State of the Real, NotesGlasgow School of Art, Nov 2003.
‘The Real’ just got realer Clive Fencott and Jo Clay SpIDERStudio, School of Computing, Uni of Teesside
Theories of virtual content - perceptual opportunities
Predictive content modelling - look at way people behave in virtual environments and try to predict what they do
Experimental investigations - eye-tracker technology – to see what they notice and how they respond
semiotics of games and VR - need to look beyond computing to ustd content of virtual environments
First Thoughts
Hyperreality and (self) consciousness
Plato’s cave walls
The craft of thought – Mary Carruthers - medieval thought practices
Baudrillard’s news (not new)
VR and ‘the real’
How real can t simulation get? Hyperreality becomes - confusion of sensory frameworks - NOT a myth without referent and t real
VR, also called Virutal Environments (Ves) is a new interface paradigm to create …. Immersion - technology of replacement of sensations of t real - embodying interface (t technology I where, which replaces sensations)
Presence - ‘t willing suspension of disbelief’ colleridge - perception illusion of non-mediation
totally present while (very) partially immersed
Total immersion
Haptic technology - data gloves, etc
Gorillas in the Bits - can move around and look at gorillas, but can also die, by looking too much at alpha male o partially immersed (but not very)
Osmose - head set and stereo headphones, but also a vest, which moves you when you move
Mechanic of immersion
Meditative VR - electronic - electro-mechanical - electro-chemical-mechanical (can create smells by squirting things up nose)
remove and replacing sensory cue that lead to sensation
proprioception gets in the way
so, meditative VR doesn’t work (n terms of total immersion)
Total Immersion
Invasive VR - bypass nervous system o eliminating sensation o virtual stimulation o major film genre • extistenz, matrix, dark city - ExistenZ Technology o implants • retinal, inner ear • neural interface chips (currently being used to replace parts of brain) • neurotropic electrodes • electrodes with chemicals to permit acceptance of electrodes to accept artifice o tetraplegics have used • biomechanics
In the film being plugged in is like ‘having your ears pierced’
Sense of self gets in the way
Realists in the film need not worry
VR as simulation - total immersion - myth without referent
VR for real - as a medium of simulation - games - virtual training environments - virtual artworks
VR is a simulation itself
Doubly unconscious
What we have forgotten or repressed (Freud) What we have learned and experiencd unconsciously (knowing how) Do we exp - t real - and the hyperreal - simulatenously?
Playing with simuilations
Virtual therapy Phobias of fear of: - flying, heights, open spaces - SpIDERS Higher levels of immersion Greater effectiveness of therapy
Re-simulation
A possibility - Real just got realer - Because t sims can get realer, but the sims are flawed - Real will always be t reference
Conclusion - exp other reals often - return to ‘the real’ - paradigmatic test for ‘reals - play a lot of mindless games (tetris) o go with t flow o exp t real o through your second unconscious
Siobhan Stelarc’s Head
Prosthetic head – 40 years of work with diff technologies ‘Online version’ - is there such a difference!?
Hayles: how we became posthuman - manipulation of symbols - info lost its body o more complex info becomes, more t sep of mind and body becomes apparent o cartesian dualism
Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger all considered this
Kant and Hegel – achieve infinite
Husserl/Heidegger – realm of finite
Kand/hegel
Husserl/heid – normality
Hayles critique of technological devel – be ustd by mind alone - body not necessary
modernity or post?
Modernity: horkheimer: master nature, and attack nature of ourselves
Ability to create
Sado-masachism of suspension - ME: this is not S&M at all
Posthuman project would answer that Stelarc’s head is an example of human identity
ME: but the cybernetic tradition does not have consensus on this. The nature of AI is still disputed
As a piece of art, the head is democratic - creates diff rel to art o interact it and inform it
Michael Smyth (Background in interaction design) Deigning for Embodied Interaction – experiencing artefacts with and through t body
Where is technology heading: Skins and environment
Where does this leave t body?
Need our body to make sense of t world
In VR we are disembodied - this is a speculative assertion. It also misrepresents virtuality
ME: just because t body is value, it doesn’t mean it has special value, such that we need not seek to transcend it
Role of 1:1 models – necessity to create something proportional to our bodies
Closest link is installation artists
(ASK WHAT THES
Marce Ages – GET PHOTOGRAPHS OF THEM - multi-.. structure - go in to exp sense of sight, sound, touch
ME: stelarc’s head is not stelarc’s art. Real Photography Damian
Defn of photography
Oliver Wendell-Homes – mirror with a memory Cinema and digital photography – threaten ‘established’ ontology of photography
Photograph as transparent record and as object
Defn of photography rely on - equivalence of forms - embodiment of this in an image
dangers of forfitting rootedness
should leave photograph behind
plus: immanence – philosophical notion from Deleuze and Guattari - after D&G photography as
Transparency and objecthood
Thierry de Duve
Andre Bazin – alluciantion that is also a fact
A mixture of fictions – Walton
A record of reality refracted through a sensibility –
‘it shares t being of the model
Sruton, R. – photography as a ‘gesturing finger’
Lunenfeld, p – dubitative
Modernist foto relied on uniqueness in time and space
Interent – art without walls
Roberts, jon – extended contextual space
Roland barthes – camera lucida
Bioteknica Sean and Jennifer
Richard Lewontin – science as ideology (it is not objective)
PhiX
What rights will an artificial organism have?
Bladerunner
Colonialism, man-made organisms – what rights?
Bioteknica - inter-displinary … - futuristic cloning - studying irrational and grotesque
terratoma - natural instance of cloning
disparatary bw science and corporate language
not scientists, but have tried to understand it! - that is a scientist
little accurate reference to use of genetic modification
little ustdg of ethical issues
biotechnika
Advanced Cell Technology Noah – ist cloned endangered animal Lily, Daffordil, Crocus, Forsythia
George and Charlie
Severino Antinori
Raelian Clonaid - captured popular imagination by claiming to clone
digital model product line of GM organisms
terratoma - cancerous growth (germ-line)
catholic church baptised terratomas until 60s, believed were virgin birth
parathegenesis - devel of embryo from unfertilised egg - cannot lead to a live (but asso with notion of pregnancy)
research will lead to therapeutic cloning technology - holy grail of cloning
terratoma – deadly form of cancer - BioArtists - eduardo kac - symbiotic research group
ethical problems about what these are doing as artists
Alba, t fluorescent bunny Photo: Cryhstelle Fontaine
Kac: bioart has increased genetic diversity! - to destroy these crates
Art as a form of life By W. Wayt Gibbs
Kac: showman
Joe Davis: genestheticist - selfclaimed most prolific author in history
ethical concerns about the organism - lack functional nervous system (do not know where pain begins and ends) - lack cognition - research on human subjects
artist tissue bank - take tissue and cells from artists - not more invasive than tattoo, etc
these tissue would be discarded anyway
Ann-Sophie Lehmann
Representations of skin through painting
Oil paint as lively pain Images so real, that appears as real flesh
In AI, android child: SKIN IS PASSPORT TO REALNESS
Ron Mueck National Gallery resident artist last year, Netherlands
Performance and Space
Experiential place making and the new real Jasper Joseph-Lester, Goldsmiths College London
Retail-architecture - holds values: permanence
Selfridges, Oxford St - supplementary space (both present and absent) - informed by logic of commodity
Bluewater, Kent - Simulated space - Transporting exp of being in busy city centre, into countryside
Commodification of space – places demands on architecture
Marxist analysis of commodity
Prada, NYC, 5th Avenue - new level of automation - clothes hidden from shopper - changing rooms with videos in mirrors to offer new ways of viewing the clothes - movement bw video and mirror
centre of architecture is the commodity process of automation market brings value to t commodity
Marx and commodity illusory body of t commodity wooden table transcends sensuousness
Selfridges, Birmingham - automated interior - exterior: spun aluminium discs o responds to light of sun and appears to move with light o curvaceous con o templre reality of shopping experience
phantasmic surplus of retail architecture
territories and distinctions Performing the Real Lennaart van Oldenborgh
Realness of image is property of origin
Reality-TV First wave – mass dissemination of cam corders - candid tv
Reality-Video
Reality-Gameshow format
Pentagon collaborated with Hollywood - reporting the war Jessica Lynch rescue
(Video) – can we still trust documentaries to tell us t truth - Rita Vort?
Daddy’s Girl (channel 4) - rel bw father and daughters - fictional boyfriend - pulled from schedule at last minute
Madonna lipstick commercial - playing herself in the ‘in bed with madonna’ film through this video
ref to Lacan – jubilant assumption of respecting the image
snuff videos – mythical genre of real death - did someone actually die here? - Is this video the last moments of this life? - Witnessing the passing of life. - Life becomes death (reveals death to us)
Suicide box footage - of real deaths - statistical indifference of San Francisco coast guard, who stopped counting the number of suicides - as a result of his indifference, the box would record presumed suicides - result is haunting and ironic o indiscriminately repetitive o one after the other dropping off o merely see black dots • ME: why cant they be more detailed (zoom!?)
Violence and death, the unassimilable, become the … of the real
Darren Brown’s Russian roulette - only way that can guarantee realness is if he blows his brains out
Slavoj Zizek real: nostalgic fantasy for t real - defining charac of 20th c
Arts, Prepresentation and Responsiibility: towards a system aesthetic James Coupe
Conscious art work Non-anthropocentric syntax Self-author and emergent Challenge notions of authorship 1928: general systems theory – challenge to castesian, Newtonian cybernetic: feedback systems (self-contained and self-regulatory) open and closed systems (living as closed – cannot ustd syst by ustdg parts in isolation)
Smithson
http://www.ctrl.me.uk/gsa
from object oriented to system oriented (systems consciousness)
posthuman art: human is no longer focus of the art
art that is alive, replace t human organism
ME: but replacing the human as artist right? Or human in art?
AI – effort to make a machine behave like a human
If a machine must be inttell, then logic must be based on itself rather than human - machine with own logic, would not be attempting to replicate something else (simulation) and would thus be real
Smith’s entropy: system as ungraspable
Kant’s distinction bw phenomena and noumena
Digital Warfare (art work) - system that connected people together of gallery guests, through text messaging - social instersis
Net Object Leonard Latiff
Cyborg Art History: Techno-aesthetics and metafictions of digital culture Elizabeth Menon http://www.snappyprof.com
(ppt on web)
REF: Virtual Art: from illusion to immersion – not very good for here students
Benjamin and McLuhan possible theorist, but many
Brenda Laurel – computer as theatre
http://www.sito.org/hygrid transgressions bw past and accepted media download original image and it murges with your own
Neo-Panofsky
Ann Hamilton - multi media with live performers
Yugo Nakamura - design/art? No navigation on website