[-empyre-] Virtual Embodiment: week 4

[Simon Biggs]

Virtual Embodiment

Welcome to the fourth and final week of the July 2014 discussion on  –empyre–  soft-skinned space:

Moderated by Sue Hawksley (UK/AUS) and Simon Biggs (AUS/UK) with invited discussants Susan Kozel (SE), Johannes Birringer (UK), Samantha Gorman (USA), Sophia Lycouris (UK), Tamara Ashley (UK), Garth Paine (USA), Hellen Sky (AUS), Daniel Tercio (PT), Sally Jane Norman (NZ/FR) and Sarah Whatley (UK).

The month's discussion engages issues concerning 'virtual embodiment'. This theme is open to interpretation - suggesting concepts and practices that are situated in the physical, the computational, the imaginative, the metaphysical or all of these spaces, depending on context. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus, developers of the Rift virtual reality headset, promises to make a new virtual experiential space popularly available. This raises questions about the impact of the virtual when it converges with popular social media. As shared VR experiences become pervasive how might social conventions shift and notions of selfhood and collective evolve? What might a collective virtual experience contribute to notions of extended or distributed mind, agency or identity? Does virtual embodiment depend on, augment or replace bodily practices? What will the quotidian affects be?

Thanks to our invited discussants during week 3, Garth Paine, Hellen Sky and Tamara Ashley, as well as those who contributed to the discussion. During the third week of discussion the topics engaged have included questions concerning how our experience is mediated and the role of embodiment in that, a questioning of the distinction between the 'virtual' and the 'real', the perception of self and agency, the collection and evaluation of empirical data on different interactive modalities, subjective porosity (perhaps this is another way of framing inter-subjectivity?) and, finally a questioning of interactivity within the framework of quantum mechanics.

During this week I attended a performance of the Australian Dance Theatre's new work Multiverse, involving dancers within a virtual 3D world that the audience also partly 'enter' through the use of 3D glasses. Whilst some interesting relations (and dance) did evolve between the dancers and the 3D graphics which, with variable success, were intended to envelope the dancers, the enforced static nature of my own body (seated) and, most importantly, my point of view, ensured I did not feel any sense of physical connectivity with the visualisation. As those who develop interactive systems are well aware, the point of view of the viewer, and how this is accommodated in the spatial representation, is key to the sense of immersion and engagement. Parallax is an important element of inter-agency. I felt as fuzzily embodied as I often do when sitting in an audience and perhaps rather less embodied than when watching less technologically mediated dance. The effects did not function to enhance a sense of empathy between myself and the dancers.

I do remember other equally static moving image experiences that have made me feel embodied; that have triggered not only my sense of empathy but, more materially, have acted directly on my vestibular sense and made me hold the arms of my cinema seat to ensure I didn't fall out. I remember the first time I saw the first Star Wars film (Star Wars 4) and Luke Skywalker dived his space fighter through a canyon of technological gizmos sprouting from the Death Star as he sought to penetrate it with his missile whatsit. That made me feel embodied (and a little sick). Alternatively, Hitchcock's deployment of the combined dolly/zoom effect to expand and contract space similarly engages physical responses. Technology can function to enhance our sense of embodiment - and we know it can function to enhance our agency - but clearly, much of the time, technology acts as an anaesthetic rather than a stimulant, even when deployed with stimulating intent. Perhaps it's about attention to detail...

Anyway, for the fourth week of discussion around 'virtual embodiment' we welcome Daniel Tercio and Sally Jane Norman, both of whom I am sure will be highly stimulating discussants:

Daniel Tércio holds a BA in Philosophy and another in Fine Arts, a MA in Art History and a PhD in Dance. He is currently an Assistant Professor at University of Lisbon, teaching courses in Dance History, Aesthetics, Movement and Visual Arts and New Technologies applied to the stage, within graduate and postgraduate programmes. He is a member of the Board of Directors at INET-MD Instituto de Etnomusicologia - Centro de Estudos de Música e Dança where he coordinates the research group on Dance Studies. As main researcher, he took responsibility for delivery of Technologically Expanded Dance, a project supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Science. His interests are wide, ranging from aesthetics, through dance history, cultural studies and iconography to digital technologies and experimental video. Daniel Tércio has authored several studies on dance and art. He has also written two science fiction novels and short stories issued by Portuguese and Brazilians publishers. His dance reviews appear regularly in the Portuguese press, since 2004.

Sally Jane Norman is Professor of Performance Technologies at the University of Sussex, UK. Her work on embodiment, gesture, and technologies, grounded in dance and martial arts, has involved historical research (avant-garde approaches to theatrical embodiment, Université de Paris III/ CNRS), and creative experimentation at the Institut International de la Marionette, Charleville-Mézières; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, Amsterdam (as artistic co-director and co-organiser of the 1998 Touch festival). Co-founding jury member of Telefonica Foundation’s Vida Art and Artificial Life competition, she has published extensively on expressive gesture and its technological extensions. Sally Jane currently supervises a cohort of interdisciplinary PhD students, teaches on the MA Sound Environments course and is preparing a monograph on live art and technology.


Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk  |  @_simonbiggs_ 
http://www.littlepig.org.uk  |  http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs

simon.biggs at unisa.edu.au  |  Professor of Art, University of South Australia
http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/staff/homepage.asp?name=simon.biggs

s.biggs at ed.ac.uk  |  Honorary Professor, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=182&cw_xml=profile.php

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