[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 2

[Samantha Gorman]

Thanks Sophia, Sue, John and Simon for our discussion. Before we move
on, Sophia, I'd like to emphasize your final prompts/questions that I
resonate with.

". . . in terms of having to deal with vision (and vision taken from a
very narrow place) being positioned and assumed as the dominant
sense."
I think its great you brought up how sight is oven privileged as
dominant. In the flavors of VR I've experienced and researched, It
seems implicitly (or explicitly) positioned as the essential gateway
through which our identities are transported. I find this troubling.
The role of sight in the range of ways "embodiment" occurs or is
designed to occur seems like fertile territory for future discussion.

In terms of the photoreal, I was also referencing how modelers and VR
technologists seem to privilege/seek the holy grail of high fidelity
graphics. I've been places where hours were put into perfect bump map
textures of cobblestones just to see if it was possible. I understand
the satisfaction of pushing the system to articulate something with
high fidelity, but I'm also interested in why. I liked the way you
identified our similar problems with the photoreal by gracefully
connecting resolution in graphics to sonic and haptic forms of
resolution. Finding patterns of 1x1 correspondence between
bodies/environment in digital dance is easy, its complicating the
system for affect and kinesthetic empathy that is far harder. To me,
this is another kind of resolution. Moving from the direct/clear to
the complex and nuanced. I was inspired by your approach with the
haptic pads. I've never heard it described as "kinesthetic empathy"
but I think that terminology is really interesting. Your experience
reminds me of a summer I spent trying to design CAVE applications for
students with specific types of dyslexia. Although, a different
context, there are really interesting crossovers. Research suggested
that symptoms could be improved through feeling/hearing vibrations of
letter forms. There were plans to augment a subwoofer in the CAVE
floor with hardware that would increase vibrations depending on if the
body was located/forming the correct 3D letterforms in space. For
educational purposes, parents and teachers understood the vibrations
as "a literal mirror" 1x1. Artistically, I was interested in what the
vibrations could suggest in a language piece more abstract, evocative
and less tied to the need for data testing. This seems to be in a
similar vein to the project you are realizing. Please keep me posted

whoops. sorry the CAVE link failed. I'll type it out this time!
http://samanthagorman.net/Canticle

-Samantha

On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 6:15 AM, sophia lycouris
<sophia at kunstwerk-blend.co.uk> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks Samantha
>
>>There's documentation of my last CAVE project with dancer Asimina Chremos
> here.
>
> I can't the link, maybe your email format doesn't allow links?
>
>>Often there is a push toward photorealism with the intent to invoke or
> create/manipulate particular emotions or sensations in the user.[.....] I
> question the utopian (particularly when it imagines the photoreal). I wonder
> about this, perhaps [.....] Leaving aside the production and technical
> reasons I question Oculus, there is the question of embodiment.
>
> If I understand your point above correctly, then I think you have faced
> similar problems with me in terms of having to deal with vision (and vision
> taken from a very narrow place) being positioned and assumed as the dominant
> sense. I have encountered very similar issues in my own work and research,
> and specifically in relation to an exploration of how haptic technology can
> facilitate the generation of kinaesthetic empathy for blind people. I was
> interested in the development of a haptic pad that can offer vibrations
> which are supposed to generate some form of kinaesthetic empathy for blind
> viewers attending dance performance - through a mapping of motion tracking
> date in real-time conditions. I had to fight very hard against the
> assumption that the role of the haptic pad is to be a literal mirror of the
> activity happening in the performance space. So, if there is a dancer for
> example doing some movement downstage right, then the haptic pad should be
> generating vibrations in the equivalent corner. This is a literal,
> figurative, photorealistic approach to this problem! Whereas the haptic pad
> is a medium in its own right, and it should be generating vibrations which
> relate to the overall sense of movement that happens on stage, not what
> individual dancers are doing. This needs some special work in order to
> achieved. Having a (often also) poor representation of the individual
> movements on the haptic pad and transferring the responsibility of
> synthesising these movements into this overall dynamic event (that sighted
> viewers experience) to the blind user is actually not fair ! It won't happen
> for them, they will start trying to decode these movements, which is not the
> point. When we experience kinaesthetic empathy in whichever form (and there
> are huge debates obviously about this, amongst neuroscientists) we do not
> experience it as result of decoding individual movements we see, which we
> then synthesise in our brains and this generates the sensation. Something
> else happens between and across the movements we see (for those of us who
> can see through their eyes), and this is the bit I am looking for. So no
> realistic approaches... I suspect this might be the problem you mention
> below with the current approaches about immersion... that it refers to the
> idea of diving in a photorealistic environment.
>
>>Coming from a theater background, I think of embodiment in its physical
> theater terms. That is, the psychophysical where there is an impulse to
> unite mind and body in the performer. Whether this impulse is right or not,
> is not as important to me as if is it possible in virtual performance.
> Perhaps this question is a good prompt toward discussion. There is something
> about ideals of "immersion" that suggest or strive to bring about this unity
> in the virtual elsewhere. Past experience and current work questions the
> ability to create this cohesion of mind and body (especially in HMD) because
> the performer/user is still tethered to the physical kinesthetic,Â
> proprioceptive sense.
>
>
>>My current design for an Oculus project emphasizes the physical traces of
> the body.
>
> I would love to see this !!!
>
> Sophia
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> [mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Samantha Gorman
> Sent: 11 July 2014 18:33
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 2
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
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-- 
Samantha Gorman
Annenberg Fellow and PhD Student, University of Southern California
Interdivisional Media Arts and Practices (iMAP)

http://samanthagorman.net/