23. Wild Avatars: Nature in Virtual Reality
SYNOPSIS:
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to breathe yourself into your own body? To flow with the out-breath of trees into your own fractaling lungs, to dance ribbonlike into an ancient ceiba’s vasculature, to stitch an ecosystem together as a mycelium highways sparkling with energy? In this episode we explore the transformational potential of virtual reality through the work of Marshmellow Laser Feast, an artist collective that has emerged as a leading VR creators in the last decade that has exhibited internationally from London to New York, Melbourne to Seoul, their work included in major exhibitions at institutions including the Barbican Centre, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and ACMI.
Ersin Han Ersin is one of the founders of MLF and describes to us how they use dazzlingly aesthetic real-time VR experiences to explore the invisible perspectives of nature’s lifeworlds – and how they are constantly pushing the bounds of what technology makes possible in expanding our ecological sensitivities. I enquire into:
Who they need to speak to in order to create their masterpieces and translate the umwelts of other species? What other scientists, poets, musicians, make this possible?
What is it that virtual reality can create that no other medium can?
What is the building block of a multisensory story?
What are some of the astounding ways that other beings experience the world that are divergent from the human?
How could global education be redesigned based on kinesthetic educative tools like VR?
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Wild Avatars
QUOTES:
That led to the question “If I'm feeling this way, what might other species feel about this place? How do they perceive the world around them? Is it as special to them as it is to us?” And that led to the whole idea of umwelt.
What if you're a mosquito and you’re flying through a forest when it's actually reversing its photosynthesis in the nighttime? So it's just producing a high density of carbon dioxide flowing through and what you see is CO2 vision.
Just witnessing these moments in an accessible, poetic way... In a world where death and life are all intermingled from a cultural point of view, like a cemetery park, and you go from one space to another, you sit under a tree, listen to the evolution of life for trees from 250, 300 million years ago.
What is the building block of a multisensory story? Maybe it's an emotional arc rather than putting a verbal definition. Can we start from the premise of the feelings we want to accomplish through certain moments?
Your self-importance moves away from you, and you feel small, you feel humbled… But at the same time, there is this life force in front of you that you are part of. And it's been alive for 2,500 years growing to a size that is a 10 story building. With thousands of species living on or around it, and you can feel it. And that feeling is really humbling.
The default network we have in our cognition that creates memories uses exactly the same network when we are imagining things far into the future. But one theory is that what makes something a memory, and not a hallucination, is the sensory input that is beyond the audiovisual.
It doesn't really matter what happens inside of the gallery. What matters is when you go to a park, when you look at your house plant, when you look at a tree, can you imagine these phases of temperature change? If you were to fly up, can you see the inner systems when you look inside? Can you notice the differences in the breeze and the smell that changes with it?
This notion of kinesthetic learning is very understudied — yet the few studies that have been done show an extreme positive outlook into how education can be translated to something more profound. When knowledge is fully gained, it becomes bodily.
Can you disseminate this to every single individual who is going through these classrooms? Just feeling the magic of life and being alive and expanding your sense of what the universe is about. How I am related to it all, and how life is so miraculous to even exist on this planet?
When the life in this body ends with its form and translates into something else, that is often very scary for us. But I'm finding it more and more magical that there is something beyond death, in the idea of thousands of different species spawned from your own body and becoming mycelial structures and flowering from the forest floor as a mushroom, while a part of you becomes part of the oak tree.
Soil is dirt and death. How can I change my own perception of soil through learning this process and turn this into an experiential piece so that we celebrate what happens there?
I mean, obviously, I'm never going to fully comprehend what is it like to be a tree. But this idea of being stillness in a world of constant change of the tropics. How do you perceive time as a tree? If you can be alive for that long, what is it like to have hundreds of different species relying on you and that you have relationships with? What is it like to see the world through your leaves? Like if you were to have eyeballs on your every hair.