The Weird Giggle: Attending to Affect in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is once again causing a stir, with conflicting assertions over its potential to usher in a glorious posthuman phase of freedom or to immerse bodies wearing headsets in pure and meaningless violence. This paper integrates philosophies of affect and affective experiences in VR by means of a practical application of phenomenological reflection. The combination of phenomenology and affect is valuable for articulating the lived experience of something unprecedented or disorienting, and for expanding the language of critique. The practical affective experiences of VR are from one particular VR artwork: MAN A VR by Gibson / Martelli, which uses captured data from dancers performing the dance improvisation form Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) to animate the figures the VR world. SRT is also the movement practice facilitating philosophical reflections on the experience of being in the VR world. In this paper, passages directly describing moments of experience in MAN A VR extracted directly from research journals act as affective counterpoints to the theoretical discussion. The result is an expansion of the somatic register of VR, at the same time as a grounding of concepts from affect theory within contemporary digital culture

Neural Imaginings: experiential and enactive approaches to contemporary psychologies, philosophies, and visual art as imagined navigations of the mind

Neural Imaginings is a Masters of Fine Arts project that culminated in this research paper, which accompanied the Post-Graduate Show held in December 2014 at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, University of Sydney, Australia. The cluster of large ceramic sculptures presented a network – Mind Labyrinth (visceral ingress) – on which sat various conical objects – Mind Flowerings. A wall-mounted sculpture accompanied the installation, titled Cosmic Dance of the Dendrite. This paper asked, Why does art move us? This trans-disciplinary paper and my creative process-led practice examine the contemporary role of the art object, first-person perspective as the reality of the Virtual, and the dialogic functioning that occurs during an art encounter. An art encounter is an engagement of audiences aimed at invoking an individual’s bodily sense experience and concomitant emotions and thoughts. Artists may harness these somato-sensory communications to activate a viewer’s awareness of their own self-agency and dialogic encounter with sculpture, that are self-evident in a viewer’s visual, tactile, somatic and/or kinaesthetic responses. The art work employed aesthetic means to activate sensorial engagement from a viewer’s art encounter, to enact perceptual responses as part of a self-authenticating, meaning‐making process. Neural Imaginings is both a presentation of, and a metaphor for, individual agency – in sculpting oneself into existence, within one’s own mental space. This paper draws on the work of contemporary theorists from art, science and philosophy, striking at the core process of consciousness. A trans‐disciplinary approach pivoted around a neuro‐physiological paradigm, including the following theorists: American philosopher Alva Noë; American neuroscientist Antonio Damasio; New Zealand art theorist Gregory Minissale; and professors on Gilles Deleuze theory, Brian Massumi and Peter Gaffney. Symbiotically, the paper’s explanation and art themes oscillated between intrapersonal and disciplinary narratives in art and science, in the pursuit of current approaches of trans‐disciplinary confluence about the functions of the mind. This paper references artworks by contemporary artists from Australia, including Julie Rrap, Stelarc, Bill Henson, Helen Pynor and Jill Orr. Contemporary international artists included: from Taiwan, Hsu Yunghsu; New York, Marc Leuthold, and Mexico, Gabriel Oroszco

Mixed Reality Images: Trilogy of Synthetic Realities III

The interplay of physical reality and digital media technologies is getting enhanced by new interfaces. The age of hyper-reality turns into the age of hyper-aesthetics and immersive image technologies - like mixed reality - enable a completely novel form of interaction and user relation with the virtual image structures, the different screen technologies, and embedded physical artefacts for interaction. "Mixed Reality Images" contributes to the wide range of the hyper-aesthetic image discourse to connect the concept of mixed reality images with the approaches in modern media theory, philosophy, perceptual theory, aesthetics, computer graphics and art theory as well as the complex range of image science. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of images and technological evolution in the context of mixed reality within the perspective of an autonomous image science

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

From Avatars to Allies: Exploring Team Collaboration in the Metaverse

This paper explores the application of virtual reality (VR) technologies in the metaverse for team collaboration, focusing on its advantages over traditional videoconferencing. We examine the opportunities the metaverse offers for virtual teams’ collaborative tasks and the factors that enable effective team collaboration. A lab experiment comparing Meta Horizon Workrooms (a VR platform for virtual meeting rooms) with Zoom demonstrated higher immersion, social presence, and collaboration scores for the virtual environment among the participants. Furthermore, we identify that the metaverse offers novel possibilities for virtual interaction and enables greater focus on tasks and team members compared to videoconferencing. We conclude that the metaverse successfully enhances virtual team collaboration, promoting innovative teamwork and knowledge sharing. However, further exploration of this technology, including attention to nonverbal communication and suitable usage scenarios, is suggested. These findings provide organizations with a foundation for considering the implementation of VR collaboration platforms in the metaverse

Pins & Needles: Towards Limb Disownership in Augmented Reality

The seemingly stable construct of our bodily self depends on the continued, successful integration of multisensory feedback about our body, rather than its purely physical composition. Accordingly, pathological disruption of such neural processing is linked to striking alterations of the bodily self, ranging from limb misidentification to disownership, and even the desire to amputate a healthy limb. While previous embodiment research has relied on experimental setups using supernumerary limbs in variants of the Rubber Hand Illusion, we here used Augmented Reality to directly manipulate the feeling of ownership for one's own, biological limb. Using a Head-Mounted Display, participants received visual feedback about their own arm, from an embodied first-person perspective. In a series of three studies, in independent cohorts, we altered embodiment by providing visuotactile feedback that could be synchronous (control condition) or asynchronous (400ms delay, Real Hand Illusion). During the illusion, participants reported a significant decrease in ownership of their own limb, along with a lowered sense of agency. Supporting the right-parietal body network, we found an increased illusion strength for the left upper limb as well as a modulation of the feeling of ownership during anodal transcranial direct current stimulation. Extending previous research, these findings demonstrate that a controlled, visuotactile conflict about one's own limb can be used to directly and systematically modulate ownership - without a proxy. This not only corroborates the malleability of body representation but questions its permanence. These findings warrant further exploration of combined VR and neuromodulation therapies for disorders of the bodily self

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a natural development from virtual reality (VR), which was developed several decades earlier. AR complements VR in many ways. Due to the advantages of the user being able to see both the real and virtual objects simultaneously, AR is far more intuitive, but it's not completely detached from human factors and other restrictions. AR doesn't consume as much time and effort in the applications because it's not required to construct the entire virtual scene and the environment. In this book, several new and emerging application areas of AR are presented and divided into three sections. The first section contains applications in outdoor and mobile AR, such as construction, restoration, security and surveillance. The second section deals with AR in medical, biological, and human bodies. The third and final section contains a number of new and useful applications in daily living and learning

Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design

Recent changes in consumer audio and music technology and distribution - for example the addition of 3D audio formats such as Dolby Atmos to music streaming services, the recent release of “Spatial Audio” on Apple and Beats products, the proliferation of musical content in virtual reality and 360º videos, etc. - have reignited a public discourse on concepts of immersion and interactivity in popular music and media. This raises questions and necessitates a deepening of popular musicological discourse in these areas. This thesis thus asks: what is the relationship between so-called immersive media and immersive experience? How are immersive and interactive experiences of audiovisual popular music compositionally designed? And to what degree do interpretations of immersion and interactivity in popular music imply agency on part of the listener/viewer? To address these questions, Bresler has authored or co-authored four articles and book chapters on music in immersive and interactive media with a focus on compositional design and immersion in pop music. In the framing chapter, these articles are contextualized through the coining of the term immersive staging, which is a framework for understanding how the perceived relationship between the performer and listener is mediated through technology, performativity, audiovisual compositional design, and aesthetics. Additionally, the chapter makes a case for the hermeneutic methodologies employed throughout.publishedVersio