MARLEINE VAN DER WERF

Marleine van der Werf THE OTHER AS A MIRROR

Marleine van der Werf (1985, CH/NL) is a filmmaker/ visual artist with a documentary practice. She researches how to immerse in someone else’s experience. Her projects are inspired by people with a radically different perception of reality that challenge her assumptions. Van der Werf translates their experiences using haptic cinema and XR-installations, in order to question the understanding of the other and the self. She believes that knowledge does not come through intellect but through experience. By inviting an audience inside a different perception of reality, she aims to stimulate imagination and curiosity as a tool to reflect on polarization.

Recurrent themes are embodiment, identity and our subjective perception of reality. Van der Werf collaborates with renowned experts in the field of science, art, and humanities. She studied Audiovisual Design at St. Joost Art Academy. Her projects have been broadcasted at television and shown at international festivals: IDFA (NL), Human Rights film festival Seoul (KR), FILE Festival in Sao Paolo (BR), Future of storytelling New York (USA) and Art Basel (CH). She won the NEXT Talent Award in 2018 (Playgrounds and partners), the Scientist Award (Abu Dhabi Imagine Science films festival) and the ACT award (STRP) in 2019.

www.marleinevdwerf.com www.thelivingdead.nl mail@marleinevdwerf.com

THE OTHER AS A MIRROR When I was ten years old, I witnessed the psychoses of my father for three days. He saw snipers attacking us that I couldn’t see. That was frightening, but it also made me aware that we don’t share the same reality. How can we understand someone else’s perspective by interpreting it within our own subjective frame of reference?

This is why I became a filmmaker, to discover what I can learn from people who have a radically different perception of reality than me. To break free from my comfort zone and broaden my frame of reference. For me as a queer woman it can be quite uncomfortable to interview someone who says all queers will go to hell, because that is what his or her religion states. But unless we enter into a dialogue, nothing will change. We need to think of what connects us, instead of what divides us. It also means challenging one’s own, my own, assumptions when making a film about, say, hooligans of a soccer club, people that are homeless, have a disability, are extremely religious or, as in my new project, people who feel disembodied. What can we learn from each other’s perspective? What if a scientist can experience animal experiments from the perspective of a lab rat? Or a heterosexual man experiencing the harassment of a lesbian woman? An architect experiencing her design from the perception of a bee? Would this experience create an opportunity to reflect about our opinions and perspectives? What if we had artistic methods to break through these boundaries?

Projects testing the method. for details about these projects see www.marleinevdwerf.com “What is it like to be a bat? What it is like is misleading, it doesn’t mean what in ‘our experience’ it resembles, but rather how it is for the subject himself. […] I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”

Thomas Nagel, essay: What is it like to be a bat?

UNDERSTANDING THROUGH EXPERIENCING How to immerse in someone else's experience? What conditions are necessary to experience this 'other' perspective? Are there methods that filmmakers can use to break through their own subjective experience? And how do we use this to represent others?

My focus used to lie solely with the character in a film. The goal was to get as close to the characters' experiences and portray this as accurately as possible. For that, I developed methods to enter their ‘worlds’. Before filming, I would collect everything about the person and take actively part in their daily life for months. It’s like falling in love: wanting to know everything about someone and trying to come as close as possible. Aside from observing and questioning, I would insert myself in the situation in which my main characters find themselves. This used to be an intuitive process. During the Master's programme, I came to understand it as a method: understanding through experiencing. My research then focused on developing this method further. To extend it beyond the concern with the characters in my films and installations towards an additional concern with the spectators or participants of my projects.

I thus developed a cyclical working method with recurring steps: 1. How to map someone else’s experience? 2. How to assess if this is accurate? 3. How to translate this experience of a character into a film? 4. How to immerse the spectator in the experience of the main character? 5. How to assess what the spectator experiences during a film? 6. How to assess if the perception of the spectator changes through the experience of a film?

During my time at the Master’s, I tested these steps in different films and installations I worked on and I used them to develop new methods, approaches and sensory techniques to research how to immerse in the experience of the other.

As a side note: The work of William Turner is a great example on how this method of ‘understanding through experience’ influences the outcome of the artistic process. At a time when other painters depicted nautical scenes in a very static way, his paintings were wild and almost abstract. Turner ‘stepped into’ the situation he painted. He had himself tied to the mast of war ships and started to paint from that experience.

An example of using this method is the way I worked on the commissioned documentary The New Hospital. Most challenging was to understand the responsibility that doctors feel when they have to make the choice between life and death. In order to understand this sense of responsibility I spend a few months at the hospital, observing and participating in their

daily work, wearing a doctor’s lab-coat. This gave me a clearer picture of what their work entails. At one point, a new born baby was rushed into the hospital with her father. He was in shock because his wife had become dangerously ill, and he frantically followed his baby who was also in a critical state. When he saw me, he ran to me and asked what he should do and whether his baby daughter would make it. I froze up completely. I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Luckily a nurse came by and calmly escorted the man to his baby daughter. Being in that position is completely different than observing how a nurse deals with a similar situation. It helped me to understand the daily pressure the medical staff is under. Having experienced it, also allowed me to connect with the nurses on a more intimate level during filming.

This conscious working method of ‘stepping in’ or ‘inserting’ myself is an essential part of my practice. This inspired me to look for other methods or tools to understand through experiencing.

APPROPRIATING METHODS OF OTHER DISCIPLINES During the Master’s programme professor and filmmaker Eyal Sivan inspired me to search for knowledge about subjective experience in other disciplines. Simultaneously, I was invited by InScience FilmFestival and the Radboud University in Nijmegen to collaborate with Prof. Dr. De Lange. In his ‘Predictive brain lab’, he researches how visual perception generates our subjective reality. The result was a short film, The Prediction Machine. An important insight during this collaboration was how much overlap there was between De Lange’s question about how humans create their visual perception and my artistic practice. While he uses a scientific approach to understand what his participants see, I recreate in a visual style, through film, how a character perceives. While he puts participants in an MRI scanner and analyses their eye movements, I analyse with my characters whether this is indeed how they perceive reality. The main difference is the form the research takes. De Lange publishes his scientific data in a magazine, I use it to make films and installations. This led me to search for other disciplines that deal with similar questions but use different methods to immerse in the subjective experience.

As a result, I met with a writer, architect, neuroscientist, filmmaker, anthropologist, spiritual medium, choreographer and an FBI profiler. This generated an insight in completely different methodologies for studying the same subject matter. The profiler uses the facts of a crime scene to create an outline of the perpetrator, their background, how they think and whence the fascination of the perpetrator for what they did. The resemblance in the way we map, collect and obsess about someone’s experience was an eye-opener. Another encounter I had with a different but similar method was during a series of workshops I taught about immersion in an animal perspective at the Technical University in Delft. The landscape architects researched how they could implement a non-human perspective in their architectural design. They collected information and did their ‘field work’, using objective information to map conditions, habitats and biotopes. One of the researchers observed a bee colony for a week. She discovered how the design of the campus negatively influenced their survival: because the grass and flowers had to be cut every two weeks to maintain the design, the bees lost their food source. Since then, the architect implements a non-human perspective in her design process. It told me that playfully changing one’s perspective to another species could change design attitudes.

But how to embody another human’s physical experience? The dancers of the Motus Mori Institute showed me a beautiful method. Through kinetic interviews, choreographer Katja Heiman and her dancers archive movements of interviewees in their own bodies. Interestingly, the dancers told me that sometimes they felt that they lost their own movements while archiving those of others. I recognize this as a filmmaker, when you’re so immersed in someone else’s perspective that you have difficulty staying objective. The process of opening up sometimes means blurring the lines between how you and your character feel.

Researching methods used in other disciplines – seeing them at work, understanding them, sometimes appropriating them – is very valuable and will remain part of my practice. It was exciting to exchange experiences with other researchers. It showed that different disciplines can have similar starting points and thought processes and that they differ only in the outcomes and the way they present these outcomes. It also made it clear to me, however, that in collaborations or exchanges, you cannot rely on the ‘language’ of your discipline. You cannot assume that others will understand your terminology. The encounters challenge us to critically question and specify what we actually mean and find a new language that both of us understand. It thus helps one to think outside of the box and reflect on ones discipline from a distance, which provides new insights.

SHIFT TO THE EXPERIENCE OF THE AUDIENCE During the research at the Master my focus has shifted from the experience of the character to that of the spectator or participant. Direct cause was the the response to my multi sensory-installation Be Boy Be Girl (co-director Frederik Duerinck). Between 2016 and 2019 around 200.000 people visited this installation, in which you choose to be a person of the opposite sex sunbathing at the beach. During the exhibition a participant said that he felt very vulnerable ‘being’ a woman in Virtual Reality. Especially when a surfer approached him from the sea. He was scared the surfer would come to ‘him’ for sex or even rape the woman that he embodied. At first I thought this was just a one-time encounter. But in different exhibitions in Europe, USA and Brazil men came to me with a similar experience. At the time it was surprising, but during the Masters programme I became aware of the significance of it. A dominant perception of Virtual Reality is that it works as an ‘empathy machine’. But as a filmmaker I noticed that the participants do not so much empathize with someone in VR reality, as that they project their own expectations of

the situation, in this case fear. Of course, the experience of watching a 2-D horror film can be similar; you can also feel fear or anticipation of something that will happen. But the same scene of a woman sunbathing in a 2D-film and the first-person perspective of that scene in VR do not generate the same reactions of the participants. This led me to conclude that, in certain circumstances, a spectator or participant can understand something through experiencing. The question is how can we ascertain what such an experience means for whom? And why does this experience, in a mere 3 minutes, lead some people to project their fears on a body they do not own?

The next step within my research is therefor to investigate how to immerse the spectator in the perspective of the character. Specifically, to investigate when they synchronize and when not? This changes also the way I structure my practice. I now concentrate less on the answers or the end product. Instead, I keep asking questions throughout the entire process. As a filmmaker you often only experience the interaction with the spectator at the end of a project, during and after the screening or in a Q&A session. But this is of course limited, because by that time you’re often already working on other projects. This means that the information about the experience of the spectator or participants gets lost. Now, rather than waiting until the premiere of the film or installation, I create prototypes earlier in the process, which I test with participants. I use the outcomes of those experiments to further develop the project. This means I am in constant interaction with the spectator, with the project being an ongoing research process.

THE LIVING DEAD Currently I’m engaged in such an ongoing research process, in the form a multidisciplinary project called The Living Dead. It’s an intimate journey in which the fragile relationship with our biological body is questioned. The ‘story’ is told from the perspective of someone suffering from Cotard Syndrome, a rare condition in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are already dead, do not exist or have lost body parts.

To translate this experience, The Living Dead will use cinema, multi-sensory tools and a sensory deprivation tank. It will also use the available knowledge on disembodiment, through collaboration with neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors and artists in the fields of dance, sound and image. It’s a project situated at the intersection of these different disciplines and, based on its investigative nature, researches ways to represent this experience in a diverse range of presentation forms, including a VR project, a multi-sensory installation and an essay film discussing the expectation of physicians, neuroscientists and philosophers who believe that Cotard Syndrome may be the key to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness.

After seeing what it is to lose one’s mind, maintaining the connection to my body became a way to survive. In that sense, Cotard Syndrome embodies my greatest fear. The aim of The Living Dead project however is not to create a sensational or horrific experience. The aim is to learn from people who suffer from it and to invite the spectator to reflect on their own relationship with their body. Given Covid, rapid digitalization and robotization, The Living Dead invites us to consider what ‘we’ are and what our bodies mean to us.

TO CONCLUDE The experience of witnessing my father’s psychosis, made me want to investigate how we can understand someone else’s perspective by interpreting it within our own subjective frame of reference. We tend to forget the basic fact that everything around us is subjective. Understanding that is even more relevant now, as there seems less and less room for discussion and conflicting opinions. Algorithms cause us to withdraw more and more into groups of like-minded people, where subjective perception comes to be taken for reality. It’s important that we find methods to break out of this polarization. Methods that stimulate curiosity and let us discover what we can learn from each other’s perspective in a playful manner. To unite and create understanding we need a meaningful discourse, and I'm hopeful that artistic research into immersion can challenge us to really engage with each other.

I am very gratefull for the financial support of this research by: Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting SEC, Van Beek-Donner Stichting, Stichting Bekker-La Bastide-Fonds & Max Cohen Fonds and a special thanks to Concept editor: Eva Wijers