Act 0

We can now, rather easily, create virtual worlds. 

We can decide and parameterize their atmosphere, their physical rules, their limitations and opportunities, the people and things that populate them, the systems that stem from them. We can reinvent structure, life, society as we decide to; model them in the image of what we love, what we dream of, make cosmic waterfalls run backwards and use our favorite songs as their soundtrack. We can set up the perfect bases for the human utopia we could never dare conceptualize and we can theorize an afterlife that would be lived by our audience rather than imagined. We can train characters to behave like people we know, people we invented, and people we fantasize. We can create for all the senses, transporting fully our audience in the most detailed embodied experiences — which can be our memories, our dreams, our desires, our fabrications,  or even theirs.

Our creativity isn’t translated into a medium or into media; it becomes a milieu. 

This is as new and unfathomable as it is old and overdone: as practices in theater, rituals, participatory arts and live action roleplay have been exploring the potentials of creating temporary virtual — yet physical — storyworlds centered around community and artistic interpretation.

As someone whose practices were always connected to physical play and virtual spaces alike, I have been curious about the common core of this storyworld making: why (do we do it, do we need it, do we want it), how (to make it beautiful, meaningful, useful, impactful, fair), for whom (the gamers, the artists, the industrials, the people, those who cannot access it), what (to do, to prevent, to foster, to plant)?

Here, I make an account of live experiences designed and organized around a central preoccupation: how can live action roleplaying (larp) help us create devices that honor the creative and human potentials of storyworld making, in VR and physical spaces? You probably understand that these experiences depend on a space, a moment, a set of rules and the inspiration and dynamics that arise between co-players. As such, this reflection, exposition, publication, exhibition, presentation, cannot convey the nature, sensation or effect of this practice. But it does attempt to draw a timeline of the research journey, and allow events, intentionality, and themes to sprout. 

Septembre 2017, Lillehammer.

The journey begins. Lillehammer’s hills are covered with the densest fir trees I have ever seen, themselves wrapped in the most condensed, lowest fog I’ve ever encountered. I moved alone to this small city entirely foreign to me. I was given a desk, in an empty office, at the top of a big university where nobody knows much about VR, larp, or artistic research. Yet, it is there that I was gifted the improbable opportunity to have time and credentials to develop a VR larp, perhaps the very first of its kind. 

Before I started the fellowship, I spent nearly a decade scouting the corners of immersive arts. I built synesthesia suitcases: physical suitcases in which there were fragments of narration for all the senses. They included a built-in discman to bring linearity through tracks, smaller boxes and drawers to open, parchments to unravel, fragrances, dents & textures. Later, I fiddled — during my master’s thesis in cognitive neuroscience — with the idea of prototyping a neuro-immersive reality. Before touching VR, I worked with video games, cinema, large-scale transmedia projects, software development — always on the content creation and conceptualisation side. Of course, I had also been writing and organizing larps since my teenage years, away from industry and arts spheres. Larp is a practice that I have always found enticing in an ungraspable way, and this research  allowed me to formulate a bit more why.

It was when I saw the VR experience Notes of Blindness: Into Darkness, narrated by John Hull, in the now quite obsolete Gear VR headset in 2016, I knew I wanted to work with VR. I could sense all of its enveloping poetic potentials: the light wavering silhouettes at various distances, the musicality of that 360 layout, the freedom to look wherever I wanted; through just that one experience, I was convinced that audiovisual immersion was an artistic emotion of its own. 

I wanted to explore the aesthetics of immersion.

As someone also with a film background and a French education, filmic aesthetics are a colossal inspiration in my practice. In particular, I always found the most sensorial and dreamlike sequences shot on film to touch something essential of our human experience, something that escapes enunciation. Lone Wolves Stick Together, the core project of this research, was born from this layered context: the inspiration of the evocative and vaporous Zone from the film Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, the encounter with the Norwegian woods, and all my coiled aspirations.

In Lone Wolves Together, two groups venture an uncanny area called “the Woods” on two different timelines. 

At first, with my early twenties dreams of what I thought of as synesthetic art, there was a yearning to gather all of one’s aspirations, all of one’s itches, all of one’s passions into one coherent mega-practice: the total artifice or reality making. Then, when furthering my practice of participatory arts, came the layered aspiration of developing creative communities and collective action. Larp in particular, I found to be particularly conducive both to engagement and co-creation by creating spaces for play that are filled with narrative elements and playful constraints; an aesthetic system that Evan Torner describes as “emergence, iteration, and reincorporation” (Torner, 2018).  Such a model “sees larp as a complex information system, ‘code that runs on humans’ (Steele, 2016), and seeks nevertheless to give players the tools to make aesthetic sense of their experiences.”

They came to seek the Chamber, a place that is believed to make one’s most intimate desire come true.

Larp and other participatory or immersive forms do form temporary alternatives, or escapes, to the evident reality. In the arts, especially when those overlap with the entertainment and new technology industries, we constantly navigate desires of escapism and belonging; seeking what Brian Sutton-Smith defines play as: “the momentary impression that life is worth living” (Sutton-Smith in Fox, 2015). Many of my peers — whether they call themselves designers, artists, players— dedicate themselves to seeking a balance between those seducing pursuits and a desire to contribute to a beneficial change in the world.

During these past 5 years of research, the world changed, society changed, the technology I work with changed, and most importantly, I changed. During my time in Lillehammer and during the confinement, I was considering that vertigo: can this practice, this publicly funded project, be useful? Useful, as in more likely to be helpful and serviceable, than it is to feed the promethean shame that fuels a lot of our technological endeavors?

During their journey, they stop 5 times. 

Those 5 acts follow a precise progression: Doubts, Nostalgia, Disillusion, Despair and Truth.

Stalker, by Tarkovsky, is a journey, and, each time it is viewed again, it is a different journey. Our perspective shifts from one character to the next, one interpretation to the other, without ever fully landing on a clear path, for we are visiting a place that shifts magically despite being captured on film. 

“The Zone is a very complicated system of traps, and they're all deadly. I don't know what's going on here in the absence of people, but the moment someone shows up, everything comes into motion. Old traps disappear and new ones emerge. Safe spots become impassable. Now your path is easy, now it's hopelessly involved. That's the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we've made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that's going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!”

(Tarkovsky 1979, 1:02:00)

The Zone itself, much like a procedural environment, is a space dedicated to adventures; a delimited land of ordeal for the body, the mind and the soul. 

At times, when reflecting on how intense film and game productions can be and wondering how to prioritize the people working on them rather than the art itself, I think about Stalker: the price for this masterpiece was potentially none less than the life of many crew members, including Tarkovsky and his wife Larisa Tarkovskaya as well as the Stalker himself, Tolya Solonitsyn, who all contracted similar cancers after being exposed to the radiation of a nearby nuclear plant during the shooting (and reshooting) of the film. While this might be a legend, I decided to take it as a lesson. In my field, that means: never pressuring anyone to stay inside a VR headset, never inviting them to remain in there for entire work days (how much do we care for our human eyesight, to let screens be so close to our corneas with less than a decade of medical follow up?), never belittling the efforts of team members who stick to the minimum hours required or must take more breaks, never making them feel like they are unworthy of working in the arts for not crunching. 

Yet still, I wonder, can we pick life over arts, while working with film and new media? Can we convince artists, sponsors, funding bodies of all sorts that the health and development of team members might just be more important than the final results?

There are six characters in two expeditions.

One group, driven by hope, went there first: Guide, Scholar and Author.

The other group, driven by regrets, went there some time after: Scout. Scientist and Artist.

This is your journey document.

After writing the first draft of Lone Wolves Stick Together, still perched high in my office and overlooking a Spring that is ever so frosty and tåkete, I put my hands on Tarkovsky’s scripts. Among the documents, the script of Nostalgia and an old script of Stalker get me so agitated that I write a cringe journal entry (Annex XIII) full of exclamation points. The characters and story I have just crystallized are so uncannily similar to other variations of Tarkovsky’s work that I feel “more connected to Tarkovsky and extremely trite.” In particular, an older script of Stalker refers to the “Room” (where one’s most intimate desire comes true) as a “wishing machine”, and I have been using the expression ever since. A wishing machine, just like what a procedural, data-driven VR could be, which is the mise-en-abyme at the core of Lone Wolves Stick Together: should we seek the Chamber/the wishing-machine/VR as a means to realize ourselves and our fantasies?

Each character has a mirror in the other group: Guide and Scout, Scholar and Scientist, Author and Artist.
Those characters know each other, project on each other, have something that the other lacks - or desires.