Portals

Outdoor site-based immersive installation

Vision hack alters how we look at familiar places

A binocular vision hack which plays with how our visual systems decide what to attend to, a discombobulation where we aren’t sure what’s there and what’s not. This startles us into noticing what’s going on in our surroundings and explores the notion that the version we see of the world is one among many.*

What people say

“...a rare genuine art-science interaction, … a touchstone example of how technology can be used to highlight the processes through which we … are moved through the world.”
Paul Graham, Professor of Neuroethology

“I literally saw a bird flying out of the camera…That’s a piece of magic.”
User tester , Schumacher College

"You're in this other world, this other realness. It throws you into another dimension." User tester, Lighthouse

“It immerses you and … makes you… invested in the story because … you (are) viewing it in a real location, …(and) controlling it to some extent.” User tester, Lighthouse

“Woah, what happened…? It was like my senses couldn’t compute it, then I realised there wasn’t a red thing(danger tape) there (at all)…” User tester , Schumacher College

Small portals installed in outdoor locations display documentary video in real-world dimensions filmed from the exact vantage of the viewer. With both eyes open, one looking through the portal, the other open on the surroundings, the live and filmed worlds merge like instant photoshop, a function of our two-eyed vision. What we see constantly responds to the relative brightness and pace of action between the digital and physical versions of the world.

"I found ... the cardboard AR hack revolutionary! ... super accessible, but super-extraordinary."
Participant in XR Circus, AHRC-funded investigation into immersive performance practice

"It made me feel like I was there.... it was coming to life."
User tester VR Lab

"Very different to any other AR/VR I have done...good to experience something where you can still see the real world." User tester, VR Lab

Since what is happening here and now affects what we see, we become more alive to our surroundings.**These shifting mechanics invite us to recalibrate how we think about that place and who (human/more-than human)belongs.

*For walker Nan Shepherd, illusions of distance and scale in the mountains, “drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is…. only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us but steadies us again.” (”The Living Mountain” by Nan Shepherd, 2011 p101)

** Researcher Lani Shiota found that seeing something out of the ordinary recalibrates our predictive vision so that we see the world with fresh eyes and begin to notice more.(Lani Shiota: How Awe Transforms the Body and Mind)

Developed through residencies at Blast Theory, Lighthouse and Fusebox Immersive Lab and funded through Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice and Artist Information Network Professional Development grants.

Sites in development

A lone Dartmoor Hawthorn and its human and more-than-human visitors

A lookout post for cuckoos, its bark rubbed smooth by ponies, this lone Dartmoor hawthorn grows at the top of a watercourse once streamed for tin. Audiences bear witness to the tree’s human and more-than-human dalliances against the weather of their arrival through small portals set into the landscape around the tree.

The experince is created with staged and remote camera footage filmed over recent summers and a unique binocular vision hack which uses the shifting mechanics of our vision to merge our present with the company of the recent past.

Images show a screenshot of footage created by Liane Mah and Dan Faberoff in 2023 and images of the site and their footage through the portal during during visits by Rachel Henson in Autumn 2025.

Benfield Valley

Community protecting a threatened urban greenspace

A project in development to mark companionship with a nearby natural place on its own terms and how it feels to live with the threat of its removal over several years. The experience will be co-created with Benfield Valley Project and supporters on the proposed development site.

The Flat Ground

Retrofit footage of kids outside during lockdown shown to the same kids as teenagers six years later

Footage shot during lockdown shows friends on a derelict stretch of tarmac at different times. Outshift left a small hidden tripod and marked the tarmac so that participants could film themselves from the same vantage point and height. Viewing the footage within the portal on the same ground, now overgrown six years later, 16 year-old Ella Charleton ‘hugs’ her 10 year-old self as she goes past and watches the now encroaching brambles momentarily disappear under her virtual feet.

Image above and left show documentary footage of Ella Charlton (reading a book) and Chloe Martins (lying down) within the portal photographed against the same location six years later, Polly Charlton looking through the portal device with Ella Charleton in the background (middle), and Ella at the back of the Flat Ground from the portal vantage point (right). Lockdown footage shot by Marco Martins and edited by Rachel Henson.

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