CCB Magazine

Virtual reality offers many new opportunities for communication and interaction. Cultural professionals can also take advantage of this. But how do you use this technology? At first glance, it seems easier than you might think. That's why Katharina Haverich has come up with something: the Berlin School of VR. She wants to help people and institutions gain practical access to VR.

INTERVIEW  Boris Messing    

CCB Magazine: Hello Katharina. You are a performance and media artist and this year you founded the Berlin School of VR. When I think of school, I always think of frontal teaching and overburdened teachers.

Katharina Haverich: I deliberately called it a school and not an academy or institute because I didn't want our offering to become so elitist. Everyone should be able to experience the wondrous and remarkable world of VR. We want to build a competence center that teaches safety, behavior, technology and possible applications of virtual worlds. But it has nothing to do with school, as you imagine. In the end, it's about a kind of VR literacy, about the ability to move safely and well-informed through virtual spaces. It's like a basic course or a driver's license.

CCB Magazine:Can you be a little more specific about what you want to offer in principle: Is it more about the technical handling and the creative possibilities of VR? Or is it also about being able to create virtual worlds yourself?

Katharina Haverich:The Berlin School of VR offers VR courses to give people insights into the technology and teach them skills for using VR headsets. We believe that basic knowledge of navigating virtual environments in virtual bodies is important to safely experience virtual worlds, also known as the metaverse. This includes, for example, understanding privacy and security settings. It can also help to protect against harassment and the unwanted collection of data by app developers and hardware manufacturers.

CCB Magazine:Who is the target group for your offer?

Katharina Haverich:I would like to reach a larger target group. This could be companies or cultural institutions and museums that want to use VR for their purposes. They could be artists, producers, curators or documentary filmmakers, but also young people, parents or older people. We have prepared a digital questionnaire to find out who might be interested in our offer. We ask about age, what VR should be used for, etc. Depending on the answers, we want to design and specify our program. For example, a group of tax consultants asked us. A school in Neukölln is interested and there will also be a cooperation with the Helene Nathan Library in 2025.

We want to establish a competence center that teaches safety, behavior, technology and possible applications of virtual worlds. The aim is to enable people to move safely and well-informed through virtual spaces

CCB Magazine:When does the Berlin School of VR open its doors?

Katharina Haverich:We are starting with the courses Virtual Reality Crash Course, Virtual World Hopping and Artistic Practice in the Metaverse from October. Fun courses will also be added later: VR for lovers, for example. Couples can register with us and spend a romantic evening in a VR world. From then on, things will really take off. We are also in the process of preparing a 50- to 70-hour course for IHK members. But as I said, our offer will depend on demand.

CCB Magazine:You received funding from the Senate for the foundation. Does that mean your courses are offered for free?

Katharina Haverich:We can offer the courses at the Helene Nathan Library free of charge thanks to the funding. Otherwise, the courses do cost something, but not as much as if we had no funding. In the long term, I would like to see a flexible pricing model in which wealthier companies help pay for those on lower incomes. The courses would then be more affordable for people on a budget. But we also need to clarify other questions, such as: Is German the only language in which we offer this? That all remains to be seen.

CCB Magazine:There are already courses that teach VR, AR and XR, such as the Aurora School for Artists. Why do we need another institution to promote this technology to the outside world?

Katharina Haverich:I know the Aurora School for Artists, it's great! But our offer is aimed at other target groups, not just artists. We are less interested in designing XR than in experiencing virtual reality in an informed and therefore safe and confident way.

As an artist, I'm always dependent on the director of the Deutsches Theater finding me great at some point. Or the Hebbel am Ufer Theater. They have to invite me, and that's crazy expensive. I have the feeling that I'm more independent in virtual worlds. New stages are opening up, a new audience

CCB Magazine:How did you come up with the idea of the Berlin School of VR?

Katharina Haverich:That naturally resulted from my work. In 2018, I made an installation, Sequence of a Horse in Motion, based on a dream I had. I dreamt that a man was hanging upside down from the ceiling, being circled by a horse and wrapped in a cloth. We recreated this and staged it live. A man was pulled up by a machine and wrapped around by a horse. I then recorded the performance in a 360-degree video and created a two-minute video clip from it, which was played on a VR headset. People from the audience could register with me; they were clamped into the machine, pulled up, got the headset on and were digitally wrapped by the horse with the rope. At the same time, they were wrapped in real life with a strap, which in VR language is called haptic feedback. And that's how I started to discover VR for myself.

First experiments with VR: Haverich's Sequence of a Horse in Motion. Images (top and center): Dajana Lothert, image (bottom): Susanne Dickel

CCB Magazine:But it was the pandemic that really kick-started your idea.

Katharina Haverich:With Corona, I started to move many of my shows into virtual reality. In 2021, I built the world ...dreams about girls with my colleague Roman Miletitch, a coder, on the social VR platform VRChat. For the project, I asked women about their violent dreams against men. I wanted to know: What are forms of female defensiveness after millennia of patriarchy? Where does the unconscious go? Women could get in touch with me and describe their dream sequences. I then recreated sequences of their dreams in VR from their descriptions. Dreams are very difficult to relive. In VR, however, they can be depicted very well. Since then, three years ago, around 20,000 people have been in our VR world. You can do anything in this world. You can appear in any shape, small, large, as a dragon, with eight arms or sixteen eyes. In virtual worlds, you are completely free.

CCB Magazine:How do people find your Metaverse world on VRChat, how did people come across it?

Katharina Haverich:A colleague said it was because I called the world ...dreams about girls and women and men probably thought that explicit situations would be recreated there, which is not the case. I hadn't advertised the project. So how do people come up with it? Who are they? I find that an interesting question. I don't know.

I would like to reach a larger target group. This could be companies or cultural institutions that want to use VR for their purposes. But it could also be artists, producers, curators or documentary filmmakers

CCB Magazine:Or to put it another way: What new opportunities does VR open up for artists and cultural professionals?

Katharina Haverich:As an artist, I'm always dependent on the director of the Deutsches Theater finding me great at some point. Or the Hebbel am Ufer Theater. Or the Biennale Anywhere. They have to invite me, and that's crazy expensive. I have the feeling that I'm more independent in virtual worlds. I've always been a freelance artist, and in a way you always get the same audience. VR changes that. It's not necessarily art and culture people who hang around there. It can be anyone and everyone who has the technical requirements - a computer or VR headset. This opens up new stages and a new audience. Hierarchies are being undermined.

CCB Magazine:Virtual worlds are not necessarily places of peace and harmony.  Meta has often had to deal with the issue of hatred and hate speech. It will probably be the same in the metaverse, in whatever form.

Katharina Haverich:I think Meta has made a big mistake or is negligent with social networks. But whether you like it or not, you are in a relationship with these large corporations that are driving and developing these technologies. I wonder whether it is possible to deal with the problems we have in the analog world differently in VR worlds. We have every opportunity to do so. For example, the issue of racism. Or misogyny. Or age discrimination. It could all be different in the metaverse. It's also a question of design.

CCB Magazine:And what could such a design look like that doesn't give internet trolls any room?

Katharina Haverich:That's what I'm investigating with my current project “Brecht into the Metaverse”. For some time now, we have been working on a virtual theater stage in the VR app VRChat, funded by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg. With a pretty wild cast, we are trying to stage a play by Bertolt Brecht in the so-called metaverse and filming our experiences.  We currently have a pilot in the rough cut and want to develop it into a multi-part series.

CCB Magazine:What do you think will be the biggest benefit of virtual worlds?

Katharina Haverich:In the metaverse, the spectrum of human communication expands. On the one hand, I think that metaverses will be used for distraction and diversion. But I also think that a lot of institutions will spend time doing training through VR. For example, I wonder if we can have schools in VR for people who have no or very limited access to education like girls and women from Afghanistan. Overall, the sense of physical co-presence is a huge attraction. For example, we often meet people from very different regions of the world on our courses: as avatars, but a hundred times more exciting than on Zoom.