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Imagine you had a pair of feet in place of your hands and were trying to pick up objects and move them around. Or your eyes fell out of your head, but you could still move around while watching yourself from the perspective of your eyeballs. Pretty weird, huh? Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s newest virtual reality project, Your Hands Are Feet, is just that: a series of six experiences that rearrange a viewer’s perspective in striking ways.
Together with her collaborator Sarah Rothberg, she recently won the $100K Engadget Alternate Realities prize, the largest such prize for virtual reality (VR). The piece is being produced in connection with the independent film Egg, a dark comedy about motherhood starring Alysia Reiner (Orange Is the New Black), Christina Hendricks (Mad Men), and Anna Camp (Pitch Perfect).
Winger-Bearskin works with room-scale VR, a term to describe any VR headset—like Oculus Touch or HTC Vive—that uses infrared sensors to incorporate the movements of your body into the virtual space you are viewing. The technology enables the sleight of hand—ahem, foot—that can present you with a virtual body reconfigured in any number of discombobulating ways: "I could see the potential for this medium where I could be an active agent, rather than someone with a phone strapped to their head who can see 360 degrees.”
Winger-Bearskin sees herself as a universe-builder, and her projects evince someone with both seriousness of purpose and a dazzling sense of humor. She is the Director of IDEA New Rochelle (Interactive Digital Environments Alliance), a nonprofit that partners with the city of New Rochelle to create a hub for emerging technologies, “which is just another way of building a city, a community.” She was recently selected for the 2017 Sundance Institute Time Warner Foundation Fellowship. On the quirkier side of things, she performs with a multimedia band called Lullabies for AI, and is the founder of the worldwide Stupid Hackathon, a gathering to hack “stupid shit no one needs and terrible ideas.”
I sat down with her to talk about universe-building, falling eyeballs, VR as an empathy machine, and other delightful things.
Kat Mustatea: Where would you want VR technology to go next?
Amelia Winger-Bearskin: Virtual reality is just when you take a computational approach to understanding how you represent a human experience. Right now VR is a very solitary experience. I put on a headset and I am alone. But this is just a blip in time. Eventually, we will figure out—because we are social creatures—how to use VR as a tool to communicate with one another in a lot of very dynamic ways.
Mustatea: That’s very intriguing, especially because you’ve said you love collaboration—that you don't want to be the kind of artist who only works alone in a studio.
Winger-Bearskin: Right, exactly. Luckily the production of VR is a very collaborative experience. It’s hard to create a fully realized VR project by yourself—which I love, because I get to collaborate with a lot of amazing people. But experiencing VR is still solitary, even when you're working with high-end room-scale VR. That’s going to change so quickly. We already have an interesting prototype for communal experiences, like AltspaceVR, and of course, Facebook is creating Spaces. It's a natural progression for any medium to figure out how we’re going to communicate with each other. We’re still in the infancy of this medium, which is really exciting for me.
Mustatea: You have been working on a companion VR experience for the film Egg. How did that turn into the project called Your Hands Are Feet?
Winger-Bearskin: We thought of it as this fantastical reimagining of possibilities. I wanted to make it a little bit more universal than just the idea of motherhood. Those first images we created for EggVR were about that moment when you might create something—a book, or a work of art, or a child—and everything is possible. It’s about that anxiety that comes from anything being possible—that it’s just a little terrifying and disorienting. That’s when we changed the name of the project to Your Hands Are Feet, because that's one of the experiences—you look down and you see your hands, and they are feet.
Mustatea: How did you come up with such visceral images?
Winger-Bearskin: We talk about them as being experiential metaphors. The way that words are metaphors for feelings—I might say that my stomach is tied in knots, or my heart is beating out of my chest, or my eyes are out of my head. These kinds of things you say to another person, and maybe they don't understand exactly how you feel, but they know what you mean. These phrases are a shorthand for a lived experience.
Mustatea: When your eyes fall out of your head and you’re seeing yourself from your eyes’ point of view, what color is your body?
Winger-Bearskin: I was interested in having it be a periwinkle blue, but Sarah reminded me that under certain lighting conditions, blue could end up looking like a corpse. So I think it’s going to end up being a purple or mauve. I kind of like a purplish brown.
Mustatea: How hard do you try to render things realistically? For example, the feet that appear in place of your hands—do they look like real feet?
Winger-Bearskin: We're not doing any modeling that looks hyper-realistic. Our style is going to be very cartoonish. If you look at a centipede or an inchworm and wonder: what would it be like if I had to move through the world in that way? It would look ridiculous. So looking at nature just helps us add to the cartoonish-ness of the movements.
Mustatea: All these scenarios sound so perplexing and funny.
Winger-Bearskin: In order to make VR seem really serious and important, you have to fight a really hard upstream battle. But if you wanted to make things really uncanny, weird, surreal and hysterical, that’s just pretty easy in VR. It’s a kind of jiu-jitsu move—just tip it in the direction that it’s already falling. Luckily, me and Sarah’s sensibilities are very much in the realm of humor already.
Mustatea: Can VR be used for something more serious and important?
Winger-Bearskin: Chris Milk famously coined the phrase ‘VR is an empathy machine’—and there are a lot of different ways of thinking about that, or rejecting that entirely. For myself, I don’t believe I have to have the same thing happen to me in order to feel for someone else—for example, to expect I will understand homelessness by viewing the experience of a homeless person in VR. That seems like a type of entertainment to me, like being asked to put on the poverty experience.
I’ve seen so much VR artwork that is didactic. What I do believe is I could give you space within an interactive structure that allows you to come into contact with your own humanity. When I can see my own humanity, what is valuable about myself, then I am able to see that in another person. And I believe that is how you create empathy.
