Lena Herzog’s Any War Any Enemy is a hauntingly beautiful spatial poem that takes us on a liminal journey about nuclear annihilation. Rather than disassociating and letting power structures sleepwalk us all into catastrophe, she explores a new form of transcendental anti-war protest by leaning into an underlying existential angst that doesn’t turn away from the human costs. It’s a cautionary tale that serves as a wake-up call about the insanity of mutually-assured destruction, and an opportunity to use VR to ground apocalyptic abstractions into an embodied experience that allows us to bear witness to possible futures that should be avoided at all costs.
I previously spoke with Herzog about her first VR piece Last Whispers in 2019 about the extinction of languages. This piece is about the potential extinction of all of humanity via nuclear annihilation, and she’s working in the third piece in her trilogy that is aiming to end on a more positive and optimistic note. I had a chance to catch up with Herzog virtually to unpack more about her process of creating this piece, and how she’s exploring the more poetic and metaphoric dream logic within her immersive, anti-war poem.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So today's episode, I have Lina Herzog, who released her second VR piece. The first one was called Last Whispers, which premiered at Sundance 2019. I had a chance to talk to her about that piece back in Amsterdam at IFA Doc Lab in 2019. She's come out with her second piece. It's called Any War, Any Enemy. And I wrote up a little blurb just to give it a little bit more context. I say, Lena Herzog's Any War, Any Enemy is a hauntingly beautiful spatial poem that takes us on a liminal journey about nuclear annihilation. Rather than disassociating and letting power structures sleepwalk us all into catastrophe, she explores a new form of transcendental anti-war protest by leaning into an underlying existential angst that doesn't turn away from the human costs. It's a cautionary tale that serves as a wake-up call about the insanity of mutually assured destruction. and an opportunity to use VR to ground apocalyptic abstractions into an embodied experience that allows us to bear witness to possible futures that should be avoided at all costs. So yeah, just a really beautiful piece. Highly recommend. Like I said, go check it out, and then we will dive in and break it all down. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Elena happened on Friday, October 18th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:34.582] Lena Herzog: My name is Lena Herzog. I'm a, for lack of a better word, a conceptual artist who works with different media, including VR. I began as a photographer and a printmaker. And I ended up in virtual reality something like, I would say, 10 years ago, maybe a little less, eight years ago, because of the concept that drove me to it, which was the work called Last Whispers. And we chatted, you and I, about that before in Amsterdam at IDFA. And it had to do with creating something that would feel present. And there's nothing like VR to bring something that is gone, like extinct languages, to something that is present and feel very much alive. And I felt that that suited the concept. And that's actually how I ended up in VR. And I loved it. I think it's an extraordinary medium.
[00:02:37.043] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:42.485] Lena Herzog: I was born and grew up in Russia in the Soviet Union at the time in 1970. And I studied languages and literature. The philological faculty at the time, Leningrad University. So the closest thing I think would be linguistics if I were to pair it up with adequate name for it in academia in America. I came to the United States in 1990 and I studied philosophy. And then I worked at a research program at Stanford University with Professor Amos Noah. And I began to work in the world of art, I think in 1995, 1997, working primarily in the medium of photography. And so essentially it was work within the frame. The frame thing about VR was to jump into the frame, to be inside the frame. It is as if you were in the middle of a painting, in the middle of a film, and both very freeing, experimental, because I think we're still in the medium which is very much developing, and extremely beautiful.
[00:03:59.943] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, we had a chance to talk about Last Whispers a number of years ago in Amsterdam. And your second piece that you have premiered earlier this year and just had a chance to watch Any War, Any Enemy on the Quest platform. So you had mentioned to me that you had like a trilogy in mind with this first piece, the second piece, and then the third. Maybe you could talk a bit about like how the second piece came about. And when you started Last Whispers, if you always thought that this would be like a three-part triptych.
[00:04:29.645] Lena Herzog: I didn't think so. The more I thought about the implication, actually implications, plural, of losing languages, which meant losing ways of thinking, because of course we think with words, the more I thought how deeply connected it is to another extinction, which is a physical one, and that is due to war, in particular the war that we might well have, and that's a nuclear war. So since three nuclear superpowers at the moment are, to put it mildly, at odds, if not in a state of proxy wars, this is very much on the table. And I was wondering... How is it that there is no art made about that? There is a lot of art made about anti-America, anti-Russia, anti-China, which is actually pro-war art. But anti-war against the whole notion of the war, and in particular against the notion of the war that could be the last war, that could wipe out not just us as human species, not us as civilization, but us as life on Earth. And I felt that it was deeply connected to the extinction of ways of thinking, which is linguistic extinction. Because, of course, the reason Margaret Atwood said that every war is a failure of language, because it is essentially a failure of understanding. I would also add a failure of will to peace. And that actually happens to me in also photography and in my print work. Whenever I address something dark and difficult, I always want to balance it. It's actually a need. It's almost a physical need that I have as a human being. And so the third piece that I'm making right now, it's called provisionally reversal. So the triptych, which will be called Trinity. And part of it is that trinities are inside the mise-en-scene. They seem to remind us of religious paintings, but they are not religious. And of course, Trinity was the way that Oppenheimer called the first bomb test. The first nuclear bomb test was called Trinity. And the third piece that I'm working on which is deeply satisfying is reversal. And that's a counterpoint to the first two extinction pieces.
[00:07:10.071] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Well, that gives us a really good overview of the inspiration of this piece. Were you looking to any books or media or other VR experiences when you were starting to dive into this piece? Because it has a lot of poetic interpretations. And so where did you begin with this piece? If there was a moment of inspiration to translate these ideas into these poetic spatial metaphors?
[00:07:35.831] Lena Herzog: The new piece that you're referring to, Any War, Any Enemy, is inspired by quite a few paintings and by literature. I'm not sure that I have seen anything in VR. If anything, I've seen in VR or in immersive spaces. Mine is actually an objection to what I've seen because so much of what you see in contemporary VR is all about murder and slaughter. My piece, Any War, Any Enemy, is against that. It's against any war. And so one of the primary inspirations was, of course, the great painting by Pablo Picasso, Guernica. The series by Goya, which I saw when I was six years old in a book called Desastres de la Guerra, The Disasters of War, a series of graphic works by a great Spanish painter, Goya, Francisco Goya y Lucientes. And the shock of encountering these works of art has reverberated with me through my time. And we have been lucky not to have seen global wars the way of, for example, my grandparents, who were in the Second World War from 1941 onwards. until 1945, when my grandfather on my mother's side, who was a sapper, was there until 1946, still demining the fields from German mines. So for us, they came in literature, they came in paintings. And I also thought that the grand design of a nuclear or hydrogen bomb, which is annihilation, needed a grand design to address it. So the second sort of a shocking finale to which I'm building up in the work is actually also inspired by Dante, frankly, and the kind of circular visualization of the end, the sort of spiraling into it. That was also an inspiration.
[00:09:52.585] Kent Bye: Yeah, I can definitely see that. There are a couple of pieces that I thought of when I was watching it. The first I'll mention is the film Oppenheimer, which is obviously digging into a lot of these issues. And there was a lot of in-camera, or at least Christopher Nolan tried to avoid a lot of special effects and trying to find other ways of visualizing, representing these nuclear blasts. And so there was the spirit of some of that in here with trying to find different ways of representing metaphoric nuclear annihilation. Because that was such a touchstone in culture. And I'm wondering if you had already started this project before that film? I did. I did.
[00:10:30.127] Lena Herzog: As you know, VR takes a long time to build, especially something as complex as Anywhere in the Enemy. Yeah, we were... I think a year and a half, two years into it already of visualizing and constructing it when we saw the trailers for Oppenheimer and we knew that Oppenheimer the film was coming out. First of all, I thought it was great. I didn't think that that was a spoiler. I thought it was great to have in the mainstream media because of course Nolan is a mainstream Hollywood director. that would address it at least bring it up i didn't like the film because although it was spectacularly made and beautifully acted there was such a heroization and mythologizing of those who wreak destruction and potentially can destroy all life on earth There was never a point where you would feel anything but a thrill about seeing, you know, a bunch of physicists in Los Alamos or testing Trinity, the first bomb, except the thrill. And I remember there was a trailer and the trailer said they knew they could destroy the world and they still pushed the button. Really? Yeah. How about not pushing that button if you think you might destroy the world? How about that? And part of it, I have to say, is a culturally... part of American mythology, this kind of frontier spirit. And that frontier spirit might well end us all, because one of the things that occurred since the time of Oppenheimer is the shrinking of the timeframe. So if before, during Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russian nukes were off the coast of Florida in Cuba, coming to Cuba, So what was that, 1962? We had Dave's. hours to figure it out and now it's 90 seconds the shrinking of the time frame from days and hours and minutes to seconds of making decisions of profound implication meaning existence of life on earth or not because this isn't about good side you're on this is about existence or not In seconds, are we really that deep enough, our powers that be? Are we really that wise, the powers that be? We'll look at the kind of catastrophic decisions that were made, or even not catastrophic decisions that were made, and the sort of time that it took ourselves as humanity or power to come to terms with that let's say for example one of my favorite examples is the vatican apologizing for how they treated galileo and all of a sudden apology comes 400 years later that took 400 years to reckon that that was wrong And there were no implications of life on Earth being wiped out. And I think part of the reason that there is so little that actually deals directly with the question of nuclear annihilation is it's very hard for us who are so dependent on life and being alive. Imagine not being alive. and to not being alive at all as species, as other living creatures. And I think it's just psychologically, almost neurologically difficult. I have to tell you, these two years have been rough of making this. And of course, what I decided to do was I decided to imagine it as facing these nuclear blasts. We are facing these nuclear blasts. But I needed to create it as a poem. Because if you've created it as photogrammetry and realistic sort of thing, then you're essentially contributing to the problem. Because the paradox would be you're blasted by a nuke and you're just fine. And that paradox was never lost on me. I knew that it had to be a profoundly poetic way of depicting it. So this is essentially an anti-war immersive poem, how I thought of it.
[00:15:01.741] Kent Bye: Yeah. And especially when I think about Oppenheimer, the movie, there was certain parts where they kind of look away from the tragedy where they're not depicting any of the human costs. It's all off screen. It's all implied. Oppenheimer has a moment where he's giving a speech and he's thinking about the implications of what has been done, but We're not seeing any visual representations. Even when he's watching the footage of the aftermath, we only see his face reacting to it rather than any of the actual human impact. And I feel like in this piece, you're trying to, in some ways, not look away. You're trying to look straight on and have a little bit more depictions of the human cost.
[00:15:40.532] Lena Herzog: And of course the human cost of it is all of us, because the way that the powers balanced each other out, the word for that is MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, that will be all of us. And the way that Christopher Nolan depicted or not depicted what he chose to depict, what he chose not to depict, is very much in line with the history of the depiction of Hiroshima. Because when the first nuke was dropped on Hiroshima and a hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki in August 1945, this was not a secret, but it was depicted as this mushroom cloud in, I believe, Life magazine about that paradox. But there was an absolute prohibition of depicting what it did to the Japanese. Now, the piece that was published by the New Yorker I believe that was a year later, by John Hersey called Hiroshima, was an extraordinary coup because he depicted seven lives of the survivors of Hiroshima. Now, why was it a coup? Because it was an essentially a clandestine operation that the New Yorker editor, William Shawn, brave, heroic man, the kind of editors that used to be around in those days, I knew also another one just like that, Louis Lapham, who was the editor of Harper's Magazine, for which I once worked. He was also like that, heroic, absolutely heroic and brilliant. So what did they do? They sent Percy, who previously did kind of a puff piece on one of the generals. And so the military thought that he was their man. They allowed him in. And Faisal probably was their man until he saw what happened in Hiroshima. When he brought back the piece, the New Yorker editors with William Shown, and I don't remember, there was another man, but I don't remember who it was, kept it completely secret. And they ran a faux issue, a fake issue that the entire office was working on while they were working on the Hiroshima piece. The four issue, either was never published or was published a month later. The issue with Hiroshima, William Shawn took personally in the suitcase to the printer, stood over the presses, took it off the presses, and personally, together with the trucks, went around to distribute it to the chaos around New York. Now, why was it a clandestine operation? Because you were not supposed to have any sympathy for your enemy. And of course, Japan at the time was as enemy as it gets because they bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. And so the kind of empathy and impact of Hersey's work, I don't think either Hersey or the New York editors knew. I mean, they knew that it would happen at the time, that they knew, but they didn't understand the kind of political implications that it had over time because it put Americans who are deeply sympathetic people into a shock of what it meant of what was done and the truth of the nuclear bombs in such a shock that it became not a viable solution to ever use that and of course at the time the soviets developed their own nuclear bomb part of it was they stole the secrets via Fuchs, the spy Fuchs, who was a German physicist who then later worked for the Manhattan Project. And he was a lefty. I don't know if he was a communist or not, but he was a lefty. He had political sympathies with the Soviet Union and he gave the secrets away. There's a fascinating BBC series about that called The Bomb by the descendants of the people who created The Bomb by Leo Salah, and Fuchs and quite a few others. Because, of course, Oppenheimer, while he was a physicist, he was mostly a director of the operation. He managed it. So anyhow, the idea of the virtual reality, I mean, it's a paradoxical one, because on the one hand, you feel you're inside of it. You feel you're inside the action. On the other hand, of course, you don't feel any implication for it. And the only thing that I could feel to resolve this conundrum and this paradox, I don't know if paradoxes necessarily have to be resolved, but I wanted to kind of resolve that one was to create it in a highly stylized way. way as a poetic as a visual and of course it is also a musical poem because the two brilliant composers and sound designers with whom I worked on Last Whiskey I worked here as well Marco Capalbo and Mark Mangini Marco created the music composed the music, its original score, and Mark Magini created the sound design, which is brilliant. He's covered in Oscars head to toe for a reason. And that's my brilliant team and Jonathan Yamayusa, the VR engineer and director who not only creates things in the Unreal Engine, but he also invents and codes things. So there's a really innovative team that I have that I encourage. incredibly lovely to have.
[00:21:30.475] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the sound design and the visuals does give this sense of existential angst or terror or facing a nightmare in a way, you know, just like kind of really finding all the ways you can create that type of unease within the viewer. Before we start to dive into the specifics of how you were able to do that, there is one other reference I wanted to ask if you had a chance to see on the morning you wake to the end of the world as a VR piece. Did you have a chance to hear of that or see it?
[00:21:59.189] Lena Herzog: No, no. First time I hear, frankly, without taking notes.
[00:22:03.991] Kent Bye: Yeah, On the Morning You Wake to the End of the World is a three-part documentary series that looks at Hawaii. There was a false alarm that was going to have basically nuclear annihilation. It goes into the embodied reactions of what it was like to be in Hawaii there, but also the animation that you have with the world spinning around with the traces of the nuclear weapons. It also features that pretty prominently within the piece. Yeah. So it's a three-part series and actually won a prize at South by Southwest and has a lot of indigenous perspectives. It's highly, highly recommended. It's a three-part series to check it out. But that specific animation, I think, is the other reference point that I had, at least when I was watching it. That was 2D animations that they had simulated, what it would actually look like if there was mutual issue or destruction. Yeah. And you kind of bookend your experience with that as an animation because it is such a visceral representation of day to day. This is the reality, but yet we don't really actually like think about this as a implication or possibility. It's something that we've managed to kind of like be sleepwalking through this reality. And I feel like a piece like this is trying to give us some sort of visceral embodied experience of like, okay, this imminent annihilation, you know, 90 seconds away would feel like if it was actually happening. So I'm wondering if you could speak to that visualization as a way to start and end this experience.
[00:23:32.344] Lena Herzog: You know, I didn't see the work that you're referring to, but it doesn't surprise me that others would use that as well. Partially because one of the first things that come up when you search for what will it look like geographically, you are coming up with, I think there was a Princeton study. There are quite a few studies of the schools that study this sort of strategic war gaming approach. And they do animations. So our animation that we three-dimensionalize is based on several of the studies that we did. And I, as I did for Last Whispers, so I did for here, the geography is at once precise and not precise. I didn't want to do Google Maps and I didn't want to make it literal because I was working on something poetic. On the other hand, the kind of clusters and the points, GPS precise based on several of the studies. So it doesn't surprise me that other works would have that. Of course they would, because they would go to the same searches that I went through. And in terms of why is it that we are not afraid and are we sleepwalking? The answer is yes, we are sleepwalking into that. And part of the reason we're not afraid, I think, is at least twofold, if not manyfold. On the one hand, we were afraid of the bomb for a very long time. And it was fear that kept us from annihilating each other. Let's face that. Part of the reason we were afraid of the bomb is because we, in particular power, because we You and I can't, and people like us, we don't decide matters of war and peace. We're usually propagandized to feel hatred for that other enemy, any enemy. They're decided by power. Power during, for example, Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy, he was a veteran of the Second World War. He was wounded in the Second World War. He was a hero of the Second World War. So was Nikita Khrushchev. If you look at the exchanges of letters that they had, they both referenced the war, the Second World War that just happened, that they themselves personally experienced at blood for. We, in our comfortable lives, what do we know? From Netflix, from the movie Oppenheimer, where, you know, the inventors of destruction are such fantastic human beings and they are sort of like Greek-like gods. And so we have an infantilized idea of what war is and what nuclear war is. And it's utterly infantilized. So for us, it will come as a surprise and flash. That's how it will come. But my deep concern, of course, is that that very fear is gone. And people get tired of being afraid. They forgot what war is. And of course, we forgot what war is because there are plenty of places in the world that are being crushed right now. In Gaza, in Ukraine, now it's Middle East is blowing up. In Africa, I mean, what do we know about the slaughters that are going on in Congo? Of course, we're the lucky ones that do not have this horrendous war. But we are the... horrible ones that might actually end the world and end life because we have created the weapons and the history of weapons has been that they can be used if they could be used they are and of course they have been in 1945 but also how stunning it is that there is no anti-war movement and by anti-war i mean anti-war any war as a way of being because we are created enough and good enough, and we are decent enough not to have wars. And so the fact that we are not demanding peace, that this is relegated to, at best, contestants of Miss Universe in bikinis, that to me, culturally, I find inexplicable. Inexplicable. Hmm.
[00:27:53.246] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, and so in your piece, you start off with some text to set the context, and then it moves into much more of a poetic exploration of all these themes that we're talking about here, really facing this head on. And so you take the viewer on quite a journey through lots of different liminal spaces that are also literal or metaphoric or poetic or... kind of surreal, but all getting at this journey of nuclear annihilation in some ways, but in more of a aftermath in the spirit world and etheric realm in between liminal space and Bardo space as it were. And so when you were planning out this piece, you know, a lot of times when you're creating immersive experiences, it's something that has a beginning, middle and end. And you have to have this iterative process where you're have an idea of what you want. I think it's unlike a film where you're like write a script and then you have a pretty good sense of how that script translates into the end product. But something like these immersive experiences, well, I found at least that it tends to be a lot more iterative where you have to sit in these spaces and then see what comes next. And so as you were Working on this project, maybe you could talk a little bit about your design process of if there was a script or if there was like a series of illustrations or like storyboards or how did you begin of trying to put this experience together?
[00:29:15.081] Lena Herzog: Yeah. The reason that my team and I are able to make this work is because of the generous support of the Marilyn and Jim Simons Foundation, but it's a grant and we're a nonprofit. So every second of labor has to be calculated very well. It has to be, I try not to experiment around too much, although there is a lot of experimentation within the things I know exactly. what I want. So I don't experiment around that because we simply can't. We're a very small team. And so I have a visual role. I set the style and I work with a wonderful art director and animator, Amanda Tasse, but I'm the one who sets the style either through my own photographs or through suggestions of the artistic references. Like here we had Guernica and Goya, but also Nicola dell'Arca, the great sculpture, which is in Turin in the cathedral. And one of the things that I knew conceptually that I wanted to do, because I was thinking, you know, in a nuclear bust, what is it that you lose? You lose your loved ones. And you lose people that are literally near you. So I thought it would be too much of going across Uncanny Valley to include my husband and my cat in this. But I took all my neighbors that would be willing to die in a nuclear blast. So what I did with Jonathan and Amanda and Chris McLeod, we did a photogrammetry on my neighbors and then imported it into the engine and then topologized it, created sculptures, and I kept stylizing them together with Chris and Amanda. At first, I thought that all of them will be in a circle surrounding. And then I realized that I needed more time and more events to sink it in. So it had to be at once frightening as well as beautiful, because beauty is a hook in your soul. And so there were some changes. The way that VR works is very different from a film, which is separated from you into a frame and you're outside of the frame and you know you're not part of it. You're watching it as a detached, away from the frame witness. So the medium never suggests to you that you can change the end. Just like when you read a book and whatever experiments that they tried with books with different endings, they were all failures. So because of our experience with the medium, now our experience with VR, which is a new experience, is misleadingly, we think that we can have choices, but our choices are either very limited by the designer of the immersive space, the game, or the VR experience. Or they are none, and you're inside of it. So the trickiest part, both for Lost Whispers and for this, and just in general, my understanding of how the medium works, was to understand the pacing, the gravity, literally the gravity of the person. And I designed it with Jonathan, my user, with my VR engineer. is that you are suspended in space. So the sort of gravity to the person, to the visitor in space, is a suspension. And whenever there is a flight, then the flight is the flight of an owl. So whenever, for example, you're flying through the space, either in lost whispers or in any way the enemy, you are flying as an owl, not as a swallow, not as a dove, not as a hawk, but as an owl. It's a very smooth sort of flight. And again, there has to be this kind of a suspended meditative space that you are not shocked and you don't have to deal with the fact that you have no agency. And so that's kind of a profound thing to deal with in the very beginning of creating a work. You have to understand that you have godlike powers. You create the boundaries of the world. You create gravity. You create the way it looks and sounds. And in order for the visitor to buy into it, so to speak, to use the consumerist word, you have to, I think, stylize it. Because the moment you start making it, quote unquote, realistic, is when we say to ourselves, oh, that's not real. And then the whole leap of faith does not occur. At least that's for me. That's what it's like for me.
[00:34:21.243] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's certain visual contrasts that you're able to create. You know, you were talking around how it would take around like 90 seconds for some of these bombs to land. And it feels like a minute or 90 seconds worth of these swarms of birds as you start off after you see this Earth rotating with these bombs that are incoming. And it's sort of like this... tension that then resolves through this big white flash. And then you're into these sequences of these explosions It reminded me of the volcano that explodes. And then there's like this person that's kind of frozen in time. And then it seemed like a kind of a series of those different types of imagery of this apocalyptic event that then you see all the human impact. But going from that all black into the all white is this kind of visual contrast that you have. And then from there, it kind of goes into these different liminal space sequences that But when you think about contrast and building and releasing intention of something that you're taking people on a journey, but you want to also from both the sound design and the visuals create these ebbs and flows as it were. And so I'm just curious how you approach that either from an intuitive perspective or try to either deliberately create those different types of explicit visual and sound design contrasts.
[00:35:39.383] Lena Herzog: That's a great question. It is both intuitive and deliberate. So the deliberate idea, for example, behind the birds, I was trying to find a metaphor for what is it that happens that coalesces into a war, any war? What is it that coalesces into a nuclear war? And in my opinion, it's not one thing. It's not one actor, but it's many actors and many, many things. Some of them are economic. Most walls have economic underpinning behind them, and the powers cannot resolve it peacefully. They want to prevail. And so they go for war. That's mostly what it's about, no matter what they say, by the way. But even more so, and I think particularly for continuing the war and bringing it to the apocalyptic ends, is culture. Because, for example, if you look at how the First World War began, which ended several empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, arguably the British Empire, the Russian Empire, because the revolution certainly would not happen were it not for the First World War. But if you look at how they got into it, it wasn't just the killing of Prince Ferdinand. It was the building up of hatred and the logic of hatred that was building up on all sides. This kind of pumping hatred was so powerful. It was so extraordinary. that even mothers and widows of men that went to fight the war and died in most horrific ways, because it was also the first time that the chemical weapons were used in the First World War, they would continue, continue, continue, because of this kind of hatred that was pumping through the bloodstream of culture. And there's recently an extraordinary book that was written by Jacob Rogozinski called The Logic of Hatred, about witch hunts, about things like that. And there is a certain logic of hatred that actually brings us over the edge and into self-annihilating decisions. And of course, how I open it, the first thing to know about nuclear war is that it's not war. It's not war. It's annihilation. That's the quote by John Somerville. So these forces, the culture, the economy, the industrialization of war, the financialization of war, they all coalesce in the way of memorations, like a memorization of birds. That's how I came up with an idea of birds. So my birds are not very good birds. They're bad birds. And so you see them building up and building up and building up to sort of a screeching resolution, which is how you see the first bomb. And you see the first bomb away from you where you know what it is. You know that this is an explosion. And you suspect, but you don't know what kind of a bomb it is. And I, on purpose, made it not the mushroom cloud where you would know, but you would aesthetically have that marker in your head and you would connect it. But it would be an ambiguous one. So I wanted to build that horrible suspicion in the person, to build up the tension and the suspicion. And the second explosion, which is happening right in front of you, it also doesn't look like the classic explosion. quote unquote mushroom cloud, because I believe that when you face it, you don't see it like that. You just see the rushing light at you and the rushing sort of matter. And the first mise en scene is air, where the first three sculpts, it's actually four because the middle one, lovers of embrace, that they turn to ash, air. And the way that I wanted to build them was actually, and you are quite right, Kent, inspired by our understanding and our seeing of the people that turned to stone in the explosion of Vesuvius in Fontbaye. And the way that they crumble, it would be like a sculpture of ash, like a person who on a brief moment turned to stone, this kind of fragile stone and then crumbled. And of course, the first thing that goes in war is love. So that's why you first see what turns to ash are lovers. Second is fire. And you see three men. And what I imagine, particularly the man that was posed by my wonderful, very kind neighbor, Nigel, where you see the man holding his hands at his face. I was imagining him as a Pontius Pilate-like figure. And in the moment of what have I done, even though, of course, in a nuclear bomb, the power will not have the time to say, what have I done? It would be just a flash. There will be no turning back. And then the third one is flood. So air, fire, So these are the three basic elements. And the flood is because we know, for example, that some of the first designs were made to drop bombs on the sides of offshore of the continents. It was called Poseidon, Operation Poseidon. And the author of that Operation Poseidon, of that design, was none other but Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize winner of Peace. Why? Because later he recanted it, just like Oppenheimer later recanted what he's made. Kind of too late, because the idea is out, the design is in, but those are the thoughts that are very specific behind the three mise-en-scenes. And then, of course, my team and I refer to it as human flood, human wave, because this will be the kind of wave that all humanity will be lost. And you see lives or souls of millions, and you pass through the wave that becomes a tunnel, which is inspired by Dante. And then you see the sort of specifics of the nuclear exchange, and then the end would become a supernova.
[00:42:11.581] Kent Bye: So after you go through the series of blasts and you go through what seemed like a series of different liminal spaces where you're like going underwater and you're going into this big portal through the Stante scene, I kind of thought of like Bardo states or this kind of liminal space of in between the realms and these souls, how you were starting to imagine this journey that you're taking us on through these different portals and liminal spaces.
[00:42:38.014] Lena Herzog: How I thought about that? Yeah. I just tried to imagine a poetic way of stretching out a second of life coming to an end. So the work is 16 minutes, 20 seconds, but it's trying to address something that would happen in a second. Again, it's sort of the crunching, the stretching of time. I have to tell you that I originally worked as a photographer and I still work as a photographer. Normally I deal with fractions of seconds. So what is a picture for the most part is one second divided by 125 times or divided by 60 times. And that one tiny piece of time, one 60th of a second or one 25th of a second is that moment when I made a decision and everything I am coalesces in that fraction of a second. So what I was thinking was, I was thinking about what is it that we are that will coalesce in 90 seconds of decision about existence or not. And the irony about an atomic bomb or any other bomb that will be the bomb of mutual destruction. It deals with uranium, which is the most elemental particle. And I think it comes to our human elemental basic matter to deal with something like that. And so that's why I went to the primary elements, air, fire, water. These are also elements that make up our life. So they would be the elements that would also be faced by us, because we know that in Hiroshima victims were blown up and nothing was left except the shadow of a person. We know that it could be Poseidon design and flood that would sweep the continents. We know that conflagrations would follow where there is no flood. So I depicted one than the other than the other. And what I am hoping is to instill a nostalgia for the world to a degree that you would come out and want to hold on to it. How about we hold on to it? It's a beautiful thing. And by the way, that's what reversal is all about.
[00:45:10.612] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to ask, you said that earlier that this was like really hard to work on this for a couple of years and I can definitely see why just because you're really facing a certain amount of darkness and really taking it head on, but also like really leaning into it and staying with it in a way that a lot of us They think about it for a moment, but move on with their lives because it could be such a paralyzing fear that you have no agency to actually do anything about. And so with VR, I've noticed that there's all these speculative futures that people can do, kind of like imaginal futures that live into a positive world that we want to live into. And this is much more on the side of like a cautionary tale of a possible future that is much more towards nuclear annihilation.
[00:45:54.517] Lena Herzog: And so... You don't want to lean into that. No. No.
[00:45:58.564] Kent Bye: Well, I feel like your last piece, you said you're going to be a little bit more optimistic.
[00:46:03.005] Lena Herzog: Yes, absolutely. Well, Reversal is, which is, by the way, a provisionary title. I'm not sure that that will be the title, but that's the essence of the work that we're working on. And by the way, we already can see that the trilogy works beautifully together. It really hangs together. It makes complete sense. And it works together conceptually, visually, musically, but it also hangs together emotionally because you see the counterpoint, the end. It's sort of a Greek way because, you know, the Greeks, they had the tragedy in the afternoon. And in the evening, they had drinks and a party and a dance. But what essentially they did was see the glory of the world, see the beauty of the world, which is an astonishing luck that we have. Because there's no other... place like this that we can tell that we can see in the whole universe as far as we know and that's something to rely on something to be grateful for and also something not to take lightly not to take for granted and so the reversal is naming the glory seeing the beauty of it and um And I'm not going to give it away. I'm not going to tell you more.
[00:47:24.522] Kent Bye: I've seen Last Whispers and now Any War, Any Enemy. And so I've yet to have seen this third piece to kind of resolve this existential angst or tension that you've depicted in this second of the triptych. But as I was watching it, I was also just reflecting on this current time of political reality. There's an election here in the United States within less than three weeks away. And so I felt like there's this existential angst and terror that was also reflecting how many may be feeling around the current political environment. But this is very deliberately around a very specific issue, which is much larger than any kind of horse race game. Yeah, any election. It's like the annihilation of humanity in a lot of ways, which is certainly a lot bigger. But as I was watching it, I was also reflecting on the power of art and these types of media to really confront people with these potential futures. Yeah. whether it's positive or negative. In this case, it's about nuclear annihilation, and there's this risk of getting people paralyzed in that fear and not taking action versus actually being able to take action, but yet living in a world where it's difficult to take your individual agency and to have collective change. As you see this as an anti-war piece, in the context eventually as this whole trilogy that has a full arc that I've yet to see, but I'm curious how you imagine... art like this, being able to then either have people have an emotional embodied experience that then hasn't at least reflect on a current reality that they have been sleepwalking through. And yeah, how you see the role of art to then being translated into some sort of deliberate political action, or at least how you see art being played into this whole complex of all the many different layers of this as a story.
[00:49:13.356] Lena Herzog: There's actually a word that's used around, I don't really like it, actually I hate it, called artivism. Like activism, but artivism. The role of an artist is to reflect the time. And the angst that you clearly sense in the piece, you feel it reflects the world. That's sort of the role of the artist, is to reflect the mood. The Germans have a very good word for it, Stimmung, of the time. What is the mood of the time? And we live in the age of rage, which is very frightening. And I think part of the rage is that people feel disempowered. They feel they have no control of their lives and they feel cheated out of things they thought were certain. And that kind of rage and part of it is well grounded, by the way. because people are less and less empowered. And of course, neither you nor I are in a position to realize the current form of power, because we don't have kings or queens, but there is definitely power, which is more anonymous and horizontal. And one of the concerns that I have, particularly in with regard to a nuclear war is that it's power that doesn't think it's power, even though it makes these decisions in this kind of murmuration kind of way. And that is a very frightening thing because one of the things that nuclear mutual intellectual destruction presupposed was that there was a clear chain of command. a clear power that was obvious, it was apparent, visible to the other side, and responsible, that it felt responsible for the decisions. You can't have your cake and eat it too as power. You either have to be power and claim it and be out with it, or you don't. And you then don't have power, you shouldn't have one. And that's in a way, I'm not a monarchist, but when monarchs failed, they tended to face the wrath of the crowds. Either were guillotined or killed in horrible ways. And they knew that they had to at least give people something. So the angst you reflect to have an impact, I think we're in illusions of having impact. singularly, and there's a lot of posturing around. I don't like that. However, collectively, as culture, we definitely have impact. What I worry is that when I go on any platform, be that television or VR, what you see, and you can see it just even by looking at things that are offered to you in these little windows, previews of zombies or, I don't know, vampires or whatever it is. In every little window, some kind of slaughter happens. So culturally, we have propelled ourselves to seeing violence as a natural way. And I wonder if that's changed this. And I think that it could have. Because it didn't used to be the case. Even 30, 40 years ago, I remember that. There was some sort of a dam on it. And to do something deeply violent and explicit was a daring thing to do. And now everybody is doing it. It's everywhere. It's the norm. and here i actually have to tell you for example my team a lot of them are exiles and fugitives from things like call of duty you know where they made this kind of somebody's chasing you to kill you or you're chasing somebody to kill them because they didn't want to make that and um two friends of mine megan and cedric For example, with whom I worked as well, later they went on to make their piece, their game, a beautiful garden where all the visitors come to this beautiful secret garden and nothing happens to you. You see a hedgehog somewhere, you go into a fountain and you meet another friend. Nobody kills you and you kill nobody. And they had an extraordinary amount of interest and visitors to it. So if people need that, we're being told that we're awful by, you know, powers that they will let, powers that they talk for themselves. That's them. People are profoundly good and they profoundly want to live in peace and quiet and beauty. I mean, it's not a shock. This is such a basic truth. So I think that culturally, collectively, we can do that. And I think that would be the way. There are certain works of art that have changed things. Like, for example, there was a film called The Day After, which Ronald Reagan watched And it changed him. And he went to reach out to Gorbachev, who was just on the hills of Chernobyl and saw a nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. And he was ready. He didn't see it in a movie. He saw it in person. And so here was Reagan, who was a B-movie actor, who saw a B-movie the day after. And it got him. And there was Gorbachev. who saw the reality of the nuclear fallout just because one of the reactors collapsed because of human error. And in Reykjavik, they almost came to an abolition of nuclear weapons. Almost did. And they were stopped by people who had vested interest in that not happening. But still, the stockpiles were cut There was mutual testing agreements. All of these agreements went out the window. They're all gone. But that is to answer your question, do works of art have impact? Yes, they do. But you can never tell. And I certainly didn't make it for having a political impact. I made it because, first of all, I wanted to file an objection to the idea of annihilation. It's an objection. I filed it. LAUGHTER And I also feel like the field is clear in this regard. And again, it's about anti-war as a notion, especially because war now at hand can kill all life on earth. And I wanted everybody to feel that life is just a good thing to hold on to. Sorry to be so blunt.
[00:55:57.501] Kent Bye: No, it's great. I received your objection and felt catalyzed to have this conversation with you to unpack it even more because I feel like there's a lot of interesting things that you're doing with the medium itself to be able to share this story that's, you know, it's a big story, but it's also a vital one. And you have lots of really fascinating thoughts and reflections and intentions that are also embedded into it that I'm really happy to have a chance here to unpack through this conversation.
[00:56:25.939] Lena Herzog: Thank you.
[00:56:27.000] Kent Bye: And so I guess as we start to wrap up, just a couple of final questions just to conclude everything. I always like to ask all my interviewees what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and this type of immersive art might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:56:41.589] Lena Herzog: Well, the most striking thing about VR is bringing something that isn't there to feel like it is real. So the potential in VR is what is our human potential to make feel real, right? What is it that we want to make feel real? And I think that there would be very interesting to concentrate on beauty, to concentrate on the best thing and let imagination take us to beauty, not to gamified, sentimentalized versions of the world, because ultimately, our aesthetics also are connected to our morals, to our ethics. I think that Nietzsche made that observation, that our aesthetics and our ethics are deeply intertwined. And so I think we have to also feel responsible for that. I think it would be good. But I also have a feeling that it is so full of possibilities, which is the most beautiful thing in life, which is possibilities. And there's so much room for invention. I think once we know that, and once our goals are set on creating something beautiful, something worthwhile, that will be not an impoverishing experience, but an enriching one. And something that people will want. Because I think the sense of awe, which is a very... clear high that you have in VR, you have this kind of a sense of awe. I wonder if it's not connected to the fact that this is new medium, like the sense of awe people felt when film came around and everybody ducked when the train was coming into the station because they thought that the train was going to come and run them over. And I wonder if that will wear out or not. I don't know. I suspect it might. So we can't rely just on that, just to scare with a dinosaur or a vampire. So substance, ideas, you know, very clear ideas have to be in there. And we haven't discovered exactly how stories function, because I'm not sure that stories function in the way, no, I'm sure that they don't function in the way that film, they function in films. So the way that I was working with the medium was to create states that address certain ideas in sequence that is intuitive and poetic and works almost as a musical, as an opera or as a symphony. And part of it, of course, also was dictated by the fact that Last Whispers, the first piece in the trilogy, was a choral piece. Because, of course, what is it? It's an oratorio where extinct and endangered languages are a giant human chorus that you hear. And you feel that they are present. They're all around you. And you're part of that chorus. And so I think it's a world of VR that's full of possibilities. It's a beautiful thing.
[00:59:53.197] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:59:58.925] Lena Herzog: Oh, come see any war, any enemy. And I think that go after beautiful things and invent.
[01:00:10.026] Kent Bye: One follow-up question I have to ask, because you mentioned beauty a number of times, that you said that you were deliberately adding the beauty in there, but it's like this paradoxical intertwining with the horror. Yeah. I'm just curious if you could elaborate on... You mentioned it a little bit in your previous answer, but yeah, it just feels like something that is sticking out to me, this kind of paradoxical, like you needed to have it aesthetically... It seems a contradiction. Yeah.
[01:00:36.725] Lena Herzog: But it's not... We have to have it to get us through the horror. And also, in order for the horror to stick, you need the beauty. That's the sticking glue of art. And whenever we let go of it, we lose that sticking glue. It's a hook. You know, I always looked at other works to see, first of all, because it's part of how I experience life, is to look at art and listen to art, to great music. And once I was actually so interested in how it worked that I made a whole book on it, on the kinetic sculptures. of Theo Janssen, a Dutch kinetic sculptor. And what I found was that there was a range of reference because it was at once archaic and they looked like Leonardo da Vinci sketches that came to life walking around on the beaches of Spanning and beach in Netherlands. On the other hand, they were very futuristic. So there was an arc that spanned back into our experience of art as well as to the future. So this kind of an embrace and not wanting to be into one trend or the other trend or sticking to a certain style, but this wholehearted embrace of the history of art, but also invention. as well as the fact that they were heartbreakingly beautiful. And so they struck you, but they also lingered. So the impression You know, how do you create something that's beautiful, either painting or photograph or film or VR? It's something that strikes you, but also something that lingers. And for that, you have tools at your hand that you rationally can enumerate. You know, you're working with time, you're working with music. You're working with building up tension, releasing tension. You're working with certain aesthetics that have to make sense. And above all, ideas that have to make sense. They have to be sincere. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's a kind of a mysterious process.
[01:02:53.815] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Lena, I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack your latest piece, Any War, Any Enemy. And I can really see your influence of language and linguistics and how you're really applying those insights of how language works with words into like the grammar and the spatial grammar of storytelling with this much more poetic piece. It definitely feels like a spatial poem that you're addressing a really vital topic around nuclear annihilation and fearlessly facing that question and using all the tools and practice of art and being an artist and pulling all these elements of experiential design together to really create something that I think is reflective of a time, even if people don't want to look at it, it's still there and is worth looking at and very much appreciate you taking the time to not only create this piece, but also take time this morning to help break it all down here on the podcast. So thank you so much again for joining me here on the podcast.
[01:03:49.360] Lena Herzog: Thank you. I was glad to.
[01:03:51.331] Kent Bye: So that was Lena Herzog. She's a conceptual artist who works with different media, including photography, VR art, and VR storytelling. And this piece was called Any War, Any Enemy, which is now available on the Quest platform and on Vimeo as well. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, I just really appreciate the use of virtual reality as a form of protest. And in this case, an objection that's being filed around the insanity of mutually assured destruction This is a piece that is exploring this in a very poetic way, not really explicitly advocating for any specific position. It's just like, hey, by the way, we live in a reality where the entire earth could be annihilated within like a couple of minutes notice. It just seems kind of surreal that we live in this reality and we don't really like talk about it or. face it very much. There's been a couple of media, obviously the Oppenheimer there's on the morning we wake to in the world, I think also covers this in a, in a much different way. That's much more of a documentary that is exploring it from a very specific place in time in Hawaii, where there's this false alarm with a missile launch. But this piece is taking a completely different approach, which is not turning away, not being afraid of looking at these metaphoric and poetic interpretations of the human cost of war, especially in Well, there's a quote at the beginning that says that nuclear war is not war. And Lena says it's annihilation. And so I think that's right, that we live in a world where we just kind of accept the status quo of all these things. And Lena's like, why isn't there more anti-war protest movements? So, yeah, I think the virtual reality is a way to enter into a slipstream where she was talking around when you take a photograph, it's like 160th or 125th of a second. And if you are facing a nuclear blast, then you really only have that much time. And so how do you take that quick moment in time and expand it out into this metaphor journey into the underworld for what happens in the aftermath of nuclear annihilation? So it definitely has a lot of angst and it makes you feel a little bit uneasy, but I think that's the point is that this shouldn't be comfortable thinking about nuclear annihilation in this way and that there's a way of using the medium of VR to actually just kind of reflect what's happening around this issue of nuclear annihilation. But there's also like we're like less than a week as of this moment from the US elections. And I feel like everybody's feeling a little bit of existential angst around how it's all going to play out. So I know I certainly am. And I know a lot of folks are on edge just to see what the future of democracy is here in the United States. So Yeah. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the third part of this triptych just to see where Lena takes us all in the future, especially as she's pulling in her background in photography and all these other influences from art and sculpture and paintings and using that to create these really beautiful spatial metaphors and poems. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage so you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
