Field Notes: Objects of Reverence

How UK arts institutions struggle to address exclusion in on-site VR exhibition

The last 20 months have seen a culture change within the visual and performing arts, from a rigid focus on venue-based activities to a more agile combination of indoor, outdoor, and online programs. This shift has resulted in a number of unanticipated, and previously unimaginable, accessibility and inclusion benefits. For example, a tide of recent evidence suggests that online arts have had a transformative impact on many d/Deaf, disabled and vulnerable people’s engagement with arts and culture. A UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project that I am leading is also finding many examples of domestic arts consumption benefiting geographically isolated, neurodiverse, older, and otherwise culturally excluded people.

By contrast, over recent years, domestic uptake of VR has remained so low that narrative and artistic uses of it have depended on sited exhibition at arts venues, galleries, and film festivals to reach their intended audiences. Rather than overcoming VR’s accessibility problems, creating work for sited exhibition just pushes them onto curators and programmers. Every user needs their own computer and headset, as well as someone watching over them. As a result, VR installations are resource-hungry, yet can only be experienced by tiny numbers of people. This article works through this dilemma with reference to a number of recent immersive activities in the UK including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream and the Royal Opera’s Current, Rising. It also speculates whether one reason why so much VR-based storytelling and art only reaches limited audiences is that the funding and production contexts within which it is created often have other goals.

Consider this snapshot of just how exclusive immersive storytelling currently is: of the 29 projects featured in the Immerse 2020 highlights, 10 are made for and currently available on personal devices, five can be experienced via Oculus headsets, one is on YouTube with interactivity removed, and 13 are not available at all (three of which were live performances). In other words, about two-thirds of the standout examples of immersive storytelling from last year are inaccessible to anyone who could not attend specific film festivals or does not have a headset. Notably, of the ten non-live immersive works featured in the Immerse highlights that have disappeared, all are VR experiences.

An extreme example of the barriers to engagement that can result from physically sited VR exhibition occurred last fall, when the London Film Festival required visitors to bring their own headsets to its new on-site VR program. It was an understandable COVID-era safety measure, and the festival deserved credit for complementing its on-site works with a free online programme of 360 videos. However, the down side of the “bring-your-own-headset” rule was that it excluded all but people who could attend a specific site on specific dates and who had a headset: a minority (headset owners) of a minority (LFF’s potential visitors) of a minority (people interested in digital art).

Thankfully, a more flexible understanding now seems to be emerging within the festival sector of what immersive storytelling is and how it can be presented. For example, the 2021 Sheffield DocFest replaced its VR-dominated Alternate Realities program with a more technologically agnostic Arts Programme, while CPH:DOX INTER:ACTIVE explored the many permutations of “live online documentary.” Most recently, building on the lessons of last year’s edition, London Film Festival’s 2021 “Expanded” programme included XR installations, 360 films, and live performances across multiple locations (including public sites), as well XR and 360 content available for free online both through headsets and a standalone desktop app.

Beyond film festivals, the pandemic has also, of course, encouraged arts providers to engage more actively with the internet as a platform for experiencing art rather than just buying tickets for it. For example, in March the Royal Shakespeare Company presented the VR experience Dream as an online performance. Initially planned as a sited single-user experience, the company adapted it by putting an actor into a headset and motion-capture suit and live-streaming their movement through a 3D environment. The performance I watched (on March 16, 2021) was also watched by 7,256 other online viewers. In that same 30-minute slot, with the same setup, a sited version of the experience would have reached an audience of one.

Projects such as the above have contributed to an opening of immersive storytelling to audiences beyond the small user communities who would typically experience it on-site. However, the old presumption that immersive storytelling necessitates VR, and VR necessitates sited installation, lives on. For example, rather than adapting its headset-based “hyper-reality opera” Current, Rising, the Royal Opera House in London waited until it could present the work on-site when UK venues re-opened in May.

The installation involved users walking through, but not otherwise interacting with, a series of semi-abstract 3D spaces while listening to a specially composed soundtrack. It could easily have been presented online as a headset and browser-based experience. But somehow the physical focus of the arts organization (viz. “this is art, so this needs to be exhibited in an arts venue”) prevailed. The result was a work that could only be experienced in a single location, and at a ticket price that passed the cost of its elaborate exhibition logistics on to the user: £20 for a 15-minute experience. Per minute, that’s just slightly less than the cost of a top-priced Grand Tier seat for a performance on the main stage.

A few months ago, the R&D Platform at Serpentine Galleries published Future Art Ecosystems: Art x Metaverse, a manifesto that outlines how immersive game technologies could help the art world move beyond its reliance on the physically sited white cube (or black box) as “the de facto framework for the display of art.” The publication highlights three key characteristics of this de facto white cube model: “Presented objects are unique and finalised; These objects are presented to a general anonymous viewership; A specially configured physical space is the hosting environment of the presented objects (“artworks”).”

By contrast, FAE sees virtual environments as an opportunity for art to become iterative, to free itself from physical exhibition spaces, and to engage directly with user communities:

For example, unlike an exhibition opening, which is usually discrete and limited by geography, the release of a new game could involve: consultation with player communities to build the audience for that game through user-testing; discussions on Discord or Twitch communities facilitated by community managers; or cultivating sustained engagement through the constant cycle of releases, feedback, and software updates.

It’s ironic, then, that XR, a technology ideally suited to helping art move beyond the white cube model, so often just perpetuates it. In an arts venue, the headset becomes an object of reverence, typically accompanied by an assistant placing it on the user’s head as if it were a crown. In a film festival installation, the atmosphere is perhaps closer to that of a graduation show: VR experiences jostle for attention next to each other with the help of home-made stage sets that act as window-dressing for installations whose only essential elements are a computer, a headset, and an empty space.

Even Dream still partially conformed to the white cube model inasmuch as it presented the live stream within a specially configured black box studio to an anonymous audience. Interaction with the work was limited to a bolt-on feature meant to allow audience members to alter the lighting of the virtual space, but it had no noticeable effect when I used it (probably because dozens of other online viewers were also trying to control the lights at the same time). This confusion only served to emphasise further the audience’s lack of agency — and the fact that what we were watching was still a sited VR experience, flattened into a YouTube video.

Listening to the Q&A after Dream, in which the creators and performers talked excitedly about the project’s innovative use of motion capture but not so much about the online audience’s distance from this experience, it occurred to me that perhaps the whole point of this “Audience of the Future” project was in fact not the audience but the production process. Reading further about £33m research grant that Dream contributed to, I realized this was precisely the case. What I had just witnessed was not art as I understood it but a government-led R&D process aimed at boosting the UK’s tech sector.

Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital Development at the RSC, writes in a blog entry about Dream: “Put technology in the hands of artists and the most amazing and unexpected outcomes are possible.” Yet too often in XR, it feels like the art is working for the technology. In contrast to Ellis’s view, digital dramaturg Jason Crouch, who has helped bring UK arts festivals online over the last 20 months, suggests that if a technology is chosen before an artwork is developed, creative paths are immediately closed. For example, the discovery that a planned VR piece might work best as a 360 video, or an immersive sound piece, or a one-on-one live performance, is precluded.

Crouch also notes, “Tech companies don’t make platforms for artists.” But XR artists do nonetheless often showcase tech companies’ technology and demonstrate its potential, performing a kind of unpaid labor for them. If even Wired is now suggesting that “we need to kick Big Tech out of the Metaverse” clearly a rebalancing of the relationship between art and technology is overdue. People who don’t care much about art will always appropriate it to further their own agendas. It’s up to artists to resist this tendency.

One way forward, perhaps, is through immersive works that engage with technology more opportunistically, and that use tech companies’ products in ways for which they were not designed. Only when the artwork is of absolutely no use to the tech platform can it function fully as art. Also needed, in tandem, are more works of immersive art that engage with technology critically. By this, I don’t mean more works about surveillance capitalism but rather works in which creators have made a critically informed choice about what technology to use rather than just adopting the latest XR gear. And, above all, works in which creators engage critically with their chosen technologies’ embedded ideologies throughout the production process, and perhaps even build this criticality into the final work.

Documentary turned a critical eye to its own process of mediation over fifty years ago. The history of VR storytelling still lacks a galvanizing moment of self-criticism equivalent to the conversation at the start of Chronique d’un été, when Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin discuss with Marceline Loridan the impossibility of filming her neutrally. Perhaps, as a first step in escaping Facebook’s walled garden, XR needs its own reflexive turn.

Which brings us back to VR’s missing audiences. Those who are excluded from art never appear in any surveys or datasets. For creators and exhibitors, it’s as if they don’t exist. Yet over 7,000 people would not have been able to experience Dream on the day I saw it had it been presented as a sited experience for one user at a time. For VR-based art to be truly critical and reflexive about its use of technology, it needs also to acknowledge and address the exclusions inherent in the one headset / one user model of sited VR exhibition.

I’m not suggesting VR artists should necessarily put all their work online, and certainly not arguing that large, distant audiences are inherently more valuable than small, proximate ones. Rather, I’m suggesting that if creators are indeed ready to reconfigure their relationship with big tech, perhaps this is also an opportunity for immersive artists to reject the role of product developer that governments and tech platforms foist onto them, to look beyond making work for their own peer group, and to engage more directly with the wider audiences on whom immersive storytelling’s future depends.

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