The Overview Installation is an out-of-body experience, achieved through the dislocation of perception when the user sees himself or herself from a third-person perspective using a head mounted display and CCTV. This experience disorientates the user from his or her ‘normal’ mode of perception, presenting to the user the possibility to rethink basic and habitual activities such as the way he or she navigates space in relation to his or her vision with a new sense of self awareness.

Two users meeting in the third-person with the mobile device to show what they are seeing

The installation opens the user’s mind to an alternate reality by altering the user’s primary sense, the sight. This alternate reality that users experience feel ‘unreal’ because it is outside of their comfort and sensory zone, and they do not know if they can trust what they see at first. This temporary distrust of their senses is termed the “Unreal Reality”.

With this alternate way of seeing, the user can then reprogram his or her brain functions in terms of the instructions sent to the body. The mind is forced to start afresh, a tabula rasa, and re-experience learning to navigate with the body.

There are some experiences which the human mind cannot imagine until experienced, for instance, seeing a new colour or to be out of one’s body. Although the Overview Installation does not literally take one out of his or her body, it simulates it. Almost all test subjects reported that they indeed felt the out-of-body experience, or an experience that satisfied their expectations of the out-of-body.

How it works: The user puts on a pair of video goggles. Through these goggles he will see a live video feed of himself from a CCTV camera in the corner of the room. The view switches automatically every 20 seconds between 6 cameras planted around the room. The user navigates the area in this vision and is encouraged to contemplate a new found sense of perception. The user will be directed back to the designated space if he or she walks out of the camera field of vision.

[Optional:] A second user can join in by wearing a second pair of video goggles. The two users may then interact with each other in various ways through games such as tag, or they could communicate with each other through speech. Having a second user or player join in the space greatly elevates the experience.

THE UNREAL REALITY: “EUGENE’S CAVE”

What is your reality? Simply put, your reality is the sensory signals to your brain which includes the signals sent from the eyes and ears. These signals are your only input channel from the known universe.

Original illustration of Eugene’s Cave

Think of yourself as your consciousness, trapped inside a cave which is your body. Your body is not you; but a vessel that you happen to control. Your sensory organs are like tiny holes at the top of this cave that let you peek out into the world. These holes are your sensory zone. The walls of the cave represent the sensations that we cannot sense with our bodies, e.g. infra-red light, ultra sound, radio waves or even dark matter, but we know they exist because of invented tools that indicate their existence. These human-invented tools produce output within our sensory zone, like a radio converting radio waves into audible sound.

Hence, altering your senses is comparable to altering your reality. This is where the unreal comes in: we have lived our entire lives inside these caves of a body that, to quote the Chinese saying, we have become like a frog living in a well – one that has lived its entire life gazing at a portion of a sky out of the top of the well and never knowing the true vastness of the sky. If the same frog were to step out of that well, the vast sky would look “unreal” to it, and it would temporarily distrust what it is seeing. In this case, the vast sky becomes the frog’s unreal reality. Therefore, if the walls of our cave were to crumble and our conscience is exposed to the true vastness of the universe, we will be just as overwhelmed as the frog coming out of the well and seeing the skies for the very first time.

There are ways to widen these holes in our cave, such as by enhancing our senses through the use of the drug Mescaline. Aldous Huxley describes the effects of the drug in his book, The Doors of Perception, where the author mentions his vision being enhanced temporarily (Aldous, 1954).

Users of the Overview Installation experience the “Unreal Reality” when their primary avenue to reality (the sense of sight) is altered, rendering what they see unreal-looking. In a sense, the Overview Installation simulates the closing of one hole in the cave and opening it at a different location on the cave. The minds of the users would be forced to re-learn basic things because their reality is suddenly changed and seems unreal. Their minds do not know if these new found visions could be trusted, and they start from a blank slate, a tabula rasa.