Breathing Plastic: Plastisapiens at MSUM Ljubljana
On a recent trip to Slovenia I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM) in Ljubljana and was very happy to stumble across a VR exhibition tucked away in one corner of the gallery. The invigilator recommended a few pieces, but the one that has stayed with me most vividly is Plastisapiens, a speculative, posthuman exploration of microplastics and our entanglement with them. Written and directed by Miri Chekhanovich and Edith Jorisch, and produced by Dpt., the National Film Board of Canada and Lalibela Productions, it combines scientific research with speculative and playful eco-fiction, offering a meditative yet unsettling journey through imagined futures.
Breathing Plastic
With no expectations, at first the experience felt like familiar VR think-piece territory: a slow drift through a strange digital environment, accompanied by a voiceover delivering exposition. The kind of VR awareness piece I have seen many times before, and have even created myself.
But there were signs that this experience was something different. The first memorable moment was the simple act of breathing. Following the calm instructions, I slowly moved my hands apart and together in time with each inhale and exhale, and was rewarded with a particle animation representing my breath flowing in and out. At first my technical brain was excited by the elegance of the problem solving. The VR system can’t actually detect breath, so the designers created this convincing and intuitive workaround. Yet experientially it went much further, creating an enhanced sense of embodiment by giving my breath a visible presence in the virtual environment, and giving me something tangible to do with my body.
Plastisapiens Chapter 2, Edith Jorisch, Miri Chekhanovich, Dpt., 2022
An Alternative View of Evolution
From that point onwards the piece unfolded in unexpected ways. The voiceover began to glitch and distort, signalling a shift in tone. I moved through a sequence of vignettes, from the origins of life to the emergence of petrochemicals, each reframing evolution to follow the origins of plastics as something that had always been present, always part and parallel to our own evolutionary story. Some interactions felt oddly cruel, such as condemning ancient sea creatures to fossilisation and petrochemical rebirth. Others were joyful, discovering my virtual hands had evolved into tentacles, or flailing long plastic-boned fingers! These moments reminded me of the power of play in VR and its potential to give users novel forms of embodiment, using small bodily surprises to provoke stronger emotional responses.
National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Toronto, 2022
Our Plastic Future
What affected me most was the emotional arc. It began informative, became unsettling and pessimistic, then tipped into an almost euphoric sense of nihilistic hope. The multiplying voices of the narrator (an auditory nod to ideas of monism and oneness) promised a utopian symbiosis with plastic, a delirious vision of new ways to breathe, eat and reproduce. A future that felt both absurd and disturbing, but which nonetheless asked me to consider what it would mean to accept plastic as part of our shared biology rather than an external pollutant.
Plastisapiens is not a comfortable experience, but that is exactly what makes it powerful. It unsettles, delights and provokes in equal measure, embodying the potential of VR not only to inform but to create space for us to feel our way through difficult ideas.
You can learn more on the Plastisapiens website, or explore MSUM Ljubljana’s programme for more encounters with contemporary art and experimental media.
