I interviewed Mammary Mountain co-directors Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille C. Baker, and Maf’j Alvarez at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different projects from Venice Immersive 2024, today is a piece that was in competition called Memory Mountain, and this is a piece that is trying to dig into some of the different aspects of the experience of breast cancer that are not like widely talked about. And so it's a little bit of a documentary in structure and form where it's taking lots of different interviews from lots of different perspectives, but also treating the body as a landscape. And it transports you into these visual metaphors of the body to then listen to different oral testimonies for different aspects of the journey from getting treatments for cancer. There's also like a whole haptic fest that you put on and the onboarding and offboarding for this piece was also quite on point where you're waiting into like this waiting room and then you have a doctor that comes in and fill out some forms and you have some onboarding and offboarding and just an opportunity to talk about the experience and so Yeah, I had a chance to talk to the team behind this project to get a little bit more about the history and evolution of this project and how it all came about. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Memory Mountain happened on Thursday, August 29th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:38.189] Tara Baoth Mooney: I'm Tara Boye-Mooney and my role in this is co-director. There are three co-directors really in this piece and I started to gather material from a very early stage during my journey on having treatment for breast cancer. and I basically was doing that independently of Camille and MAFJ and Camille came to me and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a 3D VR experience around breast cancer because she had already been working on one around ovarian cancer and she had worked with MAFJ so the working relationship was already established And my working relationship with Camille was established through some dance and haptic work that we had done. And so that's really how it started. We are all very much doing a lot of different jobs because it's a tiny budget and it's quite an intimate piece of work. We have gone very deep to try and maintain the use of VR as a tool rather than an effect in itself. So we've really tried to to remain true to the experience and the intimacy. So that's a beginning, a start.
[00:03:03.546] Camille C. Baker: I'm Camille Baker. My background's in various kinds of digital art and I've been working around performance and haptics and wearable tech and bespoke e-stitches. It was a project I did, it was about bespoke e-textiles and conductive materials and things like that. And my turning point was earlier, I was actually researching a book that I was writing around, I was calling it mobile performance, performance working with different modalities through the mobile phone, so it could be people like Atau Tanaka who's used mobile phone as an instrument or in different ways in which people use mobile phone in the last 15 years in performance and during that time I started to look a lot more at mixed reality, augmented reality, new VR headsets and new VR experiences and saw some really interesting performative I could say mixed reality works in London and was really excited by that and particularly performance-based work with theatre companies and then I got ovarian cancer and I was very early stage so I was super lucky but I'd listen to voices of different women talk about how they didn't have a clue what was going on and they'd wish they knew more and wanted to know more about the body. So I made this other project and I found out about the amazing skill of Mathieu and invited her to help me figure out what to do. And I think initially I was going to make it more soundscape and she convinced me to make it in VR. so that was Interher and Interher was sort of finished in 2021 and we started touring it in mostly art gallery type spaces and some media art festivals and then as Tara said Around 2018, when she was diagnosed, I also found out another friend had early stage tumor and my aunt and my cousin, my aunt was number two, second breast cancer. And then two colleagues that I'd been working with found out that they'd both, one of them had had it twice, another one, I wanted to interview her, she was too traumatized to talk to me, but I thought, okay, that's a sign. Six people I know have this in a really small period of time. We should do something about it. So I talked to Tara and said, I think we need to have that. That's another invisible story that we need to unearth.
[00:05:36.551] Maf'j Alvarez: Hi, so my name is Math J. Alvarez. I'm a digital artist, creative technologist, I guess you could call me. My background is in installation work and kind of fine art, but with a creative interest in technology. I've always been very, very interested in using it as a medium, really using it myself. So in the last seven years or so, I've been working in virtual reality. And I came across Camille, so... As she mentioned, we started experimenting and we actually created into her using VRChat to start with. And just walking around the inside of a uterus together as a little anime character, that was quite funny. But I've always been interested in the body and psychology and how can we use immersive anything really. Installation is very immersive, isn't it, before you even use virtual reality. So in this project, I kind of was very keen on developing my own art style and working with Tara's drawings and working with Tara and Camille and knitting together and using kind of very feminine metaphors around like making and storytelling, like weaving, like spinning yarns. So this idea that while developing the piece, we were going to dive into like Tara's mind and psychology and the kind of witchiness, like tech witchiness, really. And I suppose because your background isn't a tech witch, but mine kind of was already starting to become like that. I had worked on a project called Ever Quantica, which was really about saying, OK, we're in the digital era right now, but we're heading for the quantum era. This is just like we're not even halfway there to understanding how witchy we can be with this stuff. And I think this project, because you're interested, Tara, is very much about the land and the body and how illness and the land and how our thoughts and our body are connected in terms of how we feel. And cancer seems to be connected with our emotions and our repressed feelings and things like that and our caring responsibilities and stuff. It seemed very interesting. So I was kind of very keen to work on this project. Yeah, like Tara said, it was a micro, micro budget. We've all done so many, so many jobs, but it literally is made by the three of us. So in that respect, like, whereas we struggle sometimes to say, well, who's the director? Who's the producer? Who's the narrator? We've done so many things. And it was really a labor of love. Very traumatic subject. My mum had cancer three times in her life. Not breast cancer, but she actually died of cancer. So for me, some of the experience...
[00:07:56.413] Kent Bye: of the treatments was also quite personal and and I really had a lot of empathy for for what you've gone through and I've yeah and we've had some amazing responses from people to be honest yeah it sounds like a project where each of you are wearing many different hats and so I'd love to ask a follow-up question around just a little bit more about your context and background and sort of the the roles that you kind of were taking charge of on this project
[00:08:22.386] Tara Baoth Mooney: Well, I guess the starting point probably has been the writings and drawings and sound that I recorded while I was going through my own treatment. So I was using my mobile phone to record the machines I was using my mobile phone to record the journey from the bed to the place where I was having the treatment and sometimes the echoes on the corridor and sometimes nurses saying hello. Lots of these kind of echoey sounds that you will hear in the experience come through. There's a very strong DIY element. A lot of the drawings that you see at the end are the basis for the whole world where basically the body, I started to draw the body as topography, as land because as the body became dehumanized through the treatments, it felt more akin to a stagnant kind of body of body which is more akin to land. And that is something that I was really keen to explore personally as an artist while I was going through it. Now it happens that translating these questions and these possible kind of areas of exploration while you're going through a transformative experience it happens that they work really well in Vior and the way that Camille and MAFJ entered into the question together of manifesting those deep kind of human traumas and deep human experiences into something other abstract but also rooted in testimony and storytelling is kind of our our mythological base if you like as humans whether it's advertising or someone sitting around a fire 3 000 years ago storytelling is kind of really the beating heart of human experience so i would say from my point of view that you know gathering my own field recordings my own notes my own little pieces of crazy writing from hallucinating and not really sure what was happening at all and then dealing with the clumsy giantess who was this alter ego creature that suddenly arrived into my world while I was in the middle of it and Being able to then transfer that into the virtual world with the two women and us all working together on Google Meet eight hours a day, sending drawings back and forth, sending files back and forth, sitting there having cups of tea and coffee together, like it was a really deeply personal, deeply intimate and deeply collaborative venture in that way. Is that answering the question?
[00:11:15.845] Camille C. Baker: I want you to say about your sound, though, the music. Oh, the sound.
[00:11:18.846] Tara Baoth Mooney: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, the sound really, as I said, it kind of started with the field recordings. And then I was aware that as I was listening to these heavy kind of Germanic machines creating these extremely digital sounds. I was very aware of analog sounds just outside the window, like hints of birdsong or the wind or rain against the window. So I started to literally make a bank of the sounds that I was kind of associating with that period of my life and then from there I worked very instinctively and tried to kind of get feelings more than kind of specific music. So specific instruments like the harp features a lot. And the harp came in as something that was maybe bringing a little bit of relief because it tends to as an instrument. And then some of the industrial sounds were used more during the chemotherapy and radiotherapy segments. So I was really again trying to bring this idea of taking reality and then taking abstract and bringing them together and rooting abstract or technology in the reality, which we also did through objects. A lot of the objects that were collected during the time became totems that we used as starting points to move into the virtual, move into the technological. And that was really powerful. Again, rooting it back into land, if you like, through objects, objects that make meaning. So kind of meaning making through the physical and then meaning making manifested into the virtual.
[00:13:11.672] Kent Bye: Nice. And just a quick follow on. So is your background as an artist or what kind of like deeper background are you coming from?
[00:13:19.392] Tara Baoth Mooney: I'm an experimental sound artist primarily, but I also work with language and I work with different mediums. Fashion. Fashion, yeah. So, yeah, that's why, well, there is... Illustration. Yeah, different things.
[00:13:35.537] Camille C. Baker: She's a bit too modest. Where are we going here?
[00:13:40.479] Kent Bye: So, yeah, just a bit more context as your background and your journey into this piece here.
[00:13:44.426] Camille C. Baker: So way back in the day, I was a dancer. So I've been always really interested in finding ways to embody technology, expand the body through technology, this idea of extending the senses through technology. I did my masters under these two amazing women who were both dancers and technologists in Vancouver and I brought it over to the UK and I began exploring different ways to work with or make even wearable garments that had electronics and both sensors and actuators. I think I was working more with sensors and now it's much more about actuation and by you know sending signals back to the body rather than capturing signals from the body but previously my interest was all about how do we look at what the data from the body is telling us and how can we translate that into initially I was really interested in participatory performances like creating an experience which is like what we're doing now, but creating an experience that people can perform within. Then I had a longtime collaborator who's gone back to America now, but she was a dance professional in the UK. And we worked on a lot of different between movement and communicating silently between dancers. performers and through technology so through wearables that we'd made bespoke kinds of little sensors and actuations on the body one of which hacking the body Tara worked on with us around the housing of the electronics And we did lots of little sort of experiments around that. Her name's Kate Sicchio, and she's a dance artist now in Virginia. So we worked together for a really long time. I want to say like eight or nine years on different kinds of experimental versions of that. And then, like I said, when I went through my own cancer experience, I was thinking about how do I translate something so intimate? And is that possible to do in a wearable? I don't know. And I thought, Like I said, I was already researching something. So I really wanted to think about... Because everything, I guess, all I've been doing is about making the invisible visible. So it's a total extension of that. So I kind of felt like with Interher, I learned a lot about... the onboarding side, the installation side, a lot of that was really gut instinct, like, oh, we need a tent. So you go into this giant inflatable tent, and that's sort of, we called it the sitting womb, and it's kind of like a manifestation of the womb that you go into, and then you go down into the vaginal canal and into the actual uterus, and so it's a journey through the body, through these diseases of cervical cancer and fibroids and So it wasn't just my ovarian cancer. It was all the women's reproductive ailments that don't get talked about. Nobody even necessarily believes a woman when she goes in and says, I have some things going on. I don't know what it is. Can you do something about it? Especially endometriosis, which is where the endometrial tissue goes outside the body. For example, my cousin had 11 or 12 endometrial surgeries. And I had a lot of visitors come who had gone through these things and come and say, oh, thank you for validating my experience. And so some of that learning from into her around that validation of someone's experience that they didn't know that they felt that way or that it was something that needed to be spoken about or that there was a community that maybe they could connect with. So that project was a big learning about how to do this in an installation way, but also just this idea of taking people on a very personal sometimes taboo kind of experience that they can feel held and feeling very emotional talking about this, but they can feel held and supported and acknowledged, validated, and then come out again and sit and talk about how that went and feel heard, not just like, okay, see ya. So that whole experiential journey, not just the VR, but the whole piece is something I learned a lot about through Interher, experimenting in different places. And I really thought it was important to bring into Manbury Mountain because it's similarly... hidden silent and people feel like they're on a journey on their own and they're cared for by the health professionals but maybe only their physical experience is cared for but their emotional journey is not really dealt with or even like this holistic self is not addressed we're not just bodies that have diseases that need to be carved up and You know, the systems, at least in the West, are very mechanical. Like, you're a thing. You're a cancer now. We're going to try to treat your cancer. And then when we're done with you, see ya. And we had a lot of conversations about it. So when we got the first funding from the Arts Council, part of what we did is say we need to do some workshops. We tried to do some workshops with people going through this. We learned about that too. Not necessarily all the cancer charities want some random artist to come in and talk to their patients. So we were trying to do workshops of care and trying to see if by doing these workshops we might also be able to have conversations with people and elicit the stories. Thank you. That didn't exactly happen as we'd hoped, so I drew back on those people in my life that I knew had had cancer, breast cancer, as well as putting some calls out on social media and said, you know, we're looking for somebody who wants to share their story, who feels like they need to share their story. So we had about eight stories. So my role was then to gather those stories and then edit them from one hour, an hour and a half in some cases, to something, like I was saying to the ladies the other night, I feel quite sad that only snippets of their stories are there because it feels like they gave a lot and hopefully we're giving enough back to honour their stories. I think of it as a sacrifice. They sacrificed their story. But again, I think in a lot of ways they felt very cathartic about it as well because somebody cared enough to ask. I think that's enough for me for now.
[00:20:28.288] Kent Bye: A little bit more about your background and context and journey into the space.
[00:20:33.311] Maf'j Alvarez: Yeah, how do I follow up with that? Okay, so trying to summarize a little bit. My background, I guess, is interactive art. I've always loved games. I've loved rules. I'm a process junkie. I've come from a place of thinking, I don't understand the world. I think I'm on the spectrum and going through diagnosis is itself tricky because they've got forms and I don't like forms. And my problem is generally that I make things because I'm hyper-independent because I find it difficult to ask for help. That's led me to kind of where I am now. My mistrust of systems, my mistrust of doctors, lawyers, people in suits, tall men with suits especially, and people that tell me that they know better than me. So I think that's led me to a lot of the decision-making that's brought me here to this place now. That journey goes on. But interactive arts allows me, and games allow me to... put frameworks and reference and rules around situations that I don't understand in order to experiment with them long enough for me to then say did it work didn't it like experiment be agile so my background's actually like two-pronged very much one earns money and then one is art and the one that earns money I've gone down a kind of web design technologist user experience designer because I had to earn a living when I had children I could I had to stop being an artist and Because I didn't have the space to make the installations that I was making. And when I was making installations, and this is back in 1998, I graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in Interactive Arts. At that time, there was no virtual reality, really. There was a mini wave that was happening, right? But I'd never even put my head in a headset at that point. But we had a lot of inspiring teachers and I made an installation around an illness called stroke. It was called stroke and that was about having a stroke. And that led me to collaborate with neuroscientists and occupational health therapists and people in the sector that would help with people that were literally trapped inside their own minds. So I'm very interested in the invisible again because I didn't have virtual reality. The installation was the best thing I could do. And lugging loads of equipment around didn't really work for me after I had kids. So I had to just like say, well, what can I do that's virtual because I don't have the space. So this for me was amazing. It gave me the opportunity to make the kind of sculptural work, the installation work, the interactive work that I wanted. And because, like I said, I'm hyper independent, not because I want to be, but because... My brain is the way it is. I ended up learning to code because I needed that magic. So for me, coding was magic. It allowed me to do things that I really just couldn't do. And I really struggled to connect and to coordinate with a lot of the technical people that seem to have the power in that realm. Often men, very mansplaining world. I've struggled a lot with that. So my thesis when I was, my kids were young. My mom had just died of cancer. And I was using my masters as a kind of catharsis for trying to learn about how to deal with grief and I made various installation works and I started working with Unity. So I started to learn how to code at that point and I made works with projectors around the issue of parenting and how difficult that was actually when you can't see inside someone's brain and you have to co-parent with them. And it's difficult to see each other's perspective and how to do it. So a lot of my work is around the family, around loss, around the lived experience, I guess, but turning into gamified scenarios so that I can create a framework that I can understand and somehow share with people. So I love making games, especially I do a drawing game called Choice, Chance and Circumstance at C3. And that game turned into something called the Root Beans game, which I play whenever I can. And I played it actually with Tara when we were researching for this project. Yeah.
[00:24:04.329] Tara Baoth Mooney: It was amazing to play that game together. I felt like I was kind of catching up with a whole part of your history that I hadn't really known about. That was really interesting. And again, it's kind of rooted in the material, isn't it? It's rooted in the physical.
[00:24:20.582] Kent Bye: I'm going to have to... Oh, you have to go? Can I ask you one last question so I can edit it in? What do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:24:34.150] Tara Baoth Mooney: Well, maybe a little bit of what I was saying earlier, where I think it kind of enables us to... When it's used as a tool to manifest, I think it's really powerful for bringing you out of the everyday and into abstract space, but then also... bringing you back into your body through a haptic garment or you know through the material that you're looking at but I think it's also really incredible for people who cannot experience things physically so for instance I brought it into the nursing home where my father is And I was able to put a headset on my father, who's wheelchair bound, and he was able to fly into Mammery Mountain. He was able to go into the water and he wept. And he's 88 years of age and it would never be accessible to someone like that. Similarly, when we brought it to Dundee, We had some teenage boys who came because they had never had a VR experience and it was really quite surprising to them what the material and subject matter was and every single one of them came out of that experience with a completely different kind of understanding of empathy and care. One or two of them wept during it. And again, I think that's something that you're introducing something to someone without them realizing how you're doing it. It's a vehicle. It's a vehicle that's quite attractive and you're able to bring subjects that might be quite difficult subjects into that vehicle, especially if you do it in a kind of magical way. I think there are ways of holding magic and beauty and joy with shadow and darkness and sorrow, and I think that's really powerful. Thank you.
[00:26:41.709] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you, and I'll let you go do your docent duties of running the experience, so thank you. Yeah, I wanted to just share a little bit of where I was at in the experience just because yesterday morning I heard from my wife at 7.53 a.m. local time that she had finally heard from her doctor that she was completely cancer-free of cancer. being diagnosed in December. So it's been eight or nine months of both radiation and chemotherapy. And so watching this experience, it was like I had my own ally perspective of going on this journey. My wife and I watched The Emperor of All Maladies, a Ken Burns documentary that just goes into the history of cancer. Learning about every cancer is different and unique and everyone's experience is different and unique. And so it's a little bit tricky to just have one answer to know what to expect because you kind of have to see how you react to it. And so it feels like that cancer is like what Michael Mead calls like a form of backwards initiation of joining a club that no one wants to be a part of. and that there's a part of like being initiated into this club that you go through when you get diagnosed with cancer and go through all that. And so I feel like I've been from an allies perspective kind of initiated in that club. And I feel like this experience is also like trying to have a different way of initiating people into this experience if they're just learning about it or if they have friends or family that have cancer. And so it feels like there's a lot of stuff where there's online forums on Reddit and all these other places where people are talking about their experiences and that stuff is out there, but it wasn't something I was fluent in without having it be so connected to my own life. And so I feel like this is a type of experience that starts to try to capture some sort of cross section of these archetypal experiences that are trying to get at the essence of these different stages that people go through. regardless of what type of cancer they go through, whether it's radiation or chemotherapy or just kind of like the fundamental core experience of it. So yeah, I'd love to hear any reflections of how to like translate the diversity of the uniqueness of everyone's experience, but trying to create something that unifies it and tries to create a sense of being held in the process of coming out of it with a little bit more of a softer initiation into this club.
[00:29:09.690] Camille C. Baker: Well, from the point of view of having interviewed all those people that, and it wasn't that many, but it was very much like you said, every single one of them had a totally different breast cancer journey, right? And trying to figure out what are the parts of each story do we try to keep and how do we... add that so we i think a decision was made to keep tara's story as sort of like the backbone like the the spine of it and she you know done all this amazing poetry and drawings and you know has this beautiful voice and so she's the spine and it is based around her journey but we wanted to make sure and I felt strongly about this because of again having worked on into her that there isn't really one story exactly like you said there's many experiences and if we can get even bits of those like for example some people have surgery before they know they're diagnosed some people get a biopsy tiny biopsy and then they're rushed into like a massive 10-hour mastectomy sometimes double mastectomy and they have to make a decision before they really know what's going on what kind of mastectomy do you want like one woman was just saying you know she didn't know if she should have her own flesh or she should have silicone replacement breasts or you know what was the right way and then she found out that she thought it would be better to have flesh of her own body but then she found out because they took it from her belly that if she gained weight her breasts would gain weight because the fat was a different kind like just these weird conversations about and you know people have to make these decisions before they even know really what's happening to them right they haven't had those emotional kind of experiences yet and then there were stories of people who and a similar thing where one woman went home to her partner and he said so what about me and he didn't really think about her experiences like oh like he'd already like she said in the interview he'd already had me dead and buried and hadn't even started treatment yet and you know So it was about him, and it wasn't about her experience. And we had other people say that, like, their relationships start to crumble immediately, like, before they've had a chance to even process what's going on. And then some get down the chemotherapy, depending on what stage they are, and some don't. Some only have radiation. Some just have... We found a woman the other day said she's only had immunotherapy. So it is a different... And also, we're talking about breast cancer. Yes, each cancer itself is a different kind of thing, but we've had people with different kinds of cancers in their family that still feel they can relate to this.
[00:32:04.457] Maf'j Alvarez: So in relation to what we put in and what we left out, some of it was based on being practical as well and just deciding how long we had. And I know this sounds really boring, but my role as a user experience designer and interaction designer was to say, Okay, how much interaction, how much branching? Where can we take the story in a way that we give some key moments an illusion of choice? I think that's what we agreed on, that it wasn't really about choice. It was about saying, here are some really crunchy, horrible, tense moments in any patient's journey through any kind of disease, I think, through the diagnosis, through to like aftercare. And we knew there were certain things that everyone had in common. It happened to me even while I was giving birth. You're under medication. You might have had an epidural or some heavy drugs or something. And then a clipboard is thrust in your face. And you're really not able to read the terms and conditions. They're tiny. I mean, if you have glasses, no one's going to go and fetch them for you. And suddenly you're told to choose something that actually could have a massive impact on your life later on. But you're not in a really fit state to do that. And somehow you're given a pen in your hand and you're expected to sign. We explored the idea of this being a feature of the experience. And we thought that that was common to a lot of things. That was one thing that we didn't do. We thought about branching journeys. A lot of the choices to come back to a single thread came down to literally having the time. And I knew that I was going to have to build it all, right? So I was like, if I'm going to have to do it, let's do some experiments. So we were quite agile about doing it. We had about two months to build the whole thing. And we'd spent about a week together Tara and I, well, we initially spent a week together, like brainstorming it. So we had the key concepts of it all. But then Tara and I got together in Ireland and we went through a timeline and an emotional journey, which was fairly singular. And the only part that we we left out that we really wanted to be more interactive was this moment where during the surgery scene, you were going to have a choice and you were going to be thrust into pass through. This was the idea that you would be thrust into pass through. You would have a clipboard thrown, like, put in your hand. You're going to have to sign this thing to say you agreed to this surgery over this surgery. But it was a choice, like, do you want mastectomy or don't you? Or something like that. You would feel confused. There would be some kind of, like, augmented reality effect on the page or something. Some kind of hallucination, basically. But what we found was that any interactive element that we tried to put in, because it would require actual user testing, a lot of it, and there was only really... we were all dispersed across the world. I mean, Tara was in, we weren't together. We found that we only had to do that with our family members and things like that. It just became very difficult to use a test for real. So we had to cut out a lot of that stuff. It was just post COVID.
[00:34:30.721] Camille C. Baker: We really didn't happen. But I think that point also that you and Tara made before also was that, especially Tara, that you get on a, she called it an expedition, but I think it's kind of like a train. You get on the train of the treatment and then, you're on that train. And so you don't get off. And the thought was that if you're in the experience, interactivity is not an option you have in treatment. don't say oh you want to do this now do you you decide okay i'm getting chemotherapy and you have chemotherapy you're having radio and usually also it's like strongly suggested that you need to have those things so that idea of the illusion of choice happens at the beginning when you don't know what's going on yeah i'll do a 10-hour surgery and get rid of my boobs and cut up my abdomen or i won't right but once that's happened you can't replace those removed boobs, that's done, all that's finished. So we kind of felt like actually they're in this garment, it's a treatment, they're stuck there. Interactivity wouldn't work in some ways.
[00:35:39.301] Maf'j Alvarez: we did try we did want a little bit of gaze interaction we tried with a hack stone so just talking a bit about some of the objects that we used in the experience kind of going back to your previous question i guess there were some motifs that we used throughout the whole experience one of them was a seaweed kind of like a kelp attached to a rock and the rock represented the tumor and the rock was also the rock that you see throughout the whole experience in various guises one is that you're sitting on it, one is that you're in it, one is that it's hanging from the inside of the breast and that you're seeing the clumsy giantess, that kind of big giant figure plucking it as if it was berries or something, and these kinds of things. The tilt is also reminiscent of the mammary glands a little bit too. The lymph nodes and all this kind of again the body and things like that. So how I placed interaction into the experience was through the idea that we can have any age, any size of person coming to this experience because it does appeal quite often to older people who've already had many family members and things that have had it. So standing wasn't really an option for us. But it is a six degrees of freedom experience. We now have been experimenting with just walking people around the world. Like if I'd have picked you up and walked you around, it would have been quite interesting. So we're looking at doing that going forward as well. So interaction was subtle. If you moved your head under the petals, the petals would fall on your head. If you put your head under the water when the water was about to flood over you at the beginning, you would be able to do that. So we left it kind of up to you to sort of experience interaction, but not like force it upon you. And we just had this journeying as in through, like you're going through the hagstone, through the brass, through the window. Right. So it's like this journeying through a thing. You're being moved. So you haven't got that choice, but you're being moved. So I think that's how we did that, really. Yeah.
[00:37:26.473] Camille C. Baker: Just didn't happen. We also were under a bit of pressure to get our first exhibition we'd booked and so we ended up we were behind time and so as with all these things there were amazing plans and not all of them happened and plus we were dealing with the haptic and trying to get that to work and trying to get these chairs which we didn't bring here to Venice made they were meant to be breast shape and they were meant to be portable that would go on our backs and We'd take anywhere so we could take people on the journey anywhere up the mountain, maybe even the mountain where we did the drone footage in Sligo in Ireland. That didn't... It can happen, it didn't happen. So what I'm saying is we had even bigger plans and at some point we've had to figure out how we can scale it in different contexts and...
[00:38:19.770] Maf'j Alvarez: Just to say on that note, this is what's really exciting because looking forward, we have built the world in a very extendable way. So right now, it is what it is and you can view it with a haptic element that's been created by Paul Hayes, just a shout out to him as well. He's an amazing creative technologist, and the garment was created with, Tara designed it along with Sophie. Sophie Skach, who is a fashion designer, and again, very many different sizes of people. We had to create this idea for many different kinds of sizes. So for me, personally, as an interaction designer, as a UX designer, as a creator, as an artist, I'm always interested in access. We wanted to take this up a mountain. We wanted to take it onto a VR headset that didn't require a computer. It was going to be Unity. It was going to be on the Quest and on the Pico. And there's no reason why we can't take it to any other platform now. Walking about with it is amazing. You know, really doing this in a forest at twilight sounds incredible. There's no reason why we can't. We can literally do that tomorrow. We could even do that here. And that excites me that we're not locked into a thing because the choice that we have is our choices now as women as well as a group of female creators. I'm very, very excited about this. That means a lot to us. I think that we're a female group.
[00:39:33.451] Camille C. Baker: On that note, yeah, that's always been really important to me and that's why I really wanted to work with MathJ. But just to say also in terms of the future of it, somebody asked us, oh, do you have to bring the whole installation? And I said, no, we can do it in other ways. We want, that's the full experience, but we want as many people to see this as they can because it's, I mean, ultimately I think we also want to see if we can because we're both based in the UK, get it into the NHS or connect with them somehow. But how do we, you know, make it something that patients, I wouldn't say before they have the surgery or their treatment, but probably after. So they have that sense of feeling validated about their experience. I think it might be too traumatic to do before treatment, but just that idea of feeling seen. And so that needs to go into the medical context and also go to the medical practitioners a lot of people we talk to in dundee and other places who have connections the art and health have said oh we should help you get it into oncology wards or you know the doctors are very specific about like i said earlier very much you're like a a car they need to fix if they have some tool to make them feel more empathic like the impulse project and you know this idea of creating art for health care contacts not just for the patients but also for the health care sector to be more patient and holistically focused rather than just you're a thing that needs to be repaired I think on top of what you said in terms of how we expand the project we really want to expand the audience
[00:41:17.523] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to elaborate on that installation and the haptic vest because that's a key part of the overall onboarding of the experience is that you walk into what looks like to be a doctor's office with a lot of infographics about cancer on the wall and then have to sign a release form and then there's some waiting and there's lots of waiting that had to do for the last nine months at different doctor's offices and so going in and then I got this whole haptic vest kind of fitted to me and wrapped around and just really quite snug and so there was a I'd say for the first half of the experience or so, there wasn't any integration of the haptic vest, and there was a part of me that was thinking, oh my god, I hope that this is working, or, you know, like, because I wouldn't want to get to the end and not experience that. But it did turn on, and then I was relieved that it came on, and then my experience of the haptics was that it was sort of like a... There's different radiation that happens that's kind of symbolically reflecting the burning sensation. I didn't experience that myself, but just in talking to my wife around her experiences. But there's also just this haptics creating this underlying tension or terror. It's unsettling. It's not something that's normal. And so it's kind of like I'm entering into this... space that I don't know what's going to happen and it kind of is this sense of anxiety and I think it reflects the discussion of the topics that are being discussed but I'd love to hear you elaborate a little bit more on the haptic vest that was designed and then how you're specifically trying to use that to more directly stimulate someone's body to more deeply connect to the story that you're telling.
[00:42:49.505] Camille C. Baker: Well, there's two elements. There's the technical and then there's the sort of metaphorical. And I think MAFJ knows more about the technical side than I do. But in terms of the metaphorical, we wanted, particularly in the chemotherapy and the radiotherapy and key moments, that it not be there all the time to bombard you. And so that's why you didn't know it was happening and when it was coming in, because we wanted it to come in immediately. eventually and especially in the chemotherapy when things are scary and you don't know what's happening so you picked up on that really well and then later on it's sort of more you understand what's happening but you don't know where where you're going next that afterlife one is it's sort of all over you don't know what's happening in your future so it was really about thinking about what are the moments that are necessary for that And not to do it all the way through. Also from a physiological point of view, having too much vibration for long periods of time is not good for your cells. So we also didn't want to harm people. And sometimes some people feel it's really intense and some people feel it's not intense enough. So every person who gets in there is also having a different experience. And then we were trying to... You can talk more about what the intentions Paul had, but there was this idea that the waveform of a song might be similar to the waveform of the buzzing. So we were trying to choose some... musical he'd created this approach which wasn't just a pattern because with Into Her we just made sort of a pattern that would be different depending on the story but this time he suggested we use music because it already has a waveform it already has a pattern But then we found that some of the choices of music were too, because we were going to use Tara's music, some of the music was too complex to actually maybe come through. So we ended up simplifying what that is just to make sure people feel something. Did you want to talk more about the technical side of it? Do you want to hear about the technical side?
[00:44:55.400] Maf'j Alvarez: Sure, yeah. So, like I said, Paul Hayes worked on the microcontroller kind of architecture and software that was then going to plug into the Unity experience that I was developing. So we worked together on that. And he was very interested in the idea that we, yeah, like Camille said, that we would use a waveform and the decibel level, I suppose, of the waveform to map to the intensity of the vibration. And we had three different types of vibrators as well that we experimented with. And these are vibrators that he just bought as components, but they're typically used in cell phones and things like that. And then we experimented a little bit with how that worked. And I think Camille's right that sometimes the music, because we experimented with literal sounds of the sea, waves and things like that. The potential to really create a symphony based on this would have been incredible. Again, we didn't have really the time to explore that, but that's something that I would be really excited to do in the future. It's using two microcontrollers, one on each shoulder. And then, so each side of the garment has three pads, one on top of the shoulder, one under the arm and one just behind. And they kind of map to areas around the breast where you might have like lymph glands or things that can be affected tumors around the breast and not on the breast itself directly but around also thinking about different people's sizes so we had to make sure that they weren't going to get damaged too easily that is actually a challenge but these microcontrollers connect to the Quest using Bluetooth technology and he created an interface that we could easily pair to the headsets ahead of time and once they were paired they would kind of pretty much stay paired so in that respect it's worked quite well and Occasionally, there's a little switch in each microcontroller module that switches by accident, so we have to do that. But it's quite good. And yeah, we ended up simplifying the waveform. So what happens is we have a four-channel WAV file that gets composited using a special Python script that we then fed back into. And I just, in Unity, used the timeline to actually directly map the start and end points of the vibrator. So it was a very good integration with Unity. There are lots of ways of simplifying this, I reckon, especially given that we did create much simpler patterns like heartbeats and things like that. I just wanted to say one thing about the experience. What we've heard and what I take away from this is two things. One, the haptic suit holds you tight and it's like the feeling of being held. So irrespective of whether the vibrations are on, that's already a thing, which I haven't experienced much in VR experiences myself.
[00:47:33.118] Camille C. Baker: It was the same into her. People, even if something was broken, they felt that sense of being held. There's something really powerful about that that I don't know that we've explored enough.
[00:47:44.084] Maf'j Alvarez: The ceremonial aspect of being dressed is a psychological thing of taking away your independence but giving you care. I think this is something that we wanted to do that we felt like in a good experience with a doctor. If you're having... I mean, as a woman, I go through a lot with these procedures routinely for various cancers. tests and stuff and a good clinician will take care and they will give you the cover and all these things and a bad experience is where they leave you exposed and naked in a room just waiting for three random people to walk in at any minute which I've also had and that's frightening because you've got nothing to feel protected with and so we wanted to give people this feeling of we are now caring for you and we're going to as carefully as we can and this is tricky as you experience but as carefully as we can we're going to wrap you in this kind of like these bands and these straps and make you feel secure The second thing is that when you're in the experience, virtual reality has the ability and quite often happens that you're in a dream state. So you're in your head and then you're kind of dreaming. So you're off in some fantasy psychedelic realm having an experience like a dream. You forget that you have a body. And even if you're turning around, it's like an automata. You're not really aware that you're doing it in a way. You're just there. You're in this world. the vibrations allow people to say, oh, remind themselves that they have a body, however accurate or inaccurate or whatever it is. And that's something that people have said, that they said that they're reminded that their body is there. And that's an interesting thing.
[00:49:06.783] Camille C. Baker: One thing I discovered with INTOHER was that it connects people back to, oh, that might be, like, the location is important, it's symbolic, like, for us, but it's important in terms of, we're talking about breast cancer, this is where the lymph nodes are, this is where this happens. Same thing with INTOHER, but it gets them, like Mafje said, to really think, oh, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I'm connected and I understand what is being said. Not everybody gets that. Some people feel really irritated by the vibration and go, I didn't get why that's there. But a lot of people have had good experiences, makes them think, yeah, I'm a body, but also I'm a body that could be in this story.
[00:49:51.464] Kent Bye: Love to hear about what each of you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable.
[00:49:59.667] Maf'j Alvarez: I think for me the ultimate goal of virtual reality would be to open up spaces that we can't physically open up for various reasons. Whether they're impractical, unfeasible from a financial point of view, we can't physically get to places. Tara's story about her dad is powerful. I had a similar experience with someone who was 90 who flew around Google Earth That ability to make the invisible visible, the ability to play with things at a different scale, to really explore and pick apart abstract concepts, to have magic happen, to explore magic. Some of the other experiences here in Venice Biennale are very, very interesting too, ones which I really hope to explore. The symbiosis one, for instance, with the mycelia. I think that ability to use signals and very weak energies and actually in the future be able to experiment with them in a quantic kind of way, quantum-y way. I have a friend who's a quantum scientist and I said to her, what's going to win the race in terms of words? Is it going to be quantum or quantic or quantum-y? She said, no, no, you have to use quantum-y because quantic means something else. And I'm like, okay, so in the future we'll have quantum-y experiences.
[00:51:04.059] Camille C. Baker: think we're heading in that direction and vr is a very good place to start to explore the future of how we're going to live it i think and yeah because i'm interested in the storytelling and and also elements of the body and and that idea of finding ways to embody technology and continuing i'm still you know really obsessed with that connection between the body and technology for me i think what's been really eye-opening around the connection with the physical and the virtual is like math j says putting us into different realms and for me it's that sense of how can we find out new things about ourselves and going inside our own bodies but also our own psyches because a lot of memory mountains also about exploring the emotional and the psychic dimension so for me the future continues to be about telling invisible or untellable or or previously untellable stories and finding new and innovative ways to do that that we can't always do in the physical world and particularly as we're going you know we're we're increasingly in a hostile world both from a other people but also from the climate scenario that we've put ourselves in it might be the You know, if we ruin this world, the virtual might be the only place that we can experience something that's more magical because we will have destroyed what we have. I know, I know, I'm sorry. But I am really sad about where we are in our world. So I feel that virtual reality and... technology in general has both put us in this situation because there's a lot of negative impacts of technology but also gives us potential to explore different ways also to solve a crisis that we're in and so I'm thinking more broadly but virtual reality is part of that story I teach digital storytelling and so I'm always trying to push my students how can you say something meaningful not just something fun how can you do something powerful with this not just something pretty
[00:53:13.393] Maf'j Alvarez: I was just going to say that I think for me that I'm not into accolades and stuff, but when people turn around and say to me things like, you're doing important work, that makes me feel good because it feels like if we can do that with VR, if we can make important work with VR, then probably VR is a good medium for it. And I think that that's a life worth doing something with, right?
[00:53:31.892] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. And your experience, the way that it has the memory mountain, the way it has the onboarding, the experience and the whole journey that I was taken on and then the off boarding and the aftercare that was taken. There's a lot of consideration at each stage of this experience that I think is really experiential design was really on point. Yeah, kind of like an archetypal sampling of some of the types of experiences that are not well known or experienced as people are getting into this. I think it feels like at the very beginning of starting to create an archive and ways of exploring these connective tissues between these different types of experiences. So it feels like an experience that's going to be continuing to evolve and expand and grow. And yeah, I just really appreciate you taking the time to help break it all down. So thank you.
[00:54:14.999] Maf'j Alvarez: No, it's been great. Thank you so much for inviting us. It means a lot for us to have you see it and to put you in the suit and everything.
[00:54:22.101] Camille C. Baker: Yeah, and equally, I think a lot of the stuff that you've been telling through your podcast has been great, so it's really nice to be a part of this sort of history that you're creating in your podcast. I think it's brilliant. Thank you.
[00:54:35.685] Kent Bye: You're welcome. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
