Artist Mark Farid plans to wear Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles for 28 days straight, seeing the life of another person the entire time.
He will do so while living in a single room with a bed, toilet, and shower housed in an art gallery, where he'll be in constant view of an audience. The audience will see him as well as the projection he's seeing inside his headset.
"I want to do this because I want to find out if there is something inherent about the individual, or whether who we are is a cultural identity," Farid
told The Mirror U.K. "It is the risk to my eyesight and how my brain is functioning — but this is not an endurance test. If it is going too far, the project will be called off."
Farid will not interact with anyone besides a psychologist during the experiment, and he and his project partners aren't yet sure whose life he will inhabit. In addition to their "Seeing I" Kickstarter — which seeks to raise money for the feat — the team is also accepting applications for Farid's virtual counterpart. They're looking specifically for a heterosexual man who is in a relationship to record and livestream his life to Farid's headset.
Throughout the course of the project, the team will film Farid, his "Other," people they know, audience members, and more to produce a documentary exploring what the experiment could teach us about identity and one's sense of self.
"Seeing I is an art project meets social experiment, which will culminate in a feature-length documentary that aims to inform and educate everyone to the extent to which society and technology influence us," the team's director, John Ingle, said in a video pitching the project.
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