Each year, the Sundance New Frontier features VR experiences, films, and live performances that push the boundaries of storytelling. Cory McAbee did live performance of a piece called Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences, which combines elements of illustrated visual storytelling, embodied communication, a fictionalized lecture, and musical interludes. He describes his mixed modality performance as a “live musical, graphic novel” that could be thought of a surrealist TED talk about the nature of consciousness and reality. McAbee’s mixture of a lecture with all of these other live performance modalities felt like the early signs of how the concept of a living story is evolving.
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McAbee is a storyteller who immersed himself in conversations across the country about his big ideas as he formed the architecture of his presentation. He has been tuning into the deeper existential questions facing our society that he frames as a battle between the “truth seekers” and the “fact-checkers.” What are the limits of what science tells us about the patterns of reality? And how do the artists, poets, musicians, and storytellers fill in the gaps in what McAbee refers to as the “Romantic Sciences.”
There will be more and more live performances of this sort that are ephemeral, and hard to describe or fully capture the experience in 2D. McAbee did capture his performances, and is planning on translating this experience into a film, but it’ll no doubt be qualitatively different than the live performance version. The striking thing aspect about McAbee’s performance is the degree to which he used his full body to amplify his message, but also mixing in music, humor, and a surrealist fiction into what can otherwise be some heady topics about the nature of consciousness and reality.
I’m curious to see how this type of mixing of modalities continues to evolve, and I think the next step is thinking about how to more directly engage the audience within the performance. While conversations and questions were vital to developing some of the content of the piece, the performance itself was heavily scripted without any direct audience participation. It’ll be interesting to see if adding in audience generativity with improv elements can make the live performance even more of a “living story” that allows the audience to leave a trace of their participation and tapping into the quality of the moment of the time. There are tradeoffs to being able to be in full control of the narrative arc and crafting an emotional journey, but increasing the audience participation in this type of experience seems to be the next frontier of where this fusion of modalities seems to be headed. Perhaps AR and VR technologies will eventually provide a logistical mechanism for helping make that happen.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So in my previous interview, episode number 629 with Shari Frillo, we were talking about all the various different experiences that were at the Sundance New Frontier section. And there's different sections within the New Frontier. There's the virtual reality experiences, there's the films, and then there's some live performances. And in these live performances, they're starting to pull in all these different modalities and kind of mash them up together to see what is possible with the frontiers of storytelling. And so in one of the performances was by Corey Maccabee and it was called Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences. It was at the core like a lecture, but then there would be like these musical interludes with songs that were trying to reflect what was just being talked about. And there's like these different illustrations that were trying to tell a visual story. And then Corey himself is there giving the performance live and is using his entire body to try to communicate with these different forms of embodied communication. So Corey describes it as kind of like this live musical graphical novel. And I think there's some interesting things that he's doing that I tried to unpack and had this conversation with him at the Sundance Film Festival. So we'll be talking about his performance and the process by which he's creating this fusion of all these different communications modalities. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview happened on Sunday, January 21st, 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:57.157] Cory McAbee: The feature film will be called Deep Astronomy and it's part of the global collaborative that I began in 2012 called Captain Ahab's Motorcycle Club, which also got its start in the New Frontiers Story Labs in 2012.
[00:02:13.300] Kent Bye: Yeah, so you're blending a lot of different communication modalities, I'd say, within this performance. Both you're kind of giving a lecture TED talk mixed with sort of a performative element. So it's a little bit different style of presentation intermixed with different songs as well as some visuals as well. And so for you as a filmmaker and a musician and a communicator, I'm just wondering how you kind of think about all these different communication mediums and how you kind of tie them together in a new and different way within this performance.
[00:02:42.088] Cory McAbee: Well, in filmmaking everything fits, you know, music and design and graphics and animation and everything. And this is a live version, a live performance which also incorporates all of those things. I guess a lot of them, stage plays too. Maybe not so many graphics or so much animation. It's all stuff that I do personally. I'm an illustrator and musician and record my own music and I love to perform music and tell stories. Originally, when I first started writing this piece, there wasn't going to be any music in it. It was just going to be graphics, but it just kept expanding as I worked on it.
[00:03:23.905] Kent Bye: That's a terrible answer. I'm so sorry. Well, the thing that I'm really picking up on is that you are doing a live performance. And I would argue that this experience would be way different if it would have been filmed and we would have all been watching it. There's something qualitatively different with having you in the room. with your embodiment and you sort of coming through live and in the moment. And I think that that level of performance is something that I think is what makes it so interesting is that you have a performative element on top of something that could presumably be recorded and shown to other people.
[00:03:54.317] Cory McAbee: Well, that's something that I really love about this film process is everything that so far that's been created for the feature film is live elements or has been live performances or live events or things that happen in the real world. And so the creation of the film the creation itself is just as important as the finished product and having everybody be a part of it both people who contribute artwork and music and I mean this piece I did pretty much all of it except for you know a couple little graphics a couple little graphics no a couple of amazing wonderful graphics and uh you know some voiceover I did it all in my my room but the live experience has been captured and and audiences behave differently and you know each time and And so the events themselves are events for their own purpose, but the documentation of them are to help create a narrative.
[00:04:50.707] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just at a math conference and Rafael Nunez was there talking and one of the things he was saying was the levels of unconscious communication that we have when we're talking about the future, we may be walking forward, for example. And I think the thing that was so striking about your performance was that you were really using your body in a way to really communicate as a full immersive embodied experience of your communication with that. I'm just curious if you have any combination of like deliberately trying to like communicate metaphorically through your body or if you feel like you're just kind of like letting your body go and it's happening all at an unconscious level.
[00:05:28.906] Cory McAbee: It is. Well, there's a few things going on. One is for years I played in bands and I played electric auto harp. And so when you're playing a musical instrument, the microphone is on a stand and you're trying not to break your teeth on it while you're singing and playing something and your hands are busy doing something else. And so your relationship with the audience is Limited. I mean you you are still having a relationship with the audience, but it's you're also you're multitasking and When my last band broke up I thought I just I just want to hold a microphone in my hand and I want to move and I want to Point at an audience and talk to them as opposed to worrying about you know what I'm doing with my left and right hand and and and being strapped to a device and so That's been half of the fun of it, is just being able to get out and move. And there's also something that develops, which is like muscle memory. When you start repeating the same motions, you remember things easier. It becomes clearer, like your body's choreographing and developing habits that are associated with the material that you're delivering. Now, that actually works really beautifully with this process of creating films through live events, because when you do the same live event over and over again, you've got these edit points where you're lifting your hand at the same time on the same words, and you can jump between events that way. At one time, 14 years ago, 15 years ago, I performed in a Chinese opera at the Lincoln Center, and it was a partially westernized version of this ancient Chinese opera. That's why I was playing autoharp. I was really impressed and the director he was a traditional Chinese, you know I mean he was doing a traditional Chinese version and this version and he was more interested in how quickly somebody raised their hand and how high than he was in the script and So the scriptwriters were working, the musicians, but his focus was more physical. And having that experience and watching him, I was just sitting in a chair playing an autoharp, but watching him do that, I thought, why? And I started understanding it, not anything I could explain, but I started having a personal understanding with that. And I feel that that's something that when I first came to do these performances, was an interesting thing is like knowing where you're going to raise your hand and how high.
[00:07:54.445] Kent Bye: Yeah, that was the thing that I could tell that there was a very strong deliberate intention with your movements connected to what you were saying. And it was different than what I normally see in a lecture, which is people are kind of standing still behind a lectern. Or they might be walking around, but they're not using their body in quite the same way that you were. And there's this concept of embodied cognition, which is just to say that we don't just think with our brains, but we think with our entire bodies and with our entire environments. And so in some ways, as you perform and rehearse this content you're creating this ritualistic context under which that you're repeating it and Creating that sort of extended memory through your body and I guess that was a question I have for you Is that you know, how much of your performance do you feel is? Prescripted or if you have maybe some archetypal higher level messages you want to say and then you kind of let it kind of flow out Uniquely each time that you perform it
[00:08:45.076] Cory McAbee: Well, I want this particular performance, I want them to be sticking to a script, but the performance itself is always going to change, and the audience response is always going to change, and the relationship of the audience based on that is always going to change. The thing you were saying about
[00:09:00.915] Kent Bye: And body cognition?
[00:09:01.635] Cory McAbee: Yeah, about bodies. I had a dream once when I was very young, and the idea that I came out with from the dream was, if you had your body removed and you were just a head, you would still associate yourself as being the same size, but just everything around you would change.
[00:09:20.092] Kent Bye: Interesting. Yeah, and in terms of the content of the your presentation you were talking about the romantic sciences and you know when I was listening to you it for me I was sort of interpreting this as There's science and then there's human experience and there's dimensions of human experience that can't be falsified by science and so there's kind of like this split within our culture by which we have a the romantic poets that are talking about the dimensions of human experience versus something that can be kind of classified by science. And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on the deeper essence of this split between our subjectivity, our inner experiences versus what science can say.
[00:09:58.633] Cory McAbee: I think, I mean, I play around with that and make fun of it a little bit here and there, but we are immersed in science now, all of us, you know, even children know how to use computers, you know, and science is interesting, and it's part of our lives, and it's something we think about and talk about, and so to make it a personal thing, like the one thing I was talking about, velvet rope science versus personal, Science, you know, that was an idea that came from that like somebody considering himself a scientist who is just going about it as organically as possible and pitting himself against these Established scientists who've been studying and brought themselves up to a certain level that this character feels He too is sort of at that level and and should be at least heard
[00:10:50.373] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the part of the performance that comes to mind is that the part where you're kind of contrasting the sun setting and, you know, the facts around that versus your experience of it and sort of, yeah. So yeah. And I think that within the larger culture right now, I think there's a larger discussion about what is the ultimate truth? What is the nature of reality? Um, and I think from the political context all the way to, you know, just kind of these new paradigms that I, I see in some ways these, uh, virtual and augmented, reality technologies as well as artificial intelligence are also kind of bringing up these different questions around this but I'm just curious to hear you talk a little bit more about that. You know the facts versus the the truth Well facts versus truth.
[00:11:28.667] Cory McAbee: It was was one of the earlier themes when I first started writing this and working with it I like the idea that they're they're separate and to create two teams one of the earlier ideas was there was a struggle between truth seekers and fact-checkers and I Actually, to go back a little bit, one thing you were touching on was science and the personal connection with it. There was a time when I think physics, by what I understand, physics was considered philosophy. And I always equate philosophy with being more in terms of personal, you know, living and art and things like that. And physics as being this high calculated science. And so for physics to make the jump from philosophy to science, I think is a really interesting and very telling concept.
[00:12:24.043] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've been looking at virtual reality and looking at the nature of reality. And the more that I look at VR, it asks the question, what is base reality? And what I'm finding, actually, is that there could be a layer of base reality that's this mathematical or symbolic reality. And that right now, there's kind of a split between the philosophy of math and the philosophy of science. And in some sense, I would argue that from a mathematical perspective, you'd mentioned some of these mathematical intuition. There's the Platonism versus Fictionalism. The Platonism is that they believe that there's these objects that are real in terms of these deeper archetypes. And that mathematicians, they have this potential process by which they cultivate an intuition to be able to tap into those symbols about what is happening. those symbols are actually structures that define reality in some ways. And the other extreme is that, oh, it's all socially constructed and it's all coming from our human minds and then it's all kind of like just models that are describing reality. And so the philosophy of science is all about like what we can empirically observe within this structures or space-time. But consciousness is either emergent from our neurology, which is sort of like material reductionist, like it's only the things we can empirically experience, or consciousness is fundamental or universal, meaning that there is a sort of a transcendent quality to consciousness that goes into these other dimensions and I think that a lot of what you're talking about this sort of Multi-dimensionality and some of this there's romantic sciences I would argue is that you're kind of like trying to tap into the deeper archetypes and the patterns in lives that before they sort of manifest into reality and it's like I as an artist or a musician, that's the realm that artists do. They get into their intuition, they get into a flow state, and they start to kind of channel in these deeper messages that they may not know where they're coming from, but they're kind of resonating in a way that's kind of reflecting the deeper patterns of what's happening in our society.
[00:14:14.105] Cory McAbee: You know, one of the things that brought me to this point, too, is really being in reality. Well, first off, the way I'm dealing with those, a lot of the science that, you know, about drifting between dimensions, it's making it user-friendly. You know, it's simplifying. It's not as big as you think, you know, kind of idea. But a lot of the ideas, and we were talking a little bit before we began the interview about How more people are thinking about these things these days one of the things that formed this? Concept was going out on the road and doing concerts and then leaving a three-minute slot before my last song to talk about deep astronomy and talk about sciences and Sometimes I would just make it up on the spot and sometimes I would write it out and think about it and I'd go up and sometimes I'd read it and And the conversations I had afterwards helped perpetuate the growth of these ideas. For one example I refer to a lot is this one gentleman came up to me after a show. He was a theoretic quantum chemist. He said I know you were joking, but you're right and then he started telling me why and so the next night I get up and I start talking about it, but I'm Interpreting what he had told me and then trying to add that in and then that morphs and then I go home and I look up what I'm talking about and see if there's any relevance to anybody studies or any past Concepts that were at all popular or not and I try to find this information and then I think well, you know that I could fix that and You know, that was right because of this. And the whole thing has expanded, not just from sitting alone in my room writing it and thinking about it and looking at a computer, but actually getting out in the world and having lots of conversations.
[00:15:55.011] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's, I mean, I've done well over a thousand different interviews over the last couple of years. So it's like I get into this different flow states of, you know, in the moment of conversation, I do find that like, everything happens in the conversation. But what I'm finding, I just did about 35 interviews with all these mathematicians talking about the philosophy of math and asking them what the process of cultivating their own mathematical intuition was about. and how they sort of do that or how they know that they're sort of discovering these objects. You have this sort of Eureka moment that were, I would say that my experience of that is that you kind of have this intuitive hit, like you got some, you're onto something. And I think that as what you're doing, what I see as an artist is that you are also kind of cultivating this sense of intuition where you're trying to kind of tap in into these deeper patterns and that It sounds like that you have this feedback loop where it's a process of you putting in an idea, but then sort of unpacking it through the conversation and then kind of having this ongoing dialogue, which within the virtual reality world, there's this move towards living story. So like having the story be alive, once you write it down, it becomes dead. But it's like a story that's actually kind of like infused with the spirit and the quality of the moment of the time.
[00:17:05.103] Cory McAbee: My son, he's 10 now, he finds beauty in math. I think that's the only way to put it. And he'll sit and look at tiles on the ceiling of a waiting room and come up with a calculation and tell me about it, very excited. And it's not like he's trying to win any awards or enter the math field or anything. He's just interested. And he's just curious. And he's just trying to create things in his mind. the only word I can use to describe it is it's beautiful and I never thought of math that way, but now I do you know, especially with Johnny watching him just fixate and come up with something which I've I can't think of any of them offhand, but We've told people about some of his ideas and they were like, I've never heard that before, you know, and they work and
[00:17:58.320] Kent Bye: And have you experienced that in your own either music or your work that you're doing? That sense of like, you know, either beauty or symmetry, wonder or awe when you're creating your work?
[00:18:07.955] Cory McAbee: Yeah, when I wrote and recorded the Small Star Seminar album, the music which is being used in these lectures and also for separate concerts, it was all pre-recorded and I was making them in my apartment. And previously, I'd only played auto-harp and sang. But I wrote songs and I'm like, here's how the songs go. And then musicians would come in and put in their interpretation of how it should work. And so this time I had to do it all by myself. And in GarageBand, moving bars around and seeing the music as green lines and then thinking, I'm singing this. I don't want this to repeat what I'm doing. I want this to have its own life and have its own melody and be dancing around by itself over on this side of the wall. And feeling that they were more physical, these things, which I didn't mix it. A friend of mine did the final mix on it. And what I feel he did was create three dimensionality in it. He made sure there was space between all of these characters. So I felt like I was seeing music for the first time in a very different way while I was creating this.
[00:19:15.885] Kent Bye: Well, I think that the other interesting thing about your presentation that I saw was that you were kind of switching contexts from giving a lecture, which was sort of very active in the brain, and then switching to a song, which would be much more poetic or metaphoric, and you're trying to evoke a specific emotion. And so I'm curious to hear how you think about that, of kind of going back and forth of, you know, saying some ideas, but then going in to try to capture something else with the song and what that something else might be.
[00:19:44.848] Cory McAbee: The reason I started doing that was I felt like the first version of this was a 45-minute piece performed at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, one of the best science museums. I love that place so much. And when I was going to do it, I had this solid speaking for 45 minutes. And I looked at it all and I thought, you know, I don't think I could sit through this. You know, I mean, it's just too intense. It's too big of a dose. And so I took music and I wrote things which would address these ideas that are in the music. But they're not, the music isn't a narration of what I'm saying, what I'm just saying. It reflects the ideas. And I thought it's a good thing to put music in between these to give that a different perspective. And again, more poetic, as you say. But I looked at it as like that sip of water at the wine tasting contest, you know, where you get all this flavor of wine in your mouth. You need that drink of water to kind of clear the palate so that you can try another one and have a different experience that's fresh and be able to take it in, as opposed to it just being this one wave of nonstop Fine, fine drinking.
[00:20:57.337] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And in the second half, you start to talk about the concepts of sentimentality. And for me, I see that there's objects in the world, and I can identify the objects, but sometimes objects have meaning, and those meanings are connected to the story of my life, and it's sort of bringing this level of nostalgia. But I'm curious for you, why the focus on sentimentality, and what sentimentality means to you?
[00:21:22.129] Cory McAbee: Well, sentimentality means a lot of different things to me. One is watching people use it in politics. Trying to grab people from their sentimental bone to sway them. Watching people use sentimentality to get people to go to war. But at the same time, you know, that's using it as a tool, but it's also a very beautiful thing and it's part of us. And so the idea was, one of the ideas, there was a lot of ideas in there, these are all about ideas. One of the ideas that I really liked was trying to give a really good argument For something that's really kind of gross that people wouldn't otherwise consider and so trying to re reform our sentimentality to embrace it by improving it was it was an interesting idea and It also allowed me to take the two halves like the first the first half it talks about light being something that goes inside of you reflective light and absorbed light and the fact that we're we absorb light and it's part of us and and then on the second half when it gets sentimental talking about reflected light and the times you know when you're a child and your parents kiss you when dropping you off to school and how those moments are still encased in light shooting through space and so going both directions with both light and sentimentality and addressing them both in similar ways and then you know using those
[00:22:52.898] Kent Bye: It's still using sentimentality and everything as a tool to kind of sway the argument towards something else Yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts of how you blend like the process of giving a lecture But also telling a story and whether or not you have sort of any narrative design that you're trying to create an arc of an experience throughout this or if it's just sort of emergent in that way and because I know this has gone through the Sundance New Frontier lab and so I'm just curious about the blending of what feels like could be a lecture but also giving sort of a story element that actually has a lot of moments of comic relief and comedy and sort of surprises and sort of other musical interludes.
[00:23:34.552] Cory McAbee: I think that's just called being polite. I'm trying to make people enjoy this experience. I want it to be as enjoyable as possible. Some of the stories in there, though, I knew when I was writing them, they're not going to be in the film narrative, the feature film that I'm making. These are only for the live events, and they're only for the experience of the people who are in the room at that time. As far as the arc of the narrative in the feature that they're gonna these are being documented for They don't apply something else is going to be in there It is going to be the focal point and it's going to be the driving force But at the same time the live experience is creating this but the live experience is for its own purpose. I
[00:24:19.388] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I haven't seen the finished film, and you're still working on it, you know, and so, like, I have had the experience of the performance, and in my mind, I have a hard time, like, translating what that is going to be like, because there was so much of the richness of your live performance of being in the same room with you that, is there going to be more visual elements, or, like, what sort of other things that you feel like are going to, or if it's going to be sort of a capturing, a 2D representation of those performances kind of contextualized within a larger kind of arc?
[00:24:47.357] Cory McAbee: Well, there's going to be other people in the film. I'm also reaching out to other people to, there's other stories that create the story within the film. A lot of them were documented, or there's elements that have been documented at live events, but they're also going to be spoken about by people in this film. Some of the animation that I used, I created for the feature, and the fact that I'm using them on screen in a live setting gives me the option of presenting them here or introducing them in a different format when editing the film together.
[00:25:21.596] Kent Bye: What do you want the audiences to take away from this performance?
[00:25:25.615] Cory McAbee: I want the audiences to have their heads and hearts filled with curiosity and fun. Curiosity is a big thing that I think is nice to help. When I say this, it's not like I'm painting this picture and standing behind it. I'm curious about these things. And so I'm actually sharing things I'm curious about and ideas that I find interesting. you know, they're in no way any of these ideas, you know, are meant to, you know, like I'm not taking bows for them. I'm part of the audience too. And yeah, I just, I want them to have a conversation, you know, I want them to have that as something that they can talk about. And, you know, there's even certain jokes in there that, you know, I think people are going to probably repeat them to their friends and certain ideas that they're going to think, you know, you know, I disagree with this and have have a conversation about it and To be open to be open. It's not a it's not a closed Concept. It's not propaganda
[00:26:28.910] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think you're kind of hitting on a lot of different themes that are in the zeitgeist of like, what is the nature of reality? You know, what are the, are there realms beyond these realms that we can experience? You know, the nature of time and sentimentality and what is the nature of consciousness? They're all sort of, you're not explicitly using those words, but you're kind of talking about those concepts. And I think these are things that we don't have good explanations for. And so I sort of see what you're doing as kind of like a, a poetic and artist interpretation of kind of talking about these concepts but giving people a bridge because they are in this sort of transcendent realm that you're kind of creating this pathway to be able to kind of have maybe just a little glimmer or a taste of some of these concepts that they can take and unpack and think about because a lot of these stuff that you're talking about, there's no clear answers and because it's on the frontier of what's known and not known, there's a sense of awe and wonder of kind of exploring all that.
[00:27:18.903] Cory McAbee: And two, I'm not really playing a character on stage. I'm being myself. But in the film, I'm this uneducated, self-appointed pursuer of ideas and thoughts. And at one point, sees himself a little bit of an authority on what he thinks. He's like a scientist in his own mind, but wouldn't really call himself that.
[00:27:47.656] Kent Bye: Do you have a name for this type of performance? Because it's kind of blending a lot of things in ways. It's combining things that are different that I don't have a clear name for it. But what do you call it?
[00:27:58.838] Cory McAbee: I don't have a name for it either. I've really enjoyed them, though. I mean, this is... I still like doing concerts, but for a while I just want to do this, because it's... I mean, there are people who do, you know, multimedia events with musicians who have a lot of beautiful animation or computer graphics moving behind them and creating an environment. But it's not creating an environment. It's illustrating a story, like a graphic novel. And to have this live musical graphic novel experience I think is really fun.
[00:28:33.223] Kent Bye: That's a good description. Live musical graphic novel. I'll go with that. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of a live musical graphical novel might be? Like this live performance and art that you're doing, what the ultimate potential of all that might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:28:51.198] Cory McAbee: I don't know. I mean, I'm very new to it. I just started doing this. And I made it in my bedroom, and now I'm taking it out into the world, and people are saying what they think about it. Lot of people are gonna have a lot of different opinions about it. I know that which is good You know, like I say, it's not propaganda But one thing that I feel is I want it I want to do more of them and I have an old screenplay that I like I Wouldn't blame anybody for not making it into a film, but I think I could present it like this, you know I could do it with I can do illustrations and And there is a way to present this feature screenplay without making a movie. You can go out and do it as a very personal experience.
[00:29:36.635] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:29:39.676] Cory McAbee: No, just I'm so happy you asked me to do this, and I'm honored. Thanks.
[00:29:45.259] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:29:46.299] Cory McAbee: Yeah, my pleasure. Anytime.
[00:29:49.320] Kent Bye: So that was Corey McAbee. He's the writer and director of Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, so there's a big mashup of all these different things that I think is really interesting. At the core, going into a performance, a live performance that you're in a theater and you're watching somebody with their bodies fully expressing their emotions and doing this level of embodied communication. I think, you know, it's hard to really describe what that was like, but you can think about something like a TED Talk where somebody is showing you all these visual things on the screen, but how many times do you see somebody's actually getting their entire body within the presentation? I think this is something where virtual reality is going to be huge in terms of starting to use different forms of embodied communication. We're already starting to see that within social VR, where you can start to express yourselves in different ways. But what does it mean to actually take that level of embodiment and expression of yourself into all sorts of crazy avatar expressions or just exaggerated ways of trying to communicate with your body? And it's something that I haven't seen a lot of other things in all the different various experiences. But there's something in this quality of this live storytelling that I think is really interesting. And that's this thing that I've been referring to as this living story, which comes back through this interview that I did with Charlie Melcher and the future of storytelling. And there's this adage from Herodotus who's basically like saying you can never step through the same river twice. And that's working on a couple levels. That's that the man is not the same man when he steps through the river the second time, but the river is also not the same. And so you have this stream of life that is continually moving and the living story aspect is like you're doing a live performance and then in the moment something new is emerging. And I think listening to Corey, the way that he said that this project really came about was that he was doing these performances, and then afterwards, he was engaging in these different conversations, and then this conversation would kind of lead him to these different insights, and then he would think about it and reflect upon it, and then he would come back and talk about these things that he had sort of intuited, and then he would have these quantum theoretical physicists coming up to them and saying, you know, you think that you're joking, but you're actually really tuning into something that's true and real here. So I think at the core, the idea of the romantic science is in some ways going beyond the reductive materialism and starting to tune into something that's deeper. The metaphor that he shares within the actual talk is that when you watch a sun set, your experience of it, the truth of it is that the sun is setting, but the facts of this situation is that the earth is actually rotating around the sun and that you're just seeing an illusion. from a heliocentric perspective. But from a geocentric perspective, your perspective is that you actually see the sunset, and that's the truth of your experience. And so the difference between the truth seekers and the fact checkers, I think, is this tension that he was trying to really investigate. And I think that's kind of at the heart of where we're at as a society, is what is the deeper truth of each individual's experience, but also the collective experience, but also what are the objective facts that can be seen by objective reality? And I think it goes into like these deeper philosophies of what reality is. And that's part of the reason why I went to the joint mathematics meeting just prior to going to Sundance this year, is I had a chance to talk to all these various mathematicians who kind of go beyond what I think most of the reductive materialists go from in terms of what their basis of reality is. I think from the perspective of reductive materialism, they have no empirical evidence of anything existing outside of the natural world. And so the natural world is the only thing that we can actually know that exists and prove it through the process of replication and making predictions through the mechanisms of science. But when it comes to mathematicians, the nature of mathematical objects and how do mathematical objects relate to science is something that's a little bit of an open question. When you talk to mathematicians, they have this direct experience of like they're discovering math. You know, not everybody, but on the whole, the majority of mathematicians I talk to did express this sort of direct experience or this phenomenological experience of discovering something that was beyond what we experienced in this reality. you have this idea of the platonic realms, or these realms that are transcendent to what is experienced onto the natural world. And whether or not consciousness is able to somehow jump in beyond the structures of space-time and cultivate either what would be called mathematical intuition to be able to ascertain that fundamental nature of these objects beyond spacetime is something that is an open question. That's actually a reason why people who don't believe in mathematical Platonism believe in something that maybe is just socially constructed, and it's something that's convenient, that helps describe things about the natural world. And then there's Quine-Putnam indispensability argument that goes into all these various things about like, well, you know, math is indispensable to science. And so why is that? How can you explain why these things that are socially constructed be such a huge predictor for describing the nature of reality? So the reason why I'm kind of unpacking that a little bit more is because I sort of like rattled off a little thing in the middle of this interview, but I think at the essence of the core of what Corey's talk was getting at is talking about his direct experience of some of these transcendent realms and how this is kind of a battle within our society today, these battles between science and faith, or also this more poetic interpretation of stories. And I think that in a lot of ways, it's the artists and the poets and the storytellers and the musicians who are in some ways using their own process of intuition to tap into some of these deeper patterns of reality, and that they express it through either their poetry or their art or their music, or their stories. And I think in a lot of ways, that's what I see Corey is doing, is that he's got this sort of intuitive process by which he's trying to tap into the deeper structures of the world, and he's telling a story about what he's coming up with. And I think that is a process by which all these artists and people who are coming from more of the humanities are trying to do. They're trying to give us a map of reality that goes beyond what science can tell us about the nature of reality. So I think that the kernel of what Corey is doing with bringing these different modalities together is that you start to tap into different ways of being able to express different dimensions of reality when you have a song and the song is able to transcend and have all these patterns and invoke different emotions in you that go beyond what just giving a lecture can do and speaking. he's blending these different modalities of giving sort of a didactic lecture doing this kind of graphic novel visualizations with the graphics that are on the screen and then breaking into a musical interlude in between and using a lot of comedy and using his full entire body to communicate and to talk and but also to do it live in the moment where a lot of it was very prescripted, and there wasn't a lot of leeway for a conversation to emerge. It sounds like that in order for this entire thing to be created, he was actually engaged in that dialogue. But in the actual performance in its final form, there wasn't a lot of that interaction. And so that's the thing that I'm curious about is that If you are trying to do these types of experiences where you're trying to tap into that living story moment, where you're trying to really tune into the quality of the moment of whatever's happening with you in that moment, or what is happening in the culture, what is happening in the collective audience, and if there's a way for you to kind of tap into that and then start from there to be able to engage in a dialogue rather than kind of Write it all down and prescript it and come out with something that is very much a performance I think when you do have that you have the trade-off between authorial control and the control of what is generative from the audience and that there's just this Tension when it comes to interactive narrative of how much do you want to? Yield of your own authorial control to the generative aspects that allow you to tap into the quality moment of that time Versus how much you want to control the narrative arc and to have everything kind of prescripted So I'll be curious to see how the film version actually comes out. For me personally, I'm actually very happy to have seen the live performance because I just think that there's going to be something that was very unique for that moment when I saw it. And it's kind of like a sand painting where you, you're able to see it and experience it, and then it kind of disappears and goes away and you were either there to experience it or you didn't get to see it. So. This is a case of a piece of art that, you know, you're not going to potentially be able to see this full experience of what I experienced until you maybe get to go see a live performance of it, or you maybe see the film, but it's going to be some sort of mediated experience of that, that I think is going to be qualitatively different than something that is happening live and in the moment. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member to the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash voices of vr. Thanks for listening.
