Project Declaration - Shared Dream
For my Social VR class, our final project will take up the remainder of the semester. Here are some of the ideas I’m presently workshopping:
Potential Project 1:
Title: On Taking Space, and Learning to Give It
Concepts: Gender and Conversation Dynamics, #arementalkingtoomuch.com
Elevator Pitch:
Studies show that men often dominate conversations: Talking more, interjecting more frequently, and often being significantly more unaware of the disparity. Through a silly, comical ‘chat room’ in Virtual Reality, we can hopefully bring awareness to this issue as users chat with each other in real-time.
Project Description
While there is a long-standing set of misconceptions about gender differences when it comes to communication, there is an increasing body of evidence that men take up a disproportionate amount of conversational space, in a variety of settings. In my personal life, this is something that my partner and I have been becoming increasingly aware of and working towards correcting, in my own unintentional - yet continuous and repeat offense - of dominating conversations. In thinking about our interactions in Social VR - I have little reason to believe this phenomenon disappears, and what better way to try to prevent the spread of this continued issue into a new medium than to use that medium as a way to stop it!
On the bright side, however, technology makes it profoundly easy to track, mutate, and display these (im)balances in conversation. By using the disparity of speech in mixed-gender social environments as the driver for a host of visual effects - graphics, avatar changes, HUD/GUI displays, and more, the hope is to make a light-hearted, engaging, and eye-opening experience for those unaware of this deeply problematic phenomenon.
Damage Meter from “World of Warcraft”.
Beyond simple displays of the percentage disparity, or time spent talking - like a group RPG damage meter - I seek to play with other things and see how they too affect the conversation. How can the dynamics of size, volume, quality, clarity, and more be tampered with to affect the conversation? One might find themselves becoming more aware of how often they speak if a glaring percentage counter grows as they trail on, or find themselves encouraged to speak as the rambler shrinks while their volume is lowered until they’re imperceptible and space has been made.
Potential Project 2:
Title: To Be Determined
Concepts: Blending of Time + Space, Chronotope, navigation between ‘worlds’
As for specifics, all I’ve got here is brainstorming:
I *really* like the experience of walking up to / into a 3D image sphere from the outside, and the experience of ‘stepping into’ a new environment. In the 12th Aetelier by the Casa degli Artisti, one piece provides a beautiful example of this concept (Artist unknown, please let me know if you’re aware). Teleported into one of two spaces, identical yet seemingly displaced by time, is such a unique experience and I just want to play with it perhaps even diving deeper into the technical possibilities of exploring this.
Would it be overlapping “spheres” that ‘crossfaded’ as your experience of time passed? A fully navigable space with invisible spheres / portals / and more? Giving you a time-escherian blend of perspectives as your view of the world is permanently shifting and blending yet entirely unique? I find myself captivated by the conversation of time b/t two spatially identical locations. This past weekend I discovered a beautiful example in painting: Sir Edwin Lanseer’s “Night (Two Stags Battling by Moonlight)” and “Morning (Two Dead Stags and a Fox)”. Something about the balance of simultaneity and disparity just *tugs* at me. It’s significantly less of a formed idea than the previous, but artistically it’s also just terrific fun to think about the possibilities. Let’s see what will happen!
Night
Morning
Potential Theoretical References:
https://sites.tufts.edu/mythritualsymbol2017/files/2017/08/Basso-Stalking-with-Stories-sm.pdf
^ Kieth Basso, describing Apache place-names, referencing Bakhtin’s creation of the chronotope:
“ points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse “