With These Hands is a VR installation that “shares challenging, complex and under discussed stories of sexual assault and recovery. It explores the role of listening in the recovery of both survivors and those responsible for sexual harm.” It was produced by Tessa Ratuszynska in collaboration with Survivors Leading Essential Education & Change (SLEEC), which is a “survivor-run organization that changes systems, supports survivors and dismantles the roots of male violence.” The primary mode the narrative is delivered is through voice-over narration where you listen to survivors of sexual violence or other members of SLEEC as they share their own experiences. The piece uses hand tracking technologies so that you can embody the hands of speaker as they share their story, whilst also being in a mostly void VR space aside from a small table-top installation. If the audience member puts their hand on the table, then the narrative will pause, which allows the audience to have more agency in how the VR experience is delivered to them. The first of three segments of the VR installation was based upon this article by SLEEC member Naroa Hammerson, which was published on SLEEC’s Disobedient Survivor blog.
I had a chance to catch up Tessa at the IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam where we talked about this VR installation, as well as some of the unique approaches to consent that she’s using that is modeled after the idea that consent should be ongoing and enthusiastic. This type of co-creative strategy was also featured in the recent book MIT Co-Creation Studio book, Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media with Equity and Justice, which I will be covering in the next episode of this series (Voices of VR episode #1160).
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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. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. So continuing on my series of different experiences at the doc lab in Amsterdam, today's episode is with a piece called With These Hands, which is an immersive storytelling piece that is exploring stories of survivors of sexual assault made in collaboration with SLEEK, which is Survivors Leading Essential Education and Change. It's a survivor-run organization that changes systems, supports survivors, and dismantles the roots of male violence. And one of the things that's really fascinating about this piece was trying to explore new consent models. And so, what are ways to collaborate with a group where they actually become a co-creator with equal authorial control and ability to decide what happens with pieces like this? of times within the documentary community, a creator will go into a community, have them sign all these image release forms, and immediately at that point, the documentary filmmaker will seize ownership of all the different aspects of the story. And sometimes those power dynamics and relationships are such that the subjects don't have a lot of say of how their story is told or how they would tell the story or even what stories to even tell. And so this piece, in a lot of ways, exploring new models of those consent models, but also looking at this ongoing and enthusiastic models of consent to see how that continues out through the lifetime of the project. And so the other aspect about this piece is really exploring different aspects of hand tracking and embodiment and seeing how you can use the virtual experience to give you this sense of being embodied into some of these bodies, not in the sense that you're directly experiencing any direct experience of sexual assault, but it's creating a small tabletop vignette of a fraction of a context, and also exploring different dimensions of consent as a viewer that you can put your hands onto that table and that scene, and it'll stop whatever story that's being told at that moment. And so you have a little bit of agency as you're within a virtual experience to say whether or not you're okay with the story moving forward or not, or if you need to take a pause to digest something. Using that conceit of the hands and you're embodying these different characters as you're listening to their stories And yeah, just these three different scenes that are exploring three different stories and perspectives of members of sleek Which is the survivors leading essential education and change? So that's what we're coming on today's episode. Otherwise, it's a VR podcast So this interview with Tessa happened on Sunday, November 13th, 2022 at the if a doc lab and instant no one's so with that let's go ahead and Dive right in
[00:02:50.959] Tessa Ratuszynska: My name is Tessa Ratashinska and for the last five or six years I've been a producer for VR and XR in general, working with artists like Jane Gauntlet and also was a venue host for Limited Immersive for a while and a curator for them, so I've been in the space. And for the last four years, I've been doing a PhD in VR documentary. And that's culminated with this piece with these hands, which I would still call myself the producer of more than anything else, which is showing here at IDFA.
[00:03:23.855] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into making immersive documentaries.
[00:03:29.473] Tessa Ratuszynska: So my background's actually in fine art and installation art. So I did my undergrad in that and was really interested in projection mapping in this very kind of like the roughest kind with like no technical know-how, just a projector and jiggering around, which funnily enough is like more or less the same method has been implemented here. And I was really interested in like spaces as non-fiction experiences, how like an environment could tell a non-fiction story and the way you move through that environment. And then I kind of discovered VR documentary and was like, oh, this is it. Or this could be it. And yeah, I was really lucky enough to work with people like Catherine Allen and Jane Gauntlet on their work and really learn from what they knew about the industry. And then through that ended up on the PhD, which was funded. So it facilitated me to kind of like make my own work. Because obviously, if you're working as a producer for lots of different people, you never get your own brain space to sit and think about your own ideas and the PhD is actually about investigating the empathy machine so the kind of like trope or concept that VR is a natural generator of empathy which I'm quite critical of so All the works I've made as part of my PhD have been trying to counter that and I would say this is really the pinnacle of that, trying to make something that's not salacious, not over-ambitious, not claiming too much, just a space to listen and to listen to real people's stories and also to work really closely with those people whose stories are in the work to understand how they want those stories to be told. Hence I call myself the producer because I feel like I organised for them and facilitated that for them rather than having a strong directorial perspective and maybe also working in VR industry for a long time knowing how hierarchical production can be and how crunched VR production can be and trying to unpack that and make space for slowness and for reflection and also to really think through consent like consent with your contributors but also consent for the audience how they consent to listening to the work. Yeah that went on a bit of a tangent but there you go.
[00:05:35.068] Kent Bye: What was the turning point when you said that you saw Immersive Documentary and that was really catalyzing for you? So what was the piece that you saw or what was the complex of events that led up to that turning point?
[00:05:47.130] Tessa Ratuszynska: I think I actually saw, I believe it was a National Theatre piece about Calais, I believe. But it was shown completely out of context. So I think they usually show that in an installation, but it was just like an option to watch a video in a headset. And probably that's also where my critique started coming in early as well like this is quite a strange way for me to come across this like what I'm finding as a very intense experience to be quite unguided into just finding that on a headset but like obviously the experience that was just a 360 video but the the immersion I felt in that space was really profound to me subsequent After doing research in VR as part of my PhD, I actually think it doesn't affect everybody in the same way. I think particularly for me, I find it very, very engaging as a medium and I find the idea of learning through being in a space seems quite natural to me. and so I tend towards, actually this piece is quite linear and narrative but I also love VRs where I'm just expected to be there and to experience it and the magic of how VR feels from a sensory perspective and utilising that to tell stories.
[00:06:58.636] Kent Bye: Well, I wanted to pick up a bit on this thread of the Empathy Machine, because it has been a trope ever since Chris Milk's famous talk that he did at TED 2015. So 2015, there was Clouds of Asidra that was the basis of the talk. So I know there's been other critiques around against empathy, you know, authors that are kind of critiquing different aspects of empathy. But yeah, I'd love to hear what your take is in terms of what is wrong with calling VR an empathy machine, or what is the critiques around how to have that proper relational dynamic of empathy with this medium?
[00:07:30.791] Tessa Ratuszynska: Well, this won't be the clearest my thoughts are ever at with it, because I've made this piece and now I have six months to write my PhD, so definitely in six months I'd have a much clearer answer, but I'll have a go. I think my main, and it's not my critique, it already exists in the world, is this idea is empathy really the most efficient emotion or the thing that audiences are obliged to feel in a work about refugees? Is feeling sorry for and feeling for that person really the best use of energy or is there something that could be more mobilizing? to help people understand what their responsibility is in that situation which is not just feeling for that person who also isn't really there with you. They're pre-recorded, they can't feel your empathy, they don't receive any benefit from it. All that happens is you feel better for having felt it and you feel relieved of your burden and you can take the headset off and carry on with your day having done what it felt like was expected of you and maybe there is, particularly the work that's around people of migrant experience, like maybe that's not the most helpful thing to elicit from your audience. But then I do think obviously that's maybe quite a specific critique of a specific word and like feeling for or having an understanding for the people who are inside the works that you might experience is important. It's not like I think that nobody should have any feelings in VR. And then my second critique would be maybe a certain kind of pomp or self-belief that some makers have that they've made a really emotionally impactful work because people come out crying, but those works maybe haven't been made in close collaboration with the people they're about and that those subjects have been used as a kind of like heartstring pull tool. to make someone feel like their piece of tech is very effective and all the people that I've made work with, we've worked really closely with the people whose stories are featured in the work and that remains really important to me and obviously is like a key feature of this work that's in the festival now.
[00:09:29.936] Kent Bye: I know that at IFA 2022 there's the launching of the co-creation as a book and so all this talk about shared authorship and this idea that it's not just the authorial control of just one author kind of swooping in and capturing these stories and almost kind of like a colonizing way of swooping in and extracting out the story and then what is the editorial control. So I don't know if there's a framework to kind of like make sure that this process is more in right relationship or what is the way of understanding as we move into this new realm if this model of co-authorship or co-creation is a good guide work or if there's other frameworks that you point to to have more of an ethical production that you are not having that colonizing force but more working in collaboration with the subjects that you're covering.
[00:10:17.146] Tessa Ratuszynska: Yeah, I would say to my knowledge there's not like a one hard and fast methodology that would work and actually I was part of the panel with Kat yesterday about co-creation and even with my work obviously I worked with them collaboratively but like true co-collaboration it would be that the idea for the piece originates with the people who are inside the piece you know that it comes from them but until VR and these technologies are more accessible in all kinds of uses of the word People don't feel like that space, like that technology is for them, that it's worth telling their stories through that medium. And maybe they're right, because it is a very exclusive audience that you end up showing to. But why I'm hoping to come out of this project, because this project definitely did originate with my idea of this photogrammetry of hands and using the hand tracking and the kind of sensory experience of touching actually your own hands in the work but feeling like you might be touching somebody else and using that to talk about empathy and to maybe slightly critique the self-indulgent nature of the empathy machine. But I'm hoping or that I felt like when I spoke to the survivors about how they feel about how survivors or victims are represented in media that there was a an alignment of how we felt about a certain kind of othering gaze that's put onto survivors and definitely used a lot in VR and maybe that we could work together to make a bit of work that talks about both those things, about the representation of survivors in media but also talks about this particular media and how it has often relied on those tropes. But my conclusion to the project will be when I show the work to the survivor group, the larger group, and we work together to think if the project was successful, and what would be a true sign of success for me was if they would then have their own ideas of a VR that they would want to make, because I'm very conscious that this was my idea for how it would work, and that they let me use their stories inside it. So yeah, a much more co-collaborative or co-originated project would be a sign that this was successful, I think.
[00:12:17.971] Kent Bye: Okay, well maybe we can take a step back and talk about the piece that you're showing here with these hands. And where did this project begin for you?
[00:12:26.058] Tessa Ratuszynska: So the project began actually with a personal experience of being twice removed but close to someone who was accused of sexual assault. And I use that word not because I don't believe that it was true, but I actually can't, there's no other simple way to explain what happened. and realising that in that moment, from this side of it, so if you're not around the survivor themselves, but you're around the person that's accused, there's really no framework of what to do. People find it so uncomfortable to talk about it, and what usually happens is that person is then just excommunicated. And maybe that is what needs to happen eventually, but the awkwardness of people wanting to wash their hands of the subject made me realise that people really struggle to talk about this. and also to struggle to listen to obviously the voices of survivors who would be the most important people to be speaking on the subject. So the piece originated with the second chapter of the piece. The piece has three different pieces of original writing in it and the second one is written by poet and spoken word artist 1990s Chris. who also makes a lot of work about masculinity, as I do, and we worked together to think about this first-person narrative, and both of us, but me particularly, were thinking how important it would also be to have survivors' voices represented, and I'd already done a project with SLEEK, who were the survivor organisation that I approached to be the consults on the project, so they worked with me the whole way through the project to work out how it should look, how it should feel, and how I could best approach it. to think about how we could make that work and in the end we ended up getting some funding that was just about consent processes. So it was just about me and Sleek running workshops with the survivors asking them how they would feel if a documentary maker who works in VR was going to make their story and how we could do that in a consensual way and we ended up looking at not only consent processes like a consent document that documentarians would usually use with contributors but also the ethical agreements that universities, because it's a PhD project, universities have a certain ethical process, and we looked at all those questionnaires, those frameworks, and the survivors really tore them apart, really, and exposed how much those consent documents are for the protection of the institution, they're for the protection of the filmmaker, and they offer no protection to the contributor and they don't do what they're supposed to do which is give the contributor a way to hold the maker accountable to a certain promise of what's going to happen and so that first bit of funding was just about how we make a kind of interactive consent agreement because obviously consent is enthusiastic and ongoing that's like the bar for consent to hit and so to just sign a release form and it never be spoken about again just wouldn't work and certainly in this context and I believe in any other so The project grew out of that process and Sleek have a Disobedient Survivors blog where they publish the original writing of Survivors. So we approached two of those Survivors that had written pieces. Actually one was written by Sleek themselves and one was written by a Survivor. and asked if they would lend their writing to the project and in that process contributed them as authors. They're paid the same as everybody else. They have the same rights in the project as everyone else. They're paid consult fees and also for their writing and also the final part of that is that we have an agreement that it shows here and it shows as part of my PhD, my Viva event. And that if it ever shows again, I'd have to renegotiate with all of them their contracts, just as you would with any other kind of writer. So, yeah, that's, I guess, some of it, how it originated.
[00:16:07.754] Kent Bye: And what does the sleek acronym stand for again?
[00:16:10.336] Tessa Ratuszynska: Survivors Leading Essential Education and Change.
[00:16:13.704] Kent Bye: Okay, and yet the disobedient survivors was either mentioned in the write-up or you mentioned it here as well So maybe could give this sense of like what is the disobedient? Aspect of that because there's a part of this experience where there's a certain expectation of what you expect the survivor to say or do and to some extent there's certain narratives in this piece that were directly from the survivors that were not what I was expecting and I think that's maybe part of the point of the disobedient aspect of that so maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit just because it is the larger context of your piece is giving voice to some of those alternative narratives that may not be as predominant.
[00:16:49.793] Tessa Ratuszynska: Yeah, I guess I would first caveat in that like if you're interested totally check out Sleek's actual work because this is their area more than mine and they already have a voice, they already have their blog, they already have a podcast, they put their work out there and I think it really just doesn't filter into spaces like this where there's a lot of maybe hard-hitting, in inverted commas, documentaries that don't consider like yeah survivors certainly have their own voice and certainly have a lot to say and that should be where you're looking for information but yeah I guess to go back to the origin of the project this idea that it's very hard to talk about and it's very uncomfortable to talk about and that naturally you have to get used to listening to survivors and used to listening in a way that you might be uncomfortable like it might not sound like what you felt like you wanted to hear like it's not an easy thing to hear and that includes ideas about policing and imprisonment like that maybe some survivors and victims feel like that is what they want that kind of retribution and others don't and the idea that actually there's not a unified voice of survivors either like they're just people they're individuals they have their individual opinions And the sleek piece I wanted to include is really all about that. It is about like challenging this idea that survivors are only shown through their hands as kind of like shadowed figures who are ashamed and broken and actually like that stops people being able to identify with the concept of being a survivor because they don't feel like that and so they think well that's not me you know. And also, really frankly, when I approached Sleek and said, I want to make a piece of work with hands and hand tracking, and they were like, we hate hands. We're sick of seeing our own hands in work. So I did think that this works differently. If you embody the hands, then you're forced to think of the person as an individual, as a real person, embodied as you are. And seeing a hand as actually this very personal thing, not just like a general image of a hand. It's the survivor's actual hands that have been scanned. But I really wanted to include that critique, because I wanted it to be in the project. Like, yeah, they are in some ways actually anonymized, and a lot of VR also works like that. Like, seeing people, particularly at their most vulnerable, at their most, you know, you crystallize in maybe a 360 documentary about, for example, a refugee. You crystallize someone in the most traumatic moment of their life, and actually they're a whole person. They have a whole life outside of that, and maybe there's something to be slightly critical there of how VR can be very fixing, very othering.
[00:19:19.198] Kent Bye: Love to hear a bit more context for the decision to make this into like a first-person narrative in the sense that you are embodying the author that's speaking but also the environmental context that you're in is a little bit of a void space in the sense that for the most part you don't see exactly where you're at except for like maybe a small little cutout that's in front of you that very much feels like maybe inspired by some of your background in art installation spaces. It's like a little mini context setting of a space but in a very small way where it's I guess the mechanic in this piece is that there's a table in front of you, and that on top of that table, there's this environmental context. But other than that, you don't have a sense of the total environment. But you can, at any moment, put your hand onto the table to pause or stop if it's, I guess, to give that agency to the listener if things become too intense, if they need to stop or pause. So yeah, maybe those two things are that interaction mechanic, but also the decision to have the hands and this environmental context in this more constrained context.
[00:20:20.576] Tessa Ratuszynska: So the idea of the hands, just the mechanism of the hands, actually came from doing an audience engagement session for Limina, testing different VR works. I did the climb, have you done the climb? Yeah. Like it's not my cup of tea, like I'm not interested in VR games and you have these hands and I haven't read the instructions so they got like... The hands got raw at some point. I was supposed to talk to them but I didn't know how. I didn't enjoy it that much but I didn't think that much of it. I took the headset off, I was set up. And then afterwards I went to sit down at my computer and looked at my own hands and suddenly had this real moment of depersonalization and realizing yeah I'm just a sort of like person inside my hands and thinking like this is really interesting. I think it's actually Jaron Lanier says it in his book that the best thing about VR is when you come out and you see the world and how like vivid it is and VR just reminds you like the comparison allows you to see the world more clearly. and so I really found that a very interesting experience and really wanted to make a piece of work that used that idea and then not to get too much into theory but I really love the work of Sara Ahmed. She talks a lot about the skin as being this sight between people and especially in the othering that happens to people of difference like it exists on the skin it's something that's put onto your skin so Understanding the technology of photogrammetry and how you would use the texture that would come out of photogrammetry to wrap around the model as a skin and sort of like, hopefully my PhD I'll be able to sort of pick out something that makes more sense from that, but those are my thoughts on that. And then approaching the survivors after building a relationship with them for another project and saying, you know, do you think it would work in this context? And then the idea of what happens on the table also comes from a critique of a desire of some VRs to really simulate an experience and that the goal is full simulation. And it was very important that this work didn't feel like a simulation for lots of reasons, but mostly because I absolutely didn't want people to think that what they were going to experience was the simulation of a violent incident that happened to somebody. That's absolutely not what the work is about. And in terms of what appears on the table, like in one scene there's moss and daisies, in another scene it's a pub tabletop, those came from the people who wrote those stories, so it was their idea of what that would look like, what that would feel like, what that would sound like, and so you'd have to ask them why they decided to do that. Obviously the pub one is a little bit more, you know, that's the situation this guy this fictional character is in when he sees this message that someone has made an accusation against his friend. But the other one is much more atmospheric. I think it was about, for her, Naroha, who wrote that piece, about for her where she wanted people to feel like they were when they heard her story. and in terms of the mechanic, the pausing mechanic, that was again about consent, like listening is really important and listening survivors is obviously very important but listening is a choice and there should be a choice in that and so we had to give audiences a way to take a breath or a moment if they needed to or to indeed leave if they had to and that's something that Sleek always, they run workshops for survivors, well they run lots of different things but one thing they do is run collective spaces for survivors and making sure that people know not only how to leave but that it's fine to leave and that there's absolutely no judgment if they should choose to leave is important for them so it had to be included in the work and also for me like a lot of VRs I've done have had this non-consensual element where you put in a headset and then you have to kind of like watch what unfurls and you might not know what's coming and yeah sometimes that does hit you in different ways and you might not want to be there and the headset itself carries all this weight of being like a piece of shiny tech that seems cleverer than you and like a general audience as well like a public audience don't feel empowered to just take off the headset obviously you could but like most time people don't so giving people like very clear instruction of how that can happen and that be also something in the real world like you're not lost in this VR space that you have no control over. It's just like a very simple mechanism. Yeah, that was important to me.
[00:24:33.342] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of Zohar Kafir's testimony piece where you're watching testimony of women who have suffered from sexual assault and there's a mechanic in that experience where you turn away and it sort of pauses or stops the testimony at that moment so that you can still be immersed within the experience, but then jump out if it becomes too intense. And so, yeah, I don't know if you have other thoughts in terms of how you've seen experiences that are not consensual in that way, and what are some other baseline mechanics of consent that could be integrated into some of these projects?
[00:25:06.317] Tessa Ratuszynska: Well, first I'd love to talk about testimony, because obviously that project has been very influential on this project. It not only gives consent to the audience, who could stop listening if they want to, but it's also more consensual for the person who gave their original testimony. That if you're not listening, then they don't speak. It gives you both this agency, and it's important to protect that for your contributor, or collaborator, or whatever the word you might use. even in this pre-recorded technology and maybe a work I don't want to speak badly of works but I can speak as somebody who's put a lot of people through VR which I think is a real benefit to my practice or like I find it really helpful anyways I've watched a lot of audiences do VR and I've observed how they can behave and I remember really vividly showing Gabor Aurora's piece with Pinchas, he's a Holocaust survivor, and The Last Goodbye, that's what it's called. And The Last Goodbye is really sold on the idea that this is very realistic simulation because they LiDAR scanned these different spaces inside a particular
[00:26:13.024] Kent Bye: Concentration camp?
[00:26:13.844] Tessa Ratuszynska: Yeah, I can't remember which one it is, but yeah, a concentration camp. And, like, it's real, and then the Holocaust survivor is kind of, like, flat projected into that space, and he talks in this, like, very beautiful way about his memories, and it's incredibly intense, and it did have content warnings or trigger warnings about the content. I mean, you know what it's about when you go in, but what I observed is that because the photogrammetry is so good, or LIDAR, or whatever you would call it, But it also is very still and it's so good it almost feels like a computer game. Like that's where you've actually seen stuff like that before and some people treated it like that. So some people were like just so interested in how the tap had been scanned that they wandered away from this person as they were speaking about like the most traumatic moment of their life and they wandered away to kind of like put their hand through a wall or like look around an object because it is really immersive. It is really engaging to see those spaces but Yeah I felt particularly in that work like the assumption that people would just listen was maybe an over assumption of some audiences and perhaps like also this idea that if you scan something super realistically then it feels very real and actually had the opposite effect. It felt like a fake simulation. You didn't have to be respectful in a way that you would if someone was talking to you actually face to face. So yeah, both those projects had a real influence on this one. Not that I think that's a bad project, but I actually saw how it worked in practice and it wasn't, I don't think, how the makers had envisioned it.
[00:27:42.391] Kent Bye: Yeah, well I wanted to talk a bit about my experience of this piece because it has a way in which that you're embodied into these hands and you're listening to the story but you also see the subtitles that are in front of you so I'm kind of reading along and listening and projecting myself into there. I'm not sure if I'm still listening but because I'm embodied in their body it gives me this interesting like who am I in this scene and then I am in this projected as a female identified body and then a male identified body and then the final scene is more of a black and white mixed reality pass-through where I see my actual hands in this piece and then the narrative is still continuing so Because of the hand tracking Aspects if you put your hands by your side then your hands are no longer being tracked And so I wanted to see the hands because it felt like that was a part of the experience But then I ended up having to put my hands up for you know 10-15 minutes however long the experience is which gets a little fatiguing because of the constraints of the tracking technology, I ended up kind of like leaning back and putting my hands on my stomach and then still at different moments during the scene just remind myself of the embodiment because I felt that was a part of the experience but I guess I was really struck by embodying other characters and it made me see my own hands through that black and white low-res mixed reality pass-through camera of the Quest 2 kind of reflecting in my own embodiment in a way And almost to the point where I was like really focusing on my own body more than I remember what the third section was about. So maybe you could talk about these different sections and what that decision was to kind of switch at that last scene, but also I guess the challenges of the fatiguing nature of having your hands up in order to have the hand tracking work.
[00:29:19.215] Tessa Ratuszynska: So yeah, like this is the first time this has shown like ever. It was commissioned for IDFA. So definitely there's been some like how it works in an installation context is being felt through this exhibition. But definitely, I think I've got a handle on it now, which is inviting the audience to scooch up as close as possible to the table. so that you might have the opportunity to rest your elbows on the table and therefore your hands won't trigger the pausing and if you start a little far back from the table it's maybe not intuitive to do that. When I did testing, so I spent a period of time in the University of Malmo doing research on this project with researchers from the Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies and I showed it to them, to different researchers from there and we had a discussion about the awkwardness of the hands of not knowing what to do with your hands and and I tested telling people very directly like where they should put their hands and then in other times just letting people feel their way and there was something kind of nice about the awkwardness of it like remembering like what it is to have hands and not knowing what to do with them. I think If you're introduced to the experience with the idea that your elbows could go on the table in a way that's not too directive, that is helpful for the fatiguing, but it's definitely something to think about for an accessibility perspective as well, and you mentioned the subtitles, the subtitles are there to make it easier to listen in that if you, just your needs dictate that you would need to have subtitles there. What's the second half? Oh yeah, the camera pass-through moment. That really was born out of a desire to make audiences really aware that they are also present in the experience. So many VRs ask you to feel for someone else but don't ask you to question the politics of how you're there watching that and how that came to pass and trying to use the idea that we would see our own hands at the end as a reminder. And also that part of the work is talking about like how Survivors are just people. They're anyone. So that's why survivors can't match this image of a survivor in your head, because it's too prescriptive and maybe reminding you of that. And I hear what you're saying, that it was harder to listen in that section. I found when I've showed it, some people hear one more than the others. And it doesn't seem to be any one in particular.
[00:31:28.638] Kent Bye: Some people- Were there subtitles in that third one or not?
[00:31:30.979] Tessa Ratuszynska: Yeah, there were subtitles in that one. But maybe you were just looking at your hands too much.
[00:31:34.102] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed that there was the sign on the back, but I would have to do it again to get that last section. But yeah.
[00:31:40.193] Tessa Ratuszynska: But then you did say to me earlier in this conversation, the idea of like an image of survivor and how they might not be up to it, which is what that works about. So you must have taken something in. But yeah, obviously, this project was made on a very small budget. And so we were limited in, you know, like, how could this be achieved? And I thought maybe camera passes could work like this. And I feel like it did. Certainly in the exhibition where you actually have the real table and the spotlight allows you to see more coherence between that scene and the two scenes that have come before. But the work actually in exhibition now, it has a little QR code on the paper next to it, and I'm really hoping to get people's feedback about which pieces resonate with them most, how they felt, what they feel like it achieved or didn't achieve. I'm obviously really interested in getting feedback. Yeah.
[00:32:28.973] Kent Bye: And have you had a chance to show it to members of Sleek yet?
[00:32:32.822] Tessa Ratuszynska: So all along the process, obviously, we've been sharing assets. Actually, the audio of that piece, they recorded that themselves with a performer. It's not their voices. So each of the people whose work it is have had chances to feed in on the process. But yeah, none of them use VR or are particularly actually even interested in VR personally, so they haven't got headsets. And I wouldn't ever ask anybody to investigate SideQuest who didn't have already a little bit of knowledge about it, because it's an excruciating process. So they haven't seen it in a headset yet. They've obviously seen it, but they've not seen it in a headset. So we're hoping to do two more showings when I get back to the UK in Glasgow and in Bristol, where the other two hubs of production for the work. and see how they feel in VR and the whole time I've been having to kind of like just be that voice for them of like well in VR I think it feels like this but we'll see how you feel when you do it but for me it feels like this and there have been some things that have been interesting for example in the first scene there is a noise of a siren because we're talking about policing, and to just set that tone. And when I showed it to Naroa, whose piece that was, she thought the siren sounded scary, so we were going to take it out. But then she asked me to ask people about different parts of the piece, what stood out to people when they listened to it, when we were doing our user testing, and nobody heard the siren. And so in the limited feedback rounds I had with the VR company, so I work with Cora VR, so I'm not a developer. So that was another part of the production that was maybe not totally conducive to this co-collaborative process. There was a certain point where we had to hand our assets to someone else and they were really generous with their time and worked really hard but you know we had a limited amount of change that we could do in the work so a lot of it had to be pre-planned and so we've left that siren in just in favor of stuff that's more integral to like the mechanics of the work. But yeah so far here also nobody has heard the siren. Did you hear the siren?
[00:34:28.542] Kent Bye: I don't recall. No, I'm trying to remember. Yeah. I guess the one that stood out for me is the second one in terms of hearing about one of his friends that was accused of sexual assault and that the stigmatizing reaction to that. And I don't know if that was coming directly from Sleek or if it was like one order of separation away from Sleek or if whoever was articulating that story, if they themselves are also a member of this organization of Sleek.
[00:34:53.287] Tessa Ratuszynska: So that piece was written by 1990s Chris, as I said before, he's like a poet who makes work about masculinity. But the way that piece came to be is that Sleek run men's learning courses where men can come and kind of like learn about rape culture, learn about patriarchal masculinity and try and think of ways to unpick it in their own lives, you know. Seeker really generous with running those workshops and then when Chris and I approached them and said we wanted to do something from this perspective they put us in contact with people who'd done those workshops and many of those men who come to those workshops it is because they've gone through this experience and they didn't know what to do and so some of those men and also some because of Chris's work, people who follow his work are interested in these ideas as well. So we put this kind of open call out and Chris interviewed four men who've been in this position and it was really interesting because actually those four men that were interviewed Ended up having very different like their full stories are very different like how that incident ended up whether they did ever talk to that person again whether they did go through a kind of like Healing process with that person or whether they just stopped talking to them it was different for each of them, but their originating moment was the same this moment of finding out and not knowing what to do realizing you don't have any language in that also there's like a Fed in there, I think, this part where maybe rape culture is dripped into our society and we kind of let it pass and people maybe let their friends treat girls a bit badly and think, oh, well, he's not a bad person, but yeah, that wasn't great. And then it does come to this head and you think, well, actually, is there something I should have done earlier, you know?
[00:36:29.461] Kent Bye: Because in some ways it reflects on their own identity because they're associated, so they have to reckon that in some ways, right?
[00:36:35.438] Tessa Ratuszynska: And you have to come and weigh and think, oh, have I ever made someone feel like this? Maybe I have. And what Chris articulated really beautifully, I think, was that there is this moment for him in this kind of patriarchal masculinity where it is very reliant on how other people perceive you. And this character does say, like, to kind of try and say to himself, like, oh, he's a good lad. Like, he's not like that. And then maybe she's just thinking of it wrong, or maybe she's just upset. And then he says to himself, like, now I've said it. I mean, he doesn't say out loud. He's talking in his own head. But it's like, when I say it like that, yeah, it does sound wrong. all about how they're going to be perceived. And yeah, like the piece kind of ends there with this decision to like not meet up with the friend in that instance. But I would really love to explore more of those stories and the next steps of those stories as well. But for this first version of the piece, I definitely wanted to make sure that survivors' voices are obviously the most important and should be the most heard. So that's why we also included the original pieces of writing from survivors as well. But yeah, that's the piece that probably is also the one that It was a very interesting piece to articulate, I think, to put into words, literally.
[00:37:44.780] Kent Bye: Well, you had mentioned earlier this idea of the ongoing consent and most of the image release form paradigm is all about, like you said, signing one document at the beginning and then the creator has free reign to do whatever they want. But as you're changing into a new model of trying to have ongoing consent that is ongoing and enthusiastic, Does that mean that you've created a legal framework that articulates that? Or is it more of a handshake agreement? Because I know that when we're talking about media production, there's these expectations of having clearances of this stuff. And creators want to have the ability to capture stuff and to use it, but yet at the same time, they don't want to take something that's going to be used out of context. something that the end creators not going to consent to and so I don't know if there's a process of like getting a green light from the creators that you're covering or If you've actually articulated that into like a new legal framework to be able to have this more ongoing process relational approach to consent rather than this existing object-oriented one
[00:38:41.572] Tessa Ratuszynska: So I wouldn't, I don't know if I go so far as to say it was a completely legal framework. Hopefully this won't end up in any kind of court of law. But seeing as they're both, like all the survivors are abolitionists, I imagine that's like probably not going to happen. But yeah, we had to come up with a kind of consent framework that worked because I had to have a consent framework as part of working as the university. and I'm also a producer that works almost exclusively in Google Drive. I'm like very comfortable in Google Drive and sometimes that worked well and sometimes it didn't. We tried to run a workshop with like a consent frameworks with everybody working in a Google Drive and actually that didn't work because there was too much explanation needed of like how they could interact with the document. But what did work is giving the person that I'm working with access to this one consent form in Google Drive. We've both got access, equal access to it. We can both see every time it's been changed. And we've kind of made a promise to only change it together. And we would have these multiple meetings, which in the beginning when I approached them, I said like, you know, minimum three, but hopefully more of these meetings where we talk about the work, talk about like what currently exists, what we're hoping to make, whether we still feel comfortable, whether it still feels like something you're interested in. And every time we do that, we'll go through these lists of questions about, like, do you feel informed enough about what the next steps is, for example. It's one of the questions, like, about specific next steps. But it also has a ton of, like, blank sections where I could say to them, like, is there something that you want to put in here? Because it also holds me account, you know? Like, in the end, it became a document, hopefully, a document between us where I'd made promises to them about what would happen but also there was this understanding or like trust built between us that I didn't have all the answers you know but because we'd gone through these processes which also they were paid for that's the other thing is like paying people for their time fairly you know like they were taking two hours out of their day to sit with me on this project and so they were paid as any collaborator would be for a two-hour session Working through these questions basically together and thinking about the next step. And sometimes they couldn't consent to something yet, because for example the photogrammetry one happened in a studio in Bristol, in the University of Bath actually. in their camera studio and then the other one had to happen more ad hoc in Glasgow because that's where we were based so we didn't know exactly how that process would look the first time we did the consent agreement so then that was just left blank you know until we could fill in and it just went like that and then by the time we were doing like deep production with Cora we built up enough of a rapport that I could be like okay you're gonna need to let me know within 24 hours if this feels good to you or if not what we're gonna do yeah that's how it's kind of worked out But definitely having the knowledge that it's going to show here. I mean, if they'd said, I don't want to be part of IDFA, I would have taken out their work. I would have never shown anything that they didn't say they were happy to show. But yeah, knowing it's going to show here, and then it's going to show to them, and then it's going to show just to my PhD, and then there's no further obligation, I think helped them feel like, OK, well, we'll see how it is. So it's quite hard being at a festival where people are like, where are you taking it next? And what more money do you want? And I'm like, I have no idea. We have to chat it out.
[00:41:52.526] Kent Bye: Yeah, it sort of puts you in a unique position in the sense that if they revoke their consent, then that's basically the end of their project, aside from your PhD. So I guess we'll end there in terms of this section here. So what's next for you? It sounds like you have about six months to kind of wrap up the PhD and the thesis. And so how is the work that you're showing here going to feed into a larger elaboration, either in a thesis or a defense of your dissertation?
[00:42:14.578] Tessa Ratuszynska: Yeah, so this is practice-based PhD, so this bit of practice is like a large portion of it and then I have to like justify this piece of work which I do feel like in a good place to do that because it has been so rich to like show it to audiences and work out why I made and you know be asked by people like yourself like why did you make this decision and yeah so to be able to like write that all down and articulate that I hope will be really helpful even if I do anticipate it being slightly painful to sit for six months and write 50,000 words or whatever. and then at the end of my PhD then emerge from a darkened room, I suppose, and see what's next. But I'd love to make more work with Sleek. I'd love to make more work with Chris. I'd love to make more work specifically about masculinity and interrogating that way of behaving, that patriarchal masculinity. That's what all my work kind of stems from. Yeah.
[00:43:07.137] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive storytelling and immersive documentary might be, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:43:17.573] Tessa Ratuszynska: Well you're hearing me fresh off of a roundtable that was about like accessible futures and the XR space and I do think that there's a huge amount of potential in the XR space to really think about multi-layered accessibility from multiple perspectives so not just captioning or adjustments for people with different kinds of hearing or sighted issues or different kinds of bodily mobility but on a more expansive idea about Yeah, like people feeling an authorship and ownership of this technology, that they have as much right to make work in this space as some of the Chris Smilks of the world. I think he does get used to somewhat of a punching bag, but you know what I'm referring to when I say that. Yeah, and so like making the technology, these spaces, like festival spaces, more accessible in an ideas way that people feel like they have scope to make work in this medium and that what they make could be just as good if not better as someone who's been making work in the immersive industries for however long. That's the thing I'm really excited about anyway and want to do the most I can to try and make that happen. Yeah, that's what I would say.
[00:44:26.905] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? No.
[00:44:33.699] Tessa Ratuszynska: I don't know. I think I said it. I think, yeah. Making space to review the successes of your projects, not just on whether they fulfilled your ego-driven idea of how it should work, but also from multiple perspectives and inviting other people into that process of reflecting on if it was successful. It's a very vulnerable feeling to offer yourself up to your collaborators in that way and say, does this work for you? But I think it's really important. And obviously the book on co-collaboration and co-making, that's what that book is all about as well. It's a good theme for the festival, I think.
[00:45:09.063] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. I'll be talking to Kat and William tomorrow about that book and unpacking it some more. So yeah, lots of really interesting ideas of consent and the future of that co-creative ongoing consent as we do these immersive works. And yeah, this use of embodiment in this way of being in this first person perspective and changing embodiments and yeah, just all the ways that you've been able to use the immersive medium to tell these stories in a way that I feel like is different than other media to actually be embedded into the scene and Yeah, really powerful in that way. So yeah, thanks for joining me here on the podcast and helping unpack it all.
[00:45:43.612] Tessa Ratuszynska: Thank you. Thank you very much.
[00:45:45.714] Kent Bye: So that was Tessa Ratashishchenska, who produced a piece called With These Hands that was showing at IFA DocLab 2022. So a number of takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, the thing that really stuck with me was this idea of how consent should be enthusiastic and ongoing. I hear a lot of talk about consent in the context of sex-positive communities and intimate relationships, but in this context of taking the idea of consent and bringing it into the usual power dynamics of the documentary filmmakers and the creators, and so how can you have more of a co-creative process in that creation of these different stories? So Tessa mentioned that she was a part of a discussion that happened of the Collective Wisdom Co-Creating Media with Equity and Justice, which is a larger project that is from the MIT Co-Creation Studio and this book that just came out, trying to evaluate these more collaborative and cooperative frameworks that go beyond this single authorship, but have more of a communal process-driven approach. And so just in the process of how she was able to create this experience with SLEEK, which is the Survivors Leading Essential Education and Change, And in the show notes, you can get a link to Sleek as well as one of the pieces by Nora Hammerson, which is the Blue Mary Muffins piece of original writer that was published on the Disobedient Survivor blog. That was the first section that was a prison abolitionist not wanting to use the criminal justice system to imprison her rapist. And so, yeah, that piece of writing was either directly read during that first section or some sort of adaptation that was made and narrated in that section. So just to go back to the structure of this piece, there's these three main sections where you're getting three different stories, and each time you go into the story, you are embodying the person of whomever is creating that story. You see their hands, and the author of that story was able to also create this tabletop subsection of an area. Most of the different piece is kind of like this void space, but you see this area that is overlaid atop of a table that you're also sitting in this little booth, and you're able to put your hands onto that table, and at that point, whatever part of the narrative, it will stop. It might be nice to have an option to be able to skip forward, because if there's something where you don't feel like you can go forward at a certain point, it'd be nice to be able to have some sort of gesture to move on to the next chapter. I know that Testimony VR did a great way of being able to go in, and as you look away, you're able to pause something, or you can also go backwards and go into other stories and maybe come back to it later. So having more of a nonlinear structure to a piece like this I think would also be good. And when you're thinking about different elements of consent and really having control, because it is still kind of on a linear path as you're going through a piece like this. And so having maybe a little bit more options to have even more agency, but having a user interface that makes sense to be able to do that. I think they're just trying to add a little bit more agency for the listener so that they don't feel like they're being subjugated to a story, that they don't have much consent over what they're receiving. And if there is some section of that story that for whatever reason is too intense, that they're not all of a sudden being forced to miss the entirety of the rest of the experience. And so, yeah, just really deep thoughts around how to think about some of those different aspects of consent and also the deeper thoughts around empathy. And again, trying to be in right relationship to the communities that we're engaging with and not going in and extracting the story and then being able to tell that story to show the power of the technology and say, look how amazing this technology is of being able to draw out emotions, de-emphasizing what the stories that the community is actually trying to tell, or this other element that Tessa is saying is that, you know, you coming out of an experience through a mediated, whether it's a film or podcast, or in this case, a virtual reality experience, And you have all this emotion and it makes you feel this kind of pro-social like you're doing something, but unless you're able to either take action or be in relationship for the other person to receive the benefits of that empathy, either through an emotional context or if you're able to establish some sort of relationship after that. And so there's all sorts of different dimensions that she has critiques over the way that empathy has traditionally been talked about within the context of the broader community. Again, kind of referencing back to this Chris Milk TED talk that happened back in 2015 of the Imp and the Sheen. which actually goes back to Roger Ebert had coined the empathy machine in one of his talks when he was actually talking about film. And so the empathy machine as a phrase actually predates what Chris Milk did and goes back into something that Roger Ebert was saying as well. So, yeah, I think this is an interesting piece that starts to put you into the body of the person who is telling the story. And so this gives this other aspect of like, usually when you're in a documentary, you are yourself. And so there is this element of like, what character are you rolling? And what does it mean to start to embody the hands of these different characters in these little vignetted tabletop void space experiences that have this kind of art installation vibe in some ways or trying to give you the sense of like you're waiting in a bar in the second experience where it's a man who is friends with somebody who's been accused of sexual assault and he's deciding whether or not to ostracize him or still maintain relationships with him and It's sort of the dynamic of people who are at Sleek talking about these other complexes of rape culture and how it has rippled out into our culture. They have a number of different educational workshops. Their mission statement is they're a survivor-run organization that changes systems, supports survivors, and dismantles the roots of male violence. And so, yeah, just trying to explore these different themes. And in the last section of the piece was more of a mixed reality pass through. And so while you're embodying these other characters, then all of a sudden you're embodying your own body as I go through the last section there. And they're talking about the disobedient survivor aspects of this organization. And yeah, just the other aspects of accessibility and ownership of, you know, who is owning the stories, who have access to the stories. And one of the things that Tessa said is that eventually getting to the point where these types of stories are organically coming from these communities themselves. And so finding ways that other technologists and creators can help to facilitate the process of telling these different types of stories. 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 enjoyed the podcast, you can spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
