The Things We Carry Carry Us is an interactive virtual reality installation about scars and the stories of their origin. The project deals with questions of personal and collective memory, digital preservation, inscription and indexicality. It sees the body as an archive whose epidural markings are both permanent and transient, depending on the time scale considered.
According to the word’s etymology, scar once meant “fragment.” The Things We Carry Carry Us is concerned with the fragmentary in several dimensions. Scars are permanent records of fragments of time, turning points in lives, perhaps. Likewise, memories are fragments that get put back together every time they are accessed and retold anew, very much the way the stories here are shared and accessed. Finally, this project draws on the logics of computing and institutional medicine, both of which treat the body as a collection of faceless fragments. In that sense, it is both a critique and an appropriation.
The scars in this VR environment are 3D models made from a series of photographs taken with a macro-lens—a practice called photogrammetry. Participants who had their scars photographed and shared their stories described the process as a cathartic, performative process. And among the people I’ve spoken to, I’ve been continuously surprised by and grateful for their immediate interest to share such intimate details about themselves.
Virtual reality serves as a visual, navigable digital memory machine. Discussed in the popular press as an “empathy machine,” this project reminds us of a haptic disconnect—here, you do not feel pain, even as you traverse the evidence of it. The uncanny both pulls you in and distances you, you hear familiar-sounding stories but the experience is wholly defamiliarizing.
Exhibited at Print Screen Festival, Tel Aviv in 2016, Tisch-ITP Spring Show in 2015, and Dutch VR Days, Amsterdam in 2015.