My work bridges the physical and digital worlds, exploring the transition between real-life (IRL) and virtual reality (VR) events. These two domains are often seen as opposites — the virtual world as an alternative to the real one — a juxtaposition of the real and the non-real, the real and the fake, the real and the surreal, the physical and the digital, the real and the imaginary, colliding in complex ways.
The motivation for this project was to create an experience through which the audience can discover that actions and experiences in VR can have real consequences, as David Chalmers argues in Reality+ (2022). The physical and the virtual are thus connected, rather than distant.
Human cognition is shaped by collective experience; we approach new situations with expectations formed by past encounters.
From Virtual to Physical
Chalmers argues that experiences in VR can affect our emotions, relationships, and choices. I make this more tangible by materializing it through a physical computing sculpture that reacts to actions taken in the VR experience — creating immediate, real-world results from virtual actions.
From Physical to Virtual
We enter VR through head-mounted displays (HMDs) and interact with the world as avatars. We experience, explore, and undergo cognitive changes. In essence, we operate within the capacity of technology, entering a hybrid relationship between the human and the non-human. Our agency emerges from this bidirectional relationship — we shape technology, and technology shapes us in return (as described by Actor-Network Theory, ANT).
To capture this bidirectionality, I designed the interaction to be open-ended: the audience’s engagement with certain physical flowers directly influences the VR experience.