AR

With the arrival of the first generation of consumer headsets, virtual reality has produced a wealth of exploratory projects from a diverse group of very talented practitioners including game designers, animators, documentary journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, social activists, university researchers, and visual artists. Most of what these adventurous folks (myself and my students included) are producing is terrible, which is just as it should be.

Expanding human expressivity into new formats and genres is culturally valuable but difficult work. We are collectively engaged in making necessary mistakes, creating examples of what works and what doesn’t work for one another to build on. The technical adventurism and grubby glamour of working in emerging technologies can make it hard to figure out what is good or bad from what is just new.

Gilles Deleuze assumes that the source of creativity/the new (as opposed to just the development of what already is implicit in existing things) lies outside conscious thinking. In this paper we discuss Deleuze’s approach to finding the difference between development and creativity via the analysis of film technology, and ask whether anyone is using computers the way Deleuze conceives of those film-makers who are philosophic using film? There is a problem with creativity: the danger is that any experiment/approach which dreams of escaping conventional parameters will nevertheless inscribe these parameters in its assumptions. The question, “How do you get to the new?”  has to be approached with some caution. In answer to this question, Gilles Deleuze’s assumption is that the source of creativity/the new (as opposed to just the development of what already is implicit in existing things) lies outside conscious thinking. New ways of thinking begin in experiences that perturb our habitual filters and let in new sensory experiences. Can this be extended beyond cinema? Walter Benjamin saw the shock of DADA as a necessary prelude to the shock of film. In a similar manner, can we see the shock of film as the necessary prelude to the shock of important movements in computer art, electronic literature and digital media? It makes intuitive sense that some end run around the conscious rationality of the thinking self has always been a technique of creative minds. It is standard in many of the creative arts to employ methods that disrupt the sensorium - we are thinking particularly of performance and dance, while the whole history of modern art can be understood through this lens. This impulse holds as much for the making of the new as for its exhibition: musicians take drugs, mathematicians drink, physicists walk themselves into trance states, as they compose. The vector of Deleuze’s thought indicates that because thought is based in/derived from sensation an effective way to escape existing forms of thought is to create sensoriums which escape the existing ways we process sensation. The paper discusses some computer art and technology projects that appear to speak to this process: efforts not oriented to extending/reproducing existing human forms of thinking/doing, but that instead, look to new/augmented sensoriums producing new concepts. We believe that many examples could be advanced, but given our background we reach to work in virtual reality. Following this discussion we ask: “Is there a way to build Deleuzian solutions/perspectives into computer-based artworks designed to provoke human experiences?” We use the context of a computer-mediated art project, “Improvising Consciousness” that Anstey has been working on for several years, and focus on a limited number of design concepts that we draw from Deleuze.

Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. We enjoy the movement out of our familiar world, the feeling of alertness that comes from being in this new place, and the delight that comes from learning to move within it. –Janet Murray, Hamlet on the HolodeckStorytelling is an attempt to convey the subjective human experience; with emerging media and heightened levels of interactivity, authors/artists are finding new ways to more fully immerse the reader into their world, what Murray calls “digital swimming.” ii — in the white darkness by Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley is an example of an immersive work of electronic literature, that attempts to convey the process of memory loss in conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. With virtual reality, that Chris Milk calls “the ultimate empathy machine,” we sink into simulated fictional worlds, ideally allowing composers to push subjective experience even further, fully immersing reader/viewer/participants into an experience. John Hull’s Notes on Blindness VR experience, for instance, conveys an experience of blindness that is indescribable in words and has to be told through feeling. Both of these texts utilize the affordances of their media to convey a subjective experience and evoke empathy, Notes on Blindness through a more internal empathetic experience. And isn’t this our desire, to convey subjective human experience to others—to experience, to understand, to grow?Murray, in her article, “Not a film and not an empathy machine,” says of VR: “To invent a new medium you have to find the fit between the affordances of the co-evolving platform and specific expressive content — the beauty and truth — you want to share that could not be as well expressed in other forms. There is no short-cut to creating it.” Each medium has unique affordances and can be immersive in different ways—by highlighting the materiality of the text or by attempting to remove the materiality altogether, render it transparent, and immerse us in an alternate reality. The medium depends on the message. What story do we want to tell? How does it ask to be told? In my presentation, I will explore the gaps between the idealistic view of empathetic response in a VR experience and the realities of the technology. Including theory from Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Nathaniel Stern, I plan to investigate the complications of augmented and virtual reality narratives. I will discuss how they alter ideas of embodiment and immersive narrative, how we can define boundaries within them, how they turn the tables on reader/author relationships, how we need to consider their unique affordances in storytelling, their potential for evoking empathy and compassion, and how they are, inevitably, the storytelling of our future. 

Virtual Reality presents great promise as a storytelling medium, but rarely delivers on that promise because it is often approached as an offshoot of cinema. Virtual Reality as a narrative medium has much more in common with theater, using multi-modal narrative in a three dimensional space to tell the story. The possibility of multiple users sharing a virtual space simultaneously creates the opportunity for live performance, with one or more performers moving among and around the audience -- immersive theater within a computer-generated setting. This paper examines the aesthetics of this new space for digital performance. We introduce a new type of performance activity, “Immersive Mixed Reality Theatre” (IMRT), which promises exciting possibilities for participatory immersive digital narratives. To explore the potential aesthetics of IMRT we created Holojam In Wonderland (2017), a short play inspired by the work of Lewis Carroll. It was built on the Holojam platform developed by the NYU Future Reality Lab, which enables both performers and audience to walk around with untethered VR headsets within the same room. Sharing the same physical space is part of the enchantment of live theatre, where the audience feels they could touch the actors; this proximity with the bodies and voices of the performers creates a visceral connection with the audience. This is the sense of presence that is often elusive in Virtual Reality. We wanted to transpose the excitement of live theatre to a visually expansive experience mediated by computer graphics, allowing a live co-located audience to experience a performed narrative via a shared immersive digital world.Our work differs from other mediated experiences, including other types of Virtual Reality, in which the viewer is physically isolated. Rather, IMRT is a new type of theatrical experience that invites shared immersion by audience and performers within a digital mediated space, while retaining physical proximity. IMRT presents specific design challenges. Because all participants are represented as computer-generated avatars, the aesthetics of IMRT inherit features from animated film and puppetry. As IMRT occurs in a physical space, the performance and movements must still be connected to its physical components, to allow all participants to remain aware of each other and of the space. In addition, an experience must consider how the audience transitions between the physical and digital worlds.We have also explored the additional affordances of virtual reality by experimenting with features that are not possible in traditional theater. Individual head-mounted displays allow for personalized teleprompters, visible only to individual performers reading their cues. Computer generated imagery affords many effects, such as changing the scale of objects and characters. Having a live performer become a giant or lilliputian allowed us to create a powerful sense of wonder, which informed our decision to use Alice in Wonderland as the first text to appropriate and adapt. As an exploration, Holojam in Wonderland uses Alice as a guide into a new and exciting dream world, in this case the land of immersive mixed reality theater.

Important piece by @MezBreezeDesign on @TheWritPlatform about creating #elit and #digitalfiction in the #VR space.

- Kate Pullinger