Literature and Virtual Reality (Marchi) Flashcards
1
Q
VR as multisensory medium
A
- The technological implementation of VR, as well as its accessibility, are still dragging behind the cultural imaginary associated to it.
- Yet, its inherent multisensoriality (i.e., the fact that it engages not only the visual and auditory senses, but also touch and smell) has affected both the ways in which we communicate and, in particular, our relation to various art forms.
2
Q
From “Exhibition” to “Experience”
A
- Over the last decades, in fact, the modalities of the fruition of artworks have begun to drastically change, with a shift from the modality of the “exhibition” to that of the “experience.”
- On the one hand, the material shift from the modality of the “exhibition” to that of the “experience” in the consumption of visual art and in the marketing strategies of cultural institutions was made possible only by recent technological developments.
- On the other hand, cultural fantasies of complete aesthetic immersion – the desires it fulfills and the anxieties it brings – have long predated the actual implementation of virtual reality headsets or haptic gloves.
- These cultural fantasies, desires, and anxieties found their first articulations in literary works.
3
Q
Examples of VR?
A
— Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass
— The Caravaggio Experience
— Klimt: The Immersive Experience
4
Q
VR: A Literary Invention?
A
- Not only literary writing has anticipated the technology of VR in the creation of fictional worlds that the reader can enter and inhabit, but it has imagined the technology itself before its actual implementation.
- As Joseph Conte has argued: “Much of the nomenclature of virtual reality has its origins in works of science fiction, and therefore its conceptual genesis in literature precedes its technological application.” (288)
- Narrative fiction is also the preferred term of comparison for VR discourses, where the immersive experience is often compared to “the mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel” (Pimentel and Teixeira).
- As Marie-Laure Ryan has noted, “when VR theorists attempt to describe the phenomenon of immersion in a virtual world, the metaphor that imposes itself with the greatest insistence is the reading experience” (Ryan 2015).
5
Q
Examples of VR in literature?
A
- Robert A. Heinlein’s “Waldo” (1940): a disabled scientist who builds telepresence devices.
- William Gibson, “Neuromancer” (1984), coined the term “cyberspace”
- In the acknowledgements to “Snow Crash” (1992), Neal Stephenson’s lays claim to the coinage of the term “avatar”
6
Q
Remediation
A
- According to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: new media do not simply replace older media, but they refashion them, maintaining some of their characteristics and discarding others.
- Digital media are not brand new: They feed on older media such as perspective painting, film, television (e.g., websites include moving images, sound, text boxes etc.).
- With remediation, Bolter and Grusin challenge ideas of media purity and stability.
- While they mainly focus on the synchronic study of new media in the digital age, the concept of remediation also has a diachronic dimension, and we could think of the history of media as a history of remediation
- If for J.T. Mitchell “all media is mixed media,” for Bolter and Grusin “all mediation is remediation” (55).
- They define remediation as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (273). It is “the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another” (59).
- For example: VR and computer games remediate film by incorporating cinematic techniques.
- The process of remediation, however, can also go the other way round, when older media - finding themselves challenged by a new media ecology - incorporate aspects of newer ones. In this case, Bolter and Grusin talk about “retrograde remediation,” in which “a newer medium is imitated and even absorbed by an older one” (147).
- For example: “Animated films remediate computer graphics by suggesting that the traditional film can survive and prosper through the incorporation of digital visual technology.
7
Q
The Double Logic of Remediation
A
- Remediation is characterized by what they call a “double logic,” namely the way in which “contemporary culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them” (Grusin 2004).
- The names they give to these two contradictory tendencies are:
– “hypermediacy” (i.e., the proliferation of mediation)
– “immediate transparency” (i.e., the erasure of mediation)
8
Q
Hypermediacy
A
- Hypermediacy refers to the multiplication of mediation.
- It is defined by Bolter and Grusin as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272).
- The emphasis is on the experience as mediated.
- Example: McSweeney’s Issue 16 (2005)
9
Q
Immediate Transparency
A
- Immediate Transparency refers to the attempted erasure of mediation.
- It is defined by Bolter and Grusin as a “style of visual representation whose goal is to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation” (272–73).
- The emphasis is on an immediate relation to the contents of the medium.
- For Bolter and Grusin “virtual reality is the clearest (most transparent!) example of the logic of transparent immediacy” (161).
10
Q
Virtuality and Simulation: Definition
A
- In contemporary common usage, the term virtual is usually associated with ideas of computer-mediated digital technologies, with the cyberspace (i.e., the digital environment), and with everything we do and experience online.
- Simulation refers the form of representation specific to VR:
– The time of the simulation is “real time”
– The simulation is performative, ephemeral, and non-iterable
– The VR simulation “is not a narrative but a narrative matrix” (Ryan 1999)
11
Q
Jean Baudrillard: The Virtual as Fake —
Simulacra and simulations (1981)
A
- For Baudrillard, in contemporary society simulations have replaced reality, leading to a world where signs and images are self-referential and detached from any authentic or original context.
- Normally, when we think about representations of reality (textual, photographic, filmic, etc.), we think about reality as pre-existing the act of representation. For Baudrillard, however, reality has lost its substance as it is continuously mediated, modelled, and simulated.
- Reality has actually started to follow its own representations and models to the point that it is the simulation that determines the real world:
“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory”. - If simulations precede and determine the real, then “it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”.
- These signs are what Baudrillard calls “simulacra,” namely empty copies that don’t even have an original anymore.
12
Q
The Virtualization of Human Beings
A
“It is the same thing with the virtual. Current criticism engaging with new techniques, new images, masks the fact that its concept has been distilled throughout real life, in homeopathic doses, beyond detection. And if the level of reality decreases from day to day, it’s because the medium itself has passed into life, and become a common ritual of transparency. It is the same for the virtual: all this digital, numerical and electronic equipment is only the epiphenomenon of the virtualization of human beings in their core.” (Baudrillard 1997)
13
Q
Gilles Deleuze: The Virtual vs the Actual —
The reality of the virtual
A
- Deleuze’s concept of the virtual is tied to an attempt to move beyond the traditional philosophical opposition between the real and the possible.
- In the dichotomy between the real and the possible, the real always has the upper hand, as it is both possible and realized, while the possible lacks reality and is pushed into the past as an unrealized possibility.
- Conversely, for Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual are real. As he states in Difference and Repetition: “The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’.” (272)
14
Q
The text as virtuality
A
- The virtual in Deleuze thus represents the condition of the genesis of the actual.
- What is actualized (i.e., what gains material existence) emerges from the domain of the virtual and can revert to the virtual (through a process that Deleuze calls “counter- actualization”).
- We can think about these processes of actualization and counter-actualization with the example of a literary text. If the writing phase actualizes certain imaginative, artistic, and stylistic possibilities out of a spectrum of virtual options, once it is finished the text reverts back to a mode of virtuality, awaiting the reader’s actualization.
- In philosophical (ontological) terms, this view offers us a reality that is infinitely richer, since it does not limit itself to what is simply out there and accessible to our experience.
15
Q
Literary Immersion
A
- The degree of “immersivity” (i.e., the reader’s capacity to plunge into a fictional world and experience it as an autonomous reality) is directly proportional to the degree in which language as medium is willing to disappear, or at least hide as much as possible.
- This is due to the fact that an experimental, avant-garde text, or a text that requires an intense intellectual work of decipherment on part of the reader, is not exactly conducive to the pleasures of immersion (usually focused on the vividness of representation, on plot development and twists, on the life-like quality of the characters, etc.)
16
Q
Literary Interactivity
A
- Pimentel and Texeira definition: “the term virtual reality refers to an immersive, interactive experience generated by a computer”.
- In VR, in fact, interactivity and immersion go hand in hand, and the more interactive the digital environment, the more immersive the experience becomes (and vice versa).
- When applied to literary texts, however, interactivity and immersion seem to become almost incompatible, since the more interactive a literary text (i.e., the more participation it requires on part of the reader), the less immersive it will be.
- According to Ryan, their incompatibility is due to the different properties of the medium of literature and to its reliance on language. And yet, to “the strictures of its medium, literature owes its richness and diversity” (Ryan 1999).
- Ryan identifies “the ultimate goal of art” as “the synthesis of immersion and interactivity” (Ryan 2015) and invites literature to behave more like VR.
17
Q
Some Basic Characteristics Of VR
A
- Multisensoriality (it involves all of our senses).
- Transparency of the medium (we find ourselves in a computer-simulated environment but the computer, pixels, and binary codes are invisible).
- Disappearance of the screen and of the frame (either because too close to the eyes or because filling up all the surrounding space).
- Free and moving point of view (what we see is not restricted to what a literary narrator or a film director decides).
- Interactivity (capacity to move around, manipulate, and change the virtual world). “Real Time” dimension (immediacy of input and reaction of the system; the time of the simulation is a moving present).
- Alternative embodiments (we become a character in the virtual world, and we can take on new identities).
- Post-symbolic communication (language as a sign system is replaced by physical actions).
18
Q
Virtual Reality As “Empathy Machine”: Empathy And Alternative Embodiments
A
- The rhetoric of VR as “empathy machine” is a widespread discourse emphasizing “the potential for VR and immersive films to enhance empathy within others, and thereby promote pro-social behaviors” (Carles Sora-Domenjó).
- The main reason for this lie in some of VR’s peculiar features: multisensoriality, transparency of the medium and, in particular, the possibility VR offers of alternative embodiments, namely the opportunity to see, feel, and experience things from another’s perspective.
- Examples: “How does it feel to be a woman victim of sexual harassment? Effects of a 360-Video-Based virtual reality on empathy and related variables” & “Clouds Over Sidra (2015)”
19
Q
Ethical Implications of the Empathy Machine?
A
- If empirical studies are attesting to the political efficacy of VR experiences (in the issue of violence against women, in the plight of refugees, etc.), then those possibilities should be explored to the fullest.
- Yet, we should always also be aware and critical of the ethical implications and problems they might raise:
–The humanitarian discourse that accompanies the production of such scenes of violence and devastations seems to remain blind to its own fantasy of a totalizing and disembodied scopic regime, able to smoothly traverse and peer into every corner of the globe.
–Certain bodies (othered, racialized, subaltern and victimized) run the risk of always occupying the position of (at best, interactive) objects of representation within other peoples’ simulations.
20
Q
Examples for Virtual Reality as “Empathy Machine”
A
– Alejandro González Iñárritu “Carne Y Arena / Flesh and Sand” (2017)
– Blake M. Hausman “Riding the Trail of Tears” (2011) (intermedial novel)
