Belly of the Whale

Belly of the Whale, part of the series The Spectacles Before Us Were Indeed Sublime, takes the first chapter as a point of departure for a first-person view virtual reality experience of cruising. Passenger geo-locations are tracked and stored on the ship as data streams. Traces of their navigational paths are visualized as ghostly spectres, dynamically laid over time, visible in the following user’s VR experience. The micro-pathways of audience movements reflect the macro migration patterns and systemic structures of surveillance capitalism. An impossible staircase appears, using a generative algorithm to create new steps each time the user goes up or down, trapping them in a navigational loophole. While the user experiences the VR scenes, the brainwave headband worn by themselves or their surrounding peers feeds a custom software with the ebb and flow of their brain wave signals. The brain wave data is then translated into ocean-like waves of pink noise, sweeping viewers and listeners into the proverbial ocean.