XR Spotlight – Sarah Ticho

Dan Norman, Administrator at XR Stories, talks to Sarah Ticho, creator and co-director of Soul Paint, winner of the XR Experience Special Jury Award at SXSW 2024.

How do you describe Soul Paint to people?

Sarah Ticho: Soul Paint is inspired by an arts and health research method called body mapping.

Traditionally, you would trace around your body on a piece of paper and go through this mindfulness experience and imagine, ‘where do I feel anxiety in my body, how do I feel on a really great day, what does it feel like saying “I love you” for the first time?’ There’s this hidden world of feelings within us. This process invites you to draw those feelings and think about whether they have a location, colour or texture. We took that concept and turned it into a more immersive, interactive piece. 

You get to draw how you feel today, or a memory you’d like to explore. You’re able to describe it, embody it, move with it, and then meet the artworks of other people that have gone through the experience as well. It’s exploring your own story but finding ways to encounter other people’s stories as well.

Colour and movement play a big role as methods for communication and self-expression in Soul Paint. What do you think those qualities unlock in people?

Emotions and feelings are hard to describe sometimes, but I think we all have a synesthete [someone who experiences sensory information through multiple senses, e.g. hearing colour, tasting sound] inside ourselves. People seem to intuitively connect emotions to different colours and textures.

We wanted to create a broad palette where people could visually express using colour, but also different brushes and textures. We were inspired by things like Tilt Brush where you have animated brushes that can pulsate or fizz or sparkle. It felt important that the brushes move as well, because feelings in our bodies are always shifting and moving. Our hearts pound, our hands shake, our voices quiver. 

We love bringing people back into a playful child-like mindset. Even in our development process, when we were doing traditional body mapping, people’s eyes lit up when we would give them loads of paints and pastels. You get into a very different place, more cognitive, like “I need to articulate how I feel, and I need to find the language for that”.

We wanted to play with this idea that feelings are constantly changing. Through things like movement and dance, or even just going for a run, our bodies can move and shift how we feel as well. 

It’s getting people into that playful state of mind. A big part of Soul Paint is getting people out of their heads and into their bodies. That combination of playful design through colour and texture, but also encouraging movement, felt really important.

How did those ideas influence the choices that you made in terms of colour and movement when creating the piece? What were the choices that went into making an environment where people could be creative, and feel capable of expressing themselves?

This is the reason we chose virtual reality rather than mixed or augmented reality. The environment that you’re in influences how you feel and interact. We wanted to create an environment that felt like a cocoon. We also wanted to design the installation in a way that people don’t feel like they’re being observed. It’s not always possible, but I’m being stricter in how the piece is presented.

Originally I wanted a dark blue background inside the experience. Just you, your avatar, the palette, and no other distractions. So I was thinking with Niki [Smit – Co-Director, Producer and Writer] about how to create an environment that feels beautiful, but isn’t distracting.

In the early prototyping stages, we tried using standard avatars available on online stores, but they were all hyper-sexualised women or really muscular men. It was horrible – people felt like they couldn’t connect with that. 

It can also be a problem when it reflects you too much. I tried using a 3D scan of myself, and that was too distracting. You’re like, “is my nose that big?! Is that what my shoulders look like?!”. We played with getting people to choose from different sizes and shapes of avatars. But again, it was asking people to evaluate how they saw their own body, which is not what the experience was about. 

Once we had funding, we worked with someone who created a more abstract and gender neutral avatar. Even then, it’s impossible to create one body type that represents us all. Our bodies constantly shift and change and are kind of ephemeral – which is how we landed on this more ‘smoky’ version. It’s never a consistent shape, it’s always in flux. 

In the future we want to do more R&D around body representation, finding new ways to connect more deeply to our avatar. We currently register people’s height and, during the onboarding, their bodies are scanned into the piece – players watch their body being created in front of them. We built on research from Mel Slater and other immersive researchers on how to create a deeper sense of body ownership in the piece. 

We also had conversations about how to represent wheelchair users in VR. Do we bring in the wheelchair? Do people feel like that’s part of their bodies, or are there other ways to do it? We’ve been consulting with different groups, including wheelchair users, about how they may want to be represented in Soul Paint.

How did the Soul Paint team come together?

In 2018, I did a research project with Nesta exploring the role of the arts and creative practice in virtual reality for mental health. I interviewed two people at the Wellcome Trust who suggested Anna Firbank. She specialises in science communication, and worked with both the Wellcome Trust and Marshmallow Laser Feast. I interviewed Anna, and we became friends. At this point I’d made a WebXR prototype of Soul Paint, but had realised that WebXR just wasn’t ready for the level of graphic quality I wanted to create. So I asked Anna, and she came on board as our creative producer. 

In 2016, when I was curating an immersive exhibition at the Big Anxiety Festival in Sydney, I came across Deep. Deep is a breath control game for anxiety regulation co-directed by Niki Smit. They had embedded a behavioural researcher in the team. I loved the team’s approach, loved them as people, and when I reached back out during the Nesta research, they ended up inviting me to be their producer. I told Niki about Soul Paint, and how I wanted to embed researchers in the team, as with Deep. He loved it, and it aligned with what he wanted to do next. Niki became my co-director, and then Dr. Joanneke Weerdmeester joined the team, and worked with us on the development. 

Liz Rosenthal, who exec produced CreativeXR, supported me through the WebXR stages and then rejoined later on as our exec producer. ImproVive, our core development partners, really held the ship together. 

I had worked with Anna Bertmark, an amazing sound designer, before at Lighthouse. We ran a conference together, ‘The Sound of Story’, all about sound, music and storytelling. Through that we brought in Nainita Desai, our incredible composer, with Ed Critchley. 

Dr Hannah Wood joined as our script and gameplay consultant. Hannah has worked on big immersive projects, but also works in healthcare and understands the tension of working across disciplines

It was a mosaic of people from across Europe and America. At the start of last summer, we had a little party that was our first in-person gathering. It was so nice, everyone coming together and meeting each other – in most cases for the first time.

You’ve spoken elsewhere about how you’d like Soul Paint to be a tool that can help people, while being clear that it is an art piece and not a replacement for professional healthcare. 

Where do you think VR experiences like this can cross disciplines? Not replacing healthcare, but maybe being something that helps people. And where do you think the boundaries are? 

The arts have an incredible role in our health and wellbeing. There’s a huge evidence base that shows engaging in the arts is a powerful tool in both improving our health and creating new forms of emotional literacy, starting conversations about things that are hard to talk about. 

It felt important to have this be artist-led. But we wanted to embed people with the right research knowledge and think about how we can co-create this in a way that can fork into all these different areas. We developed a research advisory board. We have collaborated with universities and researchers, and have had healthcare professionals advise on the project development.

I’ve always had a vision that this can and will be used in healthcare contexts. There are still challenges in terms of bringing immersive experiences into the NHS – I say that as someone that supports the policy and strategy to bring XR into the NHS. It takes such a long time, there’s a lack of clarity around regulation and standards, and the number of people that you reach is still extremely limited.

So we don’t necessarily have plans for it to be a tool for diagnosis. But this project comes from my own experience of feeling unheard while navigating the NHS. The statistic I usually quote is that, when speaking with a doctor, you have about 11 seconds to convey how you feel before you’ll be interrupted.

And so we are working with healthcare professionals to think about how Soul Paint could be embedded in a consultation process. Where you can share your drawing with a doctor, and use that as a way of getting a deeper understanding of what’s happening for you as a patient. We’ve done pilots with hospitals in the past, and we’re planning how we can do more in future.

What do those pilots look like? 

One of the most memorable was with the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Guernsey. I did a week with the pain clinic. I’m fascinated and infuriated by how hard it is for patients dealing with things like chronic pain. That was always my first interest with the applications of Soul Paint. That there is this combination of emotional and physical pain that is so misunderstood.

We did a session using a really early prototype with a patient that had severe chronic pain. He often wouldn’t even be able to stand properly. He had so much pain that he had to hold on to his side for support. But, because VR can reduce your experience of pain, he was able to stand whilst  in the headset. 

He made this drawing where he was distinguishing between the different types of pain, including the emotional pain, that he was experiencing. That drawing changed the way he and his consultant pain nurse communicated with each other and led to him getting more mental health support.

We’ve also collaborated with universities to explore whether this would be helpful for people who are pregnant, to track their pregnancy over time.

What choices do you most commonly see participants make, when trying to communicate how they are feeling in their bodies? Are there any common patterns in how people choose to express themselves when given that opportunity?

I want to do more research on it. Anecdotally, there are definitely areas in our bodies where we experience the most intense emotions. 

There’s always swirly stomach feelings. There’s always things coming out of our heads. Anxiety is so embodied. It’s so in the stomach, and animated.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve found is that people love drawing outside their bodies. That people don’t feel emotions just within them, but around them.

It could be that if they’re feeling really anxious, they’ll feel physically clouded. We had a lot of requests in the development process for a TV static brush when talking about things like overwhelm. There is such range in what people draw. It amazes me, seeing what comes out of it.

We want to explore how we could make a multiplayer version, where people are drawing how they relate to one another. So many emotions are relational. I’m not just angry, I’m angry at the guy that cut me up at the roundabout. You feel love towards someone. When people are drawing love, for example, they’re drawing about a love for another person. That’s another example of where it feels like something that comes out of you, but also towards another person.

With positive emotions, people often draw a sense of wholeness. There is a sense that their body is connected. For more difficult feelings, it’s more fragmented. With things like pain, people really specify and localise what they’ve drawn. You see different parts, and they almost feel disconnected physically from themselves. That reflects a lot of research that I’ve read over the years. Things like ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, by Bessel van der Kolk. If you’re interested in Soul Paint, that talks a lot about the fragmentation of the body during trauma or difficult experiences.

Where can people experience Soul Paint for themselves? 

We’re on a festival tour, which will continue into 2025. But we are looking for partners and collaborators that can work with us to think about how it can be brought into educational settings, healthcare, and broader community settings.  

One of the things that we’re passionate about is empowering people to use it themselves, with a headset and a companion app. So that you can create your drawing and show it to your doctor or your partner or your grandma.

We have plans to publish it on the Quest store in the future. We’re looking for people to help support us to develop that, and to turn it into something that is not just a one-off experience, but a journaling tool. Being able to create a drawing every day based on how you feel, and making easier ways to share it. And having that as a more person-centred approach to how it could be used in healthcare in the future. There’s a world where it could be in your GP surgery.

Soul Paint is currently touring festivals across the world. Visit the Soul Paint website to find out more.