Riferimento: https://immerse.news/virtual-futures-a-manifesto-for-immersive-experiences-ffb9d3980f0f
Climate armageddon, the rise of the far right, the arrival of our machine overlords — it’s easy to imagine that the future is an unsalvageable hot mess. But what if I told you that an immersive experience such as VR might help us find a way out? Let me explain.
Why take a user out of the “here and now” and attempt to situate her somewhere else?
One reason is to take her somewhere she cannot otherwise go. Some creators use the technology to visit someone or something lost or past (see, for instance, Vestige VR, or historical pieces such as Immersive Histories: Dam Busters). Others use the technology to venture inside another’s mind (Manic VR). Some explore future worlds (Biidaaban: First Light), or visit remote places that demonstrate the impacts of the anthropocene (Sanctuaries of Silence). Many future narratives, though, across multiple screen media forms, tend to be dystopian in flavour. Instead, I’m interested in what might be termed “preferred” futures — what is a future we want to get to? What is the world we want to make?
In September 2018 I was selected as one of 27 Immersion Fellows for the South West Creative Technologies Network project in the UK and given the task of exploring immersion. So, I developed a question:
Might there be possibilities within immersive media for creating shared experiences that imagine pathways towards a preferred future?*
Rapidly, I realised I had a manifesto on my hands!
Most of the experiences that led me to this understanding enabled an encounter with another human being — but perhaps we could have an encounter with ourselves? Or possibly even an encounter with the natural world? Rob McLaughlin, Executive Producer of Digital Content and Strategy with the Canadian National Film Board, suggested to me also that we could have an encounter with the maker of the work, through the work itself.
Levinas noted that an ethical encounter with another recognises their infinity — that is, the complexity of that person, and an understanding that we will never fully know their entirety. He also noted that in representing others, we run the risk of instead totalising them — suggesting the incomplete picture we present is in fact all there is to them.
Consider, for instance, stories of people with disabilities. It can often be the case that the story of their disability is presented as the only story they have, ignoring the individual’s great complexity of being and of experience. So by crafting an encounter with another, instead of attempting to represent another or to have the user “be” another, I hope that immersive experiences move us towards an opportunity to understand the infinity of whom we encounter.
The world is an amazing, complex, messy, and beautiful place, and people are all of these things and more. But the world, and its inhabitants, are also in fairly dire straits. There’s a case to be made that the climate change situation is so desperate that the only route is to shock people out of complacency, and anything less is not enough.
On the other hand, there is a risk that viewers will simply switch off from relentless difficult stories because it all just seems so overwhelming and intractable. Imagining the future is clearly a fraught business.
I wonder, though, if the unique affordances of immersive media (the feeling of presence, for instance), might offer us a way forward. If we can see/touch/hear/interact with the things we love about the world now, are we better able to envisage a way to protect them in the future?
Bewilderment, in essence, means partaking in a state of being wild…a reminder of our animal state and our existence within a vast and complex system
Games designer Jane Friedhoff is onto something similar when she says she looks for catharsis over education in her games. Friedhoff, speaking at the Eyeo Festival last year, says she instead wants to create joy, while still pointing to a desired world. She defines joy as containing a number of elements: a capacity for action, a sense of feeling seen and heard, a feeling of being part of a larger whole, an ability to envision a new and better world, and something that can’t be fully explained or quantified. With this approach, she is advocating a move away from that extractive model of storytelling where we look from the outside and peer in at someone else. Instead, it’s about a joyful connection with a shared community — she says, “I can make mosh pits for my friends.” I think this sense of catharsis that Friedhoff is talking about is bewilderment by another name. We connect with others and are reminded of our position within a complex, majestic system.
I’ve lost count of the number of (usually) nonfiction 360 degree film experiences in which I’ve wondered why I’m wearing a headset, and whether I’m gaining anything more than I would by seeing the same piece on a flat screen. The creation of a feeling of presence can be enough in certain stories, but, for many, there needs to be a next step of some level of interaction. It’s a fine balance though, as the interaction needs to have some meaningful purpose to it.
Interaction needs to have some meaningful purpose to it.
Homestay VR is an animated VR story by Paisley Smith and the Canadian National Film Board. In it, the user explores a CGI-rendered Japanese garden while listening to Smith’s voiceover tell the sad story of Taro, a home-stay student with her family. Sparkling red leaves flutter around you, and you can reach out and collect them. While I thought the leaves were lovely, I was initially uncertain how they related to the story, or, specifically, how my catching them was relevant. Later, I heard Smith speak about the work, and she said, “Sometimes giving you something to do helps you stay in the present.” Smith has neatly encapsulated here the problem I noted above with some VR work and identified an important first step to encouraging a feeling of connection.
How do we go from being in the present, though, to having an impact on it? I would suggest that interactivity can lead to a feeling of agency (some level of control) in the user only when the interaction has some meaning to the story. Janet H. Murray, in her seminal 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck, calls this participating in the “‘Active Creation of Belief.” We have to put in enough work to help continue the illusion, but not so much that the effort pulls us back out.
But, at 40 minutes long, it made me feel incredibly nauseous, and I was constantly aware of the heaviness of the headset and of what seemed like each tiny pixel in my view. I regularly had to close my eyes to attempt a self-reset. If I could have stood up from my chair and walked around, I might have been able to better ignore some of the distractions of the tech.
Manifesto point number four, around using embodiment, is closely linked to the previous point on agency. By being able to take some control — in a physical, bodily way — over the experience, perhaps the user invests in a more complete way, or in a substantively different way? Perhaps the key difference here is using the unique sense of presence and the consequent opportunity for embodiment as a conduit to a different kind of engagement. Or maybe it’s simpler than that — perhaps providing the opportunity to move or speak allows users to realise that they can move and speak.
Make Noise, by May Abdalla, is a wonderful example of curating this interaction in such a way that users knows precisely what is required of them. A VR piece about the suffrage movement, it gives suggestions for what kind and level of noise one should make, and later, particular words one should speak (or shout) as a specific act towards smashing barriers. This removes a lot of the self-consciousness often associated with audience participation, which can come from a fear of doing the “wrong” thing.
When done well, the embodied immersive experience can also create joy and catharsis. VVVR is a two person VR experience in which you sit on the floor, facing your partner, and make any sounds you like with your voice. The sounds are visualised in shapes and colours streaming from your mouth, and you can also see the results emanating from the person opposite you.
The joyfulness in VVVR comes from several things—the sharing of the experience with the other person (the encounter), the recognition of and connection with our animal nature (bewilderment), and the feeling of making ridiculous noises and speaking ourselves present (agency and embodiment).
By care, I mean care for the participant in two ways. Firstly, through respect for their privacy and data — as creators make yet more personalised experiences and collect ever more data on how each version unfolds (and think here beyond immersion about things like streaming service algorithms, for instance), it is vital that we maintain an ethical eye on how (and why) this data is stored and used.
Caring for participants means respecting both their privacy and their experience.
Secondly, I mean “care” through consideration of participant experience all the way from the introduction to and the exiting of and moments after the experience. For me, one very simple test of whether an experience has considered this is whether I have somewhere safe to put my bag. If I’m going to be experiencing a room scale VR piece, the sense of immersion is ruined if I have a constant urge to peek outside the headset and check that no one is nicking my stuff. “Care” in this sense also means considering the viewer’s response to the content. If the story is distressing or unsettling it can take some time for the viewer to decompress afterwards, and being thrust straight back into a busy festival hall might not be appropriate. Ensuring that participants have an opportunity to reorient themselves is important.
This manifesto is, purposefully, technology-agnostic. A project that enables encounter, bewilderment, agency, embodiment and care will lend itself to a range of forms, across AR, projection, installation, VR, a combination of these and more. My humble hope is that creators can use this manifesto to inform the development of amazing projects that will each connect us a little bit more with the way forward. Used together, perhaps they can help us illuminate those very necessary paths toward the future we want to create.