Text by Michael Connor
CURA.36 SS2021
FUTURITY
I am in a clear, shallow sea dotted with giant monoliths under a brilliant sun. When I point my hand, a ray of plasma shoots forward in a glowing arc, causing a disembodied forearm and hand to spring forth, tree-like, from the sea bed. I continue to point, and another hand-tree sprouts from its palm, and another. With each hand, I feel a vibration, a small kick. A structure of arms teeters perilously far above my head. I point again and again, growing more and more hands. The crystal surface of the shallow water I stand in becomes turbulent, and turns red. I begin to explore this submerged landscape, entering the interior of the monoliths and dipping below the surface of the water, where I meet strange aquatic creatures.
HanaHana, 2017-2019
HanaHana, 2017-2019
I have been told that in this world I may try to reach the sun, and this objective quickly takes hold in my mind, winning out over a more open-ended exploration. Shooting plasma with both hands, I extend two intertwining towers of arms far into the sky. I climb, and I build again, and climb again. I reach a swirling, high cloud—it looks like dust—and yet the sun still looks far overhead. Again and again, I build and climb, waving my arms to direct the growth of the towers. My neck grows stiff. I am hungry. I’m scared that if I make a slight misstep, I’ll fall back to the ground. I expect that the rules of this world will not let me die, but to lose all of my hard-won progress would be discouraging.
As the hand towers grow, I occasionally find myself inside them, in fleshy interiors with floating red particles. It’s a nice touch; these types of worlds often allow bodily hollows to remain as glitches in otherwise detailed virtual spaces. The vibration in my hand abruptly changes. Has something happened? No, I accidentally waved the controller against the cinder block wall next to the play area, having disabled the chaperone guides.
HanaHana, 2017-2019
HanaHana, 2017-2019
As the journey, which is taking place in a VR environment by artist Mélodie Mousset called HanaHana, begins to feel physically arduous, I chide myself for my frailty. I think of the hardships that were surely encountered during a previous journey taken by Mousset, in this case to retrace playwright Antonin Artaud’s 1936 visit to Mexico. For Artaud, who had previously written a play decrying Cortez and Spanish colonization, Mexico represented a possibility for real revolution. As scholar Tsu-Chung Su argues, this was in part because of Artaud’s view of Indigenous “rituals which relied on physical language and corporeal praxis and not on written language and texts.” In search of this type of cultural practice, Artaud seems to have taken part in a ritual involving Peyote. Though there is some uncertainty around the level of fact and embellishment in his account of the trip, it strengthened his belief that this form of treatment was far preferable to the electro-shock therapy he had endured in France.
The Jellyfish, 2020, with Edo Fouilloux
The Jellyfish, 2020, with Edo Fouilloux
For Mousset’s journey, she traveled by container ship from le Havre to Veracruz, then spent four months living in the Sierra Madre mountains. Having had her organs forensically imaged, she cast exact replicas of them in the form of wax candles. Chris Kraus wrote of this journey that where Artaud had sought freedom from societal strictures and physical pain through “a body without organs; she was trying to externalise her own organs without a body to contain them.” The footage that Mousset shot along the way was somehow lost along the way, or perhaps claimed by the film’s subjects. The film that she was ultimately able to make from surviving fragments, Organic Journey, thus offers only an indirect view of the journey, a glimpse of its negative space.
My stomach growls, and my neck aches. I begin to wonder—did the instructions say that it was possible to reach the sun, or only that I might try? It does not seem much closer, even though the monoliths where I started my journey are beginning to recede entirely from view.
Thinking of Mousset’s interest in externalizing and fragmenting the body, I begin to consider the hands stretching above me into the sky as my own dislocated appendages. It reminds me of a studio visit I once did with artist Stephen Lichty in which he performed a kind of reverse mirror therapy for me: through a series of coordinated movements and a clever use of video goggles, he made me believe that a red silk handkerchief was my right hand, and each time Lichty touched its folds, I would feel a physical sensation.
VR involves a complex technical apparatus, and the material facts of its use transcend, at least for now, the possibility of the kind of suspension of disbelief that is often experienced with cinema or even literature. At no point during my journey in HanaHana did I forget that I was wearing a bulky headset or holding controllers in my hands. But its effects still register in the body in complex and even quite powerful ways, in feeling a sense of vertigo or feeling my arms as part of a network of long, waving phantom assemblages.
The kind of embodied but distributed awareness of the self within a larger technological and artistic environment that Mousset’s work prompts is one of the most interesting aspects of VR as an art form. I wonder, in particular, does the disassembled and reassembled VR user as constructed by a work like HanaHana actually prompt a rethinking of how we see the very function of artworks? Can they help us access other ways of relating to art than through language and semiotics, and prompt an embodied experience of art reception that accounts for the feelings of pain, fragmentation, and alienation that so many of us associate with our bodies?
Intra Aura, 2012-2019, stills
Intra Aura, 2012-2019, stills
These questions also arise in Mousset’s other works in multiple media forms as well. A 2020 VR work made in collaboration with Edo Fouilloux, Jellyfish, further rewires the relationship between the user and their environment. In this case, the user is immersed in an underwater ecosystem and asked to sing and vocalize; this input is then taken up, transformed, and echoed through other organisms in the surrounding ecosystem. The work prompts a kind of oceanic subjectivity, an immersed awareness of one’s environment and a connectedness to it that both invites bodily presence and decenters it. Made just before the increased isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the feeling of mediated synchrony and connectedness that Jellyfish offers scratches the same itch that made sea shanties, briefly, the most-loved musical form on the internet.
Back in HanaHana, even as these thoughts are beginning to form in my mind, the hunger pangs have become too strong. Taking a last wistful glance towards the sun, I remove my headset.
How Many Drops Does it Take for a Mind, 2015
CURA.36
Spring Summer 2021
THE FUTURITY ISSUE
CREDITS:
All images Courtesy: the artist
MÉLODIE MOUSSET (b. 1981) lives and works in Zurich and Fuerteventura. She is an award wining artist, a public speaker and VR expert. She co-founded PatchXR, a creative studio focused on interactive music driven experiences for XR. Her research draws upon personal biography to produce playful and psychologically charged narratives that investigate the interactions between the self and technology through installation, performance, photography, sculpture, and new media. Mélodie Mousset studied at the EBAR (Rennes), ECAL (Lausanne), RCA (London) and completed her Masters of Fine Arts at CALARTS (Valencia CA). Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including CCS (Paris), MOCA (Los Angeles), Bund Museum (Shanghai), The Metropolitan Art Society (Beirut), SALTS (Basel) and recently at Helmhaus (Zurich).
MICHAEL CONNOR is Artistic Director of Rhizome, where he led on the Net Art Anthology initiative, a web-based exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book that retold the history of online art through 100 artworks from the 1980s to the present. He has curated exhibitions and projects for Cornerhouse, Manchester, the Museum of Moving Image, New York, ACMI, Melbourne, Bell Lightbox, Toronto, FACT, Liverpool, and BFI, London. His writing has appeared in You Are Here: Art After the Internet (Cornerhouse), Digital Video Abstraction (UCPress), and MBCBFTW (Hatje Cantz).
