(Installation shot, Jamie Martinez and Erin Ko, “Neo Kingdom” in Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition (2019), curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara. Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School. Photo: Marc Tatti)

BY KATIE PEYTON HOFSTADTER

—

It’s an hour to digital sunrise, and I’m looking up the different ways to die. At least in simulation.

You can die with the human race or you can die alone. There’s nuclear annihilation: the bomb, a 360-degree immersive experience. Or the unexpected terror of gun violence: The Grass Smells So Sweet, a mixed reality installation by Dani Ploeger (just this week, my university responded to yet another on-campus active shooter threat). If you expect to go it alone—and you probably should—you might choose a more contemplative simulation. The Neo Kingdom is a virtual reality installation by Erin Ko and Jamie Martinez based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

It’s part of “Speculative Cultures: A Virtual Reality Exhibition,” organized by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara at the New School’s Kellen Gallery two blocks from Union Square. If you’ve ever seen a virtual reality exhibition, you have an idea what to expect. When you walk in, you generally find four or five people stumbling around in circles, their eyes encased in VR headsets attached to the ceiling by an electrified bungee cable. They are reaching for things you can’t see. They are pointing at things you can’t see. Sometimes they are pointing at you.

There are screens set up to project the experiences happening to people in the headsets as they bump around in front of you. What you’re seeing is the visual field of one of the two convex “eyes.”

The Neo Kingdom is tucked into the back corner of the gallery, enclosed in a barely-there red curtain. Clearly it will be a more private experience. You step into an enclosed space, where the VR headset hangs waiting for you (it comes off a bit menacing: in fact, an early version of this dangling apparatus was called the Sword of Damocles). There is no outward-facing screen, for others to follow your journey into the underworld. You will die alone.

The first thing you miss is your feet. When you put on the headset your body disappears, and you find your disembodied ghost hovering over a kind of deep-space surfboard. The pinpoints of light around you are stars: you have left the earth.

In this darkness, the universe sounds like the ocean, slow-crashing on all sides.

A bubble floats towards you; it appears to contain another universe. A red universe of red stars. (Transportation is a big question with VR: you need to move between worlds, but how?) You let the bubble suck you in. You can no longer see outside the bubble, back to that first world of stars. You have crossed from an impossible but familiar world—deep space—into a world that is both impossible and unfamiliar—the red universe of the dead.

Now, in a flash of light, the Egyptian God Anubis appears in front of you. He has a two-faced jackal in tow, and a codex you can’t read. Are you supposed to engage him? Debate him? Is he scanning your soul? What is the language on the codex? What does it mean? Are those actual hieroglyphs or Ancient-Egyptified emojis? Most importantly, are you dead yet?

The screen goes bright. Then dark. And you wait patiently for something that never happens. You wait, looking at nothing, feeling nothing, alone in the darkness with your thoughts, and the sounds of the slow-crashing space ocean.

With nothing in front of you to reach for or point at, you are staring into a pool of darkness. You let it do what pools do: settle into a reflective surface. (You’ve long ago forgotten that ten feet away your friend is still spinning around and pointing at things no one else can see.) How long will you stay in this dark cocoon? Is this the journey you are meant to be on?

Also: am I doing this right?

*

In 1991 Damien Hirst was given money to make whatever he wanted.

He hired a fisher in Queensland, Australia, with instructions to kill something “big enough to eat you.” The fisher caught a tiger shark, which Hirst then embalmed and suspended in a tank. He called it “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

I always assumed the Impossible Death was the dead shark. Our minds can never fully wrap around the death of anyone. Including the animals we breed to die for our dinner (I am not a vegetarian). Including the many thousand species extinct by our hand. Including everyone we will ever know, and of course, ourselves.

There is a second meaning, which I only understood after reading the instructions: that the fisher was instructed to kill something deadly to himself.

We humans no longer spend our days avoiding death by predators. Or by starvation, or by cold. We can create anything we can imagine, or we will soon (our imaginations keep pace). If you don’t have a virtual home yet, with a virtual pet—you will. The US Department of Defense wants lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) We construct digital avatars to live for us, and to kill for us. We’ve also created avatars to die for us.

I spoke to Tina Sauerländer, one of three curators for the “Speculative Cultures exhibition,” who has been working with digital art and XR for almost a decade (XR is the umbrella term used to denote virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR, which some people say doesn’t exist—another story)). She focuses on the impact of internet and digital technologies on people. When I asked her to describe the most powerful experience she’d had in XR, she told me about a piece by Dani Ploeger, called The Grass Smells So Sweet. It offers a surreal experience, based on descriptions posted by survivors on online forums.

In class last week, I asked students to write for five minutes about something they were afraid of. Dying, one student wrote simply.

I am also afraid to die. I want to peer into the darkness, and see a tunnel of hope. Orpheus followed Eurydice to hell, but he couldn’t bring her out again. I sense what I’m seeking is metaphorical: better mythmaking, perhaps. But stories do change, don’t they?

Is it fair to project this onto an artist’s project? Maybe darkness is just darkness.

(Installation shot, Matias Brunacci, “Virtualshamanism: An Alternative Digital Reality of Consciousness” in Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition (2019), curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara. Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School. Photo: Marc Tatti)

*

My phone never seems to go dark.

It’s always brightly connecting me to things seen and unseen. Each morning, my inbox populates with notifications from work, friends and advertisers (which lately seem to sometimes be the same). Bureaucratic announcements from two universities, which I am directed to incorporate into my understanding of the world. I am typing this text on my laptop; notification banners unfurl on the “lock” screen of my phone.

I want my smartphone to be one step smarter than the work I use it to accomplish, which would theoretically free up my time, connect me with more people with less effort. Instead, my work and a couple of corporations are using it to outsmart me, stealing my free time before I realize I have it. Late technocapitalism may advertise yoga classes, but in reality I am never far from the orders dictated to me by this device (which I freely elect to carry, or at least believe I do). My day is maddeningly fragmented, yet invisibly catalogued by Google and Facebook, advertised back to me in an increasingly optimized form. The system even advertises products to tame the very mess it itself creates, promising a life of greater presence, calm, and contemplation.

Not all virtual experiences are designed with empathy in mind.

I have a friend who died, and his Facebook page is still alive. Most people have experienced this phenomenon. On Facebook, he still lives in New York. We are still friends. I am still prompted to invite him to events, to bring his missing soul back to the advertising platform. The algorithm does not realize that he can deliver no more revenue. Or perhaps it knows he still can.

This, to me, is horror.

Our religions recognize that we need spaces for contemplating death, for contemplating life. I grew up Catholic, and the confessional offered a dark and quiet opportunity to think about your life, your mistakes, and your character. There was a man on the other side of a curtain, a priest, who could be one of several men at different times, but they all were meant to symbolize God, which was always a little confusing. It was a ritual space, to be moved through as quickly as possible. It was uncomfortable, and I went as rarely as possible.

*

As we increasingly abandon traditional religion

(the “spiritual but not religious” category has increased 30% between 2012 and 2017), many people look towards art and technology to help us rationalize irrational thoughts, including death.

“Our old agrarian mythologies and religions are ill-equipped to deal with the pace and scale of these changes and are no longer able to provide a sense of meaning or direction,” says XR artist Timur Si Qin. He believes empathetically designed virtual experiences can be used as a medium to communicate a new secular spiritualism, which elevates matter itself to a sacred status. This, he explains, is necessary to confront “(material) problem of climate change.” In 2018 he showed Campaign for a New Protocol in Hong Kong. This spring he will show it at Frieze in New York.

*

OK, I admit it. I have a god-sized hole to fill, too.

I am seduced by promises of new awarenesses. In the Neo Kingdom, I want something to happen to my spirit.

But there’s another problem. While I’m trying to focus on the virtual journey, I can’t stop thinking about my body.

I’ve talked to friends, and they all report the same anxiety. At no moment are you more aware that you have an actual body as in a VR headset. Where did it go? What is it doing in the real world? Who is watching it? What might happen to it? This is when you start checking behind you, worried you might be missing something, aware you are spinning like an idiot. You are also aware of your friend, also a spinning idiot, and also the many other spinning idiots in the room. You are a spinning idiot nation. You are grateful for the (barely-a-curtain) curtain. You wish it was thicker.

You settle down. Look around. Where, again, are you supposed to look?

There is nothing but yourself in the darkness, considering your place in the universe. It is deeply unsettling. The new spirituality is invisible. You literally can’t see it. The priesthood is locking you out of the temple.

Around you is nothing and everything, the vast potential of other worlds. Other ways of seeing. Other types of learning and intelligence. Networked organisms, altered time, collective consciousness. For a moment you are connected to all of this strangeness.

The most amazing thing? Your human brain reconditions itself to this reality. There is this other way to experience consciousness, and who knows? There may be more.

According to Jaron Lanier, one of the founders of VR, “Virtual reality is the technology that exposes you to yourself.” In the wake of a VR journey, a perceptual/reality-shift happens: when you take off the headset,” you have a chance to experience being born again in microcosm. The most ordinary surface, cheap wood or plain dirt, is bejeweled in infinite detail for a short while. To look into another’s eyes is almost too intense.”

Art isn’t about what is in the gallery press release. It’s about this moment where you are confronting yourself. The silence in the darkness after the god is gone, and the ringing stops.

You come to be challenged or healed, then you go back to your life.

*

When I take off the headset, the barely-curtains are beautiful.

The threads are so fine, they seem to hold light. I think of Arachne, the weaver who was punished by the gods for her art. Challenged to a contest by Athena, she won. Athena’s tapestry was propaganda for the gods, the ruling class, and it depicted them in positions of glory. The weaver Arachne’s tapestry was both beautiful, and true. It depicted the corruption of the powerful: the supreme leader raping women. The strong abusing the weak. Arachne won the contest, because art was greater. Athena punished her by destroying her voice: according to the legend, she turned Arachne into a spider. (Today, we know magic doesn’t work that way. What happened to Arachne?)

The curtains are so light they lift a bit off the ground. I feel lightness, too. I’ve had a consciousness-shifting experience, and contemplated something difficult. Reality itself feels just a bit more lightly held.

*

The common fear, in XR,

is that people could be put into a kind of Skinner’s box, a closed experiment in which a rat comes to believe levers produce food. The rat doesn’t know that, outside the box, food is not produced by pushing levers. Inside a VR headset, I am easily convinced that a touching a trackpad allows me to fly, clicking a trigger causes me to teleport, or that stepping off an imaginary plank can plunge me forty stories to my death. Like the rats, would I ever believe a lever produced food? It’s frighteningly easy to imagine.

Maya Georgieva, the director of the New School’s XReality Center, points out that the physical world, the one we are born able to perceive, is regulated. Why not virtual, augmented, and mixed worlds?

We’ve perfected storytelling, she explains. This is storyscaping. And it is powerful. It can be used to make us better, or worse. It can be used to create paths to save our planet, or to stoke the hatred, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (and lever-produces-food myths) that will destroy it.

The art world is wary of new technologies, especially those that are harder to monetize as investment vehicles. We have to get over it. We have to talk about it. We have to ask for what we want. We should care that this is happening, and we should care how.

*

And now it’s time:

6:40 (at least in New York, April). The Whitney website allows me to see what isn’t visible from my tiny ground-floor apartment window: the rising of the sun.

I watch my browser shrink on my screen, in facsimile (it’s a shrinking screen-within-a-screen, but the illusion is good). As the image of my laptop minimizes, the landscape behind it is revealed. I watch the sun rising over the river and the Manhattan skyline. My shrunken laptop is now on a raft on the fast-flowing river (on my smartphone, the image is a shrunken phone). The shrunken browser still tracks the movements of my mouse across its tiny screen.

This is the cliched ending of the VR hero’s journey, where the storyteller returns to the real world, more aware of it after their journey into the unknown.

It’s a small, quiet reminder that I don’t exist in a room with a keyboard. I am tied to the planet and the rest of life. It is satisfying.

For sixty seconds.

As the browser fills the screen once more, notifications continue to ding. This is not a solution. It’s just a moment.

Seventh VR Definition: A coarser, simulated reality fosters appreciation of the depth of physical reality in comparison. As VR progresses in the future, human perception will be nurtured by it and will learn to find ever more depth in physical reality. – Jaron Lanier

*

One more thing about Lanier.

He didn’t grow up as a gamer. He was a scientist, a musician, a film student. An artist. As a teenager, he remembers poring over grainy art journals from New York, in the New Mexico State University library. The images he saw felt more exciting, more evocative than if they had been perfect facsimiles.

Our conditioned brains are constantly prodding at our surroundings, testing and learning. “Reality,” Lanier says with beautiful simplicity, “is what pushes back.”

Art is something like that too. I think about my experience with the Neo Kingdom, is searching for the ghost inside. Not the holy one, but the human one. The moment when the art pushes you, and something inside of you pushes back. The true experience of art isn’t the food-lever, or even your food-lever response. It is you, questioning what it was in yourself that just pushed back.

 

XR Exhibitions mentioned in this article:

The Neo Kingdom

Erin Ko and Jamie Martinez

In “Speculative Cultures: A Virtual Reality Exhibition” (free, through April 15)

curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara

Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design

66 Fifth Avenue, entrance at 2 West 13^th Street

The Grass Smells So Sweet

Dani Ploeger

the bomb

Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser

Film by Kevin Ford, Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser

—

Katie Peyton Hofstadter is a contributor to BOMB Magazine, The Shadow, and The Believer, and is the 2019 art blogger for The Best American Poetry. She has been published in literary journals including Gargoyle and Short Fast & Deadly. Three short plays were presented at this past summer’s Fringe Festival in Washington, DC. She is currently working on a series of interviews and articles about artists and creative professionals working with technology, including digital art and design, program-based art, and virtual and augmented realities. She teaches writing to art and design students at Parsons.