Unity game engine, VR headset, wearable heart rate sensor.
Being, Becoming is a networked art piece created in collaboration with Xiyao (Miranda) Shou that explores themes of interbeing and (dis)embodiment within virtual space. The work seeks to interrogate the systemically encouraged but misguided delineations of self-as-agent and environment-as-stage by presenting an interactive virtual reality experience in which each simultaneously exists as the other—a borderless and interdependent entity experiencing itself in the act of co-creation. While the aesthetics of the virtual experience are appealing, it is this expanded relational linkage that serves as the keystone of the piece and (ideally) lingers as a point of reflection once participants reconvene with the tangible world.
Being, Becoming is a Unity-based Meta Quest VR experience with a wearable heart rate sensor connected to an ESP32 microcontroller. Within the VR world, participants find themselves situated in a hilltop ruin on a small isolated island. To either side, standing partially submerged off the shore, are two colossal marble hands, living sculptures that uncannily mirror the participant’s real-world finger positions (an unsanctioned implementation of the Quest headset’s built-in hand tracking feature). Suspended in the sky above is an enormous orb of fluid that ‘beats’ in synchrony with the heart of the participant through pulse sensor data transmitted via MQTT. What was once within is depicted without; what was once physically attached is now ecologically, ‘networkedly’ so.
By way of both the Quest’s front-facing hand tracking sensors and the positioning of the beating orb, participants are gently guided into a pose akin to religious ecstasy: gazing upward, palms outstretched, at a reflection of one’s own aliveness and its unshakable ties to the composition of the land.
Inspired by works the likes of Raphael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room (2006), Being, Becoming is a reflection upon the ecological, fractally-repeating networks within which each of us is an active agent—this activeness itself reflected in how its titular words might be read as both nouns and verbs.1 The work invites its observer to walk away with a newfound sense of radical relationality, a recognition of one’s individual (though not always palpable) influence upon the broader networks with which one is entangled.
- This idea of using the word “becoming” as a noun is inspired by a speaking engagement by philosopher Bayo Akomolafe in which he remarked upon the peculiarity of referring to ourselves as “human beings” rather than “human becomings,” considering our ever-evolving nature. ↩︎
