Chapter 2.5 Body and Medicine
Brain Processes, Heartbeats, Breath, Biosensors, Speech, and Psychology
Heart and Breathing
...
Akitsugu Maebayashi has created a variety of projects that use the heartbeat
of the visitor. In Hypersynch, the heartbeat of the performer
is used to control two open-reel recorders on the stage. In Audible
Distance, described in detail in chapter 7.4, three visitors in
a totally dark room can navigate a virtual world and determine each
other's presence only via amplified heartbeats. Char Davies created
two virtual reality installations called Osmose and Ephémère,
which pioneered new approaches to virtual world navigation via breath-activated
interfaces (see chapters 7.3 and 7.4). Davies takes the unusual approach
of using cyberspace to connect people to bodies and the earth: "Ephémère
can be viewed as an attempt to reaffirm our limitations, our mortality,
our dependency on aging bodies and an earth which which will, for those
of us now living, absorb our bones, dreams of cyber immortality notwithstanding."
...
Chapter 7.3 Virtual Reality
Unorthodox Spaces and Characters
Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland
...
Laurel notes two kinds of interventions that she sees as essential in
VR works such as as Placeholder: (1) using it as a tool to "honor
and celebrate the natural world and the ways that it articulates with
our imaginations" rather than searching for stereotyped abstract
out-of-body experiences, and (2) finding a way to incorporate deep personal
storytelling as it has been practiced throughout human history—"purposeful
action that is intended to communicate, to teach, to heal." She
notes that some participants in Char Davies's breath-activated Osmose
VR work (described below) claimed to encounter spiritual experience,
and she campaigns against the tendency of some in the art world to abandon
hope of new possibilities: "How tragic that artists have come to
hold the self-marginalizing belief that cynicism is superior to hope.
To my mind, there is nothing healthier than rolling up one's sleeves
and trying to give the world fresh visions of joy, fresh uses of technology
that indeed 'exteriorize the soul.' "
...
Char Davies
Char Davies is well-known for her Osmose and
Ephémère VR installations, which challenge conventions
about representations of artificial worlds and interface. Her synthetic
worlds do not look like the customary polygon-dominated space of traditional
3-D computer graphics. They are populated with organic shapes that suggest
plants, landscapes, body, and water. Similarly, the interface for navigating
the world reads the breathing and balance of the visitor. Before working
with computers, Davies was a painter. She then became a core developer
at SoftImage, the software company that created the 3-D software much
used by the movie industry. She has written numerous papers and presentations
that explain her philosophical focus on the experience of the physical
body in cyberspace. The biography on her Web site describes this focus:
In her work, Char Davies explores paradoxes of embodiment,
being, and nature in immersive virtual space. She approaches this new
medium as a philosophical "arena" for constructing architectures
of enveloping immaterial form. Her approach embraces the medium's paradoxes
by working with transparency, luminosity, spatial ambiguity, implicit
rather than explicit meaning, and temporality as well as a body-centered
user interface of breath and balance with the intent of affirming the
role of the subjectively felt physical body in virtual space. [6]
In a paper called "Changing Space: VR as an Arena of Being,"
Davies reflects on the experience of the five thousand [thousands of]† people who had
experienced Osmose. She was surprised by the intensity of experience
for many of the immersants. She draws on psychologist Arthur Deikman's
theory of deautomatization, which suggests that destabilizing psychic
structures can result in increased attention and "perceptual expansion."
Osmose put people in a safe but unfamiliar environment in which
they could experience their bodies and perceptions in new ways. She
refers to the literature on meditation, which reports similar phenomena.
Many visitors to Osmose reported experiences such as "being
in another place", "losing track of time," "unable
to speak rationally afterwards," and euphoria. Davies believes that a conventional VR environment
would be unlikely to stimulate these kinds of effects. The aesthetic
decisions she made about the luminous nature of the virtual world and
the noncontrol-oriented breath interface set the scene:
[I]n Osmose we used transparency and luminous particles
to "desolidify" things and dissolve spatial distinctions…
. [R]ather than relying on conventional hand-based VR interface methods
such as joystick, wand, trackball, or glove—which tend to support
a disembodied, distanced, and controlling stance toward the world—we
used an interface based on breath and balance to allow participants
to simply "float" by breathing-in to rise, out to fall, and
leaning to change direction… [T]he hands-off interface approach
freed them from the urge to "handle" things and from habitual
gravity-bound modes of interaction and navigation. [7]
In Ephémère, visitors navigate
an organic world that explores the temporary nature of existence and
the linkage between the earth and the body. Davies's Web site describes
the installation:
Ephémère is an exploration of the ephemerality
of being and the symbolic equivalence of body and earth. The work's
iconography, evolved through Davies's long-standing practice as a painter,
is grounded in nature as metaphor: archetypal elements of root, rock,
and stream, etc., recur throughout. Spatially, the work is structured
into three parts: Landscape, subterranean Earth, and interior Body.
The body, of flesh and bone, functions as the substratum beneath the
fecund earth and the bloomings and witherings of the land. [8]
Davies explains that the structure of the event itself calls forth reflections
on fleeting life. Processes of change surround the immersant—day
and night, seasons, and decay and rebirth. The fate of some of the objects,
such as seeds, rely on the proximity, movement, and gaze of the visitor.
Davies believes that the VR environment, with is simulated realness
and ghostlike presentation, is ideal for exploring ideas and feelings
about this flow of the universe:
This river of life and time, the inexorable force that pours
through all things, is what concerns me… . According to Heidegger,
the Greeks called this flow physis:
"In truth, physis means
outside of all specific connotations of mountains, sea, or animals,
the pure blooming in the power of which all that appears and thus 'is.' "
The very immateriality, temporality and apparent three-dimensionality
of immersive virtual space is well suited for manifesting such a concept.
In Ephémère, besides the various comings-into-being,
lingerings, and passings-away, and the transformations of illumination
and spatial contexts, there are "flows" of rivers, root flows,
and body fluids streaming through the work.
The artist in the era of cyberspace cannot escape responsibility. Davies
hopes her works awaken awareness of the physical world and its future.
She notes the domination of logical thinking in cyberspace construction
and warns that it may "distract from earthly responsibilities and
the very wonder of being embodied among all this":
The function of the artist in correcting the unconscious
bias of a given culture can be betrayed if he merely repeats the bias
of a culture without readjusting it. In this sense the role of art is
to create the means of perception by creating counterenvironments that
open the door of perception to people otherwise numbed in a nonperceivable
situation… .
[erratum noted by Char Davies: this is a quote by Marshall
McLuhan and Harley Parker taken from The Vanishing Point: Space in
Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper & Row (1969), p.241] †
[The following is a quote by Char Davies:] While our habitual
perceptions may lead to the forgetting of being, the paradoxical qualities
of immersion in a virtual environment, if constructed so as not to reinforce
conventional assumptions and behaviour, can be used to open doors of
perception. In this context, Ephémère is an attempt
to reaffirm our poetic and mythic need for Nature, returning attention
to our fragile and fleeting existences as mortal beings embedded in
a vast, multichanneled flow of life through time.
...
Chapter 7.4 Motion, Gesture, Touch, Gaze, Manipulation, and Activated
Objects
Breath
Char Davies
Char Davies has created a series of virtual worlds populated by organic
and landscape forms that are quite different than the polygon-dominated
constructions that constitute most VR environments. One's breathing
rhythm moves a person through the worlds as the work tries to "dissolve
the boundaries between the self and nature." (See chapters 2.5
and 7.3.) In a Leonardo Electronic Almanac review of Osmose's
exhibition at ISEA95, Annick Bureaud concludes that the breath interface
was critical in the work's success in transporting the interactor into
a virtual world:
With Osmose we are within the work but, more powerfully,
the work is within ourselves that we exhale with our breath, intimacy,
interpenetration of the work and the I, relying on the spectator's body,
whose essential movements (breath and equilibrium) are the very conditions
to the understanding of the work itself. [21]
This article may include minor changes from the original publication in order to improve legibility and layout consistency within the Immersence Website. † Significant changes from the original text have been indicated in red square brackets.