Visualising Another Kind of Truth in Virtual Reality
A visual art perspective on experience creation.
As an artist and filmmaker, for the longest time, I have lamented the fact that pretty much everything has been done.
All the major movements in visual arts, music, literature, theatre and cinema brought with them important developments in the way we have worked with creative tools, to understand our relationship to existence.
Until Virtual Reality (VR) caught my attention about a year and a half ago, I never thought it would be possible to be present at, let alone take part in, the birth of a new creative movement possessing this magnitude of historical significance. I began researching and also looking inward, drawing from both my film and painting backgrounds.
Whole Experiences
Even though the film approach seemed like the logical choice given the use of cameras and the reassignment of film post-production technology, it was actually the painter inside me that spoke the loudest in approaching this new creature. It has become clear to me that the pure visceral language of emotion present in both the visual arts and music can be combined into a state that is more personal than any film, song or painting; to provide ‘whole experiences’ with the potential to resonate further than any other art form on the level of transcendence.
Historically, every new development in creative technical know-how has opened up new dimensions in how we are able to communicate our thoughts; and with the advent of VR we have exactly that.
Story vs. Experience in Virtual Reality
It seems the general consensus currently surrounding this new dimension is to move in the direction of narrative thought, with the viewer positioned in the middle of the action. While this seems like a logical trajectory for the medium, I’m curious about what kind of “virtual reality” is trying to be achieved. Is endeavouring to tell the viewer a story actually the right way to approach things? In our waking life, do we ever walk into a place and expect a succinct story to unfold before our eyes? This is where I feel a disconnection.
From my personal experience of watching VR works, most of them are akin to forcing a square-shaped view of our perceived waking reality into the round-shaped hole that is “Virtual Reality”. It is hard for me to suspend disbelief when the medium trying so earnestly to reflect my experience of being alive is fundamentally different in its visual fidelity and its simplified perspective of how I actually experience the world (I am speaking specifically about live-action 360 camera VR).
And while technology will inevitably improve the visual fidelity part, I don’t believe we should limit ourselves to play out a 2-dimensional way of thinking in a potential 4-dimensional space.
Isn’t Virtual Reality a more fitting medium for an audience to be present within memory, dream or emotion? Our “vision” is so much broader than what we physically recognise; the goose bumps we get when looking at an absolutely sublime work of art or listening to an incredible piece of music is testament to that. These experiences awaken a primal self and for a fleeting moment we are lifted outside of our physical constructs and experience pure existential emotion.
I feel the further away humans have moved from Nature, the more blinkered our recognition of the multi-dimensional perceptiveness we possess, has become. Perhaps that is why there have always been artists in societies, who fight against the loss of our vision.
Waking Life
I believe that VR has the potential to help us access our full perceptive abilities more freely like a “waking life medium for dreaming”. From what I’ve seen so far, the VR works most successful in transporting me, are ones that inhabit sub-conscious, dream-like spaces.
In recent times the proliferation of technology including social media has wilfully decreased, rather than increased broader society’s connection with what is real. But I believe VR will be the new artist’s tool in the fight to maintain our natural vision. Ironically, perhaps Virtual Reality will also be the creative medium, which finally provides us with more than just a fleeting glimpse of our true selves.
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