[-empyre-] the symbolic and the real

["eugenie (temp)" <eugenies@onetel.net.uk>]

hi all...

'the symbolic made real' .... this is a really interesting idea. in lacan's
little world, of course, it's a complete contradiction in terms. his model
of perception could be called 'Cartesianesque' in that it assumes  an
ontological distinction between objects in the world and the mental ideas
the subject forms of these objects - i.e. between the symbolic and the real.

this distinction doesn't hold true in VR: the three-dimensional worlds with
which the user interacts have no corresponding extension in physical space;
nor, however, can they said to be ?in the mind¹ or ?in the brain¹.

the phenomenological take on this is a lot more convincing than the lacanian
or cartesianesque (i.e. visually biased) schema. phenomenological or
reflexive models hold that perception cannot take place unless the visual
system is engaged by an object in the world. perception, in other words, is
an 'event', it is located in the world.

> the game world is quite literally
>addressing the player as an agent in the simulation. At the same time, the
>artifice of the simulation immerses the player so that they perceive it
>as real. This is typically through the use of depth cues, spatialised sound,
>immediacy of feedback, realistic behaviour / physics, lighting, and so on..

as troy points out - and, as i was arguing earlier via the example of
holbein's painting - the experience of virtuality involves a wide variety of
perceptual data. the visual/pictorial aspect of VR has attracted the most
attention - certainly a lot of the history and theory of VR carries its own,
innate visual bias (i'm thinking  of lev manovich in particular) - but
clearly, virtuality as a phenomenon resists partitioning along the lines of
subject and object, real and symbolic, material and visual.

bergson's discussion of the virtual and the real is useful here. For
Bergson, vision  is a passive sensory modality ­ it can only measure
possible action on things, and for this reason it is confined to the domain
of the virtual. Touch, by contrast, is an affective sense, the only one in
which the subject¹s perception of quality is blended with a reciprocal
experience of force, and the only one that necessarily takes place in
conjunction with movement. touch, for bergson, engages with the domain of
the real. it is touch and movement, along with vision, that give spatial
coherency to perceptual data, touch and movement that form the basis of the
body schema. bergson's model is a much more useful one in examining VR,
which, as troy points out, blurs the distinctionn between the symbolic and
the real.

later
eugenie