Reimagining Perumthachan’s Pond: Information and Experience in Virtual Reality Narratives

This paper discusses a visual art project, which narrated the popular legend of Perumthachan’s temple pond through the new medium of virtual reality (VR). The paper primarily focuses on the design process that was adopted to render one of Perumthachan’s mythical architectural quirks — a shape- morphing temple pond mentioned in Kottarathil Shankunni’s Aitheehyamala — as an immersive VR experience. This VR experience was first presented to a group of school children at a lower primary school in the village of Uliyannoor near the Uliyannoor Siva temple, the place where it is believed that Perumthachan was adopted and raised by a family of craftsmen. In this manner, the project explored the possibility of refiguring a mythical space as a three-dimensional immersive virtual reality simulation. Such an adaptation produces a unique experience of a mediated narrative wherein auditory, visual and embodied modes of reception generate the phenomenon of “presence.” The paper illustrates this by detailing how a feeling of presence can be evoked by incorporating “information” and “experience” into the design of a VR simulation. This means that the factual parts of a phenomenon denoting the informational aspect, could be combined with its emotional or affective parts denoting the experiential aspect, to enable viewers/participants to engage with the VR simulation both cognitively and emotionally, which generates the unique feeling of presence.

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