Tabula Rasa, 360-degree immersive augmented reality installation, engages the audience into a transformative, spherical-space that peels away time and space to show the metaphorical impact of technology on human evolution and the history of indigenous people of Northeast Florida.

Using Google Cardboard as an interface, this performative installation utilizes the initial encounter between the indigenous peoples of North America with European explorers and builds a narrative around the use of a chair as a metaphor to underscore the generic contradiction of expansion that evolution serves over its subject, and the specific of electronic technology over nature.

The narrative serves to document the historical culture of the Timucua of northeast Florida, and their first interaction with the Spanish explorers in the early 1500’s. The primary goal of the expedition was to obtain slaves. While one of the common misconceptions repeated in history is that Ponce de Leon was looking for a fountain of youth, he was really looking for slaves who would add to his wealth.

Technically, the work is a mixture of performance, virtual reality, film, and installation. Two chairs, one white and one brown, are staged sitting directly across from one another in the physical space. The "Narrator" sits in the brown chair holding a brown cardboard VR viewer and invites the participant to sit across from him. The VR viewer displays a simulation of the actual environment of the physical space of the installation, along with the narrator sitting directly in front of them in the brown chair. The 360-degree video transforms into an early 1500’s North American landscape, engaging the participant in an immersive narrative of the technology evolving our culture to present day.

Street side: Brooklyn, New York.

Street side: Rome, Italy..

Still: Contact with European Explorer

Still: Assimilation