IMMERSIVE REVIEW RUNDOWN: Somebody’s Watching Me

A fascinating audio experiment in London, and fairytale-based installations in NYC (TWO REVIEWS)

This week the Rundown is a little light, but there’s still time to go check out both of the entries, which are Review Crew members are into. That is if you’re in London or NYC.

Let’s get to it.

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Only for the Wicked — Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
Free; New York, NY; Through February 21

Only for the Wicked is a fairytale fever dream that takes audience members through the grotesque, stop-motion world of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

While arguably the most immersive room was upstairs (guests could move through a physical installation of rucksack rocks and delicate flowers, while watching what looked like a disturbing reimagining of Humpty Dumpty projected onto the wall), I was most transfixed by the downstairs projection room.

There, seven different projected videos played concurrently, all overlayed with the same, eerily pulsing soundscape. Like upstairs, each video seemed to also present a different, twisted reimagining of classic fairytales, fables, and other Western stories.

Initially, after seeing similar characters reappear in each video, I found myself looking for some sort of linear or logical connecting thread that could explain the relationships between the different works: what happened first? who is that character? and is what they are doing in this clip consistent with what they are doing in that clip? Without a clear answer, I couldn’t help but feel immersed but a bit unmoored, watching all these moments unfold at once in this robust world of wickedness, unstuck in time.

Luckily, an art book in the gallery lobby offered some helpful, albeit unintentional, advice on how to take in a Djurberg-Berg work. In an interview with Louise Neri (a curator of a past exhibition of theirs), Djurberg expressed that as an artist “Losing yourself is actually just letting go of the part of the brain that is always controlling” (The Secret Garden, Perimeter Editions, Australian Center for Contemporary Art, 49).

While this quote was about their creative process, I think it applies for their audience members, as well. It can be tempting, especially in pieces that resemble classic stories, to expect certain narrative structures and clear-cut linear storytelling — to scan these concurrently playing videos with consistent characters and to try to make one big master narrative that connects them all. But, as far as I could ultimately tell, that’s not possible in Only for the Wicked. And for good reason.

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For this piece of immersive art, losing yourself isn’t just a suspension of disbelief. It isn’t just a feeling of being transported elsewhere. It’s a shedding of expected and self-imposed logics and narrative structures. Only then, can the Only for the Wicked audience member successfully lose themselves in this fascinating labyrinthine world of grotesque wickedness happening at and around them.

— Alec Zbornak, NYC Correspondent

Watchers- 36 Inch Penguin
£10, Online; Ongoing

My friend and I sit on her sofa, coffees in hand. “Are they really going to watch us through our cameras?” she asks. “At 11 am on a Saturday?” I shrug. “You know someone is sitting at their desk hoping we log on.”

This is Watchers, an immersive experience for two people. These two participants are in training for Vita Strategic Services, an exclusive Private Healthcare, Security and Fire Prevention Service Provider. An AI will monitor a situation and a Watcher will sit by to offer a suggestion should the AI need help. The training is going to rerun a recording of an incident, to get a better idea of how you would respond to an emergency. Three suggestions will be made of how to handle the danger. Show to your device’s camera with your fingers what number you choose and learn what choice was actually made. Just remember, you work for the VSS. You care for the interests of the clients above all.

For our experience the two of us sit looking at each other, each on our own phone with headphones. Slowly one of us raises a finger for choice one, while the other raises three. Are we being presented with the same choices? Why is she not more upset about a cat in distress?

Considering the nature of the world at present, when it comes to healthcare and deciding who is “worth saving”, this is a very prescient piece. I have friends who have done work doing roleplay for these exact situations. The insurance brokers needed to be retaught empathy, baffled by the fact that their clients “felt they didn’t care for them”. They didn’t. Why was that so strange?

There is a possibility for this show to be experienced by participants in other spaces, observing each other through a webcam for example. But there is something special about being together and able to react to each other.

The story is interesting and the voice acting and sound is very immersive, even on cheap headphones.

“That sounds like a great idea for a date” other friends suggest later when I explain my morning. I nod.

“I often like to perform moral tests on my dates” I agree. “It’s up there with running the Voight-Kampff test to look for replicants.”

Costing £10 for two tickets for this 25 minute experience: this is great fun and an affordable experience.

— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

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