PEMcast 10: Immersive Part 1

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Chip Van Dyke: Welcome to the "PEMcast," conversations and stories for the culturally curious. From the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, I'm Chip Van Dyke.

Dinah Cardin: I'm Dinah Cardin. Today, we bring you the first in a series of episodes on the theme, immersive environments.

Chip: You may already know the term immersive environment can be used to describe a lot of things.

Dinah: Virtual reality, soundscapes, site-specific theater.

Chip: Put simply, an immersive environment surrounds you and transports you, or maybe even grounds you in a story or a place.

Dinah: Here at PEM, multisensory engagement is used in many ways, including the design of our exhibitions.

Chip: For example, PEM recently used the smell of spices and sounds from a 17th century Dutch marketplace to introduce people to an exhibition called Asia in Amsterdam, all about the influence of Asia in Dutch culture.

Dinah: What other kinds of experiences are immersive? Today, we'll try to answer that question with a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department.

Chip: As well as two people who work in immersive art environments.

Dinah: We'll hear from an arts reporter at the "LA Times," who talked to me the other day about the art buzzword of 2016.

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Chip: Was it immersive?

Dinah: It was immersive.

Deborah Vankin: The word immersive is now rippling across all genres of arts. I feel like I saw that word more than any other at the top of my email box for the entire year.

I was getting emails for immersive art experiences, for site-specific immersive dance performances, even one underwater immersive sculptural installation. We decided to make it the buzzword of 2016. My name's Deborah Vankin, and I'm an arts and culture reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

I talked to about two dozen people for my article, about a dozen of them made it in there. For example, one person I talked to, Cesar Garcia, who runs something called The Mistake Room in LA art gallery, he talked about industrialization.

We came out of this period of industrialization with the invention of the washing machine, packaged conveniences, and how technology could improve your life, but as we started to see the dehumanizing aspects of technology, there's been some pushback.

Now we crave things that are maybe more basic. We want to grow our own food. We want to know where our food comes from, and as part of that, in our art, we also want something that's more basic and real and in the moment.

A lot of people said that it's a response to this increasingly digital-saturated culture that we live in now, where we are looking at screens all the time, and we're living in a somewhat more removed society in that sense.

Immersive art experiences, theater experiences, and scientific performance create a sense of intimacy and a sense of unexpectedness, a sense of interactivity.

People are really craving an authentic in-person, more direct, more engaged experience in their arts.

Matthew Peterson: I'm Matthew Peterson. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in Nancy Kanwisher's Lab here at MIT, in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department.

We're interested in the organizational architecture of the brain, basically how does the brain organize the information about the world that we get through our sensory inputs, like our eyes and our ears, and then how does it use that information to make decisions about the world, especially in the visual centers of the brain.

You see that the brain is doing a lot of processing on the light that falls at the very center of our vision. Directly in the center of your vision's a small little region that we call the fovea.

At the fovea, we have an extremely high density of photo receptors, so you get fine-grain detail. The brain allocates a lot of neurons, just a ton of resources to processing that information. You actually see an overrepresentation with that small part of the visual field in the brain's computational architecture.

If you have a very small, for instance, piece of art, you're really only engaging that central field of view. As soon as you get to a more immersive environment, all of a sudden your brain has to do all the things that it normally does in the real world.

Debra Kerr: One of the maps has a series of islands, and on the islands are these dozens and dozens of these little white rectangles. As you read his caption that he's written on the map, he explains that those are where the prisons are that hold the child slaves.

Melissa Woods: Here we are in the Darger Room. Would you mind introducing yourself?

Debra: I'm Debra Kerr. I'm executive director at Intuit -- The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. We have the Henry Darger Room as part of our overall museum experience.

Here's a very dramatic scene where the Vivian Girls are hiding from the evil Glandolineans, and they've rolled themselves up in rugs. They do actually get discovered, but there's the preliminary scene where they're trying to hide.

A lot of people ask me is all of this stuff in here really from Darger's room? Because we have a fireplace. In the front of the fireplace, we have a phonograph, we have old chairs. We have all these newspapers tied up together. An old clothes hamper full of balls of twine. Yes, everything here is from Henry's room.

These cracked paints. He mixed up his own tempera paints and poured them into these bottle caps and let them dry. You can see he's got these handwritten labels stuck to the top of them, cadmium red. You just feel when you come into this space that Henry can walk in at any time.

He's documented all of this. Look at these different flags. This one looks like an American flag, but it has Jesus appearing in the field of stars.

Chicago was such a fertile ground for outsider art. This was a genre that was early, respected, and treasured here. People like Lee Godie, and Joseph Yoakum, and Mr. Imagination, Vivian Maier. The list goes on and on. The granddaddy of them all is Henry Darger.

As a young child in the early 19 aughts, he was sent to a facility that at the time was called the Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children. Our art is made by people who are in a variety of physical and developmental circumstances, people who have been the victims of violence or abuse. Henry is probably one of those.

It's Henry Darger's 125th birthday, and we're hoping that even more people come to stand in this room, stand on this creaky floor with a fireplace, and the Victrola, and the old typewriter on which he wrote "In the Realms of the Unreal." It's not a fancy space. It's a weird, funky, little space.

Melissa: Don't you feel that Henry's here?

Debra: Absolutely.

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Melissa: I mentioned that on our campus over at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, we have a Qing dynasty house that was actually imported from an area outside Shanghai and was lived in for over 300 years as a multifamily building. It's got two stories. The moment you walk in, even though you know you're in Massachusetts and you're surrounded by all of this Salem stuff, it starts to even smell like China.

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Dr. Daisy Yiyou Wang: This house is primarily made of timbers, Cryptomeria, a kind of pine, as well as Canberra wood, particularly when it's a rainy day. I think that scent became more pronounced.

My name is Daisy Yiyou Wang, or Wang Yiyou. I am the curator of Chinese and East Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum, located in Salem, Massachusetts. This is a two-story, traditional hui-style, Chinese building. This is the only intact example of this type of architecture in the United States.

16 bedrooms. Each floor there are eight bedrooms. Unlike Western houses, there is no areas as dining room. Many spaces are versatile. For example, the place where we standing, people can do ancestral worship rituals. This is also the place women can chop vegetables and they can chat, kids running around.

You will ask, "Oh, why 16 bedrooms?" Because you can have three generations of the family members living on the same roof. You will live together with your aunt, with your cousins. Sometimes the house can host up to 20, 30 people under the same roof.

In front of us is a bathtub-like wooden barrel. It has two seating areas and there's also a metal grid. Beneath that is a metal basin with charcoal. This is a warm seat. Two people can come in the same time and put their feet in the opening on top of the grid, and then can grill themselves.

The house originally was located in a mountainous area. It is very, very cold in winter. The temperature itself is not that low, sometimes can go down to the 30s or 20s, but it's very humid. The humidity really kills me. I was there in 2013. I was really bundled up just like today, and I could barely warm myself up after walking around for 2 hours in the village.

Most people would think museums always create a space and you suspend your, whatever, disbelief. Here, what we are trying to do is really to make this place a authentic experience for people on many levels.

This house is so powerful because, unlike many museum exhibitions, when you came here, you don't actually need a lot of didactic panels or help. It has very strong transporting power. It's immersive.

[non-English speech] in Chinese. I welcome everybody to come and visit, and enjoy the house.

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Deborah: Technology's role in the rise of this trend is really interesting because it's two-fold. On the one hand, it's a response to our feeling sick of or saturated with digital culture. We want something authentic and in the moment.

On the other hand, immersive environments play really well online. Like Random International's Rain Room, which was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, became a big selfie draw. You would see people's pictures in this immersive rain environment flooding Facebook.

Also, as technology develops and improves, there are more ways to have immersive environments. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, for example, is going to be launching an underwater virtual reality experience that's a tour of ocean habitats. That's something that couldn't happen 10 years ago.

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Matthew: When I see somebody way down the hallway versus closer to me, I know, my brain knows, that they're both people and they're within some range of sizes, and automatically normalizes it to say, "This person is the same size as that person," for instance. Even though visually, the actual image that's landing on your eye is very different. The person closer to you is much larger.

We call these statistical regularities of the world. The sky is always up above, things like this that we see everywhere in the world. Our brain, through massive experience, is almost forced into perceiving the world in that specific way.

What is awesome about that, I think, at least when it comes to art, is that you can play off of these things and say, "What if we made worlds, for instance, that do not obey these statistical regularities?" Then, "What can actually happen there?"

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Deborah: One of my favorite immersive experiences of last year was the experimental opera director, Yuval Sharon, created a immersive, site-specific sculptural art installation that kicked off with also a performance inside the lobby of Disney Hall.

They had a band of stoic performers, in these sky blue bowling hats and cloud print ties, just riding up and down the escalators, chanting, underneath these giant sculptural clouds. The clouds leaked choral music, showered choral music on the crowd. No explanation and no show program and no start time, it just happened over the course of the afternoon.

The public streamed in and out of Disney Hall, and they became part of the performance, which was all around them as they rode up and down the escalator, somewhat quizzically some of them, some of them fascinated, some of them annoyed. It was really interesting to watch this unfold and how the public reacted. It was also quite beautiful.

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Chip: That's our show for today. Thanks for listening.

Dinah: Thanks to Deborah Vankin of the LA Times for talking to us, as well as Matthew Peterson from MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, and to Debra Kerr, executive director of Intuit -- The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago.

Chip: Thanks to our very own curator of Chinese and East Asian art, Daisy Wang.

You can find more content related to this episode on our blog, connected.pem.org.

Dinah: Tune in to our next episode as we continue to explore how immersive environments create empathy and deepen understanding.

Chip: Music for this episode was composed by Forrest James.

Dinah: You can hear more ambient, electronica, chillwave, and experimental dub from Forrest James at forrestjamesmusic.com.

Chip: You can hear the PEMcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts. Producers for this episode are Whitney Van Dyke, Karen Bain, Melissa Woods, Dinah Cardin, and me, Chip Van Dyke. Corbett Sparks is our audio engineer.

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