Titchener’s Cage
Participatory XR installation + traveling archive, variable duration
* 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 an “out-of-body-experience machine” and a traveling archive of embodied actions, gestures, and monologues left by participants at each site it visits. When the project arrives at a new location, it initially functions as a "holographic" recording studio, open for a few days only to local co-creators who are invited to contribute their own embodied messages—moving, speaking, performing, or simply being present. These sessions are captured as 3D point clouds in motion and added to the growing archive.
When the installation opens to the public, visitors put on a VR headset and are instructed by an attendant as they step into a bare space, where they see their own body rendered as a point cloud from their normal, first-person point of view. A single button lets them unmoor their perspective and float slowly outside themselves, observing their own body from the outside. As they move through the space, ghostly figures—pre-recorded co-creators from the current site and previous ones—appear, speak, and move around them, their proximity, actions and words getting increasingly intimate the longer the visitor lingers. The project is named after Edward B. Titchener, who first translated “empathy” into English, originally meaning to “feel into” rather than to fully become another. The work resists simplistic ideas of virtual empathy, instead centering the viewer’s own embodied presence and responsibility.
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
