Re: [-empyre-] the symbolic and the real

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Except perhaps that Bergson's view of vision is outmoded; from Land and
David Marr on, vision has been shown to be pro-active - ranging from
retinal processing (Pribram) to saccadic movement - there is constant
sampling and perceptual reorganization going on. Vision is no more passive
in the world than touch - in fact, considerably less so, given the amount
of processing necessary.

I'd argue that vision in this sense is also a reciprocity, an engagement
with the real that goes far beyond passivity. Saccadic movement, for
example, requires considerable readjustment of eye and body in relation to
the seen. And this would occur as well in vr.

Further, the symbolic also displays upon the body; the body is read
through display (tattoo etc., but even prior - the body itself is always
already symbolic and symbolized).

Again I'd like to argue that there is no difference between vr and pr
except for ontology -

Alan

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, eugenie (temp) wrote:

> 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
>
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>

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