recalibration of Méliès?) allows you to soar over the lunar surface,
your space-suited shadow projected below you; at one point it
places you on the back of a trotting donkey. The moonscape is var-
iously furnished with reflecting objects; a huge dinosaur made of
numbers (these works are overtly composed of digits, underlining
the sense of a world made from code); and stylized outlines of
national flags, a reference to international disputes about owner-
ship of the moon. Hallucinatory objects float in the dark sky: a vast
stone flower that you can perch on (scale becomes mysteriously
elastic), a mountain with its mirror image suspended beneath it.
Both of these works invoke a degree of realist illusion. By con-
trast, Chalkroomis a work of pure imagination that constructs a
potentially infinite labyrinthine space—together with the anxiety
that entails. Don your headset in one of the venue’s small, vaulted
chambers, and a miraculous effect kicks in: everyone else in the
room (visitors, technicians) vanishes but the room remains, its
walls etched with Anderson’s white-on-black drawings and graf-
fiti in English and French. Snowflakes that turn out to be tiny
white letters glimmer in the air. Then the walls peel away—all
three pieces use this raising-the-curtain effect, introducing you
into open space—and you point your handsets to fly through a
narrow door into the space of the “Chalkroom.”
This is the most alien environment on display, the most alluring
and the most expansive. Constructed of black surfaces overlaid with
chalk, it’s like a child’s reimagining of the vast palaces and prisons
drawn by the 18th-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. It is a
space of vertiginous heights and depths in which you can fly in any
direction, a network of chambers each containing its own surprises:
seemingly flat etchings that turn into 3-D clouds of letters as you
approach; a conga line of moving figures on the walls; a space where
the sounds you make become free-floating musical instruments that
you can strike to make gong-like resonances.
Flying through Chalkroomcan be destabilizing. Sometimes,
descending from mid-air too fast, I was unnerved to hit solid
ground, although it was with a soft thud and accompanying
“clunk” sound. I felt genuinely unanchored here, worried that
I’d wander into realms I might not find my way out of. It helps,
though, to hear snatches of Anderson’s familiar, calm voice as a
guide (imagine how terrifying it would have been if that voice
had belonged to, say, Werner Herzog).A
s anderson tells me when we talk later in a beach-
front interview space, it’s a pleasure to be invited to show
this work in a film festival, in a context where VR is still
viewed with suspicion. “We’re kind of the creepy cousin
to cinema. In Venice, we were on the Lazzaretto Vecchio, for lepers
and plague victims. Here we’re showing in a morgue!”
She and Huang have been working together since the mid-
’90s. Their first collaboration, a CD-ROM called Puppet Motel,
eventually became an illustration of the transience of new-media
formats. “You can’t see it anymore because the platform has gone.
All the work we did is now a bunch of arrows pointing nowhere.
It’s evaporated.” That’s why when Huang suggested a VR collabo-
ration, her initial reaction was, “Another format that’s going to
just disappear—no thanks!” She laughs. “Not that I’m working
for posterity. I’m working for my own sense of fun, trying to
problem-solve. Like, what is narrative? You have to start over
when there’s no beginning, middle, or end.”To develop these works, Anderson says, “I don’t write a screen-
play, I write something else that’s a series of possibilities.” How
exactly doyou start to create a space like Chalkroom? Does it involve
drawings and models as well as work on computer? “All kinds of
things. First of all, everything iscreated—there are no cameras
involved, no lenses, which is a wild thing already. You’re not limited
by that. I love watching people come out of this, because our lives
are geared to rectangles—our phones, our films, everything. When
people come out, I see them looking around, because suddenly
they realize we’re in an ocean of space—we forget that.”
As Anderson says in her notes on the installation, VR “can
confuse and confound the sense of proprioception and safety...
Your feet tell you, ‘I’m standing in a room in a museum, com-
pletely safe.’ But your eyes tell you, ‘I’m standing on a 300-foot-
tall column and it’s only two by two feet,’ and you start to sway.”
That’s not the only strange effect of these pieces, she says. “One
of my assistants has a condition where he can’t open his hands—
he was a bass player, and when that started happening, it was a
disaster. He was testing Aloft, and while he was doing it, his handsopened. I said, ‘Did you see what happened to your hands?’ and he
didn’t know that was happening. I thought, we don’t know any-
thing about the brain and the body and how they’re relating...
The function of language and body is key to all of these pieces—
and identity, of course, because there you are alone, and alone in
the way you are when you’re identifying with a character in a
Russian novel. You’re there but you’re not there.”
What Anderson misses in VR, however, is “the social experience—
I love people listening to music together on the same sound system,
in the same room. So our next VR thing”—a “VR opera,” she calls
it—“will use that and be part of that, and probably be much more
about creating virtual objects in sound and consciousness-jumping.
So you’ll be able to jump literally into somebody else’s mind.”
Anderson and Huang’s three pieces are informed by a childlike
spirit of play—yet also by a serious, not to say spiritual, exploration
of what it might mean to be in two places at once, your mind
projected outside your familiar bodily parameters. Behind it all is
Anderson’s longstanding fascination with the “Nature of Mind,” the
term used by her Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche. His think-
ing, Anderson says, “is at the center of how I see things in terms
of illusion and what he calls ‘consensus reality.’”
“Which is a beautiful way of saying we’re making this up,” she
says. “We both agree that we’re sitting at a table in Cannes—but
we’re not really.”July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 25As Anderson tells me [about virtual reality], “We’re kind of the creepy cousin to cinema. In Venice, we
were on the Lazzaretto Vecchio, for lepers and plague victims. Here we’re showing in a morgue!”G
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