3. Narrative Virtual Reality & Immersive 360 video
The EMPATHY MACHINE
RESTRUCTURING
NARRATIVE
PHYSICALITY
WHAT IS THE ‘REAL’ - DO WE
WANT IT?
RETHINKING THE STORY
5. “Researchers from
Washington University
…scanned the brains of
fiction readers and
discovered that their test
subjects created intense,
graphic mental
simulations of the sights,
sounds, movements, and
tastes they encountered in
the narrative.
In essence, their brains
reacted as if they were
actually living the
events they were reading
about.”
6. The New School for Social Research (Kidd & Castano):
Genre (popular) Fiction, Non-Fiction had no results
Literary Fiction improved capacity for empathy, and a reader’s capacity to understand
what others are thinking and feeling
York University (Raymond Mar):
86 fMRI studies
Substantial overlap in brain networks used to understand stories and those used to
navigate interactions with others
Mar, R. 2011. The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension, Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 62: 103-134
Kidd, David Comer & Emanuele Castano. 2013. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind, Science. Vol. 342, Issue 6156, pp. 377-380
The New Novel (1877)
Winslow Homer
(USA, 1821–1896)
7. Literature “prompts the
reader to imagine the
characters’ introspective
dialogues. This
psychological awareness
carries over into the real
world, which is full of
complicated individuals
whose inner lives are
usually difficult to fathom.”
-Scientific American 2013
9. Could VR function more like literature –
allowing you into the interior worlds of
others – in ways that have not been
possible in cinema and radio?
10. CHRIS MILK – “Building the ultimate empathy machine”
11. A still from Vrse.works’ virtual reality film, “Clouds over Sidra” 2015,
produced for the United Nations by Gabo Arora and Chris Milk
Clouds Over Sidra
12. The Zaatari Refugee Camp is home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war.
Children make up half the camp's population.
This is the story of Sidra, a 12-year old girl who has spent the last 18 months in Zaatari.
13. "We can't tell the viewer exactly what to look at
and if someone's more interested in the shoes
the person's wearing than what they're doing
then that's their choice.”
–ABC Rural Reporter Cassie Hough
“The first time VR made me cry…”
14.
15. Who exactly are we “feeling” for?
-Poverty Porn
-Euro-Lensed colonialist ‘tourism’
-i.e. Crossroads refugee & poverty immersion experiences at Davos
Listserv comments from Liz Man / Michele Stephenson
16. “We can’t be around the camera or we’re in the shot.”
On the Brink of Famine, South Sudan VR doc
17.
18. “If you grip the handles, sir, you
will… share his suffering, as you
know, but that is not all. You will also
participate in his… ‘World-view’ is
not the correct term. Ideology? No.
[…] No word will do, and that is the
entire point. It cannot be described
— it must be experienced.”
— The Little Black Box, Philip K. Dick
(Published in Worlds of Tomorrow, 1964)
19. Machine To Be Another: Gender Swap
https://vimeo.com/84150219
20. In the Eyes of the Animal
Mashmallow Laser Feast
21. “We thought of PLACEHOLDER as a set of
environments imbued with narrative potential -
places that could be experienced and marked
through narrative activity. When a person visits a
place, the stories that are told about it - by
companions, by rock art or graffiti, or even by
oneself through memories or fantasies - become
part of the character of the place. Stories give us
ideas about what can be done or imagined in a
place”
– Brenda Laurel, 1994
23. The ‘Real’?
Do we want THE REAL?
As Lacan reminds us, it is an impossible state, one that only may occur in
adulthood through moments of complete rupture or trauma, when the
symbolic order has collapsed.
24. 6 x 9
Project Creators: Francesca Panetta & Lindsay Poulton
Key Collaborator: The Mill
25. “6×9 utilizes a lot of innovative immersive storytelling techniques to show you
the hallucinogenic effects of spending an extended time within a 6′ by 9′ prison
cell. You experience blurred vision, floating, objects that disappear if you try to
look at them, and a lot of animated text projected onto the virtual walls.”
26.
27. Viens! (Come!)
“In this sensually playful, live-action VR, three women and four men, all naked, appear out of nowhere in the
white sunny space of a bright room outside of time. They meet, touch, share their energy, and are transformed
spiritually; they let themselves become one with the world.” VR film by Michel Reilhac & Melanie le Grand
28. Slippery “Truths”
Topics like Racism & Police shootings:
Janicza Bravo's “Hard World for Small Things”, live action
VR of a day in the life of a tight-knit community of South
Central Los Angeles.
29. Multiple perspectives, reveal narrative fallibility, the ambiguity of reality
and the authority of narrative.
No single truth: “the fact that we are present is not a guarantee that we
see what really truly happens.”
Rose Troche and Morris May
30. Considering the Body
A whole new set of
issues need to be
taken into
consideration:
paramount perhaps is
the physical body of
the spectator;
360 Video is not VR
31. NEW NARRATIVE
In the ‘Round’
Intentionally having things that
can’t all be seen
Importance of Camera Placement
Sound as trigger
Inside stream of consciousness:
Literature
Miss Auras, by John Lavery, depicts a woman reading a book
John Lavery - http://kevinalfredstrom.com/art/v/paintings/Sir+John+Lavery_Miss_Auras_the_red_book.jpg.html
1000 subject is Kidd and Castano
It’s fitting, then, that Milk’s first film is about a real Syrian girl named Sidra living in a refugee camp. He followed that up with one about the Millions March, the protest demonstration in response to the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City, and another inside an Ebola clinic in Liberia. He and his team at Vrse.works just finished a project with The New York Times and Google Cardboard about child refugees.
What does this mean for authorship – is camera placement the new authorship?
I think VR and immersive experience works very well for intensive encounters, and for responding intense moments – but not sure how well it encourages us to empathise with long-terms structurally-induced suffering for example. …Empathy also tends to prioritize linkages to particular individuals rather than structural thinking.
-Sam Gregory, Program Director at WITNESS
The Limits of Virtual Reality: Debugging the Empathy Machine
Ainsley Sutherland
MIT OpenDocLab
http://i-docs.org/2015/05/19/virtual-reality-the-empathy-machine/
Gender Swap is an experiment that uses themachinetobeanother.org/ system as a platform for embodiment experience (a neuroscience technique in which users can feel themselves like if they were in a different body). In order to create the brain illusion we use the immersive Head Mounted Display Oculus Rift, and first-person cameras. To create this perception, both users have to synchronize their movements. If one does not correspond to the movement of the other, the embodiment experience does not work. It means that both users have to constantly agree on every movement they make. Through out this experiment, we aim to investigate issues like Gender Identity, Queer Theory, feminist technoscience, Intimacy and Mutual Respect.
Nominated for the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling 2015 and the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction, Witness 360 puts the viewer into the position of one of those who experienced the bombing attacks that shocked London on July 7, 2005.
On July 7, 2005, London was rocked by a series of devastating bombings. Four Al-Qaeda suicide terrorists blew themselves up in the underground and on a bus. Fifty-two people died and more than 700 were injured in the attack – the most devastating on British soil since a bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Witness 360 makes it clear what the attacks meant on an individual level. One survivor recounts her experience on that day, but much more how these events continue to haunt her. This makes this form of virtual reality journalism much more than a re-enactment or a recording of eyewitness accounts. The subconscious fear that continues to grow after the attack is perhaps even more devastating than the actual explosions. Clever use of associative images grants us insight and allows us to feel what cannot be shown, or even easily described.
Perspective: Chapter 2 is an immersive experience that transports the viewer to the streets of New York and puts them in the middle of an urban petty theft that escalates quickly and leads to serious ramifications. Filmed as first-person POV, the film offers four different perspectives on the event – that of the teens accused of stealing and that of each police officer involved in apprehending them. This emotionally gripping VR experience offers an unprecedented look at the very inside of the timely topic of police brutality, one of the most important topics facing US society today.