Q&A: Circa69
Simon Wilkinson, aka Circa69, is a transmedia artist whose work has included The Cube and Beyond The Bright Black Edge of Nowhere. As he prepares for the premiere of Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping later this year, we asked him a few questions about his experience of working with VR.
Tell us a bit about your recent work with virtual and mixed reality
I’ve spent the past two years working with Oculus Rift and HTC VIVE to create multi-sensory, games engine based VR installations which exist within an expansive and complex transmedia universe.
So far three installations have been created and are touring as individual works. In 2017 I am creating an augmented reality app for iOS/android alongside a live electronic music and AV performance, which will bring all of these individual works together in the form of a large scale touring show.
The new piece, called Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping takes the form of a 4 hour venue take over. It’s a promenade event that presents a story in the form of a puzzle which needs to be solved.
Audiences are asked to install an iOS/Android app on their smartphones before attending. They are let into the building and allowed to roam freely through the venue, ideally including parts of the venue not normally open to the public. They will find 15 VR headsets in a variety of rooms. These rooms will host the three existing VR installations, as well as images on the walls which trigger an additional 15 immersive AR / VR experiences. They will need to talk to each other, and go online to make sense of the story.
The evening culminates with a 40 minute live electronic music performance with a voice over narration and projections around the room. These projections also trigger content in the app. This work will premier at Brighton Digital Festival in September before beginning its touring life.
How do you go about creating an immersive experience?
For me it has long been clear that giving people a headset and a pair of headphones is not enough if you want to create work which is truly immersive in a very meaningful way.
My work has used kinaesthetic effects (such as breezes, odours and vibrations) and utilises transmedia storytelling techniques to make the story experience incredibly immersive and interactive. I have also been exploring the use of multi-channel surround sound audio: instead of being given headphones, audiences are surrounded by real speakers — which are loud — so the bass vibrates their body and the high end sounds are peppered all around them in the space just like the real world.
My aim has been to push the tech and the production software to its extremes in serving the stories being told. That way, the work presents audiences with really extraordinary experiences; that they want to stay longer, they feel the atmosphere of the narrative environment in their bones, and they leave talking about the story rather than about how mind blowing the technology is.
What are the challenges involved in creating and presenting VR projects in the UK?
In the UK and elsewhere the biggest challenge is to understand that VR is a totally new medium. It represents a complete paradigm shift. As such, there is a challenge in finding how to work with it. Actually that’s what makes this moment in time so great; there are no rules yet. We’re all trying to figure them out. In the meantime it’s necessary to experiment and take risks to see what works.
Irrespective of VR’s arrival, culture and media consumption is going through big changes. 87% of those people who watch TV do so whilst browsing the internet on a smartphone or tablet. They’re effectively taking it into their own hands to make TV fit their need for interactivity.
As artists we need to recognise this need for our audiences to be more than passive observers. We need to create work which enables meaningful involvement.
67% of people who come to see my VR installation/performance THE CUBE go online immediately afterwards to find out more. They aren’t told to do that; it is the story and questions raised by it which are designed to make them want to know more. Some people are still chasing up the story online a week later, interacting with other audience members and doing their own research to get to the bottom of the story.
As our use of VR develops we’re beginning to see how it fits well with these times, in which information sharing is non-hierarchical and non-linear. It’s clear to me that the audience member has to be a bigger part of the story now, and that it has to be their story as much as it is the author’s.
This is a long way of saying that with VR the big challenge is that we are in totally uncharted territory.
What expectations do you find audiences have of mixed reality work?
That is a good question. Actually what I hear most from people who want to chat when they come out of the show is “I really didn’t know what to expect”.
Any artist will tell you that there are two audiences going on when you present a show and that their responses and expectations are often quite different; there are those who come to see art because there is a festival in their town, or because your VR show happens to be featured at the electronic music festival they’re attending, and there are those who themselves are artists or involved in the arts, often in a closely related field.
It’s probably most appropriate to come along to one of my shows not knowing what to expect. We have noticed that people who think they know what to expect in terms of format, for example reviewers, are less likely to go online and experience the transmedia content which augments the show itself and that we have to tell them to do it. As a consequence, I’ve been increasingly trying to frame the work in a way which deliberately jars with traditional ways of presenting. From the get-go we are shattering expectations, so even audiences who thought they knew how the thing was going to go down suddenly sit up and realise that something freaky is happening.
How do you see the medium developing?
I would say ‘slowly’. Things are moving forward but certainly not quickly, and that’s probably to be expected. It took film a good 60 years to really get its act together and as a medium it’s still developing. Maybe VR will be quicker than that, but 2016 and 2017 are still very early days indeed.
In a way I think part of the problem is that not enough artists are on board yet. Artists are under less pressure to conform to any expectations than, say, a big organisation developing training solutions. We have a lot more freedom to take risks and experiment. I think VR needs wild experimentation and risk taking right now to be able to evolve away from film and gaming and embrace its own strengths more quickly.
My own personal development using VR has been an absolute joy. I have been playing around with video goggles and VR for seven years, and by 2015 plenty of venues worldwide were keen to show my work. This means that I really have had freedom to experiment and to evaluate what works and what is dubious.
We’re all trying to figure out what the nature of VR is at the moment, it’s a lot of fun but if I had to write a book on how to do it properly right now it would be a very short book indeed. There are a few things I know for sure, one of them is that people in VR don’t act the same way they do in the real world and so if you’re going to make some VR you are going to need to test it, and people will surprise you with what they do in the world you create for them, sometimes in a good way but often in a weird way.
Are there many virtual and mixed reality experiences that you find exciting?
Keeping in mind that I have spent a lot of time in VR, and that the medium holds no novelty for me anymore, I can honestly say that most VR experiences are ultimately underwhelming. 360 video, in particular, seems difficult to make engaging. The most exciting work, for me, is coming out of the gaming sector, utilising games engine technology to create very immersive and interactive content.
Whilst I’m aware that these few sentences might seem a bit gloomy, I actually think that VR is a really awesome new medium. But we are all still figuring out how to use it well.
Literally everywhere I went in 2016 (which was 14 countries on six continents) there were huddles of people exploring the use of VR. Everyone is pushing out in different directions and different sectors, united by the fact that we are all novices; no one has figured out how to play to the strengths of this new medium in a way which allows for the creation of long form narrative content. There is literally a gold rush going on, with this hugely diverse community working together to try and figure it out.
I like this time, it is very experimental. I kind of don’t want us to figure it out, because I worry that as the medium matures the whole thing will become more conservative and hierarchical.
Whilst The Rest Were Sleeping premieres at Brighton Digital Festival in September.
