Seeing, feeling, acting. More and more XR projects are beginning to include bodily and tactile perception among their expressive possibilities. The mature choice in Mirage – to pair the OWO haptic vest with non-realistic graphics – shifts the viewer’s attention toward physical sensations. It’s an intriguing expressive device, here employed to tell the story of a young girl suffering from anxiety disorders. The spectator hears her story through a voice-over narration and witnesses the situations that trigger in the protagonist overwhelming, dizzying states of mind, all sensorially amplified along the chest by the technological vest. A piece of gaming-derived technology, here used to place the viewer quite literally in the protagonist’s shoes, the haptic vest becomes the keystone for understanding the narrative structure of the work. Because Mirage, despite its title, does not aspire to be a primarily visual or immersive experience: it seeks contact. No easy feat, to reconcile this expressive need with the many possibilities offered by technology. The narrative framework casts the viewer as a close witness to a story they cannot, in fact, alter. The mirage lies in the illusion of being able to act – to reach out a hand to the despairing girl – while being unable to do so. For anxiety takes shape in the voluntary exclusion of the outside world, perceived as threatening, and XR, with its exclusive and escapist potential, becomes a perfect metaphor for this condition. The object of our empathy – physically accompanied by tangible sensations – remains unreachable, even in the final embrace that is asked of us, an embrace that does not return us to our physical presence but instead to our absence, to our failing.
MIRAGE
by Naima Karim, Aleena Hanif (Arabia Saudita, Paesi Bassi, 8’)
COMPETITION
