Nothing to See Here review: a wonderfully bizarre view of reality (Venice Immersive)

When I encounter the term “bird’s-eye view”, I often think of a Gary Larson cartoon depicting how our feathered friends see the world – with bullseye targets stamped on the tops of our heads. But from now on, perhaps my mind will dart back to Nothing to See Here, a fabulously strange and conceptually clever augmented reality installation that really does offer a very different way of seeing the world, and our place within it.

I wandered past this installation many times, at this year’s Venice Immersive, before finally giving it a go. The experience requires you to look downwards, into a peephole situated atop a shiny metal box, about a metre tall and half a metre wide, with a speaker situated on either side. It takes some getting used to the strangeness of what you’re seeing – which is you, from a bird’s-eye perspective, looking into the box, while other people – real people – walk by.

Director: Celine Daeman
Running time: 8 minutes
Writers: Stefanie Kolk, Celine Daemen

This is why the box was placed in a public spot: it’s important to see people coming and going. Around the time you get acclimatised to this vision, something very surreal occurs: a man dressed in a blue tracksuit sidles up to you, and begins nattering away. He’s a virtual creation, played by actor Fabrizio Rongione, but he looks pretty genuine, very close to the real deal.

While other minor events happen – virtual pigeons scurry around, plus a dog, and later a wolf, appear also – this slightly sleazy fellow keeps babbling away, talking, for instance, about a woman he recently slept with. He ends the conversation by questioning why people look into the box, declaring that it’s not reality.

Nothing to See Here is so… weird. The strangeness of this experience kind of blew me away. Director Celine Daemen has made a production that’s both grounded in space, anchored in the physical world, while also displacing – an out-of-body experience that presents a different way of visually perceiving the world: another way to make sense of it, or perhaps, another form of confusion.

There’s something wonderfully peculiar about seeing yourself from above while this virtual person wanders around you, talking away, as real people continue to stroll past, unknowingly cast as side players by Daemen, who finds a fresh take on that classic Shakespearean adage: “The whole world is a stage.” A fascinatingly labyrinthine and paradoxical stage, at that: uncannily real, and really uncanny. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I love it.