You would’ve heard of deja vu: the surreal sensation of getting beforehand skilled the current, or one thing prefer it. Chances are you’ll not have heard of jamais vu: the feeling of being unfamiliar with issues that must be recognisable. Like your own home, your desk, even your palms.

Man Pearce’s protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller Memento, who can’t create new reminiscences, has a model of it. However the form I acquired a style of, in an enchanting “world-first blended actuality” expertise featured at this yr’s Melbourne worldwide movie competition, is jamais vu of a really totally different selection.

Turbulence: Jamais Vu is a VR expertise that aspires to simulate a continual vestibular situation skilled by considered one of its creators, Ben Joseph Andrews. The 32-year-old was first recognized with the situation, which causes extreme migraines and dizziness, in his mid-20s. As vestibular migraines “aren’t well-known within the migraine household”, the trail to analysis was lengthy and fraught, he says.

“With this situation, there’s no such factor as stillness,” he says. “Even the heart beat in your physique has motion. Even simply closing my eyes is one other intense type of motion. Issues that I hear, issues that I scent – my physique interprets them as motion. This creates loads of battle. It’s fairly a porous connection to the world. I can really feel particular person blades of grass shifting within the wind. A part of [Turbulence: Jamais Vu] entails taking a look at what that allows and presents. It’s an try to create a language for instance one thing that’s very robust to explain.”

Andrews’ co-creator on the challenge, Emma Roberts, introduced the VR expertise – which is taking part in at Acmi in Melbourne till 15 August – into my dwelling. Once I placed on the VR headset, the atmosphere round me adjustments in surreal methods. I’m in the identical room however I can not see in color: every thing is now charcoal monochrome. Utilizing a headset hooked up to a depth digital camera, which feeds into what you see, they’ve made the acquainted unfamiliar. They’ve made jamais vu.

The define of objects look blurry and peculiar. The house earlier than me has been inverted, so after I transfer my proper hand I see it transfer on my left. My sensory system has been thrown out of whack. At one level, Andrews asks me by way of voice-over to retrieve some aspirin from a container and place the drugs in a mug. This seemingly easy request is immensely troublesome and requires intense focus.

The extremely experiential and intimate nature of digital and blended realities enable creators to discover topics similar to this like no different artwork types. We’re not studying about vestibular migraines or listening to interviews: we’re immersed in a simulation that basically adjustments our sensory data. This is the reason VR and MR (shorthand for “blended actuality”) have a historical past in exploring situations together with autism, gender dysphoria, panic problems and lots of extra.

Andrews and Roberts say their work was influenced by artwork that challenges concepts round accessibility and normativity, similar to these created by artist Christine Solar Kim, who was born deaf, and composer JJJJJerome Ellis, who has a stutter.

“There’s one thing actually fascinating about deconstructing media by means of a disabled lens, to query the accepted normativity of how know-how is broadly used,” says Roberts. “There’s a really wealthy historical past of disabled artists doing that by means of totally different media.

“VR is attempting to mediate our method of creating sense of the world,” Andrews provides. “We’re actually focused on that, together with what might be opened up in exploring the seams of notion. Loads of the time in immersive applied sciences, like VR, it’s a try to be seamless. However incapacity, in some senses, is a seamed expertise of the world.”

Andrews and Roberts are early pioneers of those still-emerging applied sciences, exploring the probabilities of VR and MR in methods not dissimilar, broadly talking, to the early pioneers of cinema, who performed with the shape and content material of movement footage. Their earlier work consists of Gondwana, a 48-hour expertise simulating the passing of time in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest. The extra centered and private Turbulence: Jamais Vu is the primary chapter in an supposed collection that can proceed to discover Andrews’ continual vestibular situation.

“The through-line that runs by means of loads of our work is an curiosity in awe, surprise and reconnection to the world round us and ourselves,” says Roberts. “Beforehand we’ve achieved that on very giant scales – the immensity of rainforests, the vastness of house. However this work turns that curiosity and surprise inwards, taking a look at our personal experiences, Ben’s personal experiences, as deserving of surprise.”