Virtual Love: Yehuda Duenyas’s CVRTAIN

If Facebook has ever made you feel paranoid, then the intriguing and appealing virtual reality experience CVRTAIN, by technology designer and director Yehuda Duenyas, is for you. Not because the piece evokes the kinds of fears that often accompany social media use—that your data or identity are being stolen, your “friends” are not really friends, or “liking” isn’t what it used to be. Quite the opposite, in fact. CVRTAIN, which received its world premiere in January 2017 as part of Performance Space 122’s Coil festival, infuses the idea of virtual identity and sociality with warmth and care. Even, perhaps, with love. And it does so the old fashioned way—through live performance.

Figures 1 & 2.

The red carpeting leading to the small foam-board proscenium stages of CVRTAIN. Gallery 151, New York City, January 2017. (Photo by Andrew Federman)

On the doorstep of Gallery 151 in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, my companion and I found a vintage-looking sign with a pointing hand, inviting us in to “experience a STANDING OVATION in stunning VIRTUAL REALITY. The thrill of a lifetime.” Inside the gallery, a staff member (Gabrielle Young) greeted us warmly and invited us to linger and discuss the piece afterwards, as well as to take pictures to post on social media, an invitation also extended by several more signs. A red carpet led us to the back of the gallery to wait for our preassigned time to enter the experience (visitors sign up online for five- to ten-minute slots). There, we contemplated another vintage poster, this one featuring silhouettes in formal 19th-century garb, bowing and curt-seying, with the following instructions: “Les Gestes de Révérence: Try these alone or in combination.” Although the figures featured were not all ballet dancers, the instructions referred to the so-called gestes de révérence—the curtsies, bows, and other gestures traditionally performed by ballet dancers to express their gratitude to an audience at the end of a dance sequence or to acknowledge a teacher at the end of class.

Beyond this point awaited several small, almost toy-like proscenia, in the 19th- century picture-frame mode, but made of printed foam board with images of columns and curtains on them, and hung as well with real curtains. With a smile, a staff member summoned each of us by name to go behind one of these curtains. Once there, a friendly technician (Thomas Kavanagh) positioned me in the middle of a circle of red carpeting, gently placed a VR headset and headphones on my head, and gave me two bright-red hand controllers, the same color as the carpet and curtains. The headset was heavy on my head and the bridge of my nose, and the feeling of being cut off from the world outside was initially a little claustrophobic. I was grateful for the strip of light I could see at the bottom where the mask left a small gap, reassuring me of the reality outside. I stood behind the curtain, facing back out toward the waiting area, and the experience began.

As the VR user, you see in the headset initially is the backstage area of a vast, virtual theatre whose curtain color and other elements echo the design of the foam-board proscenium arch she is actually standing behind. Then, the virtual curtain before you opens and you gaze out at what seems to be a large, old-fashioned auditorium entirely filled with people silhouetted in the glare of the stage lights. Raise your arms, bow, curtsey, and try to remember and perform other gestures detailed on the chart outside, and the crowd cheers, roars, whistles, and laughs its approval. Perform other moves and they have no reaction; there might even be a hint somewhere in there of derisive laughter.¹ But there’s another catch, which you may have already anticipated—or perhaps not, depending on whether you’ve yet seen others perform (I hadn’t). When the curtain parts in the virtual, it also does so in the actual (you...