I interviewed director Sister Sylvester about Drinking Brecht that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be unpacking a piece called Drinking Brecht, which was a part of the immersive storytelling competition at IFA DocLab 2024. So this is kind of like a hybrid piece. It was originally a theatrical performance with a live band where people were doing these interactive components where you end up actually doing this kind of very first biohacking experiment where you're taking like strawberries and pineapples and alcohol and using that to extract DNA. And then also happens to be a lot of different ingredients that you could drink it afterwards. So it creates this kind of hidden speakeasy type of experience where you're learning a lot around like these different themes around the intersection between technology and war and conflicts, but also the larger context of what's happening with the war in Gaza and Palestine. It's a piece that I think was referenced a lot throughout the course of different conversations just because Brecht is somebody who, as a theater maker, was really encouraging his audience to take political action rather than just more Aristotelian mode of going into a theater and catharting your emotions. Brecht really wanted you to take political action. And so there's a lot of focus on the work that is being done this year at InfoDocLab and how does that connect to all the stuff that's happening in the world around us. so it feels very timely also a lot of focus on the modality of reading so i talked to sister sylvester and how she sees like books as one of the most immersive technologies that are out there and how she starts to include these different interactive and reading components throughout her work as well So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Sister Sylvester happened on Monday, November 18th, 2024 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.786] Sister Sylvester: Hi, I'm Sister Sylvester and I make a lot of different kind of forms of things I think but my background's in live performance but I've also made film and VR and this particular piece that I have for this year is an adaptation of a live performance to a kind of automated, I guess it's kind of an interactive documentary. inside of a lab installation. So it feels like it's a kind of meeting of my two worlds that have been quite separate, like the live performance world and the XR world, or the film world are kind of coming together in this one.
[00:02:44.157] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:50.141] Sister Sylvester: Yeah, so I had made theatre like live performance for years. It didn't really fit in a theatre context, but it was live performance. But often it's live performance where there's no actors. A lot of the work that I make involves video and sound installations in which you might read a book, but that reading experience will be quite meticulously crafted so that it is a collective experience that you're all doing together. And yeah, so I have a series of these live performance pieces. Because there's no performers, they can also be these installation pieces. I got into the kind of XR world. I had made a film with a collaborator, Dennis Tortum, who you talked to us last year, I think. So we'd made a film called Aarak, which was about the relationship between the digital and the physical world. And it was following these attempts to create archives of things that were disappearing from the physical world that people were creating digital archives of. And the effect that was then having back on the physical world, the relationship between these two spaces. So we made a short film and then we made a VR piece called Shadow Time, which was almost a sequel to our arc. And through those two, really, I got involved in this community. And this piece was actually, in some ways, Casper's idea. I think originally I was supposed to do the live performance and then Casper had this idea that we could turn it into this installation version. So yeah, I was really grateful to him for that.
[00:04:22.886] Kent Bye: In the discussion that I had with IFA DocLab curators, Casper had contextualized some of what you were doing here with this piece that when you think around the creative potentials of what you want to do with the live performance versus what are the practicalities to make something that's scalable or perhaps going to be able to tour around. I don't know if there was funding constraints or just like the festival context. I think Casper is thinking a lot around not only featuring stuff here, but what is the life of these projects after this exhibition here at the festival? And so it sounds like this is a piece that was very much created in that cauldron of living into those constraints and leaning into them a little bit. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, yeah, as Casper just walks by, maybe you could talk a little bit about the origins of this piece and then with those constraints and just that creative process for where this piece really began.
[00:05:08.666] Sister Sylvester: Yeah, I think I had been getting frustrated with live performance because I love live performance. I love like this piece when it's live. So the composer DMR, the score for this piece is incredible and the composer DMR and the percussionist Ellery Trafford and I, it very much feels like an improvisation on stage. Like we're really responding to each other. The music changes every night. Like it's got this kind of magic liveness to it. And there's also, you know, there's these moments where the audience following instructions to learn the first ever biohacker exercise. And when it's live in the room, I can kind of control how they're doing that and the time of it, and we cue it off of what they're doing. But there's something about, I've been touring these kind of quite large-scale live performances, the seven of us at least that travel with them, and it just started to seem a little absurd to fly seven of us across the world to do three shows with all this equipment freighted over, to fly back again, like the climate impact of it, the carbon footprint. Plus there's a good network of touring for live performance work, but you often end up with the same kinds of audiences, like the same kind of demographic, like the piece requires certain technical things that you have to have a kind of very specific space for. And so the exciting thing about I've been thinking about how I could get my work outside of that context and to other audiences. And there was a moment earlier in the year where a festival that I really love in Cairo had wanted to bring a piece. And when I told them the budget of the piece, it was the budget of the whole festival. and it just felt so absurd and i thought what am i doing like i can't get this work to the places i want it to go to the people i want to see it and so i had been thinking about with that piece creating an adaptation i hadn't thought about it with this one but when casper suggested it it seemed like a really good experiment to see you know if we can make it into this thing which is much lower lift maybe it would require me to travel maybe it can even just travel on its own then it can go to a ton of different places that the live performance can't and it can stay there for longer and it can just have a different kind of journey in the world. And there's also something with this one, you know, I was worried that it would, because the live performance, there's this improvisatory quality, I was worried about transforming it into this. more static thing but I actually think conceptually me not being in the room works better than me being in the room for this I think conceptually just having a voice in these hands and not having the human authority figure in the room just fits the heart of the piece better so it was yeah
[00:07:39.864] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed that when I was going in the piece, you were outside and I was expecting you to be in the room, but you never came in. And then there was someone that was there to try to like help when people were getting stuck or, you know, like when I was sitting there, there was no ice tray. And so there was someone to point out, OK, you just use their ice, you know, and But would you imagine that this is a piece that could, at least at the minimum, have someone that is setting it up and breaking it down? And maybe they're watching over if people get stuck, because there's a lot of reading and instructions. And if people get confused or not clear, then there could be someone as a fail-safe to come and help unstuck them.
[00:08:11.958] Sister Sylvester: No, I mean, hopefully at this point, I think there's no one in the room and it's working great. I think the first few shows, Huey, who is overseeing the performance, was in there just to get a sense of how the piece was working because it's the first time we're doing it. Check that we had everything and people could follow the instructions. But, you know, this is also a learning experience. I got some feedback that maybe we slow down the audience instructions a little bit. Some people find them, they go by a bit fast. So I think I'm going to do that for the next version. but you hear the instructions and you have them written down so I hope that between those two you figure it out and also I like if there's no one in the room who's that figure of authority the audience have to work together you know you can ask each other you can like ask across the room you work in your little groups of three so I think conceptually it works best without anyone in the room who knows what they're doing and you're just left to fend for yourselves so Yeah, that's how it's running now. And hopefully that's how it will run in the future. And yeah, I think touring wise, the idea was to get it to the place where you need someone to press go and you need someone to do the reset and that's it.
[00:09:15.185] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Okay. Well, we got some of the structural constraints that you're working with, but maybe you could take me back to where the idea of this piece really began.
[00:09:22.902] Sister Sylvester: I mean, I tell the story in the piece, but it began in 2018 when I was visiting Berlin and I got to the theater. I wanted to see the Berliner Ensemble. It was closed and I found a drunk technician out back who snuck me into the building and then stole a hat. Drunk and disgruntled technician. I think he was getting fired and he stole a hat that he said hadn't been washed since the 1930s and told me to steal it out from the theater. And I did and then realized that If it hadn't been washed since the 1930s, this must mean there was all of this information on it, that somehow this hat was this repository, this book of stories that I needed to figure out. And then I was in New York at the time, so I got back to New York and first started contacting academics, like biologists. and one of the biologists said to me you know what you can come to my lab and i can do this all for you but if you want to learn it yourself there's this really great community biohacker lab in brooklyn you should go talk to them so i went there and there's this amazing community biohacker lab and they welcomed this weird project with open arms they do way weirder projects there and one of the scientists there kind of mentored me i took a couple of classes i learned some basic synthetic biology, and eventually, I thought it was going to take about a week, and three years later, I got some measly pieces of DNA off the hat. Yeah.
[00:10:49.354] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, the experience of this piece very much felt like this combination of being in a lab experiment, like in school, like a chemistry class, but mixed with this live performance element and video and a performance, but it's all recorded, and so... There's a lot of educational stuff, so it feels very pedagogical on the one hand, but also there's a deeper story and message that you're also telling. And so as you're thinking about putting this piece together, there's different chapters and sections. But how did you think around the user journey of what kind of journey you wanted to take people on in this experience?
[00:11:21.701] Sister Sylvester: I think that's where I like making things as live performances first, because you can learn so much so quickly from an audience and how they respond. And this piece really started, I mean, I had just got the first piece of DNA off. No, I hadn't even got any DNA off the hat. I had just started at the lab and a curator friend in New York was organizing this festival. And he knew that I was working on this project. And he was like, well, can't you just do something? Can't you like present a work in progress or talk about the project or do something? And I thought, you know what? At the lab, we have this experiment we do when we have like kids or groups who come to the lab to kind of introduce them to. It's a really simple experiment that is also the first ever biohacker experiment that you can do just with stuff in the kitchen. And what we do at the lab once the kids have gone is we put it all in a blender and make daiquiris with the ingredients because they are like alcohol, pineapple and strawberry. and so i thought well okay so you've got this festival i could do like an opening drinks and i could just chat about what i'm researching while demoing this experiment like youtube cooking channel style and then serve everyone a drink and that's your opening drinks and that's a way that it's not just boring and me saying like i am doing this research so the experiment structure came from before i had any of the other information And it worked so well, and then people kept asking me to do that as a piece, and I was like, it's not a piece yet. But as I was making the piece, I kept basically adding bits onto that. So that structure, a length of time that it takes between each section of the experiment, started to become the structural way that I knew that I had to craft the piece. you know, in those early days, it was me doing the experiment. And then I started to experiment in different spaces with the audience doing the experiment themselves. And as I did more research, I started to add more kind of like storylines into it. And it just kind of expanded and expanded from there. But the experiment came first, and I never imagined it would be there still in the final piece, but it ended up being a really good structuring device.
[00:13:22.811] Kent Bye: it's interesting to think about how that experiment that you're doing also has timing in between of like it takes time for these things to separate in the process and then so you're really using that as an overarching structure and the way that casper described this piece to me during the doclab curators discussion was that he said it's sort of like a hidden speakeasy so the fact that at the end you can drink it as a cocktail so it turns out into a biohacking experiment into something that becomes much more of a multi-sensory experience at the same time and so I'd love to hear you maybe elaborate on this other dimension of this multi-sensory XR thing to put into this performance and how that was a part of the overall experience of the piece.
[00:14:01.454] Sister Sylvester: Yeah, I think the stage after I was just kind of using the experiment as a structural thing, I started to think about it as the real performance is the drinking. And I think that's lost a bit from here and I might add like a touch of it back in because I think there is something about it that, you know, you're actually ingesting the DNA of this person. And even though that's actually kind of trivial on one hand, you know, I'm drinking a cup of coffee now and this has got the DNA of whoever made it in it. It's also... kind of symbolic and it becomes this almost religious moment where what happens is that the performance literally is taking place inside of you as you break down that DNA most of it just gets expelled from your body some of it in the small intestine gets absorbed and used to rebuild your own proteins and so some parts of this story are incorporated into you now in a very literal sense and I would think about that also in this kind of like feminist Marxist ritual at the end of the piece that you know a lot of the pieces are kind of critique of like both science and art and the history of it and there's a line in it of what can we filch and what must we forsake like what can we steal from these legacies and what do we have to throw out And I think it's a little bit the same with the way that you are incorporating that DNA into your being. What from these legacies can we take and use for our own purposes now? What still serves us and what in the history of science and the ways that science have been used do we have to reject wholesale? So I think that the moment of drinking is this kind of ritualistic, Marxist, feminist, scientific ritual at the end of the piece. But also the thing that I like the most about it now is that Yeah, like Kasper said, the idea is that you somehow, you know, in the storyline, you also end up in this bar with this beggar telling stories about talking to the trees. And then you yourselves are in the bar, in the space. And people, both in the live performance and in this, which I was so happy it also happened in this, because they have a drink, they stay afterwards. The piece ends and they don't just walk away. They stay. They've got this didactic reading material. They've got these quotes. They've got these things to consider. And hopefully the group of three idea is that usually people will come in two. So you're usually sitting with a stranger in some way. And I've walked in there to clear up sometimes and people are having like really intense political discussions, finishing their drinks, like sitting there having these intense political discussions. And I don't know, the piece revolves around Brecht. It's a way of trying to think about what a Brechtian kind of strategy would be now. What does it mean to actually try and engage with political material and art and not just clap your hands and go out for dinner afterwards? So if people don't leave the room, I know the piece is working.
[00:16:41.602] Kent Bye: Nice. And because the piece is called Drinking Brecht, maybe you could give a bit more context for Brecht for anyone who may not be aware. And what was it about Brecht's work that really had you be drawn to it and become a bit of a fan and want to really elaborate on it in this piece?
[00:16:56.043] Sister Sylvester: I mean, I've always been a Brecht fan. I love his poems. I love his plays. I love his politics. I think, you know, he's so incredibly relevant right now. And I think all of my work has been kind of like adopting both his and Boal's techniques in terms of thinking about the relationship to the audience and thinking about trying to create politically engaged people. art but Brecht is also this incredibly problematic figure in ways that the piece goes into so it's also this you know also with the history of science like how do we take from these people the things that are useful the things that can serve us now in the ways we need to be in the world and also at the same time engage in these critiques of the ways that they were and I think the piece tries to engage with these Brechtian techniques on many different levels, but it also, I mean, the in-joke in-joke for Brecht fans is that he called theatre he didn't like culinary theatre. So of course I've literally made a piece of culinary theatre because you drink a drink at the end of it. So that was my little fuck you to Brecht. But in terms of kind of... strategies for political engagement in art, I think the work that his company did is still incredibly relevant and this is my way of trying to think through that and share that with an audience.
[00:18:19.249] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a part in the piece where you talk around the contrasting approaches to theater as like the Aristotelian idea of like catharsis, where you're going into theater and you're having all your emotions so you can process everything and then leave it in the theater and go back to the rest of your world. Whereas with Brecht, it seemed like wanting to not have it just isolated to the theatrical performance, but to really actually be engaged and take that out into the world. And so maybe you could elaborate on that idea.
[00:18:46.013] Sister Sylvester: So Brecht was a Marxist and he wanted his theatre to actually provoke people into political action. And the main kind of theory that he's known for is this idea of critical distancing. He saw Aristotelian drama like, you know, the theories of that are that the populace go to the theatre in order to purge themselves of dangerous emotions. Brecht wanted to release those dangerous emotions in society, like the Aristotelian drama keeps a stable society and prevents the population from rising up, you know, like is a safety valve for dissent, whereas Brecht wanted a provocation for dissent. So for him, the way that Aristotelian drama works was that the audience would get so emotionally involved and they would identify so strongly with a character that they forget what's happening is a fiction, is a construct. And they fully are absorbed in it. And so when the character dies in a tragedy, say, that release of emotions that they feel, that purge releases all of the potentially disruptive emotions inside of this safe space of the theatre. And so Brecht tried to craft, or I should say the collective of Brecht, Brecht's collective tried to craft... something that was the opposite of this which was that you retain your critical faculties that you watch with a very firm sense of the world that you're living in right now and you relate what you're watching to the world you live in so I think You know, like, every essay film is indebted to this idea. Like, all of these forms are all directly in the lineage of Brecht. And so I think, you know, Shadowtime, Arag, and the work I've made with Danes, and also all my own work in performance is trying to figure out how you do this, how you emotionally engage people enough for them to care, but ask them to retain their critical faculties and take... that sense of anger or whatever it is away with them, even if it doesn't immediately cause a Marxist revolution as Brecht desired.
[00:20:38.460] Kent Bye: You know, as we're talking about all this, we're just a couple of weeks out from the election that just happened in the United States where Trump just won the election. And certainly that's rippling around not only the United States, but as I'm traveling here internationally, just how much that's a part of the conversation of people concerned around where this is all going. And this idea of Aristotelian theater, of having all your emotions catharted into a safe, contained space, really reminds me of what's happening on online social platforms where you have Facebook with Meta and Instagram, where the idea is that they've detuned and deprioritized political content. They're trying to keep people on their platform. And if you try to link outside of the platform, that's also deprioritized. So just the way that our algorithmic reality is trying to create this... bubble that is not really addressing some of the most pressing issues over time but also like if anybody is trying to point to information that is going to be outside of that container to really dig in and get elaboration more details it ends up cultivating this hot take culture where you know you share your hot take without any evidence or any links or anything else and And that's the thing that gets prioritized in an algorithm. So it feels like in some ways we've created this sort of algorithmic reality that is driving towards that more Aristotelian catharsis, but it's more around escapism rather than actually driving people into being engaged with what's happening in the reality of the world today. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that and also how your piece is trying to counteract with having people be more engaged in their political actions into the world.
[00:22:10.734] Sister Sylvester: I like that Aristotelian theory of social media. I mean, it is, yeah, you feel like you've done something as well. Like you feel a release when you make a post and you're like, yeah, I'm like creating change. I'm like, bullshit, you're just adding to the mess. But I wonder what a Brechtian social media platform would look like. I don't know. I mean, this year has been a very strange year in terms of trying to make socially engaged work because of all the censorship that's been happening, because of institutional responses to even saying the word Palestine in any context whatsoever. So it feels like this very strange thing where you're starting to see these institutions that are asking for artists to make socially engaged work, but on this particular social engagement will censor anything that happens. And I don't know, I think it's a... I think for so many people it's been a year of just kind of trying to also make sense of what is even the point of making art in this context. Like, is there? I don't know if there is. I don't know if we should be doing this at all. I don't know if we all should be putting all of this energy into other much more concrete ways of being politically engaged. But with this piece, I mean, I don't have any high hopes that it's going to... Also, you know, the audience who are coming through, is it going to change their minds? I think everyone who's in that room is thinking the same thing. With the live performance, we just toured it to Illinois, and because the word Palestine was in it, we had to put disclaimers for every audience saying that the institution did not condone sentiments expressed in this work. I mean, it was absurd. But that disclaimer actually made the audience watch it in a different way and, like, reflect on their institution in a different way. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, with this piece, the most I hope for is that people stay and they read the material at the end, which directly relates what's in the piece to what's happening right now, especially in terms of the way science is being used. And if they stay and they talk about that, I don't know that I can ask a piece to do. I don't know that I have faith in a piece doing much more than that right now. There's also material in the room. I don't know if anyone, if I redo the installation, I'll do some things to kind of highlight this material more too. But on the whiteboard at the back, there's different news articles stuck there related to the re-emergence of a kind of eugenicist approach to science in mainstream academic and politics in both the US and the UK. So, I mean, it is like you're literally in a classroom. It is a really didactic piece intentionally. And there is material there which I hope that you can absorb in a way that isn't classroom-like, but also is there for information and contemplation afterwards. And I think in some ways that's super Brechtian as well. He would start every rehearsal by reading the newspaper headlines with his actors. every play that they did they're doing Galileo but they're projecting images of things that are happening in the contemporary world onto the screen so they're always trying to relate what's happening to what you're seeing to what's happening now and judge your own society so yeah I mean if people can think of a little bit about the relationship between science and what's happening now then that's something small yeah
[00:25:26.035] Kent Bye: Just to close the loop on a Brechtian social media, an emerging platform right now is Blue Sky, which is a way that people can create their own algorithms. They can also have their own identity of their websites. They're not deprioritizing links and it's built on an open source protocol. It's a certain organization is not driven by profit, but at least to build up these open source decentralized protocols so that we can have something that's more in the control of the people in a way that is less profit-driven and more driven by actually supporting the IndieWeb. So that would be my response to that little bit. But to go back to this question of Palestine and all the censorship, because last year at IDFA DocLab, you were showing ShadowTime here, and there was a bit of controversy in terms of how the institution of IDFA was even responding to the conflict in Palestine. And so I'm wondering if you could comment on that and what you decided to do with Shadow Time being shown here and also the catalyst for the piece that you're showing here, some of the writing that you said it was about a year ago that you had started to really write some of this piece. So yeah, I'm wondering if you could take me back to a year ago and elaborate on what was happening there.
[00:26:32.932] Sister Sylvester: Yeah, so Dennis and I had Shaddai time here last year, and IDFA basically condemned protesters who held up a banner that said, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, which is... There's even been a court case in the Netherlands that has ruled that it's protected speech, that it shouldn't be a controversial statement, it shouldn't be a statement that is censored. And Palestine Film Institute put out a call for people to... either withdraw their films or use their platform to create some kind of protest and put pressure on the institution. Because, you know, I love IDFA. This is my fifth year at IDFA in a row. I mean, last year, obviously I wasn't here after a few days, but I love this festival. And I think this festival as a whole is one of the really special festivals where It doesn't feel like it's just a marketplace. It feels like it's actually deeply political and supporting the kind of films and the kind of works that I want to be in community with. And when that kind of a festival does something like that, it feels like a real betrayal of all of their, you know, it's different than like another festival that you just you don't expect anything from. But like this festival is better than that. And so the fact that they, in the midst of a genocide, condemned the right of expression of the people trying to protest. I mean, I feel like they should have just made a clear statement. And then you can ask, well, what does a statement do from a cultural institution? I think it's important. I think it's important that we know where these institutions stand. Like we're obviously really honored and privileged to be here, but we're also putting a lot of our labor and our work and our love into these things. And you want to know that it's a mutually respectful relationship and you want to know that this institution stands behind the ideals that it professes to be about. And so when Palestine Film Institute put out that call, we decided that we would withdraw Shadowtime. The idea was that we were withdrawing Shadowtime until the institution addressed what had happened and came out in support of the Palestinian people and their right to expression and self-determination and all of these things. And that didn't happen, so we stayed out of the festival. This year I know there's been, there's a lot of imagery that references Palestine. There are a lot of Palestinian films. There's a lot of support for Palestinian filmmakers. There's also two films that are supported by the Department of, the Israeli Cultural Ministry, Department of Culture. So I know that that is super problematic when there's calls for IDFA to sign up to PACBI and I don't know that it's right to be showing films supported by the Israeli government in the midst of a genocide. I mean, it's not right to be showing films supported by the Israeli government in the midst of a genocide. There wasn't a call to boycott this year. I don't know that boycotting alone, like last year, I think, had an effect because it was a collective action. I know that some filmmakers' response to everything has been like, well, I'm refusing to show at any of these institutions unless they concretely... align themselves with the right side in this. I feel like at the moment my feeling is if I can say what I want to say and I'm not being censored and I can use my place within this institution to try and create that conversation or, you know, then maybe it's okay. I don't know. I don't know. I'm really torn. I don't know what... I have so much respect for the people who are just like, we're building our own networks. We're not engaging anymore. But then also you're not in the conversations. So I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.
[00:30:13.612] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know they put out two or three statements last year around it because they made a statement. They had issued another statement, another statement. And then there's filmmakers that were pulling out. And then there is also this year. I think it's worth mentioning that they have a whole trailer that is made by a couple of artists and filmmakers who did a whole. I don't know if you've seen the festival trailer at the complicit where they allowed the people who were protesting last year to create was essentially the trailer that's going to be showing at the beginning of all the different films. And so, yeah, I don't know if you've seen that or have any other comments on that.
[00:30:43.473] Sister Sylvester: I haven't. I wish they would just say, free Palestine, stop the genocide, and from the river to the sea, Palestine. I don't know why it's so hard. I mean, they did it with Ukraine, you know? Like, all these institutions didn't hesitate to make statements in support of Ukraine. I don't know why. I mean, it's unequivocal now. There's no... maybe this is happening, maybe this isn't. It's pure horror. And the fact that these institutions cannot even just say it is, I don't know, it shouldn't be that hard. It shouldn't be that hard. And I know there was also something going around about And maybe it is that hard and I just don't understand the practicalities of it all, but it shouldn't be, especially for a festival that is this festival, you know? So I think that's great. I think that, you know, the fact that there are like watermelons on everyone's badges is great, but like it can't just be the aesthetics without also like a concrete engagement.
[00:31:44.429] Kent Bye: Just to clarify, have you seen it or not? I haven't seen it. Oh, okay.
[00:31:47.212] Sister Sylvester: I have not yet even picked up my badge. I have not, sorry, I have not yet seen a film. After this, I'm going to pick up my badge and start watching films. But I saw that they were making it and I saw news about it, but I haven't yet seen it.
[00:31:59.983] Kent Bye: I think it might be worth just pulling up just because I wanted to just get your reaction to it. Okay. Okay. At the border of my rage, I met a girl with a black horse and a flag. She gave me a passport to promised Westland. Now, I work as inclusion brand, a cheap sellout, normal life, complicit, just complicit. Are you?
[00:32:39.694] Sister Sylvester: It also shouldn't have to be the artist asking it for if they're complicit and then advertising the fact that an artist has asked them if they're complicit. They should just say what they need to say and align themselves with the right side. And more than just saying it, like, I don't know why we're not just all, all these institutions have not signed up to PACBI and we have the example, we have the example of apartheid. We know this works as cultural institutions. We know we can apply pressure. Why aren't we doing it? We have a direct historical precedent for this. It works. Why aren't we doing it?
[00:33:19.265] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, if we go back to your piece, because I feel like in your piece, you're addressing all of these kind of issues that are embedded in the core DNA of the piece that you get through the readings. And I wanted to ask around just the mechanic of reading rather than, because you have a film, you have video. And I actually ended up being one of the one person out. So I ended up being alone in doing it. And so I found that sometimes it was difficult to always on my own read everything and know what I'm doing. And if I would have had someone else there, it might have been a little bit less pressure. But also there was some parts of confusion like, OK, there's two canisters of pineapple juice. And do I do one or two? Some people did one. Some people did two. So there's like these little moments where it was like I'm used to watching. YouTube videos where you could just like, OK, we're going to step through and you could have had step one, step two. And that would have been a different experience, I think, than just having to read it and figure it out. And so I'm wondering, because you are relying upon people to read and follow these instructions and then at the end you have them read something. I'm wondering the choice of mediums between the film aspects versus the reading and how you start to think around what that activates by having people go to that reading exercise and really what you're hoping to inspire through that medium.
[00:34:35.868] Sister Sylvester: So one of the things I think at the center of the piece for me is this idea of the metaphor of DNA as code, DNA as text, DNA as an alphabet, which I talk about right at the start. And the fact that, you know, it's not, it's amino acids, but the fact that they have been abbreviated to A, T, C and G makes it look like an alphabet and has led to these metaphors of, you know, the book of life. and things like that in relationship to DNA and for me at the center of the piece is this idea that this tension around instructions and following instructions and the idea that we are if we are a code if our DNA is a code that's an incredibly eugenicist view of us and it leads to these incredibly kind of eugenicist positions because it reduces us to a kind of like direct correlation between instruction and reaction And obviously that's not scientifically accurate, but it's just simple and it is an easy thing to hold on to. So it's the way that science gets taught a lot. And it's also the kind of science that gets prioritized. Like, for example, if you're an academic geneticist, the kinds of mutations you might study, rank one mutations are these mutations or like this idea that there is a gene or an allele that codes directly for eye color, say. That's a rank one. And if you study that, you're going to get pretty concrete results. And so that's a good thing to write a grant proposal for because you're going to be able to show results. If you go down to like a rank five mutation, that's something which is affected by, you know, this gene might turn on in the presence of this particular chemical at this temperature in this kind of situation. It becomes a much, much messier, more confusing, more difficult thing to study, much more like epigenetic. And you're much less likely to, you know, get the Nobel Prize for that. Although now epigenetics is becoming a much larger field of study. But this idea of the metaphor of code and the metaphor of an alphabet and the relationship between that and a kind of fascistic way of thinking. We know that a eugenicist view of biology arose with a fascistic view of politics or like fascistic political ideas. So I don't think that's a coincidence. I think those two things are directly entwined. And so through the piece, there's all these different ways of instructions happening. There's instructions that happen on the screen. I don't know if your group stood up when you were told to stand up.
[00:36:55.481] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, we did, yeah.
[00:36:56.601] Sister Sylvester: Everyone stands up. And then those sets of instructions get more complicated as they try to explain what genes actually, like, try to create that metaphor in a more complicated way. You follow the instructions on the piece of paper. I like the fact that you get confused because that's also what happens in a lab. Like you have a protocol. The protocol is just a set of words and how you translate that into what you're doing is often highly ambiguous. in the details and so that for me as well becomes this relationship between what is a code and what is the interpretation of that code and how that changes in different setting how that changes if there's one of you versus three of you how that changes if there's like a different arrangement of things on the table like there's the little things like sometimes something's written but it's not spoken So I didn't want to have an easy tutorial for that. I wanted you to have to try to understand the relationship between text and manifestation of that text in the physical world. Yeah.
[00:37:54.057] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely felt that. You know, as I hear you list different metaphors of instruction, I definitely experienced all the scenes in the piece. And what I felt like is that is really building up to this culminating part where at the end you're able to write a series of texts that allow us to really reflect on these larger issues and connecting the dots between technology and what's happening in the conflicts in the world and what's happening in Palestine. So, yeah, I'd love to give you an opportunity to share anything else that you want to share in terms of what you hope people are walking away from as they do this piece.
[00:38:24.474] Sister Sylvester: Yeah, I mean, a lot of my work involves people reading books. I still think books are the best immersive technology we have. They're my favorite technology. They're my favorite art form. I just love books. And I think the act of reading is really fascinating to me. The fact that the words you read become something different in everyone's mind, the fact that these just like little marks on a page can become whole worlds, I think is the most transformative technology we have. So a lot of my work involves reading and I also like the relationship between like a solitary reading experience and a communal experience and what that is. So in this the idea is that when you finish the instructions and you've made the drink the Petri dish contains these other kind of like little snippets of information and I can change those easily in different contexts. I can have them be in a very Brechtian way like directly reflective on the particular moment that we're in. And the idea is that, yeah, you read them alone or in your group of three or as a group. And they're these objects that you can also pass around. Sometimes people steal them, which I didn't expect to happen, but it's kind of fun. And they're all printed on kind of different types of old, like vintage graph paper I've found or different bits of just like paper that's in my studio. And the hope is that people sit and read them and have these... You know, one of the first performances where I was still kind of obsessively checking everything, I went in afterwards to help Huey clear up and there was one group where one of the people was explaining to the other two people what had been happening in Amsterdam last week with Maccabee fans and the banning of all Palestinian protest. And so these three people were sitting there having this discussion about what was happening right now in Amsterdam with one person in the audience saying, it wasn't me telling anyone anything it was them exchanging knowledge and experience and viewpoints and that made me so happy like that's exactly how this piece should end people should be like talking to each other and debating and relating this to what's happening right now in the places that they are and i think if there's anything that i want people to take away it's this relationship between science and politics like very specifically what's happening in synthetic biology now, what's happening with the rise of these kind of eugenicist ideas, the political viewpoints that they can give rise to, this idea of a kind of like ethno-nationalism, these ideas of how identity is tied to biology in these really, really dangerously simplified ways. So if people can leave and they're thinking more about the relationships between science and politics, then I would be really happy with that.
[00:41:00.975] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've heard a lot more people, especially in the Trump administration and others, starting to have more of these eugenicist discussions and language. And I feel it creeping in even in the political party in power in the United States now. So what's the antidote to that type of eugenicist thought? How do you counteract that?
[00:41:18.123] Sister Sylvester: I think just embracing complexity and junk and the unknown and the rank five mutations. I think it's really scary how mainstream it has become to ask these questions that a generation ago we weren't following those lines of scientific inquiry. The fact that it's now acceptable to have a study on the relationship between IQ and genes We can study anything we want in science. We can choose the direction we take. We know that that is a false road that leads us to a terrible place. There's other things to study. Let's study those other things. The more we place emphasis on questions, the more that's the route we take. And so I think there's a responsibility to be asking the right questions, not just coming up with the right answers to questions, but asking the right questions that are leading us towards the kind of society we want to live in. And we're asking the wrong questions in science right now. And I think too much science education is focused on a kind of pure science that imagines it doesn't have political ramifications, that imagines it somehow exists outside of that. And so scientists maybe don't always, some of them do obviously, but the education doesn't lead towards a consideration of the political and social implications of the questions that get asked in the lab. And so the mainstreaming of these kinds of lines of questioning is really terrifying and dangerous. And the thing I like about biohacker labs is this idea that citizens have to have enough knowledge to criticize what's happening. Citizens need to have hands-on ability to be using these technologies, understand these technologies, and be a part of the discussion around the ways that these technologies are affecting them. Yeah, there's also a reading list on the board. It's got all my favorite feminist and decolonial history of science texts on it. There's an amazing one called Fascist Pigs, which is this study of how particular biological objects, kind of techno-scientific objects, are entwined with the rise of fascism. I think it's a super relevant one for right now, but he looks at pigs, potatoes, wheat, and something else that I can't remember, pigs, potatoes, and wheat, in the rise of fascist regimes in Portugal, Italy, Germany, and Spain, and the ways that these technoscientific organisms, the ways that this kind of like pure scientific inquiry is actually so deeply entwined with politics. So, yeah.
[00:43:50.465] Kent Bye: Perfect. Yeah, thank you for that. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive art, immersive performance might be, and what it might be able to enable? Yeah.
[00:44:00.598] Sister Sylvester: I don't know. I think about that a lot because I'm making work in all these different forms. And I think if this was a film, it would have much wider distribution. But in this form, if it was a film, people wouldn't make the drinks and stay at the end and talk to each other. So maybe that's it. Maybe the fact that it is a space where you are creating concretely conversation... I'd love for it to go to science museums. I'd love for it to go to academic science departments. I would love for this to be a conversation that it's not just going to our audiences, that it's going to science audiences too. But I think this is going to have much less distribution than a film could. It's much easier than the theatre piece to install, but it still requires some kind of space and person changing out experiment stuff. But I think the fact that people at the end can stay and have those discussions with each other feels like the valuable thing about it to me.
[00:44:55.931] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:45:00.535] Sister Sylvester: I'm really excited to see everyone else's work now this one's finally up and running. I think that's it.
[00:45:06.562] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Sister Sylvester, thanks so much for joining me today on your podcast to break down Drinking Brecht. I really enjoyed this piece and there's a lot to unpack and to think about. And yeah, I just really appreciate that Brechtian idea of taking your action outside of the piece. And I feel like part of my practice is oral history. And I feel like that's the way that I sort of am able to bear witness to what's happening. So I've just... really happy to have a chance to sit down with you and share a little bit more about your journey and your process and what the larger message that you're getting at feels very timely as to all the things that are happening in the world right now so yeah thank you so much thank you thanks again for listening to the voices of vr podcast and i really would encourage you to consider supporting the work that i'm doing here at the voices of vr it's been over a decade now and i've published over 1500 interviews and all of them are freely available on the voices of vr.com website with transcripts available This is just a huge repository of oral history, and I'd love to continue to expand out and to continue to cover what's happening in the industry, but I've also got over a thousand interviews in my backlog as well. So lots of stuff to dig into in terms of the historical development of the medium of virtual and augmented reality and these different structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
