On the 18th (local time) at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France. Arriving in time for the experience slot of the XR (extended reality) work <Voooooo—Peeeeee—> (Buuuu—Piiii—) by the Korean two-person studio ‘Ubak Studio’, an extraordinary scene unfolded. People wearing VR (virtual reality) headsets were flailing their hands. After being instructed “Please stand on the yellow circle,” I received a headset and put it on. A blue screen appeared before my eyes, and a narration was heard. “A hole has opened in my body.”

In a near future where a body can be uploaded to the cloud to create a digital twin. The narrator, unable to tell whether they are the real me or the virtual me, confesses that it sounds as if holes have opened in the body. The hole swells with a ‘vooooo-’ and shrinks with a ‘peeeee-’. Having been diagnosed with what is nicknamed ‘Frog Melancholy Syndrome’, when I raise my hand into the headset field of view, there are four fingers. The fingertips are rounded into lumps, transformed like a frog’s.

A work that feels like the sea, like a dream, or like an error space where data has been lost, asks participants to “bring the tips of both hands together to make a circle.” The story that unfolds is certainly somber, but as you stretch out your arms, spin, and draw circles, a peculiar sense of release arises. The theme that goes ‘vooooo—peeeee—’ also puts the mind at ease.

We met Park Ji-yoon (33) and Woo Hyun-joo (33), invited to the Immersive Competition (a total of nine works) at the 79th Cannes Film Festival with <Voooooo—Peeeeee—>, on the 20th at the Korean Film Council booth installed on Cannes Beach. Having majored in visual design at Kookmin University, the two run the two-person ‘Ubak Studio’. After working both separately and together, they began operating the studio in earnest in 2021.

“Because our base is media art, we are not used to seeing many audience members at once. Even at most it was 10 to 20 people, but this time, seeing 90 spectators per slot experiencing it all together was astonishing,” Park said.

In <Voooooo—Peeeeee—>, the ‘bu’ and ‘pi’ are sounds, but they also together signify ‘volume’. Woo said, “To build virtual spaces, do not enormous data centers end up occupying the volume of actual land?” and added, “Imagining a virtual space that nevertheless has a sense of volume was the starting point of the work.” Made with support from the Arts Council Korea’s multi-arts production grant last year, the project took about five months of planning and three months of production. Ubak Studio presented the piece at a solo exhibition in November that year.

They said they could not believe it when they received an email early this year informing them of the competition invitation from Cannes. Over the past week in Cannes, it was a series of meetings with stakeholders from around the world. They said it broadened their horizons. Park said, “We met curators of exhibition spaces and showed our portfolio. Just as films have distribution, through this we could envision the work being shown in museums or immersive theaters.”

Watching other invited works was also instructive. Woo said, “We barely dragged our media practice all the way to Cannes, but some teams even designed their work so that large equipment would fit tightly into a single box to ease circulation,” and added, “We could learn how to present our piece and discuss realistic budgets.”

They also found it intriguing that, even though the narration and song are in Korean, the sentiment resonated with foreign audiences. Woo said, “Some even reacted with surprise, asking, ‘Was the narration in Korean? Was it not in English?’” They added that when they later explain the Korean meaning of ‘bupi’ as volume, foreigners delight in saying, “So that is what it meant! It makes sense.”

Using this work as a stepping stone, Ubak Studio is planning its next XR piece. They want to create a work in which “multi-users” can participate, with several people logging into one world simultaneously, like an online game, to unfold the story. Woo said, “The appeal of VR is that you can participate directly and take the lead. There will be an endpoint to the story, but it is nice that diversity arises in what an individual can experience along the way.”