Michaela French has been making large-scale immersive, full dome experiences since 1999, and at IDFA DocLab she was showing her Climate Crimes piece, which explores the complex relationship between global air pollution, climate change and human migration. The IDFA DocLab had three different dome screenings showing at the ARTIS-Planetarium for the first time in 2019, and I talk with French about some of the unique affordances of the dome as a medium that’s distinctly different than both film and regular VR experiences.
French uses the affordances of full dome immersion to connect the dots between the small microcosm to the large macrocosm within her Climate Crimes experience. So she has been thinking quite a bit about the small actions that we all need to make in order to make a difference on this issue, and she calls it more of a crisis of consciousness and a crisis of ego rather than labeling it as a climate crisis. We need to collectively change our actions, but we first need to change our thinking and our conceptual frameworks for how reality works. She’s been looking into more ecological frameworks from perception expert and philosopher James J. Gibson who pioneered ecological psychology with E. J. Gibson. This paper by Lobo, Heras-Escribano and Travieso says that “the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development.”
After diving so deep into this topic for her Climate Crimes piece, French provides a refreshingly candid account as to what is at stake when it comes to the implications of climate change, especially when it comes to human migration and who is at the most risk for being displaced due to the fallout from climate change. French had just attended Sunday evening’s Artificial Futures Symposium focusing on artificial intelligence, which created quite a contrast to what she considered to be what the most pressing issues of our day and what we’re focusing on. She is able to provide a much deeper context and ground the conversation into some pretty fundamental issues that we’re facing as humanity.
French also strongly believes in the power of immersive storytelling, and the power of dome experiences to be able to make a difference in people’s thinking. And if we can change people’s thinking, then we might be able to change some of those people’s actions. If enough actions are changed, then it might be able to bring about deeper societal and global change. It’s a difficult conversation to have, but it’s also one of the most important ones that happened for me in my coverage at the DocLab.
There’s a lot more to unpack in this conversation, but it’s probably best if you listen to it and then invite a friend to listen to it so that you can unpack it together. We all need to figure out what our role is in trying to bring about change, and hopefully there’s something in this conversation & transmission that helps you find that if you don’t already know.
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Music: Fatality
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 coming out of the IDVA DocLab, today's conversation is with Michaela French. She's been doing dome projections since 1999. She created a dome experience that was shown there at the DocLab called Climate Crimes. So she talks a bit about her journey into creating these different types of experiences and it's kind of a step back of just looking at some of the broader context of where we're at in the world. So just to paint a little bit more of a context as to at this point at the doc lab. Previous night on Saturday had been the first dome showing of some of the experiences. That's where the climate crimes showing had happened. And then the next day on Sunday evening, there was this whole artificial future symposium, which there's a number of different pieces there about artificial intelligence. So they gathered all these people together and there was a discussion. So then there was a party after that, and that's when I ran into Michaela. So she had come from the Artificial Futures and listened to some of the different lectures that were there. And there was one piece in particular, I think it was called Year of the Robot, where I guess there's some ethical, weird boundaries there in terms of taking a robot into a nursing home and filming interactions with a robot. Essentially, the robot was a puppet. There was humans behind it who were speaking through the robot. It wasn't an actual AI. But they were having these variety of different interactions that are being filmed with elderly people in this nursing home who have potentially a whole wide range of neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's and dementia. And, you know, what is the ethics of, you know, shooting a video like this where you're showing these different interactions? And I think there was interesting aspects of what type of interactions that came out of it. It was really quite compelling, but at the same time, it wasn't necessarily disclosed to the audience that this was just a human puppeteering the robot and, you know, the full disclosure or other sort of ethical oversights of how this was produced, you know, that's not necessarily exactly clear. So Michaela had a number of different thoughts about that relative to the larger issues that she's thinking about in terms of the climate crisis and the work that she's doing and trying to connect people to the largest context of what's happening in the world and what we can actually do about it. So that's sort of the broader context that kind of led to this conversation to talk about domes and the larger context of climate crisis and what we all can do about it. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Michaela happened on Sunday, November 24th, 2019 at the IDFA doc lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:51.018] Michaela French: Hi, I'm Michaela French. My practice is quite variable, but mainly working with projection and moving image. A lot of it takes place in full dome space. Rather than cinematic screen, we're working in spaces that are spherical. And the difference between that and a normal cinema screen is that you don't have any vertical frame. So it's an immersive visual half a sphere, essentially. which enables transportation to immense and immersive experiences.
[00:03:22.830] Kent Bye: Well, I'm curious if you could give me a little bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:03:30.155] Michaela French: I was first invited to work with domes in 1999. I'd been a filmmaker for some time and I was working with a producer on a number of different projects who then ended up working in dome space. So it was the first planetarium in Australia and he was commissioned to make three pieces for that dome. And I was then to lead a team of designers. We had no idea what we were doing. We'd never seen a dome before. We'd never worked in a dome before. We didn't know anything about projecting in that space. And it was really a case of learning by practice and understanding kind of how to develop language in a space that worked very differently to the film spaces that I was used to. But there was this thing that happened, right? were standing in that space, you would occasionally understand the nuances that made it different from cinema. And it was about how your body responded to the visual media of that amazing infinite space. And there was a history in that that actually went far, far, far beyond the cinematic experience and was absolutely fundamental to the human experience. And that every ancestor that I ever might have imagined had painted on a wall or lit a cave by fire or imagined a fresco or created a dome imagining a heavenly sphere or There was this space and it's like this space has a language in it and it speaks to us. The feeling is that it's like a space that we need to find out how we speak back to it, if you like. That is really what it is. It's about, it's like this thing exists. And it's an intuitive feeling. I've never said it like this before, but it's this intuitive feeling that this space exists and it's been speaking to us forever. And every era and every epoch and every history and every culture has its way of responding to that space. Yeah, for me, Full Dome is an opportunity for humanity to respond to that space.
[00:05:46.962] Kent Bye: Well, as we're talking about that space and connecting to that space, we can go back to the origins of these domes, back to the planetarium in July of 1926 with Zeiss creating the first planetarium. And so it feels like these domes and planetariums were giving people a symbolic representation of space, where we live in a time and space right now where we can't actually see much of the night sky, and we're really disconnected from the larger cosmos. But we literally come from stardust. all of our atoms and everything is coming from these stars that explode. So maybe as you're tapping into this deeper meaning of these spaces, of these domes, we can go back to looking at the night sky and listening to the stories and having these aboriginal stories of how we come from the stars. and that we are taught by the stars through tracking the stars and the movement of the stars and seeing how we could start to have the original science of astronomy and tracking the motion of the stars to be able to then come up with the mathematics and all these things. So I feel like there's so much that we've learned from the sky and the stars and that it goes back to the origins of the planetariums itself.
[00:06:53.315] Michaela French: It absolutely does and in fact one of the projects that I ran as part of the group that I run at Royal College of Art, I run a research group looking into how full dome spaces can operate in an artistic or creative way and one of the projects we did was to look at the value of starlight and what starlight had offered humanity in terms of information or insights into how we exist in the universe and there are so many parts of the information that we take for granted in how we exist in the world. The speed of light, the distance and relational kind of spatial depth of our star to the next closest star to the next galaxy. Those relationships are completely dependent on our measuring the proximity and the spatial relationships to the stars. You know, there is a really big movement at the moment arguing for dark spaces and against light pollution and a lot of that is about trying to get to a point where humanity is more connected back to the stars than they are to their screens. I had the luxury of spending a month last year in Grisedale Forest in the north of the UK. It's a World Heritage site and it's also a dark sky site and there was an astronomer who would come every evening to the car park with his big telescopes and I saw Andromeda Galaxy with my naked eye and through the telescope. It's like that's the edge of visual perception. My humanity stretches to that space. if I choose to think about it in that way. Or I can choose that my humanity sits within my iPhone screen. For me, there is no choice. But I mean, I'm talking quite broadly, I guess. But these are questions that we need to be asking. Where are our priorities? Where are we putting our attention? How can we be dismissing the value of the starlight as a really fundamental way of connecting ourselves to our planet? I just think at the moment humanity is maybe a little bit lost. and that these ways of looking actually are a way back to the things that are important. Your Twitter feed is not that important actually. When it comes down to it, what do you care about? Your family, the world still feeding you, it rotating in this amazing big system around the sun where other planets orbit and pulsars pulse and There's an expansiveness to that. We don't matter so much in that system. We're so obsessed with ourselves and our own identities and our own position in the world and what we can get and what we can be and who we want to be. It's not that important. We're all passing through. What can we contribute? What can we bring? How can we make this a better, more viable system?
[00:10:00.788] Kent Bye: Yeah, in a lot of ways, if you take a step back and look at this light pollution and the climate crisis that we're in right now and everything else in terms of what's happening in the world, metaphorically, think about the day as kind of like the ego of our individuation and the night as the dissolving of the ego and the connection to the infinite dimensions of the universe. We're getting a whole other experience of time as we see the light from all the stars from billions of years ago. We're getting an experience of time that's really like we're time traveling, but we're able to dissolve our ego and see how we're a part of something that's much larger than ourselves. But we've lost touch of that both metaphorically and literally by not being able to see the night sky. We are so afraid of the dark and so stuck in this ego individuation consciousness that we want to be able to walk around at night safely, meaning that we put a lot of this lights and everything else that we can't see the night sky that For me it just feels like such an apt metaphor for this dialectic between the ego and ego disillusionment and ourself and our relation to the rest of the world and this kind of shift of consciousness of being able to actually see the night sky, be connected, and that cultivation of that relational ecological mindset that is going to allow us to change our behaviors to be able to be more in harmony with living on the earth. So to me it feels like this is like such a perfect metaphor for all these other issues, which gets to the piece that you created here that's showing at the DocLab.
[00:11:29.180] Michaela French: I completely agree with you, and there's two things that I'm thinking of in response. One is, I had a conversation yesterday with a Finnish artist who's looking into ideas of consciousness, and the relationship of consciousness as a kind of historical thing within religious contexts, and how that's now being manifest and kind of evidenced in mainstream science. And that coming out of that, her perspective on the whole ecological crisis is that it's not ecological, it's egological. And it's a crisis of ego. rather than ecology. The ecology is what it is and it will adapt. The question is whether the ego can adapt to accommodate a system where the individual is not the priority and there are other ways of looking at the world and other ways of thinking about how we interact with one another. We're not isolated individual beings. I've just seen a talk this evening about a dementia ward where old people who are suffering from an illness that is completely devastating for them and for their families are interacting with robots. Now the robots are more puppets than robots because they're not actually artificially intelligent, they're simply responding to human directives. But that somehow that seemed to be a solution to our collapsing society and our inability to cope with the crisis that we developed for ourselves. And I've seen a close relation go through dementia recently. And the people who supported him and maintained his dignity to the end were not robots. And they could not have been robots to keep his spirit intact. So there is a sense that we hand ourselves over to this idea that technology will save us or that transport to Mars will be a solution to our Earth's problems. There is a joke running online at the moment that Mars is actually the planet we left when we decided Earth looked better. I mean, it's not true, but it's really good because, you know, we've got to get with the program and we've got to become functional humans. We're capable of so much intelligence. We have so much capacity and we are living at an absolute baseline of what we're capable of. And those who derive and decide the media line are absolutely riding the bottom of the pile. There is so much more. Step up, think better, do better, act better, be better. Capacity of humanity, we can do better.
[00:14:35.604] Kent Bye: Well, I really appreciate your... I really appreciate the intensity of what you're saying because, you know, you were talking about storytelling and the power of storytelling, the power of being able to connect people to another story and to really empower them with a sense of agency for what can they do to be able to actually make a choice to be able to shift these larger dynamics. And so, you know, we started by talking a little bit about domes and, you know, your piece of climate crimes is really trying to connect the dots between the small to the large, and so really giving us this systemic level of connecting the dots between these small choices that we're making into the systemic issues. So we've been covering the systemic issues, but you're trying to actually use the Dome technology to be able to inspire people to be able to actually change their behavior.
[00:15:26.331] Michaela French: Do you know that's so brilliant? This is such a great thing because sometimes people give you insights into stuff that you've done that you haven't seen in that way. So I'm also doing a PhD at the moment, and one of the things that keeps recurring in the PhD is this idea of a small action building to a bigger event or a bigger outcome, and that every single individual action, as we know, we know this, but to actually kind of explore it in depth, Every action has an outcome. Every action. Standing here with you and your recorder, this is an action. This has an outcome. So the film, the film is interesting because the action that we're talking about is an individual particle, a nanoparticle, called an aerosol. And every aerosol is a pollutant that has a particular structure and a particular form that is derived from a place. And every aerosol, it's essentially like a DNA structure that can anchor it back to a particular location within miles. Those aerosols get picked up into the atmosphere and carried on the air flows that travel around the world. They're picked up on the jet streams and carried into the global weather system. And the northern hemisphere aerosols impact the temperature of the oceans to the west of North Africa. The rising temperature impacts the rainfall. The rainfall, rather than moving onto the land, goes to sea, and therefore there's a kind of increasing desertification in the Sahel region. So traditionally, the Sahel region has been condemned for bad farming practices, for not knowing how to manage their land, for all of these different kind of localized problems that are said to be causing the issue. The film looks at the idea that actually it's a much bigger system. There's evidence also within the data systems that we've been looking at that the dust from the Sahel is actually really, really critical to feeding the Amazon. So the idea now, of course, that the Amazon is burning, I mean, where's that smoke going? That's going back to the Sahel. It's a system. It flows. One thing affects another. A tiny particle of dust can be traced from the chimneys of northern Europe through the system to impact that environment in the north of Africa. We're not alone. Every bit of plastic, that's one tiny thing. Every breath, every action, every carbon fuel power station, all impact. It's so overwhelming, and it's so immense, and it's so impossible. And I live in north of London, and to get to this festival, I've traveled by plane. And the film that I made to tell this story was recorded on a computer plugged into a system that was charging from a power system that is part of the problem. The projectors that showed that film are part of the problem. The recorder that's been charged to record this interview is part of the problem. Me breathing and eating is part of the problem. It's like so impossible. And yet there's got to be some other way to look forward.
[00:19:03.144] Kent Bye: Well, I think about this a lot because I do travel and I do these interviews. The story I tell myself, at least, is that what you're able to do with the affordances of these new technologies is to potentially start to tell these types of stories, stories that have been very difficult to tell before. In your presentation here at DocLab, at the DocLab conference, you were talking about how the Dome has these certain affordances of being able to communicate that go beyond what film does and also goes beyond what VR can do. There's something unique about maybe seeing the big picture that you're able to connect the dots in a certain way that maybe will allow people to change their behavior. There was a piece that was from a number of years ago, it's by Condition One, it was during Sundance, and it was going into like this transgressive It was a direct action where they trespassed into this chicken farm that had chickens in cages. And they were taking out the chickens that had their beaks cut off. And they were trying to find the chickens that were about to die. And they take them out to be able to give them some medical treatment. Because they were within hours of dying anyway. But they were trying to show the conditions of these chicken in cages. And then, since that time, I've not bought any eggs that come from anything other than cage-free chickens. And so, as an example of an immersive experience that I watched, and then, within a few days, was at the grocery store making the choice of what kind of eggs am I going to buy. Am I going to buy the cheapest eggs, or am I going to, like, make a choice to participate in a system that is going to have a little bit more ethics involved?
[00:20:35.160] Michaela French: I once read a book called A Year of Meat. I can't remember who it's by but it's an American woman and she basically goes around and does research into the meat industry in America. I mean I was already vegetarian anyway but that was like the clincher for me. You can't act responsibly having that knowledge. So I think your example is really exactly spot on, because it's about the knowledge that makes you change your behaviour. So today I bought a salad. It was in a single-use plastic box. I didn't want to buy it, but I didn't know what else to eat. That's where we're stuck. I mean, I made that film, but I bought a plastic box salad. There's guilt in that. I mean, I feel guilty about that. I grow a lot of my own vegetables. I don't eat meat. I buy all my vegetables from a local organic supplier. I try not to use the supermarket as much as possible. I encourage my neighbours to grow their own vegetables and we've started swapping plants. You know, I'm a complete nerd. But if I don't do this, then who's gonna do it? Like I'm hardly touching the surface, but it's like the beginning of something and I'm gonna keep going and I'm not giving up. And I think I'm not on trend either. I think this is so uncool.
[00:22:02.637] Kent Bye: Well, I think it's actually part of what's happening. I mean, there's the Extinction Rebellion protests happening around the world. I mean, I think there's a certain amount of people having this urgency.
[00:22:11.945] Michaela French: But maybe rebellion is actually to say, enough, I'm not shopping at the supermarket anymore. Actually, the rebellion would be not to go block the traffic in the middle of London, but to stop buying at Sainsbury's or Tesco's. That would be rebellion. I mean, they would go into absolute meltdown. What would that mean if people stopped buying at those places? They would have to look at another option. But there's the requirement of hardship and challenge. You know, it's not easy to grow your own vegetables because they don't always work and they're really slow. And you make so much effort and then slugs get them or, you know, it's not easy, which is, of course, why we've kind of ended up in this situation, because it's easier to buy a plastic box of salad than it is to grow your own. But that's how we get here. Partly I'm grateful that I have the skill that I can grow my own because I've been taught how to do that and I really despair for people who don't actually know how to grow their own vegetables or to make their own bread or think laterally about how to accommodate other ways of being. We're so attuned to comfort, you know, put on another jumper, use less heating, don't drive your car, ride your bike or walk. Our culture is completely designed for comfort and ease and this supposed kind of magical world but actually I think it makes us disconnect and ultimately we'd be better off being cold, growing vegetables and looking at the stars.
[00:23:49.972] Kent Bye: That's certainly, that'd be some good steps. For me, I feel like there's, like, each person is gonna have their part to play in this. Like, for me, it feels like the most highly leveraged thing that I feel like I can do is to continue to see these pieces of immersive work, try to understand what the structures of experiential design might be, and to talk to artists like yourself who have gone on these whole journeys of these issues and trying to tell stories about these really heart-wrenching topics that I think we're all trying to deal with.
[00:24:19.240] Michaela French: Can I say one more thing about this? So with climate crimes, it wasn't just about pollution. It was also about people. And part of the thing of putting it in the dome for me was that actually it's a story of that cyclic. So the reason for putting it in a dome is that it doesn't begin and end. It goes around. And in its original iteration, it was a looping piece. So it didn't start and finish. You could just appear and it was going. And one of the really important things in that film for me, and I don't know that it kind of works so well in the Planetarium, but in the looping sequence maybe better, was that we're telling this story about particles and about a global system and about the overwhelming challenge of what it is to be living in that northern hemisphere system that is the cause of the pollution, but then also our judgment on what it is for the migrants coming across the ocean. And so there's parts in the film where there's like little cut out figures of floating bodies that were taken from footage from these ships that would go out into the ocean and kind of monitor the different, they wouldn't save the migrants, they would just monitor them floating in the ocean. So there's this footage of people with life jackets just floating in the sea trying to get to the shore and there's three of those people in that film and I spent six months with those people bobbing around in their life jackets. I don't know if they're dead or alive but I found myself deeply, deeply aware that that was a life and that the stories that we're telling about global impact and pollution and conflict and potential genocide, if our climate increase goes up by 2%, Africa dies. That's not Africa, that's people. I mean, either we value life or we don't. We argue for it in lots of cases, when it's comfortable and when it's uncomfortable we let it go like we don't care at all. So I think to spend that time with those people floating on the sea, and I don't know the people, they were representations of a bigger picture. But those people felt something and they had lived a life and they had families that they left behind and they were floating in the middle of an ocean with no home and nowhere to go and no one giving a shit. They're people. Either we care or we don't care. For me that was a whole other level of that film. was to say we can make judgments about migrants and do we want them in our country and I'm an Australian. My country has the most appalling record for migration, probably amongst the worst in the world. And I'm proud to say that I was a supporter of some refugees who broke out of institutions. and I was able to integrate them into society in ways that may not have been entirely legal. But in terms of principles, people have an integrity and they can be labelled by politics as whatever they are, as terrorists, as dissidents as refugees but when you speak to them they're just humans and they have lives and their brothers have been killed and their families have been lost and they're alone in the world and there's a place for love basically. So you know it's about putting that first and standing by what you believe is possible and because actually sometimes the people I helped who were called terrorists had seen their family shot and one of them his wife was still in Afghanistan having their first baby and he would never see them because he couldn't go back. That's the world that we live in and that's the world that we make and we're standing here talking about the importance of AI and you just, I'm thrilled, I'm delighted that I'm here at the festival but I think there's another conversation to be having.
[00:29:03.769] Kent Bye: Well, I'm glad that we're having this conversation after that because I think it's important because there is a deeper context here and you know, like I was saying earlier that we all have to decide what our most highly leveraged thing that we can do and I feel like I'm trying to do that and it seems like that you're trying to do that as well with exploring the medium of domes and telling stories with domes and in a context where there's a lot of planetarium owners out there who maybe don't understand your vision about that and they are showing like these educational films with the planetarium equipment but you know here at the doc lab with Casper he really wanted to show that there was a potential for a consumer market to want to see some other stories or some artists come in and use the medium of the dome to be able to tell different types of stories and to see stories like yours of the climate crimes and so
[00:29:52.875] Michaela French: that's amazing about the dome space is that unlike cinema where you have a screen that you look at and if the screen is big you sort of fall into it and you get caught up in the world but in the dome space you're in the world you can't decide to look away from it, really, unless you close your eyes. And one of the key things about dome space is that it's described as an egocentric space, because there's no vertical edges. There's no edge of frame, and there's no structure in the space that gives you your vertical alignment. You actually revert to your body for that kind of core orientation. So in watching a dome film, you're inherently connecting to your body. and there's two other things that happen in watching a dome film because generally the seats that you're sitting on will be reclined so as you recline your heart rate lowers because it doesn't need to push your blood so hard in a vertical position and that kind of shifts the chemistry of your brain so in a dome space your physiology is more relaxed and therefore more susceptible to new ideas and to observe and to wonder and to consider and to relate yourself to other possibilities. And I think that's a really interesting part of that medium. It's not something that's used a lot. And I think we don't know how to tell stories with that yet. We've got little moments where you're seeing those things take place. But there was feedback from someone in one of the screenings that have happened here. And apparently they felt that they were anchored to their chair. and they couldn't get out of their chair. Not that they wanted to, but they tried to lift their arms, but they were unable to. They weren't uncomfortable. It wasn't like they were pinned, but there was just this sense of being present that kept them present in their chair. They were aware of their body, feeling heavy on their chair. It's a really physical experience, and I think For me, what's interesting about that is so much of what we're talking about is derived from our thinking and how we're told to think. But actually, how we experience the world, if we were to listen to that as the thing that gave us our information, we would find that the stories we would tell would be very different stories. In our world, In our world, we're dominated still by a view of philosophy that is 200 years old, that divides the mind from the body, and the body from the world. I mean, that's how we think. I'm standing here astounded because I'm like, how can we believe that's true? It's so stupid. Do you know? We don't exist as a separate mind. We're not a mind. Our mind, in actual fact, in physiological terms, it's been shown that our mind, if there is such a thing as a physical mind, is not held in our brain, but our brain is actually extended down our spinal column. So all of those nerves going down the spinal column and out through the various points through the spinal column and into the nervous system, that's your brain.
[00:33:32.302] Kent Bye: That's the entire body, body cognition, yeah.
[00:33:34.364] Michaela French: Yeah, your brain doesn't stop in your head. So the idea that the brain can be separate from the body, and that the mind is somehow separate from the experience of the body, and I'm going to go further, but stop me if you must. I've been doing research into an ecological perspective on how we perceive the world, based on the work of a psychologist called James J. Gibson. He's a secret genius, but no one knows about him. But they might soon, we'll see. But one of the principles that he was working with is this idea that the mind is not separate from the body, and the body is not separate from the world. that it is simply a continuation of one system into another. And we think of ourselves as having five senses. We've got sight, we've got sound, we've got smell, we've got taste, we've got touch. He saw that as a single unified perceptual system. So rather than having a channel for eyes or a channel for ears or a channel for taste or your mouth or whatever, he was thinking about that as a system. And for me, the dome is a really great kind of metaphor for that, if you like, because the sound, for example, in a dome space is spatial. It's not a single channel sending from a particular direction. It comes from all directions and it becomes an experience. Sound is an experience. We perceive sound as an experience. It's not separate from vision unless we shut our eyes. It's not separate from taste unless we decide not to taste something at that time. These systems are ways of drawing information in from the world that we exist in. It's a really beautifully evolved structure that we don't believe in anymore. We rather hand it over to digital sensors to tell us what's going on. I mean, where did that happen? So I've recently been working with the idea that my body is a sensor and that I'm very, very, very capable of recording very functional and accurate data with my body. I can hear things, I can see things, and I can feel things. And if I use all of those three systems at once, I've got a way to correlate data in a triangulation that allows me to kind of test whether what I'm experiencing is actually viable and true. It's a very functional system. But in our world, we're told it's not reliable. because the mind is separate from the body and the body actually is unreliable as a system for telling us what's going on in the world. In actual fact, in our world, we're better relying on the artificial intelligence of machines to tell us what's going on in the world. I mean, you know. And I'm not saying machines don't have their place. They actually record data, but it's different data. It's not in competition. It's different types of information. And we can use that information, but it's not us. It's not human. It's not humanity. It's not where we're heading. There's other ways to look at the world than the way we're currently looking.
[00:36:57.615] Kent Bye: Yeah, while I was here in Amsterdam, I actually, I had a text to speech read to me the philosophy entry of the process philosophy, which is often associated with Heraclitus or Alfred North Whitehead, where rather than saying that substance and objects were the fundamental metaphysics of the foundation of reality, like substance metaphysics, it's more of a process. And so it's more of a relationships of patterns of energy and relationship to each other. And I think a lot of what Alfred North Whitehead was talking about of this philosophy of organism and the philosophy of these processes is that trying to look at these things in terms of these processes that are unfolding in these ecosystems and trying to get away from the substance metaphysics which is trying to reduce things down to these concrete objects that are static and looking at things in more of these dynamic processes that are unfolding and changing over time.
[00:37:48.376] Michaela French: Static is interesting to me right now. I've been writing about static lately. There is no static. It's a question of persistence. What we see as static is simply something that persists for a long time. So in human perception there is this sense of things changing and a sense of things staying the same. That's as far as our kind of realm of perception goes. That's not actually about reality. That's only as far as we can perceive. So the world is in constant flux. The plant beside us is changing. We can't see it change right now, but if we stay here long enough, we'll see it hit the ceiling. You and I are changing. Soon, we're going to be older. Well, right now, you're older than you were. Do you know what I mean? Everything is changing. It's about how you see it. That man's getting older. His changing his shape, his moving around, everything. The floor is changing. It's about scales of perception and scales of imagination. So there's a line where we can't perceive. And then you have to use your imagination. But nothing is staying. We know that. You only have to look at history to see that nothing is static. Everything's changing. So the idea that we've got this fixed position is so deluded. But I find that fantastically exciting because there's nothing holding us in place except our stupid, stupid thinking. You know, it's like there's actually this opportunity when you look at the world as a thing in flux, There's an opportunity to say, well, you know, there's no static. It's just about redirecting or focusing. Where do we want that change to be heading? And at the moment, maybe the change is heading in a direction that no one really likes. And it was interesting hearing a talk yesterday from Monique at the end about the idea that in their surveying of people of Canada about the future, there was very little sense of what the future would bring. Because there is no envisaged future at the moment because no one's understanding how to cope with the change. I'm saying bring on the change and let's get excited about the idea of change as what we're actually in. We are changing and you can't stay the same and your body is going to get old and you are going to die and someone else is going to come forward and the tree that grows is coming from a seed and then that seed is going to become another tree and the tree that you're looking at has come from a long line of trees and the human I'm looking at has come from a long line of humans. We're all just passing through. Get with the program. Do you know what? There's nothing to lose. We've just got to stop trying so hard to hold it all in some fixed thing. I can own all the wealth in the world. I can't, actually, because no one's ever going to pay me. But if I were a multimillion billionaire, the eye of a camel. It's old stories. You can't take it to heaven. We don't know where we're going, but wherever we're going it's change and you can't take what you've got here with you. So for me it's about finding ways to build communities that are more interested in contribution, in telling stories that are about bringing ourselves to a humanity that actually is the best possible version we can be. because we are boring as shit at the moment. Oh my God, I am so bored. You know, I don't know who this man is, but he's not living to his capacity. I'm not living to mine and you're not living to yours. None of us are. We're boring because we're sort of safe on our sofas. I think there's a whole other level. Let's just kick its ass and get on with it.
[00:41:56.329] Kent Bye: I love it. Yeah, that's a perfect encapsulation of process philosophy right there. So thank you. And just finally, just to wrap things up here, I'm curious what you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies and immersive storytelling and what they might be able to enable.
[00:42:15.175] Michaela French: I think the best they can enable is changing thinking. That's the best they can enable. And that possibly, with a bit of luck, they might change action as a result. That's the best they can do. I think it's dangerous territory to think that they in themselves are something of value because it actually relies on action as an outcome to make change. Change doesn't come only through thinking, it comes from action. So for me making a film, I can change the thinking and I change the thinking in the hope that I can change in action. That's the best we can do. But that said, I also think there is a lot of value in the artistic thinking and the artistic practice to provide an alternative way of approaching our world in the current circumstance. And it is so easy to become overwhelmed by a lack of optimism. and to accept the current paradigm as reality. It's one view and there is a whole other world out there. And that if 99% of the population decided positivity was the way forward, it'd be a different world. And they say that apparently to kind of create global change or significant change within a community, you need about 29%. So let's work toward that.
[00:43:59.438] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:44:06.642] Michaela French: Take responsibility. Step into your power. Believe in more and get on with it. It's so easy to make these statements and it's so hard to actually deliver work that makes those comments real. And I think make it less about me and more about what me can contribute to the whole. Those small actions contributing to the bigger system, that's the way forward. Small action, what's your small action and how can that change? How can that make a difference? That's for me, that's got to be the answer. If there's an answer, that's got to be the path forward. But I still, I guess I still believe in human spirit and I believe in human capacity. I do. I might be naive and idealistic, but I don't care.
[00:45:03.815] Kent Bye: Well, Michaela, I just want to thank you for taking the leap of faith and to be able to have this conversation right now at the end of my DAC Lab as I'm about to end my journey here and to hop on a plane tomorrow morning. But thanks for taking the time and having what I think is a very important conversation to talk about not only the work that you're doing, but also the larger context of what it means and what's at stake. So thank you.
[00:45:25.445] Michaela French: Do you know what? There are so many insights for me in this conversation. It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope we will have further conversations in future. And really, the fact for me that the Dome is here at DocLab is a great leap forward in itself and a recognition of the value of that medium and I look forward to future iterations of what the Dome can bring to this festival and to storytelling more generally, because I think there is a real value and a real power in that medium. And the visionaries who have gone before me and made the technologies and the tools that make it possible to have these ideas, they saw it, and it's sort of for the rest of us to now make that into something useful. So thank you. It's been really nice to talk to you.
[00:46:14.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, and thank you. So that was Michaela French. She's been producing dome experiences since 1999, and she was showing a dome experience there at IFADocLab called Climate Crimes. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, there's a lot of thoughts about the dome technology, but also the broader context of what's happening in the world and how we're situated and what's happening with our relationships of these many different actions that we're doing as a collective society and where we've led up. I think the broader context of a lot of the different pieces this year at the DocLab, we're trying to address what we can do around climate change. And in a lot of ways, Michaela is getting at the heart of a lot of these issues, which is the crisis of consciousness and the different ways in which we're all complicit in our small actions that we do each and every day. And perhaps some of the best things we can do is to learn more about stories and ways to live into a mythology that allows us to see that we have the agency to make different choices and how those different choices could add up into collective change. So I think there's the tendency to get so overwhelmed to get paralyzed and to be like, oh my God, this is just impossible. What can we possibly do? And for me, I try to find the most highly leveraged thing that I can do and I think just having conversations like this and to just put it out into the world to have more people think about it because, you know, I think there's a certain amount of wisdom of like going back to looking at the stars and, you know, we can't see the stars at night, which maybe that's a great metaphor for saying how much of our society has projected our egos out to the point where it's actually disconnected us from being able to sit back and look up at the stars and be connected to something that's larger than us. So with that focus of so much on to our individuated selves that we've lost those relational aspects of ourselves to the larger cosmos and to everybody else here on the earth which is pretty much a metaphor for what's happening in the world and finding ways to look at issues of light pollution to be able to actually see the night sky and connect to something that's actually larger than us or to start to look at things like these dome projection experiences where Michaela is talking about all the different physiological things that happen when you sit back and you relax and you can have some different brain chemistry and be open to this sense of wonder and awe as you look up into being transported into this whole other way of looking at things and you know her piece climate crimes is really trying to connect the dots between these small incremental things that are happening in the world and how it adds up to these global context and then kind of flip back and forth into the small microcosm into the macrocosm and that the piece was really designed within Dome to be shown in a cycle. So it's like never ending. And so just thinking about the medium and how it affords both for that level of cyclical thinking, but also to try to connect those small actions into the larger context. And I think that's a lot of what she was trying to do with her piece here. So she's talking about being in the dome and it's gotten rid of the frame and it's a different level of storytelling that goes beyond What is in virtual reality or just film and because you're working at a certain scale and audio design that you can have so it's actually a different Distribution platform and you have different affordances that you can start to use, you know obviously a lot of the domes that are out there are thinking about doing these light shows to be able to give us this experience of the stars and because we can't see the stars at night, and we have to go into these virtual representations of that. But, you know, there's also this whole other movement of artists who are doing this type of creative work. One of the other experiences I saw in the Dome was called Fractal Time, and it was an amazing example of exploring completely other different geometries in a way that was so impressive. The resolution was so good, and the audio was just, you know, so immersive, and like Mikhail was saying, I'm like sitting back and relaxing, and it just felt like I was open to a whole nother experience of fractal geometries that were being added together. It was just a very evocative piece and there's certain ways in which you are open to more possibilities when you see things in the dome. So I'm excited that Casper was exploring what's possible with the dome screenings and really super appreciated having this talk with Michaela because, you know, she's not only thinking about like the history of trying to prove out what's possible with different types of artistic expression with the domes, but also just, you know, looking into these different thinkers like James J. Gibson and other aspects of distributed cognition or panpsychism or ways of seeing that our consciousness is kind of embedded within the world and more ways that go way beyond dualism or ecological thinking to see how There's more of our things that are in relationship to each other and connected so things like process philosophy and Alfred North Whitehead He's really talking about this underlying metaphysics of relation and how it's very difficult to kind of separate different aspects of the mind and the body and for Whitehead It was all part of a self-contained system where each of the individual parts of matter would have different levels of information that information being aggregated into different levels of consciousness. And so not trying to come up with these dualistic ways of thinking about things, of ourselves being separated from the rest of reality, but moving more into a relational metaphysics to see how we're fundamentally interconnected and interdependent from everything in this system. Trying to bring in those different types of ecological thinking I think is part of the underlying metaphysical presuppositions of what reality even is to be able to not just allow us to only think of us as individuals, but to see how we're actually within the broader context of not only a long lineage of our ancestors, but also to be good stewards of our future ancestors, we need to be able to actually be in relationship to all these things and question the different things that we can do each and every day. And I think that was a big message that I got out of this conversation was just thinking about those small actions and whatever those small actions might be for you to find your most highly leveraged thing that you can do and just keep doing that. and just try to live into this optimistic future believing that we actually have the agency to be able to make a change and to be able to cooperate and do things that we couldn't even imagine given our current paradigms. And so there does need to be certain shifts of consciousness and shift of paradigm in order to get to this place where we're in a different relationship to the world around us. 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 so I do rely upon donations from people 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.
