The Spatial Reality: Artists Explore the Future of XR show is running from October 12 to 28 at the Ayzenberg sp[a]ce gallery in Pasenda, CA. I had a chance to see all of the pieces in the show, and then talk with the curator Jesse Damiani about my highlights from the show, where immersive art is at, and where it’s all going.
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Damiani says that VR & AR art has matured to the point that’s it’s ready to be displayed at art galleries, and the audience has matured to the point of knowing how to watch a VR experience as there were a number of self-service VR stations with looped experiences. The best practices for how to show and consume immersive art in a gallery context are still developing, and Damiani shares some of his lessons learned through curating this show.
https://vimeo.com/287303979
These immersive artists and storytellers are pushing the edge of what’s possible in AR & VR, and Damiani wanted to feature artistic ambient environments that didn’t necessarily have a fixed narrative. He commissioned a site-specific piece by Cabbibo that spanned multiple levels of a staircase in the sp[a]ce gallery, and curated a number of other pieces from his network within Los Angeles and beyond. Damiani was influenced by Magik Gallery’s May 20th Show, and mentored by Nick Ochoa who is helping to pioneer a marketplace for AR & VR artists to be able to sell their immersive art.
I saw a lot of amazing pieces at the Spatial Reality show, and I recommend trying to check it either this weekend or next weekend in LA before it closes on October 28th.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So last week after the Magic Leap con, I was still in LA because I wanted to go to the spatial reality art show that was put on by Jesse Damiani. So a year ago or so, I went to the Magic Gallery art show that was basically like one night. Well, this art show that's happening in Pasadena at the Eisenberg Space Gallery is happening from October 12th to October 28th. So on the weekends, they're bringing in all this different equipment and having this immersive art show. And it's in like a design agency called Eisenberg, where in the back, they're doing a lot of different brand advertising. And they have this whole art gallery that is able to host this augmented reality art, as well as these virtual reality pieces. And Jesse Damiani, he's a contributor to Forbes as well as an editor at large at VRScout, he was in charge of curating this art show. And so I went to the art show, had a chance to see all the pieces, and then unpack some of the things that I saw that was new and different at this art show, where art is at now in virtuality, and where he sees it going. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Jesse happened on Friday, October 12th, 2018 at the Spatial Reality Artists Explore the Future of XR art show that was happening at the Space Gallery at Eisenberg. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:37.488] Jesse Damiani: So, my name is Jesse Damiani, and in this particular case I'm the curator of Spatial Reality, which is a VR-AR gallery exhibition held in Pasadena, California. Outside of that role, I'm editor-at-large of VRScout, and I'm a Forbes contributor covering emerging technology.
[00:01:53.560] Kent Bye: Great, so maybe you could tell me a bit of the backstory of how this Spatial Reality art show came about.
[00:01:58.197] Jesse Damiani: Sure. So it's one of these nice Los Angeles kind of marriages of different ideas. Eric Eisenberg, who runs both Eisenberg the agency and the gallery which is housed inside that agency, they've done some work with VR companies and he's an art enthusiast and wanted to have a VR show here. but didn't really know where to begin, so he told the gallery manager that he was looking for somebody who could curate a VR AR art show. That gallery manager used to work with the director of Think Tank Gallery, whose name is Jacob Patterson, and he's a friend of mine. I used to have a studio in Think Tank Gallery, so he floated my name up, and I basically came and interviewed and demonstrated, or at least gave the impression that I knew enough of the people I said I did, and we started cracking on this.
[00:02:40.252] Kent Bye: So how do you curate a show like this? Were you able to see all the pieces or just know the artists and trust them? Because it's not easy to just kind of like check someone's workout. It can be logistically difficult. So maybe, like, what is that process of bringing all these artists together?
[00:02:54.376] Jesse Damiani: Totally. The answer is different across all the different artists. So in some cases, like Khabibo's piece, I commissioned it for this show because he had talked about at Sotheby's doing a site-specific piece, and we kind of brainstormed about what a site-specific piece could be here. So at that point, it was like sight unseen. I just knew of his work and I trusted him to be able to pull it off. All the way on the other end of the spectrum, there were people who had already built really powerful experiences that I could go do studio visits and check out on my own. And then there was sort of in between people who had experiences that they kind of molded to fit the space. But it all boiled down to, you know, I've been really keen on the VR AR art realm for a while. And I've really admired the work that Nick Ochoa does, who I know you also spoke to when I was sort of on the ground with him for that very first show. And so he was a big inspiration for this and also a big actual help on the ground. So learning about different artists through him and through those events, learning about different artists through communities on Twitter and Facebook, in particular the virtual painting group is really helpful in virtual artists. So it was kind of a hodgepodge and because what I wanted to do was get this full spectrum of immersive technologies, I really wanted to find people who kind of embodied like a superlative realm, right? So like something that isn't going to encapsulate everything that's possible in projection mapping, but we have John Boyuk-Barber and Bill Barminski who do two very different takes on projection mapping to kind of wet the palette. And so that was sort of the ethos when looking at these different artists is how can we get this really broad range of everything or at least as many things as possible right now in 2018.
[00:04:32.673] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I've been to well over 60 or 70 different VR events over the last, like, four and a half years, I start to notice, like, the space in different things that are new or different. And one of the things about this space that was different than from what I've seen anywhere else was this self-service model of you walk up to a VR headset, you put it on, and then you're in the experience. I think, like, most VR events that I've seen have to have a minder. There's a certain amount of, like, education that has to happen, like, oh, you've never done VR before. it's kind of like the next step of like okay we've got enough of an understanding of how to put on a VR headset and what to do and that like we don't need a lot of explanation we just kind of dive in and kind of figure it out which was nice to see but I feel like an evolution of what's possible with showing VR in this kind of context.
[00:05:19.640] Jesse Damiani: Yeah, I mean part of what I really wanted to communicate with this show is that VR and AR art is here. It's of gallery quality and gallery ready now. And so a lot of the art that I showed, part of what I was trying to do is have it be as frictionless as possible. And like the thing that I keep saying to kind of like both be as optimistic and realist as possible is like we're in the VHS days of VR where VHS was this moment like, oh my god, we can bring movies home, we can play movies at home, but you have these like super expensive players and clunky plastic devices to do so. In a similar fashion, we're rapidly moving toward to, you know, with the announcement of Quest and the sort of evolution of Magic Leap and the presence of Magic Leap, we're moving toward this less intrusive type of model where you need the minder to be able to kind of walk you through. And of course there are some where you still do. But a lot of the pieces that I picked, the point was to say, you can just come up and try it at your own speed, at your own pace, and really just feel into it, rather than feel like there's somebody kind of leering over your back and making you feel like there's a point to what you're doing, rather than being able to just meditate inside of the experience.
[00:06:31.572] Kent Bye: Yeah, yesterday I ended up going to like four different VR places, a couple of location-based entertainment places that had these entertainment wave shooter experiences that I feel like are really designed for you going with a group of friends and having fun. It may be your first experience of VR, you're fully embodied, you see your hands, it's like super exciting. And I've, you know, after doing enough VR, you know, for me, it doesn't like really capture my imagination or, you know, I enjoyed The Void. The Void is great, but there's other wave shooter type of experiences that, okay, I'm going to go into an experience and I'm going to shoot like 500 things and it's going to be like nothing much more other than that. And so to come here tonight was a huge contrast into like this refreshing experimentation into like pushing the edge of what's possible but just like seeing weird stuff that like is totally non-commercial but is trying to explore different interesting aspects of what the fundamental nature of this medium can actually do.
[00:07:26.782] Jesse Damiani: Oh yeah, and I mean, you know, I have to give you personal credit, like the way that you enter experiences is how I wish everybody did, which is you sort of like white balance, you tone set, you get in there and you take in the space before you start moving. Or if it's AR, you kind of like hold on each different trigger and really take it in. And what I wanted to do with this show and what I'm hoping to see people realize is that So much of what VR has grown from has come from the gaming community, and that's vital. There's no knock on the gaming community. But the gaming community, by and large, is creating a scenario where there's always a vector, right? There's always a point, there's always a mission, there's always a quest. And we need those experiences, and those are amazing experiences. But there's also this whole other realm that's just meant to be a space that you sit inside, that you inhabit and you feel into. And you can't do that if your brain is in vector mode, is in go save the, you know, whatever mode. It has to actually just kind of relax into it and what's been so exciting tonight is seeing people do that. Seeing people just get in there and maybe even they went in and started thinking that they need to do something and they realized that they couldn't. And so they actually just kind of looked around, and then they would stare at something for a really long time and notice the texture, notice the magnetism, or notice the shader. And as it starts to aggregate in the mind, you're actually inside this other world because you allowed yourself to be. And that's what's really exciting about this type of thing, rather than, like you said, a wave shooter with your friends, which is its own kind of awesome experience, but different.
[00:08:57.175] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, and I probably the peak experience that I had in this show was having this piece right here land grab the musical and having this total deconstruction of narrative and like just real postmodern musical to like explore these different concepts referencing like art history and just like this really intelligent interesting experiment that is cutting the world into four different quadrants, and then each quadrant had its own musical that is exploring different concepts that are very self-eventual about what the art piece is about. I came out of it and immediately had like this nearly hour-long conversation with the creator, sharing what I felt, my experiences, and just like this art critical theory with someone from the art world, I feel like that we can start to potentially create that. Be like, okay, here's an experience now let's put it out there everybody go see this experience and now here's a podcast where we like talk about its meaning now how do you engage into this conversation and that's it gets into a little bit of like before we start this interview or like oh how big is your backlog and it's like 350 podcasts, but what I would imagine is that eventually being able to take those types of conversations, breaking up with AI, with automatic transcriptions, and be able to cluster them into soundbites, tag them, but being able to go in there and be like, oh, this soundbite right here, here's what I think about that. And then that starts a conversation that then could be mediated through almost like a where thoughts go with Lucas, where he's got these different thoughts, like, what would that look like if you add that construct into a memory palace within VR, to be able to have an experience but then to talk about it because I think that's the most interesting thing is to kind of like share what you felt about it or share what it means to you and to have these interactions and dialogue so I just I feel like that's what I'm hungry for that type of like experience but I think there's an audience for that for other people as well.
[00:10:47.675] Jesse Damiani: I totally agree and as you're saying that like so many ideas come to mind you know like Particularly when you start to actually be able to use something like AutoML, which is in watching what different podcasts somebody might listen to as a pattern and then start to create different spaces where you can not only have programmatic experiences, but actually surprisingly programmatic experiences the way that something like how Spotify's data is so good that your Discover Weekly plays you things that you didn't expect you would like but you love. So you go into a particular place and maybe it's just a stone texture. And when you hit different parts of the stone, it activates a soundbite from this interview, a soundbite from Philip's interview, but also a soundbite from, I'm trying to think of the most polar opposite in the end of the spectrum, like somebody from GM who's pushing into VR, somebody in the automotive side or whatever. those could all be somehow related because enough people are participating and demonstrating spatially that that's the type of stuff they like to engage with. And so one thing I'm really excited to see emerge next, this is going a little bit broader, this show was about showing individual pieces in a physical space so that people could have the full sort of commitment of a normal quote-unquote gallery experience. and feel into each of these pieces in isolation. What I'm interested to see next is sort of what you're describing where what happens when we make full void style experiences but for art and weird interactions like where thoughts go and you know yeah asynchronous social worlds like what creativity flowers around that with the simple idea of bringing really superlative artists who know how to use the medium in ways that are unexpected and surprising, but rewarding, all in one place, working on one project in unison. So that, I guess, is a little off topic from where you went, but that's what I'm really excited to see next, and that's what I'm interested in contributing to as well.
[00:12:36.954] Kent Bye: Yeah, let's have that. So I'm just going to do a little spatial walkthrough in my mind of pieces that were really striking to me that I think will stick with me in different ways. The moonbeam as an augmented reality magic leap experience. I think that using the hand gestures in a really innovative way and just the way that they're combining the tension of the puzzles with the storytelling. It's just a beautiful experience. And then Sutu, just the art, both in the augmented reality art and then the 15 minute mind at war piece was just absolutely mind blowing in terms of the art that he's doing, I think is some of the most amazing, innovative, either augmented reality art or virtual reality art. I mean, just the narrative of Mind at War, to take this soldier's story of trauma and depression and to see how the medium of VR could explore these emotions in a way that any other medium just wouldn't click or wouldn't work as well to be in that context and the way that he was able to use this cinematic way of moving through the story, using these spaces and this architecture and to have these moments where he's painting little vignettes of the memories in a singular space that allows you to see the overall arc of the story. I mean, it just blew my mind. And then Kibibo's piece of actually being able to walk up the stairs and like have this haptic feedback of interacting with these different objects and to be really curious and be like, oh, the wall is right here, but the virtual space is like beyond some like actually physically reaching beyond and interacting with objects that are in a virtual space that would be kind of clipping through a physical wall and leaning up against it. It's like, you know, it's stuff that like I've never had these experiences. And so I just love being able to come to an event like this and be like, watch a piece and then like, bend my back like so far back that I'm like looking at it upside down while I'm doing it. Just like be as weird and try to like change how information is going to my brain through blazing these new neural pathways. And so anyway, those were some highlights for me. I don't know if you have any for yourself.
[00:14:31.583] Jesse Damiani: Those are definite highlights and just some things you sort of triggered while talking, like one thing that I absolutely loved about Mind at War, because in general I wanted to steer more or less away from narrative for this show. There's a few narrative experiences, that being one of them, that I felt like the art was so superlative and there was such innovation to the form that it transcended just being a narrative piece. And again, you know me, narrative is deeply, deeply important to me. But this was for ambient, meditative, quote-unquote fine art experiences. Where I was so drawn to Mind at War was it's like this is a person who's been honing his craft for years and it shows. Every single vignette that you're a part of, every single motion, everything about it is there's something dreamlike about it. It's the exact perfect expression of that idea so that I could simultaneously sit inside his words the way I might listen to a podcast and feel into the world I was in and feel like they were synchronous and complementary. And obviously his piece using iJack, the iJack app which he's a co-founder of, gives people a true sense of how augmented reality can play out in real time in the real world that I think is powerful. Another really incredible piece that I'd like to highlight is John O'Ryan Young's, or he goes by Joy, his space in the Museum of Other Realities, which Museum of Other Realities was kind enough to let us display his showcase, because one, you get the full scrub of his different sculptures in a full range of his work rather than one isolated experience. And two, you get this sense of like a potential strategy of monetization because he's got his own blockchain infrastructure for the sale of his work. And this is something that Nick as well is working on with Magic Gallery, but for all artists. And I think this is a really important thing to showcase, because a lot of people ask, well, this is a gallery, aren't there sales? How do people sell virtual art? And it's like, We're still figuring that out. But there's some really smart people kind of cracking the code right now and iterating. And so I think that's important conceptually as well. I mean, I love all the pieces in the show. It's so hard. I spent so much time getting these and honing these and putting them all in place so that you would have good vectors through. So, yeah, I'll leave it there because I don't want to talk forever. But I'm so thankful to all the artists who contributed work in this show. And I think there's just really incredible, really incredible pieces.
[00:16:48.525] Kent Bye: So one of the other phenomenological experiences I had here at this VR and AR art show is that I feel like the AR art has a lot of friction that you gave me an iPad that like had all the apps pre-loaded already but even at that was like almost like an alternative reality game just to even like find the right app to figure out how to queue to see what even the augmented reality art even is and so There's little QR codes for people to download the apps, and then they could sort of navigate that on their own. But it feels like you're going to an art show. Now you're on your phone. Now you're downloading stuff. It just feels like, overall, kind of like a bad user experience. That if I were to just come to an art show, I wouldn't want to be looking at my phone. I would want to be really immersed in the art. And so I don't know if you have any ideas of workflow. Be like, hey, before you come to this augmented reality work show, here's a list of apps you should just download and be prepared. And maybe here's a map for if there's different apps for each piece. just to make it easy to see because right now it feels like I have to jump through like 10 technological hoops just to even see it.
[00:17:47.755] Jesse Damiani: Yeah, and it was actually, I'm really glad that you came to the show early so that you and I had a moment to talk through that stuff so that I could actually get your feedback and I'll be able to apply it for next weekend. Because as I was thinking about it, I realized there's a lot of answers to this question, but one thing that I realized was the QR code in and of itself is a bit of a confusing piece now because it's sort of conflating languages. So some people would think that the QR code was the trigger to the augmented experience rather than the app download. So that was one layer of friction. And then the clustering of any sort of description of how to get to the app right near the QR code kind of blitzed your eyes out and you didn't notice. So that's something that I learned. And so looking how to do that in the future, I'm realizing there needs to be more space, like on site. There needs to be more space. There needs to be sort of an indication of what is a QR code for an app download and how to trigger experiences. And then we did try to send out an email blast with all the apps, but it ended up coming a little bit too late. So in terms of a timing thing, having that sent out on a few different realms. But I guess as a top level thing, This is part of that VHS of VR, AR moment where I think there will come a time where there's not so many discrete apps. I think they'll probably be sort of a culling. And I'm not picking sides here, right? But like Blipper, Augment, iJack, then we have some proprietary apps. I think in like five years time, we won't have all these different apps. It just happened that the different artists built on different apps. And I don't know if that looks like mergers. I don't know if that looks like some survive and some don't. But it definitely is a friction point and it's something that I'm going to be thinking a lot more about, you know, how to make it so that it's easier for people to show up prepared for it. And I know you have plenty more ideas.
[00:19:31.936] Kent Bye: Well, I mean, this is my first real augmented reality art show. I've been to other places that had augmented reality pieces, but they always had somebody there with a tablet minding the place. They were like, OK, if you want to see this piece, pick up the tablet, where I didn't have to go through that workflow. But in a lot of ways, you're kind of trying to evolve what this could be in that there's more of a decentralized responsibility that, hey, if you're going to go to an AR art show, why don't you like download all the apps you need before you get there because you're gonna like end up being at an art show and like downloading a bunch of apps so I know that next time I know that I'm going to an augmented reality art show I first of all need to like upgrade my really shitty phone that can't really even do it and to then just do the due diligence before I get here and then By the time I get here, there's a certain amount of like, OK, which app do I use from this art piece? That was a part of the language that I didn't know. In this show, there was like the artist's description. And then at the bottom of the artist's description with the QR code was like right above it. It was a bit of a context switch for me to be like, I'm not going to spend the time reading the whole artist, what the artist thought about it. But I missed what the correlation between what the app was between that because of that context switch. So there's a bit of like, OK, those are things that I learned about. as a new user like I'm gonna do this differently but I think it's important to have those new user experiences on any VR or AR experiences because once you've curated you just you know and that you don't even have to think about it but as it starts to expand there's a bit of like best practices for what you could do to be able to have the best experience.
[00:21:01.700] Jesse Damiani: Totally and I mean one thing that that made me think of is actually having a package of all the apps that people need to download or a package sort of location where they all download them. And as part of the Eventbrite, you have to go through a page that says you have to download these. So it's like little things you learn along the way by going and trying and going and doing it. become part of this evolving language of how we even do this thing. And you're exactly right that I think the best case scenario is to where what I've been telling the people I'm working with is like we're running zone defense not man-to-man. Like you're here to just kind of keep an eye and make sure that everybody's having a good time. You know generally how to operate everything and how to put people through everything, but you're not standing and kind of, like I said earlier, leering over people Because that was a huge friction point for me when I'm at conventions. I don't know how you feel. But like when I know there's somebody watching over my shoulder, it tampers with my immersion versus there's something nice about getting kind of lost in a crowd, but also being inside of your own world and knowing that or trusting that nobody's really kind of watching you individually. So finding that place where we can do that with AR is really important, because AR has this massive install base that all you have to do is just get the software onto the hardware that you already have in your pocket, and boom, you have an immersive art show, or an immersive integration of an immersive art show. And so I don't want to see that fall off, because we do have to download all these apps. I want to find a way to make it really easy and frictionless to get them.
[00:22:26.625] Kent Bye: And so what do you personally want to experience in either VR or AR?
[00:22:31.492] Jesse Damiani: Well, as I was hinting at earlier, what I really would love to do, like, imagine putting somebody like Khabiba with his textures, with Wesley with her animations, with Lucas who did Where Thoughts Go, and other amazing interaction designers, game designers, get them into a room, and then bring actual physical immersion. One person that I've learned a lot from is Ava Lee Scott, who, she has the Annabelle-Lee experience, she's the Oracle of Altspace, but she also has real-life immersive components to what she's doing. It's a whole, she calls it a multi-dimensional experience. And one thing she hammers home is the experience begins the moment somebody walks in the door. When you go into a tech convention, your experience has begun with fluorescent lights, and hotel carpeting, and people walking around with branded shirts, and like, that communicates what it is. What I want to see next is, from the moment you walk in the door, you're in an immersive experience. And that doesn't have to be a full-blown immersive theater experience, that can just be like little touches that we've learned from theater, guiding you through certain parts of an experience. You know, we're in a gallery setting, so there's a certain set of expectations that I wanted to particularly play to being in LA, because I know the language, I've been to enough of these events that I know what will make people feel comfortable enough to approach it. But there's a whole host of other things that are equally powerful, or if not more powerful, because of the way that they're all integrated together. And so having little happy unions of like five to ten artists who have the money and the space to work together and make something that the whole space is one unified experience that brings you in and out of different realities. That's what I'm really excited about next and I think something like this show kind of plants a flag in the ground and says like there is a hunger for this and people are evolving in their maturity around using these technologies and so especially with like Quest coming out and more standalone being available in the marketplace it won't be very long before that's possible. So I'm already wanting to conceptualize it so that when the moment hits and everything's there, boom, we have it.
[00:24:32.483] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I just wanted to also mention Leslie Albrook's pieces, just in Quill, just the dynamic feeling of those, the amount of time that she spent in creating these different painterly scenes. It's a very unique style that, because it's using Quill, there's not a lot of other apps that have that same sort of style. But also, it's the first time I've seen a price tag in terms of, like, if you wanted to buy this piece of virtual reality art, then you can buy it for this amount of money. Yeah, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts. I know Joy has its own blockchain and Ethereum. And I thought, personally, I thought it was weird to say, like, when I saw the Museum of Other Realities, to see, like, this is a piece of art. This is how much it's worth. It's sort of like this weird, like, mixing of context, which is the consumer aspect of it. But then am I valuing it now based upon what other people have thought? And I guess that's happening here, too, if there's a price on it. But just, like, it's not within the context of the piece. So it just feels a little different. But anyway, I just want to hear the thoughts you have.
[00:25:27.407] Jesse Damiani: Yeah, so I think this is something we're still very much trying to figure out. Why I come down on the side of appreciating him doing that so that I don't want to butcher it. So I'm going to speak sort of in a vague way. But basically, because of the structure of the smart contract of his particular blockchain network, Every sale he just gets 10% of that sale But the buyer can sell it at whatever price point they want and obviously the seller can choose to buy it So essentially he never has to sell an art piece the way a normal artist might have to sell a $15,000 painting in order to That's framing it like, you know, oh, artists has to sell art to make a living. A lot of artists do other things for a living. But traditionally speaking, you see pretty high price tags for fine art, in part because the time and expertise that went into making it. This is kind of flipping that model and saying, I can start selling these for a dollar. And other people can just keep upselling it based on the rising value of my work. And I think that's really fascinating. What Nick is building is somewhat different and I think is more interesting on a macro level. So what Joy is building out is perfect for like an individual artist. And what Nick is building out actually allows for, I guess what we would call out of a blockchain context, like interoperability. So that somebody who's building a game could be like, oh, I love that whatever. I love that texture. I love that character. I love that building. And so you can just buy that one thing for a certain kind of use in the game. And so you can see fine art disseminate across all the digital different platforms. And that is also a really powerful way to see art be bought and sold. But then as to the Wesley point, I do think it's important that we do have people selling editions of VR experiences exactly the way people have before. You inevitably have to probably sell the whole headset and then price it as much as a painting of commensurate quality would be. So seeing a $15,000 VR experience that's an edition of one of three, shouldn't be seen as outlandish. I think that that actually is part of what will evolve people's reverence for the art form itself. Which I know it sounds mercenary economical but I just think we are sometimes mercenary economical creatures and we need to play to those existing sort of understandings to get the industry where we want it to be.
[00:27:34.492] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and art and augmented reality and what might be able to enable?
[00:27:45.059] Jesse Damiani: So what I'm generally most excited about virtual reality and what I think the ultimate potential is, is, you know, I hesitate to sound sort of hokey, but it's true. I think it's something that connects us, it decentralizes existing structures, and it's inclusive of viewpoints. And this is of course in the sort of platonic ideal of it, but it's bringing together so many different subsets of people who've never had to interact, or never had the chance to interact, and the result is this flowering of creativity and I mean creativity like capital C creativity the creative impulse not necessarily just art in the way that you know we had this this gallery exhibition and I think like we're at our best when we're working together on things be it inside of an experience or to create an experience and the intention of creating a world we are at our absolute best. And within those worlds, storytelling is how we communicate ideas. It's how we create our self-identities and our beliefs and all this other stuff. So being able to build these worlds from which new stories can emerge rather than be dictated, that is what I'm really excited to see emerge.
[00:28:54.555] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR or AR community?
[00:28:59.817] Jesse Damiani: I love all you guys, you folks. The past few years in this industry have been so thrilling because of exactly what I just described. Meeting people who have always been kind of wild beasts and outliers and just weird thinkers and all just being in one place. I just have so much fun and I'm just so appreciative that I happen to be alive at a moment when I got to meet everybody in this industry. Yeah, me too.
[00:29:25.611] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I just wanted to thank you for joining me today. So thank you.
[00:29:28.513] Jesse Damiani: Thank you so much. And thank you so much for the work that you do. You're one of our best.
[00:29:32.437] Kent Bye: Thanks. So that was Jesse Damiani. He's a editor at large at VR Scout and contributor to Forbes, as well as the curator of the Spatial Reality Artists Explore the Future of XR art show that was happening in Pasadena, California, at the Eisenberg Space Gallery. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, I feel like the theme from Magic Leap and my experience afterwards in Los Angeles was all about what artists are doing to push forward the medium. The night before the spatial reality show, I went to this VR garden event that was kind of like this avant-garde movement of artists within Los Angeles. And they started to have like these fireside chats on the top of this Los Angeles building and it was like this really cool vibe of just artists that are trying to experiment with blazing new neural pathways into the brain. And the interesting thing about art is that it's not necessarily trying to be commercial, it's just trying to change your mind about what is even reality and what's even possible with this new medium. And I think it takes the artists and the creatives and the storytellers to really innovate with what makes the medium compelling. I mean, I think even before the Oculus Rift had launched, there had already been Nani de la Peña trying to tell journalistic stories with this new medium, with some of these headsets that were from Mark Bolas's USC ICT lab but these headsets were like $50,000 and actually there's a story that both Nani and Shari told me that Mark wasn't going to let her take this $50,000 headset and so she brought along young Parma Lockheed with one of his duct-taped Oculus Rift prototypes to go take it to Sundance in 2013 to be able to show some of these pieces that back in 2012 before the Kickstarter had even launched And it was part of the reactions that you saw from the audiences of what the artists were trying to do with this technology that was still at that experimental phase that wasn't even like a consumer product yet. And I think still at this point, it's taken those artists at places like Sundance and Tribeca and the Venice film festival and South by Southwest, South by Southwest, especially because that is really where a lot of brand activations that are happening. And it's kind of crossing the chasm into something that is a little bit further behind from what you might see at some of these more leading-edge storytelling festivals, but one of the things that Jesse told me is that he wanted to get away from just focusing on the narrative in the storytelling because there's so much about some of this virtual reality art that doesn't necessarily even have to have a narrative and you just go in there and you experience the space and you're receiving it. And it doesn't necessarily have to be like a fixed narrative of what we think about and what narrative is and what it should be. I mean, one of the most mind-blowing experiences in that regard was Landgrab, which is a really postmodernist trying to deconstruct different aspects of taking something like a trope of the Western and trying to flip it on its head and find all sorts of interesting ways of doing stuff that you don't even expect. You should go check out the experience and I have an interview with the creator Philip Kostic where he really just blew my mind in terms of the meaning that he had behind the art piece. And so that's the thing about art is you experience it and you project your own meaning of how you're related to it and then you can just have discussions with people as a common shared experience of what that piece of art is for you and you can triangulate your experiences with other people's experiences that are mediated through that piece of art. And I think I wanted to put this podcast out, uh, before I dive into all the other aspects of magically, because I think like this concept and this ethic of what's possible for the artists to be able to push the medium forward is a key idea that is going to be a catalyst for the augmented and virtual reality community, especially for AR and mixed reality, because we're starting to get into like, what is the unique affordance of these mediums? And they have a project there that was put together by a number of different Eisenberg employees called a. new reality and they had the moonbeam experience which is on the magic leap and it was just an absolutely beautiful experience and really trying to use the unique affordances of the medium as the technology is out there they're really trying to push the limits for what you can do and what kind of experiences you can create and that actually the moonbeam experience was one of the better experiences that I saw over the course of the week of seeing all these different demos because there was an artistry and there was this game mechanic and it was like really trying to force you to move your body through space which i think is a game mechanic that virtual reality has done to a certain extent but we've always been limited to how much of your area that is a perfect square that can be tracked by either the lighthouse or by your Oculus Rift controllers. And you really get fixed by that boundary and that what's it mean to be able to start to tell stories without worrying about what the boundaries are, because you can see the wall and you're not going to run into the wall. And so it just allows you to push the limits and the edge of how you can use your body moving through space to be able to tell stories. And I think that is a key insight that I've been coming around with one of the unique affordances of augmented reality and mixed reality storytelling. But the thing also that I noticed was in seeing the SUTU art pieces, that was probably my favorite piece that was at the Spatial Reality Gallery was like this piece by SUTU where it was like this 10 panes and you would go up and you would lift up your tablet or your phone and it would augment that section of the pane. There's like 10 panes and it's like almost telling a story as you go through and so as you see it you may only have one of those panes activated at the same time but you just have to lower it and then raise it again to be able to discover all the different aspects of the piece and I went through there and the thing that I noticed is that it was making me really notice the art a lot deeper and the augmentation of the art was forcing me to see what is there already and to notice what was changing and so it was almost like this change blindness task to see okay here's the piece of art and you make a prediction like what's going to happen and then you augment and you're like, oh, well, I didn't expect that. And you have this inherent novelty because it's doing things you don't necessarily expect, or it's surprising, or it's able to be dynamic and moving in different ways. And so that level of novelty, I think, is something that we're craving for. Our brain is kind of wired for making these predictions, and we want to have those predictions either be met or completely transcended and the augmented reality art and augmented reality experiences they do that you take something that you already have a pretty good mental bottle of what the nature of reality is and then you do the augmented reality art and it's like oh wait here's this other aspect of an augmentation to an experience that may actually change your context and your meaning for what the original base reality is and so I just found myself after going to the spatial reality art show I went to the Indicade the next day and I found myself like sitting in this restaurant like just really noticing and paying attention and just looking out into blank space and to try to notice all the different variations and subtle differences and what is the meaning of this system and this ecosystem and I feel like there's something that shifted in my mind after going to this spatial reality art show that started to change the way that I see the world. And after going through thousands of experiences and covering the space for the last four and a half years, that's saying something in terms of the potential for where this could go. And I felt the palpable energy of the same type of excitement that I felt at the very first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, which is We have no idea where this is going to go. We see the potential is immense and it's huge. And I think that augmented reality, just like virtual reality, is going to start to change every single domain of our human experience and that there's going to be ways in which we use this augmentation to change how we relate to each other, how we relate to our context, how we relate to space, how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to the planet. So the special reality shows happening from October 12th to October 28th, if you're in the LA area or even if you're not, if you want to make a little trip and take a little location-based entertainment jaunt to Los Angeles, I think this is worth to at least see some of the experiences that are there and you can start to see like this is a baseline for what the future of immersive art is going to look like. It's going to be a lot more self-service, it's going to be these different pieces that you just walk up to and you maybe have a little taste of. There's longer experiences. The Mind at War experience I highly recommend if people want to see like the future of spatial storytelling in a way that I think it's going to have a lot of applications for augmented reality storytelling as well, but you start to see how you can use places at different scales and how to use space to be able to move through a story and to make it much more visceral. I mean, I feel like I have a location in my body. that is that story. And I think that's different from any other story that I've seen, just the way that Sutu was able to use the Tilt Brush in the virtual reality space to be able to tell stories. But overall, there's lots of different art pieces. I had some favorite ones that I mentioned here, and I actually did five interviews with the artists that night as well. So I'll be unpacking more of the show over time. The Kevin Mac piece, if you haven't checked out Blortasia, you should definitely check out Blortasia. And then he's got a new twist on that, that's at the new reality show. And that really blew my mind. So that's all that I have for today and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast and please do spread the word tell your friends this is a podcast that is just an independent podcast and I basically rely upon word of mouth and so if you enjoy the podcast share this with somebody and also I rely upon your donations and your support in order to continue to bring you this independent coverage that's really trying to support the broader ecosystem, the broader community within the virtual and augmented reality ecosystem. So if you want to see this grow, then please do become a member of the Patreon. You can become a member today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
