Two new titles invite viewers to jump inside the frame

A still image of “Hover Man” from the virtual reality experience Condemned to Play. The experience allows views to explore Pieter Bruegel the Elder masterpiece “Die Kinderspiele”

Fine art is the focus of two new August releases from Within. “Condemned to Play (August 22nd),” a North American premiere; and “Space x Girl (August 8th),” a world premiere, bring paintings to vivid life in wildly unexpected ways.

“Condemned to Play” allows viewers to wander inside the canvas of the painting “Die Kinderspiele,” which was created by the famed Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1560. Bruegel’s masterpieces remain among the best examples of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. They are weird and wonderful, filled with intricate details and revelatory moments that are extremely telling about life in the 16th century.

“Die Kinderspiele,” translates to “Children’s Games” and features more than 230 children playing 83 different games. In “Condemned to Play,” directors Gordon and Andrés Jarach animate the children, speculating that they look more like “miniature adults condemned to play for eternity.”

The viewer is transported into the unfurled 3-D canvas, and is suddenly the same size and scale as its diminutive inhabitants. The children are given voices, and their anxiety mounts to a cacophony as they fret about the games that Bruegel has forced them to ceaselessly engage in.

In “Condemned to Play,” director, Andres Jarach, animates the children of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s iconic painting, “Die Kinderspiele.”

Stilts become a prison sentence, jacks a monotonous task and riding a stick horse a pleasureless activity. It’s an eerie world, and the viewer has a front-row seat to the looks on the children’s faces. This unprecedented vantage point allows for speculation about Bruegel’s intent as a creator. Is the painting meant to serve as commentary on the ultimate uselessness of all human activity?

Trapped in limbo, the figures in the painting begin to disappear. The crisis is existential, but the art that creates that crisis is a transmedia triumph.

Minhyuk Che’s “Space x Girl” world premieres on the Within app, August 8, 2019

A different kind of landscape is examined in “Space x Girl,” a short experience from South Korea directed by Minhyuk Che. This landscape is thoroughly modern, created using the Google VR app Tilt Brush, which allows creators to paint in three dimensions.

“Space x Girl” is an abstract story rendered with abstract art. It tells the tale of a young girl who experiences space in a uniquely visceral way. Early on in the film, we are told that the girl spent most of her childhood inside of a suitcase. This may sound scary but in the experience the suitcase is depicted as a safe, womb-like space: warm and comforting and filled with the ambient sounds of the outside world.

Still images from “Space x Girl”

The girl is a live actress, but the spaces she inhabits are painted around her as she moves through and by them: The rain outside her living room window, the warm glow of a TV set, a floor rug, a beaded curtain, a house plant, the suggestion of something looming outside the frame. A freeway, perhaps?

The experience finds the girl occupying the spaces of her past. A kitchen cupboard, a baby’s crib. The colors of the painting are mottled shades of deep blue, green and yellow. Hues, like memories, helping to fine-tune a thought or a gesture.

Virtual reality may be an art unto itself, but it is a transcendental treat when the medium treads into another creative realm entirely.

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