A Tale of Two Weekend Adventures

October 17, 2016 by Ray Morgan

A Tale of Two Weekend Adventures

I've just had one of the most disparate weekends that really got me thinking about modern living. It started with a lovely, wholesome visit to the Gruffalo trail in Thorndon Country Park (nr. Brentwood) with my sister and nephews. Jack, who is nearly three, wore a Gruffalo top, clutched a soft toy of the Gruffalo in the car on the way and insisted I read The Gruffalo's Child to him two and a half times, even though looking at the pictures made him feel car sick.

We put on wellies and woolly hats, and stamped through the woods, in muddy puddles, picking up sticks and trundling through dens that people had made. I say trundle, he merrily trundled, and then pointed to the dens and said "Rach, you in there" and I had to squat down and crawl through a muddy bunch of twigs, but it was all good fun. We spotted the beautiful, carved wooden figures of the Gruffalo characters. We had a cup of tea on a picnic bench and ate biscuits and it massively felt like the trips to the woods of my childhood.

There's a photo of me and my sister as children, sat on a pile of logs, with a flask (presumably tea, or possibly squash) and biscuits brought from home, us wearing wellies and coats. Almost exactly the same as what my sister is doing now with her own children. It was simple, old-fashioned and wholesome. The only modern influence on Saturday was of course, the Gruffalo characters (but even they looked old fashioned and traditional), and the fact that Jack and I stuck our tongues out taking selfies on my phone in the car on the way home.

So what I did the following day was ultimately the exact opposite of a simple day walking through the woods. I went to see the Bjork Digital exhibit at Somerset House. I'm a big fan of Bjork's music. A lot of people think she's some Icelandic nutter who just danced around in a yellow dress singing 'It's Oh So Quiet' but apart from that being her biggest hit all the way back in 1995, she's produced some of the most awe-inspiring and modern albums of the past 20 years. In fact a lot of her songs I can relate to specific times in my life and her music is often something I find myself constantly going back to. She's always pushing the envelope and producing music that makes you think; big concepts and unusual technology. Her latest work, Vulnicura, is essentially a breakup album (take note Adele), and this exhibit was a visual representation of it through incredible video art. But here's the thing. Most of the exhibition was enjoyed (I use that word cautiously here) in dark rooms, sat on individual spinning stools, wearing Oculus Rift headsets and £700 headphones.

If you're not familiar with Oculus Rift, these are headsets you wear that give you a wholly immersive virtual reality experience. And boy, do they. Once the headset goes on (covering your eyes and most of your face), you can look around, up, down, side to side (hence the rotating stools) and see everything around you, as though it is real. It's completely unnerving. In the first black room, you put on the headset and Bjork is standing there in front of you, hands reaching out as though she's about to touch you. Then she starts to move out of your eyeline, but beckons you as she sings. You instinctively turn on your rotaing chair, and follow her as she moves. And it's... well, weird.

There's no other way I can say it. I can appreciate the amazing sound system and I love how mad Bjork's ideas are. And the technology is staggering. But. There's a but. It was so immersive (and I mean COMPLETELY immersive: one of the videos is of the inside of Bjork's mouth, you're basically hanging out with her fillings) you couldn't share it with anyone. You're on your own. No looking over at your mate to giggle at the madness of it all. No sharing of glances with strangers or seeing how someone else is reacting like you would in any other art exhibition. It's just you.

Technology now has rendered us too self-sufficient. Funnily enough I was talking to a friend about this at the weekend and he said the Internet has killed the anecdote. There's no element of surprise any more because we've already read about it online. I appreciate the deep irony of what I'm saying as I describe an art exhibit on a blog btw. But it's true - you don't have as much interaction with people anymore because you can WhatsApp them instead of ringing them up. You can see what happened at an event on Facebook if you weren't there. You can watch the whole world going by from the 5"x3" screen of your phone and not say hi to anyone in the process. And the Oculus Rift experience made me feel isolated and I didn't like it.

I still love Bjork and the album is a thing of great beauty, so thankfully, I could appreciate the Bjork Digital exhibition from that point of view, but it amused me that one day I was walking in the woods in £4 wellies and the next I was wearing state-of-the-art tech spinning on a chair in a darkened room. I definitely know which one I prefer.

To read all of Ray's preivous blogs please click the link https://www.leigh-on-sea.com/blog/tag/ray-morgan-.html