[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 3

[Sue Hawksley]

Dear Garth

Thanks for the questions you raise about the fluidity of 'self' and the different layers of awareness of lived-experience. 

On 15 Jul 2014, at 14:48, Garth Paine <gpaine62 at me.com> wrote:

>  I wonder how we situate our thinking when it is sooo complex to become aware of the point of reference we establish.  I wonder this because I want to find where the virtual begins?
> 
> recently a friend shared with me a small experiment probably known to all of you:  Please silently read the following several times - "I can hear the voice in my head reading this sentence"
> 
> Which made me think about how virtuality is inbuilt - there appears to be several of me: me reading, me listening, me observing the listener and critiquing the experiment, me in physical form seemingly hosting all of these facets of the self etc - and they all seem distinct and material in some way - so there appears to be at least 4 of me and therefore I am confused perhaps about which is what - ie. where the no-virtual and the virtual transition and which me is embodied and how?

I have been thinking more about  the virtual in terms of potential, and from a performance and theatrical perspective, in terms of play. This might be a play of or on the imagination, sensation, affect, cognitive processes, neural pathways etc. and playing on the confusion of selves and bodies, the plasticity of the brain. Research into mirror neurons reveals that what you see done by another is as important to the brain as what you do yourself. The tactile-vision substitution system (TVSS) developed by Paul Bach-y-Rita reveals that what you feel done is as important as what you see (as Sophia's research is examining).  Electromagnetic stimluation, or damage to, the temporoparietal junction can create hallucinations or out-of-body experiences or the effect of something being as if it were other - something or somewhere or someone else etc. But if we can already 'be' many bodies, where is 'out-of'body'? or is it just another body, always potentially available, revealed by whatever medium facilitates it coming to attention?

Story can also capture the imagination and generate individual or group illusions, or mass delusions. After the Fox sisters heard ghostly rapping noises in their farmhouse in the 1840s, they approached Phineas T Barnum, and came up with a format for a show which enabled masses of people to 'see' and 'hear' the dead. Playing on grief and fear and hope, the spiritualist seance seems to me to be an example of a shared virtual space, and a form of distributed cognition. The technologies used by mediums to create apparitions were lower-tech than VR systems (candles and cheesecloth secreted in bodily orifices, brought to 'life' by some clever manoeuvres) but it seems to me there is a lot in common in the quest to create surrogate bodies or experiences.

best, Sue



SUE HAWKSLEY
independent dance artist
sue at articulateanimal.org.uk
http://www.articulateanimal.org.uk