Here and Now is an immersive virtual work based on the sentence: “Right now, right here, we find ourselves on the planet Earth spinning on its axis in the infinite universe.” The text was previously used in Kata Mijatović’s performances of the same title in the public spaces of Osijek (2016) and Omiš (2020), where it was recited collectively through megaphones and loudspeakers, bringing an awareness of the present moment and the body’s cosmological position into the daily life of the city.

In the VR version, the text is relocated from a public space into a virtual abyss of a non-place and non-time. The visitor is not situated within a simulated or recognisable digital environment, but rather in an amorphous space constructed entirely from text. Sentences appear around the viewer in dense concentric circles, letter by letter, creating a sensation of floating and the loss of spatial orientation. Simultaneously, the text is spoken by a synthetic AI-generated voice, whose neutrality underscores the distance between meaning, the body, and perception.

The application and VR headset use the viewer’s geolocation data: depending on their position on planet Earth, the text forming the surrounding space rotates at the actual speed at which the Earth turns at that specific location, while its movement also matches the tilt of the Earth’s axis. The virtual environment thus becomes a literal, perceptual visualisation of the sentence on which the work is based.

Unlike conventional VR experiences that offer visually rich simulated environments, this work radically reduces visuality and employs text as the fundamental building material of space. Here, virtual reality is not a vehicle for illusion or escapism, but a perceptual apparatus that destabilises established patterns of orientation, presence, and the experience of the present. Language no longer functions merely as a carrier of meaning; instead, it becomes a spatial and temporal event that literally inhabits the viewer’s body, dissolving the boundaries between reading, listening, and inhabiting space.