HER PALACE
Her Palace is a virtual reality experience that simulates the subjective experience of internally engaging with personal memories. This simulation provides an interactive and cinematic narrative experience that features a female character with her intimate self-reflections on a relationship. This simulation bases its interaction design on theories of cognitive science, and it invites its audience to actively construct the narratives by associating the invoked memory episodes. This project brings awareness to the mediation processes of both the external mediums like virtual reality and the internal cognitive mediums like memory and narrative. It attempts to stage the contradictions and complexities of the contemporary human-media relationship by raising many questions but providing no answer.
This project is selected into the Art Exhibition of International Conference of Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2021).
Her Palace - Narrated Video Demo
In the reality that human can perceive, time is linear. We can only live in the fleeting present, but we are also connected to the past, from where knowledge is accumulated, identity is constructed, and causality is extended. Much of this connection is maintained by our memories. When we engage with our memories, our past informs the present. As we engage with our memories, the present becomes our past. In this sense, the present and the past co-exist, with the mediation of memory.
Memories are references to the past, whose referents are ontologically irretrievable. Because of the linearity of time, the moment such a reference is born, its referent dies. Therefore, the ongoing cognitive activity of engaging with personal memories, the aforementioned co-existence of the present and the past, becomes an ongoing contradiction between the living and the dead, where the living present constantly morphs into the dead past, and the dead past is nowhere else to be found yet so concretely shapes the living present.
To reflect on this metaphysical contradiction of memory, Her Palace brings the internal memory experiences to the external medium of virtual reality. It simulates the subjective experience of immersing in personal memories in an abstract virtual world. In this world lives a character, from whom an interactive, cinematic, yet self-reflexive narrative about an open- ended relationship is told. The exact shape of this narrative is forged in the audience’s mind as they invoke a unique sequence of memory episodes through their attentive gazes, and this narrative itself fades into memories. In this palace, memories are re-called, re-lived, and re-wrote. You can visit this palace anytime you like, and the memories will always be here, never die yet never come back alive.