I held this interview with Christian Cherene, one of the full time investigators of the Machine to Be Another. I learned so much about the work that these individuals are doing with this interactive system that I did not want to just paraphrase anything because he had so much to say and had so much enthusiasm about his work. The bold print are the questions I asked him and the italicized print are his answers. It was great being able to get to know him and the Machine to Be Another, not just from what I could find through research on the Internet, but through a personal perspective with one of the people who was there from the very beginning when this work first started.

So what is the Machine to Be Another if you could describe in a few sentences?

Machine to be Another is an interactive system and a collection of protocols for interactions that allow you to feel that you are in the body of someone else using different techniques from VR technology, cameras, different protocols from cognitive science and performance art as well. We use this substitute to create this situation so that you can feel like you are in the body and life story of someone else like a real person and it happens in real time as well so that you can swap with another person so that you can feel like you can be in each others body. It is part of a research project trying to ask what does that do for the understanding of ourselves---asking the question of how do we form our identities based on the kind of story we tell about ourselves or is it our physical gender or the color of our skin…what happens when you are in a different body and you shift that perspective? Can you find that somehow those different ideas or narratives inhibit or facilitate an understanding of it or dialogue? The project is just seeing how we can shift that understanding in different ways.

Where was the idea of this Machine born – was there an original concept that this grew out of or was it always what it is now?

It’s constantly been evolving. The basic idea is the same. You can ask the question what would the world be like to see it through the eyes of someone else--what would the world be like if we were able to do that? So we kind of set out trying to do that but what we really were inspired by was these different experiments, one of them coming out of Karolinska Insititute in Sweden with Henrik Ehrsson. They were doing these experiments where they were using, basically similar to what we have, using cameras to recreate the rubber hand allusion. Basically its this old experiment where you have your hand on the table and you hide that hand. You have a rubber hand and you touch both of them at the same time so you feel them touching your hand while they’re touching the rubber hand and your senses are always intermingling and so forth. So you end up overriding your sense of body ownership and projecting it onto the rubber hand even though you know it’s not yours. You kind of perceive it as being yours so if someone attacks it with a hammer or something then you know you have this instinctional reaction like ‘oh shit hold up wait’ even though you know its not yours. So they were doing experiments with this where they were putting cameras from the perspective of a manican and you could see from the perspective of a manikin. They’d poke you and they’d poke the manikin at the same time. They were measuring how this effected embodiment and you’d say body ownership changes. Is it the perception of the body that you are in or the perception of objects that are outside of your body? It’s really a funny experiment. They’d have the cameras from the perspective from a Barbie doll or ken doll as you are lying down and they are touching your feet at the same time they are touching the dolls feet. Of course your perception of size is different. They then hover some objects in front of you like a cube or whatever and you have to estimate the size that you think it is in real life. So they would measure that then the actual size… so it changes perception of external objects. They were doing this not so much looking at social implications but just looking at the kind of lower level implications. Basically those were the kind of series experiments we were inspired by.

[Didn’t catch the person’s name] He’s really interesting. He’s an old pioneer of VR stuff from the 80s and 90s..runs the journal presence. He has a lab called event lab and they were doing some interesting stuff too. One of them was using motion capture labs and virtual environments so basically you are in the body of someone else but you are in virtual reality and you’re wearing this suit with all these little balls. It kind of reads all your movements and so forth to kind of put you in that environment. So you can look around, you can look at your body, you can look at the mirror in front of you. And the experiments that they were doing..one they were running in 2013 where they had white users and they were testing how just the experience of being in the perspective of a black skin avatar – how did that change their implicit racial bias. Basically its like the bias you don’t say you have, they do this time associate test, word association test. It takes you a bit longer to correct your responses to the correct one that you are supposed to say. They saw that it created a decrease in this implicit racial bias. Things like that were interesting to us but we wanted to see what happened when we used real people. We didn’t have money for expensive equipment so it came out of necessity for that. We literally had no money for anything. We used few Chinese baskets. We found old 90s stuff that we managed to borrow from the university or whatever. We were running our experiments from these old PSTI cameras and so forth so it was all really low budget and we kind of functioned with that.

What brought about this concept of embodiment? A lot of virtual reality systems focus on seeing oneself as an avatar or being in an avatar world.  What brought about this system in which people are able to embody one another?

Basically it was out of necessity but it turned out to be something that had a lot more strength than we anticipated…the fact that you’re having a real person there that you’re exchanging with. People seem to get a lot more into the experience or get a lot more from it than it being just a virtual thing because they know we have the same interface whatever you know. You know there’s a real person there so somehow this is just a window into another person’s experience rather than a fictional avatar that you get to act like for a bit. So that came about out of necessity but it’s something we kind of kept afterwards as part of the work that we keep on doing. It’s always in real time even though technically it doesn’t need to be that way anymore. We are working with some prerecorded stuff but the idea is that the prerecorded stuff always just uses flashbacks so you still have like the real person happening in real time. We have found that the important part of the experience for people is this point of encounter afterwards. But when you are in the experience, your perception gets kind of shifted. You’re sort of disoriented, you’re not quite yourself, you’re not quite the other person. You’re someone in between. You have this strange sensation hat you’re not used to having where your seeing things and feeling like their body is yours but its not and you’re hearing the voice of someone else. It can be a bit disorienting but ultimately you face…At some point the curtain opens and you see yourself in front of you as yourself as being the other. So that always kind of freaks people out a bit. And then at some point that it’s over and you take this technology off and you meet the other person for the first time..unmediated. Its an interesting point where there is no real script where you have to follow for your social interaction. Its not a normal experience you have everyday so you kind of have to decide what you do. There’s not a thing you should do or what’s the polite thing to do. You kind of need to build on that experience in real life which is what I think is an important part of it. This creates a point of interaction. In a way its kind of critical of VR in general also, in that sort of essence like how isolating it is, how mediated it all is..trying to bring the focus back to something human at the end of it.

As opposed to the standard and dominant virtual reality that is focused more on being cinematic and fostering storytelling, you all have taken storytelling to a new level in which it has implications for medicine, psychology, social justice, sociology & the studies of identity and empathy. What brought about this choice? Why use the machine for this and not anything else?

We found ourselves being able to explore a lot of other things because of the way the project is set up because it is collaborative. So it wasn’t so much entirely just this was our genius idea that we are going to share or project onto everyone else. Rather, we had this seed of an idea and we’ve shown it to different people and they’ve suggested things and worked with us to try it out in many different contexts. That’s how we have been able to spread out..in terms of sharing this idea and sort of seeing what we can learn from each other when we collaborate with people who have different ideas. So that’s really essential to the evolution of the work.

How has the machine addressed issues like cultural bias, immigration, generational bonding, conflict resolution and body extension thus far–what tangible results have you seen?

This is actually where we’re at now..we’ve been doing this for a while and we keep on having all these invitations to these different places. But really how do we even know that its actually doing any good? How do we measure that? It’s been a real struggle because we started as a research project and we got lots of really good feedback. We had post experience interviews with everybody that we worked with. After that it started turning more into these very short shortcase events which is really hard to follow up with so a lot of these places we were going to we were kind of creating a science show. It wasn’t really done as an installation artwork so much because it would break all the time. The machine wasn’t slick, it was totally super badly programed, and thrown together. There were all these cables and cameras and it was totally not slick or user friendly in any way but somehow managed to get it to work. The problem with doing these kind of shorter events is that we’re not able to do much follow up or really go deeper into the things we’ve been doing so we tried a lot to get stuff in..2 ways of doing this: one of them is that we’ve been working with different community groups and different methodologies to cocreate stuff with people who want to use it. We just offered it up as a tool and that’s how we got all these different experiences that came out of it. We definitely had some positive feedback from the people involved for sure. It’s a bit hard to follow up with users that tried it because they were just random people. In terms of the mother and daughter that were there, they had nice a nice experience. The mother wrote us a month later stating, ‘my relationship with my daughter is more nice now..she has more confidence in school…’ We have people having very emotional experiences in some of the installations and that’s where its hard to know what happens after that down the line. We have people crying and we have a few people who have totally freaked out in which they have had mild emotional breakdowns and that was hard to manage. It’s really hard to know what happens in those contexts afterwards because we are not interconnected and we don’t really have connection to them..these are short term events usually. In terms of more sciency stuff that’s been a lot slower to actually get running. We have the machine set up now in Valencia and we have it set up in Berlin…We’ve run some pilots in these places but not any proper study where it’s longer term and really focused on the things we want to do. Most of the stuff we are doing now in the academic world is just to validate the system. So I think we can say yeah it’s the best thing ever but I think it would be dishonest because we’d be overstating stuff. Its really hard to quantify how you measure empathy and measure behavioral shifts resulting from empathy or compassion. That’s really tricky to do that. What we’ve also been doing is trying to develop a way of measuring this kind of stuff, working with different cognitive scientists. How do you measure this and what’s a proper way to measure this.  But at the same time in order to really try to do more social projects at a scale that gets funded you need to have some scientific backing to get that funding in the first place. So were slowly kind of working in all different directions at once trying to get that on the go.

I will be fine if it doesn’t work in the end, if it turns out not to work in any way. In some ways the machine is probably not a solution. This technology is built on slave labor and it’s not really democratic technology. The internet technology is empowering but it’s really just to sell stuff, its not really true you know. So there’s context where the machine can be useful particularly with young people. We’ve done a lot of workshops with young people where they really responded very well and had put in a lot of input on how this could be improved; but we have not been able to run a long study with kids. Like how do we tackle bullying in schools for instance? Then work with young people to design these things and do this over the course of a couple of months and test them and follow up. So that’s stuff we’re trying to get off the ground. But if were interacting with bureaucratic things its take ages so we’ve been able to do stuff in small scale in artistic contexts but really its only qualitative results and not quantities. We have hours of post experience interviews that we’ve done in all these different countries we’ve been in and those experiences and they seem to point to a good direction…we have hours of stuff like that but it doesn’t translate into numbers and it also depends on different community groups as well. We need to have a cohesive response or a cohesive way of saying how do we measure this before you do it and then measuring it afterwards which were still working on in a huge context.

How did the group of 8 to 9 full time investigators get involved with the research?

Just from knowing each other – it was very informal. Either we went to university together or were working on projects together. We’d get together and be like hey I’m working on something similar and then we’d figure out ways that we could bring our ideas together – so there was never any intention for this to be some serious thing but once we started playing around with the technology and included our passions and different experiences and backgrounds – this is what came about

So it started with Phillipe. He was doing this during his last year of his Master’s project for his digital arts master. He brought on board two friends of his. They were working together to make their first prototype and were working in similar kind of stuff using VR. This idea they worked on together so that’s what they presented at the end of of Phillipes’ master program which was a very early prototype of the way the system worked which was with servomotors. Afterwards, they applied to get a residency. At that point, myself and Arthur joined the team as well. We met randomly at a gig somewhere and started talking and then ‘oh were doing this project stuff.’

Basically like a lot of the people who ended up working on the project from the starting point were also part of a broader art collective…Basically Barcelona is a nice city and all but there is no work at all. Lots of people who are really talented and can do lots of things but there’s not really jobs. So a lot of people were like lets just do stuff anyway. So people were working together trying to do stuff super cheaply trying to make it open source. A lot of the stuff people were doing ended up being political. So you had this little scene emerge, maybe around 30 or so people and other people connected to that, that were involved with each other and learning how to collaborate. One person may have been a programmer, another a photographer, someone else did writing, circuit building, someone did textiles, someone did work with dancing. Together everyone was working on these projects for fun so it was kind of out of that culture that the project emerged out of. Myself and Arthur joined onto this project and then we started the residency and did that for 8 years. This was before our images were released so no one was really interested in this stuff. VR was like a retro thing: ‘oh that’s like super 90s.’ That was peoples’ approach to it. We got really lucky with the mount of attention that came to the project just by chance. We put the video online, the gender swap one just as a bit of documentation of the project. There were no jobs in Barcelona and we all finished our masters’ programs. We were all going to different cities to get jobs after working on this residency. Somehow the project had ended up on Tumblr and kind of exploded into millions of views. And people started liking it. So from there there was more inertia and then different people were collaborating and people were jumping on board. But basically that’s how it started and its been expanding from there. We’ve been saying yes to everyone that was interested in working together and seeing what kind of common ground there could be. We’re always trying to refine the ethical dimension from it and also seeing what we could learn from each context we went to. There are bout 8 of us now working on it full time. At the moment, majority of us are in Barcelona but that’s temporary. One person is in Mexico. Yeah, so we’ll see where things go next.

What do you see for the future of this project?

I’m not sure. I just want to make sure whatever I do is addressing social issues. It’s less about the technology for me then it is for making implications in this type of work. Because eventually VR will no longer be cool with the next best thing so what happens then? It’s crazy how people need this technology to interact with each other on this level. Because if you say hey come on in and do all this touchy feely stuff with people and get to know them from different backgrounds on a personal level, people would be like hell no. But these concepts of identity and empathy have become hyped with this technology. However, for me it is not about that. Once this stops making implications ins social issues then I will want to move forward. I hope that this is something we can pass on to people who want to contribute this work..that it can be big enough to sustain itself

The way its possibly expanding is its still an open source and I think one of the things we have learned a lot through the process is that at one point we were in 7 different countries and had all these projects. The project is very distributed so we’ve learned somehow or are still figuring out somehow it’s still working and we’re not sure how because its not really making money..yet somehow we have an infinite amount of work we could have been doing with it. So what we’ve done at the moment is interested groups of people that we’ve met here and there that have wanted to create like a node, like another people that are more geographically close together to work together on stuff that is around this project. We’ve now set one up in berlin and we have made an online forum this last week where people can discuss stuff. We are looking up setting up another one in Mexico as well. As other projects and different things happen more geographically then we’ll have these different nodes in different places that allow it to expand. Not necessarily just going to  be the one project but kind of taking what we learn from that and apply to different things hopefully. We’re looking at a 3-5 year project in northern Ireland, working with young people there specifically on conflict resolution. That’s something that I think is definitely a place it could be used in and in a context that if it’s going to be effective I think it would be more than likely useful with young people. Kids don’t necessarily want to have a conversation about this kind of stuff but if they are interested in technology and as soon as you find some way of having this point of attraction between different kids or groups that are maybe opposed to each other it could create some kind of meaningful contact and way of experiencing others people lives that you may think are different from you, while you’re still building your sense of self. Kids will then have these experiences that they can refer back to, not that somebody else has told them, but something that thy have somehow experienced through this mediator.

Then just trying to get funding and stuff to do these sort of things. We’re all still working with refugees and stuff like that in London later. I have another project in Codon as well, looking at xenophobia in general there which is weirdly on the rise. It is really worrying to be honest. I think the more that I work with this project the more I care about all this stuff. I go into Cali on Wednesday to work in a refuge camp for 10 days.  Not really sure this kind of stuff is the solution to all these problems but somehow at least its creating a point of dialogue and a point of encounter around these things. So maybe this isn’t a solution but maybe getting a bunch of people together will realize the need for solutions to these problems and they come from different backgrounds, maybe we’ll come up with something better..that’s really what I am hoping for. There many solutions because there are many problems.