#1818: 「Being in You」— 関係性の儀式を通して死を描く、身体的で実験的な演劇体験

The Voices of VR Podcast. which is a really amazing kind of experimental theater piece that is around death. And rather than you sort of stepping in the shoes of someone else, you actually have someone who was kind of volumetrically in performance captured, and they're actually passed, and they're stepping into your shoes. And so there's a lot of this discussion around the threshold and boundaries between the living and the dead, and also kind of your embodied experience, and as well as these kind of realms of imagination. And so it's a really beautiful and poetic piece that is using different techniques of experimental theater, but also just kind of finding really amazing ways of telling the story.

So this is an Earth-air piece, so Earth being like it's very embodied. You are having mixed reality, and it's also pulling in the physical reality around you and asking you to kind of pay attention to things that are happening, all the bustling and rustling around and just noticing that it's not a contained area. There's lots of potential distractions that are happening. But also this kind of more theatrically staged type of experience where this kind of tradition of experimental theater, introducing ways of telling stories through your own embodiment and kind of all the affordances of mixed reality and pulling in CGI and other things as well. And the air element is a lot of this kind of abstractions, experimental, not knowing quite what to expect, but also asking you to really dive into your imagination. So much of the onboarding of this piece, which is so brilliant in terms of the way that they're asking you to sort of like pay attention to like entering in this kind of magic circle. As you enter into the circle, then you cast the spell into opening up your mind to this kind of realm of creative imagination and playing with the kind of boundary, the chaperone that's around you.

And as you put your hand in and out of that boundary, it's really asking you to think about the physical reality that you're in here, but also kind of putting your hand out into this more imaginal realm. And because of the stories around death, and it's also talking about thresholds and boundaries and crossing those boundaries and having a distributed asynchronous conversation with somebody who's passed by looking at their captured embodied movements. And you're actually allowing them to sort of be inside of you as you go through some of these same movements. It feels like a bit of a ritual of connection and also a meditation on imagination and relationality and the degrees of which the physical and the non-physical are related. It's a really beautiful piece and really quite evocative and moving at the end of the day. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind Being and You happened on Monday, September 7th, 2026 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hi, I'm Michał Stankiewicz, and I'm director, producer, developer, designer, sound designer of this project,

and also taking care of leather and cables. Yeah, so my name is Jakub. I'm the developer of the project, also designer, also technical team. Yeah, maybe that's all. And I'm Ashlaiza Smith. I'm, what am I doing? creative producing co-writer co-dramaturd. Great and maybe could each give a bit more context as to your background and what kind of design disciplines you're bringing into the into your practice and a bit of your journey into the space. So my background is journalism and post-dramatic theater and it's this kind of experimental theater and I think I'm bringing this to XR, but I strongly feel that I was working for immersive experiences, or just experiences from last 15 years that I was making this in the theater or performative spaces, so I just feel that

I changed a car, but it's still shaping and, you know, designing and creating experiences. Okay, so my background is film and theater production. I was working for a while as a producer in Warsaw for a few years, but suddenly I decided that I want to learn programming and 3D softwares on my own, so I locked up myself in the basement, and I was learning it for a few years doing small projects, and yeah, briefly, this is my journey. And I'm all similarly coming from a mixed bag, wearing many different hats, but always been an artist who's playing with technology, but a dancer and so coming always with an embodied practice and then writing across many different genres and I guess you could say really interested in the space where film cinema and games kind of blur awesome well we're going to be talking about being in you having a premiere here at Venice Immersive 2026 and so maybe you could just describe a bit of what is being in you

what's the story or experience that you want to provide yeah we are so happy that we are here and you know this walk, this trip started six years ago and we were on the Binala College four years ago so it's really nice to come back here and I feel that this project is really Venice immersive child and I feel here really really really like this is the proper place to make premiere and the project is in very short very briefly you know, usually we are stepping into someone's shoes to see by this person's eyes but we reversed this direction and in our project Katzheny is the protagonist the character she gently asks you if she can look at this world by your eyes or feel by your body you know, also appear in your imagination this is like the core of the project you know Yeah, maybe you could just give a bit more context for how this project came about.

Yeah, so it's Kechenis, our collaborator. I would say she's our collaborator more than this project is about her. We met four years ago, two years before she passed, and it was beautiful work together. And Kechenis was a geologist and musician. she was art pop singer but you know we became friends and she was very into study ocean she loved being next to the ocean yeah I'm wondering how each of you sort of heard about this project what drew you to it and things that kind of attracted you to being able to tell the story actually I joined the team 7 months ago so I met Michał at the theater during some other projects and we spoke about it briefly and like from the beginning I knew that this is like the project of my life for that

time so it will be and like for me the most important part of working on it, designing and developing some mechanics the goal was to create it as most inclusive as it can be, like the mechanics of hand-tracking, being there in the rooms like this is the experience which everybody which are not involved in VRXR industry they can just put the headset on and they can experience that so from the beginning I knew that it can be such a experience and for me it is like that. I came on to the experience I met Michal over three years ago at it was ArtVR ZipScene conference in Prague and Michal was screening a film, Wish You Were Here, and I was giving a talk at Zip Scene, and actually Michal pitched this project, or kind of told me about this project then, and I absolutely was just like, this sounds awesome. So I came on as a kind of producer pretty immediately,

and we were very lucky that within a few months, because I was based in the U.S., we were able to travel. Michal came over to the U.S., and we traveled, and we met Kat, and recorded with Kat and then then I think not too long after that we did the European Creators Lab which was in Luxembourg and really helped us to kind of get new energy. Miha had been working on the project for many years before but it was a new kind of fuel and fire that that lab helped provide and then what happened after that oh and then you know traveling just a lot of interesting synchronicities to the Topsail Island connection with Kat and my family actually had a house in Topsail Island, where I had spent a lot of time in Topsail Island, so getting to go there and film. But yeah, I was always, I just, for me, Michal's like conceptual framing that really reverses the idea of you stepping into someone's shoes and this kind of idea that we have of VR and XR

and being able to flip that frame, you inviting her to step into yours and seeing through your eyes, I thought was just such a brilliant idea, and I wanted to be a part of it. I want to add that we are an indie project and we have a small team, but I can tell you that everybody in the team fell in love to this project, and it was the most important for me when I was asking somebody to come to the team. the most important for me was if this person also will love the project because everybody here they just felt in their love in this project yeah it's a really powerful piece I really quite enjoyed it there's a number of different phases through the piece and I really was touched at the end moved to tears and also the beginning is also quite elegant in the sense that it's not always easy to start an experience and I feel like you were able to really have people step into a bit of a magic circle and play with the boundary with your hand in a way that

was making clear around the interface between the physical reality and the speculative imaginative realm and you're kind of playing with this realms of imagination and it's a piece that really invites you to contemplate but also to really dive into that speculative imagination and so just curious to hear a bit about starting the piece and having a good way of making it clear that this is kind of a liminal piece that's going to be going in between two different realms. Yeah, so when I first time started thinking about making some XR projects, some XR piece, and I put on my headset, it was, I'm not sure if it was Quest 1 or Quest 2, I don't remember. For me, the first interesting thing that was like so cool was the Guardian Line. And this was my starting point for, you know, doing... Explain what is Guardian Line. So, Guardian Line, this is the line that you are, you know, drawing

that if you will cross this line, the cameras in the headset, they will turn on and you will see your reality. And this is, you know, the quest putting this kind of safe nest that you will not hit to the, you know, wall. It's like the guardian, the chaperone, you can't go past the line. Yeah, yeah, the guardian line, yeah, guardian line, also this wall appearing and that you see your space. So this was my first, you know, I was so obsessed about this guardian line, obsessed about this liminality, about this, okay, I'm in the headset, but I can see the world and I can, you know, play with this, you know. So I was very quickly trying to any other experiences with your hand, with your avatar hand. And I always like stepping on the border with this line and moving back and forth and seeing how it transforming from my hand to avatar hand and opposite direction opposite direction So I was obsessed and it was a starting point for thinking about any liminality

any layers, you know, it covers each other. And also, you know, I'm from this post-traumatic theater and we love and I love, you know, like playing with the technology itself. I felt that, you know, headsets and this all immersive thing around it's such a great potential to play with it, you know that we have this headset on the head one of the first sentences that I was like, show up in my brain was like, you know, telling the viewer, the participator you are in the headset, this headset doesn't, you know, it's quite heavy it looks like elephant and so on and so on And we have recorded these sentences, by the way, with Kat, but, you know, didn't finally, you know, drop in the script. But I was obsessed, you know, and I feel like I would like to explore this more and more. The other thing just coming from game mechanics and game design, the magic circle is that space, you know,

where you literally, we've done it since we were kids, where you're kind of drawing, The guardian line becomes a double for literally the magic circle that we draw around the same kind of way we draw around a sandbox as a kid or don't step outside of this or you'll fall into lava. But, you know, I feel like in that moment and being in you, it is an onboarding for the audience to actually remember just the power of imagination. It's like slowly remembering, draw a circle in this space. we can imagine anything right now because that becomes one of the strongest technologies in the whole piece for me also it was when I was working on it I was always thinking about this like the onboarding part is some kind of the ritual of the change so this was also what we had in mind when we were creating those walls and also the change of your hands so it was ritual yeah Yeah, I remember having an interview with Francesca Panetta.

She has a piece called Six by Nine around solitary confinement. And she was saying that they originally had done interviews with people who had been in solitary confinement, and they were talking about their own experiences. And she said she found that that didn't really work because it was much better to use a second person perspective and say you were going to be in this situation, you are going to feel this, you will notice the cracks in the line. And I feel like there was like a moment in this piece where there's like look around, notice people. It's open. You don't have a closed space. And then there's people wandering by and maybe they'll be waiting. And not every one of those was happening right in that moment. But it had just previously happened that I had noticed it and clocked it. And so it was just like a little bit offset. And so a little bit more of like I noticed it before I was asked to notice it. But it was just a really, when those kind of align close enough, and create these real magical moments of like, yeah, I'm in a festival context. I don't have my full, complete attention. There's some distractions around me,

but it was kind of acknowledging the messiness of that in a way that actually made it feel like I was more present at that point. So just curious to hear some about that technique of trying to acknowledge the reality of the context. Yeah, I really love using, I call this immersion technique, that acknowledging people what is happening out of the experience it's actually helping you to be more inexperienced I don't know how it works but and I have some thoughts why it works but I can tell that probably it works from honestly, from being honest and maybe you remember my previous piece, Wish You Were Here that had a few research studies about how I telling people in this piece that they are not there. You know, it's like just 360 documentary and many people, they told me that it helped them to tell them to feel more there

because I might trust a recipe that, you know, we are not faking you. You know, you are sitting on your chair and you just, you know, see this in the headset, you know, this world. So, yeah, it's a lot of techniques behind this project And I like to say that this project is a very technological project, actually. But the most important technology is your human body. It's your body. The imagination is technology. Your eyes are technology. Your ears are technology. Your senses are technology. And I think that sometimes in XR spaces, we are so overwhelmed by the digital technology that our human technology, it's way too much high debt. So in that piece, we were trying to give space for your viewer technology that you have because you are the most important and the most high-quality interface in the world, you know, as a human, you know. So it was like a lot of decisions around this.

I like to say about this, you know, DiscoSteen, that we made this costume very overwhelmed, some strobe lights, some visions, not visions, blah, blah, without everything. We just left this very minimalistic strobe lights and gestures because we realized that with this overwhelming, we are losing the connection with what is the most important in this moment, the connection that we already built with the digital representation of CAD. you know and it was like yeah it was i can a lot of say about you know techniques behind this it was like the most difficult project in my life i can tell you i have you know 15 years experience with making experiences and i thought that i'm good in this but it was so challenging this medium it was like so many things didn't work didn't work didn't work even i called to my mom and i said mom it doesn't work you know i don't know what to do and my mom said keep going keep going and And, you know, it's like, you know, one week before submission,

finally something started to work. And it gave us, you know, big flame to power and to, you know, keep going. But it was very challenging. And I can't really write a book about, you know, decisions and strugglings and any other things around making this piece. Yeah, well, I think it's probably worth giving a bit more context to Kat. Maybe just give a bit context of, like, your introduction to Kat, Kat, her situation, she knew she was dying and had a limited time on this earth, and you undergo this project to capture a sort of part of her essence or things that she's going to be able to be with us. And so she's the one who's being in us in a way, but we're also being able to connect to her and her spirit. So, yeah, just maybe give a bit more context to Kat, who she was, how you got connected, and the larger context for how this project came about. Yeah, so Kat, she was posting about her fight with the cancer. She was posting on TikTok and she was like saying aloud about her path.

And, you know, it showed up to my coordinator in that moment and we decided to reach out to her and I decided to give her this gift and, you know, work together on this Infinity Machine. In that moment, I was calling this project, this is just, not just, but this is an infinity machine, you know, a machine that will give you the chance to cross border with the cross line with the death. So, Kat was very into this project. She very quickly bought a headset to see this technology, to see what's going on. And we started prototyping. We started doing a lot of, you know, rehearsals, improvisations. and we had such a great big luck because she was a musician with her music studio so we could very easily record her voice on high quality and she was very very very curious live and world person and she told me that

when she was studying she asked somebody what she will do after she will take this section of study if somebody told her If you take this, you will be sitting in the house, in the libraries, and you will read a lot of books and researching. But if you will choose this, you will spend a lot of time out of the home, like in the nature. So she decided to make this the second path, because she got in love to the nature, to the wildlife, to the ocean. because every year from her childhood they were going to Tapsule Island, to the same spot, to the same place, to the same house, and she got in love to this nature. That's why we are bringing Tapsule Island. That's why she said during the last interview, two weeks she passed, that I asked, where do you want to back? Which place you will miss the most? and she set up her island because it brought me so many joys,

so many, you know, brought me also to be a geologist. So she was a geologist, musician. She was a beautiful existence that was curious. And she also, I asked why you wanted to make this project. She said that, of course, she wanted to leave her memory, her parts to her kid. But also she was very curious with cutting-edge technology. She was like, she was bankrupt, you know. So it was great collaboration. We didn't have money at the beginning, unfortunately, so I couldn't fly to and meet in person at the beginning. So we were, we had a bunch of recording on Zoom meetings. We recorded everything. But in some moment she said, Michal, if you want to meet me in person and make some, you know, something, it has to be now. and in that moment I met Ash and Ash was from US and it was such a beautiful coincidence and you know I just flew to US

and another coincidence was with this upsell island, this North Carolina it's so many coincidences happened and we had chance to met her in person two weeks before she passed we had that camera so we could record and capture her gestures that they show up in the project and And, yeah, yeah. I think the other spirit in this piece that you see kind of aesthetically and visually is because a lot of both, as Michal said, the scripting and the writing was done with Kat and iterated with Kat and recorded, but also she was doing her own scans with her phone, you know, learning how to scan the bedroom and scanning. And some of those come across, especially now, very low poly, but kind of intentionally leaving that in. And I think, I don't know, I guess I just want to note that there was a very independent artist kind of spirit of how everyone was sharing files back and forth across countries

and recording things on Zoom interviews and sending files back and forth. And so, you know, I think there were intentionally a lot of this was left in to the piece where she might say in her recording, oh, look at the five sunflowers. And there's actually three, but sorry, yes, eight. But anyway, but the intention to leave these kind of these moments in as well, and also to not like super make the scans high fidelity, because they kind of speak to also the way memory works and that there's always many versions of memory, et cetera. It was very, it was decision to, because we were thinking, oh, maybe we can make a better scan. Maybe we can use, you know, Gaussian splat, maybe, you know, this and this and this. hire someone. Yeah, hire there, blah, blah. Just make it as a 3D model. Yeah, also we were thinking to make a 3D model, but it didn't work and we very quickly decided, okay, let's make this very

originally. You cannot have bigger value than scan you know cat journeys and I don know if you figure out but in this childhood room she is in the mirror during you know this scanning you know so you can see her with the iPhone, you know, in the mirror and also in the music scene you can see in the middle, you know, her slipper, you know, also, you know, during making scan. Actually, the flip-flop, the slipper, yeah. Yeah, we didn't know that it's there actually. But I think it's a good... Yeah, and you know, so she made music, not all, but you hear a lot of her music, you see her scan, and also we were building script with Kat and also her spirit was with us and when I had really bad time with the project

I was like asking her Kat what to do, what to do, what to do and also I was working almost all the time I was working with the T-shirt Tapsile Island Skate Ring where she used to go, the ringing to skate But, for example, another sign was like when we went first time to Tapsal Island and we drove there very late and, you know, we had the first day, a short day, and we had to wake up at 6am. We woke up, we jumped to the car to, you know, drink some coffee. The first person that we met was the guy on the bike with the basket, and in the basket the guy had cat and with the information watch out cat on the board and it was like that's it yeah cat is with us watch out nice yeah bumper sticker that a an actual feline cat was on board but but but cat on board is there yeah nice and so well and this piece it feels a bit like a duet

of sorts we're guided to make different movements throughout and also just a lot of like guided meditation of sorts or just at least inviting us to kind of get a sense that we're on a beach and kind of imagine and step by step projecting our body into these different situations but we're also seeing hands that were asked to kind of be inside of our body which i thought was i've never had that envy i was really quite surreal because my hands were a little bit bigger than hers and so you know as i was moving my hands and it just felt like i had like a hand within a hand so yeah it was just like really quite provocative so maybe talk about this mechanic of literally being in you inviting her inside of me and also just the context under which that you are setting up in order to make sense of this narratively for because usually you don't want things inside of you in that way but here you're kind of doing this reverse empathy machine where there she's coming inside of me um i just can start from this that i was waiting for this moment with this hand

movement for so many years and when i first time saw this mechanic that cuba you know built it was the first light in the tunnel, I don't know if you have this in English, you know, that, oh my gosh, I was waiting for so many years because the idea is to and this part of experience it's literally the core of idea of this project, you know, that you can follow her, you know gestures and, you know, like taking her gesture and continue her gesture after she stopped continuing this gesture it's very minimalistic very very like minimal but for me it was like very incredible you know like moment working on this piece and yeah I don't know I don't have anything to say yeah you know I think the piece is a very

poetic piece in a way that is asking us to be in our body but also to imagine and so it's like a embodied imagination and so I feel like there's a way in which that inviting a body inside of us. I'm connected with that, but because actually we were checking also something which was not more powerful, we were checking also the whole body of cat inside us, but in the moment we knew that it didn't too much. Hand as a representation of her, it's also, like you said, it's something you didn't see before, but Michal decided that I think it was a good decision that this is subtle and it's like connecting us with her but for example because she had tattoos and with the body it was super powerful to see those tattoos on your hands but we thought that the line was crossed like with the whole body so yeah I think that it was a good decision to don't cross that line because it was also interesting but it was too much you know to you know to close the time and i mean i can just speak to that moment for me

i love when you can no longer tell if she's leading you or you're leading her and i think that that is that beautiful blurring that moment where you're like wait am i copying her gesture or is she copying mine and that blurring between again the layers of reality or realms i think is very nice yeah it's the core of this project because you as XR user, player viewer, participator you have a body and you are in this place so for me it was like the core the most interesting situation oh my gosh, so we have someone who is here and Kat can ask this person to do some small movement and by this movement appear here, it's such a beautiful poetry, you know, like closing and opening eyes, like, you know, this kind of small, small movement that I fell in love in this, you know, idea,

and this was this moment that I thought that it's perfect for XR, you know, because viewer has body. And also I can add that we have a lot of prototypes of, like, following her gestures, but in the visual way, like for example following some lines or particles or even colors of our hands were changing if you were correct or not correct but everything it was crossing the line of being subtle because we had a one rule and you can study this rule like how is it called in English the rule? yeah so we had the rule that we will the rule was radical gentleness so we We have way more things, way more everything, but the other rule was make radical gentleness. So we have a lot of different versions how you can interact with the hands and also the hands movement. Sometimes they were more and more and also they are interact with us by changing colors, blah, blah.

But it didn't work well, you know. So I was like, I put to my door, to my lap, the paper with two words, radical and gentleness. You know, that every time I will open the door, don't forget about this, you know, radical gentleness. Make this project radically gentleness. I can probably add something on that, which is just like, I think you kind of just said this, but this project is very metaphysical, right? I mean, it is about Kat, and Kat is a collaborator. But as you said, it's a duet between the living and the no longer living. And this radical gentleness or in these moments that are very slowed down and where the decision was made to take away the complicatedness. And in that, the peace is allowed to breathe. And it's in these pauses, it's in the slowness, it's in the radical gentleness that I actually think what you're speaking of with the human body, we're able to actually slow down enough to actually sense ourselves and to like reattune.

That's the goal or hope to bring our own bodies back into the experience. and having a conversation yesterday about this kind of move in documentary and the difference between storytelling versus a kind of story living and what that means. And I think that that slowness or that minimalness lets us all show up in different ways. I just want to add that during the process of working on this, shaping this project, that people from the game industry, they're saying that XR, this is gamification. you need to put a lot of interactivity press button or whatever this is like gaming and with our gestures that follow her gestures we had this kind of test that you could ok I'm following her hands so the hands it's green so I'm done this task and it was for us surprised that it wasn't worked because this is really not game it's nothing about gamification

because in that moment you are focusing if you are doing this well, if you are, you know, making these tasks, and it's nothing about that. It actually distracts you from being present and making your decision. It wasn't nothing about being pressed this, you know, with this. Yeah, so just want to add this, yeah. Yeah, and as I come to Venice, I see all the different work and I try to make sense of the center of gravity of elemental balance. And I had said that being in you was earth and air, earth being the body and air being the abstractions. And what's interesting is that most earth projects have some sort of environmental design, but being in mixed reality means that you're using the physical reality that's around you in a very minimalist way, in a way that it's mostly that you're in your body and then you have this poetic abstraction that you're able to be guided through this guided meditation, but also most of the virtual overlay are these kind of minimalist abstractions that are slight gestures of either the hands or,

you know, it's all kind of building up to me for when you, I can't remember if it blacks out or if it's just the hands overlaid and I'm still in mixed reality, but I just remember the music coming on and me being like transported in a way. because I remember being in her room and I saw that she had a poster of herself. So I knew she was a musician. And so when the music started, I was like, okay, this is her music. And then I just felt deeply connected to her at that moment and just was like moving with her. And I just found it so moving to feel connected to her and her spirit in that way. And like you said, it's very metaphysical in the sense of just imagining her consciousness still existing on some extent and being connected to her. But yeah, just the way that you're taking this real abstract, minimalist, poetic, embodied abstraction, tapping into the creative imagination to take it on a guided tour, but through the audio narration, letting your mind go there. And if you look at it, contrast it to some of the vast worlds that people are building, this is like the opposite of that.

It's like almost no world because the world is just mixed reality, mostly with maybe some overlay of the ocean. But it's mostly the power of the body and what you can do just with the body, tapping into the creative imagination without having to worry about doing all sorts of elaborate world building. So, yeah, just curious if you have any thoughts. yeah for me the viewer body is the most important medium that I'm working I was like in the theater but now here this is the most important element viewer body with you know his or her technology you know imagination and so on but what I want to say that we like to say about this project that this project is not mixed reality project it's project that use mixed reality to achieve something, you know, to achieve this present or you know this liminalness and something like that And yeah I mean being here using these mixed reality layers trying to keep present human viewer was challenging many decisions

but I really love this moment blurring between these two spaces. And also, it was really hard decisions how to introduce, introduce Kat Janice, how to, you know, invite her to your imagination, to your knowledge, without just sitting or standing and watching, you know, just, you know, it was challenging, and yeah. I think back to listening to all the audio and recordings that Kat made in the rehearsals, and one of the lines, the line's not actually in it, because you just do it, but it was about Kat's wishes to invite people to dance to her music as like a kind of final gesture that and I think that that's the power of sometimes you don't need to it's I know we say that sometimes in writing show don't tell or but it's like you know what you just described about getting to the dance scene and kind of really getting there even though you haven't necessarily know all the bio

and background of Kat, but it actually worked for you to actually, you were invited and led along enough of a spine of a story that you got there and you went there and you were able to basically fulfill Kat's wishes, which is like to dance, keep people dancing, you know? But I don't think if we were to start it off with that, people would have just, you know, started dancing or even being told to dance. People aren't going to do that necessarily either, right? So. Yeah, it's like you really kind of invited in to mirror the movements. One thing that at the very beginning, there's a bit of a disclaimer that, you know, you had limited time with Cat and that the project was still developing. And so you had to do a little bit of voice synthesis to have things in the narration that you didn't have time to complete. And so I'm just curious if you could just comment and reflect on the need to sort of use some of these cutting-edge AI technologies in order to complete the narrative in a way that would be more or less, as far as you can tell, in the spirit of what she wanted,

but to have it more specific in terms of how the narration is unfolding. Yeah, thank you for this question. I was in shock that some people, because we put this information that we recorded her voice and we are using her voice, but we have some, you know, places that we use synthesizing, you know, her voice, but it was like really, like, it's mostly her recorded voice, you know. And we heard some feedback that some people, they thought that everything is generated. And I was like, and I got this feedback yesterday, and I was so sad because I spent hours, days. It was like horrible, you know, like a lot of work to bring her real recordings to the piece as much as possible, you know. I was fighting for every her words, every her sentence, you know. This piece definitely could be made way faster, way easier if I just, you know, drop everything, you know.

And also the artistic decision had to be shifted and changed to build this narration, you know, with these elements that we have. And also it was quite more difficult to keep going this small guiding narration because we have recordings, but in different days, different hair moods, different, you know, moments, some recordings they were just failed with some microphone failure. so it was challenging because we wanted to make this guiding through imagination, through her story through all this journey but we couldn't what we had because it was so different elements and formats and everything and I felt that it huge value but it was so difficult to make some compromise and put together so we were, maybe Ash will tell more about yeah i mean i think that yes i mean everything miha said yes 100 but i think it's

just really important to know that like because much of it was recorded on zoom rehearsals and in bedrooms and sometimes it wasn't her music all of the audio didn't match there were moments where it made the most sense and upon iteration and doing dramaturgy to actually use some speech synthesis but as miha said it's very minimal you know and i think that one thing that i'd like to add to this is uh we were talking to scarlet chem yesterday after this after we learned some of this people had thought that the whole thing was generated scarlet said something like we'll use this misunderstanding as an empowerment and so we started talking about how it's an interesting moment in time where we're living where people might just like we actually you know i i can vouch like not hundreds and hundreds of hours of work not just done with cat and recording but that people will assume that it's AI generated in this moment. I mean, this brings up these ideas of the digital afterlife and creative legacy and what happens to our data after we die.

But I just think that, yeah, it's the moment where kind of all grappling with and people have very strong ideas. So, yeah, in some ways, it's part of the liminality because it's not always necessarily like disclosed or made clear in the moment. I mean, some experiences, some movies and films have, like, started to put, like, AI or no AI. I think there's a piece that's called Ghost in the Machine where they're disclosing up in the upper right-hand corner every single scene, whether it's AR or not. I mean, that's sort of an extreme sort of critical AI thing. It can be a little bit distracting. And so, yeah, I feel like we're still in the early phases of disclosures and trying to figure out the best way to make that all work. But, yeah, I did have a little bit of, like, unsurety as to where those thresholds were just because it wasn't clearly delineated. But, yeah, I trusted that there was some, you know, the way it was phrased, I didn't read it as, like, this whole thing is, just more that it was a supplement. Also, you only had a certain amount of time with her, so it made sense of a certain degree of, like, you're not going to know exactly everything you need

in those two weeks, where the project's going to end up. Yeah, I want to add that maybe if it was a different project, you know, maybe I had different, you know, perspective on this and maybe we would be using more, but in this particular project, when we are talking about, you know, passing this wave of cat existence to another person, you know, capturing this light, capturing this, you know, voice, capturing this tension, this vibration, this, you know, energy from her voice, it had to be, you know, her real voice. Of course, you can say that, you know, voice trained by hours of her recording, it's also some kind of wave, echo of her existence, but for me it was the most important thing that we are capturing her feelings, her mood in that moment and in the crucial moments when she's asking you close your eyes, open your eyes, close your eyes, open your eyes, it had

to be her voice, you know. Nice, and And as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and this type of embodied storytelling with imagination and what it might be able to enable. Maybe you can start. Sure. Well, I'm going to actually start from what I think we captured in this piece, which is, I think the big question is, is when does it actually end? and you know I've had several conversations with people after they did the piece that you kind of have an invitation to take it as much with you as you want and I think that's in general with extended reality you know and I think that I'm really excited about the ways that we could use it in just this way I mean Kuba mentioned ritual we've talked about grief, we've talked about when someone who did our piece

talked about suicide prevention I think we are just tapping the surface of all the ways that it can extend our knowledge and also just make us more human and I hope that that's what our piece is doing, it's kind of pointing to our, the radical gentleness is pointing to the power of the humanness I would kind of repeat you and also say something obvious that this medium is an empathy machine. You can experience something which was crafted by artists and I believe that in the future it will be more and more natural. The experience will be more natural for our bodies and for our brains. And I believe that in the future the difference between virtual reality and virtual will be almost invisible. Yeah, somebody told us that in our piece you can easily forget that you are in XR.

And we thought that this is the best line that you can ever have, you know, that this is XR piece that you can forget that you are in XR piece, you know, because it was like so not overman, but, you know, technology and everything, so you could easily forget that actually you have this headset, actually you are in this experience. And it's funny that, paradoxically, we're actually bringing this, hey, you are in the headset, you are, you know, in this festival, and so on and so on. So I can, yeah, like taking and passing this what you said that, yeah, like this can be really extending our world. And I hope that it will extending and not taking but minimalizing our human worlds but extending this world. Yeah, well, I think it's a really powerful experience of being in you, really showing the power of embodiment in storytelling. but also inviting us to use our imagination. And, yeah, just a really powerful theme of having a duet with someone who has passed

and kind of meditating on that and inviting them into our body and just really embracing the liminality of all of reality. From a process philosophy perspective, the realms of the imagination and speculation of what's possible is actually just as real of what's physical. So from a process philosophy perspective, the realms of imagination and speculation or on the same level of reality, of actualized reality. And so I love the physical embodiment of this boundary and how similar they can be between the two realms. So, yeah, just a really powerful piece and really quite moving and very much enjoyed it. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help make it all down. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. We are all welcome. What was that? It was in public greetings, you know, and thank you so much. Okay, just wanted to make sure. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast.

And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free, make it public accessible for not only you but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.