Interview with Emma Roberts & Ben Joseph Andrews
“Turbulence” – you loose something, but you also gain something
“Crip theory” and the history of neurodivergent, disabled artists coming in and deconstructing what a medium can be was a huge influence on making this piece. We were really influenced by thinkers like M. Remi Yergeau and artists like Christine Sun Kim and Jjjjerome Ellis who critically subvert the media they use as a means of challenging assumptions around normalcy and reclaiming these spaces. I think this is particularly salient when it comes to immersive, embodied technologies – whose bodies are these technologies designed for, what kinds of bodily or sensorial experiences are permitted or not permitted, how can these technologies be broken, hijacked, reclaimed, subverted to enable something else? Cripping embodied tech is one of the most exciting things about this space.
Izabella Adamczewska-Baranowska: Why did you choose XR as a form of artistic expression?
Emma Roberts: - We both originally come from a film background, myself as a producer and Ben as a director. We stumbled into VR kind of by accident, I think like a lot of people. Then was on a hiatus between making films for his PhD and was interested in exploring virtual reality and asked me to help out with a grant that we then got to make a small piece.
And we fell in love with it at the first time that either of us had made anything in like in an interactive or a immersive medium. The first time I ever put on a headset was the day of the performance that we were doing. We were both really immediately struck, I think, coming from the film world where often you're really distanced from your audience.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - The piece that we were making was a live-scored immersive installation with live musicians in the space and kind of a strange sci-fi multi-sensory journey that you went on and we felt in love so quickly with the direct interface you have with the audience and how experimental and playful you could be within that space that I think was very different to the backgrounds that we come to in film.
We're really fascinated by a lot of the possibilities that open up with the technology, which funnily enough, were often not to do with the technological capacity of it, but that what actually kind of emerges in a live context, in a very low-fi way.
So, that was kind of something that we started experimenting, a lot of our early work was very experimental, and we would just follow the things that continued to interest us. And that was in 2016, so it's been a while.
Ben, on Instagram you introduce yourself as new media artist, XR researcher and vestibular migraineur. Is being a migraineur a part of your identity?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Yeah, it's really interesting, that kind of tryptic of identities. I think that going through the process of making “Turbulence”, developing, confronting the realities of chronic migraine, made me realize that migraine it is to do with the processing of information. That's sensory, that's language, that's memory. It made me realize that there's no real clear boundaries between who I know myself to be without or with really.
There's a blurriness and a kind of dynamism between the migraine and myself. And how it shapes how you see, how I perceive the world that it is part of part of me and part of my identity and that piece was very much about coming to terms with that on a very just intimate level for myself and for the immediate loved ones in my life to communicate a little bit about this and to articulate it in a way that I had never before. Language itself is slippery and incomplete. Language that is trying to convey the kind of elusive phenomena of migraine is really, really difficult.
So that was part of the reason of wanting to use some of the skills and techniques that we developed in our previous work to apply them towards something that was very personal.
Could you tell somebody that have never experience vestibular migraine, what is it and how do you feel?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - I've had a chronic migraine condition for most of my adult life. But there's also tendencies, I guess, or sensitivities that were with me from childhood as well - like extreme motion sensitivity. In my early adult life I had developed some means of control, enough to continue what I was doing, and the little that I really know the dynamism of migraine and that it evolves and changes and grows and eludes the measures that you put in place. So vestibular migraine is something that when I look back I can see that, I always had. Like you're always quite sensitive. There was a porousness to movement in particular for me.
The vestibular system controls our sense of balance and our perception of movement and orientation and equilibrium. And essentially the migraine affects how that information is conveyed on a bodily and sensorial level. So the way that it manifests is through things such as what we would name dizziness and motion sickness and vertigo, but really I would normally describe it personally is like having a synesthesia for movement.
So, like having this kind of porousness of my perception of motion where my body through its sensitivity doesn't know what is my movement and what is the movement of other things… There's a Christmas tree just in this corner of this room. And if I look at that and I see the flashing movement of the lights, my body I can feel it's starting to feel like it's moving in those ways. It adopts the rhythms, the currents, the velocities of motion that are so mind you have it all the time, not only when the attack comes. I think that's one of the most interesting things with migraine is that it's such a huge spectrum.
And I think often when we talk about migraine, we talk about the more pain-dominant episodic form. However, vestibular migraine is chronic in the sense that it's always active, it’s 24 hours a day 7 days a week. So it's always within me. I feel like my identity is symbiotic with it. Because it's always happening, it’s inseparable from me.
The title of your work is “Turbulence: Jamais Vu”. Could you explain it?
Emma Roberts: - “Turbulence” is the title for the larger project that we've been exploring movement and motion perception for a couple of years now. “Jamais vu” is a term for a condition that might also be called derealization or depersonalization, which Ben experiences quite a lot as a sign find that a big flare-up is going to happen. And basically what that manifests as is a feeling that reality is no longer real. You might have experienced this before if you've said or written a word over and over again and suddenly it becomes you it doesn't seem like a word anymore.
One of the signs for Ben that a big flare-up is coming is that he looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize himself. Like he knows logically that this is his body and that's what he looks like, but that emotional connection to the world around him isn't there. And so that was the feeling that we wanted to manifest through the piece and through playing with passthrough.
This project is communicating something very invisible, but also very difficult and tricky: concept of embodied reality. And there's something about the relationship to déjà vu, which is much more understood idea of this kind of slippage that is strange and weird and a little bit ineffable, but very, very palpable at the same time.
And there's this kind of inversion of déjà vu within the title of “Jamais vu”: creating this moment of familiarity or a shared kind of experience. The piece is trying to communicate and give an embodied impression of something that's very hard to describe.
That thing that you said about depersonalization and the derealization is something opposite to embodiment that is fundamental for VR as a technique.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - It seems opposite, but it's still within the embodied field as well. I've been thinking a lot about this “de-“ in “derealization, because it is in some strong sense a loss, like it's almost alike habitual full memory that stores the relationships that you have to your own body, to the faces of the people that you love, to the experience of texture, of smell. It's almost like that memory, that that cache has been cleared. So in that sense, it's a kind of both a loss and experiencing a new.
Emma Roberts: - A lot of our work that we've done prior to “Turbulence” was very much playing with the duality of being inside the headset but also a body and space: being present somewhere that you're not and absent somewhere that you are when you're in VR and the body is always persisting. I think inherent to VR is an element of depersonalization and derealization because you have the separating of self where you're in between two worlds. We have a tendency to think just that we're here, but actually the idea is to immerse to forget about everything that is, and I think that one of the myths of immersive technology like VR is that it's not seamless. It's coupled with intrinsically our physical reality which is often obscured from us in those moments and it's layered in that sense, it's both digital and compelling illusion, but it's also grounded within something that is transformed, with this kind of experiences taking place alongside that.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Like Emma mentioned, a lot of our earlier work was interested in exactly that in between this. Getting very incongruous experiences where what you were seeing didn't necessarily match to what your body was experiencing and vice versa. In “Turbulence” we realize that there is a through line with a lot of the earlier exploration into this kind of liminal experience and this kind of idea of the headset as a blindfold and really the sense of absence that runs underneath presence and kind of creating experiences or encounters with kind of multi-sensory performance and in order to make that absence and then what's outside come into kind of palpable contact.
When I was experiencing “Turbulence”, I found it very surrealistic. It is not “safe”, because you realize that the reality is not what you had thought earlier.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Migraine has taught me in a really immediate sense that our sense of reality, perception, who we are, all of these things are so tenuous, they're not certain, they're not permanent. They can change so quickly. And also your sense of what reality is could be completely different to what my sense of reality is. With the piece we were trying to keep it quite open in the way that people can interact and be within the experience. We very much lean into guess the ways that people wanted to push against or hold back from that opening up of what reality can be for themselves. You have people that go through it, that are very exploratory and want to just push at the edges of that and people that just sit there and hold on for dear life and don't move. I find that really interesting: what it reveals about how different people react or respond to that opening up of reality in a slightly different way. But we really wanted the piece to be grounded in a physical reality, like it was always using a camera that allowed you to have a strong connection with your physical environment. And that was always designed to both give a sense of tactility, a sense of groundness, but also allow the experience to play out in the overturning or the upsetting or the disturbing of that relationship as well.
This analogy to surrealism is very important, because surrealists put the neurodiversity as a topic for artistic exploration. You told previously, that being a migraineur you loose something, but you also gain something. I’ve recently read an essay by Celia Svedhem, „The Dark Room: The History of Migraine and the Search for Relief”. Svendhem discovered that many artistic people suffered from migraine: Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, Gustav Mahler. Some scientists think that van Gogh, Monet and Matisse could also. Ben, do you consider your migraine as a form of disability?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Yes, I do consider my migraine to be a form of disability. As a chronic condition, it affects every part of my life: working life, personal life, my capacity to do the things that I want to do in the time I can do them in. Often when people hear the term migraine, they think of the episodic, pain-dominant variety. Their response might be, “well you could just go lie down in a dark room”. But with vestibular migraine, you realise that everything is moving. My own breath is movement. Some of the most terrifying experiences I’ve had with vestibular flare-ups is confronting the ceaselessness of my own breath: that I cannot stop perceiving my own body-in-flux, let alone the multitudes of movement unfolding in the world around me. At its very heart, migraine is a condition of misprocessing and vestibular migraine turns this misprocessing into a continuous feedback loop. But then on the other hand, as you suggest, there are aspects of the migraineur experience that open up very rich ways of experiencing the world – experiences that are extraordinarily beautiful and strange and unexpected.
Emma Roberts: - We've had this discussion quite a lot as well, like, disability doesn't necessarily come from the individual, but from the way that society is set up. Like, how familiar you are. The people reading this interview might be with the social model of disability, but this idea that actually the thing that's disabling is the way that societal norms are set up to welcome or to not welcome different ways of being in the world. And there are certainly quite a few disabling aspects of vestibular migraine when coming up against like the way that normative society exists in the world.
I think that's very difficult being in the art spaces for Ben. Things like bright lights, strobing effects, moving cameras, different ways of being in space and screen use and things like that are very difficult for Ben. So we do use the term “disabled artists” for Ben, but it's more coming from that social model of like what we could adjust for or make more accessible than it is coming from what the condition gives or it takes.
Yes, I had to ask this question because I'm strongly influenced by Robert McRuer’s “crip theory”. He uses the word “crip” in a subversive way, pointing out, that neurodiversity is similar to queerness.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - “Crip theory” and the history of neurodivergent, disabled artists coming in and deconstructing what a medium can be was a huge influence on making this piece. We were really influenced by thinkers like M. Remi Yergeau and artists like Christine Sun Kim and Jjjjerome Ellis who critically subvert the media they use as a means of challenging assumptions around normalcy and reclaiming these spaces. I think this is particularly salient when it comes to immersive, embodied technologies – whose bodies are these technologies designed for, what kinds of bodily or sensorial experiences are permitted or not permitted, how can these technologies be broken, hijacked, reclaimed, subverted to enable something else? Cripping embodied tech is one of the most exciting things about this space.
Emma, was the adventure with “Turbulence” the way to better understand Ben?
Emma Roberts: - We started the exploration then made a big list of symptoms and this is quite new for him at the time, like idea that there was a name for the particular manifestation of disability he was experiencing. We made a big list of symptoms and we were talking about that because we're partners, we live together and we also work together. So I've been seeing a lot of this stuff but not necessarily having language around it or the way that Ben describes it is very different to how I interpret that description. There are things in there that Ben hadn't talked about, like derealization, depersonalization, I don't think we had talked about that much cause it's quite scary. I feel very lucky to have that opportunity to have started the piece as a conversation like it was as a communication with Ben, but then also to see other people coming out of the piece and having these really beautiful conversations with them about their own experience or a loved one's experience.
And that might be of a disability, but also other chronic or invisible illnesses. So, the conversation part of the piece is my favorite part beyond that. I love what it catalyzes.
Could you tell me more about conversations with people after experiencing “Turbulence”?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - It's so much deeper than I was expecting: the kind of reach that it has had, but also the kind of impact. It's a very immediate challenging work.
It's often very personal. There's a vulnerability in “Turbulence” that allows people to feel that there's a sense of trust there, especially when I'm there in person. That's a really precious thing and sometimes it rekindles childhood memories of feeling strange or misproportioned or somehow out of sync with the world around you, which the people haven't thought about. Sometimes you just talk about the strangeness of how we perceive and how we experience.
What do you think about this famous quote that VR is an empathy machine? In one of the interviews you called it “emotional manipulation”.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Sometimes you hear the phrase “empathy machine” and you have these arguments or read a lot of really intelligent people pushing back against that theory of walking in someone else's shoes. Before making this piece, we had been like “don't say that word around” - and then when we premiered at Melbourne international film festival, people had the empathy reaction to that.
Emma Roberts: - But that was an interesting challenge to for us to like think about, "Okay, well, we have made this piece that is asking people to consider Ben's perspective and people are having quite an empathetic response to it." But I think perhaps what we wanted to bring to the table rather than just looking at the piece as an empathy machine is it was very deliberately designed to play with both your body as an audience member and the character of Ben. So you're kind of in between, you're not quite yourself and you're not quite Ben. So you're never fully claiming to step into Ben's shoes. It's always about your experience. I'm trying to understand through an analogy what Ben might be feeling and then you can make that jump about how Ben might exist in the world, which is I think very different to that natural assumption of that VR just lets you walk in someone else's shoes.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - One cannot just fully enter into someone else's experience. When I go into a VR piece, I'm still myself, but there's a messiness that takes place within the embodied kind of illusion of VR and the embodied reality of being a person that's in a space moving in a particular way, interacting in a particular way. So, we wanted to lean into that side of things, into this kind of messiness.
We had also reconditioned our own aversion to the term “empathy” as a response to the work because at the beginning it felt almost like a negative thing, that someone would say, but obviously, having an empathetic response is wonderful and really special. But we wanted to make sure that we were doing it in a way that didn't feel manipulative or reductive.
When I was experiencing “Turbulence. Jamais vu”, I was thinking about other mind journeys, for example psychedelic experiences using VR, such as “Ayahuasca VR”. What is the difference?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Yeah, what is the difference?
Psychedelic experience is something that you experience when you want it and just for a while. You choose it. But you can’t choose vestibular migraine.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - There are a lot of pieces that explore disability or neurodivergence, but often not made by disabled creators themselves. It’s like feeding a market. “Turbulence” is in this category, we are not absorbed of this, but we know that people are like, "Oh, I want to put on a VR headset and understand what it's like to be X." But then they take the headset off and just have a nice time and walk away, maybe thinking "Oh, yeah, I really understood what it could be to have a vestibular migraine or whatever that might be." We tried to catch that in the narrative and the way that we've written the piece. Some friends of ours helped us and Amy Crighton is working on a piece called “Cripping Up”, that is playing with this tendency.
[https://cphdox.dk/cphlab-project/cripping-up/: “Cripping Up is an interactive VR experience that invites the audience to embody Meg Fozzard, a wheelchair user, making what would be a simple journey for someone able bodied, but for Meg feels like an odyssey. They will experience the ableist barriers Meg contends with every day which will help them to recognise the ableism in their own actions and reflect on how they can do better. We want to challenge the notion of VR as an empathy machine, by reminding the user that they, unlike Meg, are able to walk away” – ed.].
I think it is a very interesting part of these trend of exploring disability in in VR.
Emma Roberts: - We didn’t want people to shy away from the discomfort. This is not easy and it's unsettling, on multiple levels, and even when you know what the unsettling thing is, some people very quick, some people slower realize what the illusion or inversion is, what the wrongness is. But you still have to negotiate yourself within that.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - We didn't want this piece to be easy. And when we were developing the work, in some of the early prototyping, when we saw people moving confidently within it, it didn't feel true. It's a 10-minute work, but it's a hard demanding 10 minutes, because we wanted it to be true to what that source is. It's not a kind of cross-over.
You take care for the person that is experiencing. In the narration, there is a phrase that you can remove the headset when you feel dizzy.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - It's really important for us. Within festival environments or public exhibitions, people are often too polite and they feel like “oh we've queued up for this or we've got a ticket for this or I don't want to cause trouble”. I don't want them to stay within the piece that is distressing or difficult or uncomfortable. This is why we wanted to meet you as an audience member to give you permission outwardly. But a lot of the narration, the voiceover is really carefully written as a supportive voice, as a guide, that reminds you of where you are and that someone is with you. When I recorded that voiceover, every single time, I could always imagine that I was speaking to someone who didn't know what was about to happen. As a as the designer of the experience, but also as the person that's drawing on this distressing phenomena, I always like to imagine that there is a guide that won’t betray you.
“Turbulence” is a kind of delegated performance. I use the term coined by Claire Bishop in her book “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship”.
Emma Roberts: - We've come from a background of inadvertently playing . A lot of our previous works was accidentally immersive theatre using VR, but we never used that term, and it wasn't until we were doing user testing in at Silver Salt's Science Media Festival in Germany. We put a friend of ours through to get some feedback, and he came out and said, "Oh, it's like a immersive theatre with magic glasses." It fit really well.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - As soon as he said it, it felt very natural because of how much effort we put into to creating this open scenography. We've never had anyone breaking the rule: you're at a desk so you should stay at the desk. Everyone's always very happy to play within the framework that they're left in which is an unspoken rule, but there are people that are opening every drawer and looking at everything. There are people that are just very content to pick up one object and examine that for the whole time. When we were prototyping the work, we were changing the voiceover or the scenography a little bit, watching how people played with it. We changed the dynamic. It’s because a lot of our earlier works was about creating frameworks for open experience. They required performers and users often to move people through space. We were trying to create these frameworks where people could experience the work as they wanted to or needed to within certain bounds. With “Jamais vu” we knew tat 10 minutes was about as long as we wanted anyone to be within the work, because of its demand.
So there was a temporal constraint from the very beginning that we couldn't exceed, but still within that, we wanted to create something that you get interested in, because it allows you to impart your own experience within it. “What is this object over here? I'm going to reach and discover it. Oh, it's this. Oh, it feels different to what I expect. Is it this?”
I actually feel immersed as a as a person within a work that can make their own choices and discover their own bits and pieces along the way. It is very theatrical. I think that putting on a headset is an inherently theatrical act, because it changes our sense of space around us and how we perceive the space within the headset.
Let's talk about art installation. Why is it the desk, not, for example, kitchen?
Emma Roberts: - We did a lot of playing with the frameworks for the piece. The flip, the edge filter and the first bit of the voiceover was the first prototype. We done some other prototyping with the pass through camera as well, so we knew the kind of experience we wanted to create but not what would get us to that experience. It had to be something that you could recognizably see yourself doing and simple because we wanted to reframe your relationship to simple and familiar actions and places. We played with hanging out the washing. I remember it's very difficult to line things up, so we had all these playing cards that you were lining up which is impossible to do. I can't remember other ones, but we were just brainstorming lots and lots of different frameworks that would fit that mundane familiar space. At the time we were leaning further into that this kind of meta-, and we had a mirror in front of you. Which is really interesting but is was also really difficult because how you look is also inverted and the mirror somehow amplifies that imbalance.
We wanted to have things that you could just reach out and play with, like the books and the text and different objects, but we also knew that we wanted to give tasks because it is only when you're asked to do a particular to use your motor skills that the difficulty with overriding the habitual becomes very prominent. I think it was when we looked at a book through the edge filter that took us down on the desk path because then we became very interested in writing for Ben, the place where like a lot of research and writing happens is at his desk. So then that kind of everything fell into place.
I think that this experience should be taken at home because this is the most familiar surrounding. But it would be complicated because you need the specific camera.
Emma Roberts: - Originally the reason that we you ended up using the camera is that while we were making this piece, the cameras on the meta headsets were locked. You couldn't access them and manipulate them. You could access them in a game engine and bring in a feed but you as the developer could not do anything to them beyond that. And so we were forced to use the additional camera on the front of the of the headset. That has now changed. And there's always a bit in the back of our mind that that is very interested by exactly what you say like having this mundane environment because really, I think actually initially when we were brainstorming the project, we did very much want it to be something that you could just download. All you need is a chair, a cup, and a coaster, and you can do the experience. But then because of the external technology, that became very difficult.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - But now that Meta have allowed developer access to the pass-through cameras, I would love to rebuild it to be able to use that because it makes it so much more accessible and so much more interesting almost to be able to bring it into new and more familiar spaces.
“Turbulence. Jamais vu” is very easy to be presented during festivals all over the world, because the scenography is to be rebuilt all the time. Do you encourage people to create local surroundings?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - There's a couple of key items on the desk that relate to the voiceover and the narrative. But really the brief is an messy desk that looks lived in, that feels lived in. And feels familiar. What is familiar is different to everyone, of course. But it also is related to the culture in which you're viewing it. If you're seated at a desk in Holland, then perhaps you're unlikely to have three books in English in in the desk. It actually fits much more to have an item that you would expect to see on a desk in Tokyo versus a desk in Australia. It's very beautiful to be able to collaborate with the presenter and learn about how this desk evolves all the time. Sometimes people at different showings will leave something behind, but you know they brought a flyer from another work and it's they've left it behind or they've left us a little note that then travels - it's in German, then in Beijing, that's really cool.
I was just preparing to send the package to Łódź for the Polish showing. And I opened up this package that had actually been sent back to us from America. And there were handwritten posted notes from lots of different audience members. “Turbulence” is evolving. Some things end up on my desk at home as a souvenirs of experience. There's something really special about how exhibitors actually put their own selves into the desk. The festival organizer or the producer will bring the books that really resonate with them and candles or plants or lamps.
Most of our earlier works was very much designed around the intensity and quality of experience and not around how could this ever be shown. We needed “Turbulence” to be a Mixed Reality work. It was very clear from the very beginning that we wanted to retain the sense of liveliness and the sense of theatricality and it's kind of almost a sense of performance like this delegated performance. But we wanted to do it in a way that was very achievable for distribution and for exhibition, that could use every day items.
Those rearrangements can be tricky. I was experiencing “Turbulence” in Prague and on the desk there was a book of Grimm's Tales. And I started to think: why Grimm's? Because of the danger? And maybe some dark fairy tale is going on?
Emma Roberts: - It is quite a stripped back installation at the same time that there's somehow more weight and significance placed on each item. And some of those items we allow to be arbitrary because I think that what exists on all of our desks is a mixture between significant items that we're working with or reading and then items that someone else has put there or we're using to prop up a lamp.
We often give some suggestions of the kinds of books or themes for the books, but that's not always possible. It makes complete sense that you would think about why that particular thing has been chosen.
But that means that you don't have a full control over your work.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Artists in immersive space often are not having full control because when you're thinking about immersion, you're thinking about the sensory, visuals, ritual. The way that people get brought into a space can be really important and there's always going to be some compromise unless you have an unlimited budget and unlimited time and unlimited space.
We're aware that there's so many books in the world that we all have that we don't need to buy more books specific for “Turbulence. Jamais vu”. I get really annoyed by the waste that can come with exhibitions generally. It is important that for this work we can just recycle or upcycle. I really like about this piece that it can come from nothing and evaporate back into nothing.
Could you tell me about technical issues? How did you hack the device?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - We have been working often in collaboration with other technical artists that were creative coders, programmers. That had always been a really enriching part of the collaborative experience, but with this work because it was so personal, it was coming through from such a an intimate place that already was so difficult to translate into language. It was clear from the outset that I needed to lead the creative technical prototyping. So within the early phase of thinking about migraine as an artistic interest or looking at migraine from my perspective as an artist rather than just as someone that was suffering with and holding on, I taught myself how to use TouchDesigner. I could do a little bit of programming and some basic things, but I really wanted to be able to create, to be able to follow intuitively right other have to translate and once I developed enough technical capacity to feel like I was comfortable to make something, this piece just happened really quickly.
Emma Roberts: - It was just out of experiments you were doing.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Yeah, we made about six to eight prototypes, really quick. Little ugly things. I'd created them in maybe an hour to two hours. It would explore just other aspects: colors, flavors of phenomena. This was one of them, but it was the one that we immediately knew that this had something. It was a particular constellation of elements that just felt right. 70% of this project forwarded in a weekend and then the other 30% took like 6-7 months of really difficult scripting. And that was the really hardest thing. But on a technical level it is also really simple. We wanted to create something that was simple in its parts, but elegant in terms of its use and execution.
Let’s get back to the narration. Ben, you are the guide. “Turbulence” is a difficult piece to be in, so the narrator has to make you feel held and cared for as much as possible.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - The art of the narration was about balancing sensory overwhelm and informational overwhelm. So, you're never getting key information through the voiceover when you're being asked to do a lot of things because you're too focused here to listen and you forget everything that you're told. You're never doing lots of things when you're receiving key information or key narrative moments and so that was a lot of the craft of the voiceover. And I must say the work of sound within that plays an incredibly important part. So particularly the work of Matt Faisandier, and how he mixes the narration, the vocals. And then also the musical composition and how that gives space and relief.
While we are having our interview, the issue with the translation of narration to Polish is still not solved. We want to use subtitles, but that means that you cannot perform fluently because you have to watch and read and on the contrary if we if somebody else read in Polish the text, it wouldn't be authentic.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - We did subtitles once for deaf audience. But in “Turbulence. Jamais vu” there are two key moments where you're told to close your eyes and that you can't receive information from subtitles if you've got your eyes closed. That's really tricky to think about how do we even tackle that through the subtitles and the way that what the subtitles are asking you to do instead.
Supporting translation work is something that we're always really open for. It's just difficult to do with schedules with other people involved and because the piece is actually technically not even supposed to be the release diversion of things. It was made for very little budget. The prototype became the final version.
You are planning to do another chapters of “Turbulence”.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - We hope to, yeah. We often do all four chapters as a live lecture performance. We're going to do it in Australia again in February in Perth, the Perth Festival. We're still working through the funding situation in Australia is not super great for VR at the moment.
If you get money, what would you do?
Emma Roberts: - The other three chapters follow the arc of a vestibular migraine attack, but looking at the technology as a metaphor through which we can understand our own perception and the way the Ben perceives the world, but how we also perceive the world as well. Basically Ben had to rebuild his own brain and the way that information is processed inside the game engine. The way that a VR headset works is so movement-driven. These technologies provide us such interesting insights into our assumptions about how our reality works, and where the gaps are between that too. So each of the three other chapters are looking at a different aspect of that. When we think about VR, we think about it maybe on a visual or interactive level, but do we consider that it's a inherently vestibular device that it's very hard? It relies on understanding and processing our movement in order to know accurately where we are in space. So, each of the chapters is looking at the technology itself, deconstructing it critically. And also exploring what disabled experience can emerge through that deconstruction, through that kind of hacking, through that kind of breaking apart. How this works and what the assumptions underneath that are?
Ben, was it an autotherapy to work on your own experience?
Ben Joseph Andrews: - Yes, it's been a been a really cathartic process, in a lot of ways. Before making this work I was very private about my experience. Creating this piece that's been seen so widely and so publicly has been quite a transformation, but the biggest one has been my relationship to this condition. I think it's been about breaking down the kind of pathology surprising aspect of this as a disability.
It's been about reframing my curiosity towards it to seeing its beauty and its weirdness from a place of intrigue and I think through that it's been really dramatic in changing a lot of aspects of my life and of my artistic practice.
So it's the therapeutic process. In other senses, it revealed the plasticity of it all. Like Emma was saying, the wobbling effect that happens in “Jamais vu”... When I created that effect, it really feels like how the world often feels for me. It bends, it distorts, it's not static, it's fluid. But in designing the work and developing that effect and spending time within the headset, the malleability of my perceptual system saw that effect and could now imitate it. So now I can actually see the world move like the effect that I designed, which gives a lot of respect to the power of what it is that I'm drawing from.
Before “Turbulence” you worked together on “Gondwana”, immersive digital ecosystem. It’s about possible future of the world. It’s completely different than “Turbulence”, but also somehow similar.
Emma Roberts: - “Gondwana” is a constantly evolving virtual ecosystem based on the rain tree rainforest which is in the top northeast corner of Australia. It's a very like ancient world, this tropical rainforest. The virtual ecosystem goes live for usually 24 hours at a time, and over that 24 hours, it tracks 100 years of climate data from 1990 to 2090. And the way how much audiences spend time in the piece pushes back against the decline of the climate data. So, we never know where it's going to end up at the end of any given day. Usually, that's exhibited as an installation, but it was designed for exhibition during the pandemic, so it can be totally virtual or have a physical imprint, but it was a departure from a lot of our life performance stuff that we've done prior to that. It's an open world environment that you can explore how you want. If you're someone who just wants to sit on the beach or you want to go and look for every animal or wander around everywhere, you go. And very similar, I guess, to “Turbulence”, is how we can offer these open experiences within a framework of a story we want to tell.
Ben Joseph Andrews: - We do the installation version of it, breaking down these barriers between someone being in a headset and someone being in the space outside, because it's often got immersive projection and lighting and sound that open up the rainforest beyond just being here in it. The interest in time and the temporal perception that is at the heart of Gondwana is definitely resurfacing in a lot of the work that we're currently working on. So, I think it's all kind of this elastic elliptical relationships in terms of themes and kind of interests.