INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST

This interview with Shaun Gladwell and Stefan Greuter, professor of interaction design and director of the Deakin Motion Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, was conducted by Eileen Lu, a Columbia DSL student at Columbia University School of the Arts. It has been edited for clarity. 

Q: Could you tell us how Passing Electrical Storms came to be? What inspired you and got you started on it?

Shaun: How we start and end and start again as individuals, anthropocentrically — as a species and as part of the kingdom of life in this vast universe — was the initial inspiration for this project. I have always researched and worked with the primary functions of art as a form of communication, speculation and meditation that reaches across time and often beyond the life time of its creators. The project engaged the universal themes of art quite literally here! I was also interested in an art experience offered via digital immersive media and haptics that meditated on both physics and metaphysics. Passing Electrical Storms was the latest and most ambitious effort to engage concepts of life, morality, impermanence and the scale of the individual in relation to the known universe.

The project could be seen as a response to the famous quote from Hippocrates: “Ars longa, vita brevis” — “Art is long, life is short.” I attempted to do this via the art traditions of vanitas and memento mori. I was also interested in people having a simulated out-of-body / near-death experience in relation to concepts of the sublime and the ineffable. These themes are universal, but on a personal level I imagined and formulated the project whilst my brother’s health was in a critical state — he was morbidly ill and passed away during the making of this work. My brother Scott was the beautiful and magnificent electrical storm I saw pass as an individual into the universe when making this work, and this is very much why I made it with Stefan and the awesome crew we had—but I have not been public about this personal aspect of the project until now.

Q: What was the goal you hoped to accomplish with it?

Shaun: It was both a process of grieving and celebrating life whilst conducting an experiment into telling the story of an immense paradox — of a great mystery that follows one of the most concrete of facts — death. I aimed to ask this question by engaging the most prodigious team — Stephan and the DML — in order to harness the most powerful and available immersive technology, medical instrumentation, and electronics to articulate recent scientific knowledge on the body and the universe whilst simulating a heart attack. All this aimed to perform a death reckoning. Ultimately, the aim was for this death reckoning to be life-affirming — a meditation on the transient beauty and preciousness of our lives.

In an update on the traditions of vanitas and memento mori, I wanted to offer these experiences as personal to each participant. Amplifying the pulse through the body was aimed to achieve an anchoring system, not only to reinforce the visual and aural components but to effectively tether the life force of the body into the journey of its end transformation. These separate components were choreographed to seamlessly merge into an overall and total experience. This was my humble attempt at updating the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk via digital media and electronics such as medical monitoring equipment, haptics etc. As an opera of our transient and transforming existence, Passing Electrical Storms tells the oldest of stories, which is also the greatest mystery, through the latest technology. But it was important to put every participant into the experience as if they were seeing themselves in a mirror — experiencing it themselves.

Q: What were you surprised to learn as you were developing it?

Shaun: I was astounded by the power of the body to provide the most effective narrative beats to its own existence and non-existence via its own pulse. To tether vital signals to an immersive space is to break the concept of stimulation with the actual — to bring yourself into that world and for the world to extend out into reality, effectively becoming the same thing. I was also surprised by art itself in many ways. Even at its most experimental, art has the potential to bring people together as a kind of music. I began to discover that art can do this in a way that other cohesive and coercive systems (political, scientific, social, and those of belief) can’t do, or can’t do as well, without art playing a central role in those systems.

Stefan: A surprising insight was the profound emotional impact that virtual reality can have on participants experiencing the simulation of death. Despite our extensive planning and technical foresight, the depth and variety of emotional responses—from unsettling introspection to serene contemplation—were striking. The user testing phase revealed significant variations in how individuals processed the experience of moving through the simulated stages of dying, emphasizing the need for adaptable interaction designs. This led to the integration of mechanisms allowing users to control the intensity of the experience and the ability to exit the simulation at any point, ensuring the project remained a safe and respectful exploration of such a sensitive subject. This underscored the powerful role of immersive technologies in evoking deep psychological and existential reactions, which was both a challenging and an enlightening aspect of the project’s development.

Q: What was the most challenging aspect for you? How did you overcome the challenges?

Shaun: On a creative, artistic, and even conceptual level, it was to evoke metaphysics via physics and vice-versa. It was the challenge of approaching an eternal anaesthetic via a fleeting aesthetic. It was certainly a challenge to try and offer an experience that provided more detail and even partially to disprove the poetic title of that famous artwork by Damien Hirst from 1991, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. We started to finally go there in XR now Damien — we began a humble cursory and punk form of “cyber-necronautics.” From a design perspective, I had to change everything with Stephan and the DML. From a design based on chroma key to machine learning framing, back to chroma key, or from beds that now didn’t have cushions so the transducer vibrations of one’s pulse were brighter, more direct, etc. The list goes on and on and into the realm that Stefan is best qualified to articulate.

Stefan: The most challenging aspect of designing Passing Electrical Storms was crafting an experience that was both impactful and yet appropriately attuned to the diverse sensitivities of a museum audience. The project’s core concept—simulating the experience of dying—posed inherent risks of distressing participants. Balancing the need for a profound, introspective journey without causing undue emotional distress was paramount. To address this, we incorporated extensive feedback mechanisms throughout the design and user-testing phases. Participants’ reactions were carefully monitored, leading to the implementation of adjustable settings for the haptic feedback and visual intensity, and the ability to exit the simulation at any point. This adaptability ensured that the installation could accommodate a wide range of individual comfort levels and emotional responses. Furthermore, we designed the environment to resemble a calming, controlled space, reminiscent of a hospital room, which helped to set a respectful tone and prepare visitors for the experience. These measures were essential in ensuring the installation was both a meaningful exploration of mortality and a considerate, inclusive experience suitable for the museum setting.

Q: Were you surprised by the reactions you received? What was the range?

Shaun: The range of reactions was surprisingly vast! From people categorically or reflexively refusing to enter the experience at all based on numerous reasons / beliefs to others putting their hand up to tap out or ripping off the headset after the simulated heart attack. These reactions were frequent but not as common as people returning alone, with friend groups, and also with family members many times over during the course of the exhibition. There were some people that made it part of their daily routine and would work around the lineup as crowds gathered to see it every day.

I was blown away by the scale of the response. I’m aware of at least two people seeking permission from their religious council to support their experience the work. Musicians at the Australian National Academy of Music asked to respond to the piece with an original composition that was performed within the installation itself. Perhaps it was the sum of all these parts that also surprised me — the dramatic power of ceremony when experiencing it, even the time it took to wait and then onboard the experience. I was surprised at how emotional it was for me to see my own son and parents experience the artwork. I was supposed to be the one of the more prepared punters :). However, the emotions caught me by surprise, and I struggled to see through the tears when experiencing it with my family — which was not bad, as in simply painful, but also profoundly overwhelming. It was unexplainable beyond the act of crying itself as the only possible response at the time actually. A lot of people cried and this actually presented a problem for the head-mounted display at times.

Q: Do you have plans to expand on this project, or is there another project you have in mind that you could tell us about?

Shaun: Well, besides exploring a design for head-mounted displays to handle crying, the technical refinements, expansions, and enhancements are something I am exploring closely with Stefan. I have also thought of updating the work conceptually — one example being to ask people, in future iterations of this work, to commit to making an actual end-of-life-plan or directive for themselves as part of the consent process before experiencing Passing Electrical Storms, and for this plan to be registered and acted upon when we as individual electrical storms finally pass into the universe.