Temp Stories: Agnes Moricz – Learning VR, from Arts Temps to final collection

Our students take inspiration from all aspects of their life, including their work with Arts Temps! To learn how working with Arts Temps can benefit your academic studies we spoke to Agnes Moricz, BA Cordwainers Fashion Bags and Accessories at LCF. Now in her final year, Agnes has been applying her experiences working with VR on Arts Temps jobs to her final collection. We caught up with Agnes to find out about her Arts Temps experience and, how this has been useful to her practice and how these future skills have benefitted her employability.

Hi Agnes, so how did you start working in VR with Arts Temps?

I worked as Exhibition Manager for an LCF exhibition for 3 months over the summer in 2018, it was Footnotes: Intimate Stories of Shoes at Sutton House. The hiring manager just asked ‘are you happy to work on computers’, I didn’t know what it was until I got there I would be supporting a VR installation!

My role largely involved setting up the exhibition every day, providing technical support and support to visitors using the VR installation. The purpose of the piece was to give users a sense of feeling unsteady on their feet or experiencing vertigo, so I had to be very careful at giving health warnings to participants before taking part. Luckily, we only had one person nearly faint!

Wow I hope they were ok! Was it useful to learn these new skills with VR?

Haha! Yes, they were ok. it was really useful, because with Arts Temps once you have experience with something you can get more jobs in that area. I attended a drop-in training session at LCF and taught myself Blender, a 3D rendering software, over a few weeks.

That helped me get another Arts Temps job that asked for VR experience assisting a Fashion Future MA student exhibiting for their graduate show. She wanted to incorporate VR into her work, to make it so attendees could walk through her painting – which was pretty trippy. But she didn’t have the experience in running and setting it up, so I was able to help her out with that.

These jobs were great as they introduced me to the broad ways which VR can be used, I’d played video games before and things but hadn’t considered it as a tool in fashion. It really helped me see the strengths of VR as a medium and I’ve recently started to use VR as part of my practice and it will feature in my final collection.

How are you incorporating these skills into your final collection?

As you can imagine it’s quite hard to physically make pieces for our final collections at the moment, as our studios are all closed. So, I’m having to be a bit creative with producing it. I wanted to do something in response to what’s going on with COVID-19, so I decided to add a virtual reality element to my show. Hopefully it will allow me to create a more personalised experience for users.

It’s something I don’t think I would have considered if I hadn’t worked these jobs with Art Temps. It’s also really helpful as brands are also starting to use VR more, so I’m hoping that showcasing my broader skills in my final collection will make me more employable when I graduate.

That’s amazing, best of luck for your final collection!

You can check out more of Agnes’ designs on her website.

Arts Temps provide exciting job opportunities to all UAL students and alumni find out more on our webpage.