“Breaking the Fourth Wall of VR”: Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts Discuss ‘Turbulence: Jamais Vu’

Turbulence: Jamais Vu gracefully handles the balance of embodiment and empathy in its exploration of the feeling of disassociation that happens during a vestibular migraine. Wearing a VR headset, the viewer sits at a desk and is invited to interact with the objects as the narrator guides them through his experience. An edge detection filter and inverted image fed back into the headset distorts perception, and as the piece progresses, so does the disassociation. 

Immersive artists Ben Joseph Andrews (who experiences that condition) and Emma Roberts are creative collaborators who explore issues of perception. They won IDFA’s DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction and DocLab Forum Award for this piece and their pitch for subsequent chapters that continue to pull back the curtain on VR and issues of space, movement and the glitches.

Documentary talked to them about embodiment in VR, the “empathy machine,” and how to balance those experiences through creative approaches. Turbulence: Jamais Vu is an IDA Nonfiction Access Initiative Direct Access Fund grantee and is currently showing at Venice. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: It’s rare for a piece to really make me feel something. I appreciate the combination of it being beautiful stylistically, thought-provoking and truly a new experience, all in a very short amount of time. For a piece that you say is “really simple,” it’s quite complex. You cleverly use basic tools for a conceptually deep idea.

BEN JOSEPH ANDREWS: It’s simple on a base technical level because it essentially bypasses a huge part of the production pipeline. Instead of doing 3D modeling or building a complex, intricate virtual environment, we’re using the camera and then applying effects. So it makes you feel like you’re in a virtual space without us—

EMMA ROBERTS: —having to create avatars. But we spent a lot of time working on the script and staging, so that’s where a lot of the complexity came in. 

It’s basically taking the feed from the camera and applying an edge detection filter. It’s picking up all the edges it can see-on objects, in a pattern, of the shadows...That gives a feeling of the physical reality being virtual. Then we flip the image on the x-axis as it’s rendered back into the headset, and modify that throughout the course of the experience. So it starts, apart from the inversion, pretty much like real time and acting like the world should act, but then it starts to morph. 

D: I have a different neurological condition, yet similar in some ways. I get a certain feeling and know an “episode” is coming, my brain sending the wrong signals. I felt that sensation sometimes in your piece. It was interesting to recognize that there are different forms of this kind of condition out there.

ER: One of the biggest surprises with this project is how incredible it is to be talking about things like chronic conditions and disability. In these overlaps there are universalities in how you understand being in the world. I don’t think we expected that when we made it, because we felt this is really specific. It’s a very beautiful byproduct.

D: It’s also ironic because we think of digital immersive experiences being more one-on-one, but in fact sometimes they really generate conversations. 

ER: We’ve definitely had more conversations than any other piece. I think maybe because it’s personal.

D:  This speaks to the idea of empathy, and VR as an “empathy machine”. How do you approach that concept? Did you circumvent it somehow to create empathy in a different way?

BJA: As creators that have been making immersive work for a few years now, we’ve always prickled when “empathy machine” gets used. For us, that’s never been something that we’ve felt we wanted to exploit because that phrase comes from a very exploitative, extractive mode of storytelling and emotional manipulation. When we started to show early versions of this project, we were struck by how many people would take off the headset and say, “I’ve got huge empathy for you through this experience.” Maybe this is actually what this technology was designed for after all, and I had a really complex reaction to that. On one hand, empathy is hugely important—genuine, empathic connection to another’s experience, something that’s outside of the realm of your own experience. On the other hand, as a creator, I felt like that was somehow negative. 

With this piece, it was always hard to navigate away from that, because you’re literally seeing through the eyes of someone else narrating the experience, and it gets very close to putting you “in the shoes of.” But throughout the entire creation process, we were also very, very aware of that as a trope, the constraints of actually putting someone in someone else’s shoes. We were also aware you are going through an experience, a simulation of a common disability. So we could play with the kind of fundamental, liminal space that an immersive occupies in the virtual reality headset: you’re never just someone else, you are these kinds of layered selves.

I think VR does perceptual layering really, really well. With Turbulence, we wanted to acknowledge that this is constructed, that you are seeing the world in a more layered way. And you are not just simply someone else, but you are also yourself. That was our way of creatively almost absorbing it into the way the piece plays out and the experience unfolds.

ER: Empathy machine to me is always a little bit of a red flag, because it assumes that just by something being in VR, that it’s empathetic and effective. We put a lot of time and effort into trying to balance it—not assuming that you’re having the same feelings as Ben, and keeping it open enough that you’re able to explore and feel out in your own way what those sensations are. We’re not just assuming that we can whack you in a headset and say “This is what Benfeels” and expect that you’re feeling the same thing. 

BJA: Audience testing processes were really valuable because people would take off the headset, put their hand on my shoulder and be like, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe that’s what you go through.” That’s conjuring up something really not useful on a lot of levels. Without something more to hold on to, something bigger, something that would contextualize it beyond my personal experience, then it felt like all you had to hold on to was the kind of loneliness and loss of normative function. And I think that was always a really good touchstone for us to know what we needed to build out so audiences had something more to hold on to than just the I’m sorry.

D: Did that change come from the programming? Or did you feel like it was more in the narration and presentation?

ER: Largely it came from the narration, but the ending zoom out was really effective in bolstering those feelings. We wanted to make sure that it was also about your ways of seeing the world—how your brain can be disoriented, but also how fragile and beautiful perception can be. And what it feels to feel again for the first time, to kind of rediscover yourself and the world around you. So we put a lot of effort into creating a balance to communicate that more effectively, and particularly in an intense-experience way so you can absorb it and it doesn’t just bounce off you while you’re busy touching other things.

BJA: One of the real challenges in the development of the piece was how to craft space, and trying to craft a way to ensure that the narration was landing when it needed to.

D: It’s a great example of you’re not “in the shoes,” but you’re “adjacent to the shoes.” We have one foot in [Ben’s] world and one foot still in our own world. It’s this balance of being present in a place that you’re not and not present in a place that you are. It enables us to have that experience, but still be very aware that it’s our understanding. I don’t actually know what it’s like to be you, because I can’t know what it’s like to be you. But I do comprehend better now what it’s like to feel disassociated in this way that I would never be able to understand otherwise. And I think that’s a nice way of doing the one-foot-in-one-foot-out, because you’re still very aware of yourself. In fact, you’re extra aware of yourself.

ER: I think that was the starting point actually, with overlays and this experience of derealization and depersonalization. Because with jamais vu, you cognitively know that really everything’s just the same, but you’re still forced to confront and re-navigate the world. Similarly, in the VR experience, you know this is just an effect that’s trying to poetically explore BJA:’s experience, but you’re still unable to properly move your own body. 

D: In terms of embodiment, VR can have these expectations of turning you into something or someone else. This piece is part of a larger project exploring and playing with embodiment in a very self-aware way.  You’re breaking the fourth wall of VR: this is VR, this is your body, let’s experience it and talk about it. 

ER: We’re creating three further chapters, each of which poetically maps to an arc of a vestibular migraine attack. But each uses a function of the headset—and how we understand it, how it understands the world— to explain how our bodies make sense of the world, and how Ben’s body makes sense of the world. 

BJA: In a lot of ways this project is rebelling against the technological fantasy of seamlessness, which is such an ideal of these kinds of immersive technologies, but in reality, they are seamed experiences. We’re really interested in a very critical, self-reflexive, deconstructive style, to almost lift the lid on how the headset constructs embodiment, how it maintains an illusion of seamlessness and of fluid space and time. By revealing and exposing the kind of underlying apparatus of embodiment, it almost allows me to be able to reclaim my own experience. That is not the normative form of embodiment. 

ER: And within that, revealing the assumptions of seamlessness allows us to talk about when it’s extremely seamed and those moments where your hand floats off over here, or you lose framerate. I think that’s something that we bury under the table. When we talk about XR, it’s like, “Oh, this happened, but shhhh…it was a really good experience.” But it’s fun to look that in the face and be like, what does that mean for the technology? And what does that mean about normative and non-normative experiences of the world? That was our real interest with starting this project, is how much of a parallel there is between the disjunctive embodiment of VR and the destructive embodiment that Ben experiences.

Karen Cirillo is a cultural worker, curator, writer, and producer who specializes in nonfiction film, media, and immersive art. She creates multimedia work and events that explore issues at the intersection of media, cultures, and society.