Turbulence: Jamais Vu

Where déjà vu refers to something new feeling familiar, jamais vu is the sensation of something mundane feeling suddenly unfamiliar. For me, this depersonalisation — which impacts my relationship to myself, my space, and those around me — is the first sign that a vestibular migraine attack is coming.

Building from my experience of chronic vestibular migraine (VM), Turbulence: Jamais Vu is a mixed-reality experience that brings you into my reality, incorporating a physical desk with a depth-camera mounted to the VR headset. This allows you to see your own hands and interact with the environment around you… except self and world are made increasingly strange in this experience, upsetting normative motor function and perceptions.

10 mins / Winner Best Immersive Non-Fiction @ IDFA DocLab, 2023
Best of VR @ Venice Film Festival, 2024
Winner XR Experience Award, Beyond the Frame Festival 2024 (Japan)
Winner Best Design Award, ART*VR 2024 (Czechia)
Winner Best Interactive/Immersive, AIDC 2024 (Australia)

Press:
The Guardian, 2023, ‘Even Closing My Eyes Is An Intense Movement: The VR Experience That Simulates A Serious Neurological Condition’

IDA, 2024: “Breaking the Fourth Wall of VR”: Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts Discuss ‘Turbulence: Jamais Vu’

Voices of VR, 2023: #1344: “Turbulence: Jamais Vu” Wins IDFA DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Award with Embodied Mixed Reality Doc on Depersonalization & Derealization”

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Turbulence is an ongoing creative research project that is in pursuit of misusing interactive/immersive technologies to uncover new languages of misperception. It seeks to develop an aesthetic of an elastic embodiment based on the unpredictable and unreliable interventions of motion–internal and external, real and imagined, impossible and infinite.

This is the first chapter of a multi-part VR docu-essay series that interrogates the technological and biological anatomies of motion.

The subsequent chapters of Turbulence were awarded Best Project at IDFA DocForum 2023.

Supported by Frame Documentary, Creative Victoria, VicScreen & Screen Australia.