Through the Wardrobe was an augmented reality experience by Rob Eagle about gender identity that took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam’s Central Station. The IDFA DocLab had three storefronts in Central Station this year during their festival to show a couple of 360 video programs, an interactive narrative experiences, and Eagle’s experience that appeared to be a clothes store on a quick glance. But each of all of the clothes in the store were associated with four different people with gender fluid identities. You pick a piece a clothing to try on, and then you go into the back of the store for a spatialized AR experience on the HoloLens 1 that dives into the gender identity journeys for each person through five different chapters that were anchored to furniture in this mock bedroom.
I had a chance to talk to Eagle about his experiential design process, and why he decided to move away from virtual reality and focus more on augmented reality experiences so that he could focus on his actual body and experiences that allow you to play with gender identity and gender expression. It definitely provided me with a safe context for me to experiment with my own gender expression, and Eagle talks about the power of mixed reality experiences to create a magic circle as well as a “hybrid space” that’s talked about by theorists like Edward W. Soja and Peter Sloterdijk in being able to blur the digital and the real in order to create a “third space” that goes beyond the affordances of each modality. So there are many parallels for how mixed reality is providing us embodied metaphors for what it means to go beyond the binaries of the virtual and the real.
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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 continuing on in my series of looking at some of the narrative innovations that are coming out of the IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, today's interview is with Rob Eagle, and he had a piece there called Through the Wardrobe, One of the things that Kasper Sonnen of DocLab did this year was to expand out to many different locations. And there was the main location where a lot of the experiences were being held. There was an eye museum where ayahuasca was being shown within like an art museum context. There was dome experiences that were being shown here for the first time. They even had an experience where you actually go into somebody's home and do an audio tour through their home. Different experiences where you're doing different audio walks around Amsterdam. And then they had this area in the main train station where they were doing 360 video screenings, but they also had this experience called Through the Wardrobe by Rob Eagle. So they took this abandoned store, they remade it so it looked like it was actually a clothes shop, but it was an art piece. So you walk into the shop and you start looking at clothes and then you're invited to try on the clothes and go in the back and then put on an augmented reality headset in this sort of mock bedroom. And then you're walking into this story about gender fluidity and non-binary gender expressions. So it was a piece that was really trying to start with the fashion and then be that as a gateway to be able to talk about using these immersive technologies into an augmented reality HoloLens experience to be able to get these stories about these different people who have a wide variety of different gender expression. So, we're covering that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So, this interview with Rob happened on Saturday, November 23rd, 2019, at the Itva Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:01.060] Rob Eagle: My name is Rob Eagle. I'm a digital artist, filmmaker, and I'm also working on a PhD, a practice as research PhD, in Bristol, in the southwest of England.
[00:02:12.129] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into immersive technologies.
[00:02:18.734] Rob Eagle: I come from a traditional documentary filmmaking background. And I started to make work about six, seven years ago about gender and the expression of gender through clothing. And I kind of hit a wall when working with a flat medium. There was something that I couldn't quite express through a flat film. There was something about the material, there was something about feeling through the body, there was something about how we understand ourselves in the world. And I wasn't quite sure what the solution was. Then I started working with 360 cameras and started working in audio installations and I had a bit of a breakthrough. That's what led me to this process of thinking through, right, if I can express ideas around gender queerness and non-binary identities and how they're expressed in the world, maybe these new technologies and haptic technologies and all these are maybe the best way for me to kind of tell stories. and to bring in eclectic voices. I think I was realizing there was a lot, especially within VR, which was very heteronormative, cisnormative, and it wasn't quite telling the stories and really wasn't reflecting the diversity of the people around me. And I guess I've always come from this philosophy of, if you don't see yourself represented in the media, you have to make it yourself. So it really started from a DIY using 360 cameras in these underground queer clubs and working with trans non-binary communities in London. And it's kind of led me up to now working more with mixed reality and a lot of the affordances around that and especially around having physical objects and bringing that into immersive experiences.
[00:04:03.594] Kent Bye: When I think about gender and gender expression, it often gets confused with sex, sexual preference, and maybe you could just give a bit of a landscape for how you make sense and kind of define what you think of the gender and differentiating from the things that it might be confused with.
[00:04:20.290] Rob Eagle: I mean, for me, gender, it's not just a spectrum. I think gender is so much more complex than just male or female, and it's not just male, female, and here's everyone else. For me, I'm bringing in elements in my work, certainly, of looking at combining male and female, really looking, for me, especially through the people that I'm working with in this work, being proud to be male and female at the same time. Now, that's quite different from sexuality. You know, there's straight, there's gay, there's bi, there's everything else in the middle. But who you desire is not necessarily how you present. And my work is really looking at kind of how we express our genders in the world. So yeah, for me, there's a big difference. And I just I felt like there wasn't enough work. There is work looking at sexuality, but there's not enough work for me in the immersive sphere really looking at gender expression.
[00:05:12.608] Kent Bye: So as you talk about gender expression and talking about clothes and fashion, it seems like a pretty clear connection, and then you start to get into like, well, if you are going to be actually physically putting on clothes, then why do you need the immersive technologies at all? So maybe you could talk a bit about your own creative process as you've been trying to explore virtual and augmented reality and all the different ways to kind of blend that with the physical reality of the actual clothing.
[00:05:38.385] Rob Eagle: My piece is called Through the Wardrobe, and I wanted to create this magical, realist space where you can be free to explore, to touch, and to kind of maybe try something you wouldn't try in your normal everyday life. So you walk into a space here at IDFA, in particular it's a shop in Central Station. So we have kind of passers-by, just passengers waiting to catch a train, coming into the shop and looking at the clothing. And so you're drawn first, you're led by your own curiosity. And that's really important for me, just to draw people in aesthetically before you confront them with technology. I want people to kind of start asking questions like, ooh, what is this clothing? Who does this belong to? And so you're drawn, first and foremost, by your own curiosity. You're wondering who this piece of fabric, who this shirt belongs to. It's the experience we all have when we go into Salvation Army, charity shops, whatnot. And you're always wondering, who owned this shirt before? Who owned these trousers? And you kind of want to know about the background. So that's where I'm starting from, before I even get to technology. So people then put on that item of clothing, you go into a dressing room, and you then have the HoloLens put on, and the headset scans the tag, and that's what launches the story. So you get to hear about the person whose shirt that is. You then go into that person's bedroom. And it should feel like this kind of encounter over 10-12 minutes with someone, a very intimate encounter in the bedroom as they're telling you about what clothing means to them and expressing their genderqueer non-binary identity. So the technology really for me is just the handmaiden of the story. The technology for me was never centered in it, and I kind of just fell into using HoloLens. I'd never really set out to use it. I thought that I wanted to use VR, and something really special about HoloLens was that you could see your body. You could see the world around you, so that kind of prompted me to build a set. And then within this set, how are we going to use the technology? So we use spatial audio, first and foremost. That's really important. It sounds like the voice is in the room with you, speaking to you. We also use generative music. So that's responding to the voice. And then the animations that happen around you are very abstract. And it's a way of kind of talking about gender in a way that is less representational, that's less simplistic, by bringing in abstract forms and shapes around you to kind of make you re-evaluate your space and re-evaluate, hopefully, how you express your own gender in the world.
[00:08:09.244] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I had a chance to go through two of the four different stories the other day, and as I was waiting for my experience, someone had come in, and I think one of them had read the whole description about what this was, so you have the whole context. If you want to read what it is outside, you can get the full context, and then you come in. Prime to know like oh, this is some sort of thing that's associated with the doc lab here at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam And I think other people come in and they have absolutely no idea what this is and don't read the signs and they just you know Maybe we could talk about some of those serendipitous encounters that you've had with people kind of wandering in and discovering what this is and looking at the price tags to discover some names on them
[00:08:51.780] Rob Eagle: Yesterday, we had these three young guys come in. They're from London. They were just here on a short break. And the one guy said, yeah, yeah, I want to give it a go. All right, great. So he found an item of clothing from Jamie. Jamie identifies as non-binary, and kind of likes sparkly, unusual clothing. And here's this young lad with the other guys. They're here for just a bit of fun in Amsterdam, putting on the sparkly jumper. Then putting on the HoloLens, going into the bedroom, and the whole time he was shouting to his friends who were in the front of the shop, yo guys, this is lit, you should check this out. And he was loving the story and the technology. Now that to me is really special because I'm not just talking to fellow documentary makers, to fellow festival goers. the fact that we can take this outside of that context and introduce a new audience to both the technology but also to the subject matter in a way that I hope is inviting and that is not intimidating.
[00:09:48.236] Kent Bye: I think that's one of the big challenges with these pieces is that there is so much constraints with space and you have this small circle of people that are on the film festival circuit. You get kind of the same people that see a bunch of the stuff and they've kind of seen a lot of things already so they're walking into these experiences with a lot of prior experiences that they're already comparing it to but I think this is pretty unique in the sense that Casper has been able to get this storefront that's in kind of this liminal space in the train station where it's just a hallway that you're going from one end to the other and people are just kind of passing through. What was your reaction when you heard that you're going to be able to take this piece that was presumably first presented in more of this official sanitized spaces within the festival context to be able to actually have a shop where you can kind of sneak people in?
[00:10:36.894] Rob Eagle: You know, philosophically, when you think about train stations, train stations, airports, we think of them as these non-spaces, that they are just liminal. But to me, they come with their own fabric. They come with these moments where people can pause, where they can reevaluate themselves. I've had some of my most powerful experiences of reading and writing when I'm in an airport, when I'm in a train station, because I've kind of paused my normal everyday life. And so for me to be able to present a piece like this, which is meant for people to question themselves, first and foremost. Yes, you're listening to someone else's story, but it's also meant to allow you to question, why do I wear this type of shirt? Why do I feel more comfortable in quote-unquote men's clothing? Why can't I wear a dress? So a train station is actually a very natural environment to show a piece like this, a piece that is in itself very hybrid, that is, you could say, liminal, but something that allows you to question. I'm questioning myself all the time, where am I going? Quite literally, when you're in a train station, you're asking, where am I going? So it makes sense for me to have immersive pieces like this that allow you to question that on a bigger level of where am I going and what am I doing with myself and my life.
[00:11:49.230] Kent Bye: The first time that I did the experience, I chose a piece of clothing that was very similar to something that I may have worn in the past. So it wasn't such a contrast in terms of stepping into it, but certainly the story, Beck's story, I wasn't necessarily expecting or guessing or even knowing what the gender expression or the identity is. I don't know if they are identifying what their pronouns are in these or not, so it's sort of hard for me to know without them disclosing. All I have is their clothes and their stories. And I'm just getting a little slice of different experiences that they've gone through. And then the second time I did it, I put on more of a dress, something that I don't typically wear. And I think you had encouraged me to try that one out just because it was really encouraging me to put on a lot of the necklaces. And the first time that I did the experience, I wasn't actually putting on a lot of the jewelry and stuff because I don't wear a lot of jewelry or any of that. I had this experience of like wearing this dress in a augmented reality headset Trying on jewelry and just like doing stuff that last time I remember doing that was a kid a long time ago So but it was interesting to just kind of wear that and I started to think about oh I could how would I play with this in like virtual reality like because it's I'm much more likely to wear a lot of this fashion type of things in VR than real life, but then the distance between the VR and the real life would blur. And then next thing you know, maybe I would have green hair and other aspects of wearing a certain amount of fashion that I wouldn't typically wear. So I found that just the way that the experience was inviting me to play around within this context where, I don't know, I guess a lot of virtual experiences, I see that you're able to step into a part of yourself that's maybe a part of your character, but you don't necessarily give yourself the space to be able to explore that at all.
[00:13:37.493] Rob Eagle: You know, you hear a lot of people in the immersive sphere talking about the magic circle. And I guess that's sort of where I started from was we need to create the safe space for you to be able to push yourself. And I had started in VR. I was thinking of this first as, you know, you have a VR avatar and you kind of you look down, you have this virtual body. And I kind of came around to, but why not? have this as a physical magic circle, as a physical space where you can actually try this. The haptics and that sort of technology that I was playing with, it just couldn't replicate the feeling of real life. And to me, when looking at gender in this sort of way, why try to recreate or why try to build a whole virtual artificial world when the real world around us is so fantastic? When your own body is an incredible canvas to paint with, to paint on top of? And so as you're kind of augmenting your world in the headset, you're augmenting your body with the jewelry and the clothing. And what I kind of hope through this process is that people are able to kind of re-evaluate their own bodies and their own environment. And including just, it's a bedroom. It's just a normal bedroom environment that we've created with this set. But how can you kind of re-evaluate, when is a bed not a bed? You know, when it becomes a climbing wall. One is a chair, not a chair. It's when it becomes a stone in a big stone circle in this experience. So we're transforming everyday objects into something a little bit unusual. Hopefully as you're also transforming your own body into something that's unusual from how you normally would express yourself.
[00:15:10.596] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the really powerful moments of the experience was when one of the characters, or I don't know, what do you call them in this piece?
[00:15:19.462] Rob Eagle: I call them collaborators, contributors, because this has also been a co-creative piece. We've been working on it for over a year, and they have given feedback, they've user-tested along the way, and they also help to shape the clothing that we have in the experience. So they also have veto power if they feel like a shirt doesn't represent them, or if there's something that they said that they don't feel really expresses what they really meant. I'm working with them and kind of expressing them the best way possible.
[00:15:45.892] Kent Bye: OK, yeah, so your collaborators that you're working with, there was a moment where they were telling a story about going into a bathroom and not really having a good option. It's just how much stress that brought up for them after they're out for a certain amount of time and just thinking about what they have to pay attention to in order to be safe and to going into a certain bathroom that is going to feel safe and not be attacked. and judged or anyway. So yeah, maybe you could just talk about trying to take the reality of that experience but then to try to recreate that within what's essentially a bedroom and then trying to recreate the feeling of that isolation or fear or terror.
[00:16:30.202] Rob Eagle: Yeah, when you're in the bedroom, you have five chapters and every item of furniture in the room turns into something else. Each chapter is programmed around the furniture. In Sam's story, where you sit down on the chair, you think, oh, I'm just going to sit down on a chair. And then you suddenly realize that actually you're on a toilet. and the walls start to come up around you, and you realize that you're actually being penned in, you're being boxed in by the walls of a cubicle, kind of grotty cubicle. And, you know, looking at the metaphors around boxing and gender, being in a gendered box, and then the animation ends with the door opening up. And it's, you know, very much for Sam trying to find some sort of freedom within the gendered box of being called male or being considered female, and actually not fitting really into either.
[00:17:18.182] Kent Bye: What have been some of the range of reactions that you've gotten from this piece?
[00:17:22.805] Rob Eagle: Most of the time quite positive. Most of the time people come out and either don't want to speak, and that's perfectly fine. Other times people want to talk about their own gender journeys. I have had a couple angry people come out and just say, oh, this is just political correctness. Non-binary doesn't exist. Those are the people that make me want to keep on putting on this piece. If I can keep angering people by challenging them and making them kind of see the human side of a very political issue, especially in Britain where we're making this piece, the media has been really, really vicious towards trans and non-binary people in the last few years. And so for me, making this piece is actually, it's subversive. It's a protest piece. It's to say, you know, genderqueerness, non-binary is a valid identity. It's here. It's here to stay. And these are real people who are facing sometimes the really nasty vitriol. So rather than saying, oh, this is a political piece, we're saying this is a piece about four people. And we're trying to look at the human side, even though we know that it's very much it's a political protest making this piece.
[00:18:27.512] Kent Bye: What's the deeper context of what's happening in Bristol and how that might be in contrast to what's happening in the rest of the UK?
[00:18:34.997] Rob Eagle: Bristol is quite a nice little bubble of a lot of free thinking, a lot of art, a lot of immersive art. I'm really fortunate to be surrounded by so many creative, challenging people all the time. There's Duncan Speakman, whose piece is here on the expansion. Amy Rose and May Abdullah with their piece Collider from last year that was here. We're all sort of within the same literal PhD family, we're all doing PhDs together, but we're in a bigger context within as immersive makers. Also sometimes just as friends and checking in with each other for a hug and a cup of tea, because this is hard. Making this kind of work is really difficult sometimes when the funding is difficult, when you don't really fit into a certain box. So who else do you turn to? You turn to other people like you, the other weirdos, the other people who are kind of thinking differently about this medium. We aren't doing this because the money is great, because the money isn't great for any of us. So you kind of want to find like-minded people and Bristol has become this nice bubble. And it's also how I found my collaborators for this piece, the four people who are non-binary. It's only because Bristol has this lovely kind of free-thinking atmosphere, but we know that we can't just live and exist within this bubble, that we have to push outside of that. So we're actually better known as artists outside of Bristol than we are inside Bristol. So taking this piece, the distribution plan actually is to take it to high street shops around Britain. Take it to different towns, especially where there are abandoned shops like we have here in Amsterdam and challenge people. Kind of open up our nice little bubble in Bristol and kind of take it out and take out some of these discussions and hopefully challenge people in ways that maybe they wouldn't find themselves challenged in their everyday lives.
[00:20:17.704] Kent Bye: Yeah, and because immersive technologies are so new, the critical discourse around it seems to be pulling in lots of things from film and game design. So as you're doing your PhD, and it sounds like it's a PhD as practice, so you're actually creating works, but are you also doing research and reading? And maybe you could talk a bit about more of the theoretical grounding that you're referencing as you talk about and explore some of these immersive technologies.
[00:20:43.552] Rob Eagle: Absolutely. I guess when I first conceived of Through the Wardrobe, it was looking at bringing together immersive theatre and traditional documentary making, and so in terms of craft and practice, that's where I was starting with, and I was reading a lot about that. But then I was thinking through a lot of the critical theory around kind of hybrid spaces. Edward Soja in particular talking about third space. For me, this idea of a third space, we're going past dualisms, we're going past binaries in terms of space. So there's an imagined space, there's a real space. And this is what makes augmented reality, and I guess you could call this mixed reality, what makes this so powerful is that you have the virtual and the real simultaneously. So we're going past these binaries of virtual and real to actually bring the two together And for me, having a framework like Third Space from Soja, or even Sloterdijk where he talks about these spheres and he talks about hybrid spaces as well, where we can create these spaces that you're simultaneously, we're talking about multiplicities here of virtual and physically real. And so having this as a framework is really useful for me to think about what is this doing and how can we go past just thinking of AR as a gimmick. Because to me, AR can be just a fun filter on a phone. You can do puppy dog faces and there's nothing wrong with that. But how can we harness it for storytelling? And I think having a conceptual framework around what is this doing, it helps us to go a little bit deeper. So that's why I'm pushing my audience to use their bodies. People are using their bodies as controllers, that's how you activate chapters. By gazing in this direction or that direction, it changes colors. Mika, who's one of the people in this piece, has a whole forest of dildos, and you look at it and it springs and it changes colors, because they're talking about the playfulness around how do you overcome dysphoria, and how do you feel more comfortable in your body? You put on a strap-on, of course. So to have this conceptual framework around these kind of fun virtual things that pop up around you within your physical environment, that's kind of where I'm working with this. It's not just virtual, it's not just purely physical, it's embracing them both simultaneously.
[00:22:49.005] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's super fascinating to hear you talk about the mixture because as we talk about the virtual and the real, it's a similar kind of like spectrum that we're kind of blurring and infusing together. And we talk about gender and gender expression, it's a similar thing. And I went to the American Philosophical Association Eastern meeting back in 2019. One of the sessions I went to was on trans philosophy and I was talking to one of the philosophers there afterwards and they were mentioning Henri Bergson and how Bergson was talking about like the mixture and how Bergson was really adopted in Latin America because there was a colonial impulse of one culture being taken over by another culture. And so there was no root culture. There was only a mixture. And so some of these Latin American countries that were dealing with all these colonial cultures of fusing together, the same kind of like, what is the national identity when you have so much of a mixture? And so they were looking at Birxan. And I don't know if Birxan would have necessarily known that his philosophy would have been going around that, but there seems to be a going from the more objective binaries, maybe the false dualities, into that more of the spectrum. So, yeah, I feel like that's a theme that seems to be coming up in many different other aspects of our culture as well.
[00:24:05.012] Rob Eagle: My fieldwork, so I began as an anthropologist. My background, as part of filmmaking, I made ethnographic films. My first films were done in Kazakhstan. And Kazakhstan, as a country, has always been this kind of amazing crossroads of cultures. And so I started first looking at hybridity as a way of being, hybridity as culture, and that we're all hybrids. And so thinking beyond these, just kind of what is pure, because what is a pure national identity? That doesn't really exist. That's a complete illusion. That's where you really start to go down the slippery kind of, you know, nationalistic view. So, embracing kind of multiplicities and embracing hybridity in yourself. We're all hybrids in our own ways. You know, I'm a hybrid American, Brit, you know, traveling the world and kind of living and making work everywhere. And everywhere I go, everywhere I travel, everywhere I live, it becomes incorporated into me, who I am, and also in my work. So I also want my work to embrace that hybridity that we all have and to celebrate that and to encourage people also to look past an essentialist kind of a pure, what it is to be man, what it is to be woman, what it is to be American, what it is to be British, and to actually embrace these trading of cultures and just to be crossroads, you know, each of us in our own way.
[00:25:21.363] Kent Bye: What do you think about pronoun declarations? Because I know that for some people they feel like it's a solidarity movement, but for other people they may see that that's putting pressure on them to be forced to declare what their pronouns are when they may not necessarily feel safe to do so. So what's your thoughts on both sides of that?
[00:25:39.883] Rob Eagle: I think when you declare your pronouns, sometimes it does turn you into a lightning rod. And there is a case for being cautious about who you disclose your pronouns to. I don't think the world is there yet of just saying, oh yeah, sure, you could be whatever gender you want to be. where, you know, certainly where I am with people in this piece, if they want to declare their pronouns, they can. If they don't want to, that's okay. I don't want to impose that on people. But I also want, when people come into the experience, when the audience come in, I want them also to engage with it however they feel comfortable. Because I don't demand so much of my audience that you have to be so vulnerable, that you have to give everything over. I think there's been a trend in the last couple of years with immersive work that we demand a lot of personal stuff from our audience. You demand very personal declarations, and for me sometimes that oversteps the mark. I feel like if I'm not ready, if I'm not comfortable, and suddenly I'm being told in a VR experience to declare something that's deeply personal, I'm going to take off the headset and walk away. And so I want my audience who come in to be able to engage with it however they feel comfortable. in the same way that I'm asking my collaborators to engage with it however they feel comfortable. So when it comes to pronouns, you know, if you want to talk about that, great. But, you know, I don't demand that from my audience, I don't demand it from my collaborators.
[00:26:57.757] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that I liked about the piece and the two stories that I saw was that you're able to move around a physical space that is like this archetypal bedroom. It feels like I'm in a bedroom, but I'm able to get this insight into, like, oh, this person likes rock climbing. And it's like, oh, I wouldn't have necessarily figured that. But, you know, you kind of just are able to learn about the human aspects that aren't necessarily purely filtered through this lens of, like, everything is about gender in every story. And so you mentioned that as people come out of this story that then they start to reflect to you their own personal journey of gender expression. And I'm just wondering if you'd be willing to share your own personal journey of gender expression.
[00:27:39.420] Rob Eagle: So I prototyped this piece on myself. Before I asked any questions of my collaborators, I asked myself the questions about where did I learn gender? Growing up, kind of sneaking off and maybe trying on my mom's shoes in her closet. I think there's something very symbolic about trying something on in the closet and kind of keeping it as my own little secret. And I think as I grew up, I still struggled with how do I identify? So this piece began as a very deeply personal kind of journey in myself of embracing my own kind of simultaneous masculinity, femininity, whatever those are, and being male and female in my own self. And it's been quite a journey. And the fact that now I don't feel ashamed to express myself in different ways. If I want to wear heels, I'll wear heels. If I want to wear a dress, I'll wear a dress. Where does that leave me? I identify as a person. I'm definitely in the middle. I've always struggled with, am I gender fluid? Am I non-binary? And I think those questions are kind of Yeah, I had to ask myself those first before I could ask my contributors, my collaborators, and it became therapy. I sat down with a microphone and created the experience first with myself as a prototype, and it became really therapeutic. So I think making work, sometimes it becomes very autobiographical, sometimes unintentionally, before we can tell other people's stories. I think it's actually, it's a really helpful exercise to ask ourselves these questions first.
[00:29:09.124] Kent Bye: Well, because you are in the process of getting your PhD as part of the practice that you're doing of creating these experiences, what are some of the either open questions that you're trying to answer or open problems that you're trying to solve?
[00:29:22.851] Rob Eagle: I'm interested in how can this technology, so this new wave, this imminent wave of AR headsets that are coming out over the next few years, how can we use them for storytelling? Not just how can powerful corporations use them to sell us things or to steal our data, because that is happening. I'm interested in how can we hack these technologies? How can we use it for good? How can we use AR as a form of subversiveness, as a form of liberation? Maybe I'm utopian in that view. Maybe I'm a bit too naive. I don't know. But I'm interested in how can we create really powerful storytelling that doesn't remove you from your body? This kind of black mirror dystopian view of this technology is making us less human. I'm trying to flip that on its head and say, how can this make us more human? I think these types of immersive technology can help us to reevaluate ourselves and the world around us. How can we do that with an AR headset? At the end of the day, it's just a tool. It's like any other form of media. What does this do in particular? For me, it's how you use your body. It's how you look at yourself, quite literally, when you're looking at your body and the world through these lenses. So the PhD is really kind of exploring the body and how can we augment the body physically and with this technology. not in a way that makes us less human, not in a way that removes us from our humanity, but actually connects us to other people and connects us more deeply to ourselves.
[00:30:50.084] Kent Bye: It also reminds me of how, just in virtual reality in general, you have the opportunity to pick some sort of avatar representation, whether it's a human or non-human, or what the gender expression of that is. And so, what have your experiences been of playing with identity when it comes into you're completely embodying a different virtual representation of yourself?
[00:31:09.420] Rob Eagle: You know, with gaming and VR and that sort of thing, it's nice to see that there are increasingly options. I have to say with this, I want to be myself. I think VR, the early days of VR, especially when it was touted as this empathy machine, the promise was step into someone else's shoes. And in my experience, you are literally stepping into someone else's shoes, but you are yourself. I never have this illusion that by stepping into someone else's physical shoes, that you're becoming them. I want you to be you, but I want you to, maybe reevaluate who you are and to find a new part of yourself. So by maybe using a virtual avatar, I want you still to be yourself. This isn't just about becoming someone else, it's becoming you, but maybe a different part of you.
[00:31:53.511] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:32:02.642] Rob Eagle: I think there's a wave of AR in particular that's coming with audio and with these new headsets. What I'm seeing with Bose in particular is really exciting. I'm starting to play around with audio and doing audio walks. We're looking at doing an audio version of this. I see its potential as really to take these stories outside of this rarefied world of festivals and really to kind of become more part of the landscape. I started working on this project in VR and kind of fell out of love with VR because I didn't see the excitement in VR that I see right now in AR, particularly in audio and in kind of the new AR headsets. I really see it has this potential to augment our landscape around us. What I'm afraid of is if we hand over too much power, say, to the big corporate bodies that are creating this technology, I think that we need to hack it ourselves. We need to be very punk with all of this and tell our own stories. If you're not seeing yourself represented in the mainstream media, you need to figure out a way of hacking these technologies and telling your own stories. That to me is a really exciting potential within these. I can share my community in Bristol, I can share these stories of genderqueerness and non-binary with the world through these technologies in a way that I couldn't before with film. This is a much more embodied way of storytelling and I can get across a message about kind of questioning yourself in a way that I never could with film. I think immersive media is really exciting for those affordances of the storytelling.
[00:33:30.707] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:33:35.662] Rob Eagle: I think we need to listen to each other as makers, learn from each other. I think these walled gardens are not helpful with technologies, with the headsets. I think the more that we can have conferences that we share with each other, I think the more that there are podcasts like this. I mean, this podcast in particular has been kind of my classroom for the first three years when I was working with VR. And I think building this community and learning from each other is the only way because We can go to hackathons, sure, but ultimately we have to share skills. We have to do a lot of skills building with each other. So yeah, I think if there's one thing I would like to see, it's a lot more of skill sharing, skills building, and yeah, really being less precious, shall we say, sometimes with our ideas. Awesome. Great.
[00:34:22.980] Kent Bye: Well, I just wanted to thank you for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you. Thank you. So that was Rob Eagle. He's a digital artist and filmmaker working on his PhD. And he had a piece there at the Doc Lab called Through the Wardrobe. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, Rob makes this distinction between yourself and your identity and that when you're in a virtual environment, you are erasing yourself and identity because you're not seeing a representation of yourself unless you have a scan of your body, which hardly never happens when you go into a VR experience. So in AR, you have the capability to just be yourself. And he also wanted to really start with the fashion. So to see what you're drawn to, to see what kind of clothing you may want to try on, whether it's your style or something that's completely not your style, you're able to go in and put on this piece of clothing that is presumably either a direct representation of this person or directly from their wardrobe, do a little scan, and then put on the HoloLens version one. And you're walking around this bedroom where there's these five different locations where you're able to then get a little part of their story. and sometimes you go into those locations and it completely transforms and so you're able to be like sitting down in a chair for example and then all of a sudden you have this augmented reality box that comes around you that's supposed to represent being in a stall in a bathroom but also metaphorically talking about you know being boxed in with gender but also on top of that symbolically in the piece talking about different aspects of feeling closed in and the terror that happens when you're going into the restroom For me, it was interesting just to feel the different haptic experiences of as me, as a protagonist in this experience, I have my body within this experience. And, you know, I went through it the first time and then, you know, I, I wanted to see another piece of another version. He had four different stories and when you go, you pick one. And so Robert actually suggested that I try out another one where I, you know, actually try on different jewelry. And I was like, oh, do I have to like, you know, actually put on the clothes? And they're like, yeah, actually you just kind of recommended it. And so then I was like, okay, I'll go along and put on another piece. And I actually put on this dress, went in, walked around and started putting on jewelry. And it's not something that I necessarily do. And so Rob talks about this magic circle of this safe space that within the construct of these immersive experiences, you're able to do things that you wouldn't normally do. And it was an interesting experience for me to do that, to explore my own sense of gender expression. And within virtual reality, I think people may have less of a barrier, I guess I would say, to trying on different types of identities and embodying different aspects of gender or fashion, things that you may not normally be doing. And so I think there's sort of a social contract that, you know, when you do that, you are interrelating with other people. And I guess that was the thing that I wasn't necessarily trying this stuff on and interacting with other people. I was in this kind of safe dressing room type of environment. and just to comment on the augmented reality aspect of it too because you know he's pulling in these low fidelity tilt brush e type of sketches or low poly different types of geometries but they're like the little art pieces that are trying to elucidate different aspects of the story that are being told and You know, I think there was a range of different styles and approaches. I just remember like laying on the bed and seeing like this rock climbing wall and just being really struck that here I am listening to this non-binary person talking about their gender expression and then part of their hobbies is to just do rock climbing. And so there's a deeper thread here that's a political act that Rob is doing to be able to talk about the gender expression, but also just to talk about the things that are normal human aspects. Like not every single aspect of the story was about gender and they're all about gender, but it was also just about different aspects of their lives. There's the deeper thread of just kind of normalizing these people and humanizing them in a certain way. And I love the story that he told about the young men from the United Kingdom who jump into the experience and maybe this is something that they are not normally introduced to. And so, you know, Rob wants to continue to travel this around and to really be provocative in the sense of, you know, challenge people, even if they're not accepting it and You know, I think the dream for him would be that he'd be able to show this anywhere and it would never have any controversy from it. And at that point, it would just be so mainstream in the culture that it just wasn't controversial at all. It was just a complete shift in the culture. So I was really struck by talking to Rob about gender and gender expression and having ways that we think about that traditionally in the past as binaries and dualisms of just masculine or feminine or male and female. and that this whole movement of gender expression is trying to make it less of a distinct binary and more of a plurality of a spectrum. And when you think about virtual reality and augmented reality, there's a similar thing where we have this binary between the digital world and the real world. And I think part of the things that we're seeing is that there is a blurring of this and we're creating these hybrid spaces. And he talked about a couple of theorists from Soja and also Sojadike who are talking about these hybrid spaces, these third spaces of the blending, the blurring of taking one context and adding another digital context and creating a third emergent context. That's this blurring and blending of these mixed reality. hybrid spaces or third spaces and how within these virtual reality experiences, things like through the wardrobe, he's able to create this kind of hybrid space that allows a little bit of experimentation or a safe space that, you know, you're able to kind of play around a little bit, not only to learn more about the people that are being featured, but also to kind of express your own identity. And, you know, I think that was successful in that and being able to give me a space to be able to experiment around a little bit and to have something to talk about with Rob and kind of unpack it a little bit more. and just the vision that this technology can be used as a liberation tool. And Rob has said that he just saw a lot of Cess normative and heteronormative content, and he wasn't seeing himself represented in the immersive technology sphere of any of that either experiences or stories that are being told. And so he thought that it was part of his own moral responsibility to be able to, as a creator in these different communities, to be able to actually start to create content that for him was speaking to the different types of stories that he wanted to hear. And he started with virtual reality, but realized that, you know, the thing that was actually interested in is more the augmented reality, perhaps even the audio tours or audio only approaches to be able to, you know, create these different experiences for people. And for him, he loved being able to actually have this storefront and to, in some ways, have this subversive element of, having in a liminal space and a train station and not knowing where they're going and to kind of stumble in and be open to possibility and to, you know, step into an art experience that was totally unexpected. And I think it was really neat to see that if a doc lab that they had that space available there, where there was a range of people who were walking into this context after seeing the signs and to reading the placards and to kind of have. a little bit more context of walking in, and then other people who are just walking into this experience having no idea, no context, and then all of a sudden they're in an art experience that is talking about gender identity, and they have a connection to the clothing, and they're connecting to the people. So I just thought it was a really interesting project, and I'm glad to see that this type of experimentation was going to be able to bring out these different types of projects into the public at large. 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 of the Patreon. This is a list of supported podcasts, and I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
