Turbulence: Jamais Vu (MIFF XR)

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From the team behind epic environmental VR installation Gondwana (MIFF 2022) comes an intimate experience of (mis)perception.

Director Ben Joseph Andrews suffers from a chronic vestibular condition characterised by destabilising episodes of dizziness or imbalance, whose symptoms can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days (or longer). Unlike his and producer Emma Roberts’s earlier work Gondwana – a durational VR that speculates on the endangered future of the Daintree rainforest – Turbulence: Jamais Vu reimagines the medium on a personal scale, taking form as an essayistic exploration of an invisible illness.

Guided by Andrews’s voiceover, this deeply intimate, world-first mixed-reality work uses the VR headset as a metaphor for individual perception, allowing glitches and imperfections in immersion to create a lived sense of what this neurological condition feels like. The result is an absorbing, sometimes unnerving experience in which the everyday world becomes an increasingly distorted funhouse mirror.