You’re standing in the middle of an arid desertscape in West Africa. The mountains on the horizon are low-poly and pixelated; the sky is rapidly translating layers of code into an apocalyptic sunset palette: rust orange, fluorescent pink, violet quartz. You feel the tug of the joystick from your other body in the other world slowly relinquishing control as this game world’s gravity reorients itself around some other presence – kind of above you, potentially another body, definitely a spirit.

The sky curdles, flashing sci-fi green as hundreds of weird lifeforms begin to tumble down across the plain, which erupts in snakes and fire pits. The jagged tie-dye washed critters start to wriggle and dance in ecstasy; just as you see the body of your mind’s eye teetering into oblivion, they disappear, the lights come back on, and you can feel control of the joystick seeping back into your body, a kind of fever dream…

When Rebecca Allen began working on The Bush Soul trilogy in the late 1990s, she had been a pioneer in the emerging field of digital art for over two decades. Before and after that, she led design and research for Nokia, MIT Media Lab Europe, NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory, and Intel, overturning the sexist glass ceiling of the emergent field of computer graphics by sneaking through a self-made pop-cultural back door. She built the first 3D animated female figure in 1981 (which was used in a TV commercial), developed complex 3D animations for the likes of Kraftwerk and Led Zeppelin, and presented a kaleidoscopic, fractal-based audio-visual work, Creation Myth: a gyrating tree of life streamed on 50 monitors over revelling dancers at the 1985 opening of New York nightclub Palladium.

“The work is based on a West African belief that we have multiple souls: a soul in your body, a dream soul and a shadow soul, and a soul that lives in a wild animal in the bush in the jungle,” explains Allen. “So even though our “soul” is in our physical body, when we’re in VR, our other soul is in this virtual world.”

The Bush Soul explores the role of avatars in a world of artificial life, but the trilogy was also responding to an increasingly real existential and philosophical concern Allen had in the face of this emergent technology. When we occupy this virtual space, what happens to our bodies? What part of “us” exists in the avatar? How do these technologies change what it means to be human?

To augur the world of the work, Allen worked collaboratively with students at UCLA to generate “Emergence”: an AI computer system and real-time 3D software that could support an interactive networked virtual environment directed by artificial intelligence. In addition to its texture-mapped avatars and landscapes, the rendering engine also included advanced behavior and language AI scripting to generate emergent relationships between characters, which play out through multisensory elements.

A largely non-verbal chorus of communication, including voices, symbolic gestures, sci-fi music, and ambient effects all enhance the sense of aliveness within the virtual world. Every object in the environment – including the avatars – is encoded with a form of artificial life; a non-linear narrative unfurls through an infinite number of possible relationships and encounters between agents. The Bush Soul trilogy presents an abstract world that responds to human interaction; a world with porous boundaries between subject and landscape, alongside an enigmatic, emergent narrative that plays out in a perpetual state of becoming.

In the early 2000s, Allen began experimenting with AR and VR technologies to develop a series of works that unravel these questions of what happens to our bodies in virtual space and the changing idea of the human in a future world of mixed reality. Instead of serving as an aphoristic warning sign of things to come, these projects offered an exuberant vision of the capacity for virtual sensory experiences, interpersonal exchanges, and alternative knowledge systems that these technologies could offer – while also hinting at their potential pitfalls.

In Coexistence (2001), the act of breathing becomes a playful and sensual non-verbal dialogue between two bodies in a room. These respiratory collaborators strap into VR headsets and face each other across a room; each person holds a piece of hardware that combines a breath sensor with a modified force feedback game pad. Your collaborator’s breaths cause the device to rattle, adding a tactile dimension to a typically imperceptible process; a jacked-up auditory component merges with a mixed reality environment to create a hybridized experience of space and corporeality.

Tracing the unknown crevices of the cave-like brain in pursuit of the mind, The Tangle of Mind and Matter (2017) is one of Allen’s more recent forays into the material makeup of consciousness, as she continues to cultivate aesthetic unique to VR. MRI scans of the brain are transformed into an explorable virtual environment: globs of brain are suspended in a star-studded, aequous environment. Taking the form of a generic female avatar that Allen mined from open-source 3D model stores, players can temporarily abandon their bodies, which remain rooted to the Earth and react to the rising levels of water. Taking the form of an embodied mind, they can float out into an interactive, ever-changing abstract horizon.

“While using artificial life, VR, and AR in my work, I’ve always looked at these universally human things like creation myths,” shares Allen. “Which are similar across cultures – despite it having been so difficult to explore ideas of myth, magic and ritual in those state-of-the-art technology research labs in the 70s and 80s, which were largely filled with male programmers who’d balk at the idea of the unknown. I just want to find out what’s core to the idea of being human. I say that because I think now we’re losing so much of it.”

Life Without Matter (2018) explores a speculative near-future wherein our existence has been mostly dematerialized. Using VR, the work involves the physical body of the viewer in both an introspective and interpersonal sense. Donning the headset, viewers pass through an Edenic primordial swampscape to access a mythic architectural ruin. Stepping up into a sci-fi-like blue beam of light, they can witness their virtual reflection, which – harkening back to The Bush Soul – appears as multiple bodies within a refracted mirror of the mind. As they regard their cosmic reflection, their shadow is reflected – Plato’s cave style – through a rounded screen visible to the audience outside of the exhibition. If we’re all living in virtual reality, the work seems to ask, does matter matter? What aspects of embodiment are going to retain meaning in this new virtual world we’re moving into?

Humans in the beginning created the gods, so we’re also responsible for creating artificial intelligence, these anonymous gods. Our creations always become the mirror of ourselves.

“It’s somehow in our destiny to create this technology,” says Allen. “Which is an extension of our bodies and minds, clearly, but it’s kind of making this current version of humans somewhat obsolete, and we are actually evolving into something else. People think technology just grows itself, especially AI. AI can have an emergent quality to it, but ultimately, it’s not separate from ourselves.”