‘Even closing my eyes is an intense movement’: the VR experience that simulates a serious neurological condition | Melbourne international film festival

You would’ve heard of deja vu: the surreal sensation of getting beforehand skilled the current, or one thing prefer it. You could not have heard of jamais vu: the sensation of being unfamiliar with issues that needs to be recognisable. Like your own home, your desk, even your arms.

Guy Pearce’s protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller Memento, who can’t create new recollections, has a model of it. But the form I bought a style of, in a fascinating “world-first mixed reality” experience featured at this 12 months’s Melbourne international film festival, is jamais vu of a very completely different selection.

Turbulence: Jamais Vu is a VR experience that aspires to simulate a power vestibular condition skilled by certainly one of its creators, Ben Joseph Andrews. The 32-year-old was first identified with the condition, which causes extreme migraines and dizziness, in his mid-20s. As vestibular migraines “are not well known in the migraine family”, the path to prognosis was lengthy and fraught, he says.

“With this condition, there’s no such thing as stillness,” he says. “Even the pulse in your body has movement. Even just closing my eyes is another intense form of movement. Things that I hear, things that I smell – my body interprets them as movement. This creates a lot of conflict. It’s quite a porous connection to the world. I can feel individual blades of grass moving in the wind. Part of [Turbulence: Jamais Vu] involves looking at what that enables and offers. It’s an attempt to create a language to illustrate something that’s very tough to describe.”

Andrews’ co-creator on the challenge, Emma Roberts, introduced the VR experience – which is taking part in at Acmi in Melbourne till 15 August – into my house. When I placed on the VR headset, the atmosphere round me modifications in surreal methods. I’m in the identical room however I can now not see in color: every thing is now charcoal monochrome. Using a headset hooked up to a depth digicam, which feeds into what you see, they’ve made the acquainted unfamiliar. They have made jamais vu.

The define of objects look blurry and bizarre. The area earlier than me has been inverted, so once I transfer my proper hand I see it transfer on my left. My sensory system has been thrown out of whack. At one level, Andrews asks me by way of voice-over to retrieve some aspirin from a container and place the drugs in a mug. This seemingly easy request is immensely troublesome and requires intense focus.

The extremely experiential and intimate nature of digital and blended realities permit creators to discover topics resembling this like no different artwork types. We’re not studying about vestibular migraines or listening to interviews: we’re immersed in a simulation that essentially modifications our sensory info. This is why VR and MR (shorthand for “mixed reality”) have a historical past in exploring circumstances together with autism, gender dysphoria, panic disorders and lots of extra.

Andrews and Roberts say their work was influenced by artwork that challenges concepts round accessibility and normativity, resembling these created by artist Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, and composer JJJJJerome Ellis, who has a stutter.

“There’s something really interesting about deconstructing media through a disabled lens, to question the accepted normativity of how technology is widely used,” says Roberts. “There’s a very wealthy historical past of disabled artists doing that via completely different media.

“VR is attempting to mediate our approach of creating sense of the world,” Andrews provides. “We are really interested in that, including what can be opened up in exploring the seams of perception. A lot of the time in immersive technologies, like VR, it’s a strive to be seamless. But disability, in some senses, is a seamed experience of the world.”

Andrews and Roberts are early pioneers of those still-emerging applied sciences, exploring the potentialities of VR and MR in methods not dissimilar, broadly talking, to the early pioneers of cinema, who performed with the kind and content material of movement photos. Their earlier work contains Gondwana, a 48-hour experience simulating the passing of time in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest. The extra centered and private Turbulence: Jamais Vu is the first chapter in an meant collection that will proceed to discover Andrews’ power vestibular condition.

“The through-line that runs through a lot of our work is an interest in awe, wonder and reconnection to the world around us and ourselves,” says Roberts. “Previously we’ve done that on very large scales – the immensity of rainforests, the vastness of space. But this work turns that curiosity and wonder inwards, looking at our own experiences, Ben’s own experiences, as deserving of wonder.”