Anamersion: Toward a postcinematic poetics of immersion

The contribution of my practice-led research is the development of anamersion, a postcinematic poetics of immersion, which attends to the immersive conditions of contemporary life forms. Notions of mutational convergences of bodies, environments, and technologies and their differential mapping and navigation are developed in dialogue with Unica Zürn’s figuration of (her) (female) body and its institutionalisation as one formation in her illustrated text The House of Illnesses, Kathy Acker’s conception of the labyrinth as the site where codes are made flesh, and Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s explorations of trauma in their computer games set in horror mansions, with special attention to the way writing, drawing, and algorithmic operations often co-constitute each other in their works and in my own practice. Bringing these predominantly pre-computational engagements to bear on technology-dependent forms of immersion in gaming and virtual reality (VR), my practice-led research provides an analysis of immersive, navigational, and environmental figurations through modes of drawing, moving image, and multimedia installation that respond to Wynter’s call for a New Studia, and Zürn, Acker, and Heartscape’s disruptions of anatomical, architectural, and textual figurations on its own terms. Developing anamersion primarily with reference to Sylvia Wynter’s thought and, by extension, that of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Louis Chude-Sokei, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others, emphasis is laid on the ways in which the over-represented genre of the human, Man, continues to manifest in and as bodies, environments, and technologies today. Understanding anamersion as a form of what Wynter calls figuration Work, anamersive approaches map, navigate, and traverse such generic structurations from the implicated and immersed positions, which have the potential to be in solidarity with the Wynterian unsettling of the genre Man by challenging conceptions of technology which carry over post-Enlightenment monohumanism into derivative posthumanisms, which continue to reproduce colonial logics with deadly consequences. Anamersion, as analytic and poetics, thus presents a significant and original contribution to the fields of artists’ moving-image and postcinematic studies, which focus on the environmental and navigational trajectories of moving-image and immersive technologies today and elaborates how these can be refigured to produce generative detachments and exits from the linear developmental narratives that underwrite a violent world order. KEYWORDS: anamersion, immersion, post-cinema, postcinematic, moving image, gaming, virtual reality, navigation, mapping, drawing, figuration, humanism, genre, environment, body, hybridity, technology, Sylvia Wynter, Kathy Acker, Unica Zürn, Porpentine Charity Heartscape

Using Techniques of Perceptual-Motor Fluency to Influence Preference

Perceptual fluency and response inhibition are established techniques to unobtrusively manipulate preference: objects are devalued following association with disfluency or inhibition. These approaches are extensively studied individually, however, the impact of combining the two techniques in a single intervention is unknown. This thesis investigates manipulations of fluency and inhibition to bias preference. Experiments 1-5 focus on perceptual fluency, examining a new looming motion for its efficacy in eliciting positive and negative affect, and whether this is stored to and retrieved from memory. Experiments 1, 3 and 5 show a robust fluency effect when participants rated the moving stimuli, however, the associative learning of the object-motion pairs is limited and context dependent. Experiments 2, 3, 4 and 5 found that preference judgments of objects rated while static were unaffected by the prior motion of the object, showing a fragile memory effect. Experiments 6-9 test short game-like tasks to examine the preference and memory effects of perceptual fluency and inhibition individually, then the cumulative effects of combining the perceptual fluency, motor-action fluency and inhibition techniques. Experiments 6 confirms that perceptual fluency and inhibition techniques influence immediate preference judgements and Experiment 7 shows combining perception and motor-action fluency has an additive effect on preference bias. Somewhat surprisingly, Experiment 8 shows that combining three techniques together does not lead to greater effects. Finally, Experiment 9 replicated Experiment 8 but with changes to imitate real-world applications: measuring preference after 20 minutes of unrelated tasks, modifying the retrieval context, and generalization from computer images of objects to real-world versions of those objects. Here the individual effects of perceptual-fluency and inhibition were no longer detected, whereas combining these techniques resulted in preference change. These results demonstrate the potential of short video games as a means of influencing behaviour, such as food choices to improve health and wellbeing