Here and Now

Here and Now / Ovdje i sada
Kata Mijatović and Mihael Giba
2026
Spatial, interactive and immersive VR installation

“Right now, right here, we are standing on a planet spinning around its own axis in infinite space. Around us are billions of stars, beneath us is molten lava.”

Here and Now is a spatial, interactive and immersive VR installation built from a short text. The text was spoken in Kata Mijatović’s performances in public space in Osijek (2016) and Omiš (2020), collectively, through megaphones and PA systems, reminding passers-by where their bodies are, in the present moment and in the cosmos.

In the VR version the text moves out of the city into a virtual abyss, a place with no location and no time. The visitor does not enter a simulated environment: there is only darkness and text. Sentences are written out letter by letter in dense concentric circles, so the viewer seems to float at the bottom of a well made of words and loses their sense of orientation. At the same time an AI-generated synthetic voice reads the text aloud. Its neutrality underlines the distance between meaning, body and perception.

The application uses the viewer’s geolocation. The text spins around them at the actual speed of the Earth’s rotation at that exact point on the planet and follows the tilt of the Earth’s axis. With the controllers, the visitor can call up a 3D model of the Earth inside VR and choose any other location: the experience changes with it, from the speed of rotation to the tilt of the text. Outside the headset, a generative web map on the wall travels across the planet and shows, for each point, its coordinates, local time and rotation speed.

Unlike most VR experiences, the work offers no rich or illusionistic world. Visuals are reduced to a minimum, and text is the only material the space is built from. Here virtual reality is not a means of escape but a perceptual apparatus that unsettles our usual sense of orientation and of the present moment. Language does not deliver a message. It happens in space and time around the viewer’s body, and the line between reading, listening and being in a space dissolves.

https://vimeo.com/1239210452

Exhibition

Device_art 8.026, KONTEJNER, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 29 September to 27 October 2026

Performances by Kata Mijatović

Right Here, Right Now, Performance Days, Osijek, 2016
Right Here, Right Now, Almissa Open Art Festival, Omiš, 2020

Production: KONTEJNER
Video: vimeo.com/1239210452
Photos: Zoe Šarlija and the artists
More: kontejner.org, kata-mijatovic.com