Re: [-empyre-] unstable perspectives

[Norie Neumark <Norie.Neumark@uts.edu.au>]

melinda wrote --
> 
> the space thing is interresting. as someone who guinea pigged to do 
> a guest lecture i found it to be quiet spatially destabiling as i felt like i was in the middle of an arena.. when uselay doing a lecture /workshop  thing is a
> frontal experience.. it seemd like i had  a room fulll of people in 
> front of
> me in sydney, and as i could hear the sound from ithica projected 
> on the
> screen behind me it seemed like room full of people behind me  
> which sort of
> triggered some sort of flight fight response in me.
> i was aware that there were two seaprate parts of the group and i 
> felt like i had my back to one ..but in their visual reality they could see  my front
> but not my visuals, and  whom i turned away from to speak to.. as from my perspective they were visually and sonicaly behind me..
> 
> any way what i'm trying to say was that the perspective of space and
> position was very physically altered by the projection arrangement, 
> andal
though im sure with time it would have become familiar.  i 
> found it a
> little bit  panoptical and it challenged my own mode of opeartaing 
> in a
> space and with other people.  i actually went away and thought 
> about it
> quiet a lot as i work with Vr stuff and the dominance of frontal 
> visualperspective.

it did get easier with time, but i have to say it was always a challenge trying to 'integrate' the 2 groups who were culturally as well as physically in different spaces. mostly it was quite exhilaratng but it was often exhausting too. i kept thinking that a lot of the problem was the layout of our room, not really set-up for what we were doing. but i noticed at tim's end too that students had to choose to look at us or each other when they spoke and that sometimes seemed to drain their energy. as i said, i felt it worked best when i spoke directly to students at our end, looking at them and engaging them to look at me and each other. i wonder how that worked for p
eople at the other end? ( i guess this is old familiar line of sight stuff for film and video and tv people) it was interesting that what worked really easily was small groups of students on each end discussing their projects together while the rest of the groups were doing other things -- definitely frontal visual perspective.

i'm interested to hear about what sorts of things  you came up with in relation to perspective in vr after the experience.

> 
> one of the great things was always supposed to be that art gave us 
> alternateperspectives.. but it seem like they have to be pretty 
> jolting today to
> actually move us..i am crying at the tv images of war,, but i know 
> they are
> also sanctioned filtered media images as well..

yeah, while this empyre is quite quiet, the evil empire is unstoppable, and the temptation to stare full frontal at the tv is painfully irresistable... watching journalists in their combat pyjamas while they're in bed with the army is just the 
sickening final straw. it's gone beyond 'jolting' to psychotic as the anglosphere officials condemn the iraqui tv etc while they've been sanctionning images on our tv of humiliated iraqui soldiers, or speak of welcoming crowds when we see 3 people holding food care parcels waving, or.... and of course we see the same thing 50 times, set to filmic music by the bbc...

norie



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