Virtual Reality Gives Sound to an Extinction Whose Form is Silence.
Languages connect us and help shape the way we view the world. Infused within our language is the wisdom and unique perspectives of the generations that used and evolved the language to where it is now. So when we lose a last speaker of a language we also lose a way of life, a way of seeing the world, and the knowledge that comes with it — and on average today we are actually losing 1 indigenous language every 2 weeks.
This is a staggering statistic and one that most of us have never heard of before. When I first began working on Last Whispers VR, I was definitely unaware of the rate at which these traditional languages were falling out of existence — because it happens in silence.
Virtual Reality is an incredible tool for communication, it is it’s own form of language — one that is not just oral but visual, spatial, and embodied. It is a form of art that has the opportunity to viscerally communicate because you’re whole body is implicated within the environment when you put on the headset and you realize you have agency in this new space that has enveloped your senses.
Artist and Director, Lena Herzog, began her non profit, Last Whispers 501(c)3 , to bring awareness to the rampant dissolution of language and identity around the globe. She wanted to create work that answered a central question: “How do you give sound to an extinction whose very form is silence?” She conceived of and directed Last Whispers VR to do just that. With the support of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS University of London, The Smithsonian, The Rosetta Project and over a dozen other world archives, Herzog and her team created a spatialized sound composition from the world's greatest linguistic archives and then approached us to produce a Last Whispers piece in virtual reality.
As AR/VR producers, we were humbled to have the opportunity to see how we could use our expertise in this new technological language to build a space where the audience could not just hear about loss of languages but actually feel it, step inside of it, not to be a passive viewer on the outside of the frame, but to let it seep into their whole being for a moment and embody it.
Created using the Unreal game engine, our Technical Director, Jonathan Yomayuza, placed each language in the experience by anchoring them within the 3D space to a beacon of light that represents the geographical location on the globe where that language originated from. Within the Last Whispers VR universe the trajectory of these vanishing voices begins far away, like a distant echo. The visitor has the ability to fully move around a volumetric environment as the chorus comes closer and closer and then envelops you. The voices or “others” become familiar and real until the visitor falls into breathing with them at the last exhale.
The piece is only one part of a larger virtual reality triptych that is still to come as we are in the early stages of production for Last Whispers VR: Part II- with each iteration being a different expression of how to answer that central question which drives the Last Whispers mission.
After much research and long discussion with my co-executive producer on the piece, Cedric Gamelin, I realized more and more how intricately our identities are interwoven with the languages that we speak whether we realize it or not. The loss of a language is therefore the loss of identity, the loss of culture, the loss of knowledge. When you put on the headset to enter Last Whispers VR it sends you into a universe that invokes these languages but more importantly I think is what happens after you take off the headset. It leaves you realizing that while you may not be able to understand the languages in the way that we are accustomed to communicating, you understand them viscerally through the language of VR- and they are still with you.
This vibration stays with you much longer than you expected and a single message embodies your consciousness: that we are all interconnected. You too are a beacon of light in that universe of diverse languages that all share a common thread of life. And you can so deeply feel the effect of this experience because it speaks to you in the language of embodiment that VR so powerfully wields — it speaks to something that is primal and true- a part of us that doesn’t require fluency or translation, it speaks to our humanity.
Last Whispers VR is on view this weekend at LACMA from 11am — 6pm in the New America’s building on Saturday June 15th. Admission is free and open to the public. For information on how to attend please go here.
Last Whispers is co-presented by UNESCO, who, along with the UN General assembly, have declared 2019 The Year of Indigenous Languages.
For more information or if you would like to exhibit/support the project please email Meghan@immersly.com
