‘Tell me if you start to feel dizzy,” the operator says, clamping the virtual reality helmet to my head, as I sit on one of a row of little padded stools, somewhere in the carpeted intergalactic welcoming pavilion whose exterior is cunningly disguised as the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London. Soon the droney space music starts up. Transported to some far-flung region of the universe, we are successively enveloped in a gooey matrix of alien frogspawn, bombarded by cosmic dust and inseminated by writhing screen-saver tentacles. Distant suns glow like headlights in fog. I keep resisting going towards the light, just in case I’m having one of those near-death experiences described by those who have returned from the brink. I crouch and tilt and fling my head back in my VR goggles, not so much in awe as to get a better view, hoping to draw the looming aliens closer. Then I’m surrounded by a storm of stardust, like being pitched into a tumble dryer of polystyrene snow, whose mesmerising flow patterns and vortices suck me in. Removing the headset, it is a slight surprise to find there’s nothing to brush off my trousers, not even a speck of interstellar dandruff.
Somehow, the VR experience in French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Alienarium 5 is all a bit hokey. If I were a creature from a far galaxy I think I’d find the welcome at this earthside arrival portal a bit confusing. One such extraterrestrial being looms in the semi-dark of a sealed room, visible through little holes drilled in the wall. Maybe someone left the creature in there, like a mop in a cupboard, and forgot about it. Perhaps the space being is in quarantine or awaiting a visit from Priti Patel, dressed in a hazmat suit. The being is a sort of lump in a flowing skirt-like substance. From whatever angle you see it, the lump looks like the back of someone’s head.
