Thinking outside the rectangle - virtual reality and the blank piece of paper.
“Make not your thoughts your prisons” — William Shakespeare
I’ve been working in virtual reality for a couple of years now and have had the pleasure of collaborating and conversing with very smart, passionate people who are trying to make sense out of what we’re all excited about. I’m very comfortable with stating loudly that none of us have any idea what we’re doing. It’s messy, crazy, experimental, hacked-together, frenetic, glorious trial and error. The textbooks have not yet been written and even language constantly falls short in explaining what we want to say. It’s chaos. And that’s the thing that excites me most.
The most disruptive piece of technology in virtual reality right now is the blank piece of paper and the most radical innovators have an equally malleable state of mind.
I come from thinking about film so I’ve brought VR headsets into production houses to give demos to seasoned cinematographers, editors, graders, sound designers. On all previous projects these people arrive with the professional baggage of the right way to do things. They have crew t-shirts from shoots in the 90s, have read all the books and taken all the classes. But once they get their heads around the idea of a 360 (3D?) all-encompassing orb, out comes the blank piece of paper.
And a blank piece of paper is a very liberating thing. There’s nothing on there to tell you what to do. There’s no guidance but also no control. And that’s new, very new. Because media is (and has always been) very tightly controlled. We’re aware of state censorship and how only some stories that are vetted and approved get airtime or theatrical distribution. We’re also aware of the need to raise substantial amounts of money to produce moving image works, which acts as a different kind of filter. But we are usually unaware of the self censorship that comes from trying to fit what we want to say about the world into the locked, linear, rectangular restrictions of a screen. The prison of the medium itself is not exposed until it is taken away.
But when it’s gone there’s a transformation that is almost comical to observe in creative people. It’s literally Catholic: “(especially of a person’s tastes) including a wide variety of things; all-embracing.” The ideas for what’s possible turn from the usual trickle into a flood. It’s a great thing to witness this liberation of imagination. It’s another thing to channel it in meaningful directions. Yes, going to the deli would be fantastic in 360 video but calm down, think for a moment, what can we do with this upgrade that we couldn’t do before? Where are the edges between 20th century media and 21st? What are we trying to say/do? What kind of a world do we want to build/live in?
What if we forget about making movies, games, live events or anything we can already conceive of, and decide instead to make VR in VR? What can that be? Where’s that blank piece of paper..?
