Aether is an interactive VR journey designed as an individual experience. It is an interaction with an organism made up of the basis of all organic matter on earth; this matter, in the virtual space, takes form as a circular thread. This thread holds the essence of the space, the air, the breath, and matter visualized as energy and light.

The participant interacts with a real-time physics simulation of a cyclic carbon molecule as it transforms from its original vibrating molecular form into pure light essence.

Each individual’s interaction with this space is different, and their interactions change the space itself. They become both visitor and performer. A guiding spoken-word narrative leads the inhabitant of the virtual space through a multi-sensory journey, weaving together dream fragments, emergence of non-being, and an awareness of the breath.

Aether and Under Aether are a collaboration between Anna Stroe and David Glowacki, to adapt a virtual reality space using a real-time computational physics simulation into a digital art experience. The project explores how interactive virtual environments could induce mystical-type “peak” experiences: how could this push forward consciousness research, and could this be used to alter ecological perception?

This VR experience was created as speculative stimuli for future consciousness research, addressing the question: how can immersive art expand the boundaries of the contemporary study of consciousness?

‘Aether: A Guided Journey in Virtual Reality’ was tested in a pilot study with participants, gathering and analyzing data from their responses to the experience. Over the course of three weeks from April to May of 2021, a group of participants volunteered to experience the VR journey, with each participant attending a one hour session, followed by an open feedback session and administration of the MEQ30 questionnaire.

‘Under Aether,’ is the final response to this project and research.

The Aether experience is a kind of scientific meditation, unraveling our attachment to our solid, individual, rational forms. Can understanding being as a dynamic, unfolding process connect us more meaningfully to our physical and digital ecologies?

Aether is a private and personal experience. It is one that is automatically changed by the presence of other bodies, and therefore is unique to each inhabitant. You determine how you would like to occupy this space and how you wish to interact with it. Your interactions change the space. Does the space also change you? At the same time as this experience is private and personal, it is also situated in a world of increasing surveillance, and decreasing physical space. These changes necessitate a quantum value shift in our culture.

Can mystical experiences of the virtual function as a glitch in the ecosystem of mainstream VR work, which often reinforces binaries and Cartesian dualistic views of the body, mind, and space? Can digital ecosystems bring us back to natural ecosystems, and can the two coexist symbiotically?

Under Aether is a manifestation of Aether. The sound and textile installation is an exploration of how transient experiences get mythologized, and how this in itself constitutes a form of virtuality. Sounds recorded from the VR experience play out into the space surrounding the textile:

In viewing ourselves as cosmic, we can return to an animate understanding of the earth. Moving beyond binaries through speculative world-building is a form of created agency.

The cosmological tapestry of all our ecosystems contains folds: folds of time, of space, of bodies, of thought. In creating ripples in these folds, glitches in the hegemonic codification of this tapestry into static parts, suddenly there appear liminal spaces in which to rebuild reality.

A digital print of an oil painting onto fabric creates a virtual representation of another object onto a tangible, physical, woven material. This textile can provide many functions, both practical and abstract: as a visual focal point, an object to divide space, an obfuscation of what is on the other side.