The world comes alive when we invest it with something of our inner selves. . . To achieve this we require the temporary protection of a frame. . . To preserve a space in which our imagination can operate on the world… Marion Milner.
The world comes alive is an experience of being, presented as a series of visually stunning vignettes for Virtual Reality. Inspired by the writer and psychoanalyst, Marion Milner (1900-98), as well as by theories of Object Relations in psychoanalysis. Conceived in the spirit of Milner’s autobiographical writings, which offer techniques for overcoming the barriers to being present in our own experience, World Comes Alive is both an aesthetic experience and a practical aide to working with embodied experience: a means to investigate how we might locate ourselves in a world that can sometimes seem implacably dead to us.
Rather than a representation of the world itself, World Comes Alive offers a frame or ‘potential space’: a setting in which our imagination can operate on the world.
An experiment in navigating and adjusting to world transitions and fresh experiences, it immerses us in the flux and flow of the world and its changing affordances. From within the VR ‘frame’, we may attend to how we feel in the midst of change, loss or expectation; or we may reflect on how and why we react in particular ways when we find ourselves in environments that by turn interest, disappoint, excite or threaten our sense of self.
World Comes Alive is in this respect an aesthetic aide in the unending process of self-transformation or going-on-living. It invites us to attune to embodied perception – to what Milner called the “special internal gesture” that enables direct and authentic engagement, avoiding the “blind thinking” or intellectual habit that defensively filters or prejudges experience before it comes to us. There is no verbal instruction or interpretation within the VR experience; however, it may be used in conjunction with reflective activities or the kind of purposeful journalling that Milner develops in her book, A Life of One’s Own (1934; Routledge, 2011).
Often, Milner observes, we watch events from a distance as spectators struggling to make ourselves part of what is happening. A Life of One’s Own details the “tricks” she devises to place herself close to things: close to the music in a concert that might otherwise seem impenetrable; close to a painting that we’re “supposed to like” but don’t know how; or close to a flock of gulls that might otherwise be too boring to merit attention. World Comes Alive is itself such a “trick”, VR being an immersive medium that closes the gap between spectator and spectacle. It is inherently experiential, inviting us to work with and from experience as free-floating anxiety reemerges in virtual space.
