Reality’s Fugue: Genesis is a virtual reality experience about this puzzle.

“A puzzle within a puzzle—
the gateway to the ultimate mysteries.”
— Tao te Ching

Reality’s Fugue: Genesis was exhibited at New Hope Arts, New Hope, Pennsylvania, January 20 – February 10, 2024 with an opening reception on Saturday, January 20, 2024, from 4:00 to 7:00 P.M with an artist’s talk at 5:00 P.M.

Samuel Brainard, in his book Reality’s Fugue: Reconciling Worldviews in Science, Religions, and Philosophy, asserts that a puzzle lies at the center of everything we’re aware of. It hides the true nature of ourselves and the fundamental nature of the universe we live in.

This approach challenges the exclusionist notion that only one worldview can be correct. It presents an alternative mode of understanding using Douglas Hofstadter’s metaphor of a musical fugue that he describes in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Different “voices” and “melodies” of worldviews coexist in counterpoint and conversation. At the same time, each perspective remains distinct; none is privileged.

Reality’s Fugue: Genesis immerses participants in a virtual world that provides a new take on the Genesis origin story to suggest how we create a shared world and hopefully to catalyze conversation.

Credits
Produced and Directed by F. Samuel Brainard and David Tamés
Contributing Artists: Carol Cruickshanks, Susanne Pitak-Davis, Aurelle Purdy Sprout, Stacie Speer Scott
Unity Developer: Patrick Nugent
3D Artists: Patrick Nugent and Katerina Pak
Composer: Linda Erickson
Narration Written by Jenny Paschall
Narrator: Fran Perlman
Technical Consultants: Danger Donaghey, Oscar Keyes, Matt Seibert
Special Thanks: New Hope Arts, Stanley Timek and Bucks County Community College Media Center, Susan Bindig, Robert Bullington, Jeffrey Jacobson, Ryan Murray, Carol Parker, Celia Pearce, Elizabeth A. Stier

Viewing the work
If you want to view the work, contact me about obtaining the APK file for the Meta Quest 2 or Quest 3 headset. Knowledge of side-loading using Sidequest is required to install this experience on the headset. It will not run on the Quest 1.

Music by Colin Owens, from his album Numbers Station © 2009 Colin Owens, used with permission. This video © 2022 by David Tamés, some rights reserved.

bookartbookshop (2021, 10:17, color, stereo)
Camerawork, direction, and sound recording by David Tamés; Editing by Christina Carroll; Music by Tom Phillips and Tom Martin; End credits by Alice Apley.

The film premiered at the Newburyport Documentary Festival on September 17, 2021, and is now available for online viewing. Official Selection, SHORT to the Point, Bucharest, Romania, October 12, 2021; Nominee, London Film & TV Awards, June 30, 2021.

When I first visited bookartbookshop in the summer of 2015, I was drawn viscerally by the tactility of the books. I returned the following summer to spend three days trying to capture the magic of the shop with audio and video. The raw footage was set aside for several years as I completed editing a feature-length documentary. Then magically, Christina Carroll, a former student, came to me looking for a video editing project, and thanks to her, the film was completed. Alice Apley, who introduced me to bookartbookshop in the first place, made the end titles. While the camera can never capture the tactility of the books, it can help us reflect on what the digitization of culture and the pandemic have taken away from us.

The footage was shot during the summer of 2016 with the Panasonic GH4 with a Olympus ED 12-40mm f/2.8 lens and a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens adapted with a Metabones Ultra adapter. I recorded most of the dialogue and all of the ambient sound with an Audio Technica BP 4029 MS stereo short shotgun microphone on the camera or hand-held with a pistol grip; the interview with Natalie D’Arbeloff was recorded with a Tram TR-50 lav, both were recorded with a Tascam DR-40 recorder, double system. I did both the sound and camera on my own.

Watch the trailer:

Farm and Red Moon (Audrey Kali and David Tamés, 2021, 78 minutes, color, stereo)

To schedule a screening, please contact the filmmakers using this contact form.

What people are saying about Farm and Red Moon:

“An extraordinarily intelligent and moving documentary on the human-meat relationship.” — Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“A thoughtful, ambitious, and emotionally affecting feature documentary about protagonist Audrey Kali’s journey to understand the ethics of animal slaughter.” — Jacob Bricca, ACE, author of Documentary Editing: Principles & Practice

Visit farmandredmoon.com to learn more about the film.

The project was developed at the Reality Virtually Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab, January 17 – 21, 2019, where it was the winner of the Best in Art, Media & Entertainment Award.

As humans, we each inhabit our own unique reality. We can never experience the rich synaptic context of thoughts, memories, and emotions that define another person’s perception of the world. Therefore, even though we often feel or assume that we are communicating our ideas to others with complete clarity, this is almost never true. There will always be transformations and noise in the signal.

Bird Box is a metaphor for all the layers of richness that are lost in the communication process. The title is a nod to the homonymous Netflix film, in which – upon viewing the same unknown entity – some people experience enlightenment while others encounter their worst fears.

Participants in Bird Box share an audiovisual space in which their experience of each other’s actions is largely similar, yet irreconcilably different. The participant in VR is enclosed in a soundcage, creating music with their motions as they paint in the canvas of a surreal virtual world. The participant in AR, who can digitally paint in the real world, can hear the VR participant’s music but can never share the act of composing. The paint strokes created by each participant in their respective realities appear as traces in the other participant’s world.

In the course of design, we pivoted the original concept many times. At first, the project involved transforming a room into a spatial instrument in which two people – one in VR, blind to the environment, and one in AR, unable to trigger the notes – must work collaboratively in order to create beautiful sounds. We found ourselves repeatedly drawn toward the delicate tension that is created between two people who cannot see eye to eye. Thus, we shifted to focus around the imperfect act of communication as a visually creative, interactive experience.

The concept art and the score were created for this project during this hackathon. We pulled some free 3D models from Google Poly and TurboSquid. A few sound effects for the demo video were pulled from freesound.org. Other than freemium assets pulled in from the web, every part of this project was created during this hackathon.

Creative team

Alessio Grancini (concept, sound design, and Unity programming), Runze Zhang (AR/VR networking infrastructure and Unity programming), Emily Shoemaker (experience design), Kelon Cen (concept and 3D scene design), and David Tamés (interface design and Unity programming)

Built with

Logic Pro, Maya, Photoshop, Rhino, Unity, ARCore, ARFoundation, OpenVR, VIU, and Photon.

See also

• GitHub Repo
• DevPost Page

The work described in this thesis provides a basis for understanding documentary construction as a process of crossing boundaries: what we create is defined similarly by borders and interiors, each with their own function and value. I examine the contours of the experi- ence of observing events in the social-historical world and sharing traces of those events with others.

Boundary crossings are examined through the analysis of three projects:

• Hawt Couch, an object that shares its memory of past events;
• Provocative Objects, an exhibition and exhibition catalog that interrogates the limitations of traditional documentation; and
• This Place in a Space, an installation offering visitors the opportunity to experience one or both sides of the objective/subjective divide.

Using a framework encompassing issues of immersion, computa- tional media, and boundary crossings, each project is contextualized with connections to dynamic media, design, cinema, narratology, philosophy, and installation art.

Download PDF

See also Provocative Objects

Image: “Musée du quai Branly, Paris, August 3, 2011” by David Tamés

Exhibition Catalog (issu)