Another exciting unit: we will be collaborating with second year students from Sound Arts to bring Forster’s grim short story “The Machine Stops” to VR. My group has chosen the second chapter, titled “The Mending Apparatus” and has begun discussions on potential opportunities.

This is an exciting project for several reasons: (1) my background in comparative literature has prepared me like no other for close reading of texts, as well as considerations of their intertextuality among other mediums, (2) beyond detailed interpretation I also have experience adapting literature to screen, like for example adapting Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to a feature-length screenplay and, finally, (3) I have the opportunity to work with other talented artists who are all willing to have fun and play to their strengths. We have sound artists that are interested in experimenting with procedural sound and integrating that expression with Unity, and we have rigorous and creative 3D modelers and animators willing to take interaction design to the next level.

I think it’s appropriate to start out this unit with a reflection on the story. Upon my first reading, my notes are separated in the following way:
(1) visual cues: primarily, but not limited to, the aesthetic of light
(2) author-reader-story relationship
(3) mentions of touch (since they may translate specifically to interaction or meditations on interaction)
(4) anything pertaining to the senses (this is a big theme in the work)
(5) spatial cues
(6) soundscape cues
(7) philosophical cues that hint at the relationship between content and form and will help shape the VR experience.

For those who haven’t read the tale, it is a 25 page story that deals with a dystopian future where all human beings are separated into personal rooms that form “the Machine.” The Machine exists underground. Everything can be done inside the room: sleeping, eating, listening to music, attending/giving lectures, and it is hinted that even procreating. Some people do field-trips to Earth, but these are limited and highly-controlled. The air on Earth has become toxic to the beings so they must have a special respirator.

In the story, the mother Vashti is called by her son Kuno to come visit him because he wants to speak to her in person. Being a stout devotee of the Machine, she hesitates but decides to go. When she arrives, Kuno tells her about how he went aboveground through unofficial means, i.e. escaped, and had developed his sense of space and touch so much that he couldn’t look back. He criticizes her faith in the Machine. He has been threatened with Homelessness, which means he will die. His mother thinks him foolish and leaves him again. Later on, Kuno is the first to predict the Machine is “dying” and when he tells his mother, she doesn’t believe him. The Machine ultimately fails causing a genocide of human beings who can’t see or breathe.

These are what I now think are the most interesting notes for some of the points:
(1) The story starts and ends with the image of the machine as a beehive. The allusions are not scattered through-out, so it seems the author consciously and perhaps strategically opens and closes with this image. He mentions irritability is “a growing quality” in that age, and that the mothers face is “as white as a fungus.” Because the beehive imagery is a bit over-done in adaptations of this story, I thought a natural progression would be to take a cue from Plato’s The Republic. Socrates talks about how societies that have become overly inflated become like a wasps’ nest. We can picture the machine like he describes this society, inflamed, aggressive, irritable. An interesting visual translation of this for our VR experience, which hints to point (3) would be to portray these rooms and this machine as an infected skin. Touch has been completely neglected in this world, and as a consequence, each individual room becomes like an inflamed, infected pore… In the armchairs sit “swaddled lump[s] of flesh” among “throbbing” sounds…

(3) There are 11 mentions of touch in the story, and 5 refer to buttons or interface switches (“the ecstasy of touching a button”). 4 of the mentions deal with the absence of touch between human beings, or even how one should avoid being touched by sunlight. Only 2 refer to actual physical instances of touch, at the end when the machine is failing.

Clearly this can translate to a specific way of designing the interface, and contrasting this representation with actual physical touch.

(4) As for the senses, the meditation on touch can be extended. Kuno’s main realization, that “man is the measure” must permeate every unit of measurement for this work, since it is a humanistic philosophy and it includes an allusion to the five senses as “those five portals by which we can alone apprehend”.

(5) A list of all spaces mentioned in the story, which will need to be included in the VR rendition. For simplicity’s sake, I will not be including it.

(6) There is an eternal “hum” that numbs the beings that live in the machine. Interestingly enough, the first tell-tale sign that worries people is when there appears a defect in the music. It is the first failure that makes life unbearable. Reminds me of Nietzsche’s claim that “without music, life would be a mistake.”

To not make this entry too extensive, I will just mention that our group had a first meeting and already made some notes about potential interaction, visual, and sound opportunities. We begun a mood-board and joint document to keep track of the evolution of the project. This is my first instance of adaptation in VR so I am looking forward to testing the potential for transmutation.