ARTISTIC STATEMENT – My Beautiful Deaths
MY BEAUTIFUL DEATHS Here is a text written for an VR project in development, produced by the Pyaré Studio. Foreword Last year in December 2015 I heard of Ming’s work through a friend in Montreal. Out of curiosity I immediately jumped to connect with her to start a hypnosis session. The process was longer and more demanding than I thought. It was a much deeper introspection and preparation than anticipated. At first it was very abstract. Slowly things became more precise. Then I went on remembering several past lives. Some were harder to remember but others came to my conscious mind effortlessly. This experience inspires me to write stories around this healing process. I don’t intend to justify or promote hypnosis as science since I don’t even understand the mechanism. What seems clear though is that I seek it as an experimental narrative device. So given the major element of virtual reality is cognitive based – a hypnosis narration is to enhance the immersion level, already created by the VR medium. For me, experiencing virtual reality with a headset is a metaphor for reaching an alternative form of consciousness the same way a hypnotherapist could induce such a deep state. Synoptic Narration Narratives occur in space and unfold in time. I choose to burst through how to portray story, space, and how to shape time within a VR experience. Hence I am taking an aesthetic stand by drawing inspiration from Persian narrative paintings or miniatures. This style of painting is characterized not only by a flattened perspective, but synoptic narrative principles. In this fashion MY BEAUTIFUL DEATHS will depict a single large scene in which characters are portrayed multiple times within the 3D-360 frame. In other words, within a single visual field without any dividers of time and space, multiple actions will take place. The visitor’s job is to decipher and find his own narrative thread. His interpretation of the simultaneous narrative is dependent on his active role, unveiling the fog of war with the help of his gaze (see below). Hence I don’t require to convey the visitors as it is to be understood as originally intended but I invite the visitor to be absorbed in contemplation. Radio Documentary The voice-overs of Ming and I are the autobiographical elements and come from the real hypnosis session we performed. This personal audio archive is used like a radio documentary where sound is used to create a mental landscape upon which events are described in words with a sense of musical phrasing, tension and release. The Audiovisual Break of Contract In the context of film and TV, we are well used to the relationship – action = sound and the other way around – sound = action. We are so used to pairing sounds with image that even when images and sounds are not associated with one another, our mind can interpolate an association between the mode of sound and the mode of vision, as described as ‘audiovisual contract’ by film sound theorist Michel Chion. Nevertheless I would like to play with the asynchronous, somewhat a-temporal, relation between sound and visual elements. The radio documentary-like voice-overs will give a unique narrative and will “clash” with the visual cues. To develop the new VR language I would like to explore the striking human brain’s ability, when tested, to follow more than one narrative stream simultaneously.
