Playing with Virtual Realities: Navigating Immersion within Diverse Environments (Artist-Led Perspective)

Abstract

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Employing a Dance-Somatic Methodological Approach to VR to Investigate the Sensorial Body across Physical-Virtual Terrains

“…In contrast, the dancer Nitsan Margaliot tended to integrate the score immediately into his dance, to be carried away by it and to identify it, as he reported, with his own imagination. [28] Phenomenologist Drew Leder writes about the paradoxical nature of the experience of the body as both absent and present, "[w]hile in one sense, the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also essentially characterised by absence" [29]. He writes that "one's own body is rarely the thematic object of experience" [29].…”

“…Whilst exposing differences in habituated sensing processes, the WOS participants all drew emphasis to their bodies in their visual absence in the VE: their bodies were sensed as part of the experience, rather than being passively lost or left behind. Katan-Schmid writes, "[a]t the outset, moving in VR technology interrupts the dancers' somatic awareness" as "the VR setting converts the experience of how dancers normally lead their dance" [28]. The experience of VR, for Katan-Schmid's dancers Goodhue and Margaliot, opened up a conscious 'perceptual gap' [1], "the dancers became aware to the distance between the environments-the virtual and the actual" [28]; rather than it disjointing the experience, the technology provided them with the ability to "develop reflective awareness to the processes of leading visions and movements" [28].…”

“…Katan-Schmid writes, "[a]t the outset, moving in VR technology interrupts the dancers' somatic awareness" as "the VR setting converts the experience of how dancers normally lead their dance" [28]. The experience of VR, for Katan-Schmid's dancers Goodhue and Margaliot, opened up a conscious 'perceptual gap' [1], "the dancers became aware to the distance between the environments-the virtual and the actual" [28]; rather than it disjointing the experience, the technology provided them with the ability to "develop reflective awareness to the processes of leading visions and movements" [28]. The WOS participants reflected on their own somatic processes and the fact that these processes were different for each of them, and this was enabled by their own experiences of VR.…”

Disappearing boundaries? Reality, virtuality and the possibility of “pure” mixed reality (MR)

“…When it comes to the philosophy of virtuality and virtual technology, there is relatively little literature. There is the odd phenomenological attempt here and there, whether it be regarding embodiment and the arts (Morie, 2007;Katan-Schmid, 2020), the nature and influence of (a particular type of) AR technology (Liberati, 2012;, or a more wholesale attempt to understand the nature of "virtual fictions" through particular concrete analyses (de Warren, 2014), or an interdisciplinary treatment with sociological accounts emphasising the various dimensions of virtual space in certain online experiences like gaming and Skype (Berger, 2020). Metzinger (2018) also has a useful article demonstrating how VR can be of interest to a whole host of philosophical domains, listing and explicating them; although he does overstate how high the interest might be, actually and potentially.…”