Ep. 1 - Experimental VR and Curation

In this episode of Dr. VR, Dr. Justin Baillargeon speaks with artist-researcher David Han about his acclaimed VR installation After Dan Graham. Drawing on influences from structuralist media artists of the 1960s and 70s, Han explores how presence, freedom of action, and public exhibition design can shape the way we experience, and remember, VR art.

“I knew it was an illusion, and yet it felt authentic. That question: why does VR feel real?, still drives my work.” —David Han

Origins & influences: structuralism meets VR

Han’s path into VR (first tried in 2014 on an Oculus DK2) began with a classic “light-bulb moment.” Rather than chase realism or narrative spectacle, he looked backward to the structuralist media artists of the 1960s and 70s, Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow, who interrogated a medium by laying its mechanisms bare.Early experiments in VR asked basic questions: How do I give myself a body? If I add a mirror, what does self-perception look like here? Those prompts naturally led to Graham’s closed-circuit investigations, where the self appears from the outside—and sometimes outside of time.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing: my VR experiments pushed me toward those earlier practices, and learning their approaches fed back into how I worked with VR.”

The work: After Dan Graham and its core mechanic

After Dan Graham translates Graham’s Time Delay Room 1 into a spatial, participatory system:

• Four televisions anchor a minimal, gallery-like room. The participant’s first task is simple: walk around and turn them on. This onboarding doubles as data capture: by the time the fourth set is powered, the system has recorded enough motion to begin its loop.

• A ~16-second delay spawns an avatar “echo” of the participant. New echoes appear at regular intervals (multiples of the base delay), creating a living palimpsest of the user’s recent past actions.

• The result is a strange duet with oneself: you keep moving not because the system tells you to, but because your own delayed body keeps “approaching,” triggering a natural urge to yield space.

  
  

The four TVs are both homage and interface: windows that let bystanders understand what’s happening in the headset and, crucially, a bridge between the virtual and the room where the art is happening.

“Those TVs bring the virtual into the real. Onlookers can map the headset user’s gestures to what they’re seeing on the screens.”

Presence through freedom of action (and full-body tracking)

For Han, presence depends less on spectacle and more on 6DoF interactivity and motion parallax—the tiny perceptual cues that convince your body you’re there. Head-and-hands alone worked, but adding feet and waist trackers raised the “tension between what’s real and what isn’t,” sharpening the embodied illusion. Wireless hardware was a must for the FIVARS installation; calibration (including height) was a practical but necessary hurdle.

Natural locomotion was a design pillar: no teleportation, no complex controller schemas. You walk to move. You poke a power button to act. The narrative is emergent and player-led.

“You don’t have to explain anything, and that’s really important.”

Spectatorship, voyeurism, and the public setting

Public exhibition complicates embodiment. Some visitors felt watched and moved less freely; others danced with their echoes. Han leans into that social tension, designing for a dual spectatorship: the person in the headset and the audience outside it.He imagines future setups where audience members are tracked too, becoming live elements within the virtual layer, a literal fusion of co-present realities.

“I think of the installation as a palimpsest—two realities layered. Can we give the outside audience an active role inside the virtual?”

Exploration over exposition

Han consistently prefers explorational VR to expositional content. Open systems ask viewers to form their own relationships to material, leave productive gaps, and generate meaning through action rather than receive it as a finished delivery.

“The more freedom we have as participants, the more impactful it becomes, even if brief moments of ‘I’m not sure what to do’ interrupt flow.”

Comfort & UX: intuitive first, minimalist always

Though not framed as a UX project, After Dan Graham adopts practices that reduce friction without dumbing down the medium:

• Intuitive actions only (walk, reach, press).

• Volunteer onboarding covers consent for placing trackers and spatial positioning.

• Minimalist visuals keep focus on bodily perception and the time-delay mechanic.

Crucially, Han rejects the idea that VR’s role is to erase “pain points.” As an artist, he’s interested in productive friction: the visible seams where systems fail or infer.

“I’m not chasing perfect VR. I’m interested in what the technology can’t quite do—and what that reveals.”

Authenticity, affect, and the “empathy machine” debate

Han resists the TED-talk promise of VR as an “empathy machine.” He’s more persuaded by affect through interaction: bodily proximity, mutual responsiveness, and spatial awareness. A simple, well-timed exchange with a virtual creature once made him flinch and feel bad, proof that embodied interaction, not narrative alone, can generate powerful affect.

Curation & exhibition design: making the invisible legible

Good VR exhibition design, in Han’s view, treats the installation itself as part of the artwork:

• Let onlookers actually see what’s happening (the TVs do this work).

• Consider lines, waiting areas, and sightlines as designed experiences.

• Explore co-presence—not just streaming the headset view, but representing people in the room inside the virtual space (with safety in mind).

Archiving the un-archivable

Like much installation art, After Dan Graham is hard to preserve. A simplified version lived in the Museum of Other Realities, but without full-body tracking it becomes a different piece. Han sees hope in emerging markerless body tracking and consumer mocap, which could eventually make “full” re-presentations feasible, but he accepts the medium’s ephemerality as part of its truth.

Conclusion

David Han’s reflections on After Dan Graham open a rare window into VR’s potential to merge embodiment, freedom, and critical play. From the thrill of interacting with your own time-delayed double to the challenges of showing and preserving such work, his insights reveal a medium still in the midst of defining itself.

Listen to the full conversation to hear David dive deeper into the creative process, his views on VR exhibition design, and why he believes imperfection can be VR’s greatest strength.

About the Guest

David Han is a Toronto-based artist and researcher whose work examines the interplay between embodiment, perception, and digital media systems. His VR installation After Dan Graham premiered at FIVARS where it won the People's Choice Award for Best Interactive Experience, and has been featured in the Museum of Other Realities.

Disclaimer: This post was partly generated with the assistance of an AI tool and reviewed for accuracy and clarity before publication