Editorial⎜A look back at Verzio’s Vektor VR “Misunderstood Bodies”

For five years now, Ágnes Karolina Bakk and András Szabó have brought tightly curated VR exhibits to the Verzio Human rights documentary festival. In 2015, VR’s second wave was ushered in by a human rights documentary that its director, Chris Milk, believes established VR as an Empathy Machine. Milk had good rhetoric, since nobody wants to be the buzzkill denying the power of human rights and empathy. But 10 years later, VR designers seem to have realised that empathy is a lot more nuanced than whatever Milk was talking about.

Empathy lets us shake off our own values, beliefs and perceptions, rerouting our mental processes to simulate someone else’s experience. According to empathy researchers, this mental simulation is how we understand one another so well and how we tap into artworks to arrive at feelings. But our minds are complicated places, with beliefs, processes, perceptions and a whole subconscious of pathologies to simulate and feel through. With the mind having so many features to copy, it’s not obvious what simulating makes for the virtuous, empathic kind VR should strive to reach.

This year, Vektor VR brings together seven works that encourage spectators to simulate feelings towards a range of neurodiverse experiences, illnesses and injuries. But rather than limiting itself to Milk’s form of empathy, where we place our mind in someone else’s shoes, the curation shows how many different forms of perception can stem from focusing on our body’s interactions with VR.

Cover: TURBULENCE: JAMAIS VU, Vektor VR 2024 📸 Novák Doro

Milk’s work CLOUDS OVER SIDRA (2015) nicely illustrated the confusion between “walking in someone else’s shoes” and trying on their mind, as does Vector VR’s BLOOD SPEAKS: SARASWATI’S STORY (2018). Both VR experiences collect 360 video of impoverished non-western communities and combine these with expositional interviews or voice over. CLOUDS OVER SIDRA focused on children in a refugee camp and BLOOD SPEAKS: SARASWATI’S STORY looks into the postpartum bleeding of a quarantined Nepali villager. Perhaps if I really strain, I could pretend the experience’s recorded voices are my inner monologue or that the character’s perspectives are my own. But really, I don’t know the first thing about perceiving in a refugee camp or Nepali village. I don’t have any of the habits of refugee life that might stop me paying attention to the crowds and dirt clouds or let me notice invisible boundaries between their public and private space.

For the most part, both experiences let me sympathise with the people around me, but I’d only be properly empathising with a clueless voluntourist. I feel for the documentary’s subjects, but I just don’t know enough about their worlds to understand or feel with them. As a result, I instinctively see it as heroic when BLOOD SPEAKS’ director intervenes to break up the village’s customary rituals. Since I’m not a villager, I just cant see well enough to recognise the ritual’s importance or guess at its danger. But by focusing on my body, I can get close to a sliver of empathy with the villagers and refugees. There is a tiny overlap between my bodily experience in VR and anyone who thought life was going to get better only to find themselves detained.

These VR experiences promise their user some kind of deeper awareness or freedom, but beyond tilting our heads we’re made to be completely static and our lack of body and autonomy is frustrating. Of course, comparing being in a refugee camp or quarantine to being in VR is a huge reach, but the other experiences in Vector VR fine tune bodily experiences to create genuinely impressive forms of empathy.

One of the clearest examples of empathy as bodily simulation is TURBULENCE: JAMAIS VU (2023). The voiceover is quick to point out that the simulation is an imperfect recreation of one of the artist’s own symptoms called Jamais Vu. The symptom is typical of Capgras syndrome, where someone recognises their friends’ features but doesn’t layer these features with any meaning. Instead the faces feel unfamiliar and like they need to be studied rather than being passed over.

Similarly, If you’ve ever said “door” over and over until it feels meaningless and becomes more like a tocking sound than a word, you’ve experienced something like jamais vu. In both cases, the phonic or visual qualities of the representations become more salient than the ideas or emotions they represent.But while Capgras syndrome or repeating a word makes representational images or sounds from the outside world feel unfamiliar, TURBULENCE defamiliarises something inside me that it’s harder to think of as representational. With the headset on and the user seated at a desk, TURBULENCE re-renders Vector VR’s gallery so that the user sees their usual environment but the world is flipped horizontally like in a mirror. The voiceover begins by guiding the spectator through mindfulness, describing the artist’s symptoms and guiding the user through action. Inverting vision seems like a simple trick that at first you can overcome by being very intentional with your movements, but mastering something means doing it habitually. As soon as your old habits mix with new inverted habits, it becomes hard to predict where your own intentions will take you.

Simplifying my thoughts by focusing on my vision and hands separately helped for a moment, but once my hands and eyes fell out of sync I’d realise my movements were broken but struggled to focus on which part of me was out of step. It wasn’t the images or sounds around me that felt strange, instead my mind and the way my habits, intentions, and movements synchronised started to feel more noticeable. Rather than my mind being a fluid tool-like extension of myself, TURBULENCE somehow cleaved off a part of my sensory-motor function, not only making it feel weird but also somehow outside myself. Rather than trying to achieve empathy by transporting me to a different place and mind, TURBULENCE had me empathising with its artist by messing with my ability to navigate my own space, body and mind.

The most impressive piece on display, EMPEROR (2023) also contains moments where the spectator’s body mimics the documentary subject’s mind. Unlike the autobiographical TURBULENCE, EMPEROR is Marion Burger’s attempt to empathise with her father as he struggles through aphasia. Aphasia manifests in people with serious brain damage as a kind of word-searching trouble. When trying to say a word like “duck”, the father in EMPEROR instead recites a torrent of words he’s associated with a decades old memory involving ducks. Lacan and Metz have both written about people with aphasia as being like involuntary poets, with the errors in language having a similar structure to metaphor and metonymy in film.

The longest sequence in EMPEROR explores one of these involuntary poems by reenacting scenes the director’s father had associated with the word “duck”, placing them in a ruined mind-palace that stands-in for the father’s subconscious. Early in the experience, Burger includes a sequence where her father should have said “vingt-huit”, meaning twenty-eight, but instead said “Weintraut” meaning a wine trout. Later the experience presents a Bosch-esque fish-bottle hybrid. At first, I could see the Weintraut’s nose sticking out of the ground, indistinguishable from a bottle. Except after I left my chair, bent over and reached out, I saw the bottlenose vibrate as if trying to break out of the ground. I realised I could grab hold of the bottle and pull it from the sand, but because VR cannot mimic weight, the bottle came away with a slippery lack of resistance.

My awkward bending and exertion gave way to too much movement and the unexpected. Once again, VR mimicked a feeling that made sense of Burger’s father’s mind; his initial strain to find names that seems to dislodge a tumble of words that fall too freely, unexpectedly and as if they have a life of their own. In the opening monologue of EMPEROR, Burger says that her father’s injury leaves her with only empathetic guesses at his experience. While we never get a chance to experience her father’s actual thoughts, Burger places our body into a metaphorical landscape of the father’s mind so they can experience word search failure as a joyful bodily action.

Unlike Burger’s poetic speculations, LOU (2023) positions itself as a well-theorised educational resource created by parents of autistic children for their community. LOU uses a calming voice over to contextualise the picturebook actions of it’s central character, Lou. Throughout, Lou is described as being ‘in his bubble’, which comes across as a synesthesthetic virtual reality where textures and sounds explode into lights and colours, drowning out or replacing the world Lou shares with his mother. But LOU (2023) does well to show that being in your bubble has a more complicated relationship to reality than a full replacement, since the human body remains in both worlds.In a scene where the user takes on Lou‘s teenage body as an avatar, the animations guide us to shake our arms like a bird and slam our locker as attempts to drown out the feelings and sounds of being in a high school.

As this happens in the virtual world, I can’t forget that my real life body is blindfolded in a quiet calm art gallery, filled with spectators who can’t tell why I’m shaking my arms frantically like a bully imitating autism. Like Lou, VR has placed me in my own bubble, compelled to act in ways that don’t match my surroundings, but aware enough of the outside world to feel embarrassment seeping in from it. Once again, Vector VR’s curation is pushing me into an otherwise unreachable embodied experience, where I’m co-present in two worlds, and blindfolded in the one I’m socially accountable to. While the voice over never makes the links between users being in VR and Lou being in his bubble explicit, it does explicitly stress how important it is for Lou to make sense of the world by drawing on his bodily senses. Since Vektor VR’s 2024 curation – and this review – are entirely about how the body can unlock understanding, Lou’s experiences come across as being richly aware of his body rather than as a an illness damping presence in the world.

MAMMARY MOUNTAIN also uses feelings of co-presence but uses it to give sense to fractures in identity. MAMMARY MOUNTAIN (2024) focuses on testimonies from the treatment diaries of breast cancer survivors, combining these with images and vibrating equipment. At times, the testimonies describe the muddled sense of self required for survivors to feel nauseating sickness, see the toll chemo is taking on their skin, and yet trust some essential process in their body leading them through healing. One of these testimonies describes a co-present sense of self, where the narrator identifies with her healing process rather than her skin or immediate experiences.

MAMMARY MOUNTAIN’s imagery depicts a similar relation where a small figure acts as a stand-in for the narrator’s experiencing self while a larger one becomes like the narrator’s healing process. The experience begins with the spectator moving slowly towards the smaller figure, with water lapping around it’s feet as it rests on a rock-like cancer growing from the static and much larger reclining body. Since the moving perspective directed me towards the small figure and let me watch it watching back, I couldn’t help but identify with it as the experience’s protagonist giving testimony. But both the small and the large body were linked by similar swirling lines, marking out the borders of the smaller body’s cancer but also suggesting landscape-like contours or elevation in the larger body. Like the landscape, this larger body hosts the smaller more agentic one, keeps it from drowning in the waters and comes to feel like the reason for its existence. As the small body gets closer to drowning and the testimony describes the figure’s pain, the larger body rises up and helps to keep the smaller one alive. So far, this is an almost entirely visual depiction of the experiencing self being supported by some larger-life preserver linked to it’s body.

But a final piece of the experience makes the same point through touch and the user’s own feeling of co-presence. In the full VR experience, the user wears a vibrating vest stitched with the same lines that cover both the figures, suggesting some connection between the user and the avatars. As the vest vibrates, it becomes hard to give in to the headset’s illusory suggestion that we can leave our bodies behind and teleport our experiences elsewhere. Instead, the vest’s vibrations become a reminder of the body’s existence and scale, aligning the user’s body with the landscape-like life-preserver rather than the smaller sicker figure. So, MAMMARY MOUNTAIN gives a chance for users to feel a sense of split-identity between bodily existence and experience, then layers each side of this split with meanings tied to the smaller and larger figures. So, by evoking co-presence and layering it with meaning, MAMMARY MOUNTAIN manages encourages spectators to simulate its narrator’s feelings and tap into a deeper empathy.

EMPEROR, TURBULENCE, LOU and MAMMARY MOUNTAIN show how VR can present new bodily experiences that mirror other people’s mental life, but it would be naively optimistic to claim all VR pulls this off. SOUL PAINT (2024) is a different experience that shows one of the darker ways we can conceive of our bodies. The experience evokes wellness culture, beginning by claiming it draws on neuroscientific and psychological research, encouraging users to take deep breaths. Really, the experience is a guided form of body mapping where users see a life-size de-personalised representation of their body and then draw on it to show where they feel their emotions. They can choose from a range of brush-styles and colours.

What they can’t choose is a more phenomenologically accurate view of emotions, where objects in the world can be scary, peaceful, painful, or enraging. When I feel sadness I don’t tie it to my body, I feel sad about something outside of me. If I’m mad about an institution, frustration lets me hone in on precisely what part of the bureaucracy is irritating. But, as if I’m under experimental conditions, SOUL PAINT creates a silo where every emotional variable has been replaced and the the only object left to feel towards is my body.

Because of this huge variety in approaches to the body and VR, VectorVR continues to be a highlight of the Verzio documentary film festival. Bakk and Szabó’s showcases an impressive range of bodily feelings, and labels each of these feelings with meaning. There is frustrating paralysis in BLOOD SPEAKS: SARASWATI’S STORY, a joyful analogy for aphasia in EMPEROR, two very different meanings of co-presence in LOU and MAMMARY MOUNTAIN, a break in the links between perception and action in TURBULENCE and troublingly body-centric introspection in SOUL PAINT. All of these experiences draw on something like empathy to layer rich meanings onto partly simulated bodily perceptions. However, unlike in 2015’s CLOUDS OVER SIDRA, most of the experiences have moved past aligning empathy and VR with a means to teleport into someone else’s body. Instead, Bakk and Szabó have found works that explore nuances through empathy, showing the many ways we can feel something new and liken it to another person’s experience. By showing how embodied experiences or even our own bodies can become a document of someone else’s experience, Bakk and Szabó remind us how VR can be at the forefront of documentary filmmaking.