is also the founder of Omnipresenz, an XR creative studio based in Barcelona that focuses on embodied virtual reality, telepresence and immersive storytelling, but above all on the magic of human presence and emotion as a key factor in creativity and human connection. Along with Margherita, Daniel has received the prestigious Laval Virtual Award 2019 Recto VRso and the Grand Prix KFF in Taiwan.