I interviewed Home director Temsuyanger Longkumer at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com. So continuing on my series of looking at the different experiences at Venice Immersive 2023, this is episode number 9 out of 35, and it's also the episode number 1 of 5 of looking at the context of place, home, and environment. So this first piece is called Home by Thomsen Younger Longcomer, and it's an installation piece that has a projection map onto a big installation of what looks like a beehive hanging from the ceiling. and Timsey Younger discovered a beehive in one of the sheds that he was sleeping in. And so he was thinking about this connection between the bee's home and his home and thinking about the relationship between people and the earth around us and started to put together this montage sequence of all these different images from nature and humans over the course of history and trying to poetically juxtapose these images of the relationship between humans and the earth onto this big sculptural beehive installation. It's around like a 32-minute loop and kind of open for anybody to drop into and check out this experience. So this is a piece that is looking at the contextual domain of the earth and home, also looking at these different aspects of death and birth and so the birth-death cycle. And the center of gravity of presence is very much into the environmental design with the projection map into this installation piece that you're watching it. But it's also this sense of emotional presence with this soundtrack of nature, as well as watching these images and trying to cultivate this deeper reflection, juxtaposing these aspects of the relational dynamics between humans and the Earth in a way that is very striking and alluring and emotionally provocative. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of Wizards of Eira podcast. So this interview with Temsu Yonger happened on Sunday, September 3rd, 2023 at the Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:15.922] Temsuyanger Longkumer: My name is Temsu Yonger Longcomer and I'm based in London. My background is in traditional arts, but I started dabbling into the immersive side of it about seven, eight years ago. And yeah,
[00:02:32.308] Kent Bye: Cool, and yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into making immersive art.
[00:02:38.413] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Well, it all started with a series of work called Living Impressions, where I was trying to take a body cast of people from which I regarded as interesting backgrounds. And the first series of those group was from some tribal people in Nagaland. That's where I come from. It's called Nagaland, which is bordering Burma. and I interviewed and took body cast of one of the chief who was the last living chief with ceremonial facial tattoos which is related to headhunting and the other person was still living as a hunter-gatherer and two ladies who was like an amazing folk singers so I took body cast of them and filmed them and I projected those films onto sculptures Now the work which I'm showing here at the Biennale, it all started with a beehive where I have a small farm in Nagaland. And one day I realized that there was a beehive under my bed. They had come and settled in this little box. And then I started thinking, OK, why have they come to this little shed? It's like a shed. It's not even a proper house yet. And I thought, despite the amazing forests and jungles surrounding the farm, and trees and things, why would they come and settle in this little box? Is it because of insecurity? Is it because of environmental reasons? Or are they becoming a bit lazy? So that's how it all started and then of course like I started like you know I live in London so again like it got me thinking about how like the bees they go from one place to the other settle in a branch one year and the next they go to another settlement for whatever reasons and it got me thinking about myself and like of course like about groups of people in general, about civilizations, about societies, how they move from one place to the other, again for whatever reasons. So yeah, that's how it all started.
[00:04:56.501] Kent Bye: Yeah, so was that first project that you had talked about where you're making the cast of the bodies and projecting, was that the first experience that you created using like projection map type of techniques or was there other ones before that?
[00:05:08.192] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yes, I did one before that which was of my father. This was in 2002, I think. And I recorded him and because he comes from an interesting background. He was a missionary and I come from the Ao tribe. It's called Ao, A-O. And we were the first people to get to be Christianized, let's put it that way, by the American missionaries. And after that, my parents, they decided to go to the most remote region of this remote little province. and that's where I was born. I was brought up in a very natural way, where everyone was living a natural life, without clothes. Life was very simple and natural. My mother was also an activist, so they were quite well known in that region. So it's a long story but to cut it short I thought like my father was getting old and I moved away from home at the age of five so I never really got time to spend properly with them and again like When I came to London and studied art, I got access to the whole archival side of it and thought it would be a good thing to archive my father's experiences. His health was not good and I thought I should capture some of his moments before he goes away. So that's how it all started.
[00:06:42.709] Kent Bye: Yes, I know recently in the immersive entertainment there's been a lot more projection mapped immersive rooms that were out there and I'm curious how you came across the idea of using this type of projection mapped of creating like sculptures and then projecting onto it. Was there other work that you'd seen that inspired you or how did you come across it?
[00:07:02.418] Temsuyanger Longkumer: No, frankly I hadn't seen anything using projection onto sculptures before and it was purely an attempt to mix sound, visual and form at the same time and that's how it all started basically.
[00:07:24.639] Kent Bye: So do you have a background in fine arts or where's the sculptural or ceramics type of papier-mâché come in?
[00:07:31.042] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah, I do. I come from a traditional art background and I started printmaking and I still teach printmaking in an academy in London. But I also like exploring different mediums and It's always been like that with me, right from when I was a student. I don't know whether it's a disability, but I'm not someone who can just go on pushing in one direction. If I have an idea, I try and find the best way to interpret it, rather than using one medium for all your ideas. Maybe it's just being lazy but I try and if I have an idea I try and find like would it be better in printmaking as a drawing or would it be better as a sculpture and sometimes like this immersive art would it be better to combine different mediums and make it into one so yeah.
[00:08:28.046] Kent Bye: I wanted to talk about the physical aspect of the installation that you have here at Venice, and then after that take a step back and talk about how it came about. We're here at Venice Immersive 2023, and you have an installation that people can pop into at any time. It's around a 32-minute loop, and you have this giant papier-mâché, beehive, half-spherical structure that's on the ceiling that then you have three projectors that are projecting onto it. So I'd love to hear about your process of coming here to Venice and creating the sculpture and what was involved there, because, you know, there's a deadline to open things up on a certain day and you have to come here early and a lot of heat to put this together. So I'd love to hear about that process.
[00:09:06.962] Temsuyanger Longkumer: To be honest, I feel a bit like an imposter, because, like, this immersive or the VR world, it's totally new to it. And, yeah, I'm amazed with what people are doing. So this all came about by chance. I came across the Biennale advert. I think it was on a website. And I thought, OK, I'll just have a go. And I was working on this project anyway. And immersive. OK, mine could be considered immersive. So I just thought, I'll have a go. And they accepted it, which I was really pleased. And I feel very honored to be showing this work in such an amazing venue and platform. Well, in terms of the physical side of it, my piece is called Home. And it's a collage of various sounds and images from history. Some of them, well, the main actors are the bees from the hive, which I filmed back on my farm. And then I created a narrative with a collage of sounds and images from history, most of them from history. And in terms of the physical side of it, it's bedsheets by the way, not paper mache. So, to go with the theme home, I thought it would be nice to use something that is related to home. So, I used second-hand bedsheets. I asked my friends to contribute their bedsheets and also went around charity shops buying them also. Second-hand, I didn't realize they had places where you get second-hand bedsheets from hotels and things like that. Yeah, I collected quite a lot of bed sheets in London and brought them here and started building it. I think we did pretty well in terms of building the physical hive, but what I hadn't foreseen was the humidity here. So it was taking very long to dry and it was sagging, so that was a bit of an issue, but somehow we managed to put it up.
[00:11:21.349] Kent Bye: So there are bedsheets, which is cloth. What do you mean that has to dry? What are you putting on top of it or what was the thing that needed to dry?
[00:11:28.125] Temsuyanger Longkumer: So what we're doing is like bedsheets, we are soaking it in Plaster of Paris to give it that stiff look and also to adhere to the, well, underneath the bedsheet is chicken wire and it's actually made with plumbing pipes, the rubber tubes, plumbing pipes, and I've covered that with chicken wire and on top of that, the bedsheets soaked in Plaster of Paris.
[00:11:55.878] Kent Bye: And so I guess as you were developing this project back in London, how did you go from creating an installation and then you create this big, pretty sizable montage of images that you're projecting on from three different angles? So how did you, like, did you create a one-to-one scale relative to what you have here to be able to test it out? So you have something that's roughly the same size, maybe slightly different shape, but then as you're projecting stuff on, if there's stuff that's trying to map out the topography of each of these, and, like, I'm just trying to get a sense of how you were developing this. back in London and then what kind of adaptations you needed to do with this installation since I'm sure that there's a certain amount of unique shape and structure to the beehive anytime that you make it.
[00:12:42.728] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah we had to we got all the measurements dimensions of the room and we started working on a little like a theater model of it like a very small scale model of it And then later on, we did not one-to-one scale, but maybe like slightly smaller, which we tried out in London. But then there was an issue of the projectors because the projector comes in all sorts of throw, the distance, and so we had to work out. So, in the end, we had to build a 3D scale model of it with 3D software and use projector with all their calibrations, see what projector would fit in which corner. So, that was quite a mission to find the exact throw and the angle and things like that. So, yeah, I learned a lot. I've never done that before, but I got a fantastic help from my technical director and we somehow managed to work it out. And, yeah, it worked out quite well.
[00:13:42.795] Kent Bye: So you were able to do like a 3D simulation of this. Were you using like a Unity build to do it or what software were you using to actually like simulate the projection of it onto the end sculpture?
[00:13:55.361] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah, a big shout out to Blender. We did everything on Blender and Yeah, I mean, we are a very, very tiny, you know, it's just two of us who created the whole thing, the visuals. For building the hive, we had like five people helping me, but throughout the whole process of making the film, we were just two of us, you know, with no budget. And yeah, so it was all made with Blender, which is of course like an open source software. So a massive thank you to Blender. And yes, in terms of the visuals and mock-up and everything, we did everything on Blender.
[00:14:38.390] Kent Bye: Okay, so it's possible to create a 3D model in Blender and then project, like, how do you simulate the aperture and the throw of the projector, like, all the different stats? I'm imagining that you're able to actually show, like, a video image, is it just from a source that you put and then it sort of acts like a, you can simulate a projector within Blender?
[00:14:57.167] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yes, you can, and I think perhaps my technical director will be able to tell you more about it. I'm a bit rubbish with all the sophisticated tools. But I came across this projector website, which tells you exactly how much, you know, if you put the dimensions of the room, it gives you the dimensions of the projection, the area of the projection. So somehow we worked out the angles of the projector in the blend the made room and then I think Rhys, my technical director, he inserted some, slotted some image onto it and projected onto it. So I think, yeah, we did it. So it is possible on Blender to do that. But the actual throw distance and things, it is from a website. It is a fantastic website where if you select a projector model and give the distance, it tells you exactly how much area coverage it'll give you. And based on that, we inserted that to Blender and worked out.
[00:15:58.755] Kent Bye: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So yeah, so it sounds like you're able to simulate it as you were developing it, but then once you come here, how close was from the simulation to when you actually build it out and you actually put it in situ here in Venice and how close was it from what you had seen in the simulation?
[00:16:16.076] Temsuyanger Longkumer: It was pretty close. I'm very proud of how it often doesn't happen, but somehow it worked out quite well. Very, very close. Of course, especially the physical hype, we had to do a bit of improvisation because we had that. aspect where we can tweak a bit in the physical hive itself so if it's like if the projection didn't go quite well we could poke the hive and you know so we could improvise a little bit like that so we had to adjust in the physical hive too but it worked out pretty accurate yeah
[00:16:52.043] Kent Bye: Is there any amount of warping or modulation you're doing to the image as you're projecting onto it? In some projection map it's getting the shape of something and then trying to really craft the light so that it looks like it's native to that rather than something that might be distorted slightly because it's on an angle. Is there any of that that's happening or is the piece that you created abstract enough that any of that type of warping is not as noticeable? So I guess I'm just trying to get a sense if you have some measurement or modeling of the curvatures of the installation to then as the image is going out somehow shift it and you know in VR it's a barrel distortion or other kind of like curving of the images in order to kind of make it look flat.
[00:17:35.066] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah, it's the first time I'm using this software, and it was the first time we were trying in Venice. We hadn't tried before, so it was like a baptism of fire. In fact, one of the gadgets just arrived after we came here to Venice, and we had never used that before, so we were quite nervous about that. So, yeah, we are using a mapping software which is called MatMapper. They have this gadget called MiniMat which is quite good in syncing the projectors. And, yes, with the MatMapper we have tweaked and, you know, squeezed and stretched certain areas to go with the physical hive because you've probably seen there's loads of pork marks and undulations on the physical hive so we had to do a bit of squeezing and stretching but at the same time I don't know if you realize that there's like all the silver foil going around the projector because even after blocking out areas there's still like you know very faint ray of light that spills out so I wanted to cover those rays so yeah I'm using very crude tin foil sheets to to cover those yeah
[00:18:49.437] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed it the second time that I went in because I went through and watched it all the way through once just from one perspective but it's got three projectors so I wanted to see how it was slightly changing or modulating. There's essentially like two screens that were pretty closely mirrored and then like a subsection on one of the ends that is like more of an excerpt and so the second time I saw it I was more from an angle looking at it so I could see most of the thing that I had already seen but also this other section so it was sort of a different perspective on it. But yeah, it's a piece that you start off with the beehive and then you start to edit in other things like people and crowds and religious activities and eventually like protest. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the sequence of images because you go through a series of different, let's say, chapters of images that you're going through. So yeah, I'd love to hear how you think about the progression of the different images as they're juxtaposed together.
[00:19:45.260] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah, so the basic concept about the piece Home is about, yeah, what is home? Like is it the physical side of it or is it the environment or is it even psychological? that was what I was thinking when I looked at the bees and also you know when I started reflecting on it and of course in a universal level as well you know what is home so when I wrote the script it was supposed to be like 10 minutes script but it started growing and ended up being 32 minutes so so yeah it starts with the bee and then I thought I'd give a very brief snapshot of what I thought were pivotal moments in history. And so it starts with the bee, slowly merges on to people, and then merges on to the religious side of it, and then progressing to the industrialization, modernization, and then going further to sort of destruction and then the cycle repeats and well perhaps I shouldn't be talking too much about the work itself but yeah I thought the psychologist and I mean working on this project it taught me a lot about the bees as well because I had to study all their behaviours found out they do a dance called the woggle dance and I juxtaposed that to human dance And also they do something like the Mexican wave, which the bee in the hive is the honeybee, but I had to incorporate different bee behavior as well. So at one point you will see the Mexican wave kind of thing going on, which happens more with wild bees. They do that when they face danger. a bit like animals or even humans we try to do certain behaviors to ward off the enemy, potential enemy. So that's just before the human arrives and towards the end again like when green earth happens it goes fades to almost like the the virgin being where which is like the pure hive and then there's a sound which was recorded of the womb baby in the womb and then leading to a baby and then the cycle repeats so I'm not explaining very well but yeah
[00:22:16.371] Kent Bye: That makes sense that it's a little bit of a birth and death, creation, destruction cycle that you have within there. And it's very much connected to reflections on nature and relationship to nature, but also the elemental qualities of nature where you really go through the earth and the fire and the air and water is sort of included, especially when it comes to the soundscapes. So I'd love to hear a little bit of reflections of exploring through each of those four elements in this piece as well.
[00:22:43.369] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah, I tried to involve the main elements, which is like fire, water, air and the natural side of it. It is very much concerned about nature as well, environment as well. And what we are doing, like humanity, you know, we are almost like condemned to this cycle of destruction and reconstruction. So it was essential for me to use all the four or five elements. Yeah. In terms of the sound, most of the sounds, we didn't design any of the sound. All the sound came with the clips. Some I bought, some I had to borrow. So they are all original clips, which I just collaged them together. And in terms of the visuals, yeah, as I was saying again, like, if you look closely, you'll probably recognize many of those images are from history, especially the recent history as well. And yeah, when I first started, I thought, okay, it'll be the bees, maybe some kind of progression to human being. and then maybe a bit towards the destruction of it but as I started all the pandemic happened and then all the social movements was happening at the same time and the war in Ukraine so I started like taking clips from all of those events that was happening at that time and collage them together
[00:24:19.745] Kent Bye: In terms of the size of the image, there's like 1080p, 2K, 4K, 8K. What was the resolution that you had to create the original images in in order to make sure that you had enough resolution to project it onto this big installation?
[00:24:35.040] Temsuyanger Longkumer: It's in HD quality, but loads of those clips are very low resolution. And in a way, I quite like that. I'm not looking to very sleek, high-definition picture. I think I like that kind of slightly fuzziness in the image quality. So, yeah, basically it's in HD, but the original files, some of them are very, very low resolution. And the projectors, apart from one is 4K and the other two is HD, but the image is like HD quality, so the 4K doesn't make any difference, I suppose, yeah.
[00:25:13.907] Kent Bye: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, as I was watching it, it definitely felt like I was going on a journey and just some moments of looking at the images and then seeing whatever like memories or thoughts or associations that came up. It's very sparse when it comes to, there's no words or anything so there's just sounds and so you're kind of left with different thoughts or just meditating on the images and I also found myself that the pace of the change was also very slow. So it was a little bit of a change blindness where you could look away and look back and, you know, may not notice that all of a sudden now there's people there. And then, so I often didn't see the things being introduced. And so I was like, Oh, I'm going to try to like actually really try to focus on this intently to see when things are flipping in and out. people to track the change and then eventually I was starting taking photos so I could like look at a snapshot of it as it goes by because the changes are so subtle sometimes that you may not notice everything but when I was taking the photos I could swap through and look at from this moment to this moment to see how things were changing. So that was my kind of experience of watching it and just this sense of the interrelatedness of all things and nature and yeah it was like a beautiful poem giving this sense of both the sound design that was very immersive to be kind of immersed into the sounds of everything and then yeah just to see the juxtaposition of all the images that were going through. I didn't necessarily pick up that it was the creation and death but now that you say it makes total sense that that was the overall arc but Yeah, I'd love to hear any thoughts or reflections of how you like to see it or the slight changes that you were subtly bringing in and out throughout the piece.
[00:26:50.898] Temsuyanger Longkumer: It's certainly not only about destruction or certainly not about death. That's why I want to leave it very open for the viewers to interpret in their own way. In the piece, the way I was morphing things, I wanted to reflect how things, I suppose, things work in our society, how policies and how movements and how things are like the way we move from one system to the other. We almost don't notice how things change and sometimes very much realize only when it's too late. And so I wanted to reflect slightly that side of it as well. And home is definitely not a statement and definitely not a prediction. It's just a thought. It's a personal thought. Definitely not a prediction. And definitely not about death.
[00:27:45.473] Kent Bye: Yeah. Less about the death part, but more of the cycle of birth and death. So more of the yin and yang where you can't have one without the other, where it's sort of like a balance between those. So more of the cyclical nature of that, more than the specific moment, more of the process of that. But yeah, what have been some of the reactions that you've had here at Venice?
[00:28:05.378] Temsuyanger Longkumer: No, it's been wonderful so far, yeah. I think I've had very good feedback from people and the fact that I think like I've left it open. I'm very pleased that I left it open for people to come in and out without booking. So I think we are having many footfalls. So yeah, it's been wonderful.
[00:28:26.267] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive art, immersive entertainment might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:28:35.989] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yeah I mean I was always a bit you know I'm not into games and things like that so I'm still a very I feel yeah coming here it has opened me to many amazing things people are doing and it's been really an eye-opener and I think If used in the right way, I suppose you can tell it's still in the early stages in terms of its effectiveness to tell the narrative or the story, but I think it can be a very, very effective tool. I think it has an amazing future. Totally.
[00:29:13.323] Kent Bye: Have you been able to see very many of the other works here at Venice Immersive 2023?
[00:29:17.299] Temsuyanger Longkumer: Yes, I have. I'm trying to see two or three every day. That's already too much for me, but I'm still very new to this realm, so I'm taking it easy. But I hope to see all of them before I go.
[00:29:30.485] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader Immersive community?
[00:29:38.686] Temsuyanger Longkumer: It's been like to see all these directors and people involved in the Biennale, especially the talks and things. It's been really good to see because when I first came I felt a bit like a, you know, like an outsider, you know, almost like an imposter as I was saying earlier. To see the background story behind their projects, that it's all coming from a very real thing, although it's in a very highly technological medium, but the root behind the project, behind their ideas, are coming from a very, very real and good place, and that's a wonderful thing to see. I wouldn't say traditional, but I'm more on the traditional side of art, And so for me, this whole, the VR, XR, all these things were a bit more like, oh, you know, I was seeing them from a distance. But I think coming here, it has really opened my eyes that there's amazing things happening. Yeah. Good things. Yeah.
[00:30:42.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I really enjoyed the piece that you created and, you know, it was quite meditative and also contemplative in terms of just trying to tell stories without much language and just the visual modes and projecting things in a spatial context. Also, it creates a different feeling as if rather than just watching something like this as a movie, it creates a different contemplation of being immersed into something that's much more surrounding me with the sound and images and light and everything. yeah, really quite enjoyed the piece and enjoyed having the opportunity to listen to you help break it all down. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[00:31:15.561] Temsuyanger Longkumer: My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:31:19.029] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this interview from Fitness Immersive 2023. You can go check out the Critics' Roundtable in episode 1305 to get more breakdown in each of these different experiences. And I hope to be posting more information on my Patreon at some point. There's a lot to digest here. I'm going to be giving some presentations here over the next couple of months and tune into my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR, since there's certainly a lot of digest about the structures and patterns of immersive storytelling, some of the different emerging grammar that we're starting to develop, as well as the underlying patterns of experiential design. So, that's all I have for today, and thanks for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And again, if you enjoyed 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 this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
