Immersive Embodiment

Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation

Liam Jarvis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030279714
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of 'virtual embodiment' in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersant's sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar. Emergent 'immersive' practices in an increasingly expanding and cross-disciplinary field are coinciding with a wealth of new scientific knowledge in body-ownership and self-attribution. A growing understanding of the way a body constructs its sense of selfhood is intersecting with the historically persistent desire to make an onto-relational link between the body that 'knows' an experience and bodies that cannot know without occupying their unique point of view. The author argues that the desire to empathize with another's ineffable bodily experiences is finding new expression in contexts of particular urgency. For example, patients wishing to communicate their complex physical experiences to their extended networks of support in healthcare, orcommunities placing policymakers 'inside' vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised virtual bodies in an attempt to prompt personal change.This book is intended for students, academics and practitioner-researchers studying or working in the related fields of immersive theatre/art-making, arts-science and VR in applied performance practices.

© The Author(s) 2019

L. JarvisImmersive EmbodimentPalgrave Studies in Performance and Technologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’

Liam Jarvis¹

(1)

Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Liam Jarvis

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 2016, I participated in a performative virtual body-swapping transaction staged by anti-disciplinary international art collective BeAnotherLab using Creative Commons technology called The Machine to be Another (see Fig. 1.1) .¹ Inspired by knowledge derived from neuroscientific studies in embodiment, this system uses live camera feeds and two Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) to enable a ‘user’ and a volunteer refugee performer—located in the same room but hidden behind a screen—to take up the first-person position of the other. While inhabiting the refugee’s virtual body, the user interacts with objects and the refugee mimics their physical actions in real time. The deployment of this illusion is conceptualized by the artists as a means of ‘increasing empathy’ by visually and proprioceptively occupying the position of the other (‘Understanding the Refugee Crisis via Virtual Reality’ 2016). The ethics of an expression of empathy that is conceived as an audience member’s temporary inhabitation of a virtualized other using live video feeds—one who may be vulnerable, displaced and/or disenfranchised—is a complex proposition that I have grappled with in my own practice and scholarship (Jarvis 2017). But an eccentric perceptual illusion of othering the self through virtual means is just one manifestation of a more pervasive trend. From smartphone apps that offer downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical pathological phenomena in the simulated symptoms of autism in the National Autistic Society’s Autism Too Much Information (TMI) Virtual Reality Experience (examined in Jarvis 2019), to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables that enable new visual perspectives beyond human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art engineering in Berlin-based art collective The Constitute’s Eyesect helmet (see pages 117–119). Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing scientific understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood. Correspondingly, the notion of an ‘immersed’ body is accompanied by the seductive promise of its porousness to a range of remote experiences and phenomena.

Fig. 1.1

BeAnotherLab ’s The Machine to be Another. BAL ©

‘Immersion’ is a multifarious concept—it has been defined using a variety of analogous theories and it pertains to a diverse range of aims in different cultural practices. From levels of attention and engagement in ‘game immersion’ (Brown and Cairns 2004),² to the state of ‘flow’ in which ‘people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990: 4).³ From the extent to which presence is felt in virtual environments (Slater et al. 1994; Witmer and Singer 1998; Di Luca 2010) to the belief that the consequences of the actions taken are unfolding as they might in reality in simulation-based training (Hagiwara et al. 2016). From empathic third sector public awareness raising VR apps (e.g. ‘feeling’ as a mediatized other does or to enhance symptom recognition, etc.) to the intensification of affects in entertainment (e.g. feeling what we imagine a character/avatar does).⁴ In theatre, the temporary transformation of the spectator into something other than a ‘spectator’ might be understood, in part, as a reconciliation of the paradox that is intrinsic to many immersive theatres. Namely, the desire for an immersant’s physical presence in a circumstance beyond their immediate ‘here and now’. It is a central contention in this book that an ontological and relational desire that undergirds much immersive experience is to feel more fully with the body of another. This ‘onto-relational’ desire concerns reconciling the physical gulf between one’s being and others’—‘ontology’ deriving from the Greek ōn, ont- ‘being’ + -logy (‘Ontology’) and ‘relational’ meaning the ‘way in which two or more people/things are connected’ (‘Relational’). This notion aligns to some extent with the correspondence Rosi Braidotti identifies between ‘ontological relationality’ and the posthuman subject, epitomized by an ‘enlarged sense of connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other’ (Braidotti 2013: 49). While the desire to be other bodies is unfulfillable, it has precipitated new modes of participatory reception and interaction for different kinds of beneficiaries in actor training, gaming and applied practices in health care, etc. And one such expression of the impossible grasp towards onto-relationality is the qualitative integration of scientifically tested body transfer illusions (BTIs) in the example that started this introduction—BeAnotherLab’s ‘body-swapping’ system, The Machine to be Another .⁵

Immersive Embodiment examines nascent ‘layered reality’ practices at the intersection between gallery-based installations, immersive performances, scientific studies in body-ownership/self-attribution and bodily realities that are ‘postproduced’ as assimilative empathic prosthesis. Hito Steyerl has argued that with the digital proliferation of imagery in networked practices, ‘too much world’ has become available to us (Steyerl 2013). Connected to this frenzied excess, even the realm of the subjective experience of others becomes fetishized as phenomenologically accessible through reproducible and proprioceptively inhabitable mediatized body images.⁶ I use the term ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’ as a loose container for a plurality of artistic cultural forms that may, or may not, be situated by the artists within the paradigm of ‘theatre’. Hybridized practices that draw on the combined tekhne or ‘know-how’ of different disciplines inevitably resist fixed definitions and can be framed within a multitude of presentational contexts. BeAnotherLab’s descriptor of themselves as ‘anti-disciplinary’ might be viewed as a rejection of the very idea that knowledge is discrete in digital immersive practices. But a commonality between the boundary-querying case studies that will be discussed in this book—which are situated in fields as diverse as applied practices in health care and VR multiplayer video gaming—is that they are giving new and varied expression to the unrealizable promise that we might become the other body. For example, in Jane Gauntlett’s intersensory VR documentary performances, immersion ‘in’ her virtual body (VB) is followed by de-immersive dissonances that are generated between the spectating body’s different sense modalities as a proximate reconstruction of sensory disturbances associated with her experience of epileptic seizure (discussed in Chapter 5). ‘Immersion’ in this respect implies the promise of a plenitude of knowing through virtualized conflations of the minimal phenomenal self (MPS) with the ‘other’ within what neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has described as an ‘era of experimental epistemology’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998: 3). MPS refers to the ‘experience of being a distinct, holistic entity capable of global self-control and attention, possessing a body and a location in space and time’ (Blanke and Metzinger 2009: 7). The extent to which the promise of ‘knowing’ other bodies is ever actuated within individual acts of immersion requires sustained critical scrutiny, which is a significant part of this book’s project in Part II.

Perceptual quirks of different orders such as cognitive forms of ‘blindness’ have long been examined in psychology. For example, in a famous study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants were invited to count the number of passes made with a basketball between players on a video. But most viewers failed to notice the person dressed in a gorilla suit walking directly through the viewer’s field of vision as the ball was passed (Simons and Chabris 1999). This experiment in ‘inattentional blindness’ demonstrates how little viewers ‘see’ and reaffirms the notion that the brain is a prediction machine. Philosopher of mind Andy Clark similarly proposes that we see the world by ‘guessing the world’ (Clark 2016: 5), a notion that is frequently exploited in various acts of ‘misdirection’ in entertainment (e.g. magic tricks). Mislocalization might be understood as another kind of perceptual quirk. In common parlance, the verb ‘mislocalize’ means to ‘localize incorrectly […] to make an error of perception involving the position of (a sensory stimulus)’ (‘Mislocalize’). Correspondingly, the noun ‘mislocalization’ can mean ‘mistaken, erroneous, or abnormal localization’ (‘Mislocalization’). Regarding the physical matter of bodies, the ability to identify and ‘localize’ limbs such as our hands in evolutionary terms has been described as ‘crucial for survival’ (Brozzoli et al. 2012). In scientific studies in body-ownership, localization specifically concerns attribution of self-identity to a body—‘the spatial localization of the self, or the “I” of experience and behavior’ (Olivé and Berthoz 2012). ‘Erroneous’ localization or ‘mislocalization’ of the body in a medical context can concern a variety of different phenomena—for example, disturbances in body-ownership caused by neurological conditions such as alien hand syndrome (Golds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’
• Part I
• Part II
• Back Matter