Nightss is an sensual experience that’s structured around an erotic Polish-language poem by Weronika Lewandowska that uses dance and spatial metaphors in VR to create an immersive poem. She collaborated with co-director and co-screenwriter Sandra Frydrysiak who also has a background in dance. They both are very interested in researching how the immersive experience they created impacts the neuroscience of embodiment, perception, and empathy in collaboration with the University of Social Sciences & Humanities in Warsaw.
Lewandowska and Frydrysiak are also interested in creating immersive experiences that help the audience feel embraced, immersed, safe, intimate, and sensual, and they’re working with the Visual Narratives Lab do help do some research into directing attention and other foundational research topics for immersive storytelling. They coded Lewandowska’s poem, and used it to structure multiple layers of story that included the emotions, visuals, movement, music, interaction, and overall immersion. Poetry uses a lot of powerful visual metaphor, and so it makes sense that the translation of poetry into immersive poems will help to form the underlying affordances of the spatial language of virtual reality and immersive storytelling.
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Here’s a performance of Weronika Lewandowska’s poem featured in Nightsss
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on my coverage of looking at the experiences from Sundance 2021, this podcast is about the experience called Nights, which tries to translate a existing erotic poem in the language of Polish into visual metaphors. So using this kind of fabric like material and changing environment and trying to translate the meaning of this poem into a visual poem. Also, the creators are coming from this research background, where they each have their PhDs, and they're doing this deep research on perception and embodiment. And as we look at these objects, to what degree is it invoking these emotions or empathy? And yeah, just lots of different ways of embodiment and immersion and perception and the future of immersive storytelling. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Veronica and Sandra happened on Saturday, January 30th, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:12.381] Weronika Lewandowska: My name is Veronica Lewandowska and I am a director, screenwriter, as well as Sandra is. And also I am an executive producer of VR Nights. Yeah, we work in a small team, so we took on a lot of responsibilities. That's why so many things during one production, my voice guides you through a dynamic environment of the night towards bright sunrise and state of relaxation.
[00:01:47.197] Sandra Frydrysiak: My name is Sandra Frydrysiak. I am also a director and screenwriter of Nights. I'm also a dance researcher. My research made me engage in VR. We met with Weronika in our PhD practice at the Doctoral Studies at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. And we created a research of perception of movement in virtual reality. And while doing it, we already knew that virtual reality is a medium that we want to explore both artistically and scientifically. And here we are.
[00:02:34.758] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe each of you could give a little bit more context as to your backgrounds and your journey into VR, especially as you're in Poland and, you know, how you sort of got into VR there in Poland.
[00:02:50.346] Weronika Lewandowska: So I am a writer and spoken word poet, and I think this practice brought me to virtual reality. And also I am an academic teacher and I did research about immersive experiences in artistic performative practices. So because I am a poet, I always try to explore the spatial poetry, like how to use space and life meeting with public to write something what is performative, what is for stage performance, And this opened for me a lot of collaborations with artists from different fields. And I think it was for me kind of university of art, you know, like art university, because I learned through meetings with other people. And I was, of course, interested in new media and technologies, how I can use them to create new forms of narratives. And I think I connected everything like my artistic interests and academic interests in my PhD. And that was the time when I met Sandra and we had an exchange. We talked about different possibilities of media and how to connect poetry with dance, dance with research, artistic research and academic research. So that was my way to virtual reality production and to be a director of my first ever VR piece.
[00:04:36.802] Sandra Frydrysiak: Yeah, actually, this is something important to be said that it is our first VR and the group of key collaborators that we built in our project for almost all of them. It was the first ever creation of VR experience, right? we were learning on the go. And we got a grant money for this project from a laboratory of visual narratives that has been created two years ago in Łódź Film School. So they built this laboratory that has a section of VRs and XRs other realities, and they develop the field in Poland. So their goal is to develop and lobby for development of the cinematic VR and other experimental forms like our work. So it is the more experimental animation actually not a film per se. So VR in Poland is on the stage one, we are building the community and we are doing so by also learning, studying and researching VR at the same time. And I guess that my way to VR was also through my research, right? Because I'm a researcher, I have artistic experience because I was a dancer, a professional dancer. For a decade, I was dancing contemporary dance. And then I delved into dance research, but I was researching dance also from the perspective of cognition. So I treat dance as a practice of perception, as a cognitive practice. And my PhD, I was looking at dance as a practice that is actually developing our perception, cognitive skills. And this is where we met because Veronika was researching immersion and how it is functioning in performative arts. So we immediately thought that we have to join forces in some way. And we were both interested in neuroscience, in neurocognitive science, also in embodiment and in movement. And we figured it out that it's very special to experience embodiment and movement in VR. So we had this research product that we have started, but we have not finished it, by the way. But yeah, this is mine and our way to VR.
[00:07:28.230] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that you would combine poetry, dance and movement, embodiment, perception into this piece because it is such a piece of visual poetry, but there's also the other distinct aspect, which is this poem that you're reading throughout the piece, Veronica, maybe you could give us a little bit more background and context of the poem. And I don't know if you want to perhaps even read a little section of it in Polish, just to give us a little flavor of the piece. But yeah, maybe you could describe the piece and share a little segment of it, just so that we can get a sense of it and what you were starting with, with this piece.
[00:08:08.060] Weronika Lewandowska: So it's a quite old poem. I wrote it like 15 years ago and perform it around the world because it was translated to 13 languages, only published in three countries. because I use it on the stage. The translation was always projected behind me when I was on the stage performing to the public. And it's really music structure, I think, because it has a rhythm. It has melody of emotions. So people, even if they don't understand the sense of words, they can have some impression of emotions and maybe stimulates imagination and people can create their own interpretation of it when I am on the stage. And also when I am on the stage, you can see me kind of dancing with my poem, because it's full of sounds and I express all those sounds also through my body. So it's not only a poem, not only text, but also it's dance. Yeah, and if you know the Polish language or you have the occasion to hear somebody speaking this language, for sure you understand that it's ASMR, the language full of ASMR sounds. So maybe I can present a part of it. I'm excited.
[00:09:41.329] Sandra Frydrysiak: I always love to hear her performing live.
[00:09:45.300] Weronika Lewandowska: Of course, we have an English translation and during the sentence you can hear the English translation inside our VR at the end of the experience. But I think Polish gives you a part of my memory because it's my language and I express myself in this language. Noc, noc, noc, koc, koc. Świerszczę jeszcze, nie mieszczę się w mieście. Duszna, mokra jest powietrza. Uciekam, ściekam, po skórze, po wodę. Łyk, łyk, łyk, łyk, łyk, łyk, łyk, kosmek moich włosów w twoich ustach. Noc, noc, noc, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod, zgod Okay, so that's like a part of it. It makes me dance. Every time I hear it, it makes me dance. It's like I think our visual environment has this dynamic and it resonates with the poem. The dynamic, which I mentioned at the end, it's like the state of relaxation. You can experience different states and transformation of poem, transformation of visual environment. I hope transformation of yourself.
[00:12:17.837] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. And Sandra, maybe you could talk about first your reaction to that poem when you heard it, and then kind of the first steps that you took in terms of starting to translate that poem into either a script or what we see on the screen in virtual reality.
[00:12:38.161] Sandra Frydrysiak: Well, this was the first step of our work, preparing the scenario and writing the script. And we started actually by a deep analysis of the poem itself. So we were talking about it. I was asking Veronika about her memories when she was writing it and what made her write it and what kind of memories she put, visual memories as well, she put into the poem. And actually it was a very, very specific kind of work with the script because we were working on several levels and levels of emotions or visuals or movement, of music, of interaction, of immersion. So we were really focusing parallelly. We were reading closely the poem and we were trying to divide it in parts and to each part because the environment is changing and the movement is changing and the rhythm and the music is changing in the pieces you'll see. So it was well thought through to combine specific moments in the work with the specific moment of the poem. Yeah, I guess that we also want it to be very sensual because the decision was made that the work in the original will stay in Polish language. So it means that most of Sundance immersions viewers won't understand cognitively the line, right? The narrative, what it is about. but somehow we understand it because we built this environment and also because Veronika's voice is materially acting on our bodies. Actually, when Veronika was performing her poem internationally, she always said that it was affecting on the affective level the audience even though they didn't know the words, right? So we were very much focused on those little things that will make you feel, make you sense this atmosphere that we wanted to create and the atmosphere that the poem and especially Veronica's voice creates.
[00:15:13.583] Kent Bye: Yeah. And Veronica, I'm wondering if you could explain a little bit about what the poem is about, because you had mentioned the ASMR aspect of it. And what was interesting is that I saw this piece probably six or seven times just because it was crashing after five minutes or so. Part of it was just, I was trying to get through the piece. but also I was trying to notice different things within the piece because there's lots of different layers. And one time I noticed where I shut my eyes a little bit and I could start to tune into a little bit more of the ASMR aspect, but because the world around me was So stimulating, I wasn't tuning into the chills that some people get when they listen to pieces of ASMR, but there was a moment when the dancer is far away and it comes towards me and like right through me. And it gave me chills when I was watching it visually, but I was noticing how the ASMR was stronger when I would shut my eyes than if I were watching it. But my experience of watching it so many times was that there's lots of layers to this piece that there's lots to pay attention to, even when you go back into it. So I appreciated that, but I'm just wondering if you could maybe help set the context as to what this poem is about. And then the first steps that you took in trying to translate the meaning of that poem into all these different layers that you had mentioned that is being translated into this visual poem.
[00:16:40.285] Weronika Lewandowska: I think the sound of crickets, it's very present in this poem because it's a part of my memory, a part of the event I had. It's connected to the nature, but also strongly connected with experience of love, relationship, and it creates intimate situation with the innocent. And nature, it's really like a part of my life, you know, I grew up on the countryside. For example, one of my imagination game was walking on the fields and singing, talking with nature. So I think in this way, I develop my sensitiveness. And when I was an adult, and I had this experience of, of the true laugh and amazing meeting with human, it inspired me to feel and immerse myself in the world entirely. And it's more or less about this meeting, but also about the state when you feel that everything is in balance in your life. And when you feel this transformation inside yourself from the state, dynamic state of chaos, and at the end, you feel that you could gather everything in one place and you feel fulfilled with emotions and laugh. So it's really about laugh. But this environment, this surrounding was the nature surrounding. So the nature is a part of the poem and you can hear sounds, you can see some pictures from the nature. and how nature makes you feel in life even more. So it's poetry, but also the act of imagination, I think. And of course, it's very essential, you know, and it, it has a lot of this Polish sounds, which were a part of the I think because when you tell somebody that you love this person, and you do it in Polish language, you can hear this atmosphere, which is in my poem, the same atmosphere.
[00:19:17.733] Kent Bye: Yeah, go ahead, Sandra.
[00:19:20.313] Sandra Frydrysiak: No, I just thought that I have shown our VR today to three of my friends and it was their first experience in VR by the way. So they were new to VR and they took out the goggles and the first impression was like, Wow, I feel so relaxed. I'm so relieved and relaxed and it's like a cathartic moment. And with Veronica, you were saying about this experience of love and this intimate space and intimate contact with nature and sound, because your voice and sound of the poem is so close to us in VR, and the environment is somehow hugging us, you know? It's like embracing us. Even the elements of our work, the persona that transforms into a fluid, we say, blanket, but it just transforms in a different form. And it also has this movement of covering you, so you feel safe.
[00:20:24.404] Weronika Lewandowska: It's like a fabric, it's like a piece of cloth you wear. I think it was my aim to touch you, touch you with my voice. Because sound is a wave, it's like touching you. Vibration of the sound touch your body. So this is kind of sense of touch in the voice as well.
[00:20:52.163] Sandra Frydrysiak: Sound is material. Sound is material. Your voice touches us and we embody your voice. But also we have created everything else that will immerse you even more. And at the end you have this moment of being somewhere else and coming back from a well, maybe not love, but some magical journey and you feel relaxed.
[00:21:20.418] Kent Bye: Yeah. My experience of it was that it definitely felt very intimate. It was very sensual. There was a dancer there that had these interactions with you that it really does feel like this seduction. There's a bit of an intimate dance that's happening between you as a viewer and this dance that's happening. And in fact, near the end, that dancer starts to walk through me or jump onto me in a way that is probably one of the most intimate interactions I've had with a virtual being in that sense. And so, yeah, that combined with all the other visual poetry You know, usually in a lot of virtual reality experiences over the last, you know, since 2013 or so, so seven to eight years now in the modern resurgence of VR, a lot of the objects have been these static objects, you know, they're not dynamic or they're not in flux or not moving as much. And this sort of fabric liquid that is like a sheet of paper that's floating around and in the air, and then having these little traces that go around it, it gives this feeling of the dynamic flux and liquid feeling more so than like a static object that's concrete. That dynamic flux that you were able to show also helps to cultivate this sense of intimacy and sensuality that I thought fit really well. So that was some of my experience of going through it, at least. And so Yeah. I'm wondering if you could talk about both the dance components, but also this object that is like this fluid object and what you were trying to create with that. And maybe some of the technical bits of how you pulled that off.
[00:23:00.095] Sandra Frydrysiak: So our idea was that we want to build a character that you meet, but it's a very ephemeral character that changes and transforms into other forms. And this gives you an idea that you might also change, and you might also be part of this environment, and you may also be fluid. And it is about interaction, about being close to the character and to its transformations, to the particles, because at one point it disperses itself in the particles, in the little, and then you have this blanket or however you call it. But from my perspective, one of the goals was to touch you, to embrace you and to touch you and to immerse you more into the space because the movement always develops in you kinesthetic empathy. So you somehow react to movement. both to the movement of another human, of the character in the piece, but also to the movement of objects and movement of the environment. So we know that the moving character has similar effect as the moving object that kind of embraces you, right? So it was all about how we wanted to make you feel in that piece. embraced and immersed and safe and intimate and sensual.
[00:24:36.848] Weronika Lewandowska: Yeah, we are also we are very interested in shapeshifting possibilities of virtual reality that that we can use our imagination to create the world which is unreal. You know, like, there is no gravity, you can fly, you can really How is it? What is it like to be a fluid? What is it like to be a fabric dancing in the air? Shapeshifting is something very, very interesting for me. We use it here also to see if we can read emotions from objects which are doing different things in the environment. Like me on the stage when nobody understand sense of words, but they just see the flying object, you know, like dancing object, dancing person on the stage. So if you see dancing fabric above your head, could you have any relations? Like, do you read any emotions from it?
[00:25:50.708] Sandra Frydrysiak: Yeah. And I want to add here that, of course, the neuroscience field has been put upside down when the human mirror neuron system was found, right? That we already know that we embody the movement of other person on the neural level, that we have this little inner dancers that explains us what this movement is about. And it is used to explain social cognition language learning and motor learning and motor understanding. So we know that we have a mirror, a neuron system that helps us in understanding the movement of the other, but of the other human being or animal. And we were very much thinking like, are objects, are we reading or percepting objects in the same way? Do we put emotions or do we read emotions from the movement of the objects? So these objects that you meet in the nights, they are there also to bring emotions, to address your affective level. And by the way, when we motion captured the choreography, the movement of the dancer, we coded it in the movement of the objects as well. But, and Veronika can tell you more about it, but our choreographer tried to mimic the movement of Veronika that, because she moves, when she performs her slam poetry, she moves on the stage. So she was trying to inspire, to replicate this kind of rhythm and movement of Veronika.
[00:27:29.217] Kent Bye: Yeah, Veronika, if you have anything to add in terms of that choreography and translation of that movement that the choreographer did
[00:27:37.060] Weronika Lewandowska: I think Sandra said everything it's like, it was a part of the process of creating visual environment. So we wanted to implement this movement motion of my body and connected it with the nature like I am the nature. I am the nature performing a poem.
[00:28:03.839] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that I think about a lot when it comes to virtual reality pieces is the building and releasing of tension. In drama, you have the hero that goes out and face some sort of obstacle, and then you're in that tension of trying to overcome something, then the tension gets released in some way. And so as I watch this piece that doesn't have like a traditional narrative structure in that sense, you're still building and releasing tension in different ways, whether it's going from night to day, or whether it's movement to lack of movement, or your relationship to proximity, how far this dancer is, it's close, then it's far, then it's close again. And then also you have the shadows that are happening on the ground that give you the sense of time passing and the processes that are unfolding. But you're kind of going from the night into this, by the end you're in this glow of the earth, you have what was less nature into becoming more nature, more green. So going from the winter time metaphorically into the springtime. So you have all these layers, but yeah, maybe you could talk about that, how you were thinking about that building and releasing of that tension.
[00:29:14.157] Weronika Lewandowska: It's part of a poem because in poem, it starts during the night and the poem finishes with the word day and the day is like ringing. So The idea of this transformation of the environment and the timeline, it was took from the poem. And we just developed this idea, how to use the potential of the poem, which has the structure, this kind of structure, and how to use the structure to build
[00:29:49.248] Sandra Frydrysiak: Yeah, the tensions and the peak moments, it's in the poem, it's in the narrative of the poem. But we also underlined it, for instance, through the very close meeting with the dancing persona. So we knew that this moment of being very close to the persona will be intensive feeling, an intensive moment of the piece. Because it's so unreal, right? That somebody goes through you. And when you experience dance, you usually experience in the art context, you experience it watching on stage, or even if it's performance in a gallery space, it's like you're feeling that you're not that close to that person. And here, you can have this possibility to be close to the person, and then unreal things happen because the persona goes through you, right?
[00:30:51.873] Weronika Lewandowska: Yeah, that it reflects the poem and the meeting which I had, which inspired me to write this poem. So there is always some kind of meeting, you know, here. I'm very happy that you found all those things in our... Exactly, it lets you name everything.
[00:31:15.964] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, that's part of the reason why I wanted to watch it a number of times, because it does have a lot of those different layers that I wanted to really just understand all the different areas. And yeah, I'm wondering if you could each speak about what your research plan might be, since you said that each of you have a PhD and so you're doing active research into embodiment perception. So what's the next step if you were to use Knights as the basis of research, like what type of research questions would you be trying to answer?
[00:31:48.214] Sandra Frydrysiak: We already have it planned with the film school. So the research project is planned. The research question is what leads your attention? So what leads your perception? So what is that?
[00:32:03.000] Weronika Lewandowska: What navigates you? What navigates you?
[00:32:06.281] Sandra Frydrysiak: Because the laboratory is called the Laboratory of Visual Narratives, and they have this big research question of finding out how to create narratives, visual narratives in VR. So we want to focus on what caught your attention, what navigates you through the work. Also, again, the question that we already had many years ago, so how we perceive movement in VR, movement of humanoids and movement of objects, and how it differs or if it differs from experiencing it in live version in comparison to watching it at desktop in 2D. I'm also thinking about exploring the category of embodiment and factors of immersion. What really in that work immerses you the most?
[00:33:08.693] Weronika Lewandowska: For me, it's our experience. It's experience that awakens full body perception and imagination. I think it's important to ask what elevates your present. what kind of elements awake your perception and imagination.
[00:33:32.649] Sandra Frydrysiak: And memory. You wanted to also think about the memory and how it creates memories, right? Yes.
[00:33:39.715] Weronika Lewandowska: For me, virtual reality experience is a source for new memories. It's not like when you are watching a movie, you see actors. And after watching the movie, you can say, okay, this actor played in this way, but when you are immersed in virtual reality environment, this is your experience. And after this, you have a memory of this experience. So it has a huge potential to create new memories and maybe to heal your mind. You know, when we show it to our friends during private press preview we had at my home, it turned out that maybe it has a therapeutic effect even. It wasn't our goal and we didn't design it in this way, but during our times, this is kind of therapeutic and you can have this kind of feeling of relief after it. So if you had it, but people at my place like today and a few days ago, they had it. So it Maybe also this is a scientific question for us, if this kind of structure we built, it's a structure for therapeutic experience, and in what way?
[00:35:10.476] Sandra Frydrysiak: And it's also the medium of VR that makes it itself. But I guess that Nights is special in that way that it really brings you there. It really helps you to immerse, to be present, and to be mindful. And you immerse so much in this world that it gives you this moment of relief because you're taking a break from life. And because you're experiencing on the same way, It makes this feeling stronger and it makes it last longer, I would say, than a traditional film. in this performative paradigm, it moves you on the affective level, cognitive level, physiological level. Like today, my friend, his hands got wet after and he was like, okay, my God, I never got wet or only in this very stressful situation. And also it brings you the motoric level, right? Because you move, so you're really present and this gives you this
[00:36:14.613] Weronika Lewandowska: I think Sandra, you said something interesting the other day. It was that we hacked your mind. We really took all your thoughts from your mind and put there our experience. Inception.
[00:36:40.835] Sandra Frydrysiak: So we are inside your head. And body as well, because it's like the kinesthetic empathy works. The persona you meet gives you the hand and you respond. I don't know how was your experience, Kent, but did you give the hand?
[00:36:56.657] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. The first time that I did it, uh, I did it a number of different times and played around just to play with the different interactions. Cause you have different things that at some point are emitting off of your hand. And so as you move your body's kind of get translated into the environment that's around you. But the first couple of times that I saw it, I was really in this state of awe and wonder because there is ways in which the fluid motion of these objects, something I don't see a lot within VR and the way that it was tied to the sound and the way that you had these. outlines of the like tilt brush strokes that were raining down from the object. And it was just a really beautiful piece to just see how it all was tied together. And so for me, I had definitely the sense of awe and wonder, but then as I watched it more, the awe and wonder goes away because you kind of know what to expect. And then I start to notice other things with the sound design and other ways that you did it. But yeah, just to start to wrap up things here, I'm just curious what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:37:58.507] Weronika Lewandowska: Of course, you can explore this medium in many ways. So it's a great way for storytelling. I hope that it will become more multiplayer that many people can experience at the same time. And we have nice experiences for social meetings, you know, like, and maybe I think maybe it will be connected with social media somehow. And other people will have some tools to create virtual reality and share it in social media, for example, or, you know, like, I hope it will be not so exclusive, like only for people who have knowledge, but somehow we will have easy tools to create and share it.
[00:38:55.659] Sandra Frydrysiak: Yeah, because this is the problem that now it's exclusionary in the sense that only people with the goggles can experience it, right? And well, outside of the gamers bubble, people do not have, at least in Poland, just my VR friends have goggles at home and others don't. But I think that the future of VR is also empathy and creation of empathy. And I'm thinking here about what Sverojnka was writing in her PhD about the development of immersive journalism and different pieces that brings you into the situation that you would otherwise you wouldn't enter, you wouldn't embody, you wouldn't experience. So using the 360 camera and showing us places, situations, people's perspectives, and from people's perspectives, VR has a real potential to develop our empathy in that sense. And I really would love to see VR being used as a social activism tool that engage you more in social issues and let you understand more different problems of the contemporary world, the climate change, the problems of migration and others, right? And all sorts of discrimination as well. So VR can put you in somebody's shoes. And really it is a different experience than just watching something on the video in 2d. When you really find yourself on the spot, there is a potential that you will more empathize with this situation.
[00:40:47.046] Weronika Lewandowska: So Chris milk, he said it's empathy machine. Yeah. So there is a huge potential for this.
[00:40:57.994] Kent Bye: Hmm. Is there, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:41:03.555] Weronika Lewandowska: I hope we will have a chance to meet people who have experienced our piece, like you, here and talk with them, because we are really curious about different experiences and how people perceive our piece of virtual reality experience. Right now we are at our homes and we would like to really go out and meet people to share this virtual experience with them and present it. This is a very interesting part of creation of VR that we can talk with people who experience it.
[00:41:49.674] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Sanja and Veronica, I just wanted to thank you for joining me here on the podcast of very sensual erotic poem and the visual poetry of it all matching your own poem there, Veronica. So yeah, I'm really excited to see where you take it in the future, especially all the other neuroscience stuff as well. So yeah, just thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing a little bit more of your journey and your story and where you're going next with the future of visual poetry and VR. So thank you.
[00:42:16.580] Weronika Lewandowska: Thank you for having me.
[00:42:19.624] Sandra Frydrysiak: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. And it was amazing to hear also your feedback and how you experience the work. So thanks a lot.
[00:42:29.969] Weronika Lewandowska: Hope to see you.
[00:42:31.730] Kent Bye: So that was Veronica Levandowska. She's the co director, co screenwriter and executive producer as well as Sandra Friedrich. She's the co directors co screenwriter and the dance researcher. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, the emotion of this piece was very interesting because it is a bit like a visual poem and just like sometimes when you read a poem you have to like read it a couple times to really get it I think this is a piece that is somewhat similar in the sense that you can watch it once and get some vibe but there's just a lot of different layers that happen in this particular piece and I find that generally that happens with an immersive experience that one of the benefits of watching some of these experiences from home is that I can watch it multiple times if I want to dig into a additional layers that I may have missed if I just watch it once. And so there's a lot of things that are happening here with the sound design and all the different contrasts that they're creating. And so first and foremost, I think this is a very evocative piece that is trying to tap into this sensuality, having you feel like you're embraced, immersed, safe, intimate and sensual. And so there's a dance character that's in this piece and it's reaching its hand out to you and you get to touch it and then you kind of dance with it a little bit. It kind of goes off and kind of morphs into this like fabric thing and then it comes back and it's really far away and then it just zooms from across the way, you know, right through me. I think the third or fourth time that I watched it, it gave me chills when that moment happened, when it just like had this virtual being that just kind of like shot through me. And then it kind of jumps up on you on your hips. And just it's a very intimate type of thing that they're trying to create with this virtual being. Overall, you know, their process was to take this poem. They're starting with this central poem that Veronica had written is this kind of slam poem that she performs in her native tongue of Polish and so there's a lot of S's and a lot of way that she speaks it that has this inherent ASMR quality which I'm not someone who watches a lot of ASMR but there are some moments that I can have some of that tingle and I was able to get that after multiple viewings and after shutting my eyes and really just kind of listening to the sound design of it all and opening up my eyes and having the dancer kind of shoot through me but But overall, there's this narrative that's kind of embedded into it. So they went through and they were coding it and operating on multiple levels at the same time. So the emotions, the visuals, the movement, the music, interaction, and the immersion. So all these different ways in which they're trying to play with all these different dimensions all at the same time, and trying to translate the visual memories that are embedded within the text of the piece, but also to see if they're able to use these objects to kind of evoke these different emotions from you. So they're going to be doing some neuroscience research on this and the degrees in which that you are embodied within these worlds and comparing the difference between being fully immersed versus watching it 2D versus watching something live and to see if they're able to provoke different aspects of your mirror neurons and empathy when you're looking at some of these abstract objects. So a lot of surprising and interesting neuroscience research that's embedded into this piece as well to kind of push forward and trying to really understand the mechanics of some of the affordances of how to guide attention and trying to evoke these different levels of presence and immersion within these immersive experiences. So yeah, I'll be curious to hear where that goes in the future, where they're doing this research for the laboratory of the visual narratives. They're working out of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. So yeah, they're using a lot of different contrasts within this experience. There's not necessarily a explicit narrative component. This does feel like a little bit more of an immersive experience, but they're playing with the building and releasing tension from going from the night to the day. There's movement to no movement. There's actually a lot of haptics that, you know, as you're holding the controllers and having these interactions with this, virtual embodiment of this avatar that's there that buzzes every time you have these different interactions. And there's other haptic explorations that they have there as well. But also having the dancer close to you and far away and coming back close to you, the shadows are moving around and then ending with going from night to day and then having not a lot of these flowers and everything kind of going from wintertime into the springtime and kind of having all this sort spring growth. So Veronica was saying that she had this real epiphanic experience with lover and also this connection to nature and that she wanted to really try to use this poem to be able to communicate that but also to translate that into this visual poem within her immersive experience. And from what Sandra was saying, that as they were showing it to other people that were her friends there in Poland, that a lot of them were reporting that they were getting this therapeutic effect from it. So it'd be quite interesting to see if there's other therapeutic impact for this type of visual poems or these experiences that are really based on poetry. You know, I've interviewed a number of different poets over the years, and I think that Poetry is very interesting to be able to translate these written metaphors into these spatial metaphors and to see, if anything, I think there's a lot of connection there between trying to evoke the feelings that you get from a poem and being able to use the language of virtual reality to be able to use that same type of visual metaphors to be able to communicate these deeper feelings. It's a lot subtler and sometimes get a really good poem. Sometimes you have to read it over and over and over again, like I said. So yeah, just to see how you are immersed into this type of experience and to see how it's able to shift your emotions and modulate your experiences. And there could actually be some very real therapeutic effects that they were reporting within some of their early demos that they were showing there in Poland. 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 listener-supported podcast, 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 voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
