You sit or lie on the most intimate physical place we know: The bed. You put on the clunky VR headsets. Then the dream-like journey began. Not too-distant from the physical setting you just entered. Suddenly, you shrink in size, starting the story within the wrinkles on an identical bed your body is currently lying on. Only, this seems to go to an infinity. You hear a cinematic, pulsating sound and voice inside your head, guiding and affirming through the spiritual journey and connecting to your inner frequencies. Spoken affirmations, aligned with the scenes you are discovering in the depths of your bed. Scenes that are tied to human body traces we leave out of natural rhythms and cycles with our body – alive, yet often disconnected to the mind that lives somewhere in the (digital) clothes. A blur and inbalance between body, mind and soul that increasingly affects our mental wellbeing as we tend to neglect our physical presence in the now as a whole of body, mind and soul.

VIRTUAL REALITY AS AN ARENA OF EMBODIED BEING

A mesmerizing story that let’s you fly through 5 worlds of abstract, symbolic traces that root within our bodies natural cycle and we often find in our beds again. Out of control. Things we consider as ‘dirt’, but should rather serve as alerts for BEING present in the moment as a whole system. In VR they are converted into concrete and integral physical presences, allowing the viewer to explore within themselves the connection between the mind and body, guided by sound and voices and frequencies of sounds.

The meditative story experienced in Virtual Reality lets you enter a kind of oneiric state of trust and weightlessness, one in which you were free to let the images and sounds coalesce and collapse into your own personal memories. BEING IN BED is nothing short of a vision of destiny and trust in something …. Larger. While hoping to direct ones thoughts to the only thing we really can control in a very ephermal universe: Our own presence in the now as a connected being of a physical body, a spiritual soul and a flexible mind that lives in between the physical and digital clouds.

Once you return to the physical room of the installation, and slowly came back into your whole body, you can be left in a profound sense of transition.  

Virtual reality has the power to transform. The textiles in the physical space have the power to absorb: Your human body traces. Literal symbolic extracts coming from your body, versus temperature reactive color changes on sheets draped on mattresses installed in the experiential setting of the bedroom.

Virtual reality can expand our human imagination. It can encourage our psychological breakthrough and personal growth. VR still does have this power (more than ever, given what we now know, technologically), yet the social Zeitgeist has since drifted towards surface and spectacle.

Concurrent with the timeline of the debut exhibition of BEING IN BED for NYCxDesign in May 2023, with a second edition being in the works for Alcova at Art Basel Miami in December 2023, thousands of people are visiting immersive experiences such as “The Klimt Experience” or “The Van Gogh Experience”. Gorgeous state-of-the art environments of light, sound and color – yet their content is century old.

Clearly, the public still craves the immersive, but to what end? At the end of the experience, almost all of the visitors expressed extraordinary emotional responses from euphoria to tears of grief.