Empathy: Immersive Medium vs Storytelling
ECHO’s Empathy, a case of study.
ECHO is an immersive experience created in 2017 by Georgie Pinn, an experienced artist and director in the immersive technology field, whose pinned interest is empathy as a creative form to connect people beyond cultures and genders barriers.
The project explores the topics of human connection, identity, and empathy that are approached by users through the use of facial recognition technology and intimate storytelling.
It was developed in two formats, a photo booth that toured in some exhibitions and an outdoor head sculpture installation called OHCE, echo backwards and pronounce “OK”, commissioned at Pitch Festival. This latter was able to trigger content live, allowing the audience to become the VJ while incorporating their own visual identity into the work.
The author’s intention with the project is, as explicitly mention on the project’s website, to facilitate the environment for users to find echoes of themselves in another through empathy, and as the world grows smaller and more connected, the role of empathy grows larger and more important than ever (Manney, 2008). Empathy, as a concept used to deliver a message in IFs, it’s a vast explored ground into which many creatives have dipped to create a significant impact on people. Moreover, the immersive media field has hoarded the concept of empathy as something easily achievable through the lenses of immersive technology. ECHO, very seemingly, succeeds in its mission to generate empathy and connect people by making them step into another’s story, but is empathy provoked by the immersive medium or by the storytelling?
Since the project it’s a location based experience and is no longer playing in exhibitions, I didn’t get to experience it myself, hence I will analyze and put in perspective which aspects of ECHO are the ones driving the users to feel empathetic towards another’s stories, and will base my analysis and conclusion in data collected from other user’s experience.
Recent claims about the special empathy potential of new media technologies are based on the notion that immersive media permit users to experience stories as if witnessing the depicted events firsthand (Cummings, Tsay-Vogel, Cahill and Zhang, 2021). However, other authors suggest that what makes us empathize is the imaginative act of the user translating the story into thoughts and feelings, enabling them to see the world through the characters’ eyes and feel their feelings (Manney, 2008).
To understand the achieved empathetic feeling of the piece, in regards to its used of immersive technology and storytelling, first we have to go through the user experience, which I will focus on its original format, the booth. In the sculptural photo booth, by interacting with a chatbot named Echo, you can revisit another’s stories and visually become part of them as ECHO is able to capture your face and use it to re-image the person who is telling the story. Once the experience concludes, users are asked if they would like to record their stories and make it part of the archives that other users will later experience, which gives the project a participatory nature.
People can step inside the booth and find the typical atmosphere, a place to seat facing a camera with a screen that should preview everything it’s capturing, a curtain for privacy, and the photo print compartment in the outside. The monitor or screen inside exposes a key element, an AL protagonist that introduces herself as ECHO while presenting a selection of stories on screen and inviting the users to choose the face of another they would like to connect with.
Users are taken on a journey to listen to the story from the selected person, and as the narration goes on the facial recognition technology starts to slightly, and with a glitchy effect, change the appearance of the person on screen, re-imaging it as the person sitting in the booth listening to the story. As a result, people find themselves on screen as the new face of the experience lived by another user. Right after the experience is over, the photos are printed, revealing captures of the transition between the two faces that have told this story.
Descriptions of empathetic feeling typically fall into two categories in the media studies field. These are emotional and cognitive. Emotional empathy describes sympathetic response without conscious thought, meaning they occur immediately. Cognitive empathy describes a conceptual or imaginative experience, where one person tries to reconstruct how something feels to another person, not just how it would feel to them (Sutherland, n.d.). In other words, the first insinuates a reaction to an environment stimulus, such as the automatic feeling of amazed we could get watching the sunrise, whilst the latter supposes a combination between the first but highly driven by the imaginative process in the individual’s mind. This practice of cognitive empathy can be evidenced in VR projects such as The machine to be another, a 2014 IF that experiments with the concept of body swapping through the affordances of a VR headset and technology, with the purpose of allowing users live in other’s bodies and therefore empathize with them.
While The Machine to be another can succeed in creating empathetic feelings in those who go through the experience, to achieve this it relies completely in the use of VR to do so, not to mention, to facilitate this experience there are a lot of coordinated performance dynamics put in place that, if not follow thoroughly, can compromise the outcome of the experience. Also, being in another’s body for a brief moment is not enough to understand your struggles. Your struggles go deeper than the way you look and the way you see the world. It’s about your experiences through life and how those moments have shaped you into the human you are now.
ECHO, on the other hand, is able to provoke empathetic feelings with a simpler implementation of immersive technologies, which does not make it better or worse than any other project but, it gives a lot more space to strategically use storytelling elements to fulfill this purpose. This project aims for you to take more than just the momentaneous experience of seeing the world through another’s perspective, you can take the story with you and it will remain with you forever because you can relate to the exact struggles another experienced and told through the immersive visual mirror in which you saw yourself.
To understand why ECHO has managed to achieve the empathetic feeling reaction in people that many VR projects and creatives seek, I have identified a couple of aspects:
From a technical perspective, the element of the facial recognition and the face shifting illusion that’s made possible with it, are aspects that allow the piece to become immersive and attractive to users. And while the affordance of this technology is what allows the visual mirror effect through which users can reflect on another’s stories, it is the human aspect that makes the entire experience more relatable.
The human aspects in this piece are more than just the previous and present users making the experience happen. From a conceptual point of view, the first human aspect is ECHO, the AL protagonist. This technological element is not just a chatbot facilitating the interaction of the users and the database archives, it has been given a name, a personality, and a gender. She starts the experience by saying “I am your echo, come closer, I can help you connect”, by placing herself as someone’s echo, an intimate connection is created between the person and the medium, it’s no longer just a technological element, it becomes part of the narrative and the reflection of someone’s choices.
The second is the user’s story, a human experience we can relate to as part of our own mundane journey that has led us to a spiritual discovery of who we are. When this is being heard in someone else’s voice is an indicator that we are not alone, that we are connected, maybe not by blood or societal formalities, but through our humanity and the way we process our feelings. This is contrasted with the agency of being able to become co-creators contributing with the archives and extending the life span of the project, as they can share their own story as well.
And lastly, the third aspect is the printed photos, a representation of a part of our memories and a self-reflection that invites the user to an introspection of self-identity, that might be triggered by a visual representation of the merged stories reflected in the face-fusion that can be appreciated in the photographs, but goes beyond appearances and deeper into the search of oneself through the eyes and experience of another.
As Manney (2008) said, “Storytelling is both the seductive siren and the safe haven that encourages the connection with the feared “other.” ECHO’s immersive technology is more than just a medium to connect the users to this parallel world in which they can share their stories. It is, in fact, an integral part of the storytelling strategy that makes the experience more successful and more relatable.
Conclusion
ECHO’s intention to create an empathetic feeling in people when connecting them to another’s story thrives because the immersive technology not only plays a role of the medium that facilitates the connection but also has adopted a human factor, and this converts it into the mediator between previous and present users. The format adopted by this project creates the space for self-reflection where, unlike other installation-type immersive projects, nobody is watching your interaction, which sets a perfect private space for intimate conversations that consequently leads to profound feelings.
Additionally, the more we put ourselves in the shoes of others, the more empathy we experience, and this recurrent experience will shape the ways we see the world and ultimately will help build a more empathetic personality (Manney, 2008). In this context, users could experience another’s stories multiple times in the privacy setting the photo booth offers, which adds to the project’s purpose of promoting empathy through shared stories.
Finally, is worth noting that the immersive experience does not have to be attached to the use of lots of high tech physical equipment to be effective, as a matter of fact, if the immersive medium is not well accompanied by good storytelling element, chances are it will only be a big showroom of high tech, rather than an impactful IFs project, and ECHO is the perfect example of the otherwise scenario.
Sources:
Cummings, J., Tsay-Vogel, M., Cahill, T. and Zhang, L., 2021. Effects of immersive storytelling on affective, cognitive, and associative empathy: The mediating role of presence. New Media & Society, p.146144482098681.
Manney, P., 2008. Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy. Journal of Evolution and Technology — Vol. 19 Issue 1 — September 2008 — pgs. 51–61. Available at: <https://jetpress.org/v19/manney.htm> [Accessed 7 February 2022].
Pinn, G., 2018. ECHO. ECHO. Available at: <https://www.fotoecho.net/> [Accessed 1 February 2022].
Sensilab monash, 2020. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtWBQ6FjZVo> [Accessed 5 February 2022].
Sutherland, A., n.d. The Limits of Virtual Reality: Debugging the Empathy Machine. [online] MIT — Docubase. Available at: <https://docubase.mit.edu/lab/case-studies/the-limits-of-virtual-reality-debugging-the-empathy-machine/> [Accessed 6 February 2022].
BeAnotherLab. 2012. The Machine To Be Another. [online] Available at: <http://beanotherlab.org/home/work/tmtba/> [Accessed 6 February 2022].
