Still: Soul Paint - Niki Smit & Sarah Ticho

How can we communicate our inner experiences to others when sometimes words are not enough? That is the riddle at the core of Soul Paint, directed by Niki Smit and Sarah Ticho and selected for SXSW XR Experience Competition where it world-premieres. A prototype of the VR experience was piloted at Cinekid 2021 (Amsterdam), arguably the world’s most important audiovisual forum for young audiences. 

One could assume that Soul Paint is designed, ostensibly, for a festival audience. Not so, says co-director Niki Smit, who explains that the biggest fans of the work come from an “unexpected corner,” namely scientists, psychologists, doctors and therapists, who seem to derive enormous benefits from it as they seek to understand the brain’s cognitive pathways.

For Soul Paint, participants are offered a range of animated and spatial tools to draw, paint and sculpt their emotions, and thereby turn their virtual body into an emotional work of art that expresses their own felt experiences within a bespoke journey of self-discovery.

Through the process of 3D drawing, sound and movement, each participant is invited to visualise and reveal their unique inner realities. They see their drawing, movement and audio description come together to create a final artwork, which can be shared with others.

Smit has always had an innate interest in psychology (a previous project was the meditative VR Deep, which is controlled by deep belly breathing), and one of his favourite writers is the neurologist Oliver Sacks. When he met co-director Sarah Ticho, it was obvious that he would have a soul mate on Soul Paint. 

“She was telling me about her [then] project that was about painting emotions in your body. And I was showing her some of my prototypes that had to do with changing how your body looks when dancing with multiple copies of yourself. And we realized that would be a very great mix,” he says. “It was a serendipitous meeting where we both immediately understood what we had to make together.”

Smit tells how a visit that Sarah took to the doctor convinced her that a tool such as Soul Paint was necessary, if not essential. “The core concept of wanting to convey our emotions in a different way, stems from Sarah’s own experience with grief and the subsequent lack of doctor/medical understanding,” he says.

“In a sense, the doctor’s office is like a performative space. On average we have only 11 seconds to tell our stories before we are interrupted by a medical professional. So a doctor’s office becomes this pressured performance moment where you not only have to make sense of your own emotions and feelings really quickly, but also be able to then adequately communicate all these difficult, ever shifting inner experiences. The VR would enable her to gather her thoughts and create a 3D picture of her ailment, and save her from a similar ordeal in future.”

Their instincts bore fruit a few years later when the first prototypes were up and running and tested in a hospital in Guernsey treating patients with chronic pain. “One particular patient illustrated his pain experience and his long-time doctor afterwards said of that picture that, ‘I could show this to another doctor and even though he doesn't know this patient, they would know what's wrong with him,’” Smit explains.

“It's better to give the pain a face, to make that pain visual, to get it out of the unknown,” he adds.

The VR artist is happy that his and Ticho’s VR work can morph seamlessly into other realms, whether medical or scientific. “That’s the nice thing, that we make something that facilitates certain human behaviours, and with that you open a new array of avenues where the project can go well beyond the intention of the artist,” he signs off.

South by Southwest takes places from March 8 t0 16. Discover the Dutch line-up or find more information about SXSW 2024.

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