"Nervous Views from Within : Towards an Immersive Intelligence"
Note: This paper/talk was delivered at the GMD-Institute for Media
Communication - MARS, Schloss Birlinghoven, Sankt Augustin, Germany
(http://www.gmd.de/MARS) on October 16th, 2000.
I wish to talk today about an emerging optic related to the immersive aspect
of virtual reality and how this optic may help us to unframe our normalizing
consciousness. As part of Roy Ascott’s Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the
Interactive Arts (CAiiA), at the University of Wales College, Wales, U.K I
conducted research into the untheorised immersive ideals behind immersive
virtual reality art: that is art which has a continuous but coherent quality
– an art which attempts to include everything of perceptual worth within its
domain ambiently but coherently in an overall, enveloping totality that is
concerted, continuous, and without evident frame or border. The reason for
the research was to develop a dialogical cross-examination of art conducted
through the incipient concept of immersionability, so as to define both an
historical sense of aesthetic immersive visuality and to place this
previously untheorised optic into a wider cognitive and social context. The
primary subject of this research is immersion then: an experience which is
the indispensable characteristic of virtual reality. The fundamental change
in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion - a perception which is
connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space - identifies
certain shifts in ontology. This understanding was achieved through a broad
inquiry into the histories of virtual reality, philosophy, and the visual
arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive
consciousness indicative of immersive culture.
After reviewing the results of my research into the ideational background
and paradigmatic implications of aesthetic immersion, I can now state that
the balance of evidence points to a definite correlation between immersive
ideals and as if imaginable desires for extrasensory (i.e., non-narrowly
empiricist) distributed disembodiment (i.e., a loss of cognitive body-image
involving the enthused transmigrational expansion of boundaries and a
yearning to penetrate and merge characteristic of spirituality (ignudo
spirto). Hence the role of immersive art remains the necessary prosthetic
task of artificially facilitating such an unrestricted state and as such
remains associated with the most fleeting elaborations of artistic
consciousness. This erudite desire to exist in an anti-mechanistic state of
expansion is temporarily realized (albeit symbolically) in engaging
immersive art. As such, immersive art posits itself as a meta-symbol of and
for expanded human potential.
This is important in pursuing an advanced inquiry into the interactive arts,
in that interactivity to me is not merely the ability to manipulate and
modify a virtual world, but the substantial ability of the immersant to
self-modify (self-re-program) his or her sense of self. In this estimation,
aesthetic immersion adheres to and fosters Kendall Walton's theory of
make-believe, as deliniated in Walton’s book "Mimesis as Make-Believe: On
the Foundations of the Representational Art", in which Walton sees art as a
generator of "fictional truths" which through art's inventiveness invites
ontological self-modification via the immersant's participation in the
creative process. The key value of immersive fictional truths in terms of
formulating a theory of immersive art, however, lies in their underscoring
the fiction behind the assumed "real" mechanistic perspective when seen as
empirically true and universally valid instead of as conventional and
contingent idiosyncratic compliances.
The foremost salient aspects of my research have shown that various
perceived possibilities for extrasensory psychic disembodiment are produced
through aesthetic immersive enclosure when the subject is placed inside the
perceptual circuitry of a particularly lavish (i.e.,
aesthetically-informationally intense) proprioceptive feedback-loop whereby
aesthetic immersive consciousness renders a lightness of being. This
lightness of being is supported by a metaphorical spatial consciousness of
passage principled on the electron transport conditions of the nerve cells.
Hence, the aesthetic immersive sensibility is a system of submerged
dispersion in linked neurological self-programmable operation with the tough
dictates of submission - rather than any organization of hackneyed
singularity. Indeed the conceptual dialectical exchange between the
disembodied/ecstatic and the bound/submissive conducted within the ambient
optical array of immersive space (conceived of as teeming, continuous, and
homogenous) constructs the neural-metaphysics (i.e., the basic
neurologically informed concepts of existence) of aesthetic immersion as
well as its, what Vladimir Nabokov would consider to be, "combinational
delight".
Fixed point-perspective generally configured pictorial art in the West since
the Renaissance. Immersion's fundamentally spherical, all-over perspective
of dynamic thresholds cast a fraction of art on its course since the
Fin-de-Siècle. This marginal tendency has now amply flowered in VR-art as
art theory began shifting VR away from its initial paean to illusionistic
trompe l'oeil. In VR-art's immersive optic the need for a 360°
cognitive-vision enlivens receptive and organizing attributes of peripheral
awareness and, as such, intensifies thalamic input to the cortex by making
the active thalamic neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual.
Moreover, with this immersive vision there is a shift to a more conscious
peripheral mode of perception which entails a deautomatisation of the
perceptual process (whereby more emphasis is placed on what is on the edges
of sight and consciousness) thus presumably adjusting the immersant up to an
expanded and fuller consciousness. This emphasis on the peripheral utilizes
the Deleuzian broad scan; Gilles Deleuze's non-linear dynamic conceptual
displacement of a view along any axis or direction in favor of a sweeping
processes in space/time. Hence immersive vision may acquire an increasingly
computational-like encompassing range useful in expanding the customary
(160° vertical by 180° horizontal) FOV outward so as to increase situational
awareness.
Such a developing syncretistic visuality would adhere to the assertion that
the history of the human world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever
more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to
be seen. Such an approach to visuality automatically undermines what Hal
Foster calls the "rhetorical conventionality of sight" and this
conventionality's "perseverance as an epistemological model".
In virtual immersion conventional optic models may be surpassed, for
immersed in a VR simulation we can exchange eyes with another person and see
ourselves and the world from their vantage point - or indeed, see ourselves
from any vantage point. These aspects of view-switching - in conjunction
with the goal of extending conscious awareness through a non-linear,
non-lateral entwined spherical series of small glances which criss-cross –
evidence key immersive ideals and their relationship to critical distance.
Thus what has been suggested to me by my research is a widespread human
desire to pursue extended consciousness through immersive excess. This is
not remarkable in that Georges Bataille showed us that sanctioned excess is
generally found in much of art's perceptible richness and that the syntax of
art is inner excess. In accord, I have concluded that aesthetic immersion is
about stimulation through excess of our internal perceptual circuitry.
However, one might ask for more of an explanation for this widespread desire
for the aoristic (without horizons) non-logocentric excess suggested in what
I have described as the inexorable entirety found in total art. The answer
to this question, which I inevitably put to myself, was found when reading
Gilles Deleuze's "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy". In it Deleuze points us
towards a recognition of our desires' productiveness, as he indicates how
desires propel us to move towards greater or lesser states of sublime
wholeness "depending on whether the thing encountered enters into
composition with us, or on the contrary tends to decompose us...".
In the case of immersive awareness as brought about through convincing total
art models, immersive consciousness is a "continual awareness of this
passage from greater to lesser, or from lesser to greater"; an awareness
which potentially helps remove the subject out of her or his glib indolence.
That persuasive quintessence of immersive total art which agrees with our
inner tendency to model ourselves as vast but whole hyper-beings beckons the
theoretical viewer/participant (what I call the ‘viewpant’) to form a ripe
neuro-philosophical totality (inexorable entirety) with the suggested hyper
but accordant possible world experienced in the immersive total art work.
This forming of a developed neuro-philosophical hyper-totality, however,
requires overcoming the dominant esprit of our time, which has been
deconstructive of totalities. But if biocomputationaly achieved, such hyper
immersive fabrications may function in accord with Friedrich Schelling's
tenant that through art the mind may come to a full awareness of itself.
In that I am evoking the word hyper, and the phrase hyper-linked, in
relationship to being and art here, I shall briefly summarize the basis of
the hyper concept as adapted from the procedures of hyper-text, hyper-media
and hyper-reality. The strategy of hyper-anything includes principles of
networked connections and electronic links which give multiple choices of
passages to follow and continually new branching possibilities. The
total-hyper-being model of existence then, especially when placing emphasis
on tabulating an evasive omni-perceptual orb, is the self-re-programmable
internal function which explicitly offers a furtherance in envisioning
internal anti-hierarchical models of ourselves. Such functional
defamiliarizations can be also understood as a desiring procedure for
instituting a sense of united-hyper-being, which is itself a preparation for
and almost inevitable instigator of it. Thus immersive total art is
inherently anticipatory of this desired state as it invites the subject to
look forward to displaying her or his own synthetic capacity in tabulating
an extended range of perceptions. In this sense, the immersive total art
context ratifies through synthetic non-alienation Walter Benjamin's
Brechtian alienating-based aspiration to close the gap between the art and
the audience.
Immersive awareness/optics increases then in relation to immersive total art
modes of presentational ideas which correspond to self-presentational ideas
of ourselves. It follows then that immersion's ideal motif of 360° display
offers the immersant an ideal liminal internal experience by re-locating
inner being within an enclosed total art indeterminacy - an energy which
functions in expanding our syncretistic visual-mental field. Immersive
consciousness is essentially a cognitive challenge to our habitual
sensibility then; a challenge to find the fullest possible cognitive-visual
resources to cope with the expanded context of immersive total art's excess;
and a proposal that implies that those cognitive-visual resources are
available, if as yet undefined.
Moreover, syncretistic cognition, when generated in aesthetic rapport with
immersive total art, is a generative set of non-linear dynamic relations
(rather than a sealed proclamation) whose method of poly-dispersion
frequently (and paradoxically) yields a plethoric sense of non-logocentric
hyper-embodiment (i.e., a sense of neurological all-overness) antithetical
to its submissional essence. Hence aesthetic immersion is consistent with
Georges Bataille's intellectual comprehension of excess (itself suggestive
of the human cortex with its vast array of micro intra-cortical nerve
connections) as a mercurial movement which surpasses entrenched limits. The
intensity of indeterminate dithyrambian excess as experienced in dynamic
immersive total art is key to this cognition.
This awareness of course includes a comprehension of the institutional and
materiality of electronic immersive technologies along with their
effectiveness for creating modalities of experimental hyper-corporeality. As
the material mechanics of construction are generally hidden within immersive
environments (so as to aggrandise their seductiveness), full immersive
consciousness demands that the immersant be consciousness of the technical
attributes and institutionalized context which surrounds and supports the
immersive apparatus even while participating in the
hyper-corporeal/spacio-temporal configurations of it's omni sweep.
Such a self-referentiality would follow an anti-mechanistic, semi-formalist,
demystificational approach towards the immersive process, thereby producing
for itself a level of post-materialistic, meta-awareness. Such
meta-awareness requires temporarily overcoming the transparency of the
medium (which is the preconditional disposition required for
total-immersion) so as to defeat illusionist trompe-l'oeil seduction where
the medium is not seen (is transparent) so as to present an illusionistic
faux world as real. This prerequisite is indispensable in that an art which
strives for technical transparency of the medium strips the viewpant of at
least one level of criticality.
The work of the Malevichian Russian Formalists/spiritualists in the early
part of the 20th century has a key place in this meta-comprehension of
shuttling back and forth between artistic levels of awareness. This
reflexive approach engages the immersant in a game of in and out which runs
counter to Brenda Laurel's declared goal of computer invisibility for VR
worlds. The value in taking such a dynamic, semi-formalist approach towards
immersion lies in its capacity to reveal the perceiving operational datum of
perception (i.e., seeing seeing, and/or seeing the unseen therein); an
operation which, in Dr. John Lilly's terms, helps reveal the metaprogramming
aspect of immersive situations.
Formalism is a self-metaprogrammable immersive tool when it rigorously
stresses immersion's own formational principles. But there is more to it
than that. When semi-formalist immersive awareness is allowed to go into
overdrive it may pick up cognitive/psychological information simultaneously
with materialistic understandings from different spaces in the work, adding
to one's self-metaprogrammatic list of probables. Thus through
non-representational/semi-formalist perception, immersive meta-consciousness
becomes aware of its own aesthetic capacity to unite and synthesize, a
capacity which reminds us of our programmatic power over our own
biocomputer. Appreciating the capacity of summational wholeness through
self-metaprogrammatic semi-formalist awareness is a dominant constituent in
full aesthetic immersive satisfaction.
By refusing the dichotomised, utilitarian, manageable codes of
representation with free non-logocentric associational operations, latent
excess triggers a multitudinous array of synaptic charges and thickens
visuality to the extent that it prevents the achievement of a determinate,
definitive inspection of aesthetic immersive space even while conveying the
impression of totality via the unification operation of the unconscious
human desire for spatial summation. This excessive threshold component of
the immersive aesthetic adds - to the usual signals in the internal
circuitry of the human biocomputer - enough uncertainty to make new
configurations of the self probable by organizing the internal energies of
the self more broadly via disembodiment.
The subsequent and ultimate aesthetic benefit of the immersive act then, is
in attaining a prospective realization of one's own perceptual circuitry as
a self-re-programmable phenomenological operation. Thus the immersive
synthetic total art model offers an alternative visual regime of and for the
self-programming psyche in that mental-visual range is extended (via latent
excess) and hence is counteractive to ontological foreclosure. With
aesthetic immersion's quantitative appetite to surpass visual confinements,
the human subject is ready to algorithmically escape and exceed previous
limits in accord with the implied infinity of our expanding aoristic
universe. Indeed intellectual, perceptual and political boundaries have
historically been the immersive ideal's nemesis.
This self-re-programmable ontological operation occurs specifically in a
constructed space between the immersive art and the subject, similarly to
the way Wolfgang Iser locates the encounter with a written text by its
reader in a third realm of indeterminate interaction which he calls the
"work"; a transaction situated "somewhere between" the text and the reader.
However, unlike a written text, the self-re-programmable ontological
adjustments and modifications one makes during the process of coming to
understand a kaleidoscopic-like total art work of submission/excess
omni-directionally, never ceases and sensorial closure is never evoked.
Hence, in accord with Bell Hooks's understanding of antithetical
liberational learning as exciting exchanges of ideas that never end,
aesthetic-informational excess approaches an oppositional Foucauldian "kind
of ecstasy" within the receptive subject. This "kind of ecstasy" potentially
found within aesthetic-informational excess is particularly liberational in
that, as Brian Massumi tells us, "if there were no escape, no excess or
remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential,
pure entropy, death".
Aesthetic immersion's non-linear and indeterminate latent excess then
facilitates our desire to transcend the boundaries of our customary human
cognition so as to feel that state of unconditionally which Hegel called the
absolute (our absolute sense as an unalloyed being akin to non-being) by way
of a neuro-metaphysics conveyed through immersive total art's necessarily
ambient milieu. This extrasensory dispersion, which presuppose a loss of
fixed reference points, implies a diaphanous neural-metaphysics constructed
around the disembodied psyche's enhanced identity as non-site consistent
with Jean-François Lyotard's assertion that metaphysical concepts have been
realized in the contemporary world. By the synthetic psyche taking up in
immersion an anti-position of circuitous non-site, we can ascertain that the
immersive sensibility is essentially non-logocentric, ecstatic, variational,
non-hierarchical, and excessive. It is particularly excessive in that
immersion deframes and overwhelms the envelope of hardened fixed-point
(i.e., window) perception with aesthetic input and hence is an excess of and
for the prosaic gaze as it offers an immersive scope beyond our perceptual
capabilities. Indeed, instead of nicely proceeding along towards an
expedient comprehension and appraisal, immersive latent excess actually
opens up an oppositional anti-mechanistic space of self adumbration for the
self-re-programming ontologically minded by revealing the loose limits of
our solipsistic and hedonistic inner circuitry. The latent excess necessary
for triggering such an immersive keenness offers to the self-re-programming
immersant a scope of sensibility beyond that which Jacques Derrida
identified as typical of the consolidated, passive, spectator/consumer.
Indeed in our heavily materially oriented, technologically accelerated,
information saturated culture, where experience is increasingly prescribed,
facile, and fast, thoughtful languor coupled with dynamic immersion in the
discursive circuitry of perspicacious excess satisfies an essential need for
immersive cognitive-visuality consistent with the interpretative theories of
both hermeneutics and the phenomenology of perception.
In this respect algorithmic immersive total art fulfils the negative
dialectical ideal of art as affirmed by Theodor Adorno. Adorno upheld the
view that the radical potential of art lies in formal innovations which
refuse to allow its passive consumption, demanding instead an
active-critical intellectual involvement (inherent in the latent excess of
the immersive aesthetic) in opposition to unthinking assimilation. It is for
this reason that immersive total art possesses a negative dialectical
felicity of its own.
Indeed the negative dialectical confrontation with non-knowing typical of
immersive total art's aorist excess is an important component of immersive
consciousness' intellectual satisfaction, as the entire benefit of
addressing the espoused ideal inherent in immersive omni-perception exists
in attempting to adhere to an exciting transmissible hyper-state which
exceeds, transcends, and overwhelms our former inner territory. However,
this transmissible hyper-state is only probable when the two fundamental
grades of immersive sensibility, which I distinguish as (1.) cocooning and
(2.) expanding, are in dialectical co-operation. When these two directions
of extrasensory sensibility connect and co-operate within a vast, synthetic,
aesthetic, immersive topophilia (wired with an excess which consequently
disallows itself to be readily grasped), what we sense is our being becoming
subliminal. It is this sense of incomplete aorist excess (latent excess
within immensity) that draws the eye and mind in and conceptually sublimates
our being in the interests of the construction of the ontological state of
synthetic hyper-being. In this sense, immersive consciousness is a pregnant
consciousness where an emerging hyper-ontology concentrates attention on
inner, developing, self-programmable selfhood in a correspondingly expanded
way to the latent-excess laced environment with which it is preoccupied.
This immersive consciousness suggests a sense of immense inner incomplete
excess as in this state of immersive consciousness one is never presented
with concluded consequences, as there always remains some further
qualification to be made and some new perspective from which an idea or
percept may be observed. In this sense total-immersion helps constitute a
post-Hegelian consciousness, as Hegel maintained that no idea has a fixed
meaning and that no form of understanding has an unchanging validity.
Dr. John Lilly's explanation of this phenomenon is that the immersant
imaginatively takes over the perceptual space and "fills it with programs,
metaprograms and self-metaprograms which are modified in the inner
perception as if an external reality equivalent". Thus this ontology is
centered even while its ontological boundaries seem to disappear by moving
out in all directions, as the meta-programming ego attempts to fill the
aorist excess with well-being. This would indicate that when cognition
becomes looped with and in aorist excess it begins to feed-back
comprehension.
This feed-backing of comprehension thereby draws well-being's self-attention
inwardly towards the inner self-referential bio-circuitry; circuitry usually
occupied with perceptual demands of a different, more standardly outward,
kind. This is a valuable maneuver in that once one has meta-programmable
dominion over self-suggested models of inner aorist excess from inside the
circuitry (i.e., once one imaginatively participates in the mental
construction of the proposed aorist excess, and one is able to visualize and
vary the parameters of the well-being self satisfactorily in accordance with
the aorist excess' propositions) one's sense of ontological involvement may
reciprocally rest in this state in actuality. Hence, we may realize (and
self-program ourselves with aorist excess to surpass) our limitations and
lazy assumptions as programmed by the petite bourgeois world-view.
Within immersive, non-linear, multi-dynamic, aesthetically-informationally
intensive total art our ontological sensation of well-being may attempt to
break out of its architectural and bodily constraints by the attraction of
the art's 360° extra-sensorial propositions superseding and over-saturating
our visual-mental norm, thereby stimulating within the immersant a sense of
private adaptability to expansion by evoking dimensions that are much larger
than our normal cognitive-optic capabilities are used to tabulating.
To review: total-immersion expands the measure of cognitive-perception
through well-being's enthused synthetic contact with an impossible
non-linear excess and, thus, is a superabundance of and for the imagination.
In that within the state of total-immersion the ontological distinctions
between space and body elusively commingle in states of
dis/hyper-embodiment, total-immersion makes extensive demands on our
previous facilities of critical reflection by addressing our inarticulate
ideal connections; the extrasensory concatenational sphere between the
subconscious and the conscious realm that cannot easily be expressed in
words but of which we can be occasionally appreciative.
Consequently, the important apex of this process of immersion is not that of
disembodiment, but rather that of disembodiment's generation of a shimmering
hyper-embodiment where self-referential conscious and unconscious
self-perceptions become extended, enhanced, and connected.
END