1 www.verbierartsummit.org 3 Interview Douglas Coupland 2 VR, the Hottest Medium — Daniel Birnbaum talks to Douglas Coupland This interview was conducted on 19 January 2018 during the Verbier Art Summit and was first published in More than Real : Art in the Digital Age by Koenig Books. The Verbier Art Summit1 is an international art platformthat fosters innovation and change. The next Verbier Art Summit will take place in Verbier from 31 January to 1 February 2020 in partnership with Jessica Morgan, Nathalie de Gunzburg director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. DB This conference is not only about virtual reality (VR). There are many kinds of new technologies that are based on new digital possibilities —augmented reality, mixed reality, new kinds of holograms, maybe. Do you think virtual reality will radically change our lives ? DC Yes–and an unqualified « yes » ! I think anything that allows you to escape from yourself, whether it’s drugs or alcohol or opiates or broadcast television, we’re always going to want that. Let me tell you about the first experience I had with virtual reality. It was in my living room in Vancouver, where I live, and we had some good friends over, and it was this beautiful July afternoon, and the light was coming through the leaves on the tree… It was just a gorgeous, perfect, perfect day in my favourite room on Earth, and there was this friend that works at Mozilla down in the Bay Area, and he broughtup the most recent version of Oculus, and I’d never used one before, and so I put it on, and suddenly I was floating above a purple swamp in Louisiana, and there were lights off in the distance–so I chased the lights like that [slightly rocking from side to side in his chair] —a very, very simple experience, and then, « Let’s do another. » It was asteroid mining on Jupiter or Saturn or something, except you could only look. You couldn’t really put your hands in or do anything— so, altogether it was maybe three and a half minutes, and then I took the goggles off and I looked at the real world and I thought, « What a dump this place is ! ». And I realised, « Oh, my God ! This thing is going to win ; there’s no way it cannot win. » The only caveat of VR experience is that if you stop suddenly or if you cut scenes, then it really affects your vestibular system and you feel seasick or you will puke–but there’s also this thing called « VR sadness » which is what I experienced. People put these things on and they come out, and they never quite return to the full world, and a part of them is invested in this machine. DB So it’s an escapist kind of technology. It will help us like drugs or alcohol. Is it a negative thing, you think ? DC Well, it’s going to happen. I mean, VR is this asteroid that’s going to hit the planet, apparently, in 2023. I mean, if I really had my act together, I’d be out there making a VR slasher movie or VR pornography or VR gaming or something. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a first VR porno, there’s going to be a first VR slasher film. So what are you going to do ? You can’t fight it. You try to understand it. Have you tried it yet ? DB I have tried it a little bit. DC What was your experience ? DM Yup. I was similarly… Not shocked. That’s not the right word, and I didn’t see wonderful things, but I looked at it at the Warner Brothers studio in London. DC Like cartoons ? DB They were cartoons, but I don’t really know what they were. I think Disney Productions or something, but it was, you know, you turn around and there’s a very large gorilla there, but like really large, and there’s a snake which is that close, and it’s super-naturalistic. And these are, I presume, children productions–so, what is going to happen to children ? ! If you growup with that as a normal kind of entertainment, not a little cartoon or a little book or something that we grewup with, but with hyper-realistic jungle scenes with crazy mega-gorillas one millimetre away from you, you will growup with a strange kind of understanding of what’s normal. DC Oh, you would, wouldn’t you ? I was saying yesterday that in the 1960s, when hippies just suddenly appeared on the scene around’65, everyone was like, « Who are these people ? Where do they come from ? », and we realised they came from television, and now we have millennials, and they’re coming out of the early Internet era, and then you are going to have these next post-millennials (maybe one and a half |