Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she’s created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place an art piece she calls “Unprotected” on top of the supreme court in order to highlight how women are unprotected as equals under the US Constitution since the Equal Rights Amendment currently remains unratified. She also talks about how there is a rush among states to outlaw abortion in their state in order to catalyze the repeal of Roe vs Wade at the Supreme court.
I had a chance to catch up with Cahill at the XR for Change conference where she was showing a couple of her pieces of AR pieces commissioned by Desert X that allowed her to use art to highlight our relationship to the surrounding environment. She talks to me about her process of how she translates her 2D art style
into volumetric drawn virtual sculptures in virtual reality, and then exports the pieces so that they can be experienced as site-specific art work.
She is also very collaborative in the artwork that she does in that she encourages a lot of collaboration either with her audience or in curating specific public art pieces throughout Los Angeles in collaboration with Homeboy Industries. She also encourages people to remix and play with her public art pieces, which can be found on the #4thWallApp hashtag on Instagram.
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Cahill is also inspired by a number of feminist philosophers who “imbue these very dry theories with blood and guts in a way that brings them to life, and allows you to synthesize them and use them creatively where they have added resonance in the work.” Her creative process is very much about tapping into the deep, rich unconscious and the generative and fertile realm of the id, but she is also really inspired by feminist philosopher who are able to bring their theories and philosophies into their live and making it animate, as the theory means nothing without having been a lived experience.
Here’s a list of recommended books that she mentions in the podcast:
- Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan J. Brison
- Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
- The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
- Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
- The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson
- The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses by Juhani Pallasmaa
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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 the Games for Change has been going on for 16 years now, and for the last number of years they've had a whole section on XR for Change. And so Jesse Damiani curated a lot of the program that happened for XR for Change. And he curated Nancy Baker Cahill to give a keynote. And then right after that, I gave a keynote there as well. So I was able to first see the artwork from Nancy Baker Cahill at the spatial reality show. She's got a very particular style where she's taking her drawings, she natively works on 2D mediums and makes these drawings, but she's able to translate her drawings into these textures and spatialize them in different ways. So she's really taking to doing these artistic expressions of her artwork in VR and then taking that from VR and then making these AR installations and created this whole fourth wall app where people can make these public art projects and be able to collaboratively share their art through the program called Coordinates. So Nancy Baker-Hehiel is somebody who is this really interesting artist and she talks to me about her latest works with these DesertX installations, which were very site-specific installations where she was taking these AR pieces and making these different commentaries and the ecological connection that we have. but she's also been doing these more impromptu ad hoc art installations through her fourth wall app and responding to contemporary issues of reproductive rights and issues around potentially having a battle of Roe versus Wade going to the Supreme Court and how women are in this state of having their bodies being protected or that Roe v. Wade was trying to establish that there's certain parts of the reproductive decisions being a privacy issue but that that's currently being contested within the United States. And so there's this question of like, who owns your body? Is this something that your body is a public resource that could be controlled by legislators? Or is there a certain amount to the sovereignty and freedom that you have and what happens within your own body? So she's exploring a lot of work regards to that, but also looking into different feminist philosophies that are connecting her to the different theory and practice of what it means to be embodied and to use the body as a site of struggle and resistance and to try to seek empathetic responses for people to feel these pieces of art within their bodies. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Nancy happened on Monday, June 17th, 2019 at the XR for Change conference in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:41.521] Nancy Baker Cahill: My name is Nancy Baker-Cahill. I'm a multidisciplinary artist. I'm based in Los Angeles. I'm the founder of the Fourth Wall app, which is a free public AR art app, which has two basic components to it. One is an offering of my four-dimensional drawings, which were originally in VR, translated into AR, which invites users to place them anywhere they want, anywhere in the world, and really, in doing so, collaborate and create context and content for the work. And those kind of live in a public archive of social media posts. That's how I know, you know, that someone just did it in Morocco and someone did it, you know, in the five train to the Bronx. That's how I know where things go. And the other part of it is actually more of a platform for resistance and that's the curated part. That's the coordinates piece. And there's also another button there right now for DesertX because I just participated in the DesertX biennial, which was also site-specific. site-inspired works. I like to call it idea activation, but those two elements are very much part of the app as well. So geolocating artworks that have been curated from other artists working topically and rigorously, insights of historic or cultural or political importance to them.
[00:03:45.982] Kent Bye: So maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into these immersive technologies.
[00:03:51.411] Nancy Baker Cahill: I came to it very honestly, I will have you know. My background is in drawing, first and foremost. I'm a drawer, as they say. I've done a lot of immersive video as well, but I also have a social practice. And in my talk today earlier, I talked about the very formative experience I had when I initiated a collaborative project with Homeboy Industries. And that was a combination of a series I had done called Bullet Blossoms, where I shot my paintings to explore ideas around violence and healing coexisting. I'm really interested in the body as a site of struggle and resistance, and in that in-between space. I'm not going to use the incredibly hackneyed word, liminal, here, but, you know, that sort of unfixed space that is so appropriate for AR, even more than VR. But, okay, I've got to backtrack for a second. The way I got into VR is because I had drawn, I'm always seeking to elicit an empathic response in the viewer. I really want people to feel the work in their bodies, first and foremost, and relate to it and connect to it in that way. and I had been working on a series that was inspired by a book on sexual assault and trauma living in the body, and somebody standing in front of one of those drawings said it was exactly how she felt, and I just felt that sort of heart-pounding greed of wanting her to feel it more, wanting to put her inside the drawing. There were various creative fits and starts, and I tried to play sculpturally with that concept, and then a very esteemed colleague said to me, why don't you try drawing in VR? And so I did, and that just unleashed the beast
[00:05:16.883] Kent Bye: And then it's become... Yeah, maybe you can talk a bit about that first time that you went from drawing in 2D and what it was like for you to start to draw in 3D.
[00:05:24.892] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, it was pure ecstasy. I would say it was an ecstatic moment. I'm also sort of a closeted sculptor, so it was amazing to draw in 360 without consequence or regard for the cost of materials. You know, I became addicted immediately. It was like a drug and is still. But I did become very frustrated with the presets in Tilt Brush, which are lovely and wonderful for most people. But I really wanted the 3D work, the dimensional drawings to be in direct conversation in terms of a visual vernacular with the 2D work. So I design my own brush strokes and with my tech partners translate them into these drawings, like the ones you just experienced, where the marks themselves refer to the content of the drawing or refer to other drawings that I've done in 2D as well.
[00:06:08.396] Kent Bye: How does one go about designing your own brushes? Can you add that into Tilt Brush or do you have to design your own 3D painting program?
[00:06:15.157] Nancy Baker Cahill: I mean, I wish I had the brain of a coder. I would be doing that night and day. Actually, I wouldn't. I would be hacking actively, and that's all I would do, because that is my impulse. But no, I draw them in 2D. I draw the brushes in 2D, and then it's just a layer. And there's still something lost in translation, to be sure. I mean, what I've been talking to my partners about is trying to create a drawing app that I can just use for myself with my own marks. so that it is all integrated, but that's a hugely expensive endeavor, and right now I just have to work with it. I've got to kind of hack what I have.
[00:06:47.741] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, so I had a close look up at one of the pieces that you have here, the XR for Change, and it looked like, essentially like a texture on an object, not necessarily like any volumetric dimensionality other than just being a 2D plane with the drawing that you have there.
[00:07:03.937] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yes, that is correct. That is correct. When I'm dealing with a dimensional, any kind of dimensional object, I will try and alter its texture as dramatically as I can. But otherwise, yes, I'm really interested in playing with translucency and opacity and the actual stroke of the work because my own process in 2D is so physical and it's so much about gesture and mark making and the emotion that is communicated. I know that sounds like bullshit. Am I allowed to swear on your podcast? But it really isn't I mean it really is this is I'm nerding out now and for a minute as an artist But like the pressure the amount of pressure that you put any like and think of Chinese artists the way they wield a brush It's sort of like that and so I want to communicate that the same way
[00:07:41.063] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just at the Augmented World Expo and trying out tactical haptics and they had this ability to give you like haptic feedback like you're actually drawing on something and I was like, oh, this is like way different to actually have that haptic feedback when you're drawing. I was like, oh, I could, I want this. I want to be able to have that feedback. And so as you, as a drawer for you to still have that feedback of the physicality of that, I imagine is a big part of your process.
[00:08:06.564] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yes, because when you're working against the grain of the paper, or with the grain of the paper as the case may be, that's one thing. And you're feeling the pressure that you're placing your entire body weight against the wall or whatever. That's one thing. But yeah, in disembodied space, there is no pushback really. And so while it can be wildly freeing, you also don't get the same kind of satisfaction of that haptic experience. Although speaking of haptics, I would very much like to incorporate haptics into the VR experiences, because many, many people who stand in my drawings have said to me, I want to touch it, I want to feel these marks, I want to feel the drawing, I want to stand inside of it and feel it sort of rushing around me, actually. So, that will probably crash my computer several times over, and I don't even know if the tech exists, but I would like to do it.
[00:08:52.271] Kent Bye: I wanted to get a little bit more clarity on your process because you're drawing it in 2D, somehow getting it into 3D, but then how do you, do you then go into Tilt Brush and basically organize it and copy it, or what's your process for creating this spatial piece of art with kind of blending these two worlds?
[00:09:09.193] Nancy Baker Cahill: I really think of Tilt Brush usefully as an architectural tool. So with the brushes that I intend to create, I use it as an architecture for the actual drawing. So it serves that purpose first and foremost. Because again, I'm not using all the presets, I'm just using them to really mark and trace the performative moment of the drawing. All the decisions are recorded in time and space, which I also just love conceptually. Because we can't always see that, you know, they're all flattened on a piece of paper. But to see them all unfold in 3D is pretty exciting. But we then take those raw materials and then incorporate the 2D brush strokes and then they're translated into the works they are now. And I add sound when I can and try and make the experience as immersive as possible. And then after that, translate them to AR when appropriate, when warranted.
[00:09:56.106] Kent Bye: It seems like that there's also dynamic motion that's in there as well, the pieces that you're showing here. So maybe you could talk a bit about, like, what does the motion mean in these experiences that you're showing here at XR for Change?
[00:10:06.971] Nancy Baker Cahill: I just love that you asked that question, because I originally, in the drawings that you first experienced at Spatial Reality, those were glacially animated. And I did that very intentionally, actually, to stay away from any language of gaming. I wanted them to be frustrating in a way, I wanted to slow time down. And in these cases, because these two pieces, Revolutions and Margin of Error, were created as site-specific AR installations for the DesertX biennial, one at the Salton Sea, one at the wind farm in Palm Springs, I really wanted them to be actually dynamic and reflect the accelerated rate of climate change. I also conceived of them as hyperobjects, and that's a whole other conceptual thing which we can talk about. So the way that my partners were able to I said, you know when I was trying to create this so much So much natural life is the Salton Sea is really a place of particulate death And when you stand on the shores you're standing on dead fish fish cartilage that's been crushed up Most of the fish have died most of the birds have died because the birds feed on the fish So I wanted to create something that felt both like a murmuration and also like a school of fish but gone terribly awry and have motion that was dizzying chaotic out of control and not repetitive and so that you would get this sense of like, oh, I don't have a grasp on this. That this is sort of beautiful and I recognize it as naturalistic, but also unnatural simultaneously. And with Revolutions, which was placed in AR over the wind farm, again, I was referring to the idea of something in a state of dissolution, that when we raise the ground to create these, what I perceived as AI gardens, these turbines, these wind farms that address a crisis of our own making, In doing so, we disrupt the local ecologies so dramatically. And so I really wanted them to appear as if they had been kicked up, these beautiful desert blooms kicked up into the sky and shattered and buffeted by the winds. And then they would gesture very gently to their compatriot over the Salton Sea, really part of the same problem but executed differently and conceived of differently. So that, in their case, in the case of the flowers, I really wanted them to twerk at unnatural angles again and then just shatter slowly.
[00:12:03.570] Kent Bye: Well, being here in New York City and seeing the piece within VR, I feel like I haven't had the full experience of seeing these pieces in the full context of what they were meant to be, which is a site-specific AR piece. But just from my experience of seeing the VR version of it, I got this sense of, like, with the first piece, almost like being underwater and seeing what seemed to be, like, what I kind of projected onto it as, like, trash. Because it was like, this is how a bunch of trash would move Together it doesn't seem like this would be necessarily an organic So I had like a trace of like this feels like like a result of human behavior in some ways the anthropomorphic scene that there's some Aspect of humanity here, but that this isn't like a natural process It's beautiful in the sense of the shapes But the way that it's aggregated in a cluster is kind of moving around like it's a bunch of trash in the ocean So that was my first reaction to it. I don't know if that was sort of the vibe of what you're going for.
[00:12:58.235] Nancy Baker Cahill: I love that because it gets at the heart of the matter, which is human intervention and the way that we've messed everything up. I did source the sound in both drawings from the sites themselves. So I wanted to bring, whereas with most of my activist work and with the coordinates, I'm really trying to draw people to site. In this case, I really wanted to bring the site to you and into your VR experience. So that is what you experienced in Margin of Error was a series of of sounds taken, sourced directly from the site itself, and then layered, because I wanted to layer that as well. And actually, I love that you said trash. You're the first person, you know, it is a beautiful, those blues are meant to elicit this kind of magical thinking, this dazzling, sparkly blue thing, which is the salt and sea, that was really articulate. But I also wanted to create this sort of ugly underbelly, and so I used this really ugly brown as an underlighting, and I really wanted that to get at that Grossness that kind of trashy thing and I'm so glad you picked up on that because we have trashed the earth not to be earnest or didactic, but we really have In the second piece make it give a bit more context You said it was created in part for art installation or a biennial like what what was the larger context for how that came about? Both of them were. The curators of DesertX basically invited, these are all site-specific public artworks and land artworks in the Coachella Valley. They invited me to choose a site I chose to, and I conceived of it as a call and response between the wind farm and the Salton Sea, that the Coachella Valley was bookended by these two these two sites that both had an element of human intervention in them that was largely, if not destructive, I mean, you could say wind farms are constructive too, they generate renewable resources, but they're there for a specific reason. There was a time when we didn't need them. So anyway, I just, that was why. And site specificity is really crucial to me in that part of the app. where I'm really, again, asking for the richest conversation possible between the image and the site and the kind of thought activation that that provokes.
[00:15:00.159] Kent Bye: My impression of wind turbines is that they're overall a positive for the ecology above and beyond fossil fuels, but it seems like you're kind of addressing maybe other unintended consequences of them and impacts. So what are they doing physically?
[00:15:14.723] Nancy Baker Cahill: Oh, well, they're amazing. And look, some people think they're very beautiful. And I actually think they're dazzling in their own way. They're distractingly dazzling when you're driving. Be aware. But they also, in many cases, were placed on sacred land. And to do that, to quote, plant these farms, you have to raise that land. And in doing so, you kick up all kinds of natural flora and fauna. people are dislocated as well. And this happens to be in a more affluent community. Salton Sea is in a less affluent community. They both have impacts. And so it's really talking about impact in general.
[00:15:47.218] Kent Bye: And so the second piece where it looks like almost like these exploding flowers going out and they're kind of rotating around and so you get this sense of like they could be correlated to the wind turbines kind of moving around but Also, getting this, in some ways, violent explosion feeling that there's an impact in some ways. So, maybe you could unpack that a little bit.
[00:16:09.674] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yeah, well that's why I titled it Revolutions. They were both titled very intentionally. And Revolutions not only refers, of course, to the revolution of the turbine, but to what it will take to reverse climate change. and of course that they appear as explosions almost like firecrackers and that was also a callback to revolutions of the past and just almost like a call to action in terms of climate change. Margin of error was named margin of error because that's a little bit of an oblique nod to just how difficult GPS location is and how frustrating geolocation can be because it has its own margin of error but it really refers to the very razor-thin margin we have of evaporation, rate of evaporation when the Salton Sea evaporates by a certain amount all of the toxins in it become airborne and it becomes an environmental catastrophe, potentially. So we have to constantly keep it at a certain level of water and that's not comforting.
[00:17:01.285] Kent Bye: Yeah, on the plane ride over here, I watched the National Geographic documentary of Into the Abcanfango, which was showing how the river delta basin in Botswana was drying up from various irrigation and other just ecological devastation that was happening from forests that were being burnt down, and then they were clogging up the river, and then the river was slowly not flowing as much, and so there was all these human-intervened ways in which they were preventing water from going from the lake down into this delta. And so the delta had been drying up over these number of years, and they went on this scientific expedition to see what was happening and to kind of trace back but to me it was really striking to see that because the message was that it is such an interconnected ecosystem that these things may have these unintended consequences like these people who are burning down the forest up the river who want to scare the animals to be able to hunt them they don't realize that they're ruining the ecosystem in a way that is having all these other unintended consequences and so just this interconnected interdependent way in which all these things are connected and to me it's striking that with augmented reality or you could start to Draw people's attention to this in some way and be able to have them pay attention to something that has already been there But you're able to recontextualize it in some way
[00:18:16.825] Nancy Baker Cahill: This is exactly right. This is exactly right. This is the great opportunity of this project and actually the project I just initiated in New Orleans deals directly with a lot of these issues that you're bringing up. In fact, I would argue less than unintended consequences, in many cases, consequences that are informed mostly by greed and, you know, the presence of petrochemical plants and the pollution of those estuaries and all the kinds of things that are going on. That's just the environmental stuff that's going on there. that doesn't even address any of the other stuff that's happening there. Not in terms of climate change, but in terms of racial profiling, racial police violence, all the kinds of things that are happening with abortion, reproductive rights. So I think there's no shortage of contested sites, there's no shortage of battlegrounds, which is why I'm calling the project Battlegrounds. and really asking people in that community and in other communities with great curiosity, what feels urgent to them? It's like going to Botswana. What is urgent for you? It's not what's urgent for me in Los Angeles. We've got our own host of problems. But to go into different communities and ask them, and I have this platform, how can I serve you? How can we bring this to light through art and through the discourse that's possible when you marry those two things, when you marry art to sight?
[00:19:27.397] Kent Bye: Well, you mentioned earlier about embodiment and the connection of your work to embodiment. And having 2D drawings, you don't have a spatial relationship to the art. It's in a frame. You can have an experience of it. But with VR and AR, you have a whole other spatial relationship to the work that you're doing. And so I'm curious, how do you connect that back into the body and embodiment?
[00:19:49.958] Nancy Baker Cahill: I'll tell you. Well, first of all, I want to just make one point, which is that when you invite someone into a site, you are asking them to stand on that ground, to smell the air, to hear the sounds. I think AR is one of the more embodied experiences you can have. I feel, and I'm not saying this with hubris, but my hope is that even in 2D, you can, based on the experience that that woman had standing in front of it, if you construct a drawing well enough, and mine aren't under frames generally, because I don't like that, it disrupts the intimacy of the experience, but you can still elicit an embodied and an empathic and a visceral reaction. That's just the kind of work I make. I can't speak to other artists, but I'm interested in that visceral, that gut reaction. And so if I'm doing my job right, that's what I'm doing. If my imagery is compelling enough, you are still feeling it. Now, are you feeling it with every sense? No. But I want to recommend a book that an architect recommended to me, and I think about this in terms of immersive experiences and in terms of the drawings, the 2D drawings. It's called The Eyes of the Skin, and it's by Jahani Palasma. He's a cranky philosopher. And I really enjoy cranky people. And he talks about the hegemony of the visual and the fact that he's very frustrated. It's a cri de coeur, this book. And he's exhorting architects to think about haptics, to think about sound, which is one of our older senses, much older than sight. and it's how we know the world and we've deprivileged it so much, we've ignored it so much that it ceases to have the same intuitive command over our decision-making that it used to have, or knowledge, body knowledge. And he talks about how close you stand to a wall, where the window is, all of these things that affect your body in space, that these are things that we have to consider. And we have to consider when we're making any environment or space, and in my opinion, any kind of drawing, any kind of art experience has to consider things beyond just the hegemony of the visual and how can you elicit those things. That's my challenge as a, you know, and that's how, by the way, that's how I pay my rent is through my drawings. So I have to make sure that they are compelling or I can't pay my rent.
[00:21:54.196] Kent Bye: Well, this whole process of creating the visceral experience, do you have a theory of what that means? Do you have like an idea or is it an iterative process? Like how do you get to that point of knowing where you've achieved that state of being visceral?
[00:22:08.022] Nancy Baker Cahill: I only know it because if I'm working authentically and if I'm working from a place of truth, generally that's the point of connection. If I sort of wade into the muck and into the messiness and into that interstitial space that we talked about, you know, that sort of irresolvable neither-nor-ness, and I'm really working with a lot of biomorphic forms most of the time or shattered forms, particulate forms that refer to the body or refer to an action on the body. That's the only guarantee I have. I have to work from that place. If I try, if I go out, if that's my intention, like I've really got to communicate this, I guarantee you I will not communicate it. I have to work from that id, that sort of unconscious, that deep rich unconscious, that's the generative place, that's the fertile place creatively.
[00:22:52.755] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I talk to game designers and architects and other artists, my sense is that there is this process of cultivating your own sense of design intuition where you create something, you feel it, you experience it, then you let other people experience it, you see how they react, and then you sort of refine this process of cultivating your own sense of design intuition. But it's an iterative process where you're in this unknown sub-symbolic realm of just following these unspoken intuitions and just chasing what is curious to you. And you may not understand it until you're done and then people react to it and you have your own reaction. But there's this dialectic there between, you know, you mentioning this book to go read about it, so then you have the theory. So you have this dialectic of the theory and the practice to be able to make sense of it. And I feel like we're kind of in this interesting place where there's a lot of direct embodied experiences, but not a lot of theory to help elucidate.
[00:23:45.331] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, I would say all of the books that inspire me, whether it's Susan Bryson's Aftermath, which is pure, she's a feminist philosopher, so her embodied visceral animal assault, she couldn't make sense of it except through a theoretical understanding. So I'm really drawn Maggie Nelson as another example. These people who talk about very personal, deeply embodied visceral experiences in the language of theory. In other words, they, in my opinion, this is my unvarnished opinion, they They imbue these very dry theories with blood and guts in a way that brings them to life and allows you to synthesize them and use them creatively where they have added resonance in the work rather than again some sort of outside North Star that might lead you in the wrong direction. They have to have meaning. The theory means nothing without being a lived experience somehow. So everything I read about solitary confinement, I'm really drawn to happy topics. um you know look at even you know regarding the pain of others the body and pain all these books they are deeply defacement they're all theoretical books but from that you can extrude something that is useful in the opposite impulse which has nothing to do with that and yes you're right you know when you connect you know when you connect with an audience when they have that kind of wow moment or they burst into tears or they say that's how I feel you know that's the beauty of the connection that's why at least that's why I make art is to connect that's primarily what I do.
[00:25:13.422] Kent Bye: Yeah, the deeper and longer I've done this podcast on VR, the more I get into these philosophical issues. And so I actually went to the American Philosophical Association Eastern meeting here in New York City this past January, and it's very steeped in the analytic tradition. And what was interesting is that The Eastern meeting is like one of the bigger ones and so they have all these other ad hoc groups that you know are up to their own to curate but from the analytic mind they have this like it's either in the analytic or continental tradition and yet there's so many other philosophies that don't fit into that false binary and that what I found was that some of the most interesting and relevant topics that were being discussed there were coming from the feminist philosophy. I mean, they had a whole retrospective of Me Too. It was like things that were happening right now in the culture was related to the direct embodied lived experience, and that doesn't always necessarily fit into the analytic mind. But I was certainly drawn to both the feminist and continental philosophers that seemed to be really addressing and talking from a theoretical perspective what's happening with immersive media.
[00:26:15.812] Nancy Baker Cahill: I love it. I mean, you just said that so beautifully. I have nothing to add. That is exactly right. And that's what's compelling. And I would argue also people of color, their experience, their lived and embodied experience, it's not mine as a white woman. But I certainly understand and read with great curiosity about the type of struggle. And I think that the thing that is compelling to me about the body as this site, as this sort of ground zero site, is that we all have them, regardless of our gender experience, station in life. We all live in these. these vessels that carry us around and carry knowledge of all different types. And that's where we can find points of intersection and points of connection.
[00:26:54.577] Kent Bye: My impression is that there's something about the intellect tradition of philosophy that's so obsessed and focused on the mind. It's like a mental monism where they only see things through the lens of the mind and they almost deny the existence of the body. And I'm just curious from your own perspective and evolution of looking at feminist philosophy, like where does the body come into the picture when it comes to what the feminists have to say about the body and how that is connected to the work that you're doing or what, you know, the things that you're finding in terms of their insights into embodiment and to the work that you're doing?
[00:27:26.583] Nancy Baker Cahill: That's such a humongous question. I'm not exactly sure. I can start with, I don't like to start with a negative, but I will say that I find that You know, anything that did spring from Freud tends to be so male-centric. And I always felt myself, even when I was a student, rebelling against it and thinking, that's not my experience. You don't speak for me. That's not my lived experience. And I think that, you know, if I go back to like the kind of very foundational feminist philosophers that I read, at least as an undergraduate, you know, I was really drawn to Judith Butler who wrote Gender Trouble and, you know, less drawn to the Catherine McKinnons of the world and that sort of thing. More and more, again, increasingly I'm drawn to the women that I read, the writers that I read, who, as I said before, like Maggie Nelson, who are really sort of weirdly metamodern about it. They draw their inspiration from all different sources, which I think is a strange sort of intellectually collaborative, if that makes any sense. And I think that a matriarchal tradition is more inherently collaborative. Everything I do is more or less collaborative, whether it's through coordinates or social practice or anything like that. And I think it has something to do with, I don't want to say anything that's sort of biologically reductive because I think that's not useful, but I think that a lot of us, a lot of female-identified humans, if that's okay to say, have experienced some form of struggle, domination, and that writes itself into different types of narratives that are very resonant and that we can all relate to. And when you see those through the lens of various philosophies and you kind of consider the body in any number of... I don't subscribe to certain, you know, subject-verb-object. I feel like that's a very, very damning way to understand feminism. But, I mean, we haven't even discussed maternity, motherhood. reproductive rights. I have three children. I've been a mother. I'm a fierce reproductive rights activist. The idea that my womb would be a site of public interest, that this itself would be a contested site, is really upsetting and energizing for me. So, I can't tell you who, I mean, I can point to the people, I can curate my own list. I'd love to teach a class. I mean, I have my bibliography. It's on my bedside table, you know? And they're all really cheerful titles. And as you can imagine, but I really, you know, I'm interested in the storytellers who are speaking honestly and who are bringing philosophy, bringing certain elements of theory into their life and into practice and making it animate and not some dry, as you say, academic cerebral place that is inaccessible, which I also think is very patriarchal and not democratic. And I could go on a whole other rant about certain types of academia, but I won't.
[00:30:10.810] Kent Bye: Well, I've been very inspired by Chinese philosophy and looking at the metaphors of yang and yan because I feel like there's something about the yang and yan that implies that it's a balance and that we all have combinations of those and the masculine and feminine in our culture right now get into that gender binary that I feel like gets complicated. You know, I love yang in the way that he can talk about the enema and animus, but even saying masculine and feminine has its issues. So I just, I prefer to say yang and yan, but I feel like there's, different aspects of the yin, which is the like the yang being the more the ego individualized solar aspect where it's the competitive zero-sum game, and the yin being more of the collaborative nonlinear cyclical, it's ego disillusionment. So it's how you as an individual are connected to the larger whole. And I feel like in some ways the philosophical crisis and crisis of consciousness that we have right now is that there's so many aspects of the environment and those yin qualities of the ecosystems that have become invisible and not been accounted for. Because of that, they've been devastated in that. with this art, both virtual and augmented reality, I feel like it's primarily a yin medium where you're able to create these entirely new contexts and draw up these new dimensions and be able to take an object and put it into a space and that changes your relationship to the holistic context of the whole space itself and then you take it away and then you change your relationship to it. So I feel like there's a lot of the yin qualities of the medium that could draw a lot of from both the continental philosophers as well as feminist theory.
[00:31:42.900] Nancy Baker Cahill: I couldn't agree with you more, and I think it's also this sort of unintentionally and sort of ad hoc collective experience, which is also so beautiful. The unintended, unimagined, and unexpected communities that form around either specific experiences or an aggregate. When people all experience something, but they experience it differently, and they record it differently, and they understand it differently, and yet they all share something. I think that's a beautiful way of explaining it. Parenthetically, I also feel very strongly you should read Maggie Nelson's Argonauts.
[00:32:10.553] Kent Bye: Okay, I'll put it on my list. I usually go back to Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. When I go back from a trip, I usually go to Powell's and buy some books. It's not good, but it's amazing.
[00:32:23.687] Nancy Baker Cahill: It's so good. There's nothing better than books. I'm a book nerd.
[00:32:27.870] Kent Bye: So I wanted to ask about this whole public collaborative aspect that you have from your pieces of art because you showed some clips of both on your Instagram but also on your presentation where people are able to take your pieces of artwork and start to interact and play with it in different ways. pin it to different objects, just like you have with the facial filters and other things. We were able to kind of attach these virtual objects to things. But people are starting to attach your artwork to a conveyor belt in LAX. It's something that's just sort of like, what? I never thought to think of doing that. But I look at it, and it's like, that looks like a piece of art that's on a conveyor belt. It's like, that is wild. So I'm just curious if you could give a little bit more context as to this app that you created in order to enable people to do these public art collaborations in this way.
[00:33:14.832] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yeah, well it goes back to my experience at Homeboy Industries, you know, really knowing and trusting that the individuals I'm working with have a unique story to tell, even if it's an unknown and unseen audience. When you give someone raw materials, when you say just like, here's something for you to work with, like go nuts, do whatever you want. Some people are going to make choices that are what we might consider banal, like I'm going to put it over my bed, okay. I wanted to really challenge, some people make humorous decisions, some people make political decisions, but it's that question of choice and agency. They choose how and when they experience that public art, and I really wanted to challenge that notion that you have to go to some institution that's decided, these institutions of permission that say, this is what's important. Maybe, maybe not. You know, those are very intimidating places for a lot of people. And my feeling is like the more art and the more fluid people feel and fluent people feel in playing with art and in using art and incorporating art and understanding its role in their life and in their own content creation or just experience of their own lived in real life life, the better. So one of the unexpected consequences not only were these communities, but also was this joy piece, which is like a dirty word in the in the art world, you know, joy is not cool. But it's really amazing to see just the kind of ecstatic experience of making that decision and saying, like, I chose this, I did this, you know, not from a point of ego, not from a point of narcissistic whatever, but really just from a point of choice, you know, and participating creatively and collaborating. I just, I don't know, that gives me a kind of joy. I think that's a conversation that we're having that I don't even sometimes know we're having, but I love it. I love that it's happening at all.
[00:34:59.176] Kent Bye: You showed a clip of somebody that took one of your pieces of art and put it at the border, the Mexican border of the United States. Maybe elaborate a little bit of what happened there, that video and what that meant for you and what they may have been trying to say with that.
[00:35:11.775] Nancy Baker Cahill: That's my dear friend Tanya Aguiniga. She's an incredible artist. She does amazing activist work at the border. She herself was Mexican born but is an American citizen. Really important person in my life. She started playing with the app early on and she just happened to be at the border and she placed the work. This is where occlusion actually helps. This is where occlusion actually does not bother me. She placed it on the American side and pulled it through into Mexico to underscore this idea that borders and boundaries, when it comes to art, are ridiculous and always should be. And that's played itself out, certainly with the app globally, but it really, you know, to put it in a context that that's a contested site right there. That is a deeply, deeply contested site, and it's a scar, if you ask me, and her. And so that really, in my mind, opened up a whole new realm of possibility. I thought, if I go back to the sort of seeds of inception of where coordinates came from, I have to say that must have played a huge role. Because when I think about what she did, it's like, wow, we could choose these very contested sites, or sites of any kind. and add content and prompt thoughtful discourse around those sites, and really make it about, again, as I said, activating ideas, instead of just sort of accepting things as they are, adding, as you said, a layer, another layer, another, getting back to philosophy, just another, being additive in a way, thoughtfully, intentionally, not for the sake of adding something, because I was talking before about AR trash, not just to have something there, but really, to be deliberate about it and to start talking about it. Because sometimes, I mean, I just feel like there's so much why I put a piece over the side of the massacre in Vegas. Nobody, I mean, people vaguely remember that that happened, but do they really think about it? You know, what was the worst mass shooting in American history? Surely it won't be the last, but you know.
[00:37:01.230] Kent Bye: Yeah, you're talking about contested sites and talking about the womb of women being a site that should be a part of your private body, but is now becoming a political site. It's a public site according to politicians, but also you have the Supreme Court that you had a piece of art as well. And maybe talk a bit about what you were doing there with the Supreme Court and that connection there.
[00:37:22.635] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yeah, I mean, listen, that still gets the, I have a column of fire that comes up through my body when I think about it. That was one of those cases where the beauty of this app is the ability to be nimble in these moments. And Dr. Ford was testifying. I happen to have a series, the SIRD series, which is based on trauma in the body and sexual assault, the aftermath by Susan Bryson. And I thought, I want to put this right smack dab in front of the Supreme Court. And then I added the word unprotected because it is 2019 and we are still unprotected equally. Female identified people are still unprotected by the ERA. It has never been ratified. And of course all the resonances beyond that of being unprotected in every possible way now that we have such an imbalanced court in terms of reproductive rights and other rights and in sexual assault and sexual harassment. So that just was ripe. I felt I had to do something. I had to do something. But what was interesting was the collaborative process. I had to collaborate with someone on the ground, and it was a complete stranger. Interestingly, the hardest time I've had to find a collaborator was in Washington, D.C., because there was such a culture of fear there around activism. And I could go on and on about that, but I will not. But it was a friend of a friend of a friend who stood there for 30 minutes in front of that building and helped me in real time place that work and make it look the way it did. Now it still jumps around, it's still glitchy and matrixy and whatever, but it's there and it remains there and I'm going to keep it there until somebody makes me move it, which they won't. I'm just going to leave it there. But it struck me as a unique opportunity to speak up and speak out. And I just happened to have the series that was appropriate for it. But the joy of that moment, because there's always a joy piece, is that, you know, I got to bond with a stranger who just shared my values. We were totally in alignment. She was ready for some guerrilla AR action and went about her day afterwards. And so did I. But we had this moment of intersection. We had this moment where we both just met over our devices and made this thing happen. So that's the subversive potential. That's what I'm interested in.
[00:39:24.302] Kent Bye: And just for a bit more context for people who may not be living in the United States or be tracking, but a new Supreme Court justice, Justice Kavanaugh, was voted into the Supreme Court, even though there was a potential sexual assault. Storied history. So now Alabama and other states starting to potentially create a situation to take Roy v. Wade to the Supreme Court. I don't know if you can give a little bit more context as to what's happening with all this.
[00:39:49.596] Nancy Baker Cahill: OK, so there are a number of states who are just rushing to be the first. They want to be the first states to outlaw abortion in every single case. Now, Alabama has just passed a law. My understanding, it's either passed this law or it is before. They've got the feel heartbeat law, which means that the minute that a heartbeat is detected, that is considered a U.S. citizen, which. Okay, so, but they've also outlawed abortion in the case of rape, incest, or mother's health. They've since proposed legislation, I don't know if it's passed yet, but it's certainly up, if it hasn't passed it's going to, that gives rapists paternal rights. So our bodies are not our own. And women this will hurt the most are the most disadvantaged. And the women who have the least access to health care. So I think it is a human rights issue. And I find it I don't have the words to describe how I feel about it. I think it is a gross miscarriage, pun intended, of justice. And it's happening in St. Louis, in Jackson, Mississippi. There's a wonderful documentary called Jackson, which documents the last and only abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi. St. Louis is also on a fast track. Louisiana, I believe, has only one abortion clinic. And Mitch McConnell that Mitch McConnell, his state, I believe Kentucky may have either closed or has only one abortion clinic as well. And Texas just reduced their number to, I think, like two. And we all know how big Texas is. So good luck if you need it and you don't have the means and resources to get it. It hurts poor people. And these are supposedly Christians who are behind. I'm going to go on a rant if you don't stop me.
[00:41:24.876] Kent Bye: Go ahead. No.
[00:41:25.576] Nancy Baker Cahill: No, I mean, it is the most unchristian. It is deeply unchristian. All of this is unchristian. As I understand Christianity, maybe my understanding is different, but I think it's appalling. I think it hurts poor people, it's designed to hurt poor people, and it's designed to keep poor people from having agency.
[00:41:44.902] Kent Bye: And so, going back to the contested sites, because it seems like there's a lot of stuff that's happening in the world right now, and that, like, there's some role that you could take these hotspots of these issues and put art there that maybe brings an awareness. And so, like, how do you see this, like, playing out, or, like, where do you want to see this go in terms of where art could play a role in all of this?
[00:42:07.609] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, we have curated exhibitions. My friend and co-curator Debra Scacco and I curated, I might have mentioned, along the LA River. We called it Defining Line. It's in AR. You can go on the website, fourthworldapp.org, and track it and see where all the different sites are. But we engaged all artists, Angeleno artists, and they all spoke to issues of immigration, colonization, climate change, this kind of thing. And that is a whole conversation. So there are curated exhibitions along these lines. There's one in Europe happening right now. It's almost finished. Of course, Coordinates is an ongoing global exhibition that is just sort of not ad hoc, but we're adding as we go. But Battlegrounds is very specific right now to New Orleans. And that's where I've got sort of my laser focus. I'm really focused on that city right now. And then with the hopes of it expanding to other cities in the Deep South afterward.
[00:42:53.986] Kent Bye: And in terms of a theory of change, what would happen? People see the art and then what?
[00:42:57.765] Nancy Baker Cahill: Listen, I mean, with the kind of repressive government we have right now where our First Amendment rights are being stripped all the time and we've all been taught to mistrust sources of information and we're in this 1984 13th hour world, it's hard to say how much change it could affect if it gets people at least talking. and thinking about those sites and being thoughtful about them or having charged conversations. It doesn't have to be thoughtful. There's a wonderful, I didn't include it in my talk because I was on the clock as you were, 20 minutes, but Maggie Nelson has this wonderful quote about kind of wandering into the uncomfortable. She puts it beautifully. It's in my, I wish I had my computer with I just quote her directly, but it's about wandering around in the discomfort of complexity. And I think that that's what I'm interested in, is not shying away and taking a black or white perspective, but really wandering in that complexity and like digging in a little bit and having uncomfortable conversations and seeing where they lead. You know, are they going to lead to more polarization or are they going to lead to connection? Remains to be seen. But we have to at least try. I don't know if you listen to the podcast S-Town. Well, I listened to like the first half of it. Yeah. Very surprising podcast. I thought it was a masterpiece personally, just because it, all the assumptions that at least I brought to it, you know, Oh, I bet this is going to happen. Oh, I bet this is going to happen because of this, or I'm making this assumption about this person because of this, they were all upended. And I think that's one of the most beautiful things is, you know, I don't want to sound, I'm very, what I just said before was so didactic and I recognize that and it's repellent. I know, but I actually am more interested in the nuanced conversations.
[00:44:32.700] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the quotes that I gave in my talk that I gave right just after yours was from Marilyn Schlitz, where she says, one of the core competencies that we need in the 21st century is being able to embrace and handle paradox. Because there's so many different polarized perspectives that we need to be able to see that space in the middle where we can sit with what is inconsistent information from these different perspectives, but to savor in that nuance so that we could be able to handle the complexity in that paradox.
[00:45:02.607] Nancy Baker Cahill: Yes, I couldn't agree more. And I think that the paradox is that in between. It's that neither nor. It's the thing that can't be pinned down, which is what makes it a paradox, you know? It's an inherent contradiction that somehow works. And so, yeah, it's like dwelling there. Now that you've said that, I wish I'd not only heard that quote, but that I had my computer here so I could just feed this back to you. We'll look it up.
[00:45:24.455] Kent Bye: We'll figure it out. We'll put it in, and you can send it to me. So just to kind of wrap up things here, I'm just curious, for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions that you're asking or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:45:36.887] Nancy Baker Cahill: There are definite technical problems I'm trying to solve, although Apple, I sat through the two and a half hour keynote. I know that occlusion is going to be something, and body mapping and that sort of thing is going to be, with several generations to come, something we can address. Geolocation is wonderful, but inexact. I obviously could work with different types, but it's a money issue. I'm definitely hamstrung by my lack of resources. So, all the gumption, all the impulse, not always all the resources. And, you know, my real concern really is ethical. How do we keep the conversation thoughtful? How do we think about who it affects, who it doesn't affect, who it harms and who it doesn't harm, you know, this technology and the applications of this technology? How can we continue to wrest the narrative away from maybe more dominant interests and stay subversive and stay nimble and continue to think outside the box?
[00:46:26.972] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies are and what they might be able to enable?
[00:46:36.020] Nancy Baker Cahill: Well, I think they have the potential to be utterly transformative if used thoughtfully, again, and intentionally. But then you still get into questions of you're still controlling something when you're the creator. You're still making decisions that affect other people, which is itself a paradox, too, if you're trying to do good. You know, there are these inherent complications that are difficult to resolve. Gaming is in a whole other category where that's concerned. I don't know. I think if it allows different types of perception and understanding and expansive thinking, then it's doing what I hope it will do. I hope it doesn't shut us down. I'm much more interested in what it can open up.
[00:47:17.232] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just wanted to elaborate on the paradox of being at Games for Change, and I go through all these models of consciousness transformations, biodynamics, there's a hierarchical impulse in those saying that there's a growth and one is better, and yet there's a sense of going from your ego and yourself to larger Scopes of identity out to communities in the world and the planet and that we're in this Tragedy the commons where there are philosophies and perspectives that are destroying the earth and destroying these commons Meaning that there is a bit of a hierarchy in terms of we need people to adapt and change their perspective but yet there was a moment in my talk where I have to reckon with the impulse to want to change other people and And to say, like, maybe the only thing you can do is to change yourself and to put stuff out into the world that maybe invites people into a process to also want to change. It's like more of a Yen take on free will, which is like, I have no free will over anybody else's agency. They have to make the decision. We're trying to create the conditions for them to do that.
[00:48:21.196] Nancy Baker Cahill: Or everything, as I always say, comes back, you can't eat. Always, you have to tend your own garden. Yes, exactly. That is exactly right. After going through his entire auto-defe and everything else with the ridiculous pen gloss, he's like, well, I guess I just have to tend my own garden. Yeah. And lead by example. Yeah.
[00:48:40.925] Kent Bye: Right. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:48:45.457] Nancy Baker Cahill: I guess I would just say that the one thing I forgot to say about my VR drawings is I do really love to let people be led by their own curiosity. And to the extent that we can have people led by curiosity, I think that's a really, really valuable, I wouldn't even call it a tool, I would say experiential element that I hope can be incorporated more and more.
[00:49:03.693] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for sitting down and enjoying the day and all the work that you're doing. And it's amazing stuff. So thank you.
[00:49:10.899] Nancy Baker Cahill: Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:49:13.470] Kent Bye: So that was Nancy Baker Cahill. She's a multidisciplinary artist and the founder of the fourth wall app. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all. Well, the body and embodiment seems to be a huge part of Nancy's process and wanting to create art that really has this embodied visceral reaction within people. And she says that's not something that she can just architect with her mind. She can't like go out and try to deliberately intellectually do it. She actually has to get into this id, the deep rich unconscious or this deeply generative and fertile place of creativity and that it's not something that is coming from a theoretical perspective. However, she does get very inspired from a variety of different feminist philosophers. And she says that she really likes the philosophers who imbue these very dry theories with blood and guts in a way that brings them to life. And that you in some ways have to synthesize these ideas and use them creatively, where they have added resonance in the work rather than just some sort of like external concept or construct that might lead you in the wrong direction. But they have to have meaning and that the theory means nothing without having been a lived experience somehow. And so she's really focused on these embodiment aspects. And so she's citing a number of different works here, including an architecture book called The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Palasma, which is trying to get away from the hegemony of the visual and to really focus on the sound and the haptic aspects as well. And different feminist philosophers enlisted a number of different books, including Susan Bryson's Aftermath, Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, as well as she gave a quote from The Art of Cruelty. So the quote that she didn't remember, we're talking about paradox and sort of the complexity and nuance of these variety of different moral issues and Maggie Nelson says in The Art of Cruelty, she says, true moral complexity is rarely found in simple reversals. More often it is found by wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort, and developing an appetite for nuance. So I think that's a key takeaway that I've been focusing on in my talks, given that quote from Marilyn Schlitz saying that, you know, one of the key competencies of this era is being able to deal and handle paradox. And I feel like there's a lot of these moral dilemmas where there isn't actually a clear answer because there are two sides of these different equations. I think, you know, a big open philosophical question is like, where does life begin? Depending on how you answer that, you come up with all sorts of different conclusions, but One of the things that Nancy is saying is that there's this element of your own body, your sovereignty, and that, you know, if you're raped, if you have some sort of threat to your life, then is it then up to the mother's choice to terminate the pregnancy? And it gets into these more complicated issues where you know, it doesn't have these clear answers. But what seems to be happening is that Roe v. Wade, which in the United States was passed here on January 22, 1973, the original ruling was actually casting abortion as a right of privacy, which is found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law." And so there's this privacy aspect in the 14th Amendment that there's all these different states within the United States that are bringing these different federal cases up so that they want to take this to the Supreme Court to be able to essentially overturn Roe vs. Wade. So what Nancy is doing is that she's actually creating at the Supreme Court this piece of augmented reality art overlaid on top of the Supreme Court where it says unprotected. So it's taking one of her artworks and being able to essentially make this public art installation that if anybody who has the fourth wall phone app you're able to actually see this art installation and she's really interested in this concept of contested sites of these variety of different battlegrounds whether it's in New Orleans or these other contested sites where there's a variety of different issues where she's wanting to allow people to have their own experience a collaborative experience of being able to remix and use and to find their own ways of making choices and taking action to be able to play with and have their metaphoric hands onto this virtual art where they're able to create these variety of different social media posts. And so she has these other pieces that she was talking about and showing at XR for Change, which was the margin of error as well as revolutions that were at this Salton Sea and this wind farm in Palm Springs, California. And so she's allowing people to have their own ways of remixing and creating their own experiences with these augmented art pieces. So it was interesting to me how she was really focusing on this more collaborative aspects where she wants to be able to cultivate these ecstatic moments of being where people are able to show their own creativity and to have this more fluid aspect of playing with the art and reflecting on the role that it plays in our lives and that we don't need permission from these different institutions and that she's just really interested in this concept of giving people the raw materials and to see what kind of choices they make and how they express their agency. So I really like this collaborative aspect of where she's taking her work and I expect to see that this is going to be a lot more common of people creating these different tools that allow other people to be able to remix and use and to create their own meaning through that. And I think you already start to see that with facial filters and the different trends in marketing and advertising that are happening either on Instagram or on Snapchat. And finally, I think there's this sense of, as an artist, she's trying to bring about change in the world, and then at the very end, she's sort of hesitant towards, you know, having too much control as a creator, and that, you know, I had a very similar reaction when I was talking about Games for Change, and, you know, I'm somewhat skeptical in terms of, you know, how much effect we can have in actually forcing or compelling change upon people. I really think that if true change is going to happen, the decisions have to be made with each of these individuals to make the change themselves. And that, you know, Nancy Baker Cahill quotes from this Voltaire Candide, which says that, you know, you have to tend your own garden, that we have to inspire people to be led by their own curiosity, and that it's a key experiential part of this change is to create these opportunities. And it's almost like tending a garden where you're trying to create opportunities for change to happen, but that it's not something that you can force upon the world. And so she's overall wanting, through her work, to be able to help wrestle away the narrative from these dominant interests, and to stay subversive, stay nimble, and to be connected to the world around us, and to be able to provide these opportunities to shift people's context of the work that she's making. Because you see something in reality in these site-specific pieces of art, then you augment it in certain ways, and then you take that away, and through this symbolic expression, you're able to maybe see something about the world that you didn't see before. And so finding these opportunities where you can subtly shift some perception, the shifts in perspectives, and this more expansive thinking, and that's what she's trying to do through her artwork. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to, first of all, thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and to send a thank you to all my Patreon supporters, because I wouldn't be able to do this podcast without the support that I get from my supporters on Patreon. And I'd like to invite more people to become a supporting member of this Patreon. This is a listen-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations 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.
