By exploring these pages, you will be able to study my artistic doctoral outcome called “NUMB - exploring emotionally charged interactions to motivate reflection on non-fiction topics”.

 

This artistic doctoral research started in the autumn of 2018, although it is also a continuation of an artistic project that I started in 2013. Then, I began working on the topic of the Norwegian Lebensborn children – that is, children born of German soldiers and Norwegian mothers during World War II. These children experienced dehumanizing objectification and ostracism because of hatred of the occupying army.


In the autumn of 2018, I co-produced a feature film about these children called “Wars Don’t End” and created a mobile game called “My Child Lebensborn” that lets the players play as the adoptive parent of a Lebensborn-child in Norway in 1952, and be challenged by situations that are representative of these children’s experiences.


This experience of game development made a huge impression on me, because I saw that the players started to care deeply for the child in the game. I had the urge to further explore how a participant can have a more personal and meaningful experience when being actively involved in the material – that is, when they have to reflect and make ethically hard choices instead of being a passive audience.


Numbness and distrust

This experience also made me want to explore how interactive experiences can be used to create more compassion for others. I have worked in journalism and digital media for many years, and have become increasingly concerned by the way people seem to be ever more divided into opposing camps and stuck in their own echo chambers, even though digital media availability and consumption is increasing (Budzinski, Gaenssle, and Lindstädt-Dreusicke 2021).


There seems to be less common ground and unity and more division and distrust in the world. This observation has made me think that the 'telling' format that is the basis for most of our linear media isn’t as effective as it used to be. There are so many sources that are trying to 'tell us the truth' that we seem to be getting numb and listening less. Can interactive experiences that involve the participant more actively than linear storytelling be a more efficient way to communicate? Because I find Virtual Reality (VR) to be the most immersive medium to date (as well as one of the least explored), it is my medium of choice for this artistic research project.


My artistic research challenge

After my years of working with the Lebensborn and the topic of Children Born of War (CBOW, the children of occupying soldiers and women in the occupied land), one major question has stayed with me:


How is it that an adult can look at a child and see an enemy?


For me, this question is at the core of the suffering of these children, and it is also a question that is linked to the role of emotions in human decision-making. How can adults morally defend abusing some children while caring deeply for others? What makes us divide people into deserving and undeserving? And lastly, is it possible to remove the stigma of being defined as the undeserving ‘other’ – is it possible for CBOW to be seen only as children?


These rooms

My exploration of this question and how it can be expressed in a VR experience is to be found within these rooms that I invite you to explore.


To your right, you will find the office, where I have placed texts describing the background for this project and my artistic research method in more detail. I have also included a presentation of my own personal experience with interactive media. Working on this project has shown me how my background and previous experiences shape the way I analyse and interact.


Texts discussing objectification and prejudice in more depth are collected in the library, together with a description of the Lebensborn and CBOW and my analysis of relevant interactive experiences for this project.


I have placed the descriptions of my artistic explorations in the kitchen. The kitchen journal describes the development and journey resulting in four consecutive VR experiences, while the four concepts themselves are laid out on the kitchen table.


Lastly, I invite you to visit the living room to partake of my concluding thoughts based on the experience I have gained from the iterative process of letting reflection and artistic practice inform each other.


Please explore the rooms and material in any order you like. The letter ‘i' in the top right corner of every page leads you back to a site map which gives a structured overview of all of the material.


Participation and interactivity

I sincerely hope that this use of the Research Catalogue will invite an interactive exploration of my thoughts and experiences. I aim to motivate participation, which is why I avoid terms like 'audience', 'viewer', 'reader', 'user' or 'player' in this exposition. I find that these terms have too many connotations when it comes to the agency or motivation of the person experiencing the material. I choose to use the term 'participant' instead. I find that this term conveys the idea that the person receiving my material is engaging with it without indicating any form of motivation or level of agency. (My only exception is when I write about the players of “My Child Lebensborn”, which is intended to be experienced as game.)


Presenting this exposition in the Research Catalogue ensures that it will be archived and available in the future. However, this also means that the catalogue is technically conservative in its affordances. The pages do not scale to fit different screen sizes, so please try to zoom in or out to adjust if necessary.


The constraints of the Research Catalogue also affect the level of interactivity that I can offer. I would have loved to be able to engage you in interactive discussions and to learn from your thoughts and reactions on this platform. Since that is not possible, I do invite you to ask questions or share your thoughts with me via e-mail.



 


 

Thank you for looking behind the door and giving your time and attention to this exposition on the Research Catalogue.