MINE
machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 37’ 06”, United States, 2023
Created by Brent Watanabe
Brent Watanabe’s latest project is a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between virtual reality and contemporary culture. Originally conceived as a semi-narrative interactive experience, MINE spans eight mesmerizing episodes, each presenting a different facet of our complex relationship with consumption, waste, the environment, and the digital world. Originally presented on Meta/Facebook's VR platform Horizon Worlds, visitors are invited to journey through a kaleidoscopic array of immersive and fully-realized virtual environments, each revealing a new layer of insight and critique. From the grotesque realities of animal exploitation to the dark allure of gaming, guns, and surveillance, MINE is a bold and unflinching statement on the pressing issues of our time. The original work has been reimagined as a single-channel walkthrough video edited by the artist for VRAL.
Brent Watanabe’s art practice defies categorization, fusing traditional techniques with cutting-edge technology to create installations that are at once visually arresting and intellectually engaging. Drawing on his extensive background in drawing and sculpture, Watanabe uses computer programming and electronics to create kinetic sculptures that are at the forefront of a new wave of digital art. Watanabe’s work has been recognized both nationally and internationally, with his groundbreaking 2016 project, San Andreas Deer Cam, receiving over 800,000 visitors in its first three months alone and being featured in publications such as New York Magazine, the BBC, and WIRED. In addition to his solo work, Watanabe has participated in group shows and screenings around the world, including Through Machine Eyes at the NeMe Arts Center in Limassol, Cyprus, Game Changers at MassArt Art Museum in Boston, and Playmode at the MATT Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. With recent solo exhibitions at prestigious venues such as SOIL Art Gallery, McLeod Residency, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Anchor Art Space, and the Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Watanabe continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of digital art.
Matteo Bittanti: “An existential crisis built atop Meta Horizon World’s utopian social VR metaverse” is how you describe MINE. How did you approach designing the different settings and episodes in MINE to effectively communicate this complex and multi-layered theme to users?
Brent Watanabe: MINE originated from an artist residency with Facebook and my proposal for a project using their unreleased VR platform Horizon. It took several months for them to grant me access to the platform, so I had a lot of time on my hands to consider what I might create. I was designing in the dark, without any information about the authoring environment, technical limitations of the platform, or how social interaction worked in Horizon.
Conceptually, I knew I wanted to work with some of the themes that I continue to return to, time and time again: human consumption and waste, and our treatment of animals. However, I knew that the features and capabilities of the Horizon platform (the medium?) would greatly influence and inform my choices.
I did a lot of sketching and ideating, in both 2D drawing and in VR (using Gravity Sketch), thinking about what is unique to the medium of VR and how the themes and ideas I work with might best be expressed. VR can create an immersive, pseudo-physical experience for a visitor: when done well, the immersive environment can fool your body (proprioception?) into sensing the wall near your right shoulder, or experiencing the vast cavernous space you just entered.
In my practice, I tend to focus on creating work that is experiential, rather than illustrative, of the themes I’m exploring. For this project, I knew I wanted the VR visitor to experience the themes, to live and participate in them, rather than wander through an illustration of the themes.
Once I gained access to the platform, I immediately visited Facebook and user-generated worlds to get a sense of the culture and experiences that were being created in Horizon. I found the experiences very limited: ultra blocky worlds with few visitors, little interactivity, and mostly remakes of Hollywood franchise content.
As I came to understand the platform constraints – memory, fidelity, concurrent visitor count, among others –, I recognized the need to break my project down into smaller pieces. I thought of MINE as a concept album, with each world/episode a track on the record. There would be the overarching themes, some recurring characters that appeared throughout the experience, and some unifying audio/visual elements.
I also recognized the need to vary the experiences to keep the visitors engaged, while maintaining a cohesive whole. A more passive cinematic experience might be followed by a highly engaging video game-like experience, followed by a meditative wander.
The designing of the individual episodes happened largely through experimentation, both technically – playing with perceived space, time, and interaction – and conceptually – how might I moralistically interrogate visitors? how would a visitor experience a mind numbing work week?. Horizon makes it very quick and easy to sketch directly in VR, which enabled me to rapidly block in a scene or space, test it, refine, repeat. This structure allowed me to work, at times, almost subconsciously.
Matteo Bittanti: I love this idea of the “concept album”. By the way, the contrast between the cartoon-like aesthetics and the bleakness of some of the themes – violence, conspicuous consumption, and surveillance capitalism among others – creates a powerful cognitive dissonance in the viewer/user. Can you talk about the design process for the different episodes in MINE, and how you created the distinct visual and auditory experiences that users encounter throughout the experience?
Brent Watanabe: I began working in Horizon while it was in beta, and immediately hit platform limitations: a limited palette of primitive building blocks, no dynamic lighting, and hard memory limits per world. The authoring environment is in VR, so it was much faster to build in than game engines like Unity and Unreal, but incredibly limited as well.
I knew animal characters would play a large role in MINE, and given the platform constraints, I moved away from any semblance of realism and explored other visual styles, simplifying and embracing the restrictions, making lemonade out of lemons, so to speak. I took a lot of inspiration from the illustrator Ed Emberley, who created a series of how-to-draw books in the 1970s and ‘80s for children. His instruction focused on how to combine simple shapes, letters, and numbers to create just about anything: a deer, an automobile, a forest. These ideas translated well to working with primitive 3D objects – spheres, cubes, cones –, and created a playful, toylike environment.
This cartoon-ish imagery counterbalances the themes explored in MINE, and makes the subject matter more palatable, while also highlighting its perversity. Slaughtering pigs, shooting animals, butcher hooks, piles of discarded body parts mixed with garbage, almost become playful when rendered as low poly game objects.
Matteo Bittanti: In your online documentation, which you began in January 2021, you describe MINE as “a world of worlds”. Specifically, you write: “imagine that you could start in a shooting gallery world, and after achieving a goal take a portal to a graveyard, where you would follow a path and read the headstones. From there, you might find a portal to a working factory, where you attempt to package x number of products before the timer runs out, and then on to the next…”. Was this – which incidentally reminds me of Everywhere, Everyone, At Once – the original spark, the epiphany that eventually led to the finished product?
Brent Watanabe: Are you referring to the movie?
Matteo Bittanti: Yes, indeed!
Brent Watanabe: That was the initial spark. Once I realized there was not enough memory to create one epic experience, I decided to break it down into these discreet but interconnected experiences. Initially I imagined an almost Sesame Street format, with the themes being presented in a recurring manner, the way Sesame Street would return to “sponsored by the letter C“ throughout the episode. It’s still there in MINE, but toned down.
I was going for a somewhat schizophrenic experience, veering between somewhat familiar magic realism to ridiculously fantastical, often in the same episode. And hoping that this sense of dislocation and disorientation would resolve a certain amount after three or four episodes, when themes and characters begin to repeat and recur.
The biggest challenge I faced was: how to make something that is interactive and experiential but not a game, and how do I keep visitors engaged? How do I create something that is game-like, but not a puzzle or a first-person shooter or a story-driven scenario?
Matteo Bittanti: As you said, MINE is a VR experience that explores themes such as human consumption, waste, and our relationship with animals and the environment, which are central themes in your oeuvre, from San Andreas Deer Cam to Animal Crossing: All Mine. How did you balance the darker and more surreal aspects of MINE with the interactive elements and user experience, and what challenges did you face in doing so, without falling into the trap of didacticism, hyper-sincerity or earnestness?
Brent Watanabe: I frequently worry that I’ve fallen into that trap. I’ve been fixated on themes of human gluttony and waste throughout my work in large part due to struggling with my own complicity, my conflicted feelings and opinions, my (fallen) Catholic guilt. I share confusion and questions, not answers.
A big goal while creating MINE was to force the player to become an active participant in the project, both as the protagonist (consuming human) and the exploited (animal, although arguably also the human), rather than a passive viewer.
I tried to achieve this with a number of strategies.
In some instances, it’s engaging the player in something playful and game-like, even while what they are doing is repugnant or morally questionable. I suppose many video games do this regularly…. Become an active participant in something that, in this project at least, is not winning, but enjoyable. Shooting things with a gun in a video game is inherently enjoyable, even if the outcome is a mother hen losing her children. Cause and effect in an interactive experience is engaging, even if pressing the button pulls a chunk of flesh from a squealing pig. Solving a puzzle, however simple, can be enjoyable, even if it’s collecting cans of soul/essence from an elephant to receive a gift basket as reward.
I wanted a lively, tender, morbid playfulness, with a touch of humor. But not laughing at, not laughing with. Maybe laughing in spite of?
Matteo Bittanti: Each setting in MINE seems to be referencing popular video games, from survival horrors to sandbox-like open world builders. Is the fact that most of the interaction takes place through shooting or pushing buttons a not-so-oblique critique of video games?
Brent Watanabe: Some of this was in reaction to the predominance of shooting games I encountered in Horizon: shoot faithful recreations of real guns, shoot zombies, shoot one another. Meanwhile, Horizon Worlds moderators were flagging and taking down worlds for “questionable content”: something that looks like a stripper pole, mildly sexually suggestive content, or references to marijuana. As long as these shooting worlds don’t depict heads exploding or excessive gore, they are fine. I was curious to see what would be the reaction to my shooting gallery that, however playfully, depicts animals suffering, or to my hallway with guns that quietly point at your head and follow your every move.
Most of the violence found in popular video games is very impersonal and task-oriented: shoot your way to a checkpoint, destroy the enemy hordes. I wanted to experiment with smaller, intimate moments of violence: push a button to inflict pain on an animal that looks you in the eye, sledgehammer your way into the body of an elephant, trap a whining dog in a box.
Matteo Bittanti: Indeed. These are topics that Miguel Sigart explores in his compelling books about the relationship between ethics and gaming. Can you walk us through the technical aspects of creating a metaphysical horror experience on Horizon Worlds through its distorted architecture, grotesque funhouses, and maddening mazes? What advantages or limitations did this platform offer compared to video games? How do you see MINE fitting into the broader landscape of VR experiences, and what unique aspects do you think it offers to users?
Brent Watanabe: Horizon Worlds authoring environment enabled me to work very quickly when building environments and visual assets. I found that it was often faster to simply sketch something out in VR than on paper. Working directly in VR gave me an immediate sense of scale, space, and physical relationship.
However, with that immediacy came many limitations.
I had to accept several visual compromises. Horizon Worlds is a closed environment, and you can’t import anything you’ve created outside: 3D models, 2D images, external code, even reference materials. There were no textures for 3D objects, just flat color (limited textures were added later), no transparent materials for windows or water, and no ability to import audio other than recording through the VR headset microphone (some complex hacks and workarounds enabled limited imports). There were also hard limits on memory usage per world/episode, which forced many tough decisions around level of detail, amount of interactivity, and forced me to trash several full segments.
I faced a bit of a learning curve when programming interactivity in Horizon, which uses a visual coding system where you drag and drop chunks of code together to create logic. It’s very similar to systems available in Unity (Playmaker), other VR world builders (Rec Room), and the educational platform Scratch. I normally code in a text editor using keyboard and mouse, so it took some time to get used to that.
Being able to work in VR in the game environment you are creating is an amazing experience. You can switch back and forth between God mode and visitor mode in real time, rather than working in a desktop editor, building, and pushing to your VR headset to test. The platform enabled me to invite visitors to my works-in-progress to critique the experience, in the actual (virtual) space, and sketch and riff on ideas in real time. I wish this was available in a more powerful engine, like Unity. After working this way, it’s been difficult to go back to a standard desktop editor.
Matteo Bittanti: The theme park is often used as a metaphor for America due to its ability to offer a diverse range of experiences and attractions, while also reflecting the country's consumer-driven and entertainment-focused culture. The theme park is also a recurring motif of MINE. In his most popular book, Neil Postman famously argued that “We are amusing ourselves to death”. What happens when the theme park becomes the only filter through which we understand “reality”? Postman wrote his book in 1985 and was referring mostly to television. What role do the gamification of life through badges, trophies, and VR tech play in the contingent moment?
Brent Watanabe: I’ve been fascinated by theme parks and boardwalk arcades since childhood, both attracted and repulsed by the artifice, the novelty, and the excess. The availability of base novelty abounds today, especially on social media. This theme park of mundane spectacle taps into our primate brain and the urge to see what’s just around the corner, regardless of whether or not it’s worthy of our time or attention. It’s not about finding something truly interesting or inspiring, it’s just checking to see what’s next.
Sadly, I wonder if we’re moving into a post-gamification period? Does the public require rewards to influence their behavior now that pop culture and mainstream news offers ‘official’ alternative realities (QAnon, conspiracy theories, anti-science)?
I wanted to include this bit of writing I found online; it captures my fascination with theme parks and their melancholy wonder:
“A tribute to arcade shooting galleries”
“Like some nightmarish Disney tableaux, this gallery mixes the cute woodland creatures with the stark reality of frontier living. See the pianist, forlornly plying his trade, oblivious to the reality that the saloon has disintegrated around him. A small dog rests on a crate of high explosives… just one of nature’s creatures lured by the pianist’s bleak lament… lured to their imminent demise at your brutal hand. Don’t reveal all your cards in one go, though: why not toy with them by first shooting a spittoon or lantern? ”
Matteo Bittanti: In one of the most powerful situations in MINE, we end up in a cemetery full of bizarre tombstones, named after consumer goods, brands, and tools. You call it “a gravemarket”. Can you unpack this scene?
Brent Watanabe: The gravemarket is a meditative, open-ended world where visitors can wander aisles of tombstones, read the inscriptions, and pay their respects to or memorialize the products of their choice. I came across a note I took early in the ideation process that nicely summarizes the experience:
“Explore a graveyard/supermarket hybrid, with product names on gravestones. A shrine to consumer culture? Do our products define us, even in death? An amusement park push cart provides offerings to place on graves, in memory and reverence of the departed.”
I wanted to create a quiet, contemplative place where visitors could ruminate on life; the bastard child of a graveyard and TJ Maxx (TK Maxx in the UK).
Matteo Bittanti: In his excellent book The PlayStation Dreamworld, Alfie Bown compares video games to dreams and suggests that psychoanalysis is the best tool to decipher their inner meanings, their logic, their impact. This is relevant, I think, because MINE looks like a nightmare “directed” by David Lynch. But how does one wake up from this? Is unplugging the only solution? Can you “fix” or subvert the dream from the inside? Or were we just stuck inside the dying lady’s psyche from the get go?
Brent Watanabe: How does one wake up from this? I think of something my Grandmother frequently said, which she obviously did not coin: “Everything in moderation”. But how do we achieve moderation in a culture that worships excess – wealth, celebrity, ‘influencers’, political views?
I marvel at times how much computing has changed since my childhood in the 1970s and ‘80s, and how much it has shaped how we average Americans spend our time. My nieces and nephews have never experienced a time without instant entertainment at their fingertips via phone and iPad. I have become accustomed to nervously fidgeting with my phone, frequenting the same services – Instagram, Google News, YouTube – when I have a free moment. Why don’t I take advantage of the cornucopia of information available on the internet, the promise of connecting to anything/anywhere/anyone at any time?
I don’t think we, as a society, can unplug at this point. I think instilling curiosity and a hunger for knowledge in future generations is our only hope. But, of course, the big question is: HOW?
MINE
machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 37’ 06”, United States, 2022
Created by Brent Watanabe, 2022
Courtesy of Brent Watanabe, 2023
Special thanks to Lele Barnett, Sophia Pereyra-Johnston, Jake Know, Meta/Facebook Open Arts
