© Lucas Wozniak 2024
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Common Groundlessness invites participants to complete gamified tasks in VR scenes that animate worldly urgencies.
Award: Best Undergraduate Media Arts Award
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How can virtual worlds subvert their isolating and alienating mechanics and encourage deeper engagement with the world and the body beyond and beneath the media screen?
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A “cabinet of curiosities” game structure invites audiences on a journey through layers of contentious pasts, precarious presents, and dystopian futures:
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A VR experience in which participants experience personalized narrative arcs as they follow their interactions’ consequences through unique, unexpected sequences of events.
As they build up an inventory of objects, memories, clues, and symbols, they will return to the riddle at the crossroads: Where do we take refuge, when we, as poet Bayo Akomolafe forewarns, “are coming down to earth,” and we “will not arrive intact”?
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Virtual reality (VR) is distinguished as a medium by its ability to provide a sense of deep immersion within another world — a sense of actually being in the places it depicts, such as a forest, museum, dreamscape, or alien spaceship. VR audiences are not mere viewers, but participants; full-body interaction allows you to look around in any direction, touch or grab virtual objects with hand controllers, move freely around a room, and more.
Common Groundlessness explores my curiosity about the perspective-widening and self-transformational potential of such a fluid, captivating environment. Can VR function as a tool to enhance human communication and generate valuable new forms of awareness and inspiration? Can VR help participants develop a sense of expanded agency and purposeful urgency, without being just another means of isolation and escape from the complexity of the world’s challenges?
In her book Staying with the Trouble, technoscience feminist Donna Haraway advocates for “intensely inhabiting specific bodies and places as the means to cultivate the capacity to respond to worldly urgencies with each other.” In this piece, I investigate ways to embody this intentional practice in VR. I am especially interested in Haraway’s term “sympoiesis,” which refers to a disavowal of alienation—a recognition of our deep entanglement with other beings, human or not.
I attempt to make concrete sense of these mazy ideas by weaving together diverse scenes designed around collectivity and responsibility, or response-ability. Throughout the experience, participants are prompted to cooperate with a mysterious, otherworldly being to complete objectives and contribute to the repair of a spaceship with a faulty navigation system. As they take care-ful action together and help to tell complicated histories, they gradually restore a damaged cybernetic memory apparatus that is responsible for guiding the spaceship down to earth.
In one scene, viewers watch a live-updated counter (scraped from a website) of tons of waste dumped in the ocean each year as a giant blue whale glides by. They must recycle a water bottle in a bin to “restore” this part of the ship’s neural map before they proceed to the next scene. In another scene, participants encounter stories of the original stewards of the local landscape, the Leni Lenape, in the tradition of “indigenous land acknowledgment.” They explore the site of William Penn’s meeting with the Leni Lenape on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682. The past mixes with the present as they teleport around to various “fire markers” and take in the multimedia exhibits, which include modern-day testimonies of Leni Lenape descendants and artworks depicting indigenous resettlements. On more abstract terrain, an “idea-garden” exhibits statements of optimism, calls to action, and wisdom from leading thinkers across disciplines and invites audiences to select and commit to the values and perspectives that matter most to them.
The piece offers a multisensory experience as participants get involved with the world in depth and up close, spontaneously triggering events and co-authoring the narrative. They navigate a complex, evolving map of objects, patterns, and movements, both fantastic, such as shock waves and dark green energy orbs, and realistic, such as seeds with finely textured ridges. They hear in all directions, from surround-sound underwater currents and whale noises, to a beeping that emanates from over their left shoulder. The sturdy ground and gripped hand controllers give virtual objects and surfaces a tangible presence, centralizing the body’s placement and maneuvering as the basis of narrative progression.
Whether or not the participants make it safely down to earth in the simulation, they will soon find themselves landing with a recharged sense of place in the “real” world.
This work is an introductory experiment for me within the larger territory of virtual creations. I am eager to keep researching and experimenting with how to make these worlds more engaging, interactive, worldly, and relevant.
{{sect1}}
Common Groundlessness invites participants to complete gamified tasks in VR scenes that animate worldly urgencies.
Award: Best Undergraduate Media Arts Award
{{sect2}}
How can virtual worlds subvert their isolating and alienating mechanics and encourage deeper engagement with the world and the body beyond and beneath the media screen?
{{sect3}}
A “cabinet of curiosities” game structure invites audiences on a journey through layers of contentious pasts, precarious presents, and dystopian futures:
{{sect4}}
A VR experience in which participants experience personalized narrative arcs as they follow their interactions’ consequences through unique, unexpected sequences of events.
As they build up an inventory of objects, memories, clues, and symbols, they will return to the riddle at the crossroads: Where do we take refuge, when we, as poet Bayo Akomolafe forewarns, “are coming down to earth,” and we “will not arrive intact”?
{{sect5}}
{{sect6}}
{{sect7}}
Virtual reality (VR) is distinguished as a medium by its ability to provide a sense of deep immersion within another world — a sense of actually being in the places it depicts, such as a forest, museum, dreamscape, or alien spaceship. VR audiences are not mere viewers, but participants; full-body interaction allows you to look around in any direction, touch or grab virtual objects with hand controllers, move freely around a room, and more.
Common Groundlessness explores my curiosity about the perspective-widening and self-transformational potential of such a fluid, captivating environment. Can VR function as a tool to enhance human communication and generate valuable new forms of awareness and inspiration? Can VR help participants develop a sense of expanded agency and purposeful urgency, without being just another means of isolation and escape from the complexity of the world’s challenges?
In her book Staying with the Trouble, technoscience feminist Donna Haraway advocates for “intensely inhabiting specific bodies and places as the means to cultivate the capacity to respond to worldly urgencies with each other.” In this piece, I investigate ways to embody this intentional practice in VR. I am especially interested in Haraway’s term “sympoiesis,” which refers to a disavowal of alienation—a recognition of our deep entanglement with other beings, human or not.
I attempt to make concrete sense of these mazy ideas by weaving together diverse scenes designed around collectivity and responsibility, or response-ability. Throughout the experience, participants are prompted to cooperate with a mysterious, otherworldly being to complete objectives and contribute to the repair of a spaceship with a faulty navigation system. As they take care-ful action together and help to tell complicated histories, they gradually restore a damaged cybernetic memory apparatus that is responsible for guiding the spaceship down to earth.
In one scene, viewers watch a live-updated counter (scraped from a website) of tons of waste dumped in the ocean each year as a giant blue whale glides by. They must recycle a water bottle in a bin to “restore” this part of the ship’s neural map before they proceed to the next scene. In another scene, participants encounter stories of the original stewards of the local landscape, the Leni Lenape, in the tradition of “indigenous land acknowledgment.” They explore the site of William Penn’s meeting with the Leni Lenape on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682. The past mixes with the present as they teleport around to various “fire markers” and take in the multimedia exhibits, which include modern-day testimonies of Leni Lenape descendants and artworks depicting indigenous resettlements. On more abstract terrain, an “idea-garden” exhibits statements of optimism, calls to action, and wisdom from leading thinkers across disciplines and invites audiences to select and commit to the values and perspectives that matter most to them.
The piece offers a multisensory experience as participants get involved with the world in depth and up close, spontaneously triggering events and co-authoring the narrative. They navigate a complex, evolving map of objects, patterns, and movements, both fantastic, such as shock waves and dark green energy orbs, and realistic, such as seeds with finely textured ridges. They hear in all directions, from surround-sound underwater currents and whale noises, to a beeping that emanates from over their left shoulder. The sturdy ground and gripped hand controllers give virtual objects and surfaces a tangible presence, centralizing the body’s placement and maneuvering as the basis of narrative progression.
Whether or not the participants make it safely down to earth in the simulation, they will soon find themselves landing with a recharged sense of place in the “real” world.
This work is an introductory experiment for me within the larger territory of virtual creations. I am eager to keep researching and experimenting with how to make these worlds more engaging, interactive, worldly, and relevant.
