Tender Claws From Virtual Virtual Reality & The Under Presents To Stranger Things VR & Body Proxy

Some of the most memorable experiences that have ever been made for VR headsets started in the minds of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro at Tender Claws.

Artists and creators who have closely followed good VR projects over the last decade still carry with them today their experiences in Virtual Virtual Reality on Daydream headsets and, during the pandemic, the intimate social connection possible in Quest systems buying a ticket to a showing of The Tempest in The Under Presents. The pair estimate their theater in VR hosted somewhere between thousands to tens of thousands of individual performances across the pandemic, providing a vital place of performance to actors when their physical venues closed and much-needed magic and social connection to isolated attendees.

Their sequel Virtual Virtual Reality 2 might be seen as prophetic to the ends of Rec Room and Horizon Worlds while Stranger Things VR released at the zenith of Meta’s explorations into mixed reality on Quest systems. More recently, the pair have returned to their installation-based roots with experiences touring through festivals in projects like Face Jumping and, this year, the AI glasses-based Body Proxy.

 “What we do is kind of like look at the zeitgeist and look at both the critical and creative landscape that we're participating in,” Gorman said on the Good VR Podcast. “And think about speculative futures and narratives that make people think about technology rollout or what the systems they're engaging in are…I think what has been really supportive and important for us as artists in that our pieces come out as sort of precedent sometimes and make a statement about these speculative futures that then may or may not come to pass.”

Their work across space and embodiment strains the very definition of games, with the pair responding to my questions across an hour-long conversation I edited down to around 47 minutes with the podcasting platform Riverside.

“ I think we have a very blurry definition of game and we will refer to all of them as games and all of them as experiences depending on the audience we're talking to,” said Cannizzaro during the conversation.

I discuss with the cofounders the recent colocation chat I had with Alex Coulombe and Steve Lukas and manually corrected the transcription of our conversation to the best of my ability in an effort to make their deep reflections as universally digestible as possible.

“You have [an] audience and market that feels like, ‘oh, what is a game and what is an experience?’ And that's still a discussion. But in the worlds we inhabit, we are far past that discussion and looking into a broader -- what is interaction in this space,” Gorman said.

“I  think it's actually maybe your relation to others through the technology is what creates presence.”

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