The Room Presumed

The Room Presumed utilizes machine learning and real-time video processing to reveal the paradoxes inherent in the ways we speak about immersive media. In other words, the act of speaking about immersion, as is so often done in the marketing of tech, is somewhat paradoxical. One could imagine instead, that a true state of "immersion" may defy the need for language all together. The work is inspired by an early 1980s thought-experiment at Atari in which a group of computer scientists envisioned “virtual reality” without any of the needed tools to do so. Through this exercise, the subjects became improvisational actors, speaking the roles of “user” and “interface.” Scripted by an ML trained on this account, The Room Presumed distends their unfinished acts and reveals the illusory comforts of a so-called “technological immersion.”