Mark Farid plans to wear VR goggles and live another person's life for 28 days

Text Thomas Gorton

Today, Mark Farid launches his fundraising bid to begin a 28-day trip into a separate Oculus Rift-enabled reality. As part of the seeing-i project, the London-based artist will wear virtual reality for a month non-stop and quite literally see the world through someone else's eyes. The other person, or avatar, will only be known as "Input". This anonymous person will be wearing a Google Glass type headset, transmitting what they see straight to Farid. He'll see the world through their eyes, whether they're in Sainsbury's, at the cinema or having sex. Farid will have constant access to another, entirely different life. He wants to find out whether it'll change him. With filmmaker John Ingle, Farid wants to turn the experiment into a documentary that analyses "the construction of identities through culture and technology" and how digital mediators are affecting our behaviour. Are our personalities inherent or are they cultural identities created by external factors? Will Farid begin to lose his sense of self, whatever that means? "Input" will be chosen by Ingle, the curator Nimrod Vardi and the psychologist who has been analysing Farid for the past year. You can even apply to be "Input" on the website. The identity of the chosen one will not be revealed to Farid. He'll eat, sleep and shower at the same time as his digital counterpart. "I have no knowledge of who this person will be," Farid tells us, "other than they are a heterosexual male who is living with their girlfriend or wife." Farid will live in a space containing only a shower, bed and toilet, breaking for one hour a day for a session with a psychologist who specialises in neuroscience, the only person he will talk to throughout the experiment. The space will be open to visitors for 23 hours a day, bar one hour when Mark breaks to talk to the psychologist about how he's feeling. The experiment stops at the first hint that he is becoming irretrievably unwell.

Mark Farid

There is barely any space between online and offline life now; we live in different forms of reality within reality that are becoming more and more native to us. We wanted to find out from Farid if he thought any of these means of communication or existence (internet, IRL or virtual) are a "lie". Or is it possible to have multiple, genuine versions of yourself, all at once? "I don’t think any of the realities in which we live are genuine," Farid says. "We take this physical reality as 'real', but, you know, every building, road, park and garden has been designed, trees are planted with the express goals of pertaining to position, pollution and colours. Every creak of a floor board, church bell ringing, cheering crowd, and cars driving... are all man made. Everything within our existence is unnatural: even to the extent of the sound and feeling of wind when it travels through our city or village, the design of the surrounding area dictates this. We live in an entirely man-made world, where none of it is 'real'."

Mark Farid