Andrew Melchior: "Every instrument begins as disruption before becoming art"

The story of VR and AR is really the story of human imagination catching up with its tools. The difficulty has never been cost but curiosity. For years, these experiences imitated older media. They looked like cinema with extra steps. The transformation will come when creators begin to think in the language of spatial experience itself, when the work is felt rather than explained.

When Björk and I worked on Stonemilker 360 for MoMA PS1, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, she stood on Grotta Beach in Iceland’s freezing wind, encircled by cameras. Viewers later said it felt like “FaceTiming Björk”, which was remarkable for someone so private. That intimacy was not futuristic but profoundly human. Technology became transparent and emotion took over. The future of VR is not spectacle but sincerity. 

We made our own VR headsets out of iPhones and 3D printed headsets with fresnel lenses to make sure everyone could try it. VR is like TV and Radio but optics are hard. Much harder than acoustics so it's taking more time to make the ideal headset that suits everyone.

You worked with David Bowie and I think that one of his most important contributions, besides his music, was that prediction about the internet - “the Internet will be an alien life form, not just a medium”. Do you believe that the internet has become an alien life form as Bowie mentioned?

Bowie saw much further than most. The internet has stopped being a reflection of us and has become an ecosystem of its own, one that feeds on our attention and learns from our behaviour. During the BowieNet years he would enter his own digital world disguised as a white rabbit avatar, talking to fans directly to hear their honest opinions. It was both theatre and anthropology. 

Today that silicon based alien life form is fully grown. We live within it. We are in some ways the wetware for AI to understand the place it has been birthed into. The question is no longer whether the internet and its child ubiquitous AI is alive but whether we can remain conscious inside it, shaping its evolution instead of being shaped entirely by it.

AR is a technology that can be somehow shared, that can exist into a wider space, but VR is a technology limited to the individual. I would compare it to the practice of listening to music by yourself, in a room without any other signals and notifications, just for the sake of music and sound. Do you think that this is an obstacle in adoption of VR or maybe it is the appeal of VR - going by yourself in different worlds? 

It is its strength. In a world that never stops talking, solitude has become rare. VR allows us to reclaim that stillness. It is not about isolation but concentration. When you put on a headset, you step into a space where attention is restored to its rightful scale. 

A well-designed immersive experience can produce something close to communion. It is the intimacy of silence, the kind of solitude that artists and scientists alike have always needed in order to think clearly.

As a journalist, one of my troubles regarding writing and talking about VR and AR projects is to “translate” them to a wider audience. Please take us behind one of your projects, your pick, and try to explain it “as I’m five” - how would you explain AR and VR projects like you did to people who never saw VR and AR?

Imagine walking through your city and hearing the walls whisper. The air carries songs and voices from the past. You reach out and the memories speak back. That is MOST, the project I am developing in Kraków’s Jewish quarter. It is a living bridge between times where history becomes sound. You do not control it; you simply walk, and the city tells its own story.

This is how I think AR should work. It should not demand attention but reward awareness. It should make the ordinary world luminous again.

You are currently working for the Jewish Culture Festival for almost a time travel experience in history. People say that we don’t learn from history. Do you think that VR and AR experiences can increase our empathy regarding history? Because we can understand that experience better?

Yes. They allow us to enter history not as tourists but as witnesses. When you inhabit a re-created moment you stop reading about events and begin to feel them. The cold, the silence, the fragility of other lives become palpable.

Technology, handled with care, can teach moral perception and subjective empathy. It reminds us that progress without memory is a form of cultural amnesia.

Today AI is creating music. Most of the music we hear around us is a simple tune of 4 chords. Or even less. I am curious what your expectation regarding the future of music is and if you think it’s not that different than any other period in history (when Mozart was considered vulgar, for example) when quality “content” was reserved to a limited elite and the rest was listening to the most simple tunes?

AI will generate oceans of sound, much of it forgettable, and within that noise will emerge new possibilities. Every instrument begins as disruption before becoming art. The role of the artist now is to teach the machine how to listen, how to care.

When anyone can generate a melody, authenticity becomes the rarest note. Music will survive the algorithm because emotion cannot be automated, only imitated. Human performance and interaction will be reified and treated with more admiration than ever before.

How would you describe yourself? Technology expert? Artist?

I work where sound, science and story converge. Some days that means building systems, other days composing, producing or writing. I am an artist who uses technology as a material rather than a subject. My concern is perception: how humans, machines and environments communicate and alter one another.

Technology is my pigment, my score. Through it I try to explore what consciousness feels like at this moment in history.