CRDM 701

Week 9 - Karla

Hi all.  I think we can agree that the readings for this week were challenging, and I admit that I struggled through some of the pieces.  In this post I will try to pinpoint some passages I found particularly interesting, acknowledging now that there is much I will not be able to cover here.

First, I really enjoyed the Bolter and Grusin chapters because of their commentary on issues of representation, reality, and presence.  As Bolter and Grusin explain, the aim "of virtual reality is to foster in the viewer a sense of presence:  the viewer should forget that she is in fact wearing a computer interface and accept the graphic image that it offers as her own visual world" (22).  They identify VR as "immersive" in terms of being a "medium whose purpose is to disappear" (21) and as attempting to encourage presence by "[coming] as close as possible to our daily visual experience" (22).  Given the use of HMDs in VR, the notion of complete immersion appears unrealistic, though it does seem plausible that users can become so engrossed by the seeming reality produced by the images in the VE to at least temporarily ignore that they are participating in a simulation.  I wonder if, and this pertains to Hillis' writing, the militaristic base of VR helps to contribute to the possibility of "immersion"?  Specifically, I am referring to VEs that draw upon conflict situations, such as the one Hillis describes with the soldiers, in which users can be "terminated", creating a sort of life-and-death situation.  Although users realize they will not actually die if they are "killed" in the VE, in the moments in which their "lives" are threatened it appears easy for users to at least briefly identify themselves with their "characters" to the point of temporarily suspending reality (video games can create this same effect, as players will vigorously grapple with controls to "save their lives" and claim "they have been shot" rather than "their characters have been shot").  VR perhaps offers a stronger sense of this due to the fact users are "immersed" rather than "existing" only outside of the game.

Drawing upon Hillis again in relation to Bolter and Grubin's discussion of VR, I found it interesting that a character in the VE Hillis describes steps in before the user can encounter part of the environment (a tree?) more closely, distracting the user from his/her goal of coming in closer contact with his/her surroundings.  Is the use of such a distraction perhaps the result of wanting to inhibit users from more closely examining the VE, thereby preventing them (as much as possible) in a way from focusing on the "unreality" of the VE?  As Hillis comments, VR "privileges sight, and other senses play a subordinate role to it" (xxii).  Of course, it seems that VR would have to depend more heavily upon sight than the other senses given the "nature" of it, but is this also the case because it is easier to recreate something visually than in terms of other senses?  "Real" sounds can be recorded and added to the VE, but presumably images that represent the sources of those sounds will still be necessary, otherwise users are just surrounded by creepy atmospheres in which they hear lots of noises but have no visuals to which to track the sounds.  Wandering around in the dark provides a real life comparison for VR users who mostly hear sounds from their environments but lack visuals to accompany the sounds, but most of us do not move around in the dark most of the time (so privileging sound over the visual would perhaps lessen the attempt to make the medium disappear in favor of immersion).  As for the sense of touch, although VEs can allow users to actively participate in their surroundings (picking up objects, for example), how do users understand the textures of their surroundings?    I think of AR Facade at this point and how the user can pat one of the characters on the shoulder to offer support, but can that user "feel" what it is like to actually touch the shoulder?  Does the user have a sense of the flesh that he/she would feel if he/she were actually touching a person's shoulder?  Or of the fabric of the sweater the character is wearing?  To my knowledge, the user lacks such notions of touch.  Admittedly, I am not really "up" on VR technology, so perhaps advancements have been or are in the process of being made to enable users a greater sense of touch in VEs. 

On a final note about Bolter and Grusin's work, which will transition readily into Baudrillard's writing, the discussion of reality is particularly interesting in terms of how individuals and media establish reality.  Bolter and Grusin state, "Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer's experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response" (53).  They follow this claim with the argument "all mediations are themselves real . . . as artifacts (but not as autonomous agents) in our mediated culture" (56).  According to Baudrillard, "Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum" (11).  Baudrillard indicates the attempt to define according to opposites, such as "the real by the imaginary" (36).  In relation to VR, it seems striking to criticize "limitations" of VEs with respect to how "unrealistic" surroundings can be, as though we identify (at least to an extent) what VR is according to what it is not.  Are such criticisms the result of the terminology we use (the use of "reality" coupled with virtual in a way that associates such reality with our "real" reality), a need to seek out and establish the real wherever we can, etc.?  I like the example Baudrillard uses of Disneyland with respect to the real, as he asserts, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation" (25).  If "it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real" (41), why is there a preoccupation with the real?  Does the real necessarily carry some truth value greater than the non-real?  Why do we create non-real environments, but then try to recreate them in various realistic ways?

Finally, in his discussion of body and assemblage, Wiley writes, "Spinoza says that my body enters into relations of movement and rest with other bodies such that, together, we compose a new body . . . 'what we identify as a body is merely a temporarily stable relationship'" (76).  He later states, "A biological individual is a concrete assemblage with a certain degree of coherence and autonomy in relation to its contexts, so there is individual human agency, among many other kinds of agency, but the individual is always caught up in other assemblages (with tools, with other individuals, with the market, with ideologies and bureaucracies, etc.)" (77).  Wiley later addresses the subject of the other, referring to Grossberg (who drew from Deleuze and Guattari), commenting, "While identity theorists define 'the other' within an economy of difference -- that is, as what the self is not, cultural studies should see others as 'fragments' in their own positivity, 'without having recourse to any sort of original totality'" (79).  Connecting to Hillis' introduction, Hillis notes, "The ability of VEs to destabilize identity formations has clear implications for what we mean by community, city, and public life" (xix).  He states further, "The self can never be completely articulated, in part because one is never a self on one's own; however, one's self is constituted by and within the language community of which one is a part" (xxxii).  The issue of identity construction, especially in terms of online or VEs, appears to be a substantial topic of conversation now, and I think it is interesting to consider how identity formation in VEs responds to otherness.  For example, communities such as Second Life demonstrate a range of identities in terms of the avatars people use, and I wonder how "[t]he ability of VEs to destabilize identity formations" impacts how otherness is perceived in VEs. 

Given the current length of this post, I will just include a couple of ideas here at the end that I was unable to mention above.  First, Hillis mentions that "virtual reality" is sometimes used interchangeably with "cyberspace", and I am curious as to whether this is problematic?  The conversation in CRD 702 yesterday about terminology ("persuasion" versus "argumentation", for example) is partially responsible for that question.  Second, Hillis writes, "Within virtual environments, pleasure and surveillance are in an as yet underacknowledged dialectical, and not oppositional, relationship" (xxxviii).  Personally, I would like to hear a bit more about this.

*Because I am focusing my project essentially on how online therapy establishes presence and employs distance between counselor and patient advantageously for communication, the discussion of presence in this week's readings was of particular interest to me.  The lack of face-to-face communication in online therapy raises concerns regarding authenticity and the real, knowing whether a patient is telling the truth and whether the therapist is really there "listening."  One method of online therapy is VR, so it was helpful to read the pieces this week for their discussion of VEs as well.

Posted at 12:05PM Oct 24, 2007 by kmlyles in General  |  Comments[0]