tell me how you really feel
proposed AR environment | created in Maya
In a wide room with a large mirror, you are completely alone.
A hand comes out from the mirror and gently moves towards you. Its gestures are inviting. It roams your body, feeling you in intimate ways, embracing you without needing to be asked.
The hands aren’t real, yet you still feel them, a light pressure on yourself.
The tips of your ears feel hot. It’s embarrassing, seeing yourself like this, and incredibly uncomfortable.
To be shown that deep down, you do just want to be hugged, to have someone squeeze your arm, to have fingers graze across your back in assurance…you haven’t experienced these things before, not really, not without questioning, “is this okay?”
You cannot move your own body, watching these hands move, but it is safe. No one can see this except for yourself.
You can take the time and accept, yes, I do want to be held just so.
tell me how you really feel exposes the deep desire to be touched buried beneath the first responses we have to avoid contact with people we don’t know, and an extreme hesitance to initiate and accept it from people we do know.
For those who have no qualms about touching or being touched, it can simply be felt as a welcoming embrace. It is an experience that can provide sensual intimacy or extreme discomfort, but hopefully both.
However sensual the actions are though; this piece is in no way meant to be sexually stimulating. Rather than searching for an internal physical reaction, this piece seeks to pull at the limits one sets in creating boundaries between themselves and others, and to push the mind to conjure up false external sensations in wake of those mental triggers.
tell me how you really feel seeks to target the limbo emotion of desire and disgust borne of touch starvation, and to truly feel something that is virtual.