Intimacy in atemporality: the desktop documentary-VR performance hybrid, “As Mine Exactly”
Still image
from As Mine Exactly (2022), showcasing the curved appearance of the VR desktop
presented during the performanceOn a breezy March morning I rushed through a little alley in downtown Columbia, Missouri, to a post-industrial red brick building with the words “As Mine Exactly” painted on the window. Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton welcomed me into a small room bathed in soothing music and dim lights. Two chairs stood opposite each other, surrounded by speakers hanging on the walls, grounding me, this performance’s single audience member, into a space where intimate secrets would be shared.
This performance, titled As Mine Exactly (2022), is the newest addition to Charlie’s significant oeuvre of essayistic films. Spanning self-reflexive shorts, video essays, found-footage media critiques, and a contribution to the VR anthology A Machine for Viewing (2020), Charlie’s work, in addition to this performance, continues to push the bounds of cinema as a technology.
As Mine Exactly emulates a live conversation between Charlie and his mother, Jane Shackleton, focusing on the time she began having epileptic seizures, and extends Charlie’s thematic interests into the curved screen of a VR headset. Mother and son both speak candidly about their fears and subjective experiences of living the episodes versus seeing them. Charlie performs his part of the conversation live while Jane’s pre-recorded voice plays from the speakers, situating listeners between them. They share fragments of documentation over nearly two decades: family photographs, Charlie’s videos of his mom while having seizures, and Jane’s detailed diary notes about how she felt afterwards. Avoiding the temptation of making grand conclusions about the particularities of seizures, the pair thrusts its audiences into a space of affect, rooted in their own uncertainties across all this time.
As Mine Exactly was first performed as part of the Ctrl+Alt+Shift immersive sidebar of the eclectic True/False Film Fest (March 3–6, 2022). The section also included works by Yannick Trapman-O’Brien, Victoria Mapplebeck, and Tamara Shogaolu installed in a gallery space. After the festival, I had a longer conversation (edited for length and clarity) with Charlie, on his stylistic decisions and philosophical and emotional frameworks around ethics, form, and documentary.
Milton Guillén: As Mine Exactly is an extremely intimate piece that moves away from the so-called empathy machine trope of VR — it doesn’t attempt to dilate time or lean into immersion through 360-degree video. What’s unique about your work is that it’s constrained by subjectivities. How did you handle this material and what were the different stages, across time, that elicited the treatment and care you gave to it?
Charlie Shackleton: A couple of years ago I started mentally revisiting that period of my childhood, when my mom was first diagnosed with epilepsy. I had the version of it in my head that it was this quite academic series of events. All the artifacts of that time — the photographs, the videos, but even just things that my mom or I had written — were all incredibly emotional to revisit, but also weirdly clinical. They were all already stored in a folder that hadn’t been opened for 15 years.
The more I thought about the experience of that time, both from my perspective as a child and from my mom’s perspective as someone experiencing seizures for the first time, I saw a lot of similar contradictions. These very intimate moments were nonetheless imbued with a real distance because of our difference in perspective and the distance that a seizure forces upon the person experiencing it. By fortunate happenstance, I had also been exposed recently to VR for the first time. As intrigued as I was by the technology, I felt very skeptical of a lot of the claims, namely the ones you mentioned, that were made on its behalf. My bodily experience of VR is not one of immersion; it’s one of dislocation and incapacity. Few art forms are defined by two completely opposing forces like that. I’d been thinking about the contradictions of this technology at the exact same time that I’d been revisiting this childhood material and memory, and finding a lot of the same contradictions. The form of As Mine Exactly came quite organically from these two things.
MG: I completely identify with this sense of dislocation versus immersion. In this work you bring a multi-modal scripted performance, using desktop documentary techniques within a VR headset, while also performing a script live to a single person at the time. Could you speak a little bit about why you made it this way, in the context of the work’s themes?
CS: Before it was an artistic project, I talked to a friend about having been a child, having observed my mom’s seizures, and ultimately having filmed a number of them for medical observation. This friend instantly made the connection between that and me being a documentary filmmaker. My initial reaction was, “No, absolutely not. It’s too sensitive to me and it’s too personal.”
Once I started interrogating that thought, I realized that I found the idea that I could take this incredibly intimate material and release it into a content ecosystem in which it can be consumed in any number of ways, with any amount of engagement, empathy or a lack thereof, off-putting. For much of the work I’ve made, that’s exactly the kind of unpredictable lack of control I want for its artistic possibilities. With As Mine Exactly, it felt irresponsible, both to me and my mom and also to a viewer, to put something sensitive out into the world with no assurance that it would be received in an ethical way.
That was what led me towards this setup: one person confiding in another who has to commit to something not insubstantial, spending 30 minutes in a small room with another person, focused on the story that they’re telling you. All of the technologies that are used in the piece (desktop documentary, VR, multi-channel sound) are ways of strengthening that bond.
MG: It did feel like a confession as well as a meditation that created a sense of respect to the process and the story you shared. There are other ethical directions to consider here, such as the collaboration that you have with your mother. How, if so, did the two of you collaborate on the final piece?
CS: Initially I had real hesitations about making a personal documentary. For one, I worried that it was only resonant to me and that I was a bad judge of what would be interesting to other people. I also knew that there was no way to make a piece in which me and my mom had equal agency, short of co-directing it. Even then, it’s my idea, and it’s me that is setting out to do it, so there’s always going to be an imbalance. I began thinking about my ethical responsibilities to her, to accurately reflect her perspective, but also to acknowledge my own greater agency within that act of presenting perspectives.
That informed, in large part, the decision for me to perform my narration and half of our conversations live in the room with each participant. As much as that might feel like a very over-the-top demonstration of artifice, to me, it was really no different than if it had been pre-recorded. I wanted at least to demonstrate those relative degrees of agency.
At the same time, I don’t mean to overstate the imbalance, because at the core we both wanted the same thing out of the project. We had many conversations about whether to share this material with anyone else, and if so, why and how. I would never present anything in the piece that she was uncomfortable with. But I never wanted that label of collaboration to tip over into a denial of the basic differences in our roles.
MG: At the end of the performance you walk away and give the audience member a break, leaving us with our own thoughts. Was this format informed by the emotional weight of the performance or the seriousness of the material?
CS: I worried that ending the piece by leaving the room and letting the participant stay there for a few minutes would feel theatrical, like I had disappeared or something. I decided to be very practical about it and explain that I was going to do it and what would happen after. I think through that lens, it turned into a mutual act of respect. It is a lot to have to take off a headset and immediately be confronted by the person who’s just been performing to you for half an hour, so I wanted to give them an easy, decompressed way to finish the experience.
One of the things I like best about when people finally emerge is that they rarely thank me for it. It’s much more often a sense that we need one final acknowledgement that we’ve just been through something together before we go our separate ways. It really makes the whole thing feel both easier emotionally and also like something more important has happened.
As Mine Exactly performances continued through March 20 at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival (March 16–20, 2022).
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