Receiving and connecting beyond medium
By Scott Stein
In the middle of the pandemic circa 2021, alone at home and away from physical spaces and people, I spent a few months with a group of people I’d never met in person, gathering in VR to be together, face each other, perform with one another. We were miles away, yet learning to be connected with each other in subtle ways. Also, to learn how we communicated and performed in these new bodies. In VR, in an app called AltSpace VR, we were expressive cartoons. Our eyes weren’t our own. Our hands weren’t our own. And yet, we made them work as our own.
The workshops were led by Jeff Wirth, someone I’d talked to before (but never in person), at a time when I was already disconnected from others and trying to find myself again. VR, however is familiar to me. I write about new immersive technologies as an editor at CNET. I also find myself attending many immersive shows and experiences in physical locations, everywhere
from New York to California to London, or Las Vegas. Theme parks, places like Meow Wolf, shows like Sleep No More, or intricate site-specific art pieces.
But my sessions with Jeff Wirth and our team were not about immersing. They were about interacting. Not just with each other, but for others who might be watching us. What Jeff calls “spect-actors,” a term I hadn’t really digested until I thought about how passive I can be in immersive experiences, or even invisible.
Immersive entertainment and experiences are everywhere, but the art of being truly interactive? That feels like a toolset we still only have the most embryonic sense of.
I think about a world that’s already around us: not just of immersive technologies, but of tools that demand a ton from us. Social media, a wave of emergent AI, data-collecting ecosystems that mix algorithms and agency in strange and often unsettling ways. We can feel in charge of ourselves, and then suddenly adrift. Every day I wonder how much I’m truly interacting with my virtual communities, and how much I feel a loss of agency at the hands of intermediary technologies that distance us again.
“Interactive” has a long history, one I’m not even fully aware of. Video games have been interactive for decades. Theater has been interactive, in greater or lesser ways, for thousands of years. We interact with everything in our lives. My life, well, it’s interactive.
But to create interactively? To immerse myself in something and also feel like it’s interactive, and I’m interacting with it? To learn to be and become in new worlds and feel both like we’re doing and listening? I find this unbelievably challenging. I used to perform improv years ago, and the hardest part to me wasn’t being spontaneous. It was being spontaneous while also
listening and receiving.
Jeff Wirth’s book Interactive Acting, which has been a doorway for me, reminded me of some essentials that my deep curiosity into strange new tech worlds has often overlooked. Kindness empathy, responsibility. A lot of Jeff’s beliefs, and our VR improv sessions, were often about receiving and connecting, and making something that welcomes as opposed to alienates.
To me, interactive is about understanding. And building. What I love about the idea of communities focused on interactive performance, interactive art, interactive experiences, is that it acknowledges a part I’d been forgetting in my testing of tech and games and many apps. It’s about ourselves as much as it is about the experience. It’s about both, together. A bridge.
I think we’re just beginning down some new roads, but the pathways have been laid with work in the past. And there are plenty of artists already working on new ideas now. I think about Odyssey Works, or Third Rail Theater Projects. Game designers like Erik Zimmerman, or philosophers like David Bohm in his book On Dialogue, or Margaret Kerrison’s books about
design, or Curtis Hickman’s explorations in The Void. I hope this becomes a place of conversation where we all can learn about what’s here and what’s coming: you, and me, and everyone else.
I’m still learning, but we’ll all have to learn. And the future of an increasingly immersive, multilayered world with its own levels of distractions will depend on it. Knowing what being truly interactive is, and what our roles in interactivity can be – studying it with artists, thinkers, participants – this will make that future world better. A world we’re already in, and need to know
how to operate in better
About the Author:
Scott Stein started with CNET reviewing laptops in 2009. Now Scott explores wearable tech,VR/AR, tablets, gaming and future/emerging trends in our changing world. Other obsessions include magic, immersive theater, puzzles, board games, cooking, improv and the New York Jets. Scott’s background includes an MFA in theater which he applies to thinking about immersive experiences of the future.