Not Here, Not There

Bryan Yueshen Wu 2023

What was the most recent immersive experience you’ve been through?

How do you feel about it?

What does immersion mean to you?

Hi there, I’m Bryan.

I’m a sound art explorer in the Information Experience Design programme at RCA.

As you read this, I may have completed my final assessment and be ready to graduate from this lovely college.

Thank you for opening this booklet. It serves as an archive of my primary research process for my final project,

Not Here, Not There,

which explores the ontology of immersion. I began this topic during my dissertation last year when I grew tired of hearing discussions about large-scale commercial works dominating conversations about immersion. I then decided to investigate the audience’s mental engagement and true feelings in an immersive experience, demonstrating that analog techniques can be just as effective. The experience of being in the Lascaux Cave is a paradigm.

In this book, I briefly introduce the artwork before diving into a collection of my self-reflections on immersive experiences.

These include diaries, poems, and pure reflective writings that capture the processes I consider to be “immersive”.

The style of these reflections is influenced by Roland Barthes’s confessional writing on photography in Camera Lucida, which has greatly inspired me.

These writings are fragmented and independent of each other, so feel free to jump around rather than following them linearly. In the final part of the book, you will find my dissertation, which offers a broader discussion of immersion in a more academic yet relatively informal writing style.

While some of the content may overlap, I hope it will provide something unique for you to explore.

Lascaux Cave in Montignac, France

Concept & Installation & Sound: Bryan Yueshen Wu

Graphic designer: Xiaoying Su

Project photo credit: Qianhao Chen, Mingyue Ma

Film: Sunghoon Song

Sound mixing engineer: Aijia Wang

Project advisor: Dr. David Meckin

Dissertation advisor: Dr. Clair Le Couteur

Special thanks: Dr. Gian Luca Amadei, Ke Peng, Qianhao Chen, Mingyue Ma, Xiaoru Wang, Jiang Zhu

Content Perface

I was lost in a forest

Role-playing

Nothing is there Digitality

An artificial world made by myself Post-rock

I speculated immersion

I thought I was dead Bibliography

Postscript

of Immersion The Artwork Reflections

Speculation

Not Here, Not There

Composition

Improvisation

took a shower Movie Interactivity? Meditation Reduced listening Time species Look up the sky Chaotic sources Scroll, scroll, scroll Write something, Bryan A beam that rays through 6 10 21 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 36 37 39 40 41 43 44 45 42 49 50 52 57 59 60 63 66 85 101 106

of illustrations Abstract Introduction

Back

List

was lost in a forest

The Artwork

“What

Rabindranath Tagore

you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.”

Not Here, Not There is a contemplative sound installation that explores the ontological dimension of immersion, drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s notion of “two bodies” in his essay Leaving the Movie Theatre. Roland describes the first body as a narcissistic entity that becomes absorbed in the immersive medium, while the second one fetishizes its surroundings. In this sonic experience, the audience is invited to encounter and immerse themselves in their “sonic self” and all its sonic affordances; Through a series of interactions, they will be led on a journey across the boundary between the two bodies, ultimately engaging in an introspective conversation with themselves.

Etymologically, immersion describes a deep mental involvement. However, with the advancement of digital technology and its corresponding jargon, people’s perception of immersion seems to have fixated on the ways in which digitality, particularly on a grander scale, moulds immersion rather than one’s actual feeling within that given environment. In the vein of Roland’s deconstruction of the immersive experience in cinema, this project seeks to dismantle this newly formed associations of digitalisation and immersiveness, and engage the audience in a discussion about the essential constituents of immersion.

This work comprises a spatial composition that emerges from an interplay between the audience, the stage light, the shadow, and the mono sound system. The soundscape and lighting are intricately intertwined with the intuitive movements of each individual in the space, creating a sonification of their presence. The constant visual feedback of the shadow stimulates a dialogic engagement with the self, empowering the audience to play an active role in shaping their experience. In this way, the work encourages an embodied exploration of the interconnection between the audience and the space, foregrounding the role of the individual in shaping this immersive encounter.

Complementing the installation, the experimental moving image work serves as a poetic response, further exploring the nature of selfness in immersion. The protagonist endeavours to unravel the essence of immersion and its interconnectedness with the self. We hear the sound of the wind as the rustling leaves sway on the branches, and we see the shape of the wind as the trees dance. How do we perceive immersion through the vessel of self?

Not Here, Not there, 2023

Moving image, Stereo sound, 3:33

Reflections

Honest, true, and prue

Savour this moment, me and you. Have your spirit unwind, relax, and free your mind. Together we breathe, together we feel, it’s my story, where all is revealed

I was lost in a forest

24/October/2021

I was there, the rhizome, barks and leaves also stayed there. It was a story never shared.

How can I hear the past, tomorrow and today? I feel, therefore I am here! It’s the information they wanted to convey.

I was standing there. I was immersed in my reimagination of the natural world surrounding myself, with my arms open, attempting to embrace the signal from the fern, the arbour, and the dew hanging on the edge of a leaf. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to bring the fragrance of the earth in the air into my nasal cavity.

I was emotionally lost and couldn’t help putting down this short poem.

The project was Message to a Post Human Earth, an interactive and multisensorial experience design piece created by Anagram studio. I went there with my friend an hour ago, and it was such a long journey. Honestly, I couldn’t even understand what would be presented after reading their introduction. I only knew it would happen in a forest, alongside some augmented reality stuff. But it did remind me of another installation piece called Regarding Forests that I saw the other day. The designer applied multiple forest-related media such as soundtracks, moving images and scents design to immerse participants in a forest-like indoor environment. That was such an intelligent way for multisensorial design; I mean, if sometimes technology can bring a forest to you indoors, why bother to have the show in a natural forest (it is really far from my flat!)? Anyway, I still came simply because it would be an excellent chance to kill my leisure time.

I was not expecting anything, but I had to admit that it was an impressive artwork. Yes, the narrative, inspired by the nuclear waste age in the 1980s and plant intelligence, was quite appealing to me, but what fascinated me most was how they constructed immersion.

Upon our arrival at the gallery, my friend and I were given an iPhone-sized AR device that could be hung on the neck and a headset, respectively. Without any preparation, we suddenly saw our locations appearing on the map of our devices, followed by a woman’s deep voice coming out, and then we were guided to the forest; I was acting as the future, while my friend represented the past. I crouched down, picked up a leaf and looked at its augmented patterns through the device’s lens; I walked closer to a tree, touched the bark and felt the haptic information it carried; I stood facing my friend, shouted out words and waved to her vigorously. I felt so touched, maybe by the story and, more importantly, by the intimacy between myself and the forest. The whole forest was borrowed to construct the story, and we were not only participants, but also performers to each other, and the natural surroundings.

It is a question posted by Anagram studio on a blog. They answered by designing this incredible journey. This kind of semi-digital way of building immersion enabled me to better concentrate on the narrative behind it and made me understand why sometimes we still need the natural forest rather than a digital version.

So, then what if there’s no digitisation at all? Can I still feel the story without the AR device?

Are there other methods that can simplify the journey but maintain the intimate relationship between participants and the forest? Maybe intentionally create a muddy path? Maybe design the experience based on natural objects, such as the falling leaves or the twigs on the ground? I don’t know. I was lost in thought again.

Role-playing

When to be honest, when to lie, everyone would need to be careful. Although it was the texts that thoroughly guided us, the whole scene was in my mind so vividly.

No high technology, but super engaging. Is it an immersive experience?

Nothing is there

When I was writing this paragraph, incidentally, a moth stopped by my computer screen. I was attracted by it and began to stare at it but was in a trance, with a blank mind. When it finally flew away, I recovered and started to think about my state just now. Unlike the experience in the Orleans House Gallery, where I was immersed in the forest and the narrative, I had little knowledge of biology and the moth species. It meant that I was simply distracted, without seeing the “story” behind the moth on my screen. Is it also a kind of immersion? And how do people actually get immersed?

Digitality

I took the VR headset from my tutor and installed it on my head.

Four years ago, I was invited to do a VR experiment with my undergraduate tutor. I was standing in front of a giant ball in the virtual environment, where the sun was rising slowly on the boundless horizon; my task was to recognize and describe the ball’s material and features. More importantly, it was technically the first time I had a taste of VR techniques.

Unfortunately, I am not a massive fan of it. Maybe it was because of my carsickness; I was a bit dizzy and could not focus well when my view changed following my looking around.

Other than the physical reaction, I also felt trapped, uncomfortable and vague: it seemed that my vision, my attention, and my mind was extracted and stolen from my body, and I could not feel myself.

An artificial world made by myself

I have to admit that sometimes it is hard for me to focus on a piece of English text and read properly, especially when it comes to the complicated terms; I would soon become absent minded. I do enjoy reading novels in Chinese though, or those in English with fewer difficult words. I’m such a visual-oriented animal and tend to translate sentences into images, even moving ones, while reading. It’s almost like a world-building process that occurs simultaneously; I stand from a god’s perspective, watching the scenarios happen to each character. But when difficult words appear, the whole thing gets disrupted; the world in my head vanishes, and I’m pulled back to my presence.

I become aware of my surroundings again - the touch between my fingertip and the paper, the softness of the sofa, etc. A sense of threshold maybe? A threshold that I need to cross to reach the imagination world? But it is so invisible, unnoticeable and subtle... When did it appear? How did I blend in? I have no idea. The only thing I know is that familiarity may help - a familiar description in a familiar language, with a familiar environment… I guess I will easily dive into the artificial world I make.

Oh, it reminds me of Kate Pullinger’s work, Breathe - a reading experience on mobile devices that utilises data around the reader, such as location, time, weather, etc. Although I’m not new to this technology, when the ghost said it’s approaching Old Oak Road near my flat, I was still a bit surprised. The scenario where I passed the road this morning came straight to my mind; I was pushed into this imagination, this artificial world, immediately. There was a moment when I felt the ghost so close to me, as if I was absorbed in the book. Yes, familiarity helps, at least for me.

Post-rock

Here it comes, soft and serene. A canvas with delicate seams, a tranquil scene. Black and white, I see ripples forming, I see a breeze touching the sky.

Now it hits, bright and fierce. A bold stroke that dances and peers, kissing me from my doze. Converging into waves, with gusts that flood in and enclose.

What a take, the power and force, like a symphony of nature’s discourse. A reminder, we are just passers, or guests. We should always cherish, and caress.

Composition

“You are a sound person, for sure. You have ears. Drop your earphones. Try not to close them. Embrace the soundscape, the noise around you.”

Nate

I enjoy post-rock music and experimental sound pieces, but with no formal training in sound or music at all. An outsider. When I was introduced to Matt’s unit on sound, Acoustic Territories, I felt lost, like a bird without wings. So many questions flooded my mind: what makes a sound art piece great? How does it differ from music? How do I compose it? When should I blend music elements, and when should I keep them separate? I was adrift in the sea of my own confusion, with no anchor.

It was Nate who gave me confidence. Even though I’m not in the sound pathway of our course, in his wisdom of being a composer, he still calls me a “sound person”. His words are like a beacon of light that guided me forward, through the darkness. I’ve been composing soundscapes for nearly two years now. Yet, I still have no answers to my doubts. I don’t know, I just created my own path, trusting my instincts and immersing myself in this process.

To me, composing is like conversing with different tracks, a mix of passive and active imagination, I guess? Each field recorded sound carries a unique narrative, like a snapshot in time, a photo captured with sound. When I close my eyes and listen, I’m transported back to that specific site, that moment, that feeling, as if I have opened a time capsule. Details might be lost, but the image of sitting on the grass and enjoying the sonata performed by a group of birds and another hovers around my mind.

This process seems passive, I’m merely processing the information the memories I already filed away, and the recordings just help to pull the drawers out from the library. I’m not creating something new. But when it comes to composition, I become an artist, creating my own masterpiece. I take each sound and deconstruct it, examining each texture with a magnifying glass. I dissect the track and organise it into a library of emotions; I try to jump out of the space the track gives me and create my own sonic landscape. I blend the various sounds together, taking the low-frequency noises of factories by the River Thames and weaving them into a mysterious tapestry. It’s like painting or creating a collage, using each colour, brush and material that I know, to create something new.

In the end, it’s all about celebrating the original soundscape and creating something that speaks to my soul. It’s about trusting intuition, and allowing the sound to take me where it will, like a dolphin in travel, darting across the ocean.

Back to VR

July/2022

Once more, I grasp the VR headset, this time for gaming. The past two months have been tough, leaving me stranded, unable to return home. It was Covid. The pain, both physical and emotional, has been overwhelming, unbearable. I need solace. I need distraction. Perhaps from this second-hand VR set.

I try to shake off the negativity and lose myself in the virtual world for a while. It’s been so long since I last used a headset, since I did it for academic purposes in my tutor’s lab. But now, I crave entertainment. All set. I adjust the headset to a comfortable position and ready to enter my “virtual home”. So in the Steam VR platform, I will first get into a villa-like space with a balcony, where the menu on the wall can be used to activate different games, and all the objects, furniture there can be interacted with. It sounds quite immersive, and is the exact elaboration of the meaning of “immersion” online: an artificial world overwriting the real world, isn’t it? But something feels off. The pixelated dots layer together like a veil, and the objects inside my virtual home look too stylised and shiny. The VR controller set is clunky and awkward: I will have to pull the trigger and move my thumb to the top position in order to “grab” something. It is far too different from what happens in real life. With our sensitivity in capturing details and distinguishing reality, I’m reminded that I’m not truly in the digital world, but in my own flat.

Still, I downloaded a game recommended by a friend. It’s an action-packed adventure, and as I stepped onto the riverside, I basked in the beauty of the sunset. When I tried to move, I almost threw up: I pushed the joystick and rotated it gently, but the movement made me dizzy. My vision dashed and spined wildly, like I was riding a fierce leopard that was chasing its prey. My brain told my body to move due to the movement signal sent from the sight, but my physical self was trapped in the flat and the mind was suppressing the likelihood of travelling. The feedback mechanism was too much, and I was overcome with vertigo. I removed the headset and braced myself against the wall, with my head still spinning.

I deleted the game, unable to cope with the disorienting effects. I would never come back again.

Mumbles: After a long time, I finally developed it into a mini project, lazy me… So, in response to this specific discomfortable feeling, and also the invitation from my friend Xinyi, who is currently researching 3D vertigo and wants to bring her investigations together into an experimental film, I composed the track that reveals the discomfort. It was then tailored and fit in her film. You can scan the QR code to have a look

Bony Labyrinth, 2023 Moving image, Stereo sound, 5:47

Improvisation

07/December/2022

I have to admit, I love doing sound improvisation. It feels like I’m having a constant conversation with the environment, the audience, and the instrument.And the best part?The audience’s instant reactions will always tell the truth. It’s like an unpredictable game, so engaging and immersive. But until now , I’ve never really written anything about it. I want to share what’s been going on in my head lately .

I’m currently working on a project called Evolution with PK. We started it just for fun, six months ago, during one of our White Noise events. But now, we’re taking it more seriously.

Last month, we performed an initial version at a student-organised sound event called Passage, held at Iklectik. We created a live moving image by putting powders on loudspeakers and capturing their movements with a camera in real-time.

It was like an analog audiovisual performance. The narrative was not that clear, so I decided to improvise with my analog synthesiser Neutron. And it was one of the most nerve-wracking and unforgettable experiences I’ve ever had.

Right before the show, we did a lot of tests to determine the optimal frequency range for the best powder movement; And we came up with a rough structure for the sound composition. We borrowed some decent equipment and tripods, and we thought everything was going smoothly.

But when we started the sound test at the venue, we realised we had forgotten the backup battery. The battery status on the camera turned red and blinked, meaning it could shut down at any moment. We were in trouble.

The audience was already waiting. The lights started to fade out. We had to start. And that’s when I felt like my body was being split into three. One part of me was focused on the pre-designed structure in my mind, guiding me through the world of sonic textures. Another part was fixated on the blinking battery status, while the third was aware of the audience. But the second body, the one paying attention to the battery status, was dominant, as if it was standing on top of the pyramid and manipulating the other two. I tried to calm down and tell myself that it would be okay even if it shut down halfway. I could just fade out the track and pretend it was the end. But I couldn’t. The warning blinking sign enlarged the unknownness of how long the camera would hold, and the nerves grew and spread in my head.

My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t focus on what to play next or what the audience was feeling. It was a complete mess. When I finally decided to end it, I thought I had played for at least eight minutes, but my friend told me it was only four minutes, and he wanted more. Oops, my sense of time was also messed up.

Mumbles: Evolution is a collaborative project between Ke Peng (PK) and I. It celebrates the vitality of inorganic substances. We put luminous powders onto an acrylic panel, and then attached four transducers to its bottom to provide a complex vibrational environment; The powders will then move according to the sound. We also used an image recognition method to record data from the powder behaviours, and fed it back to the sound system. They thus influenced each other, and evolved together. You can head to my website to take a closer look at the whole project: bbbryan.com/Evolution.

I took a shower

01/March/2023

I took a shower today. A daily occurrence, hardly deserving of praise. But upon reflection, I discovered that my reasons for indulging in this routine are normally mundane: to wash away the grime of daily life’s chaos, to relieve boredom, or simply because it must be done, like after a drenching rainfall without an umbrella.

The experience is immersive, which encompasses both its literal and figurative senses. I’m surrounded by drops of water, each gathering into a chain that eventually lands upon my skin. As they fall, they rise into gauze, fluttering and twisting in the wind. The sound of their descent becomes a liquid melody, composing a symphony of purest notes.

Suddenly, these droplets become my intimate lover, kissing and embracing me with each touch. My mind is fully engaged in this deep mental involvement.

Sometimes I close my eyes, listening to the inner bursts of inspiration that awaken within. Sometimes I simply let my vision blur, couching in the softness of nothingness. These moments are peaceful and tranquil, a rebirth of sorts.

Naturally, the basics should be in place to facilitate such an immersion: a proper water spray, a comfortable temperature, and a reasonable shower area. If I were confined to a narrow space with only a cold trickle of water, I would never find such beauty in the mundane.

Movie

12/March/2023

Normally, I find solace in the art of cinema. It is a shelter where my mind wanders, free from the burdens of reality. In fact, upon my arrival in London, the very first entertainment I awarded myself was an all-access membership to a nearby cinema.

Yet, yesterday, life presented me with one of its toughest days. I broke up with my beloved. It was an experience that occupied not only my mind, but also my physical being.

The once familiar happiness was replaced with a numbness that filled me, as if rubber had erased all senses of pleasure. I couldn’t breathe properly, as if my lungs were filled with water, and my stomach was heavy with rocks and stones, rendering me without appetite.

Perhaps my body’s self-defence mechanism was working to pump more blood towards my head, but in return, it left my limbs cold and motionless.

In this desolate state, Jiajing presented me with film tickets, hoping to offer me a temporary distraction.

However, I was a mere puppet, lacking any semblance of life.

The film’s plot, easily understandable, was set in a forest, and the cinematography was magnificent.

But I was unable to enjoy it. Instead, all I could see were two characters running from ferocious dinosaurs projected onto the vast screen.

The only sounds I heard were the noise of their footsteps and the ringing of tinnitus in my ears. I tried to find comfort in my seat, adjusting my position multiple times, but it was in vain. Just alive.

Interactivity?

Interactivity may be absent in some immersive experiences, such as moviewatching, where the audience sits and watches passively. While the perception of the image reflected from the large screen, the composition of light and darkness, and space can be an interaction between the viewer’s sensory system and the cinema, it is mostly passive. I believe that an active process can enhance an immersive experience.

What can active interaction bring to an immersive experience? I am still uncertain of its global impact, but I know that exploratory interactions improve my experience of perceiving immersion. I discussed the “threshold of immersion” in my earlier writing section on reading. Interactivity may help guide the audience through that threshold. I reckon every individual has a unique perceptual model that forms from birth, influenced by surroundings, people, weather, food, and other factors. Therefore, inclusive design, with the wish of including all the users, is greatly challenging. In the creation of immersion, even when an artist creates a comprehensible narrative, differences in perception and cultural backgrounds can hinder audience understanding. Adding interactive elements based on embodied cognition may help. When things become unclear, people tend to rely on intuition to explore the world out of curiosity. Feedback on that intuition can lead to engagement.

Nonetheless, the interaction should not be overly complex or confusing. Don Norman, in his informative book Living with Complexity, discusses taming complexity with good design.

“Forget the complaints against complexity; instead, complain about confusion,” he writes. Same here. Interactivity can either enhance or detract an immersive experience. Suppose you are playing a VR game with a high-tech machine gun and need to adjust twenty different parameters to get a powerful shot, each with different postures. The constant trial and error may become tedious and boring, distracting you from the immersion. Instead of feeling like you’re holding a gun, you’ll only feel the texture of the VR controller.

Meditation

16/March/2023

Still not recovered. Thoughts of all kinds were wandering aimlessly, arbitrarily, chaotically in my mind, like comets on a voyage. They crashed into me, draining me, depleting me of my energy and emotions. I tried to work, hoping it would distract me and act like a refuge to my internal turmoil, but it turned out to be fruitless. As night fell, I finally turned into meditation, a practice that I never thought I could master. Yet, it was my last resort, my only way out.

What should I do? I recalled the sage words of Kobe Bryant, to seek five minutes of stillness each day, to listen to the inner voice and observe what lies beneath the surface. But it was difficult. As I closed my eyes, the noise of the world faded and the tinnitus drone, a deafening silence took over. Negative thoughts then rose like an army, threatening to erode my mind. I attempted to fight back. I focused on my breath, the sound of air rubbing my nasal cavity, the sensation of my body against the armchair, and tried to detach myself from the first-person perspective. From the vantage point of a guard at a gate, I watched my thoughts pass by without engaging them directly.

The alarm rang. It was the end of the five minutes. I felt refreshed. At least a moment of peace.

Reduced listening

18/March/2023

Yesterday was a day of exploration and discovery with Sophie and Gian Luca. We embarked on a city walk from Woolwich to Greenwich, along the River Thames, aiming to explore the metropolis and the liminal spaces. It was a day that brought me much joy and contentment. I took my sound recorder, a hydrophone, an electromagnetic microphone, and some tapes to conduct field recordings and listening exercises.

During our walk, a cargo vessel passed by the river with a group of crows perched on it. I quickly set up my recorder, pointed it towards the vessel, hit the record button, and put on my headphones. As always, the soundscape coming from the recorder was vastly different, and the world became crisp and crystal clear as if I wore a filter. I expected to hear low-frequency noises, and in fact, the low humming sound of the vessel did dominate, with the cawing of the crows enriching the higher frequency information. The entire spectrum was beautifully balanced.

I then reduced my focus only on the vessel, trying to push away the crows’ chatter. As the ship approached, I felt the air more strongly. It was energetic and dynamic, swinging and fluctuating, and then it flooded into my head. It was like a swarm of dancing particles, sometimes soft and tiny, whispering to me, and at other times, it became a giant, gently touching my eardrums. It was a stable imbalance, a shapeless shape, as if the sonic image came from the soundscape’s deconstruction and reshaping.

In that moment, I realised that the world is incredible, and we are not always creating something new. It’s already there, waiting to be discovered. We merely create tools to uncover or simulate its hidden beauty. As I was urged to move on, I wondered if I needed the granulator plug-in to create similar sonic textures on my computer, or if I should pay more attention to the world around me.

It was a reminder to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us and to see it through a different lens. We should take the time to immerse ourselves in the world and experience it in all its wonder.

Mumbles: So, I did deep listening exercises with my sound recorder and a hydrophone alongside the River Thames with our group, and filmed some textures of the water. Lots of unexpected sound textures were found, including low-frequency industrial noises, the granulated texture let by a ship, the crisp sound from the flow, etc.; After reflecting on how industrialisation has influenced the natural surroundings, I put together this experimental short film. The outcome can be watched via this QR code

Passers-by, 2023 - ongoing Moving image, Stereo sound, 1:24

Time species

26/March/2023

One two, one two, breathing with my tempo.

The global soundscape still dominates, going straight into my left ear, across the skull, stops at my right membrane somehow. Birds singing, granulation mumbling. Guess it’s the noise, as if it’s nothing. No, no. It’s more than that; Passing, fluctuating and flowing.

Now it comes to the right. Dynamics stops, nobody talks, feels like in the darkness, alone. Fear, drowning, unknown. Oh look, it is flickering; It just comes and goes. Sometimes sharp, sometimes bold. In my head, it is a mix of time codes.

Mumbles: I put down this poem when I was doing the listening exercise in Laura’s workshop. It was about the exploration of “sonic contamination”. In this exercise, we were asked to sit next to our chosen “time species” and listen to a real-time composition of different soundscapes. In my case, I’ve selected a tree, and what I heard was the global soundscape of the forest, the sound collected by a contact microphone under a moss and a hydrophone inside a log respectively.

Look up the sky

I love to gaze up high, and free my sight, letting it soar to the sky, both in nocturne and daylight.

“Look at the stars, look how they shine for you.”

Coldplay

Sometimes it's like a land, fertile, vast, and plain; Withered branches sneak in and out, they stretch, spread, and sprout. I spot rhizomes, I see veins, and an intricately-mastered spider net. Sunbeams scatter around, rays warming my face, awakening my trance. What a gift captured by chance.

As the orb rises and falls, hanging and shining bright, sprinkling its velvety light. With this gorgeous sight, I urge them not to hide. “Hey, don't be shy,” I whisper to their cover

They peek through the blanket, a glittering, twinkling map to uncover. The wonder is never-ending, as long as you take a break; Listen to the voice of your feeling, a true immersion to stay.

Chaotic sources

28/March/2023

In the midst of our chaotic world, Jiajing’s new Instagram account, “Chaotic Sources”, offers a refreshing perspective. This photographic archive captures the intricate patterns of nature’s chaotic systems, from the twisting of branches to the messy arrangement of fallen leaves. The term “chaotic” can be interpreted in many ways, such as the mathematical Lorenz equation and digital randomness, but in this context, it is a pure celebration of nature’s messiness and unpredictability. It has made me fascinated, since most of the artificial chaos are simulations of the natural world.

As I stroll through a forest, I’m captivated by these natural patterns. To me, they are simultaneously abstract and familiar, teasing my mind with the boundary between the two. The bark’s texture is both a stranger and a reminder of my established model of what a tree is, a perception that I’ve carried with me since childhood. This familiarity allows me to immerse myself in the textures of nature, exploring the world with fresh eyes. Nonetheless, when a complete abstract geometry such as Modrian’s masterpiece is exhibited to the audience, some may get confused due to a lack of historical and art knowledge. This frustration will detach them from the state of being immersed.

Does this same phenomenon apply to sound?

When I use a contact microphone, a hydrophone, or a geophone to capture the subtle sounds of my surroundings, sometimes I can with ease identify the source of each sound, which makes myself mentally involved.

But when I manipulate the field recorded track with a granular synthesiser, where the sound could be manipulated in different ways such as time-stretched, chopped and rearranged, I’m lost in a sea of unknownness.

Well, it’s still a combination of the known and unknown, but with the latter taking centre stage. There’s much to explore...

Soil, Roots, Reflection,

Bryan Yueshen Wu, 2023

02/April/2023

There is a newly coined term called “doom-scrolling” which refers to the tendency of people to become trapped in a cycle of seeking negative information on their electronic devices. I first came across this term during a Critical and Historical Studies writing tutorial with my tutor. We were discussing the concept of immersion and its ontology. It was suggested that immersion is not always a positive process; it can bring about negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, or even desperation. My tutor brought up the example of the Covid outbreak, where many people kept scrolling on their phones to look for news about the number of new Covid cases every day. The worse the news, the more they searched for it, creating a harmful feedback loop.

Yesterday, my friend Mia told me that she uninstalled Instagram. She said that every time she posted a story, she would constantly refresh the page to see people’s responses and wait for their likes, which made her anxious and unable to focus on anything else. “But guess what?” she added, “The people I really want to share my life with are actually in my life. Why don’t I talk to them instead?” I couldn’t agree more. Social media has become addictive and toxic in recent years, trapping people in a similar cycle to doom-scrolling. Maybe the word “doom” is too strong for this situation, but the mechanism is very similar. It’s so engaging and immersive that it takes you into a world of expectations where you imagine receiving a lot of likes and positive comments from your friends. Expect, refresh, expect, refresh - it becomes endless. This process may make you happy, but it also keeps you stuck in the loop and distracts you from continuing with your daily routines. Oops, immersion can be harmful.

Scroll, scroll, scroll

Write something, Bryan

While I was compiling this booklet, I stopped for a moment and said to myself, “Oh, my work mode is such a mystery.” It’s quite weird. I’m like a wanderer in text, my mind traversing fragmented paths, guided by sparks of inspiration. Unlike those who carefully craft one chapter after the other, I couldn’t help but yield to the call of my jumping mind. It’s like a journey of non-linearity, where I may spend mere moments on chapter one, only to be transported to chapter five, seemingly disconnected, yet linked. In these fleeting moments, I find myself deeply engaged, caught in the web weaved by inspiration’s spell. A weird sense of immersion?

A beam that rays through

12/April/2023

I’m currently working on a submission for the White Noise album open call. My goal is to explore the relationship between humans and nature, but I have been struggling with where to start. I have been listening to field recordings I made on different sites, but I am having trouble finding inspiration. While scrolling through the photo album on my phone, I came across one that my friend Mia sent me a while ago. As I looked at the photo of the sunbeam piercing through the trees, I felt a sudden spark of inspiration. For the first time, a photo transported me into an immersive experience, making me feel as if I were standing on the soft forest floor, basking in the sunshine, and surrounded by the sound textures of nature. This experience led me to create the poem below, as well as inspired my composition.

I step in there deep, feeling the breath under my feet. Surrounded by the veil that the mist weaves, I see the shape of the breeze. Warbling, chirping, twittering, it’s the serenity they celebrate.

The sun ascends in tranquillity, the beam pierce through branches, and the canopy. It illuminates all, it also reveals the stark reality. Oh, I see a different face. Evolve or degrade, golden hue or darker shade. It’s what we need to embrace.

Beam, 2023 Stereo sound, 02:56

Untitled, Mia Mingyue Ma, 2023

Not Here, Not There

It’s not here, it’s not there. Where is it?

As we come to the end of the chapter, again, I invite you to reflect on what immersion means to you. Has this journey sparked any new insights or perspectives?

One of the reasons I admire Roland Barthes is his frequent introspection and attention to his true feelings. In his essay Leaving the Movie Theatre, he describes feeling as if he has two bodies in the cinema: one body is narcissistically absorbed in the moving image, while the other fetishizes what lies beyond, such as the texture of sound and surroundings. It’s as if we’re trapped inside a box with two opposing perspectives, unable to see both at once and only capable of seeing one facing inward or outward. We are constantly jumping between these two bodies, never fully present in the moment. Where is the mind in this state of flux? Is it in between, suspended in an intermediate state or does a clear boundary separate the two? Perhaps at times, even more bodies emerge in the mind, further complicating the matter.

Furthermore, how important is the presented environment in an immersive experience? If it is a personal experience, is it still necessary to provide a narrative, or can an abstract “nonplace” suffice for the audience to project their own thoughts onto? How abstract should it be? I look forward to exploring these questions with you further in my artwork, should you choose to experience it.

Speculation of Immersion June/2022

List of illustrations

Figure 01 – Dawid Ścigalski, A participant with the AR device in Message to A Post Human Earth, 2021, <https://contemporarylynx.co.uk/an-interview-with-mayabdalla-co-founder-and-director-of-anagram-studio> [accessed 13 March 2022]

Figure 02 – Barbara Ehrenreich, The Lascaux Cave, 2019, <https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancientcave-art-painting-lascaux-chauvet-altamira> [accessed 18 February 2022]

Figure 03 – Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd, Layers of experience overview, 2019, <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rcauk/detail.action?docID=5631703> [accessed 17 May 2022]

Figure 04 – Alastair Somerville, A perception model, 2019, <https://acuitydesign.medium.com/perception-model-starting-with-imagination-3798216614ba> [accessed 9 February]

Figure 05 – Robert Zemeckis, The Air Mag sneaker in Back to the Future, 1985, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/> [accessed 24 May 2022]

Figure 06 – Yuki Li, An umbrella designed by Naoto Fukasawa, 2017, <http:// xueyingli.int-des.com/unit-2-2-physical-computing/small-talk-unconsciousdesignwithout-thought/> [accessed 29 May 2022]

Figure 07 – Yueshen Wu and Laura Selby, A snippet of the MYcelium project, 2022

Figure 08 – Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd, A cube with two perspectives, 2019, <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rcauk/detail.action?docID=5631703>

[accessed 17 May 2022]

Figure 09 – Lee Gyu-lee, The production team inserted Na-yeon's favourite dishes, seaweed soup and rice cake, into the story, 2020 <https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/ www/art/2022/02/688_287372.html> [accessed 18 February 2022]

Figure 10 – Glass, The Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, n.d. <https://www. google.com/glass/start/> [accessed 30 May 2022]

Speculation of Immersion is an experimental writing piece with a personal and confessional tone in response to the stereotypical connection between immersive experiences and high technology these days. I hope to stress the accessibility of immersion by focusing more on the state in which people get immersed.

Initially inspired by Camera Lucida where the author Roland Barthes incorporated deep personal reflection towards photography, in this dissertation, I also try to approach and explore the research on immersion by using my perception as a tool.1 Three writings in different styles are included: I was lost in a forest, a diary, which is the starting point of my interest in this topic, followed by I speculated immersion, where I discuss the immersion state by including its ontology, participant’s psychology, and my speculation towards digital technology development in immersion. Finally, the fictional writing I thought I was dead, acts as an outcome of my interpretation of an immersive narrative. The whole piece is written in a relatively informal, accessible and engaging language, which is my attempt to form a low-tech methodology in immersing the readers.

Keywords:

Immersion/ Storytelling/ Experience/ Accessibility/ Interactivity

1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981).

Abstract

Immersion has emerged more frequently in my friends’ discussions and is becoming a hit these days. Due to a boom in digital technologies, numerous contemporary artists are starting to utilise various media, including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, etc., to create immersive experiences in different exhibitions. A certain number of advertisers sometimes would also use the word “immersive” to attract more visitors. The concept of immersion and these relevant artworks have made me quite refreshed and curious about the transition from my design career to the domain of new media art.

Immersion means differently to different people. Some authors emphasise that this term originates from the moving image industry and refers to diving into an “artificial” world,2 while others believe that it is equivalent to “engagement”, “involvement”, or any other vocabulary that can represent a mental fixation where the virtual experience overrides the perceptual experience in the real world.3 These terms, “artificial world”, “virtual world”, or any other similar definitions, have drawn my attention. I would immediately connect them to “artificial intelligence” or “virtual reality”, primarily related to high-technological advancement. Even when I searched the word “immersion” in Wikipedia to get an initial idea, “virtual reality” is in the bracket right after it. It seems that digital technology is essential in immersive experience design and creation.

Nonetheless, referring to Oxford Reference, I have found that “immersion” is merely about a “deep mental involvement”.4 It means that immersion should be far more accessible than I expected, and the “virtual world” may not necessarily be based on digital techniques. Still, it can also be created by our mind or imagination, as long as the media can make people concentrate well. In that sense, some simple experiences like playing chess or reading a novel can embody immersion without

2 What Does Immersion Actually Mean?’, Think with Google

<https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-154/future-of-marketing/emerging-technology/vr-ar-mr-and-what-doesimmersion-actually-mean/> [accessed 2 January 2022].

3 Chenyan Zhang, ‘The Why, What, and How of Immersive Experience’, IEEE Access, 8 (2020), 90878–88

<https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2993646>.

4 ‘Immersion’, Oxford Reference

<https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001/m_en_gb0401360> [accessed 3 April 2022].

Introduction

a doubt. Perhaps the developing jargonistic subjects about immersive experiences have overcomplicated people’s thoughts and have shaped a stereotypical bridge between high technology and immersion.

With curiosity and interest in how immersion can be more accessible and straightforward, I included three writing pieces in different genres in this dissertation. The first piece, I was lost in a forest, is a diary where I put down my gut feelings after participating in a forest-based immersive experience project. It is the starting point of my research in analogue and digital immersion. And then, inspired by the theorist Roland Barthes’s reflective writing from the first perspective in Camera Lucida, I compiled my second research writing, I speculated immersion”.5 I mainly concentrate on the discussion of the people’s immersion state, including immersion’s ontology and the process of how people will come to the state of being immersed. Also, I provide my insight in speculating the development of immersion in the future. In contrast to the technical and scientific tone in most immersion research writings, I intentionally adapt to a more casual language in discussing some relevant academic sub-topics. Additionally, some fragmented writings about my perception of specifically related experiences are inserted at the beginning of each topic to give a context on how I started to think about it. I hope to increase the readability by putting my research in the mentioned way, which is correspondent to the accessible nature in the definition of immersion.

The final autofiction writing, I thought I was dead, plays a significant role in how I intend to use immersive narrative, which describes a possibility of immersion in another universe. Its style is greatly influenced by Kate Pullinger. In her work Breathe, a literary experience on mobile phone, the conversational tone and the Application Programming Interface – a technique that can access the data around the reader, including time, location, etc., are employed to make the reader a close part of the story.6 The interaction between the audience and the text is another essential inspiration in my storytelling. For instance, readers can use the given grating card to reveal the secret message at the end of each chapter in Thomas Brezine’s A Mystery for You and the Tiger Team series; 7 and in the Neverending Story, Michael Ende has designed people’s reading experience to be coherent with

5 Barthes.

6 ‘Breathe’, Kate Pullinger <https://www.katepullinger.com/breathe/> [accessed 2 June 2022].

7 Thomas Brezina, A Mystery for You and the Tiger Team (Egmont Children’s Books).

the main character’s reading, making the boy’s fantastic adventurous episode more real.8 Similarly, I try to share some immersive qualities of these works and conduct the story through conversation between my protagonist, another self of mine and readers, with reasonable interactivity. By chatting with me, you will be able to know my experience and unveil the truth of my death.

The three pieces follow the journey of my mind when I tried to unpack the nature of immersion: being inspired, analysing, and interpreting. This experimental methodology might cause an issue of being less formal and be problematic in some rigorous research discussions for academic purposes. Still, I do hope to provide a provocation regarding how to cause an immersion state, and hopefully, the readers can think with me alongside their reading and feel a bit of being immersed.

8 Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (Penguin, 1993).

I was lost in a forest

07/December/2022

I was there, the rhizome, barks and leaves also stayed there. It was a story never shared.

How can I hear the past, tomorrow and today? I feel, therefore I am here! It’s the information they wanted to convey.

I was emotionally lost and couldn’t help putting down this short poem.

The project was Message to a Post Human Earth, an interactive and multisensorial experience design piece created by Anagram studio.9 I went there with my friend an hour ago, and it was such a long journey. Honestly, I couldn’t even understand what would be presented after reading their introduction. I only knew it would happen in a forest, alongside some augmented reality stuff. But it did remind me of another installation piece called Regarding Forests that I saw the other day. The designer applied multiple forest-related media such as soundtracks, moving images and scents design to immerse participants in a forest-like indoor environment.10

9 ‘Messages to a Post Human Earth – Anagram’ <https://weareanagram.co.uk/project/messages-to-a-post-humanearth> [accessed 4 January 2022]. Although sometimes installation work and experience design is a bit overlapped, here I would describe it as a large piece of installation.

10 ‘Regarding Forests, Chrystel Lebas’, Sharing Historic Barts , 2021 <https://bartsheritage.org.uk/regardingforests/> [accessed 2 January 2022].

That was such an intelligent way for multisensorial design; I mean, if sometimes technology can bring a forest to you indoors, why bother to have the show in a natural forest (it is really far from my flat!)? Anyway, I still came simply because it would be an excellent chance to kill my leisure time.

Coming back to my poem, I am sure that many stories are hiding behind the rhizome, barks and leaves. They are invisible and not being shared. How can we feel the things that we don’t know are there? It is a question posted by Anagram studio on a blog. They answered by designing this incredible journey. This kind of semi-digital way of building immersion enabled me to better concentrate on the narrative behind it and made me understand why sometimes we still need the natural forest rather than a digital version. So, then what if there’s no digitisation at all? Can I still feel the story without the AR device? Are there other methods that can simplify the journey but maintain the intimate relationship between participants and the forest? Maybe intentionally create a muddy path? Maybe design the experience based on natural objects, such as the falling leaves or the twigs on the ground? I don’t know. I was lost in thought again.

I then realised that I hadn’t really comprehended immersion, though I thought I did. I will have to rethink and unfold this familiar stranger more carefully.

Figure 01 - A participant with the AR device in Message to A Post Human Earth

I speculated immersion

An ontological discussion on immersion

I still remember participating in the detective role-playing game with my friends: it was a kind of card game where participants would be assigned different characters in criminal investigation cases and would need to behave appropriately according to the instructions to keep themselves innocent. When to be honest, when to lie, everyone would need to be careful. Although it was the texts that thoroughly guided us, the whole scene was in my mind so vividly. No high technology, but super engaging. Is it an immersive experience?

Since my last visit to the Orleans House Gallery, I have been questioning myself: what exactly is “immersion”? In a sense, this question belongs to the ontology domain, where “what is it, what does it mean, to be” is an ultimate question for philosophers.11 However, the concept of ontology is quite opaque. According to Jacquette’s conclusion, there are two main types of ontology: pure philosophical ontology and applied scientific ontology. They will have different meanings when used as a discipline or a domain.12 Thus, to avoid unnecessary sophistication, here I will borrow this concept without a technical elaboration, and would like to interpret “the ontology of immersion” as simply as its nature of being in a general way.

11 Dale Jacquette, Ontology (London: Routledge, 2014), p.18. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315710655>.

12 Jacquette, p.19-24.

I got myself started with a quick research on immersion’s meaning in Oxford Reference, where it is defined as “the action of immersing someone or something in a liquid” or “deep mental involvement in something”.13 Obviously, the latter explanation is a connotation, which is yet straightforward. I can immediately compare my gaming experience in a virtual reality world with my diving journey, which can both involve me in a multisensorial way and temporarily diminish my self-awareness. Moreover, interestingly, “liquid immersion” is a good metaphor when we describe the levels of immersion: we can immerse our friends by pouring a bucket of water over, which only lasts for a second, or we can invite them to stand in a waterfall, which is a more intensive immersive experience.14

From the perspective of etymology, based on the online dictionary, “immersion” comes from the Latin word immersionem, which is a combination of ‘in-’, meaning “into, in, on, upon”, and mergere, another Latin word with the meaning of “plunge, dip”. From around 1640, “immersion” started to carry the definition of “absorption in some interest or situation”, which described a mental state other than solely a physical fact.15 It is similar to what it means figuratively today. Based on the research on these dictionaries, it becomes clearer that “immersion” is more about a state in which people are engaged well, but it is not something that has to be related to technology. Hence, I can conclude that immersion is meant to be accessible by definition.

Nonetheless, the language itself could limit the immersion analysis: the dictionary indicates that the word “immersion” emerged around 500 years ago,16 and the Latin language originated about 2700 years ago.17 But what about the people before that time? I disagree that humans didn’t have the sense of being immersed ahead of the time linguistics came into being. So, what was the earliest form of immersion? Some believe that it is the creation of cave art, where people painted giant creatures onto the walls and ceilings and would use fireplaces or sandstone lamps to make a

13 ‘Immersion’.

14 Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd, Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling: Genre, Narrative and Environments (Milton, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 2019) <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ rcauk/detail.action?docID=5631703> [accessed 17 May 2022].

15 ‘Immersion | Etymology, Origin and Meaning of Immersion by Etymonline’ <https://www.etymonline.com/word/ immersion> [accessed 9 February 2022].

16 Ibid.

17 Tore Janson, A Natural History of Latin (Oxford University Press, UK, 2004), p.6.

flickering and moving effect on those paintings.18 The Lascaux Cave in France, for instance, holds splendid brightly coloured animal paintings with a history of more than 20,000 years.19 Evidence also shows that some sonic properties of caves may add to the immersive narrative. In Rupert Till’s study of acoustics in different heritage sites, it is noted that the reverberation produced by a two-metre-height cave is similar to that produced by concert halls, and some caves with the strong low-frequency support as well as the natural sonic effects had provided powerful spaces for Palaeolithic humans to carry out rituals.20 So, stop for a while and empty your mind. Look at Figure 02 and try to imagine the superimposed lines of a drawn bull on the cave wall. It is so muscular and wild. Now comes a flickering light, and the people surrounding you begin to chant and drum, followed by a generated aweinspiring reverb. Can you already see the images are being animated: the bull is moving and passing you by, heading towards another race? Anyway, I would like to describe the experience of either the rave that Palaeolithic humans had in the cave or the visit that tourists paid there as a splendiferous immersive experience with purely analogue techniques.

18 ‘The Origins of Immersive Experiences’, FutureLearn <https://www.futurelearn.com/info/blog> [accessed 9 February 2022].

19 Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘“Humans Were Not Centre Stage”: How Ancient Cave Art Puts Us in Our Place’, The Guardian, 12 December 2019, section Art and design

<https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancient-cave-art-paintinglascaux-chauvet-altamira> [accessed 18 February 2022].

20 Rupert Till, ‘Sound Archaeology: A Study of the Acoustics of Three World Heritage Sites, Spanish Prehistoric Painted Caves, Stonehenge, and Paphos Theatre’, Acoustics, 1.3 (2019), 661–92

<https://doi.org/10.3390/acoustics1030039>.

Figure 02 - The Lascaux Cave

Speaking of analogue immersion, besides the cave experience, the design of churches is also worth mentioning. In the Middle Ages, architects used painted glass to create visuals on the churches’ windows, conveying sacred Biblical narratives to the believers and immersing them into the otherworldliness through the colourful light matrix.21 The rib vaulting and gothic arches were built to open the façade for larger windows and provide a soaring space, helping to gain a thorough light source flooding through the stained glass. Together with the liturgical music, ambient sound, people’s chanting, polychrome sculptures, conducted rituals, etc., the church forms a virtual environment that detaches individual’s sensations from the surrounding towns.22 All the mentioned analogue media, including roleplaying card games, a piece of engaging text, the cave art, and the windows in churches, add to the fact that immersion can work well without a digital approach.

Regarding the nature of immersion, in fact, in 2009, there was an exciting debate where someone had raised the question of whether immersion is a feature of a specific medium, followed by a response saying that immersion “is not a component of any medium” and “is purely an invention of the mind of the one immersed”.23 According to Curtis’s interpretation of this debate, in the former account, the “representational feature” of different media is at the root of an immersive experience, making immersion exclusively subordinated by the medial characteristics of an “immersive aesthetic object”. Hence, immersion and realism are in a synonymous state.24 On the contrary, by quoting Scarry’s words, Curtis continued to point out that if people treat immersion as our mind’s invention, then we should consider the “operations of imagination” rather than the process of how to generate immersion.25

I am pretty fascinated by the debate, as it has the same charm as the “I think therefore I am” formulation put forward by René Descartes.26 In this area, a

21 Patrick T. Allen, ‘A Brief History of Immersion, Centuries before VR’, The Conversation <http://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-immersion-centuries-before-vr-94835> [accessed 9 February 2022].

22 Francis Marchese, ‘The Gothic Cathedral: An Immersive Information Visualisation Space’, 2014 <https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.4671.4889>.

23 Robin Curtis, Immersion and Abstraction as Measures of Materiality (Brill, 2016), pp. 40–64 <https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004308237_004>.

24 Ibid.

25 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton University Press, 2001) cited in Curtis.

26 Lex Newman, ‘Descartes’ Epistemology’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2019 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019) <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/

entries/descartes-epistemology/> [accessed 19 February 2022].

classical question of “can our minds be independent of the body?” now becomes “can immersion be independent of the media?”. In the theory of mechanical materialism, idealism cannot stand since the world consists of materialised objects, so immersion will never happen without a cave, a projector, or a VR headset.27 Nonetheless, I believe that whether people will be immersed or not is also relevant to their experiences and perception. There will not be absolute immersion, no matter how perfect the media itself is. Back to the instance of the cave art, if the audience knows nothing about the historical background of the cave or cannot recognise the animal drawings on the wall, they will not be engaged in the space at all. I will continue to discuss the psychological side of immersion in the next section.

Interestingly, if we take a closer look at the objects surrounding us and ponder the process of how they come, we may realise the concept of “object” sometimes is not truly meaningful. In the book The Order of Time, the author argues that “even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events”.28 Consequently, even the “hardest stone” is “a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet” and depends on “how our bodies are structured to perceive”.29 Holding this viewpoint, I can then consider a cave as a network of events, including the process from crustal movement to gradual dissolution of limestone. Likewise, immersion is no longer something about the meaningless medium itself. Still, it is more homologous with the subsequential occurrences of before, being, and after the immersion state, which is relevant to people’s minds and imagination.

Both views of the debate are fascinating. As for me, because of the human sensory system and habituation, sometimes it is difficult to sense the subtle ongoing changing events around us, so we may still perceive daily items as objects. The cave is still there with paintings on it, and a VR headset is still a device with the “immersive” label, which can provide participants with a virtual narrative. It may not be so significant in an immersive experience as long as we enjoy the immersive journey.

27 ‘Materialism | Definition, Theories, History, & Facts | Britannica’ <https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialismphilosophy> [accessed 18 February 2022].

28 Carlo Rovelli, Erica Segre, and Simon Carnell, The Order of Time, First American edition (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), p.62.

29 Ibid., p.63.

How do we get immersed?

When I was writing this section, incidentally, a moth stopped by my computer screen. I was attracted by it and began to stare at it but was in a trance, with a blank mind. When it finally flew away, I recovered and started to think about my state just now. Unlike the experience in the Orleans House Gallery, where I was immersed in the forest and the narrative, I had little knowledge of biology and the moth species. It meant that I was simply distracted, without seeing the “story” behind the moth on my screen. Is it also a kind of immersion? And how do people actually get immersed?

By definition, immersion is merely a mental state in which people concentrate well, and it seems that everything can lead to everyone’s immersion state. However, as Linda Candy states, quoted by Gröppel-Wegener and Kidd in their book Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling, “every human being senses the world with perceptual faculties common to us all and yet each individual differs in the exact nature of that experience”. Different people may have a significantly different experience of being immersed due to the complexity of individual perceptions.30 “Immersion is not inevitable or a universal experience”, Gröppel-Wegener and Kidd continued to add in their writing of the “participant layer” of the proposed framework (Figure 03), where they concentrated on unpacking the storytelling experiences, further emphasising the uniqueness that the same designed immersive experience may bring to different people.31

30 Linda Candy and Sam Ferguson, Interactive Experience in the Digital Age: Evaluating New Art Practice (Springer International Publishing, 2014) cited in Gröppel-Wegener and Kidd. 31 Gröppel-Wegener and Kidd.

From my perspective, I would argue that determinative factors of whether people can be immersed in something include their personalities and the established mental models based on their former experiences or knowledge. Research on role-playing games states that “the motivation to engage in live action roleplaying originates primarily from personality rather than skills such as acting”.32 For example, actors, one of the most professional role-playing groups, are more empathic to the comparison group.33 Also, in a general perception model put forward by Alastair Somerville in a workshop (Figure 04), we can see that before people take actions in certain situations and make clear senses, there will always be a process of imagination, anticipation and prediction ahead of it, which is mainly based on the experience models of what people have learnt.34 Sometimes, perhaps simply a pair of Air Mag sneakers (Figure 05) on a shelf can already bring some double fans of sneakers and films to Marty’s time travel again, while for people who are not interested in sneakers and know nothing about the movie Back to the Future, it is nothing but a pair of theatrical shoes.35

32 Lauri Lukka, ‘The Psychology of Immersion’ in The Cutting Edge of Nordic Larp, ed. by Jon Back (Knutpunkt, 2014) p.81-91.

33 Daniel Nettle, ‘Psychological Profiles of Professional Actors’, Personality and Individual Differences, 40 (2006), 375–83 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.07.008> cited in Lukka.

34 Alastair Somerville, ‘Perception Model: Starting with Imagination’, Medium, 2019 <https://acuity-design.medium. com/perception-model-starting-with-imagination-3798216614ba> [accessed 9 February 2022].

35 Robert Zemeckis, Back to the Future (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, U-Drive Productions, 1985).

Figure 03 – Layers of Experience overview

Figure 04 –A perception model

Figure 05 – The Air Mag sneaker in Back to the Future

Additionally, before talking about the immersing state, I would like to borrow the concept of “affordance” from human-centred design to discuss an effective activation of certain immersive experiences. “Affordance” is used by Don Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things to describe the relationship between an object’s characteristics and its agent that indicates how it could be used.36 Knobs afford the behaviour of being turned, and buttons afford to push, for example. Although sometimes this relationship is implicit and requires people to learn to reveal it, like mastering a control panel in an aircraft, our reaction towards affordance still tends to be habit-lead and “brainless” in daily cases. In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear introduces habits as the “mental shortcuts learned from experience” that are drawn on automatically when faced with a problem. 37It is quite connected to the mentioned perception model. We are establishing our perception models and developing ourselves all the time. When a behaviour finally becomes a habit, we may skip the anticipation and prediction process and do it automatically. Think about the experience of turning on a lamp: you did not even think about the action but just pressed the switch. The interaction between you and the light is simply so habitual and unconscious.

A related famous design example that came to my mind immediately is Naoto Fukasawa’s umbrella. It is more troublesome for people who go shopping to carry both the umbrella with a long handle and their shopping bags on rainy days. Habituation will then make them hang the bags onto the handle, which may cause the bag to slide down. To tackle this prevalent habitual problem, Naoto catches the affordance and deliberately adds a notch to the umbrella’s handle (Figure 06). It facilitates this habit, which is an unimpressive but efficient redesign.

In the immersion field, I believe the concept of affordance is equally essential. The design thinking of how to communicate the possible interactivity through immersive media is almost similar to the one in product design. Designers can choose to utilise a more complex technique and train the users to adapt to the immersive space, like instructing them to memorise all the manipulations in a VR game. Or they can consider the more conventional habituations to establish a more intuitive affordance and get users immersed more instantly once people start interacting with the media.

36 Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 1st Basic paperback (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

37 James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Penguin Publishing Group, 2018).

To me, the latter is more critical and has been the practice I pursue. I have been telling myself, “People will never get immersed if they don’t feel it.” In my latest collaborative project MYcelium where my teammate Laura and I explored the shared memory between humans and nature through a mycelium network, we attempted to create an indoor forest-like environment (Figure 07). Apart from the digital methods such as projecting moving images of a forest, more importantly, we also managed to explore the haptic texture of mushrooms and finally cast them using silicone rubber. Combining the visual elements, we hoped to promptly trigger people’s feeling of being in the environment where fungi grow when they touch the artefact. Based on the participants’ feedback, the softness of our artefact mushrooms is somehow more effective than the digital tools in our creation of this immersive forest.38

38 The MYcelium is my current collaborative project with Laura Selby aiming at exploring human’s shared memory with the natural world through the mycelium network. Until now, it has two phases: phase one is an outdoor installation filmed in a forest, which is a design response in the Informed Practice Unit, MA Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art; and phase two is an adaptation for the indoor exhibition environment, which was demonstrated in IRCAM Workshop 2022, Centre Pompidou.

Figure 06 – An umbrella designed by Naoto Fukasawa

Now the medium works well, and people enter the artificial world where they get immersed successfully. But what does it look like within the state? Roland Barthes used the metaphor of “two bodies at the same time” in his experience of being in a cinema, quoted by Fabienne Liptay in discussing paradoxes of immersion. One body is “narcissistic”, “lost”, and “engulfed” by the moving images, while the other, the “perverse body”, which exceeds the fetishization of the screen, is more about perceiving the movie theatre.39 Nevertheless, in Burcu Dogramaci’s analysis of immersion created by water, steam and light, he points out that waterbased materials such as steam and mist have unique immersive qualities that can “swallow” and absorb individuals. In such experiences, immersion becomes more physical, participants become captured by the work, and the barrier between here and there is dissolved, which should be assessed as “an important paradigm of the immersion”.40

39 Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (Anchor Books, 1995) cited in Fabienne Liptay, Neither Here nor There: The Paradoxes of Immersion (Brill, 2016), pp. 86–108 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308237_006>.

40 Burcu Dogramaci, Water, Steam, Light: Artistic Materials of Immersion (Brill, 2016), pp. 19–39 <https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004308237_003>.

Figure 07 – A snippet of the MYcelium project

Without any doubt, different media will bring people a distinct sense of being immersed. In the cinema, even those with sensor-equipped motion seats, the immersive qualities are mostly shared by the screen, a relatively two-dimensional world. In this case, people seem not to directly sense the story except for the vision and auditory aspects. Instead, their mind brings them to the immersive narrative. The physical perception and the events happening in their imagination are inconsistent. When it comes to the experience where participants are physically engaged, like being surrounded by a mist-based installation, people are more likely to become part of the story. They can practically feel the events, and the sensation that should happen in the story is also happening to them, which eliminates the feeling of the real world to some extent.

I still tend to stand for the two-body concept since I think distractions such as the emergence of sudden incomprehensible plots, tiredness, etc., are inevitable, dragging people back to the sense of their own body. But rather than describing them as coexisting simultaneously, I would say that the two bodies will be dominant in our perceptual experience alternatively. Although a successful immersion can sometimes block out the physical environment where people are actually in, the surroundings are just logically staying there.41 Take a look at Figure 08 now. Is the cube facing outwards or inwards? Yes, it can be either, but take a closer look at it. Can you see both situations at the same time? Maybe not. Due to the limitation of our attention, we can solely activate one perspective at a moment. Similarly, we may only be in one body at once, either the one being immersed in the narrative with the protagonist’s perspective or the one being faced with the media in the real world. Is there a way to combine these two bodies? I think the book The Neverending Story is an excellent exploration of breaking the boundary. When the readers hold the book, they become the protagonist, also holding the book called The Neverending Story. I will continue to discuss this appealing topic of eliminating the two worlds’ boundaries in the next section. 41

Liptay.

Figure 08 - A cube with two perspectives

Of course, due to the complicatedness of our brain, the process of how people perceive immersion could be far more sophisticated. How will emotions affect immersion? Is distraction a kind of immersion? Under the psychology of immersion, numerous questions still contribute to the process and need to be acknowledged, but I ignored them in this section. Nevertheless, the above aspects that I generally focus on could eventually be a reference for my immersion design practice; for instance, I may try to prioritise the intuitiveness so as to maximise the accessibility of an immersive experience after writing this section.

Regarding digital technologies

I took the VR headset from my tutor and installed it on my head. Four years ago, I was invited to do a VR experiment with my undergraduate tutor. I was standing in front of a giant ball in the virtual environment, where the sun was rising slowly on the boundless horizon; my task was to recognize and describe the ball’s material and features. More importantly, it was technically the first time I had a taste of VR techniques. Unfortunately, I am not a massive fan of it. Maybe it was because of my carsickness; I was a bit dizzy and could not focus well when my view changed following my looking around. Other than the physical reaction, I also felt trapped, uncomfortable and vague: it seemed that my vision, my attention, and my mind was extracted and stolen from my body, and I could not feel myself.

Although I emphasise the accessibility and analogue methods of immersion quite a lot, without question, the emergence and advancement of digital technology are pushing the development of immersive experience design. Thanks to these technologies, artists and digital creators are able to break the limitation of time and space when they create immersive stories. In a project called Meeting You, Kim Jong-woo and his team spent nearly three months scanning the photos and videos to create a digitalised avatar figure of Na-yeon, a

a young girl who died of a mysterious illness. On the reunion day, her mum burst into tears when she finally stepped into the virtual reality world and had the opportunity to sit with her kid and watch her eat the snacks and dishes she wanted to eat if she could recover (Figure 09). All scenarios were then captured and edited as a documentary film, which became a hit after being posted, with more than 19 million views online; some people consider this project touching and meaningful, while others doubt if this is too emotionally manipulative.42 42 ‘“Meeting You” Creator on His Controversial Show: “I Hope It Opens up Dialogue” [VIDEO]’, Koreatimes, 2020 <https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/art/2022/02/688_287372.html>

[accessed 18 February 2022].

Figure 09The production team inserted Na-yeon's favourite dishes, seaweed soup and rice cake, into the story

Although the mother said she was happy and did not feel manipulated, I reckon part of the reason could be the limitation of the current technologies. Her daughter’s avatar was not “real” enough, which could keep her alternative state of the “two bodies” I mentioned before. Hence, the jumping between the artificial world and the natural world will save her consciousness from being manipulated in a way. What if the future technology can be developed well enough to merge the two states completely? Donna Haraway once described the cyborg world as the one with nonlinear processes in A Cyborg Manifesto: gender, race, class, etc. will not be defined definitely, since the category construction is highly complex and nothing should be classified in a simple language, and the boundaries, such as those between human and nonhuman will be broken down.43

I find the depicted world fascinating. Reflecting on myself, although I am a student, I cannot simply label myself as like that since I am also a man, an immersion enthusiast, a football fan… I cannot be trapped in any single boundary, which makes every individual unique. Furthermore, although from a macro view, our skin is a barrier protecting our body and sets the boundary, the bacteria from our body and the environment will still keep exchanging when we are breathing, touching, etc. There should not be an absolute boundary.

Therefore, similarly, the boundary between the immersive world and the real world might be eventually eliminated. Some design responses associating augmented reality, such as Google Glass (Figure 10) which almost provides wearers with a tiny, ubiquitous computer projecting the digital information onto the glasses, seem to be exploring the topic.44 However, in this case, the added layer of the digital world is more likely to assist our perception of the real world instead of creating a new immersive space. What if the technology is developed in a more extreme way, which mostly overwrites people’s actual senses with a perfect artificial world: do we still need the real world in that situation?

43 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century’, in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, ed. by Joel Weiss and others (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2006), pp. 117–58 <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4>.

44 ‘Glass’, Glass <https://www.google.com/glass/start/> [accessed 30 May 2022].

Figure 10 - The Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2

Similar themes have been explored in several film and television works. For example, the famous movie Matrix depicts a future world where humanity is trapped in the machine “Matrix” that simulates reality and enslaves people’s bodies as its energy source.45 Connecting back to the discussion of the Meeting You project, as for an individual, if this Matrix-like technology is applied, emotional manipulation or even mind control might be easily caused since the artificial world is so hard to be distinguished from the real one. Nonetheless, when it comes to the whole society, despite the unethicalness of the machine which is destroying humans, people are provided with a relatively satisfying immersive world, which is accessed by everyone equally. It is such a dystopia that all the people are slaves, but from another perspective, it may also become a utopia for the original lower class due to the fact that everyone is now sensing a newly-formed absolute equal social system.

In the next section, I will continue to respond to this exciting question of merging the two worlds by creating a short fictional story that shares certain immersive features.

45 Lana Wachowski and others, The Matrix (Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, Groucho Film Partnership, 1999).

This is an autofiction story mainly based on a dream of mine. The writing style is primarily inspired by Kate Pullinger’s immersive literary experience Breathe, 46and the inspiration for some settings in the story comes from the film Free Guy.47

I will be acting as the protagonist Bryan from one of the other universes and communicate with you through the file you are reading right now. Following the conversation, you will gradually unveil my life, my confusion, and the dilemma I am faced with; hopefully you can help me out in the end.

I hope to respond to the discussion of the immersive world and the real world raised in the last section by giving such a story, which is also my practical experimentation with immersive narrative.

Note: This story is fictitious, and any similarity is purely coincidental.

46 ‘Breathe’.

47 Shawn Levy and others, Free Guy (20th Century Studios, Berlanti Productions, 21 Laps Entertainment, 2021).

I thought I was dead

Hey! Hey! I’m glad you are there!

Can you hear me?

I’m not quite sure how you found the communication tool in our world – this weird document with a greyish cover you’re looking at right now, but please, keep it safe! Every single word I’ve said will be documented in it, like a live subtitle… and well, yours usually will also be, but it seems the electromagnetic fields in your world are influencing its functionality, and it’s not working for you at the moment…

I know you’re a bit confused… How can I explain it…? It is like… Oh, it is like the recent popular movie in your city, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness!48 I love the name “multiverse”, which is such a nice conclusive word: there are exactly numerous universes existing simultaneously. They might share the same time scale, but the events happening in each may be quite different.

%^&5*$#8>…… Hey…...%$1*(0@...*(^%2_+?*3=!

&*%&*@(J&(UL!(@&>......^*(

48 Sam Raimi, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Marvel Studios, 2022).

Theoretically, every universe is parallel, and it is almost impossible to jump in between and communicate with another world. I did try extremely hard!

This is my last resort, you know… I cannot trust anyone in my world; I have to do it this way, even though it is highly risky…

Anyway, you are the only one who found this document; you must be the chosen one! Will you please stay for a while and listen to me? Please, please… You are my only hope now….

Cool, thanks!

So, something really strange and unbelievable happened to me. I was stabbed yesterday, in a corner, surrounded by concrete walls…

Yes, I was stabbed! I thought I was dead!

He was not tall, and not strong at all; he was wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and a Bluetooth headset on one side, with a wide-edition double-breasted suit on… Sounds like Harry in Kingsman49, right? I thought he’s a gentleman.

49 Matthew Vaughn, Kingsman: The Secret Service (Twentieth Century Fox, Marv Films, Cloudy Productions, 2015).

I didn’t know him, and I didn’t even notice him in the first place. I was just walking along the sidewalk at my usual brisk pace. And then he showed up suddenly: with a switchable sticking out of his sleeve, and came straight at me with a big swing of his hand. I didn’t even have a moment to think. I just slid a step to the right, turned and ran.

I know, it was quite lucky of me not to get killed straight away… I ran for a long time at a loss, deliberately passing through two or three boisterous markets, but still failed to get rid of him…

When I finally came to that factory-like place with the concrete walls, I was too tired to run, half squatting, gasping for breath. I was exhausted. But he did not look tired at all. His glasses were still in place, and his suit was as sharp as ever. He then approached me slowly, and the sound of his leather shoes hitting the concrete was becoming louder and louder. Followed by a stab. I could then feel a hot billowing liquid slowly infiltrating my T-shirt from my abdomen.

It hurt, quite hard. I was even more breathless than before. I had to sit on the floor, and then lie down, clutching my wound. I didn't know how long it would take; although I used all of my strength to get some fresh air, the concrete ceiling around five metres high just slowly blurred in my vision and eventually plunged into darkness…

Normally, people should die in that way, right? If nobody saved you, and all the blood flowed out of your body, you were supposed to die, like to sleep without waking up again, right?

But I, the one who is speaking to you right now, did not… Perhaps it was at the stabbing moment, or probably after I had almost fainted from bleeding when my perspective seemed to be changed… It was like… It was like my mind was being pulled away from my body, almost like having an out-of-body experience. You know some PlayStation games, don’t you? Maybe you have played the Grand Theft

Auto series?50 You can change the protagonist’s perspective, either to be a headup angle of view, similar to the first perspective, or an overhead perspective, like a god’s view, right?

It was almost like being switched from the protagonist’s view to a god’s view at that moment. But it was not entirely true. I was back to my view in the next second. It seemed that I was still me. I tried to stretch my fingers and arms as far as possible to test my new body, and I could still feel it.

No, but I can’t be me, you know… I’m not an idealism believer! My actual body was still on the ground, and I was… I was just the bilocation of myself.

Maybe I’m a ghost? Ah… I don’t know…

50 ‘Grand Theft Auto V - Rockstar Games’ <https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v> [accessed 5 June 2022].

Oh, by the way, I noticed the man had been there quietly, all the time. He had been observing. He looked at me, the one lying on the ground, and looked around. It seemed that he was not surprised at all, mumbled something in his mouth, and turned away expressionlessly, calmly as if he had never murdered anybody, had never seen me and my doppelganger.

No, no, I didn’t speak to him straight away… To be honest, I was too scared and thunderstruck. I was just standing there with my non-working brain. After a long time, when I finally fully recovered and wanted to ask him for an explanation, the man had already disappeared.

I don’t know if you are the same, it is pretty stupid, but so many times, I have imagined what will happen to me after I die. I can feel the fear inside my head that everyone will gradually forget me as if I have never been born. I also try to feel the nothingness brought by one closing eye with the other open and compare it to the sight after death. Sometimes I even think I’m going to turn into a tiny bug after my life cycle, and I will feel powerless when I fly around my girlfriend, but she cannot recognise me…

None of them matched, you know, none of them! The situation I’m facing now is wholly different, indescribably strange. What had happened was totally beyond my comprehension, completely, and thoroughly.

Am I dead or not? I can’t help repeating this question all day…

Oh sorry, I forgot to introduce myself.

My name is Bryan. I’m 23.

I’m a native of Guangzhou City, and I’m an art student at the moment, but I’m actually not romantic at all. Please don’t blame me for it, I actually have a sense of ritual and romanticness in my heart, but sometimes my actions just are not keeping up with my mind…

Likewise, this time, I didn’t care too much about my body in that corner and didn’t even say goodbye to myself. After panicking for quite a while and finally finding the man had left, I actually felt quite relieved. I just enjoyed the freshness of this… Rebirth. I took the things in my pockets back, walked lightly, whistled and left that factory building.

What happened next? Well, I had no idea where I could go at that time. My mind was so empty. I just suddenly felt homesick. I never missed my mum as much as I did when I walked out of that building.

91 … …

But… I didn’t know how I should explain everything to her, you know… If I say something like, “hey mum, your son has been dead, but not entirely. Look at me, I’m the soul out of his body!” She must think I’m talking shit…

Wow, this is almost like a story for a movie, right? Frankly, I have read so many fictional books with similar plots, and those scenarios have flashed back in my mind countless times when I’m bored. But now, when it really happened to me, I started to feel overwhelmed…

Okay, okay, finally, I still decided to go home. I came to the side of the road and tried to wave for a taxi, but it seemed that the whole street was extra crowded and noisy yesterday, and the cars just roared and galloped past me without answering, perhaps because it was at peak hours…

I had to walk.

At the moment the door was opened, my mum was like… Super stunned. I noticed her eyes were red and swollen as if she had cried a lot not long ago…

My gut was telling me that my mum had already known my death, and that’s what made her cry. But I still asked her,

Normally, my mum is super tough though she is small in build. She has been a senior high school teacher for almost 25 years. Honestly, the school she is in is not that good… Some of the students there are quite rude, in bad manners, and speak mean languages. I don’t like them at all. Even so, all of them in mum’s class

“Why? Did you just cry?”

were able to pass the university-entry exams thanks to her… Also, she only shares good news rather than bad, and never spreads negative emotions at home even if something goes entirely wrong; it seems like there’s a black hole in her body that sucks all the pessimism for her.

I have been in a relationship with my girlfriend for nearly 10 years. I never told anything about that to my mum and thought I was hiding it so well… It was not until last year that I realised that my mum actually knows every single detail, maybe from my social media or something, but she just doesn’t talk about it…

Oh, my girlfriend… I miss her too. We were in the same class in junior high school… It was exactly 10 years ago. Yes, I fell in love with her at first glance, and we’ve been in a relationship since then. She is so good, you know, so good. Kindest, wisest, most graceful and gorgeous… But it was such a pity that my school was a traditional one, and no one was allowed to have a close relationship with each other. Also, her dad is a professor, and my mum is a teacher… Kind of also traditional family background. So, we had to hide it, and pretend we’ve never been together. So tough…

Well, sorry for digressing… my point is, it is very unusual to see my mum cry that bad, you know… That’s why I reckoned she had already known something at that time.

As predicted, “No,” she said, “Remember to text me if you come back that late next time.”

“Cool.” I hugged her gently and went back to my bedroom, swallowing the words about my rebirth that I was about to say.

I still felt a bit strange and confused… I don’t know. Maybe it was curiosity about how my mum would know about my death. Anyway, when she was taking a shower, I went to her bedroom and finally found this file…

It is almost like a… Microsoft Word document there? But plus, it has a chatting function, I guess.

It was the first time I had used this kind of communication tool. It is pretty weird, right? Everyone prefers to use their mobile phones, and the voice-to-text function is already quite developed… Why will JUL Tech design it in this way? It is so old-fashioned and useless, isn’t it?

Yes, the document you are looking at right now.

Oh, JUL Tech is the most famous technology company here, almost like Meta in your world.

I spent a whole night trying this out and finally cracked the first layer of the passcode. Then some information was revealed. Maybe you cannot see it, but my death report was exactly shown there! No wonder my mum will know it! But it makes absolutely no sense because the date written on it is 6th June 2021. I was already killed last year! How is that possible?!

And then now, it requires the second password, which is much harder to decode. But I found a shortcut incidentally. When I tried to push the document to another dimension, or say, another universe, it would cause an instability. It is quite likely that the receiver from other universes will see this passcode right after they try to build the connection…

That’s how and why I reached you!

Please go back to the place where we started this conversation! Perhaps you will find a password with 6 digits… Please help me to find out the truth!

Have you found it?

Six numbers?

5…8…1…0…2…3…

Yes! It works!

What? What does it mean by “Subject NO.001”? Am I… Am I in their experiment?

Hey professor! Here he is! The signal is strong!

How is it possible? Does it happen again? Jack promised me he had taken him down!

I have told you! You need to update Jack! It is full of bugs!

%^#*)(>@_++>… I think…&**(@ …

Shut up!

Have I warned you not to kill Bryan in the first place? The beta version you developed is just a piece of shit!

At least my beta version enables him to self-develop… It is a valuable test!

But we can’t really see him, professor…

According to the signal strength, you idiot! Even Jack is smarter than you!

NOOOOO!

Please don’t! You evil JUL…

…

God, finally… How did he manage to break the boundary and jump to another universe? That’s actually impossible.

I told you he can do self-development…

Who is he talking to?

That’s so weird… Only his words are recorded. Seems that he’s talking to himself…

Shut your mouths, you two! Damn… we have to take him back! Quickly!

Impressive…

Thanks for your reading till here! Hope you enjoy it!

Maybe you have already noticed that the real Bryan was killed last year, and the Bryan who keeps talking is an avatar in the digital world. To explore how people can live in another world after they die, JUL Tech has been secretly experimenting in an extreme way.

Bryan is their first subject. After he died, his digital avatar was derived immediately, thanks to the beta version. However, due to the unstableness and overpowerful program that enables avatars to self-develop, JUL Tech can hardly control the digital Bryan and had to send another digital killer Jack to erase Bryan…

There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, and I will leave the rest implicit. Thanks again!

100

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Oh, immersion. What a big word. Take a breath, and feel inwards. Is it that big?

No, you need no help. It’s a conversation, a journey with self.

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See ya.

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