You would’ve heard of deja vu: the surreal sensation of having previously experienced the present, or something like it. You may not have heard of jamais vu: the sensation of being unfamiliar with things that should be recognisable. Like your house, your desk, even your hands.
Guy Pearce’s protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller Memento, who can’t create new memories, has a version of it. But the kind I got a taste of, in a fascinating “world-first mixed reality” experience featured at this year’s Melbourne international film festival, is jamais vu of a very different variety.
Turbulence: Jamais Vu is a VR experience that aspires to simulate a chronic vestibular condition experienced by one of its creators, Ben Joseph Andrews. The 32-year-old was first diagnosed with the condition, which causes severe migraines and dizziness, in his mid-20s. As vestibular migraines “are not well known in the migraine family”, the path to diagnosis was long and fraught, he says.
“With this condition, there’s no such thing as stillness,” he says. “Even the pulse in your body has movement. Even just closing my eyes is another intense form of movement. Things that I hear, things that I smell – my body interprets them as movement. This creates a lot of conflict. It’s quite a porous connection to the world. I can feel individual blades of grass moving in the wind. Part of [Turbulence: Jamais Vu] involves looking at what that enables and offers. It’s an attempt to create a language to illustrate something that’s very tough to describe.”
Andrews’ co-creator on the project, Emma Roberts, brought the VR experience – which is playing at Acmi in Melbourne until 15 August – into my home. When I put on the VR headset, the environment around me changes in surreal ways. I’m in the same room but I can no longer see in colour: everything is now charcoal monochrome. Using a headset attached to a depth camera, which feeds into what you see, they have made the familiar unfamiliar. They have made jamais vu.
The outline of objects look blurry and weird. The space before me has been inverted, so when I move my right hand I see it move on my left. My sensory system has been thrown out of whack. At one point, Andrews asks me via voice-over to retrieve some aspirin from a container and place the pills in a mug. This seemingly simple request is immensely difficult and requires intense concentration.
The highly experiential and intimate nature of virtual and mixed realities allow creators to explore subjects such as this like no other art forms. We’re not reading about vestibular migraines or listening to interviews: we’re immersed in a simulation that fundamentally changes our sensory information. This is why VR and MR (shorthand for “mixed reality”) have a history in exploring conditions including autism, gender dysphoria, panic disorders and many more.
Andrews and Roberts say their work was influenced by art that challenges ideas around accessibility and normativity, such as those created by artist Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, and composer JJJJJerome Ellis, who has a stutter.
“There’s something really interesting about deconstructing media through a disabled lens, to question the accepted normativity of how technology is widely used,” says Roberts. “There’s a very rich history of disabled artists doing that through different media.
“VR is trying to mediate our way of making sense of the world,” Andrews adds. “We are really interested in that, including what can be opened up in exploring the seams of perception. A lot of the time in immersive technologies, like VR, it’s a strive to be seamless. But disability, in some senses, is a seamed experience of the world.”
Andrews and Roberts are early pioneers of these still-emerging technologies, exploring the possibilities of VR and MR in ways not dissimilar, broadly speaking, to the early pioneers of cinema, who played with the form and content of motion pictures. Their previous work includes Gondwana, a 48-hour experience simulating the passing of time in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest. The more focused and personal Turbulence: Jamais Vu is the first chapter in an intended series that will continue to explore Andrews’ chronic vestibular condition.
“The through-line that runs through a lot of our work is an interest in awe, wonder and reconnection to the world around us and ourselves,” says Roberts. “Previously we’ve done that on very large scales – the immensity of rainforests, the vastness of space. But this work turns that curiosity and wonder inwards, looking at our own experiences, Ben’s own experiences, as deserving of wonder.”
Turbulence: Jamais Vu is available to experience at Acmi, Melbourne, as part of the Melbourne international film festival, until 15 August. Ben Joseph Andrews will be speaking at the free Miff event Power Shift: The Future of Seeing on 15 August
