Domesticating Reality: Moving Beyond Wonder

From the stained-glass windows that bathed churchgoers in colored light to phantasmagoria shows with their smoke and mirrors and magic lanterns to the wireless VR headsets that extend our senses in new ways—we have always been immersed.

This year’s DocLab theme, Domesticating Reality, offers points of entry into the full program of interactive and immersive non-fiction. The exhibited works explore how we’re simultaneously shaping and being shaped by technology. How we negotiate the spaces around us, and the bridging of the physical and the virtual, in relation to our bodies, our homes, our cities and the emerging technologies that we’re constantly entangled with.

Engaging with liminal spaces
As the web is becoming less of a place for endless exploration and more of a user-driven environment, there’s an exploration back to more traditional formats in digital storytelling. We see immersion manifesting itself in location-based performance pieces, like Richard Misek, Charlie Shackleton, and Oscar Raby’s A Machine for Viewing, which merges the VR environment with the physical presence of a constructed space and an artist to guide you through the work. The work becomes a space where the user or spectator moves between different forms of interaction—embodying the mixed reality concept through the entanglement of what we see as the virtual or the real, this liminal space between two worlds.

In Duncan Speakman’s Only Expansion, an audio walk that remixes the sounds of the city around you, he sees immersive media not as something that cocoons us but as something that expands outward and offers a new perspective. The live augmented audio that he uses in the work directly shapes our perception of reality, manipulating how we move through our environment and perceive the space around us. For Speakman, “any mixed reality work could be considered as eco-critical if it directly engages with your immediate surroundings”—with augmented audio having the potential to reach beyond the human/nature divide, to decenter you, to address our current ecological crisis. His work allows room for the context of the person that experiences it, giving a new variation on perceiving reality by making the audience feel reality as opposed to seeing it.

Disrupting the narrative arc
The very notion of reality is put into question in Francesca Panetta’s In Event of Moon Disaster, a hybrid work that illustrates the possibilities of deepfake technologies by reimagining the Apollo 11 launch. As an artist, journalist and documentary filmmaker, what is interesting for Panetta are the possibilities that these new forms can open up in relation to new ways of engaging with audiences. Her work draws a wider narrative arc in terms of fake news, the history of misinformation and deepfake technologies—going back 50 years to consider the present moment. Panetta did this because she wanted something that lingers with you and moves you—something that will make you really think about the technology. “Political material has the potential to alienate,” she notes, “but this story, which happened 50 years ago and takes the universally-loved theme of space, hopefully will draw audiences in and encourage them to contemplate.”

Jumoke Sanwo’s Lagos at Large explores the changing realities of urbanization within the social and physical stratification of the city of Lagos. For Sanwo, the way we shape technologies and are shaped by them is present in questions about whether African countries should still be interested in virtual reality because of their current state of development. She notes that “what is important is for people to shape and voice their own narratives: Who is telling the story and how is it told? And for stories to emerge from a deep understanding of cultural norms and traditions—Africans now exploring immersive technologies as a medium of storytelling can unbundle many layers of projected realities onto the continent. Our realities do not have to be a spectacle of stereotypes, we can also revel in the mundane, the everydayness that is rarely the focus.”

Habituating the human
As you hover your mouse over disembodied captcha images, lingering over whether this is, or is not, really a traffic light (or is it a car?), you start to wonder who’s proving what to whom. Are we teaching the machine to recognize these images? Or are we proving that we’re also human? Is technology shaping us to the point where we become machines? These questions are taken up in Artificial: Room One, a theater piece about AI by Ontroerend Goed (Alexander Devriendt and Angelo Tijssens). In this work, the visitor engages with an AI to teach it how to be more human. For Devriendt, “the more we teach a computer about who we are, the more difficult it becomes to prove who we are.” Their interests lie not in the machine, but in how we can use this machine to teach us something about ourselves.

The DocLab theme takes part of its name from domestication theory, which identifies three stages of technology being adapted by users: (1) wonder, (2) utopian and dystopian perspectives, and (3) domestication. The DocLab works can be positioned at different points in the cycle, some of them spanning across all three simultaneously. For deepfakes, there has been a lot of speculation this year about the implications of these technologies, Panetta says. “The dangers are real,” she admits, “but they also need to be seen within the larger context of misinformation”. According to Sanwo, in Nigeria they’re still at the “wonder” stage with VR: people are fascinated by being immersed in these technologies and intrigued by their possibilities. And in relation to AI technologies, Devriendt and Tijssens see them as existing at different points in the cycle depending on whether they’re a chatbot, a humanoid robot, or AlphaGo, the first computer to beat a professional player at Go.

Rendering our worlds into being
Clouded by the language of “innovation,” which often presupposes history as a straight line, and the language of capitalism, with growth at all costs, we lose sight of history, of histories, as a series of fissures, of ruptures, of disjunctions and gaps. Sanwo chose to use VR as her medium because it fuses all of her backgrounds—photographer, video artist, poet—and allows her to engage fully in the oral storytelling traditions of her Yorùbá ancestry. If our new tools for storytelling offer us anything, it’s possibilities—the possibilities to render our worlds into being, to move between different realities, to collapse the notion of time and space, and to embrace the multiplicities inherent in ourselves as we move, entangled with technologies, through the world.

Margarita Osipian is a Belarusian-Armenian writer, curator, and cultural organizer living and working in the Netherlands. Margarita is part of The Hmm, a platform for internet cultures, a member of the Hackers & Designers collective, and the art editor for Versal, an art and literature journal based out of Amsterdam.