There were a number of pieces at SXSW that were centered around embodied interactions including HONEY FUNGUS, which is a series of interactive embodied experiments telling a broader story of cultivating intimacy with ecology. This piece leans more into embodied dream logic rather than clearly articulating a narrative journey, and I had a fascinating conversation with Jonah King who decoded the underlying symbolism. King’s first step of his creative process was to go down a rabbit hole researching queer ecology and the latest research on fungi, and he wrote an essay titled “Unfathomable Intimacies” that lays out his original inspirations. One thing that really stuck with me from the experience was this intriguing AI mash-up of Smithsonian Field Research and amateur erotica designed in order to cultivate a new form of ecological intimacy with the world around us. I appreciated this experience a lot more after having a chance to learn more about additional context provided on the website as well as insights gained from my conversation with King. To me the dream logic in this piece leans a little bit more into personal symbols that need some decoding rather than more universal archetypes that are easier to project the intended meaning upon. But I always love learning more about Fungi since they represent so many paradigm-shattering insights.
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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 continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2025, I'm going to start to dive into a number of experiences that have some compelling embodied interactions as a core part of the story that they're telling. So the first piece that I'm going to be diving into is a piece called Honey Fungus and it's about honey fungus and it's overall trying to tell the story of the larger ecology and our relationship to it and trying to cultivate an intimacy with these ecological ideas. So Jonah Hill started with an essay called Unfathomable Intimacies, which was kind of exploring some of the larger themes of intimacy and being close to nature that he wanted to explore this kind of like queer ecology and a number of different authors that he came across. And also just fungi and just the paradigm shifting insights that scientists were learning about fungi and the ways that it was completely changing their mind around what the nature of reality was based upon observing these fungi and how they're in relationship to the world around them. And so through those rabbit holes of research that he went down, did a bunch of research, wrote this essay, and then started to build it out in Unreal Engine, wanting to really focus first and foremost on these embodied interactions, and then starting to structure the narrative around that. And so the overall experience has this sort of dream logic. And I feel like with dream logic, you can have like universal symbols or personal symbols. And this one leans a little bit more onto the personal symbols where I really needed to have this conversation with Jonah to kind of unpack either the context or the meaning of some of these different symbols and these different embodied interactions. I mean, I think I got some of it on a high level, but there's a lot that I got from the conversation and reading through the essay that was filling in some of the gaps that I didn't get from the experience alone. The other thing I just want to mention is that there's this really cool mechanic where you are grabbing these little orbs and you're sticking your head inside of them. And then when you stick your head inside, you hear these. really weird mashups between amateur erotica and this is smithian field reports and so it's taking this biological scientific information and mashing it up with sensuous erotica that is again trying to cultivate this type of intimacy with the world around us and overall just trying to put the experiencer of this piece through these different embodied interactions to be a little bit more closer to the world around us and to the amazing features of fungi themselves So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Jonah happened on Monday, March 10th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:07.521] Jonah King: My name is Jonah King. I am a visual artist, media artist, filmmaker. This is actually my first VR experience that I've made that I'm presenting at South by this year. And so, yeah, I'm really new to the field. And so far, I really love it. Yeah. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Sure. So I'm from Ireland and I did my undergrad in media art, digital media art. And then I came to New York, did an MFA at Columbia in also new genres. And I have been working as a visual artist for nearly 20 years, probably. But in that time, I've been really omnivorous. I've like made experimental theatre and a lot of multi-channel video installation inspired by kind of art house cinema at the beginning and video art and then found this probably during the pandemic when I couldn't work with actors anymore and I'd been doing stuff in 3D, a lot of 3D animation and built a PC that could handle what I was trying to do. And then just kind of, you know, we were all sitting in our rooms for nearly two years and I bit the bug and just went really into 3D and interactive. So that's, yeah.
[00:04:18.752] Kent Bye: And when was your first encounter with virtual reality as a medium then?
[00:04:22.722] Jonah King: I think my first encounter was with the New York Times when they did the cardboard headsets about the refugee crisis, I think, or about migration at least. And I remember putting on this Google cardboard with an iPhone and hearing something behind me and being really startled and turning around and seeing a small child behind me. And it was like the first time that it kind of got me and it really did get me. It was like a physiological reaction. and it reminded me a little bit in the studio with multi-channel installation which is probably the majority of my works before this have been three to five screens i did a lot of experiments where i was hanging screens and then projecting different colors and like just sort of feeling the physiological response to imagery if it's just over your shoulder in your peripheral vision and so that was kind of like the first time i was like oh there's something in this that's really magic yeah
[00:05:16.244] Kent Bye: So where did the project that you're premiering here at South by Southwest 2025, Honey Fungus, where did that begin?
[00:05:22.748] Jonah King: Yeah, so it has a kind of long back tail. All of my projects are looking at different ways that new scientific discoveries are undermining dominant cultural beliefs. So I'm really inspired. Actually, everything can really come down to this one quote by this amazing philosopher and poet, Fred Moten, who gave a workshop that I attended. I haven't seen this written, but he made this statement, which I should probably get tattooed on my body. He said, can an understanding of quantum physics undermine our subjectivity to the point where you form new habits of assembly? So anyway, that made me think about our own biology, and I stumbled across this fact that 63% of our biological mass is not human. We are like a collusion of forces intertwined, different little beings having their own societies and, I don't know, worlds within us. And so then there's this funny question that arises about, you know, where do you place you within that constellation of things? And is that constellation of things bounded by the surface of your skin or does it extend beyond into the larger ecosystem? And, you know, we can really fundamentally say, of course, yes, you know, you hold your breath and you die and so on. And at the same time, I was following... very superficially following this research in Barcelona that you probably know about. Mel Slater was one of the academics looking at first person body displacement in VR. So there's all this stuff coming up where you could stick people in a different body or kind of remote people away in VR. Yeah, I think even just speculatively that made me imagine like what is this thing where you can very quickly have your consciousness catch up with where your body appears to be placed and it reminds me a little bit of like in a dream where you kind of download the knowledge of the context in your dreams very quickly and get on with it. So it seemed in VR you could be put into pretty much anything and you'd kind of roll with it. And that seemed like an interesting way to talk about this larger ecological web that we are part of.
[00:07:28.399] Kent Bye: Yeah, thematically, a lot of those themes of the interconnectedness of our body to the world around us reminds me a lot of the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast. I'm just curious if you have come across any of their work and the parallels between some of those different themes you were starting to explore.
[00:07:42.236] Jonah King: Yeah, absolutely. I love their work. I just saw their exhibition at Bitforms in New York about two weeks ago, and we're definitely in conversation. I think it's really interesting to think about why digital media artists seem so obsessed with ecology, but I think there's also a big ecological turn. This isn't the only VR experience that's thinking about fungus and mycelium. And a part of that is because the scientific research of the last couple of years is really mind-blowing and really upturns so much of our pre-understanding about nature. Everything from honey fungus, the name of the project, is named after the largest plant entity, single living entity in the world, which is a honey fungus. There's one honey fungus that they reckon spans from Northern California up into Northern British Columbia. And there's probably a myriad of these interconnected honey fungi talking to each other. and you can tap into the filament of the mycelium at one place in a state and through its transmission through its kind of it pulses in a kind of like electrical cable you can determine the weather conditions on the other side of the state so there's a sort of similarity in thinking. Merlin Sheldrake calls it the wood wide web. There's a kind of a way in which technology, our technology, current technology is echoing pre-existing biological formations. But it's also just fascinating and it's very of this moment, especially as we face, you know, climate catastrophe.
[00:09:15.296] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's been a number of fungus, mushroom-themed VR and immersive projects over the years, including Hypho at Sundance of 2020. That was one where you're actually kind of embodying and going into the mycelial threads. There's also Forager. I had this whole immersive haptic installation, very visceral experience. showing the time lapse of a mushroom through this 3D mesh that gives you a sense of it growing over time. And then there's an amazing stereoscopic 180 video that I happen to see through Sandwich Division's theater application. It's called Fungi, The Web of Life. It actually features Merlin Sheldrake's work following him. But there's some incredible time lapse photography that's in that piece. And I learned so much around just how core to life fungi are. And so it seems like that, you know, my take on it, at least, is that this ecological turn, that there's something around VR as a medium that is moving us towards like process relational philosophy, but just the interrelatedness of our being and how VR as a medium is able to preserve these relational contexts in a way that absent of those frames allows us to describe those holes and parts can be preserved within that context that you can start to represent that in a more holistic fashion. So I feel like just the medium itself is providing new opportunities for us to better explore the fundamental interconnected character of fungi. So anyway, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:10:48.716] Jonah King: Sure. Well, I mean, yeah, I totally agree. And in terms of Yeah, so I think fungi is really interesting because it's a very literal example of interdependence, right? Like, as you said, so much of the natural ecology depends on fungi. It's kind of the binding agent of so much of the world's life forces. But also, you know, we're interdependent on so many other levels. And so when you want to talk about There's a panel today at South by about awe in extended reality. So if you want to think about awe and the induction of awe, you think about like staring over a vista, like a natural vista, something that makes you feel part of a larger formation or part of an emergent field, right? And I think that these are concepts that exist in esoteric Buddhism and in meditation and in sort of psychedelic philosophy and in so many fields, but increasingly also just in science and having this example of mycelium as a literal thing that you can go to a plant pot and pull out the plant and see it and be like, oh, this is a living entity where all of it's functions are happening external to its body. It's reproducing, it's eating all on the outside. Some of the mycelium like schizoid commune I think is the name of one of the mushrooms that has 2,800 gender identities or something like that. So you begin to see these examples very directly that yeah completely overturn individualism and at a time when things are getting increasingly partisan it's very hard to be a bigot when you begin to dismantle phenomenologically and also in terms of your psychological constructs just dismantle individualism on that level you can hopefully begin to say well these sort of dividing constructs like gender like race like social class are really problematic, obviously, but also really mutable, like just absolutely superficial. Yeah.
[00:12:58.357] Kent Bye: Yeah. So we've talked a lot about like the context of Fungi and where did this project begin for you in terms of the catalyzing moment where you decided that you wanted to make a project and then talk about your process for the development of this piece?
[00:13:11.929] Jonah King: Yeah, sure. So this project happened in part because of project funding by the Irish Arts Council. So they gave us a project award in 2022 and that made it certain that the project was going to happen. It had been pitched initially as a kind of a short film in VR, but the more I began working in VR, the more I wanted to lean into interactive and remove kind of watching something that could potentially be on a 2D screen. Some of the texts that you hear in the project are from an other artist called Su Huang who made these beautiful series of poems by combining Smithsonian field research with amateur erotica in an early kind of GPT and it creates these like slightly like kind of sexy but there's no humans involved sort of poetics And I began to think about like, you know, okay, so we're talking about mycelium, we're talking about fungi, but what we're talking about is like other worlds that aren't necessarily fathomable by our own day-to-day lives of being human. And would it be possible to imagine intimacy within the context of a soil ecology? What would that look like? And Sue's poems really sum that up really nicely. They're just kind of like disconcertingly familiar. And so that was a core ingredient. And as I said before, like working in the pandemic in kind of isolation, I also think like on a personal level, I witnessed my grandmother at one point had a stroke and it was brief and she was fine, but there was like a couple of days where you sort of saw, and I'm sure many people have had this experience with family members or also people who've experienced dementia, things like that. You saw the kind of narrative of herself, like disappear from the biology. And that was fascinating because it seemed like the last thing on the priority list. Like she could still walk around, eat, go to the bathroom, do all these things. But the sort of construct of the individual was just evaporated like condensation on a window pane or something. So all of those ingredients came together and in terms of developing the project, I worked with an amazing production company based in Brooklyn called Pariah Interactive. They work with a lot of artists in New York. I incubated the project through the New Museums startup incubator New Ink. And I also met people like Winslow. We worked very briefly in a studio together when he was creating Forager and doing photogrammetry of the mushrooms growing while I was starting this project. And I saw these people, this community of people, making their work, making this radically strange new work in XR. And I had had pretty much all of my training and professional experience in a sort of more commercial side of the art world, just galleries and museums, which I still love to participate in, but never felt totally home for the kind of work I was making that involved, you know, people would come in and hang up their paintings. And I was like up a ladder in a gallery trying to drill multiple projections in the ceiling or whatever. And I just saw this kind of opening of creativity and the newness of this field and thought it would be really nice to give it a shot. Yeah.
[00:16:19.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I certainly have a lot of vivid memories of this experience of that weird hybrid between the erotica and what was the other thing?
[00:16:27.694] Jonah King: Smithsonian Field Book Research or Field Research Archive. Yeah.
[00:16:31.958] Kent Bye: Smithsonian Field Archive. Yeah, it was kind of a weird mix, but also the structure of the piece feels like it's in these discrete chapters and that there seems to be like at the core of these chapters some type of interactive component where it's getting my body engaged into the experience. And there's other narrative components, but it felt like kind of a sequence of different chapters rather than like a coherent narrative. At least that's what I was taking away was more of the interactive components than sort of the narrative. But as you're designing the piece, I'm wondering if you could describe how you think of the structure of the piece and like the journey that you wanted to take people on.
[00:17:08.413] Jonah King: For sure. So yes, that's a great question. And I think it's really interesting. A lot of my projects have been scripts and then production. And this was production and then script and part of production and then script. And I made it over several years in small increments. And a part of it was going like, what does this medium do? And interaction just seemed, especially when I was building an Unreal Engine, I was learning Unreal Engine as I was building it. I hadn't had experience in it before. And working with Pariah, of course, he really took the lead on that. But then I took over at points and built stuff in. And I was like, you know, what if we had to stretch our arms? And I'd get these kind of ingredients of ecological philosophy. Like, for example, there's a word that only exists in Native American language called papawi, which is the force that pushes mushrooms up overnight. And we don't have that word in English. We don't have it in English. any other language as far as I know but I was like how can I have a sort of a bellows experience where we can push the mushroom up overnight like what could I make that in VR and and is that something that I could only make in VR right which I think is key and so there was this kind of like okay so what if we bring the controllers out and then bring them in together that feels like it's kind of pumping or bellowing something and then we need some sort of haptic feedback so that got added on and then I began to draw these, like, I was thinking about this sort of interdependence with mycelium, so I started to draw images into mycelium, and then that became the structure that sort of grows around you in the tube that you're in in one of the scenes. Then it began to be a thing where I had a scene where there wasn't an interaction, but it felt wrong. So it was like, OK, well, people are expecting an interaction. And I tried out my friends and I'd see them look confused. And so I'd build back. And so this project has been like going to school for me. I learned both how to do it, but also maybe hopefully what works better as I went. And so each little chapter got globbed on until it began to form its own coherency. And then I realized I wanted it to be starting going down and sort of in and then ending in a kind of expanse and a sort of like dissolution and I sort of put that structure onto it and then you know it would need like a little bit more guidance and so that got worked into the voiceover and so I've never really made a project that was so intuitive like that But I really enjoyed it. I think maybe I'd write a script next time, but I still loved doing it this way. And so that kind of ended up in the result that you have now. And then there was obviously reining things in and honing things back and cutting things out.
[00:19:41.809] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I've talked to a lot of different people in this immersive space, I feel like there's people that are usually coming from some type of center of gravity, whether it's from a cinematic background with filmmaking, a theater background, or even architecture, or someone from a web design background, and then also game designers who are much more into this I'd say iterative process that, you know, I feel like there's a tension between the pre-production, production and post-production linearity that you see in like film and architecture, where there's kind of like a roadmap where there is a script that you're following and everything is kind of built around that. And in an architecture, it's like the architectural plans and But there's distinct phases of production, whereas I think in the game design world, there's much more of an iterative approach where you have to see how the interactions feel in the context of each other in a string of different interactions. And so it's not something that you could plan out how that's going to be because you get a lot of iterative feedback. So as I look at this piece, because I was left with those interaction experiences then, it felt like a piece that was designed from that interaction design at the center of gravity of it. it makes sense that you would then find other ways of stitching it together, because it does feel like these little interactive vignettes that are exploring some sort of new dynamic with how I'm moving my body in this fungi context.
[00:21:03.162] Jonah King: And certainly some of my favorite VR experiences I've had have been 360 video, but this was in a game engine, so it's like, what does the game engine do that you can't do anywhere else, was kind of a core question. So the interesting thing about the process of learning this for me was actually what it isn't. So, you know, I love video and film, but it wasn't the space to make a straight short film. Like you lose the luxury of editing and framing in a certain way. It seemed more like my experience in experimental theater than it did to film. But then also, you know, there's things that you get in a theater that you don't get in this, but maybe then it's more close to practical magic because you're kind of guiding people's attention. And so maybe it's about there's a space where this medium will eventually just like have completely its own force. And I think some of the creators here are certainly doing that. And that's what's really exciting for me. Yeah.
[00:21:58.333] Kent Bye: And so when you think about this journey that you take people on, you know, now that you've created all these interactive components, what is the design intent that you want to have as people go through this journey?
[00:22:11.007] Jonah King: Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, this is a PC VR experience, which allowed me a lot more room for visuality. The hope is for people to rethink their relationship to the larger ecology, that you can have nine minutes of hopefully like high visual experience. And it was important for me from a visual arts background, but also just be able to have the luxury of the PC VR, which gives you bloom and gives you all of these sort of like very textural deliciousness, to have a kind of meditative experience that allows you to kind of rethink your own role in the larger ecosystem.
[00:22:53.328] Kent Bye: So you were referring earlier to this kind of bellows in your experience where you're moving your arms back and forth, and you're having these segments grow up around you. And you're referring to this indigenous word that was around the force that pushes these mushrooms up. And I'm trying to remember, is that explained in the piece at all, or is that just part of your own design inspiration?
[00:23:15.316] Jonah King: I don't think it's explicitly explained the reference to the word, but it was just the starting point for making the experience. Yeah.
[00:23:22.422] Kent Bye: OK. Yeah, because sometimes there'll be the language and grammar of immersive storytelling in VR is like poetic dream logic, where there's some sort of symbol that's happening. And in this case, there's a very distinct reference to what that symbol is. As I was watching it, I wasn't like decoding it. But now that I hear it, I was like, oh, that's actually pretty cool now that I know that. And so there's a part of me that wonders if there's ways of decoding some of those symbols. Or I'd love to hear some of your thoughts in terms of the line between that really abstract, poetic experience versus the way that it's tying back to the fungi in a way that may not be explicitly clear, at least when I went through it.
[00:24:00.819] Jonah King: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I hope to make, I love immersive, so I hope to keep making an immersive, but I'm also making other types of work. So I make sculptures, I write, and I do films for traditional film festivals. So I think in the constellation of works, it leans more towards, like, for example, I give that fact about the word that describes the mushrooms pushing up overnight, papawi, in an essay that I've published alongside this or kind of previous to this. And that was where I like worked out all the ideas and that becomes the sort of codex. So in my practice, when I go to make a larger project like this, I write a lot first. So I'm reading a lot, I'm writing a lot, I'm thinking about, I make these kind of, there's a word for this, like autofiction essays. where I'm thinking and reading about theory but I'm also relating it to my own life and then it becomes a document that's maybe a page or two long and then usually I publish those in an exhibition catalog or somewhere or other and it also just becomes the thing that I refer back to when you're like you know six months in and you're just thinking about the code and you're totally confused as to why you started doing this you can reread the essay and make some choices based on that and it becomes the kind of yeah the seeds the spores for these like various moments right but it's really more my process And if people have the experience and read the essay, they can think about how they inform each other. If they read the essay, don't have the experience, hopefully that stands alone, and so on.
[00:25:24.842] Kent Bye: And so is that essay published? Or was it advertised here in the installation?
[00:25:29.867] Jonah King: It's been published, that particular essay was published in 2023, but often it's in exhibition catalogues and it's on my website. So I tend to circulate it around to my friends and students and community in general or people who are interested in the work and want to find out what was really going on more about it.
[00:25:49.233] Kent Bye: Okay, well, I'll have to get the link and put it in the show notes. And I'd love to take a look at it just to see because it's always interesting to see how these ideas can be expressed across different media. Because it sounds like this essay was really the seed of then creating your own design document or creative inspiration for moving forward and also an aggregation of all the research because you had mentioned that you were doing a lot of research into the fungi and hearing all this latest mind-blowing stuff from different scholars and researchers. And so I'd love to hear any reflections on some of the really interesting pieces of research that you came across or how you go about finding it, what context, if you're reading papers or if it's more like condensed in books or videos, podcasts, where are you getting all this kind of research around fungi and what were some of the things that really stuck out for you?
[00:26:39.571] Jonah King: Yeah, I mean, I just tend to go obsessively down rabbit holes. So a lot of this sort of research or thinking was happening during the pandemic, like during lockdown, when I feel like it was the first time biology was being taken more seriously than economics. Like we had this pause at the beginning and people started to, you know, everything sort of changed because there was these like undead little pursuers that were coding everything and we were beginning to reframe our perception of public space and intimacy and things like that and then I discovered a lot of people around this field that I saw this is loosely called like queer ecology so people like Timothy Morton have written a lot about this who's an amazing scholar I love followed Timothy Morton's work on object-oriented ontology before that, and then they wrote an essay called Queer Ecology that is really beautiful, summarizes a lot of that stuff. Donna Haraway, obviously, Cyborg Manifesto, really fantastic, talking about the edges of the body and how our relationship to technology and nature kind of just completely intertwine. Those were key texts. Then it was actually I'd started drafting this project when Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life came out. And that was just like everything in one book, you know. And Merlin Sheldrake talks about the biology side and the ecology side, but also queer theory, also psychedelics, also all of these things that are sort of like somehow overlapping with each other, therapy and things like that. Yeah. And also there's another person that I'm thinking of who's great, who wrote The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing, really amazing book talking about, you know, these mushrooms that grow as a result of a particular type of extractive capitalism, but then become like the most valued objects in type of a kind of culinary market. Really interesting, weird stuff that was just kind of dissolving boundaries. Yeah.
[00:28:28.855] Kent Bye: Have you had a chance to see the VR piece called Plastisapiens? No, I haven't. Okay, it was at Tribeca back in 2022.
[00:28:35.718] Jonah King: They have a big installation, kind of like webby installation, and there was plastic, right? Yeah, I think so. Heather... Mary? Yeah, there's a book, Plastic Matters. I don't know, I'm going to get this wrong. But Heather, someone, amazing writer, amazing book. Yes, completely in that field, totally. Yeah, they're definitely in conversation, and I love that work. I saw that at Tribeca as well.
[00:29:01.211] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, because it reminds me a lot of the also leaning into Donna Haraway and the boundaries between our body and the world. There was also a piece by Polymorph that showed it at the Doc Lab a number of years ago. It also showed here at South by Southwest. I saw it in Portland, Oregon. It was called Symbiosis, where it was very much inspired by Donna Haraway and this idea of you becoming these different entities and going in the world is really a haptic driven experience. But this idea of this speculative future and with plus sapiens, this kind of feminist futures, but also this ecological integration for all that. So yeah, so it sounds like there's quite a lot of like philosophical deep thinking that is going behind this project.
[00:29:42.057] Jonah King: Yeah, for sure. And it's also just like what I listen to on the train, what I'm reading, you know, it's like just a lot of my brain likes to consume a lot of different stuff like that. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, there's a lot of philosophical thinking. But I think also, I mean, I think of visual art training. When I went to undergrad in Ireland, we didn't really have classes. We had workshops where we could make things and then we had a critical theory classes. So it kind of built up a lexicon and engagement with philosophy and critical theory, which I think is really normal in visual arts, and then has been really nice to draw on later when I move into other fields, that kind of literacy with weird ideas and seeing what people are thinking about.
[00:30:25.562] Kent Bye: Have you had a chance to see any other projects while you're here at South by Southwest?
[00:30:29.167] Jonah King: Yes. What's the name of the one just there with the red curtains? Oh, that's the Just For You trilogy? Just For You trilogy, yes. I watched the Just For You trilogy and really loved it. Yeah, there was some really interesting uses of space in that, and it gave me the textures of... a particular type of art house cinema that I really love like it brought me back to Jens Fankmeyer and like you know David Lynch and who's that Canadian guy who's amazing kind of that really I grew up on and love and I just love being immersed in that space and seeing all the different openings and the ways that you were looking through boxes and your vision was constricted and held and guided yeah that's an amazing work loved it
[00:31:08.560] Kent Bye: Yeah, I first came across All That Remains at Venice in 2022, and it just like blew my mind. It felt like it put me into this altered state of consciousness of like, what did I just experience? Yeah, this kind of surrealist, absurdist, but also, yeah, just really perverting any of my expectations for where it's going to go next.
[00:31:26.187] Jonah King: And I think, I mean, side tangent, but, you know, surrealism in both VR, immersive and just 3D animation spaces is really prevalent in part because I think the technology lends itself very easily to surrealism. But also because surrealism, I think, had a bit of a bad rap. for a few decades in the art world and now it's being used to different ends particularly like queering phenomena like queer ecology but also just like weirding and changing spatial and temporalities and you know usefully disrupting consensus reality in a way that's really exciting and lovely yeah nice and so what's next for you or honey fungus Right, so this is the world premiere of Honey Fungus and I've been working with an incredible production company, The Hybrid Studio, who've really guided the completion and evolution of this project. Alex Darby is the producer and we are just basically, now that we've had its first premiere in the world, we're hoping to tour it as much as possible. We want to bring it to as many festivals as will have us and show it to as many people as are interested to watch it. And from that, I think I certainly am daydreaming about the next VR XR projects. I want to make a work about the crisis of masculinity in the Irish countryside. I think it's going to be musical and it's going to draw a lot on like pre-Christian Irish mythology, because I think I really want to see some of those like deities in the VR space. And I'm developing some other projects outside that. But that's the main one at the moment.
[00:32:57.168] Kent Bye: Is the crisis of masculinity in Ireland different than what's happening elsewhere or what specifically is happening?
[00:33:03.700] Jonah King: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, talk about a microcosm to speak of the macrocosm, but Ireland has this funny tradition of like the eldest son inherits the land. But Ireland's also a country where a lot of people leave, you know, like famously our biggest exporter are people. So, you know, what has happened is that a lot of men inherited farmland. Everybody else left, siblings left, women left, villages emptied out. Not completely, but a lot. And then these men were left on their own. And there's been movements like Men's Sheds, which I think started in Ireland or Australia, which are attempts to bring men together around, like, cooperative building projects. so they'll build sheds or other kind of useful things for the community and it forms these like windows of camaraderie around work because it seems like a more useful way to create masculine community than like sitting and having a chat over a cup of tea for some reason and so i'm really interested in picking that apart and looking at that yeah
[00:34:04.412] Kent Bye: Oh fascinating very cool awesome well lots of really exciting things yet to come so yeah I guess as we start to wrap up I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality in this form of immersive art and immersive storytelling what that ultimate potential might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:34:20.855] Jonah King: I love this question and I was expecting it because you ask it at every discussion and I don't really have a clear answer. So I was thinking about it today before we met. I feel like one of the most interesting things for me about this space is that a lot of the people in it are coming from different backgrounds. They felt like maybe they were doing something in, you know, we mentioned before, theater, visual arts, film, that didn't 100% fit, but somehow there's something about this is more alluring and has more promise. And I think that plurality of background is making really interesting symbiosis, like overlaps and weird connections and things that are happening because somebody actually has a background in something completely different and, you know, gaming, coming into abstract theater, you know, all this kind of stuff. But I do think then the next thing that makes it really interesting is when it detaches from the tradition of the spectator-consumer model and we begin to think of how this space can both apply to things like healthcare and mental health but also draw on those industries, practices, traditions and go back into novel immersive experiences. And also, obviously, we're all thinking about it like AI is about to really change the game again. And I'm really excited to see what that means for immersive.
[00:35:39.725] Kent Bye: Awesome. Very cool. And so is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:35:45.950] Jonah King: I don't think so. I mean, I really love everyone I've met and it's really exciting to be in a space that is so wide open and has so many curious people trying to figure out things for the joy of it. Of course, again, I want to thank everybody that worked on Honey Fungus. It definitely was a communal project. It takes a village to raise people. Some of the folks who worked on it, like the voices of Helga Hansen reading the erotic text by Sue Huang and Anna Roberts-Gervalt made the singing when the spores sing. Those are actually, again, hidden research. Those are actually Keening songs from Irish traditional funeral rites. It's like a pre-Christian practice of having people sing these mournful songs around gravesides. Yeah, so many people were involved, and also New Ink has been amazing. Everybody knows who they are, but it's been great to work with them.
[00:36:43.198] Kent Bye: Yeah, I forgot to mention, I wanted to just bring it up here at the end, that I got a build at home, and so there's a way that I could play it multiple times, and so there was the ability to hit the return button to fast forward, and so I went through the whole piece, but then I was like, I really want to listen to every one of these erotic, weird, mashup poem-like things, and so... I actually went through and would fast forward and like listen to each of them. I had to do that like three or four times just to kind of grab all of them. Cause sometimes I would fast forward too long and it would get shortened. But, but yeah, there was something around that, that it's a weird and a visceral experience, but also like I was trying to understand like what is happening here. It's like this kind of surreal mashup. So yeah, just really appreciate that. I don't know if you have any other comments around this mechanic of grabbing these little spore like things and you put it in your head and then you get transported into this mashup of the, uh, the Smithsonian Field Report with this kind of erotic poetry.
[00:37:36.511] Jonah King: Yeah, I mean, I think that interaction was actually like the first idea for the VR. And I wasn't sure if it was going to transport you into another space or how it was going to work. And then it just became a little cocoon by which to focus on these texts. And I think that confusion, I hope, isn't just bamboozling, but it's actually like a productive confusion. I think part of the truth of thinking about ecological intimacy is that we cannot fathom it. there's a great I remember reading Robert Anton Wilson this kind of psychedelic philosopher talked about wanting to cultivate a general agnosticism about everything so I feel like hopefully going through the experience will leave enough space and enough confusion to kind of maybe destabilize the certainty you might have going in
[00:38:28.334] Kent Bye: And I think it puts me into this hybrid space where this like this mashup of these expectations around erotic, but also ecological. So it's this ecological erotica that was a new genre for me. So I just was savoring in it. It just was it was provocative. So I found myself coming back to it.
[00:38:45.968] Jonah King: Yeah, that's great. And I think, you know, we're trying to dispel, you know, a long held myth that, you know, humans are at the center of the universe and the earth is just this temporary kind of dirty place that you have to trudge through to get somewhere better. And this kind of idea, like there's an amazing... Another factoid, there was a moment when King James was translating the Bible to English where he changed the wording around a relationship to the earth from being a steward of the earth to having domination over the earth as opposed to being the steward of the earth. And it was to assert his divine right as king, right? But I feel like those are important moments where paradigmatic models get institutionalized. And I think we need to move into a space where we can review those, interrupt them, disrupt them, discard them, and think about ourselves as more of a symbiotic thing within everything else that we're in. So eroticism around ecology is hopefully a way to play with those frames, right?
[00:39:49.738] Kent Bye: Brilliant. Awesome. I got so much more out of this conversation that I think adds a lot of really interesting context for my own experience in reflecting on the honey fungus. And yeah, just really appreciated hearing more about your process. And yeah, just more around all the research and all the amazing things that fungi are doing. And yeah, this kind of surreal trip that you're able to take me on. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:40:11.940] Jonah King: So glad, so glad to do it. Thanks. And also, you know, it's been amazing listening to this podcast. Like, the last couple of months, sometimes I got really confused doing Unreal Engine blueprints late at night, and I'd be kind of, like, pottering around the studio listening to, like, this incredible archive that you've created. So I'd love to also hear, like, how do you become the voice of VR? Like, how did you end up doing this?
[00:40:36.216] Kent Bye: Well, it sort of goes back to when I got my Rift in January 1st, 2014, I mean, it's a long story how the specifics, but generally, it was more of a recognition that this was a pregnant moment in history, that I could see the trajectory of how this was going to have impacts on so many different aspects of our lives. And it was born out of the desire to have insights around design, because within two weeks of receiving my rift, I participated in a game jam where we produced a piece of work. So within week three of having my rift, I had already produced my first VR project. But then I didn't understand the principles of design, experiential design. And so from the very beginning, the podcast has been around exploring VR design, the principles, what I call now experiential design. And I'd been doing lots of different podcasts previously in different contexts where I would go to conferences and just do 20, 30, 40. I think the highest number of podcasts I ever did at one conference was 81 interviews at DrupalCon. Stamina. Yeah. Well, that's the number of interviews. I think now with doing up to 30 hours of interviews at Venice, well, sometimes I lose my voice, so I have to kind of take extra precautions. But the point is that I knew I had this kind of superpower to just have a lot of conversations quickly to understand an emerging field. I did that with emerging technology with open source, Drupal content measurement system, and then I... As soon as there was the first gathering announced for the VR community of the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference, I booked my tickets immediately and then signed up for a 60 second pitch and then changed what the pitch was going to be and then decided that with that pitch I was going to announce the voices of VR. So then I recorded like four episodes and then from there it was just a matter of like recording like 46 episodes over like those two days and with that I had like the first 50 episodes and then from there just trying to hit like over 100 different events since then and 2016 i started to go to sundance new frontier and so about a third of my coverage since 2016 has been around immersive storytelling specifically so i think there is a certain point where it was really interesting to understand like the nature of the technology but at another point there was like well okay it's really around how this technology is enabling the new ways of telling stories so that became a primary focus of the thing that i'm most passionate interested in is talking to artists and creators because i feel like with everything that's happening in the industry, you can look to see what the artists and the storytellers are doing and that they're pushing the technology in a way that I think is the most interesting and creative and moving and just inspiring way. And so I just love to see all the experiences and talk to the creators. So I put myself in a position where I just want to be able to travel around and see all the latest and greatest work and talk to all the best artists in the space. And so, yeah. And it's driven by my curiosity to understand what's next. And yeah, I guess there's a whole UFO documentary, which is a whole other like weird guilty pleasure of mine. But I think at the core of something like UFOs, implications of potential crash retrieval programs and virtual reality technologies is that they're both emerging ideas and topics that represent fundamental paradigm shifts. I think that's a consistent thing that is important. What interests me and draws me is to what's next? What's the new paradigm? How do I start to create these frameworks to understand both what I'm seeing for myself, but also to see what's here now, but where is this going in the future? So this realm of potentiality is this consistent theme I've been exploring. And so it's this conversation I'm having with the cosmos and the universe and everybody who's participating in that. is in this ongoing oral history project of trying to understand the new structures and forms of how we can co-create a better future. So it's kind of like that curiosity has driven the actions to be able to go around and have all these conversations. So that's kind of like, if I were to try to summarize it as succinctly as I can, I think that's kind of like the heart of it.
[00:44:27.569] Jonah King: That's fantastic.
[00:44:28.170] Kent Bye: It's amazing.
[00:44:28.670] Jonah King: I mean, it's a canonical repertoire of work. I just felt like, you know, what I was saying in the studio, you know, you're very much in isolation, especially when you're working behind a computer. And it just felt like I was contributing to something that was collective and that there was this kind of repository of, as you said, a history project of what was happening, holding testament to this particular moment that who knows what it will become in 10 years time. It's going to be fascinating.
[00:44:50.731] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's this other idea of this kind of process-relational paradigm shift that's also the way that each person that's producing something, I experience it, and then they have their process, and then I capture it. And then whatever I capture in that interview may be someone's favorite interview of anything that I've ever done. And I have no idea, but just capturing these little nuggets and putting them out into the ether with this idea that not everyone can afford to come to these events and see these experiences. And so there's people around the world who are isolated geographically in other ways, isolated, but are still kind of in conversation. So, so yeah, I guess this, uh, getting an interview is like an initiation into this archive of all the people that have come before. So you can now pay it forward with other folks who will be a future creators that will maybe someday be on the podcast as well. So. Anyway. I'm honored. Awesome. Well, thanks again.
[00:45:45.212] Jonah King: Thank you so much. It's been really wonderful. Yeah, lovely talking to you.
[00:45:48.954] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists and And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
