Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
get outta my head
You can now walk around someone's mind with an Xbox controller
Turns out actually getting inside someone else’s head is a bit weird
WE’VE ALL BEEN there, someone does something we can’t for the life of us get our head around.
“I’d love to know what’s going on in his/her head,” you’d say.
Well, for friends and acquaintances of Honk Kong artist Alan Kwan that dream is now a reality. Oh, and for us too.
Kwan’s virtual reality project ‘Bad Trip’ is on display at Science Gallery Dublin’s lifelogging exhibit which kicked off yesterday.
He has spent the last four years, ten hours a day, mapping his mind by recording activity via a camera mounted on his glasses.
He then uploads the memories into the Bad Trip virtual reality engine which he designed.
You enter a darkened room where the ‘game’ itself is playing on a giant screen with suitably creepy ambient noises coming from all sides.
Once you log on using the Xbox controller provided you can wander sandpit-style around a black-and-white appropriation of the artist’s mind.
Scattered around the landscape are various houses that Kwan has designed, and inside you’ll find ‘memory blocks’. Walk into those and you plunge into a colour kaleidoscope of various memories Kwan has experienced.
There are snippets of conversation and images of people’s faces (though it can be hard to distinguish specific people) and it’s all a little disconcerting to say the least.
Well worth a try though. There are lots of different houses spread around the landscape although TheJournal.ie only managed to access one.
Not for the want of trying mind you, we spent a good four minutes trying to cross a staircase between mountains only to fall off. Pity, the house in the clouds looked very cool.
Oh, and there’s also this. Sitting outside a house, half buried in the ground, minding his own business.
https://vine.co/v/OPAzjgiVlLl
The stuff of nightmares.
have your say