Polymorpf is small design collective & studio based in Holland that creates of all kinds of different immersive experiences that usually revolving around the senses and the human body. I spoke with Polymorf founder Marcel van Brakel as well as Mark Meeuwenoord, who has worked with Polymorph since 2014 doing a lot of sound design and music composition. Their 2015 DocLab piece of Famous Deaths allows you to “immerse yourself in a fragrance documentary” of the what celebrities might have been smelling when they died.
- Symbiosis (DocLab 2021)
- Algorithmic Perfumery (DocLab 2018)
- Famous Deaths (DocLab 2015)
This was recorded on Monday, November 22, 2021 as a part of a collaboration with IDFA’s DocLab to celebrate their 15th year anniversary.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, welcome, everybody. We're here at the IPA Doc Lab. It's the 15th year of the Doc Lab, and we're going to be having a conversation with a couple of creators from Polymorph. So Marcel and Mark, maybe you can each introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive media.
[00:00:26.713] Marcel van Brakel: Hi, I'm Marcel van Brakel. I'm founder of Polymorph. I started off as a filmmaker and then moved into theatre and then moved into immersive art and interactive art. And with Polymorph, we're a small design collective studio based in Holland. And we create immersive experience, of course, of all kinds. Sometimes it's more performative, sometimes it's more involving other media. Every project is different. a bit, it's mostly evolving around the senses and the body, the human body. That's kind of central to a project and work. And Mark is my co lead designer, artistic team, whatever. Partner in crime.
[00:01:09.208] Mark Meeuwenoord: Yeah. Mark Maynard. I've been working with Marcel within Polymorph since I think 2014 or something. And I have a background in philosophy and not super active, I have to say, but I studied it. And music. And in Polymorph, I'm doing a lot of sound design stuff and music composition. And I also work with music and sound and robotics. Yeah, that's the general scope of what I do.
[00:01:41.777] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that the DocLab is featuring a lot of these different types of documentary projects that are trying to go above and beyond just the initial 2D media or different structures of storytelling. And so maybe you could tell me a bit about your deviation from using film into these other media, including smell. So maybe you could just give me a bit more context for some of the other projects that you may have had here at DocLab.
[00:02:07.160] Marcel van Brakel: So yeah, well, I think actually our first project was moving away from the eyes. We designed famous deaths and it was part of a research project, a longer research project we did on the sense of smell and how we can incorporate that into media design and into interaction design. And for that, we created a smell printer and some kind of morgue freezing cell in which the audience could be shoved in and they would stay there in the dark. and with only smell and sound we could kind of recreate the death of a famous person until the moment that you die and actually kind of consider it some kind of analog VR system because you're put in a first person position re-enliving the person's life but we kind of discovered that our sense of smell is so much overlooked in media design. It's not there, but it's so, so powerful because it's kind of interconnecting with your deepest or your oldest part in your brain. And that makes us very powerful to kind of, as an interactive tool to kind of manipulate your audience, but also your feelings and connect to memories. So that's where it all started, I think. And after that, we did a lot of different experiments with the body in different modalities, because we got so excited about these realms that are mostly overlooked if you stay only on the visual level. And I think now, with our latest project here at IDFAT Symbiosis, we move back to the visual again within the VR. But the previous project we did on IDFAT were mostly targeting different senses than vision.
[00:03:47.088] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to see some photos, read some interviews, and it looked like you were choosing a number of different famous celebrities who had died, like Whitney Houston or JFK or Gaddafi. And the audience members would actually get onto a little slab and go into a morgue-like refrigerator as they're laying down as if they were dead. But while they're in there, they were getting all these smells. So what were the contexts for onboarding people into this experience? Were they told that this is going to be the death of Whitney Houston or Gaddafi or JFK? Or how did you communicate to them what they were about to experience in terms of going into this morgue-like refrigerator to be able to smell these things? So yeah, I'm just curious to hear how that all was communicated.
[00:04:31.333] Mark Meeuwenoord: I think a lot of the communication was done by, or still is actually, but by the visual impact the freezers make. You know, you have this iconic image of a death container, basically, which suddenly is in like an art space kind of situation. And then, of course, you will be told that you are going to experience the last moments of this person's life. laying down in the dark, getting different sense and an audio design to accompany that. And people just undergo it and they are immersed in it. And I think one really helpful aspect or impactful aspect is that you're going to lie down, you know, people are being put on this on this tray and that aspect is a step in giving in or giving over to this experience because of course when you're standing up or used to standing up or sitting down at tables you have this bodily thing that you're used to or something. And when you lay down, that changes, you know, you are getting more vulnerable or more perceptive or at least in a different, literally a different state, different bodily state. And then people get out and the door opens and the tray pulls out abruptly and you're back in the space again. And that's really where people need to have this little conversation about what just happened to them.
[00:05:55.473] Marcel van Brakel: So a lot of the onboarding was also not done by us, but by the audience themselves, who started talking and share experiences. And I think also one of the key elements of the design is that you have not one story, but you have like parallel stories. So you have like three or four stories to choose from. So people also had a different experience to share. People also a bit afraid to get in. So you had to overcome a certain barrier to step into this situation of total surrender to the system and to maybe being confronted with the claustrophobia of the space because it's a very tiny space.
[00:06:34.660] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that there's a piece a number of years ago at Sundance by marshmallow laser piece called sweet dreams and has the Experience you're in this virtual environment, but you're eating these different flavors of candies and then cosmos within us was another piece that Actually had smell docents were these little sticks that they would have somebody who would put something right up to your nose while you're in a virtual experience because it's really hard to edit smell because once it's used and Take it away. So they would have the sticks that would they hold in front of your nose. But what I noticed with each of these experiences is that a lot of times the sense of smell is very subtle, that the visual field can dominate. And it sounds like this experience, you're really focusing complete attention on the smell and not even having other sensory stimulation. I don't know if you had sound or other senses that are playing a part, but really trying to focus on one sense I think is interesting because a lot of times the smell or taste is something that is below our conscious perception. It's something that's kind of subtly influencing us in ways that we couldn't even necessarily articulate with words, but there's something about the flashbulb memories that we get with smell that really take us to deep visceral memories of our past if we have associations with the smell. So if we don't, then It's going to create a whole other visual experience that probably people will remember this experience that you created based upon if they smell it again. So I'm curious to hear your own take on what's it mean to really focus on just the smell and what type of experiences you were able to create by doing that.
[00:08:04.498] Mark Meeuwenoord: I'm not sure if we make work that only focuses on smell as an isolated thing. If that's what you're asking, I'm not sure about that. I think it's always a part of complete bodies, but it's about... So yesterday we were in this conversation and Marcel was talking, so we constantly hear each other say things, and we're like, ah, wow, that's interesting. He was explaining in this conversation we had yesterday how as a director you can focus direction and focus attention and play with that. So I think in a lot of these works where we use smell and scent, it's sort of a compass or a light to focus story direction. And you can follow that direction. But it's also always a question. So how will this work? You know, how will this work in this confined space? How will this work in a complete... So now in Symbiosis, of course, we also use scent. And it works differently because it's in a different design context, in a different story world. I think it's about that, about exploring, for us, at least for me, exploring the way we can use these different senses in conveying stories to an audience. But that's not an answer, I think, to your question.
[00:09:14.517] Kent Bye: And I'm curious, it sounds like you have another experience here called symbiosis. Maybe you could give a little bit more context as for what that project is trying to do.
[00:09:21.148] Marcel van Brakel: Yeah, so in the current project, it's a multi-user VR project where three users at the same time are interconnected in the same VR world. They are turned in a new bodily architecture, so a non-human bodily architecture that is fitting the VR model, which is obviously also not human, but the combination of human and animal DNA or human and other plant-like DNA or other critters. And the objective of the project is to do a kind of thought experiment. So the objective is to have a speculation, a future speculation on what might happen if we leave the human-centered position, where everything is about us and about our power, our human agency, and it's serving the human goals. And what happens if we leave that and move towards a more symbiotic relationship with nature or other living creatures? And within the different stories that we present, there are different answers to that question. But one of the main strategies is to put you in a non-human body position, and with that is a scent design that helps you to get emerged in this different world, and also in this different way that these critters perceive the world, because it's maybe different than ours. So it's always in combination with visual. And with Famous Death, it was like a conscious choice to not do that. To more tap into the storytelling ability of the user himself, because the smells will trigger personal episodes. And with that, the story of being Whitney Houston becomes multi-layered. It also has the images that are already present in your brain. And we kind of tip them and switch them on with the scents and with the sound, of course. to have a very intimate and very personal media experience in a way. So that's a bit different strategy than we do now in the current setup.
[00:11:16.805] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because this is the 15th anniversary for the IFFA DocLab, I'm curious to hear reflections of what you see the DocLab is able to do in terms of the wider documentary community and how it's provided maybe an outlet for your work to be able to push the edge for what's even possible and what the role of the DocLab has been for you.
[00:11:38.100] Mark Meeuwenoord: Ah, well, it's been, first of all, maybe I think a friendly home, a community where you feel really connected to other makers, other people that are in this same unsecure field of trying to tell stories in a different way than traditionally. So and I've been also not only with Polymorph, but also, for example, with things like Duo Disco and Distance Disco involved in certain more social event kind of things in this community, which really feels good. And I think also for us as Polymorph, it was really an igniter since Famous Desk, because that was actually the first work as a group we presented there. And it really helped us lift off or something. with this project as a sort of a first step into a bigger realm of connecting to other places, other festivals. And now it's it's been really important as a platform or as a lab or as whatever name you can give it, a lot of names, I think. But for me personally, foremost is the connection with other makers and in-depth talks you can have about your work, but also about your insecurities, about your work. and how to get them to a broader audience and that's a very special thing I think, that's very special.
[00:12:57.826] Marcel van Brakel: I cannot agree more with Mark. And what I also think that Docklab really acknowledged that some of these things are really our experiment and they can fail and they give you also a lot of trust to fail. Of course, they want to have successful show, but I think they are very supportive also to help you out and to believe in the dream that you're having. And for us, being at Docklab opened up the whole thing. I mean, it really kickstarted everything that happened after that. And we're so happy that we can return on a regular basis also to DocLab. So it's not like this one-off thing between building a relationship with each other. I think that's very valuable. And there's so much smart people out there, so much to learn. That's always awesome to get connected to that and to stay connected to that.
[00:13:48.359] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear some reflections on the fact that, you know, usually when you're creating a piece of media, you want to have everything sometimes contained completely within that media for what you are trying to say. But when I think about smell and what you were able to do with your previous projects is sometimes leaning into the fact that the smell is going to bring up memories and experiences of the audience and how that is going to be this unknown blob of memories that you're tapping into and then fusing it into your work. I mean, I guess that's always happening in terms of when we're watching any media, but I feel like there's much more deeper visceral experiences with that when it comes to senses like smell or other ways that you're fusing all these different things together. But there's this aspect of leaning into the audience's experiences and how you're going to be tapping into something and then blending it in. what you're doing and I'd be very curious to hear some of your reflections on what you learned from being able to do that and trying to maybe in some ways take a step back from having complete control over what it is that you're trying to say and really lean into whatever experiences may come up with an audience.
[00:14:55.726] Marcel van Brakel: Yeah, I think the brain is a prediction machine. It tries to predict the future. And in storytelling, you want to make use of that ability of the brain that it's always trying to make sense out of all of the data that it's getting. And I think what we learned is to take that even more seriously than we did before. I think since the beginning, we kind of acknowledged that when you make a media experience, it's always a dialogue with the audience. It's also partly out of control. But I think since we get more and more interested also in non-human storytelling or non-human perspective or different perspective, and also to give freedom for the audience to create their own sensemaking. in a sometimes also surprisingly new way because we stimulate the body in a different manner than you ever have experienced. For us, it's very rewarding and very interesting because it mirrors back these experiences of the audience. It's also giving us surprising new insights and surprisingly new feedback. And I always like that, that there's an element of surprise also for us as a designer. So the audience doesn't follow the path that we kind of designed, but there's also freedom to kind of distort that or find other paths or find new perspectives we didn't anticipate. And to get back to one of the things that people kind of mentioned when they did the experience, that they thought during the experience, they thought that we would manipulate also the temperature of the installation. But of course, that was not the case, but it was the effect of the hormonal ability of smell to trigger flight or fight emotion settings in your body and in your brain. So people would feel heated at certain moments when we put on a fire smell. And that kind of made me realize that we're so, on a subconscious level, so subtly, so smart, actually, in sense making, that it's very cool that the story is kind of enriched with different interpretations and different meaning mirrored back by the audience.
[00:17:08.806] Kent Bye: Marc, I don't know if you have anything else to add to that.
[00:17:13.002] Mark Meeuwenoord: When I was trying to reconnect with the question, I was thinking about these technologies. It's the same, I think, as we try to, in different projects, Famous Devs is of course not the only one, but try to discover and explore scent or discover and explore touch as a medium of conveying stories. we constantly develop these technologies ourselves. So we use these things that are there and try to construct new things with them. And it can be like a sand printer over here and thing that talks back to you or a thing that makes you feel deep and cold. And now in our latest project, we all put that together. We developed a lot of soft robotics, which one of the takeaways. So you have this concept, okay, soft robotics, that's cool. Let's do something with that. It's not like that, of course, but it's also like that. and then you start exploring that and making that stuff and then it's super tiny and then in the process you discover that it needs to be bigger and different and it changes completely. So during this process of developing these technologies and now we have this enormous array of big cylinders that actually produce the haptics in the suits And then looking back to soft robotic developments in a lab, it's like these tiny little silicon things, you know, and we made like these huge things. So this completely different outcome. So for me, the big takeaway in that process is that you have to move along with your insights and your things and your failures to actually get to a point that you can say, this works in the design, this helps the story, or this maybe needs to be improved still. But it's an interesting new direction and new, maybe even an aesthetic layer or a story layer that is added through this process of letting go your original ideas. Me personally, I find it very hard some way, but it's like a super lesson for me constantly. And this environment of doing that, this not only working with Marcel and the team, but also in DocLab, that helps me making those steps or some way. I don't know. That's for me one of the biggest takeaways of these processes.
[00:19:28.992] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, and just as we start to wrap up here, I'm curious for each of you what you think the ultimate potential of these new forms of immersive storytelling might be able to enable.
[00:19:41.281] Marcel van Brakel: You start or should I start? No, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things. I think since we get interactive with all this kind of digital media and robotics and hardware, we kind of also realize we're something different than that. And maybe that also needs different kind of stimuli in the future. So I'm really, really excited about this merging of the body with kind of organic hardware, like this wetware computing and this biological robotics that's starting to emerge now in the labs. And I think the merging of the artificial with the real, it's already going on, but will be more and more invasive into the future because it will become the same thing. And I'm really excited about that. And yeah, for us also playing around with the bodies and with the perceptual models of the body, it's very interesting to kind of rethink what it means to be a human because the sensory apparatus that we have is just there by chance. and it has a certain modality. And at the same time, that's very determining the way that we perceive reality and how we build models of it and how we understand it and how we can philosophize about it or think about it. And I think by putting the body into a situation where it's out of control or out of these known modalities, it also opens up new spaces for new perspectives and new ways of thinking about reality and how these things work. And I'm really excited about that. Yeah. That would be my answer. Yeah. Wow.
[00:21:22.260] Mark Meeuwenoord: How to top that? No. Yeah. So I, for me, I think to add on that maybe is all these possibilities and all these new technologies that are emerging, but not only emerging, but are getting accessible. They have, of course, their histories. And we should be aware of those histories, I think. There are not only possibilities to unfold ourselves in the new, but there are also traps to keep us in the old or something. I think that's an important thing we should realize. And what we, I think, do is constantly especially when there are these new things, new technologies, these unknown territories, we try to mirror or use it as mirrors to say something or understand something or to feel something about ourselves. And that's a constant thing we're in or something, like a constant wrestling match or something as a human. And at the one hand, I'm super positive about this. I'm really excited about it. At the other hand, I think it's the same old we do when new things are appearing. like when the train appeared I find this story very interesting that the sickness the train sickness appear to you know people got sick and it was a medical discord that started writing about this thing and then it eventually went away again so it's this constant push and pull of things, and I'm trying to cite like a little line of text from Russell's script, a push or pull things that we're in, I think, in these times, and maybe in all the times, but okay, but there's certainly positive things to grasp on and for changing ourselves. And to end time, I think it's impossible to not change.
[00:23:10.921] Kent Bye: Great. Well, Mark and Marcel, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader doc lab community?
[00:23:16.823] Mark Meeuwenoord: Yeah. keep it up and I really hope keep seeing you guys in like different phases and different maybe in a couple years maybe next year in this I'm super happy to be part of this community and I'm proud and see you around hopefully for drinks and the social stuff not only the online stuff of course yeah we want more drinks and in the flesh yeah
[00:23:48.232] Kent Bye: All right, well, Mark and Marcel, thanks so much for dropping by and giving a little bit more context to your own work and to think about where DocLab is at now and where it may be going in the future. So thanks for joining today.
[00:23:59.140] Marcel van Brakel: Thank you so much, Kent. Bye-bye.
[00:24:01.142] Mark Meeuwenoord: Thank you, Kent. Thank you all.
[00:24:03.191] Kent Bye: So that was Marcel van Brackel. He's the founder of Polymorph. It's a small design collective studio based in Holland that creates immersive experiences of all kinds, usually revolving around the senses and the body. As well as Marc Myernoord, he's working with Polymorph since 2014, doing a lot of sound design and music composition. This conversation was recorded on Monday, November 22nd, 2021 as a part of a collaboration with the IFA DocLab in order to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
