‘Machine to Be Another’

Can a virtual reality help to develop feelings of empathy? Innervated by this question, the artist collective ‘Be another Lab’ developed an experimental series that enables you to immersively slip into an alien body.

The performative installation ‘Gender Swap’ combined two immersive first-person cameras and head-mounted Oculus Rift glasses with one displaying the visual image that the other is recording – and vice versa. Each participant, ideally one male and one female, could enter the feeling of being in the others body. Cautiously and almost unknowingly, participants started the coordination of their movements. An embodied sensation of physical presence is connected to the virtual image of the other body and the participants were allured to investigate the other body as if it was their own.

Challenging the myth that virtuality comes exclusively together with disembodiment, VR setups such as ‘Machine to Be Another’ give us an opportunity to question the boundaries between two people and to see and feel the world as someone else. ‘Machine to Be Another’ is an Open Source Art investigation on the relation of Identity and Empathy that has been developed on a basis of low budget experiments of Embodiment and Virtual Body Extension.

Designed as an interactive performance installation, the ‘Machine’ offers users the possibility of interacting with a piece of another person’s life story by seeing themselves in the body of this person and listening to his/her thoughts inside their mind.

The performer is someone interested in sharing a story about his/her existence. This role can be assumed by an actor interpreting a real situation, or rather it may be taken by any person (e.g. from the public) who is interested in sharing some episode about his or her life. In any case, the stories that are told by the performer will be experienced by another person, say the user.

Interview with the artists

With ‘The Machine to Be Another’, Philippe Bertrand, Daniel Gonzalez-Franco (ES), Arthur Pointeau (FR), Christian Cherene (FR), Marte Roel (MX) created a simple tool that can be applied in a variety of experimental situations. Together with partner institutions, they invented several different setups representing social scenarios that are demanding for an increasing empathy.

Complementary workshop
‘Empathetic Technology Design’

As part of NODE15’s educational platform, the artists introduced and demonstrated the technological aspects behind their work.

As the project is realized open source, workshop participants learnt how to implement and adapt this empathetic technology concept for their own scenarios.

About the artists

BeAnotherLab Collective

themachinetobeanother.org

BeAnotherLab is a transnational and interdisciplinary research collective dedicated to developing empathic technology and methodologies. The Machine To Be Another is an open-source interactive system designed to explore the relationship between identity and empathy through interdisciplinary performance-experiments drawing from neuroscience, VR, storytelling and performance art. For three years BeAnotherLab have been working with an extended community of researchers, artists, activists and members of the public to create performance-experiments related to the understanding of the other and the self. Exploring issues such as mutual respect, immigration and physical disability bias, gender identity, conflict resolution, body extension and embodied dance performances.