* Note about the above trailer: all VR imagery is recorded from the visitor’s point of view – it is what you see when wearing the headset. Throughout the piece you are able to switch between first and third person points of view (i.e in and out of body).
Titchener’s Cage is a site specific, traveling archive of embodied actions, monologues, memories and messages left by participants from each place it is installed in, as well as previously visited locations. At each site the project visits, for the first few days it functions as a “recording studio” and is only open to those members of the public who are interested in leaving their own embodied messages. Each is left on their own for a period, free to move about the space, use whatever items they brought with them, tell a personal story, etc, with their performance volumetrically captured as a 3D “point cloud”. Following this period, the installation opens to the general public.
To enter the installation, you must put on a virtual reality headset and step into the middle of an empty room. You are then inserted into a bare virtual space, with your own body rendered in real-time as a point-cloud, in a manner identical to that of the previously captured participants. Your point of view in the virtual world is the same as in the real one – if you look down at your body, you see it where you expect to, only made of floating dots.
You are also given the ability to “leave your body”, cutting the invisible tether and floating up and beyond the virtual room you initially manifest in. Similarly to real “out of body experiences”, you still see your own body from the outside as you float out. As you linger in the space, various “visitors” (the pre-recorded participants mentioned above) appear around you, one or two at a time, moving, telling a personal story, asking a question, etc. All of this is experienced as if it is really happening around you: you may move around the installation room to approach the different figures, their voices get louder and softer with distance etc. In ideal conditions, about half the visitors you see were recorded at the current installation site, and the other half are a mix from the previous places. The longer you stay in the room, the more emotionally and physically intense are the visits you will get. A complete stay is about 8-10 minutes long.
The project is named after Edward B. Titchener, the early 20th century British psychologist who coined the English word “empathy” in a translation from the German “einfühlung”. At that time the word had less to do with purporting to “feel what’s it’s like to be another person”, and more to do with “feeling into” another person – examining our subjective, embodied sensory and aesthetic experience of other people, and even of objects such as works of art. This distinction is increasingly important as a current trend in documentary immersive media is to claim that it can serve as an “empathy machine” that allows the viewer to magically understand the “other” simply by seeing the world from their point of view for a few moments. This piece, in contrast, provides a virtual experience that is centered in awareness of your own place and physical presence, and thus responsibility. Rather than depriving the viewer of a body altogether, or presuming to put them in another’s shoes, it is anchored in the viewer’s sense of their own body, which is presented on equal footing as those of previously recorded participants.
Where the project is / where it is going
Like much of my work, this is an evolving project. It has traveled the world for a few years, accumulating messages and performances at each site. There are several parallel directions in which it may develop, around any of the following: deeper collaborations with particular individuals or locations to make more intentional recordings; experimenting with different ways of constructing a perceived narrative structure; leveraging the unique technical capabilities of the system (everything happens in real time, and exactly the same system is used for recording and playback) – this allows for connecting more than one installation site in real time and mixing real-time visitors from different locations with prerecorded ones, etc.
Support:
- Sedona Summer Colony artist residency
- AS220, Providence, RI
- Connecticut College
- Further facilitation by each of the host venues listed below.
Venues + Communities visited and recorded so far:
- “Unleashing” exhibition, Columbia University Teacher’s College, New York City, NY (Upcoming: April 2018)R
- i-Docs Festival, Bristol, UK (March 2018)
- Currents New Media Festival, Santa Fe, NM (June 2017)R
- Hyphen Hub, New York City, NY (May 2017)
- Codes & Modes, Hunter College, New York City, NY (March 2017)
- Choreographic Technologies (CRCI), Brown University, Providence, RI (March 2017)R
- Video Vortex XI, a collateral project of the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kochi, India (Feb 2017)R
- Initial prototype: AS220, Providence RI (Sep 2016) R
R = Recordings made on location and added to the project archive
Installation
About 10 minutes per participant