Week 4 Pre-Session Reading

Murray, Janet, 2020. ‘Virtual/reality: How to tell the difference.’ Journal of Visual Culture 19(1): 11-27.

Author's opinion and experience:

The future of VR is not an inevitable and delusional metaverse but a medium of representation that will always require our active creation of belief.

There is a common myth about some extraordinary powers of VR and possibility of a seamless migration out of the physical world and into an all-encompassing computer-generated substitute reality and this is wrong. Magical thinking vs technological prediction.

Reason for this: The cumulative effect of so many unexpected technological changes arriving so rapidly over the past three decades – the internet, smart phones, GPS in cars, video conferencing at our fingertips – has made it hard to distinguish realistic claims about the future from technological fantasies.
We know that people can come to perceive external objects as part of their own bodies. But as Jeremy Baileson (2018: 86) points out, the touch must be exquisitively synchronized or the ‘the illusion fails’. The rubber/virtual hand experiment is truly delusional, but it is important to note that it is a fragile and momentary delusion. ... As a media critic and a designer, I am very much aware that immersion is a delicate state that is easily disrupted (Murray, 2011: 100–103, 2018[1997]: 123– 157).

It is true, as Madary and Metzinger (2016) point out, that we can be tricked by VR into thinking we are in an entirely other space. ... Of course, I knew I was still only a few feet away from them, but for a moment I was also ‘downstairs’ in a virtual world. The illusion was successful, but also easily dispelled, because I never completely lost awareness of where I was, of what was real and what was virtual.

It is in fact this double consciousness that makes VR so thrilling – our sense that the virtual seems so real despite our knowledge that our feet are still planted in this world.
We can also draw on our experience of other media, for there is no reason to believe that VR will be any more likely to deceive us than older media forms, which were once described as equally magical. In January 1896, when audiences first saw the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station, they did not run from the theater in terror thinking it was an actual train as the oft- repeated legend has it, though they were no doubt startled and disoriented (Gunning, 1995; Loiperdinger and Elzer, 2004). As the film historian Tom Gunning (1995: 133) has explained, ‘the first spectator’s experience reveals not a childlike belief, but an undisguised awareness [of] (and delight in) film’s illusionistic capabilities.’ Their excitement was not fear of magically conjured trains, but ‘delight’ in the new human powers of representation.
VR experiences are like movies but with interactivity; they are like paintings but with navigable spaces; they are like plays but with computer-controlled characters; they are like theme park rides, but with simulated motion; they are like games but with VR headsets and controllers.
When we are in a well-crafted VR experience, we will suspend disbelief and get lost in it, the same way we do in a movie or a narrative videogame. When we tire of it, we will take off the headset, feel disoriented for a moment perhaps, and then return to the one reality we all live in, and are responsible for our actions in, and never fully lose awareness of, no matter how deeply we may long to transcend it. It is not hard now to tell the difference between the real and the virtual, and it will not get any harder in the future because that is not how a medium of technology develops.
If we want to encourage VR practices that serve humane and ethical purposes, it is important that our analytical discourse be anchored in the very real perils and challenges of the human lifeworld, and free from the false and distracting expectations – whether fearful or hopeful – of a magical escape from our shared physical reality into an impossible virtual future.

The opposite opinion:

needs and hopes for global empathy

VR technology will eventually change not only our general image of humanity but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as ‘conscious experience,’ ‘selfhood,’ ‘authenticity,’ or ‘realness.’ In addition, it will transform the structure of our life-world, bringing about entirely novel forms of everyday social interactions and changing the very relationship we have to our own minds. (Metzinger)

Such psychological changes are of great concern when it involves violence or criminal activity in the virtual world. (Ananthaswamy, 2016)
our vulnerability to VR by their shared belief in the absolute plasticity of human consciousness
VR is a technology that will subsume the brain, override the sensorium, and be processed as equivalent to physical experience, rather than a medium of representation that the brain will process in its appropriate cultural context, just as it has learned to process speech, writing, photography, or moving images, without losing its grip on what is commonly accepted as reality.
What I can easily imagine is that 99 percent of the population lives in the virtual world, especially if the physical world becomes dystopic, after nuclear destruction or terrible climate change, say. The virtual world will be much more interesting and pleasant. There will be some hankering. There will be people who just like being in the level-zero world, just like people who like living in cities or people who like living in the country. We’ve got an increasingly urbanized society now, but that doesn’t mean everybody lives in the city. Maybe we’ll have an increasingly virtualized society. But that doesn’t mean everybody is going to be virtualized. (Ramakrishna, 2019, emphasis added)

What to research?

‘Proteus effect’
As a documentary VR pioneer, Nonny de la Peña does not just point a 360° camera at a distant refugee camp or a mountain scene and expect instant empathy or sublime wonder. Instead, she focuses on dramatic moments where very specific spatial positioning creates engagement. Using authenticdocumentary audio and meticulously constructed physical models, De la Peña places the interactor in the middle of a long and slow-moving food bank line in close proximity to a person who unexpectedly collapses from diabetic shock (De la Peña, 2016), or has them walk past a line of verbally abusive, hate-filled abortion opponents to enter a women’s health center (De la Peña, 2013), or adds them as invisible witness to a family fight in a Georgia living room where a young gay man is insulted and assaulted (De la Peña, 2017). In all these cases, as in any other medium, immersion is earned by an evolving craft-practice which is constantly adapting, extending, and refining complex sets of shared social and media conventions.

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