Interview with Sotalo: Part 2
Part of the "VR is Alive!" Artist Spotlight Series
For this interview we are fortunate to join Sotalo (he/him) in the Virtual Furry Museum to chat about how he created it for the furry community.
How long has the furry community existed?
Well, if we're just talking the modern fandom, the remnants of that started in the 1970s when Mark Merlino in California gathered as many people together that he could that loved cartoon animals. He was one of the founding members of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization and they tried to find as much anthro content as they could find. And then there were APA fanzines that people would submit art to, and they also gathered a lot of people, a lot of cartoonists who loved anthro animals. According to him, the first moment that it became furry was in 1985, which was a room party that he had at a science fiction convention. That was where he actually invited artists along with fans of those artists together to be in the same room.
The start of the fandom, there's so many things, different things going on in different places, but one of the oldest pieces regarding the modern fandom in the history exhibit upstairs is Wendell Washer's letter to Mark Merlino where they were talking back and forth about violence and animation, how parents were restricting what animators were able to do, and two people just talking and saying that, yeah, they like drawing anthro animals. But we can go back as far as even before civilization happened and we can find examples of what could be considered furry art and anthro animals and art. That has been around longer than any piece of written media that we have! The Lion-man statue is over 40,000 years old. It predates ancient Egypt by, I think, 35,000 years. It predates Mesopotamia and the city of Ur. It predates even the earliest notions of civilization that have ever come forward.
People have been drawing furry art in caves for a very long time. There's papyrus up there from ancient Egypt of an artist just drawing an animal and a gazelle playing a game of Senet. That papyrus, it continues and just shows animals doing things that humans were doing every day and they were tending to livestock and growing crops. I don't have it in the museum because it would break VRChat's terms of service, but if that papyrus kept going, it would be the lion fondling the gazelle in bed. The archaeologist who discovered that piece was so embarrassed, he blotted out the lion's private part, so we have no idea how well-endowed it is, but there was, let's just say, a very long stretch of blotting out. I'm not trying to say that all furry art is NSFW, but it does make me chuckle a bit that that's been around longer, far longer than most of us have!
There's no museum on this planet that really has furry art being presented anywhere. As a part of a permanent exhibit, a permanent display, there are very few fine artists who are furries and have their fine art exhibited in museums. That is extremely, extremely hard to find! The stuff that's in museums that has animals, even if it looks nice, does not represent our voice. So, I wanted to make a museum that was just our voice.
That's definitely very interesting. I'm curious about where this history connects with virtual reality, too. How has social VR influenced the furry community?
Oh, tremendously! One of the greatest things about VR is we can actually be our fursonas. As one of my friends says, it's the fur meet that never ends, and everyone has a fursuit! An actual fursuit to get me to look somewhat close to this in real life would cost $4,000 to $5,000, and they get more expensive than that, depending on the complexity. It is impossible, it is completely unfeasible for people to actually be their characters, but coming to VRChat, it's not that expensive to take a model that already exists and recolor it. Purchase the model, recolor it, and now you have a character, and you can be that character and interact with other people from all over the world. It basically is the dream. Not only that, but we can do all sorts of things that would be very cost prohibitive in real life. My friends have been coming into the museum very frequently, and I've been showing the museum to a lot of people. The cost to build this without VR would be astronomical!
When I first got inspired to make the museum, I actually visited a museum, and I wanted to make... Can I talk about what inspired the museum? Yes, sure, that's one of my questions. Ok, I talked with my cousins about visiting them in New York. They invited me, and I told them I wanted to go visit a museum, and I chose MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. It was a beautiful museum and it had many, many floors! I think five or six floors of incredible modern art. I was trying to take pictures of all the anthro art so I could get inspiration for what I could do in mine. Unfortunately, they only had really a few animals. They didn't have much. The only piece that they had that was anthro was a piece by, I think, Jeff Koons of the Pink Panther holding a mermaid's leg behind, and the mermaid has a breast out or something. That's not the furry fandom, but it was apparently one of the most valuable pieces in there, that sculpture. Yeah, it was valued at $40 million or something. Anyways, I went through an entire museum about modern art, and there was nothing remotely furry in it. There's no museum on this planet that really has furry art being presented anywhere. As a part of a permanent exhibit, a permanent display, there are very few fine artists who are furries and have their fine art exhibited in museums. That is extremely, extremely hard to find! The stuff that's in museums that has animals, even if it looks nice, does not represent our voice. So, I wanted to make a museum that was just our voice. This is what furry art is. It's an entire museum of nothing but anthro art, art that furries love and art that furries created, and art that inspired furries to create. Yeah. It was only just white boxes at the time, but when I first put all that stuff in Unity and put on the VR headset and came into the world, I broke down in tears. I had created a building, and it wasn't that hard. That's awesome. That was a moment. That was an incredible moment!
There's people in this museum who want to see their works who can't see it, and I think that's a big call that this technology needs to be more accessible! It needs to be easier for people to come in here. We need more women in here. We need more elderly people in here. We need more middle-aged people and people who are parents to be able to come in here and communicate with each other.
I'm curious about VR's impact in terms of opening more users' eyes and minds to the “furry gene,” and how VR kind of helped the discovery, that process, for particular users. Have you observed that more in VR, or is it more of a network?
I think there's a lot of furries in VR because of the tech, but unfortunately this is not something that VR is good with. The tech is quite difficult to manage and work through. There's certain crowds of people that I would hope to be able to reach out to and connect with, but those people don't necessarily have a Steam account. They don't necessarily know how to download a video game. There's a lot of furries here, and then you have a lot of people who do know those things. If people are going to run into furries, they have no idea what furries are. They will run into them, and they'll be able to talk with them and make a connection. That is a good thing, but I just wish that VR could be more of a town square and less of a skewered demographic. There were artists in this museum who accepted being in this museum who want to come in here, and I tried so hard to show them how to set up an account and how to come in here, but they just weren't that technically inclined. There's people in this museum who want to see their works who can't see it, and I think that's a big call that this technology needs to be more accessible! It needs to be easier for people to come in here. We need more women in here. We need more elderly people in here. We need more middle-aged people and people who are parents to be able to come in here and communicate with each other. What the community was that we had in the world where people could go and interact, we should bring that here where people can interact with people all over the world. So, yes, you can, but then there's an asterisk, and it would be nice to see the asterisk go away.
How has your personal experience been with being in social VR, and what have you enjoyed versus what could be better?
I really enjoyed meeting furries that were not in my same country, or in my neck of the woods. That include furries like MyroP, who helped me with this world. He knew Udon very well, and a lot of the Udon programming here is basically his code. Maybe I tweaked a few little things, but a lot of the Udon in here is his. He also helped me get comfortable with Unity, Amplify, and Bakery! It was very wonderful meeting someone like that, and just people like that in general who are very helpful and very kind. I think just having the ability to meet fascinating people is great. VRChat was incredibly popular during COVID, and people couldn't meet each other face to face anymore. People were coming in here, and they had the same, if not an even better social experience than they would in the real world!
The things that could be better, I mean, the big thing just always comes back to the people, and you're always going to run into unsavory individuals. Thankfully, VR has ways to mute those individuals, or block them, or remove them. It would just be better if... I heard, and this wasn't a furry who said this, but I was at a show, and someone went on the show and said, “Yeah, it's just usernames. You don't have to care about them. It's all they are, just usernames. You can just replace them with another username.” That kind of dismissive attitude about people really grinds my gears, and there are some trolls in here who only seek to cause trouble, and that's not mature. That's not the best of what VR can do, or what any online community can do, and of course, this isn't limited to VRChat. It's everywhere. Anywhere you go online, there is going to be toxicity, but you find those people who are your friends, and you stick with them, and you end up having many wonderful memories together.
Part 3 of our interview with Sotalo is available to read here.