Is the growing interest in technologies of Virtual Reality still connected to its primary roots in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, pioneered by authors such as Terence McKenna, R.D. Laing, and Timothy Leary? This conversation takes in account forms of re-enchantment of the world and animisms arising from the use of such technologies in their applications in the visual arts domain.

BEN VICKERS

Because much of this interview is likely to try to unpack the role of virtual reality in MAKING, I wanted to begin by grounding our discussion elsewhere, so that the role of technology might be better understood as a prosthesis to a particular line of thinking and experience of the world, rather dian what I believe is too often assumed: that the technological informs the work. So, to this end, I wanted to start by addressing the subject of animism and what some currently refer to as reenchantment of the world. You've both addressed animist ideas and principles in the work you've made. What does animism and these forms of enchantment mean to you?

 

JAKOB KUDSK STEENSEN

For me, there are two ways of thinking about it. One of them is more theoretical and historical, the other is more personal. When I was a kid, I was sent to this school where we couldn't have toys; we were just outside. So there's a kind of way of just being in the landscape. And then, through that process of sensing something and using your eyes or your body or different tools to reanimate it, you are capturing some... not essence... but some kind of sensual relationship with those things that you observed. Reassembled. So that is my basic approach to animism, and it's the core concept of all the art I do. I approach some place or landscape or history and then very intuitively try to travel through it, even if it's a virtual world. I just look around and move around and use my own body. And I don't try to overthink what it is that I am paying attention but just embrace its feels and what kind of sense it does arouse. I just take in those senses and immediately start creating, and that process, in the end, leads to something that I couldn't really imagine before. Maybe I start with some kind of concept of process, of place, or some natural organisms. But when I make the piece, it has to be kind of a corporal element of channeling that environment through my body, and that is actually how I move with a camera, outside, when I do research for a piece. When I'm animating, it becomes this physical activity. I really believe that there's knowledge in our senses and how we learn to reshape input we get from them into other formats to me is what VR is right now.

The other theoretical aspect of this is inspired by Adorno, who wrote in his Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)—he has a few pages where he writes about animism versus a kind of commercialized approach to making images. And he's using the metaphor of putting on a mask, so if you have a culture where someone is putting on a mask or a costume or performing a ritual, they know that it is the same person, but they also sort of believe that he's connected to other elements in the environment at the same time. So there's this middle ground of understanding an environment through that cultural activity of animism, and that is absolutely essential for anything I do in my own practice.

KATHERINE VEGA

I really hear you in respect to the creative process itself being this kind of unfolding, emerging, coming into being of some- thing which is alive itself... It's not all thought out before you embark on the creative. There's something in that which corresponds to how I understand animism. I met Graham Harvey, who had written something called An Animist Manifesto, earlier this year—it gives utterance to this idea of the whole of life as something that is sacred and that sense of human bodies being part of this wider thing, part of that which is more than human, a network of life.

I grew up in London, and I certainly didn't know that whilst growing up. I had a very English upbringing... I went on a residency in 2013 to a Maori community in New Zealand. And I learnt so much there. It was a big shift for me in understanding the creative process and being in relationship with the rhythms of the earth... You know you have the mountains and human bodies and they are all emanations of the earth that is held in such an authentic way in that community. When I attended a meeting in the Maori meeting house, you went into it with ceremony and ritual in the creation of a particularly potent space of communication. That meeting space existed to receive what the community needed to hear that would be useful to keeping the health of that community. There wasn't this kind of ego perception of conversation being like an expression of an individual. It was more about just giving space for what needed to be said and this sense of the Earth speaking through different people. It just seems so creative and healthy and so much part of what happens in collaborative creative practice.

You know, maybe these things come in dreams, and maybe they come in the little visual impulses we have in a day and the sudden intuition to do something, that sense of living attention. That's what I understand as animism.

 

BV

You both seem to be attempting to build new practices or rituals for addressing what are rapidly becoming incredibly strange times and moments and engulfed by crisis. But rather than responding in a way that proposes a solution or a direct response, it seems that your works instead act to absorb the impact quietly at a different speed and thereby propose a shift in perspective. Could you respond directly to that reading of your work, as well as the specific role of climate crisis and these kinds of subjects in both of your practices?

JBS

I think of a piece called Terratic Animism, where I spent a month traveling through all kinds of energy infrastructures in the States and some mountains in Massachusetts. I had this costume made of mylar, and I was going to these places and filming myself out in this environment... I knew that the main source of interest was a dome from the 1960s, a sculpture that's very iconic for the World's Fair and that was made four years after the first images of earth were made from satellites... some kind of utopian idea of this kind of total technology of the earth and human synthesis. So, as someone who was growing up much later than that, I was very interested in that feeling when my generation looked back at that monument and what it represented. And so my approach to that piece was more like a Zeitgeist, a response to this idea of an apocalyptic future of climates in pop culture.

In 2016 my animistic approach to this was to construct a costume and travel around this landscape of infrastructures. Then I recreated it and animated it as a big virtual forest five hundred meters that you're able to walk around in. I think that in that piece, I am referencing streams of thought both from the sixties and the pop culture of these utopian-techno futures that have gone off track. But the way I do [it] is very intuitive... it has to do with materials. I was, like other artists, fascinated by mylar. It is this almost sci-fi reflective material that's used in space suits but also for emergency blankets. Again, it is this idea of animism. It is the shaman with the mask and rituals. He sings like a bird, he's the spirit of the rock. But for me, the world that surrounds me—it's computers, it's cameras, it's Facebook. It's being in constant motion. The camera is never still.

KV

I feel there's something about the creative mode that's necessarily naïve... I've spent a lot of time in the world of science and in neuroscience labs and have this sense of how the scientific method of testing and retesting is so much better for saying things about the predictive aspect of ourselves. There are these capacities we have as human beings, and one is to make predictions based on what we have already experienced—and science is very good at stating that. But there is something in culture—that kind of uncertain space of the creative that brings in the new. That is something I've been trying to make space for, not only in making the pieces of art I've produced but making that space for those inside the experiences. When you talk about time... Well, I guess the predictive is always about looking back to the past, and our past is full of conflict and war and blood and nonexcellent ways of being together.

JKS
You could see it that way. Yeah.

KV

It seems really important, at this moment in 2017, to open up to the creative space of potential. And not [to] be dogmatic or utopian, but it is there in the creative act. Something that I've been trying to do with virtual reality is almost "retime" people to the phases of the moon, to the planet itself. There's this project that I've been malting called Of the Spheres, and I've been doing these mixed reality rituals outside, which have sometimes involved virtual reality. One was made for the eclipse in 2015, in which people had an internal view of the mathematics of an eclipse, of the alignments that happen... and then the VR view opened up into a webcam view, and they were sitting on the beach and able to look up at the sky with the intention that they would then be able to witness the solar eclipse as it happened.

So nature itself provides these moments of retiming us beyond our little sphere of experience. And I feel that is something intriguing about virtual reality space, that we can open up to a non-neurotic mode of being... Giving people space to listen to their own senses and perhaps plunge into their own sensory systems in ways that they haven't ever done before. I have no desire to shatter people, and I actually think that many of the virtual reality experiences at the moment are pretty shattering... But to dive into the senses: you don't need virtual reality to do that.

JKS

I can align with this perspective. When I made a work like that forest, I'm thinking more analytically about the kind of fall of a utopian dream for this tech no-utopian eco-future with humans in total control of a planet, but together with nature as well. That's a dream that felt like it was sort of in crisis. But if we return to animism: in how you animate a leaf, for example, as part of a forest... it's purely sensual. I think a lot about how it moves, and at what kind of speed, and the mist, how does it move, and what kind of atmosphere and feeling does that create? That is in the animation itself. You know, that's probably why we see so many YouTube clips of melting ice. That in itself is so simple but has such a strong message and power in it.

KV

There's this giving of attention in the process, the giving of attention to this question of how does a leaf move. Which is a kind of mystic question. And I totally agree with your point that even by going towards that subject, even by foregrounding the natural world: what people bring to the piece, bring to the installation, bring to the performance, it is their own awareness of living at this moment in time, with their sense of a threatened ecosystem all around us.

When I made Gather, which was a very rough-and-ready virtual reality piece in 2013 (returning from that experience in New Zealand), I was basically trying to explore virtual reality's ability to give body to a nonverbal language, asking myself how I could create embodied language through having leaves grow out of people's arms, whilst giving them fields of lavender which they could smell and handing them flowers which they were feeling in their hands. But what I was so surprised and [laughs] enlightened to find was how that was experienced as a very elegiac, very sad experience... Because the audience weren't necessarily immersed in the natural world. There were all these questions about whether the only way of experiencing the natural world was going to be in this kind of mediated form, in quirky, glittering virtual reality experiences. Which definitely steered my development onwards and reframed my thinking in respect to VR's affect.

I'm always trying to take virtual reality outside these days... asking people to participate in a ritual on the land and just exist next to each other. Otherwise it risks becoming a sealed, lifeless, arid bubble, and that does feel quite deathly, it does feel sad, like it threatens living in the world... [sighs] I've experienced people coming with lots of emotions and then talking through memories they had as a child, and as I go on with the work, I'm more and more compelled to make room for that "emotional unpacking." I think it's something about the very fragile wonder people have when they first encounter virtual reality technology, which hasn't yet become totally integrated as an everyday experience for most people. And in that space, there's just so much emotion...

JKS

It sounds like you're very engaged outwards, embracing the people and landscape and everything. But for me, a lot of what I do also has to do with quite extreme months of solitude and this experience of loneliness of being alone in the woods or walking around in the park at night with your own thoughts or memories. It's this sort of loneliness, for me, that really resonates with time spent in front of screens and computers. So tying that kind of virtual loneliness... the imagination that you are actually connecting to the natural world through an animated natural world—it's a kind of fantasy. For myself at least, that is a really key element of how I work. It's also the memories and imaginations that are evoked by different landscapes or the idea of stereotypical landscapes...

KV

That's so interesting. I've been reading Char Davies, who is one of the first artists to have worked with virtual reality in the 1990s, and I was also reading Michael Heim's The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993). And both of them start their pieces of writing by talking about the landscape that is in front of their computers as they write. To make that space, it feels like there is something deeply solitary about it.

In the Of the Spheres project, I've been fascinated by the relationship between the earth and the stars and extraterrestrial communication, this huge urge to communicate with consciousnesses that might or might not exist. There is that sense of the lonely human—the listening, waiting, expectant, longing human being, who is dying to be part of some sort of living network that they don't know about yet I feel like it's so much in Carl Sagan's Contact book. (1985), and it's kind of a science-fiction type feeling But it has a potency, that feeling of interiority and a sense that there is more to come.

BV

The strangest aspect of this conversation is the synchronicity with which you respond directly to questions that I haven't yet asked [laughs]. So let me try and weave a couple of those questions together, if only to draw on key reference points. I wanted to ask what you think the relationship of VR is now to its earlier history, given that a lot of the early development and formulation comes from psychedelic thought, specifically the psychedelic age, and thinkers such as Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. Rereading recently The Psychedelic Experience (1964), I was struck in the closing of the foreword, with the interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a book that will "only open itself to spiritual understanding" once one has been through "special training and special experience;" here they suggest explicitly that the psychedelic experience provides this. And within this school of thought, there was a synthesis with the early development of virtual reality, which speculated the potential for VR to unlock or create new forms of communication and corporeal connection with other states of consciousness. I wonder where all these historical reference points sit for you working with VR now? Specifically, you've touched on the likes of SETI and the desire to make contact, but also that sense of isolation/interiority. Where does your work exist? The present, the future, the past, or somewhere else?

KV

There's something about communication that seems much more to do with convergence and people being drawn together to seek to express something that they do not yet know. It's like this unfolding thing that's coming through neuroscience about reality being like a hallucination we're all having... through all the multimodal experiments that are being done and the cutting-edge consciousness research. Leary and all his crew were saying that in the 1960s, but the scientific paradigm had very much yet to arrive there... I've been reading Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), by William James, and contemplating that the space of revelation or vision has always been disruptive in Western evolution, but has always been so much a part of its evolution.

BV

In these early stages of the development of virtual reality, there was a direct drive towards expansion of consciousness. Yet in this moment the virtual reality experience we encounter rarely recognize that history or even remember it. Do you think that virtual reality can still be disruptive in that way or offer any type of "special training"?

 

JKS

For me personally, if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't make VR, because those thinkers are deeply inspiring to me. And also another artist, John Whitney—he made a piece in the sixties which was also one of the first virtually animated images. And, you know, his entire thing was animistic. This kind of tribal rhythm of geometry. I attended a talk at Tribeca Film Festival where he Skyped in and explained that he thought that the technological limitations they were operating under made it so their philosophy and thinking around why they did it was much more important. The philosophy of VR was strong also with someone like Terence McKenna, who is also someone I really like to read and listen to when I work. In a context like a film festival, VR is being developed within a production system that has an emphasis on something like a story or a narrative or a limited time experience that has a beginning and end—but not so much on actually just making a space. There is a different approach that's much more similar to film. And so the idea that you could actually make virtual reality, expand your senses and gain access to other ecosystems and organisms around you, is not in the language or the purpose for most of the commercial VR which are being made. This whole new wave of VR is really driven by commercial interests and headsets... a hyper-commercialized, capitalist mode of producing what they also refer to as experiences.

For me, VR is interesting because I can make a world and then, through these animistic practices, that world is composed entirely of things and choices from my intuitive response to specific places and histories. I believe that, at least in my own work, there must be some kind of knowledge inherent in that which can maybe expand how you perceive or think about a landscape. One work I've made is a replica of an entire island, four by four kilometers, made entirely of other people's images and satellite images and infographics from different scientific studies. I take all those images and look at them in the context they come from: tourist photographs of the island, which is Bora Bora, and all the natives who work at the resorts, working for these French companies, and these resorts who made this post, and then you have all these people who are very emotionally responding to that image. There are literally hundreds of posted comments for these images, where some people get really angry on the ethics of tourism, and others that say it doesn't really matter, and then there's some kind of emotional fantasy of what that entire landscape is. I think that animism as an expansion of consciousness versus making something which is purely narrative based and has an experience and clear aim... they're opposites, and they are not really being made in the same space right now.

KV

I totally agree that I wouldn't be using VR unless I thought that there was a potential for a radically different kind of communication and opportunity to share embodied knowledge that is really held by people on earth and lots of different cultures. The kind of knowledge that they hold has not really been given as much emphasis. This kind of knowledge is so much to do with the glue that holds everything together, that glue which keeps community together and keeps humans evolving in a healthy, creative way.

I'm doing a 360° video virtual reality project in collaboration with a community in Vanuatu in the Pacific, and it's taking a long time to get to a space of really understanding how we can relate and collaborate and create in a way that is whole, is true to the kinds of embodied practices of that particular community, which is known for its water music. Different lands have different stories, and different cultures have different stories. For them to rise in different sorts of ways—we haven't had time for that yet, so I'm not too perturbed by the attempt of current media to figure out how they can commercially leverage this virtual reality moment. I think that there is a potential rising, and it has been rising through many, many decades. Perhaps, you know, stretching all the way back to rock art in the Neolithic caves. So when you ask about whether it's in the future, or it's in the past, or it's in the present... I think it's the present in process, but that is such a mix of remembered futures of ancient origins that we somehow have in our DNA or in our collective memory. It's alive and finding a new form to speak through.

One of the things I'm really fascinated by is the interest in group dynamics. So, thinking about somebody like R. D. Laing, who wrote about relational psychology—the understanding of how projections work within clusters of people—perhaps we didn't have a way to really look at that before. I think what I'm trying to do with the virtual reality experience that I've been building in the University of Geneva with the effect lab there is to explore what a mutual space might be. And that's been in the context of dance work and simple things like contact improvisation and staring into someone's eyes for seven minutes. I don't know if you've done that recently. It's a really strange experience. That is a fully psychedelic experience when you just stay with that tension with someone else. And what we've been trying to create is using Unity to link two virtual experiences up, so you think you're alone in a space, but you gradually figure out the avatar you're seeing is another person. Perhaps there is some deep learning that can come through these kinds of mutual experiences. It actually seems like such fertile ground for understanding not only that our perception systems are, in some sense, mediating hallucination all the time, but there's this participatory knowledge of the 1960s that if we're creating reality, how do we create it in relationship with other people, and how do we keep on creating it? And that seems a political question and a very, very important question at this present moment in time.

Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist and based in New York, specialized in VR and interactive media installations. Through his practice, Steensen is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine by developing futuristic virtual simulations of existing real-world landscapes. His art has recently been exhibited at Carnegie Museum of Art, The Moving Image Fair, New York, MAXX, and as an art director, Steensen's work has been shown at Sundance and TriBeCa film festival.

Katharine Vega is an artist and researcher at chroma.space, the artist group she founded in 2010. Her projects explore the flexible relationship between the physical and the virtual, the real world and imagined ones. Recent performances and exhibitions include Gymopie Regional Gallery, Flux Laboratory (Geneva), Phoenix Gallery & Watermans Arts (London).

Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, explorer, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.