I interviewed director Queer.Space about Dollhouse for Queer Imaginaries that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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[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 continuing my series of looking at different immersive experiences from IFA DocLab 2024, Today's episode is with a piece called Dollhouse for Queer Imaginaries. So this is a part of the immersive nonfiction competition, and it's a VR chat world that has like three different levels that is trying to create this safe space for LGBTQIA plus communities in Africa. And so there's also another component to this piece where it was performed as a live performance in a planetarium. And so translating a VR chat camera into a live transmission of that world onto a full dome and having different people from Africa coming in and speaking into a whole audience in the planetarium. So talk a little bit about the planetarium, a little bit of a guided tour, and also kind of like a little bit more of the context for how this project came about. So becoming all that more on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. And I should note before we get started is that I was progressively losing my voice at Eva doc lab this year. And so we're at the point where my voice is pretty correctly. So just a heads up there. Um, So this interview with Queerspace happened on Wednesday, November 20th, 2024 at Ifadak Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:34.650] Queer.Space: So I'm Queerspace. I'm an artist and architect based in Cape Town, South Africa. I convene a collective of queer practitioners and architects here. who are interested in space and sexuality. In VR, I'm really interested in understanding how we can create safe spaces for marginalized communities, looking at social VR as a platform that can host these convenings of people across geographies.
[00:02:00.627] Kent Bye: Great. And if you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:06.010] Queer.Space: So I originally started traditionally as an architect. I went through the pathway of architecture school and I was kind of jaded by the profession for a little while. It was becoming really challenging to affect change in the slow kind of bureaucratic process of designing buildings, which can take multiple years to even get to the point where there's a design, let alone getting it funded and constructed. So I started looking for new pathways to share work. I also grew frustrated at trying to resolve some of the challenges in Cape Town just through spatial interventions. So trying to create safe spaces for marginalized communities, space just wasn't ready for us to be able to intervene in the city. And VR was an exciting opportunity for us to share work in a way that could transcend the boundaries of space and social divides in our city. So I got into VR actually through an incubator lab with the Electric South called the New Dimensions Lab. It happened in Johannesburg last year, and it was a great opportunity to kind of refine a pitch for a project. I had been doing this intensive research work for over a year, understanding what this project could be, and all of the puzzle pieces came together during this lab. I met my incredible collaborators, Dale Deacon, Jason Stapleton, Sandra Rodriguez, who was an incredible advisor on the project, Brett Gaylor, Brian Afunde, and all of these individuals shared so many incredible takeaways and suggestions for how we could do this project. And it became really natural that VRChat was a medium that we wanted to use, a platform that we wanted to host this on. And I met other collaborators through the Metaverse crew, which is a collective out of South Africa. that is sharing resources, ideas, technologies, specifically for VRChat and for the metaverse.
[00:03:52.142] Kent Bye: Can you describe to me some of your first experiences within VRChat?
[00:03:56.363] Queer.Space: VRChat is a wonderful, zany place. I think that I immediately felt welcomed into the space because I think VRChat has a lot of people who do feel marginalized to some degree. And my first experiences were quite crazy. I used to just put on my headset and world hop and I went to this world called Cuddle Me, and it's just this beautiful place where there's this ambient music playing and people just sharing intimacy. They're hugging each other in VRChat, and I found that to be really profound. I think we live in cities that can feel so isolating, And VR is seen as this technology that's going to bring us further apart. But we see VR being used for people to actually gather in the absence of real world connections. And I think that can be really beautiful. So that was one of my first experiences.
[00:04:44.235] Kent Bye: Nice. And you had mentioned the desire to create these safe spaces and the difficulty of doing that in physical reality and turning to these virtual spaces. And so maybe you could just elaborate on your original idea and then how it continued to develop and then where you started to actually take some of your first steps of starting to iterate and build this out.
[00:05:04.400] Queer.Space: Yeah, so I think originally I viewed this project that I'm creating, Dollhouse for Queer Imaginaries, as a love story about home. Selfishly, it grew out of a personal desire to understand belonging and what home meant to me. And I spoke to the collective people that we work with on the African continent who are interested in similar topics, and there was a lot of shared experience. But this project is deeply rooted in my story and trying to explore that further. For a lot of black indigenous and people of color in South Africa, home is more than just a structure to us. Home is intrinsically interwoven with ancestry and spirituality. So when we're robbed of home or removed from the image of it, we lose so much more than just material space. And what I wanted to do is think about how we could provide spaces where people could feel safe, where they could embody the best versions of themselves, and where they could really feel welcomed and safe in all of their wholeness and complexity. And I think very few spaces like that exist in our context. As I'm sure many listeners would know, convening as queer people on the African continent is becoming more and more policed. And unfortunately, instead of making progress, the scenario is just getting much worse. I work with incredible collaborators who try to meet up physically in their cities. Arafa Hamidi is an incredible collaborator who was part of our dome projection, and they convene queer communities through parties in Tanzania. But that's still limited in how many people you can bring together and how many people are willing to risk their safety to come into a public space. VR was just a natural solution to allow people to convene in a way that feels discreet. People can embody avatars, which can be a practice of drag. They can wear whatever may draw too much attention in the physical world, which is very, very exciting to me. And they can pose as a gender that they identify with instead of what they biologically were born as, which is really special. So VR was just a natural container for this project and a great platform for us to start this movement, which I think is going to be much longer than just this one project.
[00:07:15.282] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on some of those constraints as to why it's not safe to be convening within the physical spaces in Africa, specifically South Africa. I know Lawrence Lessig, he talks around different vectors of control of society in terms of there's laws that are set, so if there's any specific laws if it's more of a cultural thing, so communities and culture are making it not safe, or if there's economic vectors so that there's businesses that may find blowback in some ways where it's not economically viable. So I wonder if you could just elaborate and help set a broader context for what's happening in South Africa and the need to turn to these virtual spaces in order to find and cultivate these safe spaces.
[00:07:57.574] Queer.Space: Yeah, I think the vectors are so important because I think the challenges, the barriers exist across all. We're fortunate in South Africa, we are one of the most open countries from a legislative perspective for LGBTQIA plus people. Despite that, I think many South Africans feel like we live in cities where there are two worlds existing in one space. There's very much a world for the wealthy, the upper class who have access to resources, but also safe spaces. But then in the BIPOC community, I think things are a lot more different. I think culture is a really big dividing point. And I think South Africa still has massive gains to make in LGBTQIA plus advocacy. So there is a lot of hate crime. There's a lot of physical violence pointed against queer communities. And unfortunately, those are on racial lines as well. So BIPOC people generally don't have many spaces where they can convene safely. And economic barriers are another means to that as well. A lot of the physical spaces that exist for queer people in Cape Town are located in parts of the city that are difficult to go to. And I can speak about this for hours because that's a result of apartheid spatial planning and purposive measures that the government at the time put in place in order to divide people. And we're still seeing the vestiges of that divide us further in the modern day. Now it's not so much, well, it's purportedly not based on race now, but it's very much class and sexuality does play into that as well.
[00:09:30.071] Kent Bye: So you just elaborated on what's happening in South Africa. And you mentioned that you have some collaborators in other parts of Africa that may have different implications when it comes to some of the laws that have been passed. Maybe you could just elaborate on what some of the other contexts are for some of your other collaborators that are working on this project.
[00:09:47.722] Queer.Space: Yeah, I mean, my collaborators come from a variety of different cities, Cairo, Dakar, Tanzania, Dar es Salaam specifically, and Nairobi. And all of those cities have really strict rules around the LGBTQIA plus community. So it's difficult for people to even present as LGBTQIA plus in public. I feel like often as queer people, we oscillate between these states of being like hyper visible and invisible. And the government's measures have made it so that we really do have to be invisible most of the time. We're not really allowed to exist in the state that we would like to be. So in the absence of people being able to actually meet and express themselves as queer people, digital spaces can provide us that space.
[00:10:35.131] Kent Bye: And we talked a little bit around race and class and some of the legal implications. And does religion also play a part in that as well?
[00:10:43.556] Queer.Space: Absolutely. I mean, there are really conservative religious communities. And I think this project, my project, focuses on that intersection a bit more. So I am openly a queer Muslim, which comes with a lot of complexity. And growing up, I didn't see anyone that was like me, who openly spoke about those two identities intersecting in a way that's not a contradiction, but is actually just a part of who I am. It's just my identity. And Yeah, I think for a lot of people, just the existence of me as a queer Muslim is an affront to the system that they've built. They view it as a stain, a tarnish on society, and they feel really emboldened to actually take action against that because they feel like it is a rupture in the system that they've created.
[00:11:34.929] Kent Bye: OK, well, it seems like we've said a little bit of the what's happening in the context for where you're at and your place in time in South Africa and Africa in general. So maybe you could tell me, like, where did you then go from there in terms of starting to both design this VR chat experience, which is the dollhouse for queer imaginaries? Like, where did you begin to actually start to build it out?
[00:11:56.618] Queer.Space: Yeah, I think it started as like a very traditional architectural project. Like I had this idea very early on for a conceptual framework and the idea was to use the dollhouse as a container. Dollhouses are really interesting because it's children's first kind of interaction with space making. And I loved this idea that we could invite people to create home in their own image. And that's what you really do with a dollhouse. Like it starts off empty and there's furniture that you could place into that home and it becomes a way where you could refigure spaces. Interestingly, like as architects, we also create models to trial and test ideas. And this really did feel like an experiment. So creating this project as a model that could shift and form in different iterations was very exciting to me. And then originally the idea was far more ambitious and we're still on this journey. But the idea was to invite a series of storytellers to come and tell their stories what home meant to them. So the dollhouse would be a container for plural explorations of what the queer domestic could look like. and each one would have its own conceptual story. That is still something that's in progress, but very early on, we realized that it would be important for us to center the story or this project in someone's story, and my producer suggested that it would be a really good idea for it to be mine. So reluctantly, I decided to do that. And it's still something that I'm very, not just nervous about, but uncomfortable with because I've always viewed my role in the collective, but also in the artistic world as being a facilitator. I want to be a loud speaker to other people's stories. I want to translate their stories into different projects. So that's where I feel more comfortable. But this project got increasingly personal and deep as we started creating it. So we set the onboarding experience of the project in my childhood bedroom. And we ended up telling the story of what home meant to me at different stages of my life. So in the onboarding, we start off and we unpack my process of leaving home. because it was no longer safe for me. And you see me in a very vulnerable moment of my life, sharing with audiences what that moment meant for me. Like, what does it mean for me if I stay at home? What does it mean if I leave? And what am I leaving behind because I can't take it with me? And when we built out the narrative, it became increasingly interesting to us to allow the dollhouse to close that loop. So the dollhouse component of the project, each room represented a queer space that I've engaged with in my journey of discovery. So I found home on the internet and I also found home with my chosen family in house parties. So I found it really interesting how we could take traditional forms of the home, like a kitchen, and create a house party out of it. Have like a DJ booth set up as part of it as well. Cruising spaces are really important to the community because it's a way where people can feel a certain level of intimacy when they're deprived of that in the rest of the city, all their lives. So the bathroom becomes a cruising space with glory holes and graffiti, which kind of lays some of the narrative of the story. And there are much more intimate spaces for respite, like the bedroom, where for the first time you hear the adhan through the window, the call to prayer. in Arabic and it has a really nostalgic feeling to me because you hear the adhan at some point in the onboarding and it kind of closes that loop. So yeah, telling that story was really important and we wanted to end it with a question of what comes next. So in the performances that we've done for the project and in the activations, I typically read out a prayer, a dua at the end, talking about where I am. Like this process of building home is a much longer one, and there's a desire to get to a point where I can really occupy a space that can hold me and all of my complexity, but can also hold others and change the dynamic of what home means to others moving forward. So yeah, it's a deeply personal story that we hope will be an entry point, a way to teach people about the play mechanics of the dollhouse. And this is going to be a multi-year project where we are looking to invite other people to expand the world. And that's the beauty of VRChat. It can keep evolving. It's not a static project. We've pushed out like three updates this week and it'll continue to be updated. Yeah.
[00:16:16.590] Kent Bye: Okay. So just a clarifying question, because when you say the onboarding, when I think of onboarding, I think of the very first thing that I see, which is like, I think different than what you're talking about, which is the second floor. So in the architecture of your piece, you have three different floors, which is nice from an architectural perspective, because it allows you with elevator mechanic to expand out and to have multiple different levels that you can go up and have lots of different stories. And it's very modular in that way, but The onboarding that you're talking about is actually on the second floor. And so you're not actually starting on the onboarding. And so maybe you could elaborate on when you first go into the world, you have this mechanic of growing big and small and like and you have to get big in order to like actually push the button. So maybe just like set the context of that first floor. And if you're considering the second floor, the onboarding, then why not put that first? And, you know, just some of the decisions that you made there.
[00:17:07.412] Queer.Space: That is such a good question. Yeah, so we view our project as having multiple audiences. So there's the community, people who understand the story, and this is very much something that they'll keep coming back to. We don't imagine our audience as being one-time users. They're people who will come every weekend to experience different parties in the world or share space with others. So that's our primary audience, but we also anticipated that taking it to festivals like this, we would want people to understand the context of the piece. We decided to put it on the first floor instead of the ground floor because we wanted to give people the option to skip it. We know that it can be really frustrating if this is your favorite world to come to and you have to keep watching the onboarding every single time. So we did want it to be an opt-in experience and we also wanted it to be something that felt contained in a space. I didn't want it to start off with a negative note, which I know can sound weird because in linear storytelling, you do want to set the scene very early. So what we actually did is we have users spawn in a lobby space, which is inspired by kind of a dressing room. The idea is that you have a moment where you can change your avatar and see yourself embodied in your avatar in a mirror. And we thought that, although it's so simple, like anyone who's in VR understands that that's quite a simple idea, but we expected a lot of first-time users experiencing the project, specifically on the African continent, and we wanted to give them a moment to really appreciate seeing themselves in a character. So we thought that would be a great way to start the experience. You see yourself in your character, you play around with it, and you're almost like in an ante room, like backstage before you go into the rest of the experience. And you can also like group up with your friends before deciding where to go. Like maybe you do want to show someone the onboarding experience before you dive into the dollhouse, but you're given that choice, which I think is really important.
[00:18:58.740] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I guess, well, you said the first floor in the United States, we typically think of the first floor as, you know, there's a floor zero that happens in Europe and Africa. Yeah. So when I said second, I guess that's what you're referring to as the first floor. Okay. So on that first floor, once you go into that, which is essentially your monologue, which is in your bedroom, you made the architectural decision to have more of a theatrical staging. So, you know, you could have just had it. So you're coming out of the elevator and going into your room. But yet you come into the back and then you have like what makes it feel like you're on a theater set and you walk around and then there's kind of lighting and other things to indicate that this is a simulation or a replication. More that you're on stage rather than you're actually in the room, like a virtual recreation of the room. And then the room is also, as you're speaking, starting to shrink and close on you. And then when you're done speaking, it goes back out. And so maybe you could just elaborate on the choice to create the theatrical staging rather than the actual room and for coming into the back and having to go around the corner in order for it to begin.
[00:20:02.816] Queer.Space: Yeah, I think, thank you for that question. It's something that we thought a lot about. So I wanted to think of it metaphorically. Like to me growing up, I was very theatrical, so it is a reference to that. But I like this idea of asking the question, how could we ever be ourselves if we're performing on a stage for others? And that's what it really does feel like being a queer person in a conservative community. you do feel like you're putting on this act for other people and you could never really go back into your own personality, your own actions because you're stuck performing for others. I also really loved this idea of viewing the homemaker as a performer, like someone who performs multiple roles in order to keep up this artifice of what the home should be. So looking at both of those metaphors, we decided to construct the bedroom on a soundstage. And it was alluding to both of these metaphors, but we also thought it would be a great experience for people walking through the soundstage, understanding that this is a recreation of an event, but also stylizing in a way that felt like it fitted in this dollhouse project, which is very theatrical and over the top.
[00:21:11.929] Kent Bye: Okay, and yeah, there is a sense of anticipation of coming in and then going around the corner and having the monologue start. And I actually triggered the monologue and then someone else spawned in later and then we went again and then it was like this moment where I had already seen it so it wasn't triggered and the other person had saw it and they were watching it so I was like, are you seeing it? Are you not seeing it? you know, VRChat, you have the choice of having like either global or local. So this was a local so that when each person comes in, they're able to see it, which ensures that they can, you know, just come in and not worry about other people have already triggered and it's not going to trigger for them. And then on the other hand, it's like if people are there together, then you have this like splitting of the experience where it's not a shared experience anymore. And I think it's just like a constraint of VRChat. But I'm wondering if you like made that choice of like, okay, this is going to be a local rather than a global event.
[00:22:03.397] Queer.Space: Yeah. I mean, we wanted it to be an isolating experience. We wanted users to understand that you're going through this experience by yourself. And that's the way that we wanted to achieve it. You also can only watch it once. So if you come back, It's not available to you unless you respawn in the instance, which is intentional. Once you've left home, there is no coming back. And it's very clear that in the story, the character has left the bedroom to the dollhouse and will never have an opportunity to return, at least in the story. So those are some of the reasons why we did it, but optimization is another as well. I think working to optimize in VRChat is a lovely creative constraint, And it's a constraint where if you know where the boundaries of what you can do are, you can really have fun with it and make it work for the project and the narrative that you're trying to set.
[00:22:50.950] Kent Bye: And I have this experience of coming to festivals like this and watching 20 to 30 experiences within a matter of a couple of days. And then I find myself trying to remember. There was the monologue that I saw twice here. I saw it once in VR and then once in the Dome. But then I think it gets encoded into my short-term memory, but not in my long-term memory. I think in part because whenever there's just a speech, a speech alone without any other context to help elaborate what's being talked about, sometimes it's harder for me to remember exactly what was said. So maybe you could just recap the gist of the speech that you're making there in your childhood home.
[00:23:26.414] Queer.Space: Yeah. So the monologue basically starts with me speaking to my friend on a video call and urgently trying to communicate that it's time to leave because it's no longer safe for me at home. I speak about the fact that in my culture, men wear black and women wear white. And in that binary, I just don't feel like I belong. And it's talking a lot about acceptance. It's talking a lot about that kind of gut wrenching feeling that you're disappointing people who you love. And there's a lot of references to kind of Bollywood melodrama and the films that I grew up with that really center family as a core fundamental of storytelling, but also love. Like you can't have a romance in Bollywood melodrama without family being involved, which I think is so interesting. So the experience plays out and I have the suitcase that I've packed and it becomes time to leave and I contemplate and tell the audience that everything I want to take with me, I can't. You know, there's intangible things that I leave behind, the smell of my family's cooking, the sound of the adhan coming through the window. Those are things that I'll never be able to really replicate in true form. And there is a sense that I've left with a few things, but there are many things that I won't get again. So the onboarding experience ends with the door slamming shut, and there is this level of finality. I've left, I disappear, and you don't see the NPC character again in the experience.
[00:24:55.492] Kent Bye: And can you also elaborate on the walls closing in on you and then snapping back?
[00:25:00.205] Queer.Space: Yeah. So the walls closing in was very intentional to show this kind of constricting space. It did feel like home was becoming smaller and smaller across the years because it no longer could hold me and everything I wanted to be. So we did want to kind of use that as a way of raising the stakes, rising the tension before that culminating moment where I have to leave. And a lot of this is inspired by theatre. Hendrik Ibsen's A Dollhouse is an interesting precedent for this project as well, where there is a final door slam, where Nora slams the door and decides to leave, which at the time was very monumental. And this feels like a recreation of that. The snapping back is purely just VR chat. It's just purely there to reset the experience because it couldn't stay small. But yeah, that's some of the thought behind it.
[00:25:48.899] Kent Bye: OK, so at the end of the onboarding, you're leaving your home and then you can go back into the elevator up to the what you would call the second floor. Maybe I would call the third floor. And then you have this space where there's like a table with a dollhouse and there's like a key on the table that when you pick up and you get small and then you can explore around into this dollhouse. And yeah, maybe could just elaborate on that. this idea of the dollhouse as a metaphor and also as a sanctuary or a place that feels safe for you as you're escaping from the constriction and the dangers of being at home or no longer feel safe.
[00:26:22.884] Queer.Space: Yeah. So the dollhouse was always imagined as a container which can hold our stories and experiences. And we do view it as that. So it was really clear to us early on. We went through like maybe 50 iterations of what this should look like. Originally, I wanted something very architectural, very speculative. It looked like something coming out of SkyArk, the architecture university in Los Angeles, where there's really speculative forms and everything looks like it should belong in a kind of future, like Afro-futurist form. And we realized very early on that that wasn't working because we were true to the concept what this house needed to represent was a controlling image. It needed to represent what a traditional home looks like. And a traditional home, as we know it across geographies, weirdly enough, is like a gabled house with a certain material palette. So we made this look like the type of dollhouse that I played with and others know to play with so that it was really clear the way that they needed to interact with the dollhouse and that they could interact with the dollhouse. scale became a really interesting thing for us to play around with. One of the most interesting things about playing with a dollhouse is that it's sectioned. Like you can see through all of the rooms in the dollhouse and you can see multiple different interactions between people happening at the same time, which was something that we found really interesting. And we also like the idea that people could be at real-world scale peering in, and people could be at doll scale having a great time moving between rooms with their friends, and each of these groups could see each other and perceive each other, which is something that's very VRChat as well. So we loved that idea and we felt like we needed some way for people to understand how to dive into the world. And I mean, the most clear precedent that we kept coming back to is Alice in Wonderland. So giving them a series of objects which they can use to toggle between scales. So we had a key that allows them to shrink down into Zol scale and then a poppers bottle or leather polish, leather cleaner or whatever it's called as being the way that you grow into real world scale. So the user has the opportunity to pick up the key and there's some exposition written in the cutting mat as well, which explains this in more detail if you haven't fully understood it immediately. And then you're in doll scale and you can explore all of the rooms of the dollhouse. And most importantly, as is kind of fundamental to the experience of playing with a dollhouse, your agency is embraced. You have full reign over moving furniture around. throwing it over the table, which I saw people doing, and I got very excited by that. But you can rearrange rooms entirely, which is very exciting. And we're hoping in future iterations to also allow people to rearrange rooms, which I think could be really cool.
[00:28:58.737] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I want to dive more into the dollhouse, but before we do that, I wanted to skip to the dome version because in the dome version that you collaborated with Avinash of WeMakeVR, you had a whole translation of this VRChat World live broadcast into a planetarium, which is sort of like a... 360 view, but kind of like cut off from the bottom. At some point you have to make a choice as to what point you're going to not see parts of the floor, but you're going to see from like the waist up or from the feet up, maybe from the ground up, you know, from the perspective of the ground. And so, uh, in that you were on stage and also kind of giving us a guided tour through the space in a way that was different than how I experienced it when I went into the VR version. So there's this whole other dimension of this guided tour. that I got from the Dome experience that I didn't get in VR. And so first I'm wondering if you could just kind of elaborate on that process of working with Avinash in order to have this live streaming of a VR chat world within the context of the Dome and how you wanted to pull in other people and have a more of a social experience within a kind of asymmetrical social experience where there's a couple people in VR and then 200 or 300 people in a planetarium watching. Yeah, maybe just kind of like elaborate on the origins of this idea to do this translation of Dollhouse for queer imaginaries experience into like a dome experience.
[00:30:23.437] Queer.Space: Yeah, I think it was a really natural progression. Firstly, a big thank you to Avinash Changa, without whom this would have never been possible. I mean, he's really developed the technology to make that type of dome projection possible. And it was such a seamless collaboration as well. What we really wanted to do from the start is we recognized that IDFA was an unusual way to premiere the project because the project was always intended for an African audience, a very small niche audience, but an African audience. And we wanted people to experience the project the way that we saw the project being used. which is that you really would go through the project by yourself. People are going to be there activating the world and your interactions with others are core to the experience that you're going to have in the project. So for the dome projection, it was so obvious to us that we really needed to invite practitioners that we've worked with from the African continent to participate and kind of help to set the tone of what interactions could be like in the dollhouse. So we invited two collaborators who are based in South Africa and Tanzania, and both of them are collaborators that I've worked on with other projects who do really amazing work, both in VRChat, but also in their cities to convene people. And we gave them opportunities to tell their stories at key points in the experience. We also, for the installation at Dabraka Kront, we also invited South African practitioners and queer architects and artists to be part of our opening as well. So they were virtually in the world while people were diving into the dollhouse, which enabled these interactions and exchanges between festival goers here in Amsterdam and practitioners in the global south.
[00:32:03.237] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I think as an audience member watching this, you know, in the planetarium, there was a little bit of like the locomotion and the movement and mostly the yaw rotation is kind of like motion sickness inducing. It was okay. I mean, I've seen stuff that was worse, but it was still a little bit disorienting in terms of like the turning aspect. And so probably having like a fixed orientation might be a little bit easier there. on the audience but also there's an asymmetry of communication in terms of you were speaking in the audience for 300 people and then sometimes there's feedback but also sometimes you would be speaking there'd be a delay like that must have been difficult to even have to do that but then sometimes what you were saying was not being translated to the people in the world and so I feel like the audio kind of I mean it's certainly like a pioneering effort just to even get it to work but I think Figuring out the audio channels to figure out how to broadcast both in world and out of world in a way that is seamless was probably like the biggest challenge on top of the motion sickness comfort of locomoting in VR because there is options within VR chat where you teleport and you are able to move without moving the camera and you know, even though it maintains a certain amount of environmental presence and consistency there's kind of a dissociative aspect when you're teleporting but at the same time it can also be a comfort setting that might actually work a little bit better within the context of a dome experience where people may be suffering from different levels of motion sickness as they're watching it within the context of a planetarium
[00:33:34.818] Queer.Space: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, it was a first time for a lot of us to do this type of drum projection where everything was live and we scripted it, but truly like there's a lot of technical hurdles that we had to work around in this pioneering effort, as you mentioned. So one of the things was definitely movement. So we considered at some point having fixed cameras and it just felt like that wasn't a great opportunity to show people how users would navigate the space. But I think if we had to do this again, we'd have more fixed cameras because it would just help to stabilize the camera in certain frames where we wanted to focus on a longer piece, like a monologue or people sharing certain things. And that would definitely reduce the motion sickness. I definitely do understand what you mean. the audio issues were challenging. So there was latency issues with our microphones and we were streaming everything using Wi-Fi because it's VRChat. So we were streaming our audio going into VRChat, coming back into the speakers of the dome production at the Plantarium, which was the reason why there was that kind of echo, that delay in hearing what we were saying when we were unmuted. So we also made the decision to mute ourselves for most of the experience, Avinash and myself, so that there wasn't that latency issue. But whenever we needed to signal to the participants in the world that it's time to go to the next component of the experience, we had to unmute, which is why there was that problem. But I think that there's definitely ways to work around that with audio channels and also just maybe finding ways to switch off the microphone when we're speaking to audiences in the world or more automated ways of figuring this out. But it's the first time. We're hoping to do many more. I hope that IDFA continues doing these incredible dome projections. They're fantastic. And we're also looking at opportunities to showcase this project in a similar format in South Africa.
[00:35:23.164] Kent Bye: But I do want to go back to the guided tour aspect of this piece because I found it really interesting to hear your additional context for what these spaces were. And when I jumped into the VRChat experience and I did it here, there wasn't any other people that were there that were giving me that additional context. And so it just ended up being like these rooms that I didn't know the full story, the full context. And so I found it really both insightful and helpful to hear that in the dome presentation. but also wanting to hear more of that within the context of the VRChat experience. And so I'm wondering if you thought about how to either, you know, like you do on the second floor, you have a monologue with your avatar there. If you thought about having some way of if people want to get more information or context for these rooms and what they mean, if you're going to continue to expand this out and have either you come in again as that avatar speaking or other ways of transmitting that information.
[00:36:20.069] Queer.Space: Yeah, that's a really good point. And we kind of struggled with that for a little while because I always felt like it should be the dollhouse itself should be free of exposition. I think people explore the spaces and gain whatever they want from the spaces. That's not necessarily in most cases, it's not going to be what I intended. And I kind of loved that freedom. I love that people could go in and have an entirely different experience to what I intended. And they could also just take as much or as little away as possible. And to me, that was really freeing because it leads into that interactive component of the dollhouse. But after seeing people interact with this project through this festival, I'm seeing a different audience that probably does need to see more exposition and story in order to appreciate the project. So what we're thinking about doing in these future iterations or expansion of the world is to have object-based and video-based exposition. So you don't necessarily have to engage with it, but it's there if you want it. So there's small things like the prayer that I recited at the end of the dome projection will be a letter that you pick up and it plays the audio that tells you the story. There's other things, like there's great archival videos that we put together that we didn't end up using in this project, but we can definitely integrate it to tell more of the story of why these spaces are there, what they were inspired by, and just helping people to understand the narrative of the different rooms in the dollhouse.
[00:37:45.469] Kent Bye: Right, so you're having the premiere of this piece here at IVA DocLab, but it sounds like that you've been meeting with some of your community within these spaces, or maybe you could just kind of elaborate on how you've seen these virtual spaces that you've been building as a refuge or sanctuary for folks from the LGBTQIA plus community and BIPOC communities of your region, and just how you've seen the virtual spaces as a way of cultivating these communities.
[00:38:12.096] Queer.Space: Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, firstly, collectivizing is really important. I think it gives communities who were previously or currently denied resources the opportunity to share resources, tools, tactics for existing in the city. So I've seen a lot of people giving each other advice. Like, I know this great collaborator in Kenya, and we have really emotional conversations about where she feels she is in her life. and the fact that she aspires to be in a place where she could share more openly. And we talk about different tactics of existing in the city, like what do we need to do in order to get by, let alone to thrive at this stage, but just get by. And I think VR, social VR, has the opportunity to connect people who just wouldn't otherwise be connected. And we also see the metaverse crew as being a great opportunity for sharing resources across collectives as well. But I won't get into that in detail. The other ways that this is really beneficial is it provides a space for refuge. And I referenced it in the dome projection as a locus for healing. I think that a lot of queer people feel really isolated, but also overwhelmed in the physical city. And the digital space could be a space where people just go to be alone. They could just go to virtual space to feel like they could unwind and they don't have to answer anyone's nagging questions. So there's opportunities for different levels of engagement. And I think that's really important.
[00:39:37.304] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that you were presenting during the dome presentation that we haven't talked about yet here? I mean, you said that you've written a script and you were walking us through and sharing different things. I thought it was really beautiful by the way, just all the additional stuff that you were doing. It's not an easy job to be standing on stage, rehearsing all these things, being in VR, having the echo or the delay, you know, it was like, I was like, how is he doing this? That's amazing. But, um, but is there anything else that we haven't talked about yet here on this podcast that you wanted to really share? to the planetarium community that you wanted to maybe mention now?
[00:40:09.265] Queer.Space: Yeah, I mean, the dome projection was really interesting because yes, we had a lot of technical challenges and it was interesting skirting that. I think Avinash and myself have such a great rapport that we just found a way to signal to each other when we needed to shift into Plan B, C, D, E in some cases, which was really fun. And I hope that we at least communicated the project to some degree. And it was also really interesting you speak about the script. I wrote that script and I found it really challenging to perform that out to an audience because it does feel deeply personal. And one of the ways that I could get around that is because I was wearing a headset. I couldn't see a single person in the audience. And I think that was really important for me. And it does speak to VR. Like I was in a room with people who I've known for a very long time and I appreciate deeply. And I was performing to them and to myself.
[00:40:58.342] Kent Bye: in a virtual room in VR, right?
[00:40:59.543] Queer.Space: In a virtual room in VR, yeah. And I couldn't see how people were reacting to it. I couldn't really see whether they liked it or disliked it or whether they were judging me. It did feel like it was a purely personal experience, one that I would have in my bedroom. And that was one of the reasons why I think I could be authentic and I could share openly in that space. There is one thing that I think audiences should know. At the end of the dome projection, I noted something which I feel is really important. I said that I hope audiences that experience the space recognize the plastic quality of the dollhouse. as a kind of urgent call to action, an urgent desire to recreate the digital world in our physical cities. And I think that's really important. I'm not really proposing this project as being a replacement for real tangible space that people can actually feel safe in the physical city. But I hope this can empower more people to recognize how important this is.
[00:41:56.191] Kent Bye: and to feel like this aspiration is worthwhile like we need to all collectively look at how we can do our part to make this a reality in our physical cities yeah there's this idea and process philosophy that there's the mental pole and the physical pole and that there's a process of what starts as an idea of these imaginations these speculative futures these possibilities so going from the possibility to the actuality it feels like you know science fiction for many years as stories around what's possible and that people get inspired and then actually build it at some point and so just the same these kind of like after futurism indigenous futurism arab futurism feminist futures or even just like virtual futures that you're able to build the virtual space to then actually have real embodied interactions and experiences cultivate communities and then build it out in the physical world
[00:42:48.314] Queer.Space: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I hope like part of my aspiration for this project is I hope it becomes redundant. I hope like I'm not still building the dollhouse in five years because that would mean that the project is not successful. I hope that ultimately people are empowered enough from this project to make this project redundant.
[00:43:08.786] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and these virtual spaces might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:43:18.496] Queer.Space: Yeah, I think the ultimate potential of VR is shortening the distance between people, both physically and socially. So I think physically reducing the distance between people, people can have headsets across the world and we can all be in the same virtual space, sharing ideas in a way that just wasn't possible before. We're seeing global North creators, global South creators sharing ideas across VR. And I think that's really beautiful. It just reduces that distance. which is poetic, but also it's a great way of kind of reforming and rebalancing after the atrocities of the past, which I think is really powerful. It's a great way to build community, but also socially. I mean, I live in Cape Town, a city that is divided purposefully by apartheid planning. And I think we can reduce social distance during VR. People who wouldn't otherwise interact find themselves in the same space. And because you can't see each other's markers, social class, race, ethnic group, religion, in VR, unless you choose to, you can have interactions that feel more pure. You're interacting with someone because you find them interesting, not because they belong to the same group as you. So I hope that VR will help reduce that distance.
[00:44:33.473] Kent Bye: Right. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:44:39.317] Queer.Space: Nothing more, but I hope to see you all in the dollhouse.
[00:44:42.559] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Queer Space, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to talk more about all the things that you're doing. I think this idea of creating these safe spaces, these sanctuaries for communities and to provide opportunities for people to connect in these virtual environments in a way that they feel safe and feel like they have a place to be vulnerable and express their full identity in a way that they might not be able to feel safe in the physical world i think it's such a vital use case that i've seen so much within the context of vr chat there's a lot of these marginalized communities that are gathering together in these virtual spaces and unfortunately it's more and more needed in the world today it seems to be kind of a pendulum that swings back and forth and you know unfortunately right now it seems to be swinging in the wrong direction in terms of making it safe for more and more people to be who they are in the physical world. So yeah, just really appreciate both the project that you created and to hear all of your deeper thinking about, you know, as an architect designing these spaces and what does it mean to create these spaces, but ultimately wanting to create these spaces in physical reality at some point as the ultimate goal. So yeah, just really enjoyed both the project and having the opportunity to unpack it here more today. So thank you so much. Thank you. 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 voicesofvr.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.
