Turbulence: jamais vu

Close your eyes and think about the space around you. Does it all feel stable, and solid, and still? XR artist Ben Joseph Andrews lives with a chronic condition called vestibular migraine that affects his perception of motion and balance. The first warning of an attack is a sense of derealisation, a strange lapse in reality. In this MR work, you see your body as an avatar— one that moves when you do, yet feels mysteriously disconnected. Seated at a desk, you are guided to complete a series of everyday tasks that would normally be performed unconsciously. The more time passes, the more your perception becomes elastic and unreliable. And while you know that that beyond the screen is a world that is stable and solid... you must first confront the unsettling reality that the familiar can easily become something different.

I’ve lived with vestibular migraine for much of my adult life, and for most of that time I saw it as a barrier to creativity rather than a source of it. But recently I’ve realised that while there is pain, there is also beauty. I can shapeshift, the boundaries of my senses stretching into the distance and incorporating the rhythms of human and non- human forces. Turbulence attempts to reframe vestibular migraine as a mode of expanded perception, where boundaries between self/other, living/non-living, are porous. XR is the perfect medium: an intervention in reality that
is uniquely vestibular but which—just like my brain— can glitch into weird new ways of being-in-the-world. Normally we avoid these slippages of embodiment, but they’ve always been one of the most interesting parts of VR to me, perhaps because they’re the closest I get to describing what vestibular migraine feels like. This project is an intervention in the way we understand our brains, asking us to critically think about the structure of reality. Perhaps this condition aligns us with something more essential... that even reality itself is ever-moving, ever-changing, ever- becoming.

Ben Joseph Andrews

PRODUCTION: Pernickety Split - Emma Roberts, Ben Andrews
PO Box 298 Flinders Lane
8009, Melbourne, Australia
Tel. 33 744239812
petrichorvr@gmail.com

WORLD SALES/PRESS OFFICE: Emma Roberts
Pernickety Split
PO Box 298 Flinders Lane
8009, Melbourne, Australia
Tel. 33 744239812
petrichorvr@gmail.com