Char Davies's Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality

CHAR DAVIES’ IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ART AND THE ESSENCE OF SPATIALITY This page intentionally left blank Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality

LAURIE MCROBERT

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9094-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McRobert, Laurie Char Davies’ immersive virtual art and the essence of spatiality / Laurie McRobert. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9094-2 1. Davies, Char. 2. Art and technology. 3. Virtual reality in art. 4. Interactive art. I. Title. N72.T4M37 2007 701’.05 C2006-901759-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). In memory of my parents Katarzyna Kos and Johannes Demkow This page intentionally left blank Contents

Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 3 1 The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 11 2 Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 30 3 Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 42 4 Substantial Essence 58 5 On Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 75 6 The Essence of Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 93 7 Instincts and the Unconscious: Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 108 8 Speculative Inquiries into the Elements of Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art 125 Epilogue 143

Appendix 149 Notes 151 Index 185 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations

All images and illustrations courtesy of Char Davies. Plates follow page 66.

Black and White Plates

BW-1 Cup (1984) BW-2 Glass Jars on Mirror (1985) BW-3 Winter Swamp (1973) BW-4 Winter Clearing (Swamp) (1986) BW-5 Leaf, Light (1990) BW-6 Root (1991) BW-7 Seed (1991) BW-8 Conceptual Map of Osmose (1994–5) BW-9 Model of user/immersant: causes and effects with related perceptual and environmental states (1995) BW-10 Osmose spatial and temporal structure with ovoid-spherical landscape (1994) BW-11 Osmose spatial structure viewed as cube with spatial realms (1995) BW-12 Osmose structure: viewed from above as circles with seed at centre (1995) BW-13 Ephémère structure: spatial stratification and temporal evolution in landscape, under-earth and interior body (1998) BW-14 Spatial-Temporal Structure of Ephémère (1996) BW-15 Ephémère as landscape, I (1996) BW-16 Immersant wearing a stereoscopic HMD and breathing/balance interface vest (1995) BW-17 Computer equipment used to run visual and sounds in Osmose and Ephémère (2003)

Colour Plates

C-1 Blue World-Space (1985) C-2 Yearning (1993) C-3 Tree and Pond, Osmose (1995) x Illustrations

C-4 Forest with Cartesian Grid, Osmose (1995) C-5 Roots, Rocks and Particle Flow in the Under-Earth, Osmose (1995) C-6 Scrolling Walls of Code, Osmose (1995) C-7 Semi-transparent Trees in Winter Swamp, Ephémère (1998) C-8 Interior Landscape (Arctic) Appearing inside Boulder in the Winter Swamp, Ephémère (1998) C-9 Seasonal Transformation in the Forest Landscape, Ephémère (1998) C-10 Seeds, Ephémère (1998) C-11 Germinating (Blooming) Seed in the Under-Earth, Ephémère (1998) C-12 Interior Body, Ephémère (1998) C-13 Bones in the Interior Body, Ephémère (1998) C-14 Eggs in the Interior Body, Ephémère (1998) C-15 Installation view of immersant performing Ephémère (2003) C-16 Installation view of live performance of Ephémère (2003) C-17 Immersant performing Ephémère (2003)

Figures

1-1 Spatial structure of Osmose 22 1-2 Spatial-temporal structure of Ephémère 27 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Charlotte Davies for generously allowing me access to her working notebooks and for supplying me with illustrations from them and with real-time images taken during someone’s immersion in Osmose and Ephémère. She was always available to answer my questions and to explain the dynamics involved in her artworks from both artistic and technical perspectives. John Harrison explained the technical aspects involved in programming 3D immersive art; Tanya das Neves was always there to advise me and to help find any information or material I needed; Dietrich Sider assisted me with the prepara- tion of the manuscript. I thank them all for their invaluable help. A special word of thanks goes to my colleagues Bill Frost and Heather Stephens, who read the manuscript and whose constructive criticisms helped produce a better book, and others unnamed here, who read and commented on early versions of the manuscript. Their suggestions were always thoughtful and helpful. Chris Bucci was the editor at the University of Toronto Press who responded to my e-mail about the book I was writing on 3D art and believed in it from the start. Siobhan McMenemy inherited the editorship when he left the Press. James Leahy did the final copy-editing, and Frances Mundy was the managing editor responsible for seeing the project to publication. I am grateful to all of them. Finally, I thank my husband Stan McRobert for providing that proverbial ‘moral support’ throughout the years it took me to write this book, and two other very important people in my life: Charlotte Tansey and the late Eric O’Connor, S.J., founding members and past presidents of Thomas More Institute for Adult Educa- tion in Montreal, who taught me to put ‘curiosity at the centre of my life.’ This page intentionally left blank Abbreviations

AC Artificial Consciousness AI Artificial Intelligence AL Artificial Life BWE Brain Wave Entrainment CAVE Cave Automatic Virtual Environment DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid ECT Electroconvulsive Therapy EEG Electroencephalograph EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing EMI Experiments in Musical Intelligence fMRI functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging HMD Headmounted Display ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art IT Information Technology MRI Magnetic Resonance Imaging MUD Multiuser Domains NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration PCR Photo-Convulsive Response PET Positron Emission Tomography REM Rapid Eye Movement (dream sleep) rTMS repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation SGI Silicon Graphics Inc. TMS Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation TOE Theory of Everything VRML Virtual Reality Modelling Language UFO Unidentified Flying Object UV Ultraviolet Light VR Virtual Reality This page intentionally left blank CHAR DAVIES’ IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ART AND THE ESSENCE OF SPATIALITY This page intentionally left blank Introduction

What Is Immersive Virtual Art?

This book is about the impact of Canadian artist Char Davies’ immersive virtual art and the powerful dynamics encountered by people when they experience it. Never before in history have artists presented their art in immersive virtual environments, and never again will viewing 2D art be the same. In this book I concentrate not only on the aesthetics of Davies’ digital art but also on the phenomenon of the spatiality in which not only the art forms but we, the participants, float. Immersive virtual art is an emerging technological art form that, in effect, immerses participants in virtual space in the same way as scuba divers immerse themselves in water to explore another world. In fact, her experience of scuba diving was Char Davies’ inspiration for creating the body vest, a novel interface between viewer and computer which measures bodily responses and allows immersants to control their journeys within the artwork itself. In the ocean, divers float between flora and fauna, with fish swimming toward them and vice versa. In the case of immersive virtual art, one finds oneself inside a mesmerizing spatiality that one also ‘swims in,’ where images float toward and through the immersant, and the immersant floats toward and through them, in what could be thought of as an interactive spatial ballet. Since immersive virtual art is a relatively new phenomenon that many people have not yet experienced, I invite uninitiated readers to take the time to log on to Char Davies’ website at http://www.immersence.com, where they can familiarize themselves in more detail with the type of equipment that is used to experience this art and see what the installations look like when the work is exhibited in public venues such as art galleries or museums. On the website, one can also see the real-time images an immersant sees during immersion and video clips of flythroughs of Osmose and Ephémère. On my own website http://www.mcrobert.org, I have provided links to data mentioned in the book that could not be included here. For readers who understand the technology used to create immersive virtual art and to experience it, I invite them to skip the sections where I discuss this; for those who do not, I begin with the following introduction. In 1965 Ivan E. Sutherland gave a seminal paper entitled ‘The Ultimate Display,’ which laid out the fundamental principles for a future virtual environment display 4 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

system ‘to serve as a looking-glass into the mathematical wonderland constructed in computer memory.’1 He also developed models of his innovative display system. Some years later, between the years 1985 and 1990, the principal project team at NASA Ames Research Center conceived, created, and developed what is now popularly referred to as a ‘headmounted display,’ or HMD. Their ‘objective was to develop a multisensory virtual environment workstation for use in Space Station teleoperation, telepresence and automation activities.’2 More specifically, an HMD is a headmounted, wide-angled, stereoscopic display system powered by a host computer and external hardware, such as graphics and sound synthesizing equipment, to create a digitally immersive space. While the space is generally referred to as virtual reality (VR), I refer to it, as Davies does, as immersive virtual reality. The underlying purpose of an immersive virtual display system is that it complements human sensory and cognitive capabilities, allowing a person to be viscerally interactive in it. Although technologically still in their infancy, there are many varieties of HMDs available today since the use of 3D environments is of tremen- dous benefit for training military personnel, astronauts, doctors, and other profes- sionals who need to practise difficult procedures safely. Char Davies uses this kind of display technology (as do other digital artists) in order to exhibit her art. The HMD is the vehicle that interfaces with the computer and the immersant, processing the optics, sound, and kinesthetics that constitute her virtual realms (worlds as she initially referred to them). She could have chosen some other system to show her immersive virtual art (see chapter 6, where we discuss the CAVE system), but she believed at the time, and believes even now, that a low-resolution, totally surround 360° HMD system is best suited for her artistic needs.3 Whereas the visual environments produced by the NASA computerized system are generally explored by a joystick or hand-held game controller, or with a data-glove that feeds back tactile information,4 Davies uses a body vest to achieve sensory feedback. By measuring immersants’ breathing and balance, she allows them to negotiate the immersive virtual environment hands-free and arrives at kinetic results that are unique to her artworks. This method of negotiating immersive virtual space, rather than the typical joystick method, is part of the genius underlying Davies’ artwork. This, in combination with her use of spatial ambiguity and semi-transparency in the visuals, is the suspected underlying reason why her immersive virtual art plunges people, within a matter of ten minutes or less, into a reverie or dreamlike state. Floating in immersive virtual space, such as that evoked by Davies’ works, makes many individuals feel as though they have entered into uterine waters. Readers have only to read immersants’ comments, or any of the essays posted on Davies’ website, to satisfy themselves as to just how powerful the reported feelings evoked by this art are. Art in immersive virtual spatiality often leaves us surprised, enchanted by the unusual sensations and perceptions that we experience during immersion. On Davies’ home page, on the Web, there are links to Osmose and Ephémère with excerpts about the ever-changing immersive environments captured ‘on the fly’ (an expression which means that they were recorded during someone’s immersion). Here is a description recapitulating what Davies conceives immersive virtual art to be: Introduction 5

Osmose (1995) is an immersive, interactive, virtual environment with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a stereoscopic head-mounted display and real- time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e. a place for facilitating awareness of one’s own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.5

On the same Web page, a diagram is provided to help a reader understand the dynamics in Davies’ art. While on the website, click onto Ephémère (1998) in order to get an idea of its dynamics, which differ from those of Osmose. (These differences will be discussed in detail as we proceed.) About this second work of art one reads,

Ephémère’s iconography evolved through Davies’ long-standing practice as a painter, and, as in Osmose, is grounded in ‘nature’ as metaphor: archetypal elements of root, rock, and stream etc., recur throughout. In Ephémère, however, this iconographic repertoire is extended to include body organs, blood vessels and bones, suggesting a symbolic correspondence between the chthonic presences of the interior body and the subterranean earth.6

It is, however, impossible for someone, despite all the written information available about the experience, to imagine what one of Davies’ immersive virtual environments is like if they have not experienced it. I strive throughout the book to be as descriptive as possible about the immersive experience, but this is undeniably subjectively coloured; no words can replace an actual immersion in a technologically produced work of art of this kind. As we will read in future chapters, the immersive virtual experience in Davies’ work never strands us outside of our bodily feelings in a sense of bodilessness, although it does create in some people feelings of transcendence. Computer created, it is still a space that seeps into us, that we imaginatively relate to and feel, a space in which floating objects are not ‘nothing,’ but something, almost demanding to be touched. Unlike the flora and fauna of the great reefs of the world, which environmentalists hope we do not touch, we do attempt to reach out and touch the 3D virtual phenomena in Davies’ art, but when we do they just evaporate, disappearing into their digital worlds – touch is not incorporated in Davies’ work. In Davies’ immersive virtual space we encounter three-dimensionally enveloping scenarios representative of landscape and other aspects of the natural world, including the subterranean, filled with semi-abstract, semi-recognizable forms or elements that are translucent and semi-transparent and coalesce to form multi- layered images which appear to be moving and floating toward us as well as through us. Hooked up to a computer through a stereoscopic HMD and a body vest that monitors our breathing and balance, we are locked in a symbiotic relationship with a computer, a relationship that even a person sceptical of technological art would find difficult to condemn (plates BW-16, BW-17). The visual content of Davies’ work, although algorithmically produced, appears organic, soft-edged, and ephemeral, as though constructed out of flowing lines and translucent membranes. This is not because the algorithms producing it are 6 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art less geometric, as John Harrison, Davies’ programmer, points out in the next chapter, but because he has developed the appropriate mathematical equations to create the special effects that Davies desires. As well, the Softimage7 software used by her artistic designer Georges Mauro has been described as ‘the world’s most sophisticated visual effects software.’8 Harrison’s innovations to certain parts of the software, further enhanced the effects used in producing Osmose and Ephémère.9 As good as the software program is when it comes to special features – such as, for example, ‘Transparency map,’ which determines which parts of the image will remain visible and which will not, allowing for the diffusion of edges and blurring of lines – it is Davies’ and her team’s specialized use of it, and Harrison’s customized programming, that creates the special effects in her artwork. As well, she has employed the software tools in ways which subvert or circumvent their conventional use, one that generally strives for hard-edged, opaque photorealism. This unpacking of traditional uses of geometrical space/time is an important aspect in Davies’ digital art, and foundational for my argument. I theorize that what can change in an individual’s perspective after immersion in Davies’ artworks is a perspective toward space and time and that an experience of this calibre can evoke innate feelings of space and time (plate C-7). In the book, I consider different aspects of Davies’ virtual art: its particularly visual sensibility, its symbolic alignment with the past, and its opening of windows onto the future world. However, my primary concentration is on immersive virtual space and spatiality and their effect on the psyche. Computer-produced immersive virtual space emerged in the late twentieth century and is still relatively new to those who do not work in the technological arena. Of course, we should not ignore the immersive techniques of the past that used caves, cathedrals, pyramids, and grave mounds, as well as, in the past century, devices such as the magic lantern, panorama, and so on. And we all know what being immersed in the silent spaces of our own mind is like – I am referring to the divine or eternal dimension of space and time some of us feel or even the kind of space that love evokes in this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.10

Like falling deeply into the space of love, so too can we fall into the depths of feelings in our own biological space when we find ourselves encompassed by Davies’ digitalized, cathedral-like worlds. Immersive virtual spatiality, in a virtual environment, therefore, is decidedly not about the commonly held conception of 0–1 digital dynamics and their ‘roll’ through computer-linked cyberspace. Not that immersive virtual spaces are being perceived as having no place in cyberspace – there are people engaged in design- ing primal virtual spaces that might turn out to adequately represent sacred spaces in cyberspace forums.11 Rather, it is about opening up new horizons for philoso- Introduction 7 phizing, not through concepts, once thought by philosophers such as Hegel as fated to sublate images, but through the very power of images. Cyberspace is a quite different, more controlled, experience of space ranging from manipulative MUD rooms to informative forums. In contrast, being in the midst of Davies’ immersive virtual environments allows one to experience a sense of space, as I argue in the book, that exists in the very depths of our DNA. It would be misleading to refer to Davies’ immersive virtual art, with its encompassing, ethereal 3D virtual spaces, by using the word cyberspace – a concept we will discuss again in chapter 2. Instead, we must use new terminology to identify it, and that is why the term immersive virtual space is now beginning to be used among technology-based artists and theorists when describing such art. Davies herself coined the neologism ‘immersant,’ an offshoot of the word immersion, thus introducing a convenient way of referring to people who have participated in her artworks. Differing radically from the more conventional example of 3D virtual reality art produced by designers and artists, who tend to structure their environments geometrically, Davies’ immersive virtual art is really in a separate category. Many technological artists use digital space to create ‘architectonically’ structured worlds which visually confirm what one artist has referred to as ‘patterns of space in the mind.’12 Essentially, however, these worldviews are still based on geometrical and mathematical laws that more often than not resort to a play around mathematically iterated images.13 What is new about Davies’ immersive virtual art is that, among other things, it explores techniques based on transparency and non-linear dynamics that break through our once iron-clad imaginative obsession with Euclidean geometry, and hence through our mathematically rigid conceptions of space/time.

Char Davies’ Background

Canadian-born Char Davies studied liberal arts, including visual art, philosophy, religion, anthropology, and biology at Bennington College, Vermont, from 1973 to 1975, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978 from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, the same university that would bestow on her an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2002. In the decade following her undergradu- ate degree, she developed her own symbolic language and aesthetics, which manifested themselves in her paintings. During the 1980s Davies began experimenting with the 3D virtual space of computer technology. At this time she got involved with the fledgling company Softimage, becoming one of its founding directors in 1987. The company became one of the world’s leading developers of 3D animation software, which was used for special effects in Hollywood films such as Jurassic Park and The Matrix. Even as she attended to her corporate duties at Softimage, in the late 1980s she found time to create a series of digital still images (Interior Body Series, 1990–3), which were exhibited in Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada. But, most important, with a small dedicated team, she conceived and developed the large-scale immersive virtual environment Osmose. Premiering at the Musée d’art 8 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art contemporain de Montréal in 1995, it has since been exhibited worldwide. (See the Appendix for a list of exhibits.) In 1996, she began working on her next immersive virtual environment, Ephémère, becoming its executive producer through her own company Immersence when her professional relationship with Softimage ended in 1997. Ephémère premiered at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998 and was subsequently exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2001, as well as in Perth in 2002 and Melbourne in 2003–4. Never idle, Davies chose to take some down time to write a PhD dissertation about the philosophical underpinnings of her own art practice. This degree was granted to her by Plymouth University in February 2005. The 120,000-word doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Explo- ration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception,’ was originally begun at the CAIIA Centre for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, University of Wales. (It should be noted, however, that although I read and refer to drafts of early versions of it, I did not have access to the final version in time to more fully incorporate and appreciate its developed theoretical concepts in this book.) Presently, Davies is planning her next artistic endeavour, which she hopes will immerse us in a real landscape in real-time.

Biological Transcendence

As digital artworks (some suggest the term ‘art systems’ be used to describe interactive computer artworks)14 Osmose and Ephémère are replete with familiar, universal dynamics that can be approached from many different academic perspectives. Wound into our study of Davies’ immersive virtual art are inquiries that deal with philosophical, psychological, and biological issues, upon which terrain her art encroaches. Because our focus must necessarily be on Osmose and Ephémère, a certain amount of redundancy occurs. It is easy to be repetitious in describing immersive virtual art and so incur the disdain of connoisseurs. On the other hand, one has to remember that many who read this book will want to be thoroughly introduced to an art form they may have heard little or nothing about. I want to make clear in this introduction that technologically based art of this immersive quality is very complex to create, and I do not pretend to be an expert on the subject of its intricate digital algorithmic composition, which is a fascinating study in its own right. This book is not about the actual digital construction of such art, nor how its dynamics are conceived and created digitally, nor what algorithms are used, nor what special effects make up the work. Moreover, readers should also know that artists are not required to be experts in the software programming of the art they create. Rather, they are encouraged to work with software engineers and animators, as Davies has chosen to do, and to envision and direct the virtual art they wish to create, whether they understand its algorithmic substructure or not.15 Several other points should be underscored in this Introduction. The use of symbolic imagery of nature in Osmose and Ephémère is not meant to evoke ‘nature- Introduction 9 as-it-is.’ Some immersive virtual spaces can be referred to as depicting the virtually real, but the images in Davies’ works are hardly meant to be real. They are bound only to the level of symbols, sometimes more literally executed while other times more abstractly. Strictly an artistic rendition of a symbolic nature, they do not, and were never intended to, represent nature-as-it-is. It is important to emphasize that this book is not about art and virtual reality but about art and immersive virtual space, and how the novel experience of experiencing art while ‘suspended’ in 3D space can change our consciousnesses. Still, the use of natural elements by Davies in her artworks has the potential of grounding us in nature, even helping us appreciate real nature – for we are, after all, part of nature. Davies’ artistic intent, however, goes beyond the elements of nature – her artworks, she emphasizes, are meant to depict an osmosis of self/world, interior/exterior, inside/outside, typical ninetheenth- and twentieth-century dichotomies explored by philosophers during this period. Davies is apparently not unaffected by the late-twentieth-century deconstructionist movement, even though the being-in-the- world she intends is influenced by, as she points out, a Heideggerian ‘being-in-the- world.’ But whether her intention is merging with nature’s inert elements or merging with being-in-the-world of animistic nature is not that relevant here. What counts, in our discussion of her work, is whether osmosis occurs between immersants and the world they feel immersed in. In philosophically discussing Davies’ artworks we do so through Heidegger’s (now timely) dialectics about the essence of technology and technology per se; through Plato’s ‘virtual ideas’ (forms) hovering above reality, and even through the orthodox icon’s inverse geometrical perspectives. The end result of being immersed in Davies’ technological artistry is the confirmation that reason is grounded in nature, not nature in reason. (Recall that philosophers such as Hegel attempted to convince us that we must sublate nature to reason in order for thought to reach its goals of Absolute Spirit or Idea.) Then, too, we must consider the immersants’ experiences of feelings for transcendence. These feelings of transcending mundane space and time are more often than not reported by immersants and are a rather surprising dividend for the artist and her team, who were not expecting such a response at all; hence these feelings cannot be ignored in assess- ing the overall impact of Davies’ immersive works of art. The question to be asked is ‘Why are these feelings emerging, and what can we make of this digitally produced transcendent experience that evokes what appears to be an entirely new experience of spatiality?’ I am thinking here of the philosophical sense of ‘transcendence,’ those longings for another world, for an ‘unknown God’ – so poignantly written about by poets and religious mystics throughout the ages – and how they compare with the feelings produced by the digital nature of transcendence. Will computer-generated art, with its 3D immersive virtual scenarios, allow us to penetrate the mysteries of a transcendent experience most of us never before hoped to obtain, let alone aspired to know, in some new way? Or do we fool ourselves when we contemplate grasping such a grandiose notion as a biological sense of transcendence through a medium such as immersive virtual art? Questions of this order first surfaced for 10 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art me as I contemplated certain presenters’ artistic endeavours at the 1995 Inter- national Symposium for Electric Art (ISEA) proceedings. These questions are still valid for me today, and in the second chapter I examine some of them. My thesis in this book is that immersive virtual art such as Davies’ is fated to act positively and catalytically on the human psyche, to bring us face to face with an experience of space/time that we intuitively know but had no way of consciously accessing until now. I argue that being immersed in a virtual 3D spatiality allows us to grasp and understand, as never before, the power of the unconscious. Immersive virtual art such as Davies’ acts as a facilitating medium that allows us to appreciate something more than our mathematically conditioned, four-dimensional experience of space and time and takes us deep into our DNA and an innate sense of an archaic/eternal space/time. Does such immersive virtual art succeed because it permits us to familiarize ourselves and to become comfortable with a non-verbal, dreamlike spatiality? Renowned physicist Steven Weinberg points out, in respect to our Einsteinian and quantum constructions of space/time, that we are imaginatively constrained by these mathematical notions. He asks, ‘How can we get the ideas we need to describe a realm where all intuitions derived from life in space-time become inapplicable?’16 Namely, how do we get beyond our present intuitions of space/ time and move forward imaginatively into another dimension of spacetime?17 And here I mean for us to interpret intuition not as an abstract philosophical concept but as one that is biologically founded. Inspired by Davies’ art and how it can help us to integrate our bodily feelings with space and time, I will be asking important questions in some of the later chapters that are related to the body’s biochemical responses by considering the effect of immersive images on the visual brain. Can such art, by employing three- dimensional computer-imaging techniques, control or manipulate our visionary brain in some specific way yet unknown to us? Can such work produce biochemical by-products in the brain that affect consciousness? Does Davies’ art, with its immersive virtual spatiality, provide us with an atmosphere more attuned to the spatial dimensions that we find in dream space? Will deriving ‘new intuitions’ about space and time that transcend Einsteinian paradigms of relativistic space and time provide us with a way of better understanding the unconscious dimensions of our psyches? 1 The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art

From Philosophical Ideas to Immersive Images

Although many ‘new media’ artists exhibited their work during the International Symposium for Electric Art (ISEA) conference in Montreal in September 1995, none impressed me as profoundly as the immersive virtual art of Char Davies. In 1979, Davies, who began her career as a painter, primarily of landscape works (ca. 1978–87) (see, e.g., plate BW-3), approached the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) about making a documentary film about her experience of painting loggers at work in a logging camp.1 They accepted her proposal, and after the film was made she began to work on several more film-related projects for the NFB. But something within Davies became dissatisfied with working in 2D, whether painting or making films, and as early as 1985 she sought ways to obtain grants to do research using 3D computer technology.2 She first conceived how she might depict such a three-dimensional space while viewing an early 3D computer-animated film Vol de Rêve made (around 1983) at the University of Montreal. She states, ‘In this short film, I first recognized the potential of 3D digital space for communicat- ing my ideas about being enveloped in light and time and space. I immediately began considering whether such technology might be an effective way to represent animated strokes of light-in-flux.’3 She was convinced that this new medium might effectively enable her to go ‘beyond the painterly two-dimensional picture plane, and into a virtual three-dimensional space on the other side.’4 In her attempt to depict an ‘enveloping’ osmotic-type space, Davies realized that such painterly representations of three-dimensional spatiality would never be satisfactory to her, as the images would still manifest as two-dimensionally flat. Fate was to intervene. While working at the NFB, she rekindled a friendship with Daniel Langlois, who was working there as a computer animator. He subsequently started a company to develop a user-friendly 3D computer software, which he and Davies named Softimage. In late 1987, after her last exhibition featurely solely paintings, Davies temporarily left behind her own artistic ambitions to devote herself full-time to the fledgling company. In 1989, when the company was flourishing and more time was available to her, she began experimenting with the developing Softimage software for her own purposes. Working with layers of light to produce ambigu- 12 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art ous, translucent effects, she created a series of 3D cg (computer graphic) still images, entitled Interior Body Series, that were to serve as prototypes, or conceptual models, for the enveloping 3D environments of light and space that she would one day create in her immersive virtual art.5 Today, Softimage remains best known for providing the software used to animate Jurassic Park’s lifelike dinosaurs, and also for graphic-laden films such as Titanic, Independence Day, and Armageddon. After a decade with Softimage, Davies left the company at the end of 1997 to pursue her own artistic research, full-time, naming her research company Immersence. We will return to parts of this early story in subsequent chapters. For now, suffice it to say that in the process of building this software company, Davies saw the artistic potential of using digital tools to explore and communicate her own sensibility of the world. During a 1995 ISEA talk about Osmose, Davies affirmed that hers was ‘a work-in- progress exploring the potential of immersive virtual space – as a medium for visual/aural expression & kinesthetic experience of philosophical ideas.’6 In this respect, Davies appeared to me then, and appears now even more so, to be at the forefront of a new form of art and is arguably its leading artistic exponent. What makes Davies’ immersion technique unique is her use of immersants’ breathing and bodily movements in order to navigate in immersive virtual space. This creates an interface between immersant and computer that is unrivalled in her field.

Artistic Vision and Direction

It is important to emphasize that Davies never considers her digital works of art as solely her own creation. She acknowledges, even stresses, the crucial importance of the team who worked with her to digitally implement her artistic visions, both in Osmose and Ephémère. On the list of credits for Osmose is Char Davies, concept and direction; John Harrison, virtual reality software development; Georges Mauro, 3D graphics and animation; Dorota Blaszczak, sound design and programming; and Rick Bidlack, music composition and programming. Osmose was sponsored by Microsoft, while Davies’ second production, Ephémère, was co-sponsored by Immersence Inc. and Softimage Inc. Both Osmose and Ephémère benefited from Davies’ close affiliation with Softimage.7 Technological art of this complexity was at that time impossible to produce without a team, and without sponsorship of some sort. An artist working alone without any financing from the corporate world, or without a large endow- ment, would have found it extremely difficult to produce such work. Today, art of this calibre can be produced with a ‘lowly’ personal computer instead of the high- end silicon graphics super-computer, as the recent re-engineering of Osmose and Ephémère attests to. Char Davies is in the habit of journalling her life and work. In this respect she has authored many articles, private journals, and the working notebooks, some of which include her thoughts on producing art in three dimensions.8 Not only does she achieve her artistic goals as outlined and sketched in her notebooks, but she The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 13 has gone even further – she has immersed us, for better or for worse, in a three- dimensional artistic milieu that makes two-dimensional art seem antiquated. At this point let us turn to her notebooks and the entries that describe the epiphany of her immersive virtual art.9

Notebook #1

The first notebook contains the rudimentary ideas for Osmose that Davies jotted down while she was in Brittany in 1993. It is written in a very contemplative and pensive style, as are, I was to find out, a good deal of her notes. I was always under the impression that artists worked spontaneously without really thinking too much about the end-product that they were going to produce, whether on canvas or in another form. It never occurred to me that an artist would carefully consider how certain concepts (mainly philosophical ones) could be expressed in images. But then again this was no ordinary art that Davies was thinking of producing. Confessedly, my approach to Davies’ notebooks and her subsequent art is philosophically coloured. In the first few chapters I focus primarily on the different philosophers whom Davies had read or was reading when she wrote these notes. Those she mentions in Notebook #1 on Osmose are Heidegger, Bachelard, Rilke, and British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner. But there are many other influences that have shaped her art, primarily her life experiences. A careful perusal of her unpublished papers reveals that she has developed recurring themes about nature in her artwork, from her early work to her later 3D artwork (see, e.g., plates BW-5, BW-6, BW-7). Davies’ notebooks, or ‘working notes,’ as she calls them, particularly in respect to the time-based creation of Ephémère, which is much more complex than Osmose, are filled with detailed sketches about how to schedule time frames to fit the elements, as well as her thoughts about how certain concepts can be turned into images. Surprisingly, this creative process is easy to read, perhaps because it is laced with reverie. Davies generally conceived her 3D dynamics while writing and sketching at Reverie (the name she gave to her land in southern Quebec), where she was immersed in solitude and tranquillity. If Bachelard is right about home and the poetics of space, then Reverie is foundational for shaping her thoughts, memories, dreams, and, of course, Osmose and Ephémère. Dynamically, in respect to the art she produces, Davies is doing the opposite of what Hegel was doing. He was trying to get rid of images and replace them with concepts. Davies, on the other hand, engages in an artistic practice which involves the concepts of certain philosophers, including the poet Rilke, translating them into energetic 3D images, or rather 3D elements in immersive virtual space, a medium so new in the field of art that its potential is only now being recognized. From the beginning of her work with digital technology Davies is clear about her mandate. She is not blindly ‘a tool of technology,’ a Heideggerian turn of phrase we will explore more fully in chapter 3; rather, she wishes to use digital technology to subvert the conventional reasons for generating so-called virtual reality. She does not want to duplicate reality or to mimetically represent hard-edged appearances 14 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art of the world, as other new media artists are doing. In an interview published in 2002 she states:

I am not a techno-romantic. I do not believe in the techno-utopian view of VR, of cyberspace. The technology associated with this medium is not neutral – it has come out of the military/scientific/Western/industrial/patriarchal paradigm. And so by default, the technology not only reflects but reinforces dominant values, unless deliberately subverted by the artist.10

Subverting Techno-Romanticism

The idea of subverting the ideals of techno-romanticism, a new form of romantic idealism that we will discuss in the next chapter, is something that comes naturally for Davies because, as she admits, hers is an ongoing-dialogue with nature: ‘I don’t believe, as some in the field do, that nature is an outmoded metaphor and that the sooner we can recreate ourselves through silicon and genetic engineering, the better off we’ll be.’11 To subvert what is going on in mainstream applications of digital media, she first attempts, with her 3D computer graphics, to develop a way to create images that reflect her ideas of osmosis (by which she means a dissolution of dualist categories, an osmotic inter-penetration of subject/object, figure/ground, interior self/exterior world). According to her notes, it appears that the artist who motivated her the most is the English painter of landscape and maritime scenes, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) – not his earlier work, but his later work, which was, to Davies, much more abstract in his representations of light and time and space. Primarily, however, her passion for semi-transparency and the ephemeral dissolution of the boundaries between things is due to certain seminal experiences she has had alone in nature and also to extreme myopia, a condition she readily admits has informed her translucent art12 (plates BW-1, BW-2).

Gestating Osmose, 1993–4

We have just to reflect on what is on her mind in Brittany in September 1993, when she writes her first notes in anticipation of a still-to-be-conceived immersive virtual artwork. These critical thoughts include ideas of a sense of 360-degree space, of circadian rhythms laced in light and darkness, and a gestalt that shifts from just being in space, to her somewhat dramatic notion of ‘hearing space.’ One is reminded of Bachelard’s reference in Poetics of Space to L. Milosz’s line of poetry: ‘L’odeur du silence est si vieille’ (The odour of silence is so old).13 On 29 September 1993, Davies submitted her first ideas for Osmose (as yet unnamed) for budget approval at Softimage, and at the same time she began to develop these ideas for a paper (which she refers to as the ‘white paper’ and remains unpublished; it contains seminal ideas for a yet-to-be-produced future work).14 Reading through her entries in the earliest Osmose notebook, we find the essential dynamics of her future artwork laid out. She wants to create an immersive, interactive, visual/aural experience of ‘nature-space.’ It must be a landscape where the immersant can sense unity with nature; where the ‘edges of the mind and the The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 15 enveloping horizon become one,’ where ‘we can effectively pass-on this experience of “Nature” as sacred space,’ where ‘we can hopefully alter the way people will “see” nature.’ She wants to compensate ‘for our collective loss of nature/ sacred space, for our increasing distancing from the natural world.’ Her goal, at this time, is to ‘attempt to reestablish this lost link by re-creating a mystical experience of nature.’ At this point, she still relates to virtual space ‘as a yearning for spiritual space’15 (plates C-1, C-2). Throughout these early notes, one finds reference to ‘nature as mystical, sacred space.’ Later, when she achieves this goal in Osmose, she is surprised by this sense of ‘spirituality’ that so many participants report finding in it. Nonetheless, at this point in her conception of the work, ‘spiritual space’ as a notion is clearly identifiable. Oliver Grau also identifies this notion when writing about Davies’ work: ‘Yet whereas Osmose was deeply embedded in a spiritual conception of nature, the image worlds of Ephémère include organs of the body, bones and the circulatory system.’16 By late 1993, in her detailed Osmose ‘white paper’ she no longer refers to nature or space in this way. She takes a giant leap away from any notion of ‘spiritual space’ by 2002, when, in an interview with Carol Gigliotti, she points out that others refer to her immersive space as ‘uterine space.’17 In her early notes, however, Davies ponders about how to recreate these ideas of nature/sacred space; she reflects on how the heightened sense of being one in meditational practice might be reproduced digitally. She envisions this as happening through a ‘stillness’ that differs, substantially, from other interactive artworks or commercial computer games that encourage high-speed action and movement. She writes, ‘In terms of technique and form, real-time rendering might be opti- mized if high resolution details or animations take place only when the participant is still ... Sound is as essential as images – and also responsive to participants’ attention/stillness.’18 She sees space as visual/aural as though a fluid relation existed between the visual and the aural. From the beginning, Davies thinks in terms of openings: how her images might operate like kaleidoscopic windows and/or doors, allowing one to enter the ever-changing patterns and spaces inside ‘of a stone, of a blossom, of a tree, of a cell, etc., – micro spaces.’19 Aesthetically, she wants to produce an alternative to conventional hard-edged photo-realism by working with semi-transparency to create spatial ambiguity and gestalts: ‘VR space as ideal means to create this experience, beyond paradoxical limitations of still images and film.’ She is looking for a way to break out of the rigidity of ‘frame’ that, in the case of conventional approaches to the medium, is based on a total dependence of a single-camera point of view, which, she writes, ‘gives image space a unity that counteracts my intent.’20 She ponders how 3D painting might proceed and wonders about the ‘ability to “paint” gestures of strokes/marks in physical space using a tracking device.’ She considers how ‘these “strokes” of color or tone appear in virtual space,’ and how she might ‘create truly virtual three-dimensional paintings in which strokes, marks, coalesced into nearly- apprehensible form, then dissolved in relation to the viewing subject’s proximity and attention.’21 She thinks and writes about how to overlay multiple perspectives and scenes in order to override the hegemony of the camera, about how to open up a view. 16 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

In September 1993, after much contemplation, Osmose was named. Her nota- tions underneath the newly named Osmose read: ‘biological process, osmosis; spatial, three dimensional; relational, between a cell and surrounding solution, a self/world, entity/environment; a semi-permeable fluid boundary; inner/outer.’22 She notes that her research must include finding the VR equipment suitable to channel body movement, eye movement, speech, and breathing; that she must find the best way to develop 3D sound and the most effective way to render real- time images; and that she must delve into all aspects of creating immersive virtual art: graphics, visuals, lighting, and event-based algorithms.

More on Davies’ Early Working Notes

Davies’ working notes on Osmose Notebook #2, 1994, are comprehensive and laced with sketches and diagrams pertaining to how the dynamics should work, and what visual elements should be used to create her work of art. At this point, she has earnestly embarked on researching the kind of work she wants to create. Usually at the top of the page she notes the philosophers or other writers she is currently reading. As the ‘Tree’ in Osmose begins to take shape, we see on the first page the marginalized names of Gaston Bachelard, Robert Graves (Golden Bough), and Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer. An associative-like list of phrases follows: ‘the basis of the world; AXISES (emphasis in text); tree of life (emphasis in text); as the central metaphor; as omega point of a world.’ Under the emphasized title ‘Primary Image’ we find, based on her reading of Bachelard, the tree as verticalizing image, as an up-thrusting search for light, as an ecological witness. She focuses on the sacred tree, the cosmological tree, the healing tree, the tree as lung of the earth (breath). On some pages she vertically aligns words, beginning with cell, leaf, tree/plant, forest, root, cell, DNA, along with sketches of the manner in which the dynamics in these realms might operate and interact. A perusal of The Poetics of Space, a book often referred to in Davies’ notes, reveals that Gaston Bachelard was also impressed by Rilke’s poem about the tree:23

Tree always in the center Of all that surrounds it Tree feasting upon Heaven’s great dome ... Tree that perhaps Thinks innerly Tree that dominates self Slowly giving itself The form that eliminates Hazards of wind!

Bachelard states: ‘if I could ever succeed in grouping together all the images of The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 17 being, all the multiple changing images that, in spite of everything, illustrate permanence in being, Rilke’s tree would open an important chapter in my album of concrete metaphysics.’24 Ostensibly, but not necessarily for these reasons, Davies has made the oak tree central in Osmose. Bachelard describes the tree this way: ‘And from verse to verse, the poem grows, increases in its being. The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God.’25 So, too, is the tree in Osmose. It has an archetypal aliveness to it that no immersant can forget. As her immersive odyssey takes shape in her mind, Davies begins to chart how the environmental content with its life forms might interact with the subjective state, or as she puts it, more formally, ‘user model.’ The notebooks contain comprehensive charts listing the environments she plans to create. For example, under the category ‘Current Environment World-Space,’ one finds: Deep Forest, River, Pond, Subterranean Earth, Interior Body, Cell into DNA, Ocean, Abyss, Information/ Code, Ciel, Out-of-Body. On the other side of the page a column entitled ‘Inter- Action/Subjective State’ explores real-time interdependent and interactive behaviour and has its own list.26 Embedded in these comprehensive entries we come across sketches of a box with seven levels and an opening through which we can see trees and a pond (plate BW-11),27 and on the following page, among the notes, is an emphatic ‘must create a non-Cartesian space!’28 On 20 April 1995, Davies writes about initial immersion, in the ‘stereoscopic HMD – on the onyx.’29 Ideas appear to be flowing quickly through her mind, judging by the speed of her shorthand writing: ‘need to be able to get caught, follow certain paths ... Forest as a place to become lost, no sense of direction, disorienting – frustration, want to escape, to return back to clearing – want to be careful in clearing not to fall back into Forest – Very effective, especially when we see Forest edge superimposed over Clearing.’30 Recording her own conversation on 1 May 1995 with Georges Mauro, her 3D computer animator, she writes about discovering a mesmerizing effect as one spatial realm dissolves into another. She ponders about how the forest and clearing are to be related in her artwork and concludes that ‘their relation is one of time and not space. – This is a very new approach to VR. Rather than popping from one world to another – exit one world, enter next – worlds can at moments co-exist in relation to each other and have immense effect.’ She is invigorated by this idea and by the effect of the overlapping ‘spatial simultaneity,’ achieved through semi- transparency, such as viewing the roots of the tree from underneath, creating ‘an ambiguous superimposition’ from below, looking upwards for the viewer.31 As one reads these entries and examines her sketches, one is privy to the genesis of the ‘worlds’ in Osmose and how the dynamics we eventually encounter in the finished work originated in the artist’s imagination. Davies’ sketches can be extremely detailed. She first conceives these worlds by sketching them as interconnected circularly in levels that surround a clearing (plate BW-8). In order to access these worlds, as she conceived them, then, one must first encounter the Talisman.32 As the Talisman symbol begins to take shape in her mind, it is meant to represent the way in or out of a ‘lifeworld.’ Later, this symbol evolves in her thinking and metamorphosizes into the ‘lifeworld,’ a symbolic, translucent, pod- 18 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art shaped element that appears in the Abyss and at the end of the immersive session is just out of arm’s reach. An important visualization is that of a ‘Heideggerian-type’ clearing in the forest, which she sees as a centre of respite for a person who is immersed in her work of art. One finds her ruminating that if we simply merged with everything in the piece then ‘it would be too oppressive – [we] need a “clearing” to be able to have relief etc., – that is what makes us human.’ She believes that complete osmosis with anything would make us mad.33 In the next few pages of notes she is able to visualize just how the dynamics should carry us from one world to the next, and whether they should go up or down. Always one sees her extend these up/down dynamics to include horizontal dynamics. Gone is the early box she conceived with spatial realms on different levels, like neatly arranged floors, and in its place are circular diagrams,34 with arrows that point in the directions where the different worlds she is imagining will be located (plate BW-12). (In reality when translated into computer mathematics, the dynamics cannot work circularly but, rather, operate on a vertical axis. Once one reaches the bottom, one is automatically recycled by the computer program to the top world [see chapter 5]). The last few pages of the second notebook have an air of resolve to them, as though Davies has figured out exactly how she wants the different worlds to appear, in what order, in what direction, and with what fluidity (plates BW-10, BW-13). She seems to have a handle on how these worlds are going to superimpose themselves on each other, and how a translucent effect will be achieved as one world disappears and another appears.35 Although we have only a relatively small parcel of entries to inform us what concepts motivate the virtual images in Osmose, references to Bachelard’s and Rilke’s conceptual and poetical writings are enough to give us some indication. For example, Davies often quotes Bachelard’s ‘for we do not change place, we change our nature,’36 and as a result, many other writers and reviewers quote these words from her work to describe her intent. The quote is a line from a paragraph in a chapter on ‘Intimate Immensity,’ where Bachelard discusses many different writers and their approach to space. In this particular phrase, Bachelard is referring to Philippe Diolé’s discussion on desert and sea. Diolé, a psychologist and ‘ontologist of under-seas human life,’ states: ‘to go down into the water, or to wander in the desert, is to change space ... Neither in the desert nor on the bottom of the sea does one’s spirit remain sealed and indivisible.’ Bachelard finishes the quoted contemplation with: ‘This change of concrete space can no longer be a mere mental operation that could be compared with consciousness of geometrical relativity. For we do not change place, we change our nature.’37 Perusing Davies’ notes, we reap many insights into how an artist, by virtue of the fact that she is an artist, can visualize and then create the imagery for an immersive digital work of art, a medium in which she had never worked before until she began to create her 3D digital still images. Poetics of Space is replete with imagery that resonates with elements that Davies eventually uses, with the tree being one of the dominant images. Bachelard interlaces tree and space:

To give an object poetic space is to give it more space then it has objectivity; or, better The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 19

still, it is following the expansion of its intimate space. For the sake of homogeneity, I shall recall how Joë Bousquet expressed the intimate space of a tree [from La neige d’un autre âge, p. 92]: ‘Space is nowhere. Space is inside it like honey in a hive.’38

Towards the end of the book we are treated to the tree as roundness. To quote Bachelard again:

Sometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form that guides and encloses our earliest dreams. For a painter, a tree is composed in its roundness. But a poet continues the dream from higher up. He knows that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself. In Rilke’s Poèmes francais, this is how the walnut tree lives and commands attention. Here, again around a lone tree, which is the centre of a world, the dome of the sky becomes round, in accordance with the rule of cosmic poetry.

It is here that Bachelard quotes Rilke’s poem on the tree (referred to above) and continues by saying, ‘Needless to say, all the poet really sees is a tree in a meadow: he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasil that would concentrate the entire cosmos, uniting heaven and earth, within itself.’ He adds, ‘The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God ... Rilke’s tree would open an important chapter in my album of concrete metaphysics.’39 With this, Bachelard ends his book on the poetry of space. The lyrical images of a tree described to us by Bachelard are reminiscent of the images that Davies strives to create digitally. Her frequent citation of Bachelard and Rilke in her marginal notes confirms that their poetic sensibility has resonated with her own. Her ability to translate these poetic images into a digital 3D and immersive format has left many of us who have been immersed in this artwork breathless. In her early notebooks we are rarely treated to detailed technical discussions of how a digital scene will be made. She leaves most technical aspects to John Harrison, the software developer, and Georges Mauro, the graphic designer and animator. It is well established that in creating highly complex digital art, artists and technicians often work closely together, with the artists responsible for conceiving, directing, and pushing the frontiers of technology.40 This is, perhaps, the most effective way an artist can create such work without abandoning her creative urges and setting time aside to master the codes of software programs. In the case of Osmose and Ephémère, Davies believed it best to leave the technical aspects to her team so that she could stand back and critically direct the work in progress. Conceiving imagery is what Davies does most intuitively, and transposing it into digital format did not constitute an obstacle for her since her Softimage experience with digital software was considerable. For example, she was responsible for writing the first Softimage user manual (with Georges Mauro) in 1988 and for describing the technical aspects of the creative tools available in Softimage when it was first being marketed. Accordingly, she has extensive, hands-on knowledge of planning 3D scenes and building models, of applying various material properties, textures, animation, lighting, rendering, and so on, gained when she was at 20 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Softimage in the late 1980s and while constructing the 3D cg still images known as ‘The Interior Body Series’ between 1990 and 1993. Hence, instead of detailed accounts of how elements are put together to create a 3D scene or image, we are treated to what I believe are more important processes – imaginative processes at work – as Davies figures out the construction and details of her work of art, how she can achieve the desired effects, how the work will flow, how the work will move the user, and so on. Through her notebooks, we gain an extensive perspective of how she plans to coordinate technological techniques with her art, which will allow her to achieve the translucency and three-dimensionality she could not achieve using conventional 2D art media.

Experiencing Osmose

It is tempting to continue with Davies’ notebooks and her account of the creation of Ephémère (and we will do so shortly), but let us turn for the moment to a completed Osmose, which premiered during the Montreal ISEA conference (Osmose debuted at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1995), at which time I first encountered the work. Although so much has been written about Osmose,41 this book needs to begin by including an account of an immersive 3D experience to situate the unfamiliar reader. Davies’ 3D art is both a collective experience that happens in a theatre-like area and a private, individual experience that takes place in a small chamber located behind the theatre audience (as was the case with the earliest exhibitions of Osmose), or in front of the theatre audience side by side with the screen (as was the case with later exhibitions of Osmose and Ephémère). In order to understand the nature of such installations, let us begin first with an overview of the theatre experience and proceed with a few reflections on my own immersion.

The Artistic Product

Theatre participants viewing Osmose can watch a screen in front of them while hearing the sound through stereo headphones. In the case of Osmose, members of the theatre audience see and hear what is projected onto the screen in front of them (plate C-16). This amounts to seeing and hearing what the immersant, located in the small chamber beyond the confines of the theatre (who is seen as a silhouette), is seeing and hearing in real-time (plates C-15, C-17). When I first saw Osmose at its premiere in 1995, a person in the audience could see the silhouetted immersant, opaquely, if he turned away from the screen and looked over his shoulder to the back of the theatre. I watched and listened to the work of art on the theatre’s screen while awaiting my turn to be the ‘silhouette,’ quite enchanted by the theatre viewing alone, although at the time I had only a vague idea of the artistic implications involved in what I was viewing. To participate as an immersant in this work, one needed to sign forms releasing the art museum from any responsibility. Presumably, at the time, the experience The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 21 could prove overpowering in some physical or mental way for certain people. Only about thirty people could view the artwork in any one day because the timing is strictly controlled. When my turn came, I was outfitted in special equipment: a vest that responded to my breathing42 and a headmounted display (HMD) with stereoscopic images and sounds. The HMD is combined with a head-tracker that responds to a transmitter located above one’s head and is able to mathematically track the space displaced that changes as the head and body move.43 The tracker also coordinates Osmose’s complex eight-channel stereo soundtrack, which is intimately connected with the imagery.44 Each image I saw, each sound I heard was there because I was calling it into being, generating it, so to speak, through my breathing and movement. Inhaling, I was told, would cause me to ascend and exhaling would bring me down, while voyaging in virtual spatiality. I could bend my head up or down to see spaces above or below me and turn forward, backward, or sideways. Those who can manoeuvre in this controlled virtual space without experiencing a sense of disorientation or dizziness do best. (Alas, I was not one of these agile, balance- prone people.) I was grateful, therefore, for the presence of a technical ‘psychopomp’ to help guide me through the three-dimensional worlds I was to encounter (the technician, I later learned, was Georges Mauro). When the HMD is put on you, the first image, or rather 3D scene, that appears is a three-dimensional grid; receding lines surround you, setting up a starkly Cartesian, mathematical/geometrical mise en scène. Soon, however, the work begins its magic and a strange, enchanting, three-dimensional artistic environment emerges in front of your eyes, enveloping you osmotically in a spatial world I was totally unprepared for. Most immersants, as Davies prefers to call the people who experience her artwork, stay connected for twenty minutes or more so that they can experience as many worlds as possible; there are ten. Davies and her team carefully pondered how to get the most people through the work in the shortest time and yet leave enough time to maximize the effects of the immersive experience. In Osmose, the worlds symbolize a journey through the different realms of forest, clearing, cloud, leaf, stream (not an actual realm but part of one), pond, abyss, lifeworld, lines of software code, and excerpts of philosophical texts. Initially, I came into a forest with many trees, which soon gave way to a clearing with a pond, much like Heidegger would have had it. And, as it turns out, the artist had this in mind because she referred to Heidegger’s ‘clearing’ when speaking later in the week to an audience at the ISEA conference. (It was, of course, impossible for everyone at the conference to be ‘immersed’ in Osmose.) Figure 1.1 shows a schematic of Osmose’s worlds. Although nature’s realms dominate, there is more to Osmose than just the representation of nature; the work also contains worlds of text and code that step into intellectual realms. As Davies explains, the floating words in Osmose are those of her favorite philosophers and poets, particularly, Rilke. These words were deliberately chosen because they ‘often kept her company’ (as we have already seen in her working notes). Also interlaced in the text are her own words, from her writings about nature and technology. Embedded in the Code World, she ex- 22 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Figure 1.1 Spatial structure of Osmose

Text

ENTRY: Cartesian Grid * * Cloud * Leaf * * Forest * * CLEARING * * Forest * Pond * * * Abyss * Under-Earth * Life-world * ENDING: Code Receding Life-world

plains, are the many lines of custom computerized code, written by John Harrison, that produced all the environments or realms immersants float through. It is as though the code were there to remind us that the osmotic nature of the experience would not have been possible without the computer (plate C-6). Curiously, the linearly formed text and coded worlds constitute conceptual parentheses around the images of nature, and, indeed, both Davies and Harrison describe it this way in their writings on the subject, although they do not share with us the logic underlying this paradigm.45 The text world was one that I did not expect to encounter. As I experienced it, it was a world of infinite words floating vertically and horizontally that one could read if one retained one’s intellectual presence of mind. Surprisingly, during my first immersion, my left hemisphere resisted and reacted negatively to this world of words with which I am most comfortable in real life. The spatially immersive atmosphere of Osmose proved to interfere with my intellectual experience of it. As the words in Osmose floated about me to heavenly heights or down to cavernous depths, I frantically, in my mind at least, tried to get away from them and back into worlds with images. It did not come easily. I asked my guide how long I would be a prisoner in this word world, and he advised me to breathe in and expand my chest in order to get above it – this was no mean feat. It took a lot of breaths because, alas, one also has to breathe out as well during the process, so it becomes one breath up and one breath down, with the exhaling downside breath often winning out because it is naturally longer. Eventually, I floated up into a computer-generated unlikely ‘cloud’ and through it into another world, which turned out not to be the ‘heavenly world’ I was expecting but rather the world of Code, computer code which gleamed phosphorescently and was accompanied by a mischievous, bouncy musical soundtrack. Fortunately for my uncooperating left hemisphere, this world did not stay around too long, and I soon found myself in an enchanting underworld of geometric-diamond-icelike boulders whose symbolism evaded me (plate C-5). On the one hand they looked like giant jewels; on the other they were associated with The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 23 the underworld. It wasn’t until I viewed Ephémère (Davies’ second work of immersive virtual art) a few years later that her underworld symbolism began to make sense to me. During my first immersion I felt as though I were immersed in heavenly space rather than in a subterranean world. Soon, however, the overpowering and dominating ‘cosmic tree’ was to reappear. It was not my first meeting with the amazing glittering tree, so in a way my impatience for the worlds of words and codes was no doubt due to the fact that I wanted the tree world, or some other magical world like it, back. Slowly appearing from behind me, the tree travelled toward me, getting bigger and more glorious in its diamond-like sparkling attire until it embraced me like a lover (plate C-3). Aesthetically it was so pleasing, and so perfect in its treeness, that for me it could be nothing less than the archetypal cosmic tree that archaic cultures revered and which most indigenous cultures still do. Like me, many immersants felt the tree to be symbolically archetypal, and it is generally described this way by reviewers (see www.immersense.com). The translucent tree immersed itself in me, travelling into me, becoming me, and leaving me sadly anticipating the moment when it would be gone. Later, I mused: ‘Now I know what Martin Buber meant by the I-It experience.’ What replaced the tree at the end of my time limit was a giant, exquisite, transparent cosmic sphere (the Lifeworld) appearing non-threateningly in space, dissolving into me, and then slowly disappearing, getting smaller and smaller, travelling beyond me out of sight, leaving me quite alone and in darkness for but an instant. The technician at this point turned off the program and removed the HMD quickly, anticipating the disappointment that people feel when their time is up. In effect, the experience had been like ‘tripping,’ although without drugs.

First Immersion Reflections

My initial response to Osmose was that I had finally seen the heaven I believed in as a child. The experience closely resembled an image I held of what being immersed in a cosmic consciousness would be like after death. Immersion in virtual space was so soothing and aesthetically beautiful that it brought about positive thoughts about death and dying. At first I believed I had undergone a disembodied spiritual experience, but some months later I was to agree with the artist that it had been what she intended it to be: an embodied experience with the senses fully engaged with this artificially produced, three-dimensional space. As the artist explained at a lecture and press conference,46 she was attempting to provide viewers with a sense of being in profound and fluid relationship with these virtual realms of her artistic creation; hence she hoped that the immersant would re-enter the real world with greater sensitivity to ‘being-in-the-world.’ Davies also hoped that the experience would create a new understanding of philosophizing about nature. A Montreal art critic reacted somewhat cynically to Davies’ work:

The achievement of such goals is somewhat problematic because the idiosyncrasies and sheer presence of the complex technology speak more of technological mediation 24 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

than proximity to nature. Frankly, a quiet stroll through the woods would accomplish such ends more and to a greater effect.47

I and many others did not respond in this negative way to immersion in virtual space. The artist obviously had achieved her goals with us. As other artists have put it, ‘the trick to electronic art is to camouflage its technological signature.’48 Davies certainly accomplishes this. Despite my positive response to Osmose, my reaction was not one of renewed sensitivity to my own presence in the world or any immediate concern for nature. What I experienced, initially, was a connection to a cosmic immersion in space. Eventually, I would look back at my first immersion in a virtual environment as a dreamlike experience, as having been immersed in some new form of magic stereoscopic box that controlled my vision and my brain. At that time I believed with a certain degree of confidence that Osmose was not intended to exploit the senses through technologically produced 3D virtual images; rather, something much more profound was happening during immersion. Having summarized my personal immersion in Osmose, let us turn once more to Davies and her notebooks on Ephémère.

Numina: ‘Garden in the Machine’49

With the making of Ephémère, which was initially conceived as Numina, we find Davies attempting a more technically complex production than Osmose – for Davies, Ephémère is really a continuation of what she had attempted to achieve in Osmose. For one thing, her conception of an immersive production had changed from a stage setting, in which one can float around for as long as one pleases, to a scripted setting, carefully timed from beginning to end. Figuring out the details of frames and timed aspects for certain sequences became much more complex. One finds in Davies’ notebooks pages of complicated charts that feature how time, as well as the vertical and horizontal dynamics, colour schemes, breathing, visual/ aural dynamics, might all work together. Four Ephémère notebooks are packed with revealing details of the creative artistic process in progress. Fortunately for us, Davies likes to write down her thoughts and ideas about a new work as she conceives it. The meetings between team members John Harrison and Georges Mauro are carefully noted, although only the highlights are recorded. Admittedly, these entries are not always easy to read, but they have a life of their own and are fascinating to examine. Suddenly one is privy to the fact that producing such an artwork, art striving toward a certain aesthetic and dynamic, is a very complex task – much more demanding than the artist ever admits. Producing a digital work of art that interacts with an immersant is a far more complex process than creating a work of art that hangs on a wall in a museum. On 18 December 1997, a year after the team had been working on the new production, Davies writes pensively: ‘It is such a monumental task to try to synthesize, integrate all these disparate parts into a whole – the same task as painting but on the scale, even more complex [than that] of a feature film. All for 15 minutes, one person at a time’ (plate BW-9).50 The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 25

Inspirations

As already noted, when Davies began thinking about the new work she named it Numina. Hence the first notebooks in this series refer to Ephémère as Numina. In May 1996, the cover page of the notebook begins with the words ‘flow, flux, transformation, perceptual relativity, reciprocity’ and, further down, as though to seduce us, the words ‘Fallen Light.’ Davies begins by pondering the scale of space. She writes that if you can grasp the scale of space while looking down at a coastline, or across at mountains in the distance,

it allows you to sense a larger scale of time passing, to transcend the limit of a human life – you can feel the cycles of days and months and years and millennia. If we can give access to this scale of time [through space] Numina will have a profound effect [on people]. We also though need the middle-body-size scale of time (as in Osmose) and also the very small. I then suggested to Georges, that a way of doing this.

Davies continues:

This mortality/ephemerality, continues the theme of Osmose (Lifeworld) but takes it further. In this way Numina expresses to each person, the inescapability of their individual mortality, the finitude of their individual passage, though a numinous flowing world. Each life then blooms and ebbs, a mirroring of the rhythms in the world.51

And later she pens the words which describe the main rhythms and theme in Ephémère: ‘You are born into the world and you die out of it.’52 She sees its elements as ‘the same,’ as ‘archetypal elements’ which can refigure over and over in various combinations and scales, and distances, and reflects that this can also be a way of showing the world as a transformative web.

Nightlight: Fog, as Dematerializing Inspiration

Davies often writes about the night and how she derives inspiration from the silhouettes she sees in nightlight. Out in the dark, tones of grey to black pulsate in fine textures of dots. Trees that are black, floating silhouettes are surrounded by auras of light. Ostensibly, nightline, but also fog, inspire her.

Tonight on the land, there is the most unbelievable luminous ebbing, flowing fog. We go out at 10 p.m. and walk, mouths agape, incredulous. The fog dematerializes everything, everything is joined with everything else, floating. It was hallucinogenic, creating a sense of strange delicate vertigo. Very similar to being deep in the sea enveloped by blue. The lack of color, everything in tones of grey, the ebb & flow of the fog, glowing then subsiding, – form dematerialized, form dissolved, – huge areas that could not be read, could not be recognized – so similar to Turner’s best painting, and to certain styles of traditional Chinese landscape painting – Here is the key to Numina–for on a night like this, walking among the shrouds of apple trees, the locusts, spruce and maple, everything – absolutely everything, the trees, the shad- 26 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

ows, the lane, the stepping stones, the shining waterfall, all become so numinous my head is spinning in euphoria, speechless, in wonder, yes in absolute wonder.53

She continues:

So in Numina – the key is the fog, the dematerialization of form, a glint of laneway or stepping stone, the luminosity, the perceptual interplay at this exquisite level of darkness and light where the eye can barely see and the mind begins to fall, for there is nothing to rest on – In Numina – the black and grey of night should be as rich as the exquisite warm violet, rust, crimson, of dawn and dusk and the silky pale creaminess of daylight which fog-like in its brilliance also obscures, obliterates, dissolves. In such conditions, there are not discrete entire landscapes, but elements in space, compositions that change from every point of view – And fireflies are but those retinal specks, flashing bright. There is no edge to such a ‘landscape,’ the edges are drowned in the luminous fog or in shadow – and the fog advances and recedes.54

She goes on to say:

I have not been so transported by landscape, since being on the coast of Brittany and having the first ideas of Osmose. Tonight, all of Numina is contained here, all around me – not the clarity of seeing 50 miles, – no, all that is doomed in its clarity to illustration; no here in the ambiguity, the fluctuation, the dissolution, the embracing of fog is the key to Numina. Fog can overtake transparency in fact, for a means of dissolving form, for merging elements together, for breaking down inside and outside – ... Fog not only dissolves – dematerializes, it frees elements from gravity, it ‘unbounds’ them in some way, so they begin to float, and I too am without reference to subject/objects, without clear vision in the semi-darkness, with retinal patterns projected upon everything. I too become unbounded and begin to float, and experience a euphoric, exquisite, delicate vertigo, a release, a high.55

Light

This experience of nightlight in the fog leads to questions about the approaches to lighting, and how the lighting in Numina should differ from that of Osmose. Whereas in Osmose

the luminosity was in the elements, light and bright against black space, in Numina, space itself is luminous and the elements are dark, dissolved by the luminosity of the space. A very different premise ... In Chinese landscape painting, everything was enveloped by luminous light and atmospheric fog – so all trees and boulders/ mountains were dark form against light atmospheric space. Similarly, the late paintings of Turner were enveloped in foggy, dazzling light and all forms dissolved by it.56

Other insights follow seemingly quickly: ‘The anchor of Numina, the central point – if not a tree as in Osmose, should be a rock, a boulder, a stone. A still point amidst the flux. This rock should have “water” – be empty and full.’57 Once more Davies refers to Heidegger: ‘The Greek Temple: by not moving, reveals, reflects, The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 27

Figure 1.2 Spatial-temporal structure of Ephémère

ENTRY: Winter Swamp Spring >>> Summer >>> Autumn >>> ENDING

Level I Forest Landscape: river, boulders, foliage leafing > falling trees & leaves > embers & ash Level II Under-Earth: stream, boulders, seeds germinating > decay > embers & ash Level II Interior Body: arteries, organs, eggs falling > bones (aging) > embers & ash Transitional Thorns/Neurons

River / underground stream / bloodstream: flowing on all three levels discloses the movement all around it, the light changing etc.’58 She visualizes a rock as providing a kind of Greek temple anchor in her new work with all else in flux, closing and disclosing, retreating, coming forward, hiding and revealing – ‘Around the enveloping horizon are lights, of urban cities – so the “world within” a sanctuary, is enveloped, surrounded, threatened – a garden within the machine, a virtual garden within the city, no longer a wilderness, nor an Eden.’59 As Davies writes about the structure of the piece, she returns to the theme of ‘garden in the machine.’ She ponders the lights of a city and its noise as surrounding a refuge. She treats us to a drawing of a beginning with a refuge or core in the centre in which code is written. Another circle surrounds it, representing the city noise and smog. Out of this sketch, arrows point upward to the word ‘sky’ and downward to the words ‘below ground.’ Proceeding even further downward, more arrows indicate that the piece should be ‘grounded in the body’ and the entire work suspended in spacetime.60 Framing these circles is a rectangle with preliminary ideas of stratified worlds depicted on different layers: summer/fall, winter/spring, decay/death. Her hope is to reveal that ‘we are losing – the ephemeral, luminous rhythm.’61 She continues, ‘The goal of the work is to create an existential vertigo – not narrative, but stripping away to an existential level of being – a spinning in slow motion.’62 Davies, a dedicated environmentalist, is deeply troubled about the destruction of the trees on the land that surrounds hers. Roads are being built for logging, and housing developments are encroaching. She writes, ‘Numina is no longer only a dream, a merge of light and transformation, with city lights at the distance – it literally is an embodiment of “the garden – in the machine,” surrounded, suffo- cated by human activity, by housing developments, parking lots and highways – and the garden is shrinking in every way. Numina is a lament, Osmose was longing, Numina is a sorrowful lament.’63 Of course, Numina becomes Ephémère and ends up being not a lament but a study of ephemerality instead and, as we can see from figure 1.2, replete with up/down dynamics as well as horizontal ones.

Creating Images out of Mathematical Formulas

And so begins the slow, creative experience of recreating this dreamlike atmosphere that Davies envisions for her immersive virtual art. Although the images are created algorithmically, the geometric forms are softened by the use of semi- 28 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art transparency to create blurry, symbolic elements that, because they are translucent, take on an ethereal dimension. The prime graphic technique used by Davies – one she worked to perfect for years in her two-dimensional painting and then in her 3D digital stills – is her use of semi-transparency (as well as subdued colour). Trans- parency itself is now a commonly used digital tool, available in every 3D digital software, but Davies is recognized as having been the first to understand the significance and implications of it (plate C-7). The use of semi-transparency that Davies developed in her pre-computer artwork (i.e., painting) dominates Osmose and Ephémère and is the most significant visual characteristic. A second graphic technique Davies uses in her immersive virtual art, which she foresees using and writes about in her early notes, is the creation of many floating particles (or ‘brush strokes’) in order to give the impression of enveloping space.64 This technique, she believes, can enhance the feeling of being bodily immersed in space. But perhaps the key to her work is the confusion of habitually perceived spatial relations between figure/ground, solid object/ empty-space, and so on. In conceiving and creating a perceptual ambiguity, she also creates, within us, a new sense of space By developing customized codes for these artworks, John Harrison, the team’s virtual reality software developer, is able to transform stark-edged mathematical/ geometric forms, foundational for any 3D architectural or animation software, into the soft-edged semi-transparent forms65 that Davies’ work is known for. To facilitate architecture, design, and art, software engineers such as Harrison use programs with mathematical formulas that change objects into groups of smaller and smaller polygons. Writing about such technology, Joseph Nechvatal explains:

The polygon is a surface made up of three vertices, like a triangle; the greater the complexity of the model, the higher the polygon count. Small computers can render models made up of only a few polygons many times per second, whereas faster ones can render millions of polygons per second. For example the computer at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington (HIT Lab) is a Silicon Graphics 320 VGX workstation which is rated at 1,000,000 polygons per second.66

A high-end silicon graphics computer was initially used to create Davies’ works of virtual art. John Harrison, who at Davies’ request re-engineered the artworks in 2002 (by changing the code that worked on the Silicon Graphics Onyx to one that can be run on personal computers), explained to me just how complex Davies’ art is to create: ‘If you want to be able to see through objects in a virtual environment, then the computer has to be able to keep track of, and process, multiple layers of imagery at once.’67 Creating the transparency features which characterize Osmose and Ephémère required Harrison to custom-design innovative ‘transparent texture maps.’ It was a huge technical challenge that was partially accomplished by constructing semi- transparent models and textures, and by using loose vertical strokes that suggest edges or flecks to intimate sky or air. Through such transparencies and the use of subtle colours and textures, boundaries and edges appear to be dissolved. This The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art 29 allows Davies to ‘“play” with figure and ground relationships, creating perceptual fluidity ... to “play” in the ambiguous zone of suggestion rather than illustration.’68 To create the effect of immersion, Davies and Harrison explain, each frame needed to be executed in 1/30th of a second or less, which required a speed-up factor of more than four million compared with the techniques used for Davies’ static digital images.69 Just rendering a scene – in which one instructs the computer’s software to calculate all the incremental mathematical values programmed-in to produce a particular composite frame – can be a quick or time-consuming process depending on its complexity.70 For example, Harrison cites just one technique he achieved by deliberately misusing the ‘z-buffer,’ which allows figure and ground to be transposed, resulting in reversal of distant and proximate objects. Three- dimensional space operates according to the Cartesian coordinate system x,y,z, and Harrison is expert at writing mathematical algorithms for special effects and hence for manipulating objects in 3D space. (Icon painters also misuse space, which results in a collapse of it, and we will discuss this more fully in chapter 4.) The final effect is the translucent, dreamlike atmosphere that, as Davies writes about in her notebooks, is characterized by a dissolution of opacity and solid boundaries, and an osmotic inter-penetration of form and space, as everything the immersant sees around himself becomes semi-transparent, immaterial. Finally, we need to emphasize again the role that Davies’ myopia plays in creating the semi-transparent, ambiguous qualities we experience in her virtual art. When uncorrected, her vision does not allow her to see distinct, hard-edge objects.71 It is this soft-edged, magical in-between that Davies sought to capture in her painting well before she became involved in producing immersive virtual art. In the process of creating Osmose and Ephémère she also, quite inadvertently perhaps, managed to achieve a soft interface between technology and human essence, between machine and human sensibility, something we will discuss again in the next chapter. In sum, it is a rather remarkable interface that Davies has achieved, which speaks to human essence through the auspices of a computer. 30 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art 2 Digital Knowing versus Digital Being

The Technoromanticist Movement

Let us begin by considering whether Davies’ immersive virtual art is in line with what Richard Coyne calls the ‘technoromanticist movement.’ Davies claims her art is intent on subverting the conventional effects of digital technology and its use by the militaristic/scientific/Western/industrial paradigm. But does it fall into what Richard Coyne in his book Technoromanticism1 describes as new romanticist dynamics? In his book Coyne identifies what he believes to be the dominant dynamics underlying cyberage computer culture. In so doing, he focuses almost exclusively on his thesis that technoromanticism is simply a continuation of a neoromanticism that follows on the heels of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment and romantic traditions. According to Coyne, the digital narratives being advanced in this technological epoch or information technology (IT) culture are products of long-reigning neoplatonic states of mind which, however manifested in any epoch, have the same ultimate goal of utopianism.2 Whether we consider IT culture as a whole, or limit ourselves to just some particularities of information technology, Coyne contends that the digital narratives align themselves with Cartesian disembodiedness, identifying with a floating collective intellect in cyberspace or with ultimate transcendence into a better world in order to encounter technological ideals. Coyne puts it this way:

The dominant ethos is now romanticism: a focus on subjectivity, a new metaphysics of proximity, a revival of the early socialist dream of community, a disdain for the constraints imposed by the body, embracing the holistic unitary patterning of chaos theory, the representation of the object world, a hope for its ultimate transcendence through the technologies of cyberspace, and a quest for a better, fairer more demo- cratic future.3

Coyne, who heads the Department of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, grounds his own Heideggerian-postmodernist theories in the pragmatic. He borrows liberally from Heidegger’s pragmatics, to which he adds the dynamics of a myriad of postmodernist vacillating middles. Coyne’s pragmatism oscillates in an Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 31 in-between conceptual space (i.e., difference in Heidegger or differance in Derrida).4 Nonetheless, however pragmatic Coyne’s thought may be, he still presents it as if it were located in abstract or conceptual space. As such he is dealing with intellectual space (or noetic space) and not a virtually visceral space that one can immerse oneself in, and float around in, as one can in Davies’ digital works of art. Ostensibly part of the postmodernist/deconstructionist movement (he cites in his book the work of French postmodern philosophers Lacan, Derrida, Fou- cault, Irigaray, Lyotard, Habermas, and many others), Coyne is unrelenting in his repeated statements that ‘technoromanticism’s trajectory [is aimed] toward a transcendent disembodied reality.’5 He has his own opinions about the value of Davies’ work, which we will discuss later in the chapter. Immediately, however, to situate Davies’ virtual art and my own thesis in respect to technoromanticism, let us examine some ‘digital narratives’ which I have chosen that represent ‘transcendent disembodied realities,’ along with digital narratives that are biologically embodied in human essence. Is Coyne right in his insistence that technoromantic goals are all focused on the transcendent abstract? Or is there another possible trajectory for digital technology that deals with the romantic and transcendent in a bodily way?

Love Affairs with Machines

My first example is that of Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who is well known in the electronic art community. He is the explorer/experimenter par excellence of the relationship between the human body and technology, between the physical and virtual worlds.6 One of the computer’s great talents is that it utilizes algorithmic programs to produce repetitious sequences that are particularly effective in creating animated films. Quite a few years ago I viewed a demonstration video entitled Virtual Theater about motion capture.7 Experimental then, it depicted an actor whose muscles were wired up by sensors to a computer, allowing his actions to animate an object on a screen. The objects could be anything from a bottle, a car, or a feather, and they moved in a way that was entirely human because human action was creating it. The human movements could be saved by the computer program and called up to animate other objects in a similar manner whenever needed. It is easy to marvel at the ingenuity of the marriage of human and machine in producing cartoon worlds or animating robots through the use of human bodily motion. In fact, the research I saw then has since been implemented and is widely used in the world of cinema and advertising.8 The point I wish to make is about an excerpt toward the end of the Virtual Theater demonstration clip which features Stelarc, almost totally nude and almost completely wired (he also performs human/machine feats in front of theatre audiences).9 In one scene, Stelarc is wired to a larger-than-life-sized metal robot10 and begins a tender, fluid dance. The computerized robot, so clumsy and massive, begins to emulate Stelarc’s movements, quite awkwardly. It is difficult to see this part of the film and not be overcome with emotion as one becomes aware of the profound need in some human beings to be intimately connected to machines, to 32 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art identify with them. Stelarc confesses to more, and when one visits his Web page one finds different mantras such as ‘The Body Is Obsolete,’ ‘We Are Zombies and Cyborgs,’ ‘Fractal Flesh,’ to cite a few. As though in concert with Hans Moravec’s outrageous claim that bodies are redundant,11 Stelarc believes we operate ‘mentally’ in the world, feeling our bodies only if we are sick or hurt, and that we are presently evolving as absent bodies. We simply don’t need our bodies. This reasoning drives him to create scenarios demonstrating that avatars, or anyone else for that matter, can control a human body. His goal, as I read it, is to demonstrate that it is possible for AL (artificial life controlled by a computer program) to take over a human body in physical space – something he has already demonstrated in front of theatre audiences.12 The love affair with computers and machines certainly reaches new heights with Stelarc’s unorthodox visions. Is he perhaps the quintessential example of Coyne’s technoromanticist? Does Stelarc take the marriage of humans and machine beyond the symbiotic relationship displayed by medical science, the military, or astronauts? It is as though Stelarc, the performing artist, is leading the way for our technological culture by nurturing and embracing a human–machine interface that suggests some sort of cosmic imperative that, however radical, falls within the category of technoromanticism’s digital knowing.

Denucleated versus Nucleated Technological Art

People like Stelarc and Moravec, who laud artificial intelligence (AI) and the cyborg bodies or the bodilessnesses that go with it, fit into the category of researchers who overtly support the denucleation of humanity, which roughly speaking means getting rid of the DNA that creates our bodies and digitally downloading our minds into an electronic data network. And if denucleated technological art (sharp-edged geometric art constructed or designed to please the mathematical mind) manages to take over the imagination (as a virus does a cell) by substituting a sterile imagination as a pseudo-nucleus, it will surely begin to eat away at the essence of humanity. Undoubtedly, we will then be in grave danger of collectively becoming dehumanized because of technology. Above I have examined such dehumanization in the strivings of Stelarc to create ‘movatars,’ a motion capture system (robot) that allows a physical body to animate a 3D computer-generated virtual body to perform in computer space or cyberspace. Below, I will look at an antidote to it when I discuss Douglas Hofstadter’s position on the potential loss of ‘essential nucleus’ in computer-generated art or musical compositions. Much is being written about the artificial intelligence which we are on the brink of creating.13 Many artists who work with computer technology now ponder whether in order to create authentic artificial art they will first need to create artificial consciousness (as distinct from artificial intelligence). Some are even asking whether artificial consciousness will be the next technologically created artistic accomplishment. In this respect, Mike King posits:

The electronic arts derive their energy and fascination from the relationship between artist and machine. Attempts to automate art are increasingly successful as develop- Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 33

ments take place in artificial intelligence, artificial creativity and artificial life. How- ever, it may take artificial consciousness to create a totally artificial life. This in turn requires the resolution of the question: is quantum mechanics inextricably linked with consciousness? If it is, then a computable consciousness may be impossible – and the future of a totally artificial art may hinge on this.14

The statement is interesting because it demonstrates the continuing fascination of linking consciousness with a mathematical universe. One wonders what kind of consciousness physicists might be able to invent with a quantum mechanical model so that it can then be digitally simulated to produce one that is artificial.15 Rarely, if ever, does one find digital aficionados discussing in their ‘digital dialectics’ human substance or essence and how it will emerge after its encounter with digitality. Indeed, much of the technologically based art that is being created at the moment appears to have no real substance or essence to it. A human nucleus seems to be missing in this art, not because it has been purposefully dispensed with, at least not yet, but because its creators function best in mathematical worlds where human essence does not have to be accounted for.

Speaking Digitally to Human Essence

A computer continually creates information through 0–1 codes on digital tracks that loop around and around. As Bill Gates puts it in his book The Road Ahead,

Any kind of information can be converted into numbers using only 0s and 1s. These are called binary numbers – numbers composed entirely of 0s and 1s. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit. Once the information has been converted, it can be fed to and stored in computers as long strings of bits. Those numbers are all that’s meant by ‘digital information.’16

Users today are mesmerized by the information available to them through 0s and 1s, a digital technology that most people do not understand, that was never intended to penetrate a ‘nucleated core,’ and that assuredly does not speak to human essence. Does this mean that most virtual art is destined to stay this side of evoking true human feelings, and that we are wasting our time considering a digital relationship to feelings? In order to answer this question, we need to examine the development of feelings, emotions, aesthetics, and ethics in light of the digital revolution. What role will digitality play in the evolution of biological consciousness (as distinct from Moravec’s silicon-brain consciousness), assuming with Darwin, of course, that we are creatures with evolving brains that are destined to biologically evolve even consciousness over time? The global culture we live in appears to be embracing a new means of defining, and even of relating to, a new meaning of human nature – all this, at the moment, through highly coloured digital, idealist lenses. Will embracing the digital talents of the computer expose us to a dimension of robotnik unfeelingness or will our feelings be honed more profoundly as a result? Will the video game craze succeed in destabilizing our sense of humanness or will 34 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

3D immersive art, with its virtual spatiality, allow us newer, more sensitive insights into the essence of consciousness? Argentinian art critic and novelist Pablo Baler writes about how he envisions the art of the future.17 For him, the future of art will be technologically biased. As bodies and computer-controlled environments morph into each other (he uses Stelarc’s and Davies’ work as examples), reality is destined to become an ‘aesthetic-fiction.’ Although Baler does not address the issue of consciousness directly, he is very much aware that being haptically connected and bodily engaged in 3D ‘non-architectural’ spatiality will allow us to artfully create our parallel universes and our own realities. Although Baler appreciates the difference in contrast between ‘Stelarc’s somehow violent, action-based performances of interface’ and Davies’ very different interface, which he describes as ‘being spatially enveloped, of diving and floating rather than driving or flying,’ he sees them as ‘metaphysical differences’ having to do with the ‘medium’s potential to embrace all possible ontological and epistemo- logical arrangements’ (he suggests we leave any possible male/female connotations out). The ‘aesthetic-fiction’ coalesces into this: the aesthetics of the idea of art will shift and ‘be inexorably absorbed by metaphysics and metaphysics by fiction.’ Baler’s romantic approach to virtual reality leaves us dangling in the typical metaphysical, neo-noetic world that Richard Coyne describes. Immersive virtual art such as Davies’ handily supersedes the noetic by revealing its complicity with the biological nature of human beings, not only because it accesses consciousness in a different way, but because it is an epochal Heideggerian technological tool that happens to be surfacing at the right moment in an epoch whose science is just as biologically grounded as it is digitally rooted. Far from leaving the body behind in favour of computer-based art, Davies’ work with both may also turn out to be, as I am suggesting, a ‘consciousness-producing’ instrument.18 Because of her artistic vision, we see that machine and human can be vibrantly in tune, not through a disembodied Moravecian ‘transcendent mind,’ or through a Stelarian ‘movatar,’ but through a participant’s bodily sensations and emotions. Computer art is described by some as post-biological, as ‘beyond the body.’19In Davies’ case, the body is not discarded in favour of an avatar or AI, but instead it anchors the artwork, and together they uncover a bodily based essential spatiality.

Pioneer Thinking: Pioneer Implementation

Writing in 1993, Joan Truckenbrod recognized that women created computer- based art differently from men. She urged the creation of a computer that could be ‘designed to correspond to our sensory experiences, and allow us to create events that are experienced by the user or audience in an integrated manner.’20 She hoped to see a computer organized in such a manner that sensory data could be integrated to transform a viewer into a participant. She foresaw some sort of tactile system acting in conjunction with gestures that would work in a three-dimensional computer space. ‘These devices [would] be used for creating sound compositions and visual compositions through body movement.’21 She wanted to ‘conceptualize technology as Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 35 a craft with tactile hand manipulated devices [bringing] it closer to a kinaesthetic environment.’22 In the context of kinaesthetic environments, Davies has constructed her own unique version of motility by her use of the body vest. But, more significantly, by eschewing hand-manipulated devices for an interface that is dependent on the entire body, Davies and her team have succeeded in capturing an immersant’s bodily impulses in such a manner that sensational energy is integrated with digital code, not dominated by it. Truckenbrod is on the side of knowing through feeling. She believes that women respond to a computer and hence to art created through it in a unique way that has to do with ‘being’ rather than ‘doing.’ She cites, for example, her own use of nature’s ‘transformational cycles or metamorphosis’ as artful inspiration, along with her use of women’s issues such as family and childrearing.23 Fitting easily into Truckenbrod’s theory that there is a difference between masculine-created computer art and feminine-created computer art, Davies’ immersive virtual art easily flows with nature’s pulses both metaphorically and literally. Suspended in enveloping virtual space, immersants watch, hear, and respond to images that come and go as though inside biological time yet outside of it in cosmic time.

Flesh and Blood Interface

In my view, the reason why Davies’ art succeeds to the degree that it does is because it embraces digital being and not digital knowing. Her flesh-and-blood interface with the computer transforms a viewer into a participant. Just as Stelarc’s bodily gestures are able to move a robot, Davies provides immersants with a way to move their own physicality in a digital environment. As already stated above, this is perhaps the most important aspect of Davies’ work because just viewing Osmose or Ephémère as part of the theatre audience does not invite any kind of special interactivity to take place. When viewed by the audience in the theatre, and particularly without a preliminary introduction to what one is seeing, Osmose simply appears as an abstract series of images, as if it were a film. The same is true of Ephémère. It is immersion into computer-created space that evokes bodily sensations that can best be described by neuroscientist Candace Pert’s words ‘molecules of emotion.’24

Technological Frontiers and Human Essence

The field of digital interactive art has not exactly been inundated with digital artists working with immersive virtual space. Since 1995 when I was first introduced to her art, Davies remains one of the few artists who is still interested in producing such fully immersive virtual environments. Not many artists have been as adept as Davis at merging human essence with digital codes. Most important, she has avoided cyborgian grounds while recognizing the need to show that there are other ways to incorporate the use of the body with computer technology. She is, however, most vociferous about her idea of subversion. She states in a 2002 interview with Carol Gigliotti that this has been her political project for some time: 36 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Because I am attempting to subvert or at least circumvent conventions in the medium, I think of my work as political, though in a very subtle way. Years ago I was more didactic in my views and in my art: but as a result of having been a Marxist in the late ’70s – organizing female bank workers before I’d even ever had a job, visiting China as a guest of the government and so on – I have little tolerance for didacticism. So I guess I believe in subtlety, in altering people’s perceptions, or rather allowing them to be refreshed, intensified, in a very subtle way.25

Before we return to the question of Davies and technoromanticism, let us continue to build our case by examining Douglas Hofstadter’s position on essential nucleus.

Hofstadter and ‘Essential Nucleus’

Douglas Hofstadter was a keynote speaker at the convention where I first encountered Davies’ work.26 What caught my attention during his talk was his statement that, generally, there is no point to computerized art, no ‘essential nucleus’ to tie it to something meaningful. During his speech I found him using the words ‘intuition’ and ‘depth of emotions’ freely, in what I thought carried classical ‘spiritual’ connotations which, of course, tied in nicely to his idea of ‘essential nucleus.’ To demonstrate the difference between rhythms in real musical patterns and those in artificial music, he played a piece for us composed by Bach late in life, and then a piece composed by a computer that had been programmed to extrapolate some of Bach’s musical phrases and recombine them to produce a flow of music that sounded as though it had been composed by Bach. Of course, because small parcels of it had been composed by Bach and ‘lifted’ by the computer, the music itself was not without Bachian influence. The result was a computer’s deconstruction and reconstruction of Bach’s musical phrases, put together in a synthetic way, which at first hearing seemed to suggest a Bachian essence – a virtual Bachian composition. The computer program used is called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) and was developed by David Cope, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With this program, a person can create new works by a composer long dead, by using syntactical rules through which he can compose a reasonable facsimile of the original composer’s style that sounds familiar enough to fool even knowledgeable people. This kind of syntactical computerization of a composer’s work is quite threatening because it deals in ‘forgerizing human talent.’ It works its magic parasitically by incorporating fragments of the composer’s ‘human essence’ into it. To demonstrate the difference between computer ‘forgery’ and the original music, Hofstadter used the same genre of computer technique as EMI to extrapolate and create from a paragraph of Hegel’s words a new paragraph of Hegelian words. Hofstadter explained that although with large groups of phrases (five to eight words) one could be fooled into thinking one was reading Hegel, a Hegelian would immediately see that the structural content made no sense. The style was Hegelian, but the meaning, the logic underlying the original words, was lost. Although this was easily noticed when Hegelian and Shakespearean phrases of Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 37 words were manipulated by the computer, it was less easily detectable in musical phrases; hence the danger inherent in a computer’s manipulation of a great composer’s work. Hofstadter’s position is no longer the same as it was in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,27 published in 1979, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. A more recent book, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, written with a research team at Indiana University,28 points to the galloping stupidity in the multitude of approaches to artificial intelligence. Hofstadter reminded the audience that the human mind is infinitely deeper emotionally than anything that artificial intelligence could hope to create by parcelling together bits and pieces of a great composer’s work. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions, computers will never write anything as lyrically beautiful and uplifting for the human spirit as did, say, the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. What was missing in computerized creations of this artificial nature was the core, the essential human quality, of the person who created the piece of music. The computer’s manipulation of syntactical phrases could not put back any ‘essential’ quality, as Hofstadter referred to it. ‘Essential nucleus’ is what Davies spontaneously creates in her technological art, primarily by her use of bodily interface as an integral part of immersion, but also by sharing so much of herself in her artwork. She appears to have found the way to create art technologically that reaches out to address ‘human essence’ by anchor- ing her art in her own ‘essential nucleus’ and transferring it to ours. I am not referring here to that divine aspect of human nature which artists in the past painted into their work by depicting religious scenes replete with holy or saintly people, but rather to a deeply rooted, archaic biological sense of humanness which is instinctive and grounded in our bodies. Aside from Davies, there are other artists who are also, indirectly, trying to evoke an ‘essential nucleus’ in their work, and we turn to one now to better understand how they approach this goal from a biological way.

Epileptic Twilight

At the same International Symposium for Electric Art conference where Hofstadter spoke, I was able to see, hear, and familiarize myself with the kind of art that was being produced in the field of two-dimensional computer art, art that also appeared to speak to an ‘essential nucleus.’ During a slate of presentations in a panel entitled ‘On Sharing Subjectivities,’ Isabelle Delmotte29 presented art forms that were inspired by her epileptic seizures and created with the help of a computer. She explained that what we were seeing was her attempt to depict, in images and sound, what she felt while trapped in ‘an inbetween twilight zone.’ These were images she became aware of as she slowly recovered her sensibilities after a seizure had rendered her unconscious.30 Although words could not describe the intensity of the feelings of fear she experienced temporarily as she regained consciousness, the images she showed us could. The disconnectedness with the real world – being paralyzed and locked into an unconscious/conscious in-between dimension, a state she cannot control – is very 38 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art real and very terrifying. Her virtual images portray the ‘edges of reality’ or the ‘different reality’ she experiences after a seizure and before she is cogently conscious. As she describes it, the experience of the loss of time can be depicted spatially by imagining an enclosed space with its own life and rules. To supple- ment her art she created a soundtrack that in itself, she writes, has the ability to put her into a near-epileptic state. She sees her work as a search for ‘memories that reside in my body not in my consciousness.’ Delmotte’s words best describe her awakenings, semiconscious states, and emotions: ‘Being brought back to animal instincts and primary sensations has given me an insight on the physicality of linguistic tools and provided me with another language.’31 In her paper Delmotte points out that consciousness does not depend on language during her epileptic ‘inbetween’ experience; rather it is a phenomenon of the body that does not require thought, that lacks any form of language, but still is part of our notion of consciousness. Although Delmotte does not attempt to locate where in her brain all this takes place, neurologists know that experiencing the kind of fear she describes would be controlled by the amygdala, even though it permeated her entire body.

Art and Instincts

Damasio outlines the basic structure of the brain for us: the brainstem or reptilian brain is responsible for maintaining our automatic bodily functions; the limbic system arcs the top of the brainstem and houses the seat of our emotions; and the cerebral cortex in the forebrain is where reason is located. He reminds us that the limbic system has long been thought to harbour the seat of emotions.32 In Delmotte’s art we are not just dealing with left brain/right brain dynamics – we are talking about a journey into the depths of her instinctive nature, an instinctive nature that Heidegger hinted at with his invitation to recognize and embrace an archaic ‘being-in-the-world.’ By delving into her instinctual nature so overtly Delmotte has bridged a gap for us in respect to Davies’ art which is subtly covert in its goals. Why is it significant to acknowledge the importance of this instinctive part of the brain? Because then Osmose and Ephémère not only become works of art evoking what works of art have always evoked, our emotions, they become a way of cultivating an important intuitive dimension that is mainly lost to us except when we dream. The conse- quences of such 3D immersive works of art is that they can be used not simply to entertain but to open up new insights into self, or nature, or ‘being’; they can provide us with a way of understanding our unconsciousness, what the basis of our emotions are, what instincts are all about. Osmose/Ephémère and their dreamlike qualities can serve as vehicles that confirm that Jung’s archetypes can be understood as instincts, a subject we will address again in chapter 7.

Consciously Experiencing the Unconscious

If dreams are basically survival mechanisms, alerting us symbolically to the conscious events we need to heed, then has Davies, through her art, discovered a way Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 39 for us to experience the instinctive dimension consciously? We have seen how Delmotte was able to artistically reconstruct the images of her own instinctual fear while in the twilight-dream states of her epileptic attacks. Her imageful depictions of them are, indeed, otherworldly with a nightmare intensity to them. By confronting the powerful emotions she feels in the twilight state, she reports that she has gained a certain degree of familiarity with the epileptic experience and that the experience provides her with a new way to survive her ordeals. Is it possible that Davies’ immersive virtual art provides us an easy way to access and better understand the limbic region of our brains? Could one immerse oneself in the appropriate artistic 3D milieu and evoke the same dreamlike frequency of brainwaves and hence learn to enhance and control our emotional states? We will return to these questions in a later chapter.

Unreality and the Ethical

We have spent some time examining the 2D digital art of Delmotte and her insights into her experience of an ‘instinctive nucleus of fear.’ Her digital art would definitely not fall into Coyne’s neotechnological ideational category, but neither would Davies’ immersive virtual art. Like Delmotte’s, Davies’ art immerses us in an instinctive nucleus of emotion that has to do with knowing through bodily being, rather than knowing noetically, abstractly. While there is more to be said about the ‘essential nucleus’ that is evoked by Davies’ immersive virtual art, there is another dimension to her work based on the ethical and moral, which is just as profound. Davies’ artistic representation of nature is meant to be unreal; its very unreality has the capacity to turn an immersant’s attention to being-in-the-world because of the images of nature. It is as though Davies is privy to a premonition of the future, as though she knows that the natural world will ultimately be lost to us, not only because we are ecologically irresponsible at this moment in history, but also because the technological instinct, if it succeeds in taking over our epochal consciousness, could stealthily lead us to condone ideas of AI ‘disembodiedness.’ In a way, Davies is a ‘deus ex machina,’ speaking to our consciences through her virtual art, silently prodding us to consider the moral and ethical implications of our individual responsibilities to save the natural world that we are so quickly destroying. Her artistic visions dare her to create unreal three-dimensional scenarios of a sort which we might be forced to stroll through in the future to get our fix of nature artificially. They alert us to the sad fact that the nature we know today may be in its death throes. It is as though her immersive virtual art is surreptitiously yet audibly whispering to us, ‘unless you recognize the truth hidden in the laws of nature, this human-made virtuality is all that you earthlings will have left.’ But where does this leave Davies in respect to neoromanticism, or the AI aspirations of Stelarc or Moravec? Artistically, as we read her notebooks, she is, indeed, romantic and poetic and hence could be mistaken for a Coynian neoromantic (we know that one of her key artistic goals is to obliterate boundaries like the subject/object dichotomy, seeking a transcendence of them, and hence borders on idealism). Practically, however, she is a realist and an environmentalist deeply concerned with changing global perspectives in respect to being-in-the world, 40 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and doing so by using her artistic talents and computer technology in an ‘inverse’ way.

Coyne on Davies’ Osmose

Finally, we are ready to return to Richard Coyne’s identification of the idealism underlying technoromanticism. Undoubtedly Coyne would categorize Davies’ virtual art as part of the neotechnological movement, especially if he has only experienced her virtual artwork and not read anything she has written about it.33 Coyne has an interesting chapter in Technoromanticism on space and spatiality34 where he discusses what kind of space we encounter in certain digital narratives. For example, an action-packed computer game can lead us through space that confronts us with puzzles, while all the time unfolding a narrative. This gives the mind something to do, which for Coyne means that it is practically engaged. If virtual art is to do the same, Coyne advises, then like digital narrative it must tell a story. He is disappointed with Osmose for this reason. Having been immersed in Osmose, this is what he has to say about it:

In the case of computer games, such as Myst and Riven, every move and every action has been anticipated by the game inventors and is exhaustible. It is worth comparing such games with other ‘immersive environments’ such as C. Davies’ Osmose, which is a virtual reality art installation that provides freedom of movement through a ‘virtual space,’ but a space in which there is nothing to do except contemplate, look, listen, and ‘float around.’ Based on the notion of relaxation through contemplation, for all its qualities as an artwork, it is difficult to see how this work presents as a spatial environment beyond its immediate fascination, because there is nothing to do. From a Heideggerian perspective, space builds on spatiality, which operates in a field of praxis, and if there is nothing to do that draws you in, then you become aware of other sources of breakdown extraneous to the focus of the system: the heavy headset, the low image resolution, the noises in the museum, the time constraint, the queue of people waiting to use the system, and so on.35

For Coyne, the prospect of ‘a space in which there is nothing to do except contemplate, look, listen, and “float around”’ is anathema. As a practical person, it appears, he cannot accept the peace of ‘floating around’ in an artificially produced spatiality that invites one to leave behind the space of practicality where cognitive thought lives and instead just contemplate being-in-space. Coyne leaves us no doubt that his preference is for thinking practically within the space of slippery dichotomous concepts and not for contemplating the artistic images and symbols in Osmose’s artificial spatiality. It is as though his sense of practicality is being violated by this digital work of art because it furtively engages his bodily sensations instead of his intellect.36 So, while he lauds an abstract space where thought can think ‘practically,’ even while playing a computer game, Davies’ immersive environmental space proves to be unpractical for thought. Indeed, Davies’ virtual artwork is replete with dynamics that invite us to descend or ascend into sensational impulses and really feel space oozing in and out of Digital Knowing versus Digital Being 41 our pores – but this does not necessarily mean we subsume all objectivity. As discussed above, the resulting feelings for some could well end up engaged in practical thought – to preserve nature as it is. Admittedly, not all immersants experience such ethical insight, which, if it occurs, would probably happen after reflection. Not unlike Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, which connotes ‘being-in-the- world’37 – being ‘engaged before becoming reflective,’ as Coyne puts it – immersion in virtual art can create feelings of being-in-the-world. So if, as Coyne states, ‘Heidegger points to understandings of information technology that are pragmatic, situated in human action,’38 so, too, do Davies’ artworks. In her later, more formal, reflective, writings, she cogently describes the dynamics she hopes to achieve in her artworks; they include changing a viewer’s perspective on being-in- the-world and presumably, by extension, putting this insight into practice. We find no neoromanticism lurking here. In this chapter, we have addressed Coyne’s neoromanticism, noetic thinking, and artificial intelligence (AI), all bent on advancing bodiless thought. At the same time, we have concentrated on identifying the nucleus of human essence and noted how thinking based on feelings is derived from it. In the chapter that follows, we turn to a philosophical discourse that examines Heidegger’s understanding of technology and technological essence, and what he means by them, in an attempt to expose the dynamics that drive Davies’ desire to produce technological art that is subversive. Is her idea of using digital technology subversively just another way of employing digital technology in a pragmatic manner? We wonder, as Heidegger suggests of gifted artists, whether it is possible that Davies has no choice but to engage in her subversive artistic tactics? Is she a ‘tool of technological essence’? Is she driven by fate to tackle the overarching notion of being-in- the-world in relationship to technological art? Does she even realize that she is doing so? 42 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art 3 Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence

In this chapter we put aside our discussion about neoromanticism and human essence (although they continue to be prominent themes throughout the book and are never ignored) and focus instead on Heidegger’s notion of the essence of technology and how he differentiates it from technology per se. My claim is that immersion in Davies’ virtual art ‘unconceals’ and allows us to grasp what Heidegger means by an essence of technology. Concomitantly, it underlines and defines what he means by an essence that is substantial (which I have labelled substantial essence and about which more will be said below). When we are immersed in Davies’ beautiful, abstract representations of nature, while floating in a seemingly infinite space, I think it is possible to grasp what Heidegger means by substantial essence. What Davies manages to accomplish, perhaps quite unintentionally, becomes clear when we superimpose Heidegger’s philosophical dynamics over her project. Most important, Davies’ immersive virtual art points to the dangers of technology in the same way that Heidegger’s does.

Davies as Instrumentum

In chapter 1 we discussed how Char Davies began by painting images directly onto canvases as conventional artists have done for centuries. We went on to examine how she developed a particular artistic technique involving the use of semi-transparency, based on her own soft, myopic vision, designed to dissolve hard edges and collapse boundaries between things. In the mid 1980s, before bginning to work with 3D digital technology, she exhibited a series of paintings under the title of Espaces Entrelacés, an exploration of how interior self was inter- twined with enveloping exterior landscape. Her intention, even at this time, was to transcend ‘dualistic ideology’ (the subject/object dichotomy), in much the same way that postmodern philosophers do. Her early works of art are the precursors of the subject/object osmotic-dynamics found in Osmose (see, e.g., plate BW-4). In effect, the new medium of immersive virtual space enabled Davies to bring to fruition the artistic osmosis between subject and object that she had attempted to obtain in her early painting. Although Davies originally sought to accomplish her osmotic feat through the Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 43 two-dimensional painting techniques she had developed, it is almost as though she had been taken in hand by destiny (as Heidegger might have put it) to become ‘an instrument of technology.’ Everything she aspired to fell in line when, in the latter part of the 1980s, she became deliberately involved in the corporate development of Softimage, which exposed her thoroughly to the power of digital technology. And, in using the ‘instruments of technology’ for her own artistic agenda, she began to court what Heidegger refers to as ‘dangerous possibilities.’ The dangerous possibility in the computer technology that she was using was not the technology itself – that was not ‘daemonic.’ Rather the danger lay in Davies’ exposing herself to prevailing beliefs that technology was a means to an end in itself with total disregard of its effects on human essence. We noted in chapter 1 how on this subject she avowed that she was not ‘a technoromantic,’ that she did ‘not believe in the techno-utopian view of VR, of cyberspace,’ and that ‘the technology associated with this medium is not neutral,’ having come ‘out of the military/scientific/Western/industrial/patriarchal paradigm.’ Quite aptly she identified the dangerous possibilities inherent in technology and saw her role as artist as one that deliberately acts to subvert the dominant values in control of computer technology. She puts it this way: ‘I do not welcome a technologically-engulfing, disembodied, cyborgian future.’ Further,

I don’t believe, as some in the field do, that nature is an outmoded metaphor and that the sooner we can recreate ourselves through silicon and genetic engineering, the better off we’ll be – and when we have fused our brains with our machines we can leave this spoiled planet for virgin territory elsewhere – this I think is a testosterone dream.1

Technological Essence

We have alluded to Heidegger frequently during the course of the last few chapters. It is now time to address his philosophy directly and see just how Davies’ idea of subverting technology fits in. Heidegger has often been misunderstood in respect to his views on technological essence and its relationship to technology. The confusion arises because Heidegger believes that technological essence precedes technology even while it emerges from it. Before we begin to dissect Heidegger’s views on technology, technological essence, and art, and weigh them against immersive virtual art, let us first consider the following statement he makes, late in his life, on the subject of technological essence while in conversation with an interviewer. Heidegger states:

So, above, all, the misunderstanding that I am against technology is to be rejected. I see technology in its essence as a power which challenges man and, in opposition to which, he is not free any longer – that something is being announced here, namely a relationship of Being to man – and that this relationship, which is concealed in the essence of technology, may come to light someday in its undisguised form. 44 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

I do not know whether it is going to happen! I see though, in the essence of technology, the first appearance of a very profound mystery, which I call an ‘occur- rence’ (Ereignis), which may lead one to the conclusion that there can be no question of resistance against, or condemnation of, technology.2

The Technological Question

Keeping Heidegger’s definition in mind, that we may be dealing with a profound mystery when it comes to technological essence, let us peruse his essay The Ques- tion Concerning Technology,3 which offers us ample philosophical material against which to examine a contemporary computer-based work of art and to test the validity or falsity of its dynamics. How might Heidegger have responded to Davies’ art? Would he have categorized it as a negatively ‘enframing’ technological effort or seen in it positive glimmers of his mysterious, liberating technological essence? Would he have identified the different aspects of the ancient Greek notions of poiesis, physis, techne, and episteme as occurring in her immersive virtual art? Would computer-based art such as Davies’ have been aesthetically pleasing to him? Pleasing enough to be a vehicle of truth? Is the computer-based work of art capable of defending Heidegger’s notion that an essence of truth is to be found in the work of art? And, finally, how does the essence of technology fit into all this? As Heidegger tells us at the very end of his essay, in order for us to grasp what he means by technological essence, we do best to consider it in the light of the essence that we find in a work of art. In another essay, ‘Origin of the Work of Art,’4 he makes a similar suggestion, this time counselling that mathematical essence can be substituted as an essence that one grasps in the same way that one grasps essence in a work of art. To be sure, even though he invites us to make this analogy, he means the essence found in a work of art to be of greater profundity than mathematical essence. Heidegger recognized the value of essence in mathematics. He wrote about it in an essay entitled ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,’5 where he examined the meaning of the concept of mathematics in early Greek writing. It seems that in its root meanings ta mathemata encompasses much more than just numbers, formulas, geometry, and what can be learned or taught.6 It is a knowing of ‘things’ as they are. We do not arrive at this kind of knowing from things themselves; rather, we bring it to things as something we already know. We know the essence of things automatically.7 The ‘mathematical sublime’ is an excellent example of mystery that human beings can grasp and is no doubt why Platonic ideal forms are so often used as examples when essential qualities need to be expressed. Classical artists and even modern artists use the mathematics of proportion to compose their artistic images, hence employing the notion of mathematical essence. Heidegger does so, too, in order to explain the essence operative in a work of art. The essence that Heidegger wishes us to catch onto is contained in the Greek notion of poiesis. It is not something conceptual, not just a Platonic Idea, but more – it is a ‘presencing,’ something that inspires us to think about it, that beckons us, that arises when we are viewing a beautiful creation, whether in sculpture or in any other Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 45 form of art. For example, when a craftsman/artist brought forth ‘presencing’ in ancient Greece, Heidegger tells us, it was a liberating, enlightening event (Ereignis).

‘Presencing’ and the Essence of Technology

Meant to be substantial, Heidegger’s notions of essence can, nevertheless, be very abstract. Thus at this point, we need to examine the secondary notions related to Dasein and Being, like ‘the essence of technology’ and the notion of ‘presencing.’ Heidegger tells us that presencing harbours within itself a ‘saving power,’ a phrase he borrows from Hölderlin’s poetry.8 If we encounter this saving power in presencing, it is because we have already been enframed by technology’s dangerous powers. He refers to such an enframement as an ordering power and believes it calls forth a saving power. The two – the dangerous ordering power of enframement and the saving power – go hand in glove to reveal the essence of technology. We are reminded, however, that the entire cache of saving power can never be brought forth completely in any one epoch. If it could, then future cultures would be denied the saving power found in their own ‘destining principle’ (by which he means ‘fate’).

‘Ordering Principle’ and the ‘Rule of Enframement’

One of the principal theses in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ focuses on the concept of enframement, which, as we address it here, will help us understand how Davies’ hope to subvert our present uses of technology would work. Dynami- cally, enframement contains within itself the essence of technology in both its positive and negative roles. As Heidegger envisions it, it is something that sets itself upon us for a reason, a reason that we cannot know while we are enframed in it. It is as though technological essence is trying to break through the technology that is enframing us.9 This kind of Heideggerian enframement by the military/scientific/ Western/industrial/patriarchal paradigm is what Davies wishes to subvert.10 But does Davies’ immersive virtual art conceal an essence of technology and therefore meet all of Heidegger’s criteria for his notion of essence in ‘the work of art’? Is it poised to unveil in some way the very technological essence that he talks about that continued to remain mysterious to him (in respect to the destiny it would reveal to us someday) until the end of his life? We need to answer the questions we asked above, including the one which asks, ‘how might Heidegger have responded to the computer technology Davies uses to create her immersive virtual works of art?’ Let us begin by classifying such art. Oliver Grau, in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion,11 wonders whether or not an ‘immaterial art work’ is even classifiable as a work of art. Taking his objections seriously would mean that we should not even consider Heidegger’s ontological categories as part of a technological work of art since the latter’s fleeting images cannot be recreated or seen twice in the same way. As Grau states it, they are not materially accessible to ‘function as illuminating and vibrant testimonies of the social memory of humankind.’12 Still, as Heidegger has put it, modern technology sets itself upon us for a reason that we are not yet privy to. It 46 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art keeps us standing in reserve as vehicles for some as-yet-unknown purpose. Ostensibly, artists using this technology are such vehicles since their art, even when ephemeral, is destined to play a vital role in this unknown purpose that we are propelled toward in order to make history unfold according to our destiny. Considering the mathematical sublimity that produces the fleeting virtual images within immersive virtual art, and the essential aesthetics experienced by the immersant, Heidegger no doubt would categorize such technological art as a legitimate work of art.

Substantiating an Essence of Humanity

Myron Krueger, one of the pioneers of virtual reality (what he originally termed ‘artificial reality’) and interactive art, offers an example of what Heidegger means by dangerous enframement and fits nicely into the category of neoromantic. He perceives ‘technology as the essence of our humanity. An empty hand signals that our anatomy is incomplete until we pick up a tool ... Rather than thinking of myself as inventing technology, I have always believed that it was already there and that I merely discovered it.’13 Krueger’s idea that technology is a ‘Platonic idea’ that was always there from the beginning is not at all in line with Heidegger, for whom such an idea of technology would contain dangerous possibilities. Krueger is really aligned with mathematicians/physicists, who, particularly if they are Platonists, also believe that formulas are out there, ‘floating in space,’ waiting to be discovered and plucked out of the air, although not all of our Platonic mathematicians/ physicists necessarily believe that mathematics/physics underlies ‘the essence of our humanity.’14 Taking a tool into one’s hand and fashioning a work of art would certainly fit into the framework of Heidegger’s early interpretation of the Greek word techne, which, by ancient Greek definition, would today include the wiring of a computer chip, or the growing of specific molecules to be incorporated into a biochip.15 Heidegger certainly believes that the artisan, the hand holding the tool, is responsible for calling forth essence into a work of art. An artist brings forth the essence in a human being, which in and of itself can unveil a new kind of thinking about Being that reveals itself in Dasein and thus shapes history and the people in it. According to Krueger’s interpretation, human anatomy is incomplete until one picks up a tool, a tool that we could interpret as idealistically connected to ‘Tech- nology’ floating somewhere in space. The tool (in this case the computer) becomes the absolute essential extension without which a human being’s essence remains incomplete. There is a dangerous implication here: contrary to Heidegger’s intent to seek out the mysterious implications of technological essence, Krueger’s invitation to us is that we become ‘standing reserves’ for technology. Davies knows full well that this may turn out to be the case if our digital technology furtively seduces and changes us into cyberbeings or technoromanticists.

Daemonic Technology

The use of technology in a daemonic way is easy to understand if we cite the example of video games (which boys and men, especially, can become addicted Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 47 to), which in some instances are becoming increasingly graphic in their depictions of violence and hence problematic in content.16 At the beginning of the twenty-first century we see a whole range of game titles that promise to indulge players in masochism, mutilation, and even prostitution.17 Games of this sort offer the opportunity to personally practise and enjoy torture, mutilation, and bloody violence. The recent introduction of full-motion video sequences, powerful sound enhancers, and realistic graphics also encourages the depiction of more realistic violence. Apparently, designers are keen on showing off the special effects of their products, and the best way to do this, it appears, is through violence. The video games produced by gaming giants such as GT Interactive Software, Interplay Productions, and Virgin Interactive, which are apparently intended for adults only, easily fall into the hands of children, and parents of children, who, according to statistics, pay little attention to what games their children play. Producers and devotees of these games go to great lengths to convince us that the games do not produce violent children. Any kind of government regulation of them is seen as anathema infringing on the rights of freedom of speech. Statistics compiled by psychologists as to the probable cause of the increase of violent children in today’s society tell the other side of the story.18 There can, indeed, be a daemonic technological essence that emerges from digital technology if we surrender our human creativity and identify with technology rather than stand apart from it. Something daemonic could be evoked from technology if technological essence becomes a prisoner trapped within a human being unable to transcend the ordering principle of enframement that has enrap- tured him. If people see technology as an essential part of the culture and cannot stand apart from it objectively, they become locked in an abominable technological cul-de-sac of ‘standing reserves.’ Only by recognizing the dangerous dual aspects of technology’s ordering and enframement principles can a culture hope to identify the essential truth underlying its encounter with technology. For Davies the kind of technological essence that we are on the verge of glorifying could be labelled as a dehumanizing essence, one that we unknowingly substitute for human essence, and one that as it gains strength we soon may be unable to oppose. Today’s technology, at its most frightening microscopic apex, is all about changing our DNA, animals’ DNA, and plants’ DNA, in short tampering with the essence of life. Then there is the macroscopic side of technological expertise, the side that is rechannelling rivers and building huge dams (e.g., China’s grand-scale hydrological engineering) that actually tilt the earth off its axis because the dams have made our earth unnaturally ‘top-heavy.’ We do not need to list how technology is interfering with all aspects of nature on our planet; informed people know the story well since there is a profusion of material available on the subject.19 The truth is that, as technologists, we want to reinvent nature (this includes making cyborgs of ourselves); we want to remodel the earth and, heaven knows, the cosmos too. We in the West know very well the dangerous horizons we are pushing and yet do nothing to stop the destruction of naturally evolving life which has taken billions of years to evolve. If Heidegger is right and technology can have no identifiable essence of its own, and if an ordering principle takes hold like a virus, grabs onto and aspires to change and control the essence of technology and make of us ‘standing reserves’ 48 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art for its sake, then everything becomes a means to an end, including our planet, which because it is doomed to perish billions of years from now when the sun implodes, has already become part of the discard mentality.20 But we are, proleptically, ahead of ourselves; we will return to these ‘dangerous’ truths in respect to digital technology later in the book. All we really want to focus on in this chapter are the positive dynamics borrowed from Heidegger’s philosophy in respect to the digital work of art, because these are the dynamics that allow us to contemplate whether or not Davies inadvertently identifies an essence of technology that operates surreptitiously in her immersive virtual art work. As an artist, Davies appears to create what flows naturally from her psyche. She does not seemingly aspire to construct truth in her immersive art; if truth is to be found there it does not appear to have been contrived, but to have happened spontaneously. As Heidegger might have put it, she is destiny’s child, an ‘instrumentum’ of technology.21 Still, although her early notes appear to indicate that she wants only to introduce an immersant to a seamless world where we are a part of nature and nature is a part of us, references to transcending dualistic notions remind us that her earliest philosophical intentions are much more complex and can, indeed, be classified as a search for ‘truth.’ In the early nineties, for example, she was already alluding to the dangers of technology, and by 2002 she was reflecting on her own use of technology and on what it has allowed her to achieve. She writes:

While Jaron Lanier said that immersion in virtual environments might increase appreciation for the real world, I tend to think that unless the values embedded within the medium (à la Descartes) are deliberately circumvented or subverted by the artists/designers, this medium will not only distract us from earthly responsibilities but will actually reinforce the dominant western worldview that has always approached nature as a resource to be exploited. As an artist, I therefore have two choices: I can either unplug and never go near a computer again or I can choose to remain engaged, seeking to subvert the technology from within, using it to communicate an alternative worldview. Up until now that has been my approach. My strategy has been to explore how the medium/technology can be used to ‘de-automatize’ perception via use of semi-transparency, seemingly floating through things etc., in order that participants may begin to question their own habitual perceptions and assumptions about being in the world, thus facilitating a mental state whereby Cartesian boundaries between mind and body, self and world begin to slip. Rather than directly critiquing the technology and its conventional uses, I have sought to use it for alternative ends, hopefully demonstrating to others that this is indeed possible. While from an anthropocentric perspective, the few decades into the new millennium may prove to be very exciting and possibly bright for certain segments of humanity – I feel very sad for the rest of the earth, all those other beings who live here too ... 22

Immersive Virtual Art as Dangerous but Saving

We must consider at this point just what technologically based art is revealing about our destiny. We must ponder whether the Western world is on the brink of reinforcing a dangerous destiny by succumbing to technology’s dehumanizing Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 49 power, or whether it is possible to initiate the advent of saving power – a power destined to unconceal the essence of technology. Why has this age of technology appeared in our destiny? Are new-media artists, such as Davies, even classifiable in the same category as classical artists of yesterday when it comes to addressing this saving power? Heidegger states, ‘We press on past the essence of technology’23 to try to get at the truth of why this instrument, technology, presents itself in our destiny. Let us address the dynamics in Davies’ works of art. Interestingly, sometimes her immersive virtual art appears to precariously straddle the boundaries of technology and technological essence; sometimes it seems to pulsate between dangerous ordering and saving principles. This is a good sign, because, as Heidegger states, the closer we come to the danger of identifying with the ordering principle of technology the more ‘brightly do the ways into the saving power of its essence begin to shine and the more questioning we become.’ So far as Davies’ questioning of militaristic/scientific technology, Heidegger would have thought she was on the right track. For him, ‘questioning is the piety of thought.’24 In carrying on a dialectic with technology we can ‘save ourselves’ by unconcealing the essence of technology. In effect, this dangerous dialectic is what Heidegger refers to as a necessary part of the ‘stellar course of the mystery.’25 Let us ask, then, yet another question that Heidegger might have wanted us to ask. If the essence of technology is, indeed, being revealed in this particular technological artist’s work, is it in response to the dangerous aspects of the enframing principle? To answer this question we must first ask another. Why is it that when nature still abounds around us, an artist is endeavoring to create three- dimensional virtual interpretations of nature that enable people to experience nature artificially through strapped-on technological apparatus monitoring their bodily responses? Is it not preferable to do so through unsullied, unencumbered senses while immersed in real nature? Is Davies not deliberately provoking the ‘pious’ danger hidden in this kind of immersive virtual work of art, the danger that we might prefer virtual nature to real nature?

Tripping on Technology

To the degree that Osmose takes one out of the ‘real’ world into a digitized representation of nature, to the degree that it allows one to ‘trip’ on the sensations produced by floating in an enveloping 3D spatiality which we experience as though we had taken some potent drug, we are, indeed, thrown into a grave sense of danger; we stand poised to lose touch with real nature. Some have responded to Osmose in this way:

The images and sound ... are quite spectacular and hypnotizing as the viewer appears to be moving around and even through the transparent images and deep space. At a certain point, light, vision, sound, mind, breathing and body merge, inducing a calming, almost meditative state. It’s definitely trippy.26

Yet, is this ‘pious’ or ‘trippy’ danger poised to reveal the essence of technology, some mysterious concealed truth, and if so, is it a dynamic Heidegger would have agreed with? 50 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

In Heidegger’s view, when an artist brings forth the beautiful she also brings forth a presencing which is ‘a’ truth. So, is Davies bringing forth presencing through her immersive virtual art because its images are beautiful and its space exotically enveloping, and if so is there a ‘truth’ hidden in it? An important concept for the Greeks was poiesis because they conceived it as bringing forth ‘presencing’ or ‘truth.’ Heidegger reminds us that the Greek notion of poiesis overarched the concomitant notions of techne, physis, and episteme.27

Techne, Physis, Episteme, and Osmose/Ephémère

The dynamics that we are exposed to in Osmose and Ephémère impact us psychologically and physically. Davies manages to accomplish both a physical and psychological response in an immersant because the dynamics encountered in her immersive works of art intimately interact with immersants’ emotional energy as though they were encountering a ‘presencing’ or truth. The worlds we move through in Ephémère, for example, are always ‘bursting into bloom’ with ever-new images, and as they travel through us or we through them, we respond to these imageful worlds by opening ourselves to them like a flower does to the sun. When we open ourselves to the technology that produces virtual art, we are in our own way confirming Heidegger’s claim that technology is a legitimate way through which technological essence or truth can reveal itself. So, if truth is brought forth in the beautiful as Heidegger and the Greeks claim it is, then Davies has surely achieved a bringing forth of truth simply through the category of beautiful. But has she accomplished more than this? Has she allowed us insight into the dangerous and saving aspects of technology? Has she managed to unearth and express through her immersive virtual art ‘the’ or ‘an’ essence of technology and in her own way confirm what Heidegger writes about? Is her immersive, virtual, technological art revealing an essence of technology? I think that Davies’ Osmose and Ephémère do just this, primarily because of the artistic techniques used. In her early notebooks we saw how Davies outlined the operative dynamics of the three-dimensional realms in Osmose and what emotional responses she sought to achieve in the immersant. Immersed in Davies’ worlds, a participant ought to feel the overwhelming essence of nature, not because there is a promised experience of being one with virtual nature, but for the opposite reason, because of a newer and greater appreciation of nature-as-it-is. Davies puts it like this:

As technology, Osmose does not seek to replace Nature. Immersion within it is not a replacement for walking in the woods. Osmose is a filtering of Nature through an artist’s vision, using technology to distill or amplify certain interpretive aspects, so that those who enter Osmose can see freshly, can become re-sensitized, and can remember what it’s like to feel wonder. In reminding people of the extraordinariness of simply being alive in the world, Osmose acts as a spatial-temporal arena where we can perhaps re-learn how to ‘be.’28 Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 51

The Saving Power of Truth

In contemplating the questions that a work of art posits, the mysterious essence that art depicts, the truth that underlies its images, Heidegger states:

There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing which brings forth truth into the splendour of radiant appearance was also called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne.29

Heidegger’s definition of techne in all of its Greek meaning, inclusive of the dynamics of physis, episteme, and poiesis, reigns supreme in Davies’ immersive virtual art. It is difficult to deny that she has achieved the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful through the radiant digitized appearances of nature, or that, concomitantly, she has come close to unleashing a dangerous truth hidden in them, that we could, indeed, succumb to their illusions. The dual aspects of the essence of technology did set itself upon Davies; she may well have been used by ‘fate as a tool.’ One finds her saying, frequently, variations of ‘My work is my pathway to seeking some kind of understanding. I am compelled to do this, even though I know I will never find an answer.’30 Although she may not have been at the ‘mercy of technology’ she could have avoided using it. The fact is, she was deeply drawn by the 3D space it could provide her. Even though there does not appear to be a consciously predetermined subversive agenda in her early working notes,31 in an essay in 1991 we find her quite explicit on the subject:

Given the dominant values of our society, it is important to remain wary of virtual reality, measuring its potential uses (benefits in communication, education, design, medicine ...) against its probable uses and the attitudes these may foster. The technology associated with virtual reality is not value-free. Inherent in three-dimensional computer graphic tools are a host of conventions such as objective realism, linear perspective, and Cartesian space, all of which tend to reinforce the western scientific/ mechanistic/dualistic worldview. I have been creating images in virtual three- dimensional space for several years now. For me the challenge of working with this technology involves subverting its conventions and the ideology behind them in order to make images that can act as antidotes, reaffirming our organic participation in, other than our separation from, the world.32

Simply making statements like this does not qualify her as a ‘prophet’ in any way; what is much more important is that she provides us with a vehicle, her artwork, through which ‘saving truth’ can be revealed. So what are the dangerous aspects of Davies’ immersive art, and how is ‘saving truth’ being revealed through it? The dangerous aspects lie in the seductive 3D virtual manifestations of unreal nature depicted in her immersive virtual art 52 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art against which the saving aspects of ‘truth’ become ironically self-apparent. Obvi- ously we must cherish and protect ‘real’ nature and not succumb to computer- based versions of three-dimensional representations of nature.

Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Technology

Thus far our premise is that a technological work of art can be aesthetically pleasing and also classifiable as a possible vehicle for truth if it meets Heidegger’s criteria and his belief that truth is to be found in the essence evoked by the work of art. Davies’ art creates beautiful images that to my mind can reveal what Heidegger means by ‘Truth.’ But why is truth accessible through these seductive, immersive virtual 3D images of an unreal nature? What do these virtual images of nature have to do with truth and the essence of technology? The answers to these questions will become apparent shortly. At this juncture, we should heed Heidegger’s warnings that technological essence is not to be identified with technology. We should also pay attention to Heidegger’s prediction that someday technology will reveal the mystery underlying technological essence, an unconcealment that will constitute an epochal breakthrough and presumably initiate the new way of thinking he aspired to. In analysing Davies’ artwork, as though through a transparent overlay of Heidegger’s philosophical notions, we find ourselves confronting in her work a technological essence that has nothing in common with mainstream technology but rather seeks to subvert it. For many immersants, there is, at the end of immersion, a sense of renewed wonder of being alive and, after reflection, a renewed appreciation of the ‘real’ world, especially that of nature. Does this in some way constitute the beginning of some kind of epochal breakthrough? Are we to surmise that breaking out of an enframement of the militaristic/scientific use of technology is possible through such art? Ostensibly, Davies has used technology (techne) to reveal a notion of technological essence in a way that Heidegger surely would have approved. By bringing forth poiesis in beautifully constructed, artificial images of nature, she has stood us on our heads and evoked in us a fervour not for virtual nature but for the real thing. Unlike the later Heidegger, who is concerned but tacit about the role technology and technological essence are destined to play in history, Davies overtly identifies the precarious relationship between humankind and technology, and although she does not venture onto theoretical grounds in her working notes, the underlying reasons for her artistic visions resonate relentlessly throughout them.

The Work of Art

A dilemma arises for us because we still must link Davies’ digital technological essence to Heidegger’s mysterious technological essence. We need to do so if we are to identify a constant that overreaches the ancient Greeks and our digital age. Is there such a constant that digital technology is revealing and would it evoke a technological essence and give rise to it? To help us answer this question we turn again to Heidegger’s essay on the ‘Origins of the Work of Art’ and consider two Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 53 other questions he asks that have to do with ‘originating essence’ in order to throw additional light on technological essence and its substantive nature. The first is, how is ‘originating essence’ captured by an artist so that it manifests itself in the work of art she is creating? Second, why does the ‘originating essence’ in a great work of art always manifest the same essential truth in every epoch? There is a third question that we must add to Heidegger’s, and that is, can an ‘originating essence’ be captured in a digital work of art such as Davies’?33 Before proceeding with answers, we need to first call attention to Heidegger’s depiction of the work of art as capable of revealing an originating essence, one that issues from the earth, so to speak,34 and not from an essential quality based upon ideas of God, or Platonic ideals. Unlike Hegel, who believes that works of art have lost their impact as vehicles for expressing essence, Heidegger wishes to establish the unknown origins of ‘essence’ as emanating out of earthly substance. By identifying earth as a concealing/revealing source, Heidegger is at the same time addressing its inspiring essential substance. How does the earth mysteriously give up its secrets to artists? Heidegger claims that the earth both reveals and conceals its essential nature, that this dynamic must exist if earth’s mysterious resources are to be drawn upon by successive generations of artists in each epoch. So, what each world culture discovers is part and parcel of the same originating essence, always there, waiting to be liberated in history in some unknown way through the work of art or some other vehicle of essence like the language of poetry. There are two individuals who institute the release of originating essence; one is the artist and creator of the work, the other the preserver or champion of it. This is the gist of Heidegger’s reasoning concerning earthly materials, worldly culture, and the artists’ and preservers’ role in history.

Earthly Substance and Technological Art

Using Heidegger’s criteria for identifying essential substance in earthly substance and hence in a work of art, we can account for what he might mean by it when we address technological essence in a work of art. Technology has introduced important new venues for art to take. To be sure, immersive virtual art in its creation depends ‘on earthly substance,’ yet virtual images are produced as though out of an ‘ethereal space’ since the images in immersive works of art are like ‘ghosts in a machine.’ When one is immersed in Osmose or Ephémère one reaches out to the images only to touch nothing.35 Yet, in the case of Osmose and Ephémère, the 3D virtual images create illusions of substantiality. Do they come close to depicting, through the use of technology, what Heidegger means by substantial essence to be found in a work of art? In some ways they literally do, although these translucent images should not be categorized in the unknown, unseen abstract category of substantial essence that Heidegger describes.

Poiesis and Digitality

Art, Heidegger teaches, is encompassed by the greater notion of poiesis. It is of the earth through the auspices of human beings and their projections of essence onto 54 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art things; they are the creators of poiesis in the world. By employing the Greek notion of poiesis Heidegger strives to introduce essential substance to philosophy. Poiesis represents an all-encompassing essence, grounded in temporality, that embraces much more than just the metaphorical images of poetry that come to mind when we think of poiesis. Heidegger categorizes essence as an unknown category that cannot be conceptualized because it is actively evolving; it needs to be grasped without our resorting to abstract concepts such as Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. We grasp essence, for instance, by seeing truth in the essence manifested by a work of art (e.g., Heidegger’s example of essence emanating from a peasant’s shoes).36 Despite the fact that Heidegger’s philosophy lauds the work of craftsmen or artists as ‘originators’ of history, it is interesting to note that at the end of his essay, Origins of the Work of Art, Heidegger puts the artistic image aside in favour of poetic words, using Hölderlin’s poetry as an example of what he means by poiesis. He employs poetic words that describe essence from the point of view of language rather than resorting to the use of an essence that emanates only from images and a work of art.37 Davies, on the other hand, manages to purvey quite a different sense of essence by keeping her images alive as images and not allowing them any possibility of metamorphosing again into concepts. In Davies’ immersive works of art, the philosophical/poetic concepts that inspire her images do not readily lend themselves easily to becoming concepts again. Of course, by their very makeup, virtual images cannot represent what we normally think of as substance, yet during immersion in Davies’ technological art we do more than just relate to 3D virtual images ethereally; we also negotiate them physically. It is as though virtual images are sculpted out of the substance of digital spatiality, a spatiality that remains, nonetheless, nothing at all without its images. In the past, works of art were often produced by the careful use of mathematical and geometrical grids in order to establish proportionality and harmony and render a painting pleasing to the eye. (Among well-known formulas are those employed by icon painters, which are discussed in the next chapter.) To produce virtual images with 3D software an artist or designer also utilizes a mathematical grid of x,y,z coordinates.38 We find such a grid employed in both classical art and computer-produced art, pointing to the common ground of mathematical essence that still reigns supreme. Deciphering how a 3D, digitally made image emerges from the angles and lines of geometry and how the essence in mathematical formulas translates into Heidegger’s notion of substantial essence would need much more analysis than we can attempt in this chapter. Suffice it to say that Heidegger’s view of mathematical essence throws light on how the digital image translates into essential substance,39 and how it is also dependent on the essence underlying mathematical truth. Three-dimensional software programs that are used to create dynamic works of art like Osmose and Ephémère are based on mathematics, mainly geometric formulas, and create ephemeral images that can potentially affect us sensationally much more than 2D art does, even though this latter art (especially in the past) also used and still uses mathematical/geometrical formulas.40 Viewing conventional, non-interactive 2D art is a passive experience; participat- Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 55 ing in 3D immersive art such as Davies’ engages an immersant’s bodily sensations actively. The eyes must process and negotiate artistic images stereoscopically; breathing must be controlled by the immersant if he is to move up or down in immersive virtual spatiality. We look incredulously at Davies’ virtual images, which, as both substantive and essential, provoke in us feelings or ‘knowing’ that make transparent a technological essence, one, that – both unlike and like Heidegger’s, which is limited to the earth, world, and history – goes beyond all this by adding body. So, what we are dealing with in Davies’ art has to do with technological dynamics that are interfering, bodily, in some way with the individual’s normal perception of knowing/being in the world. And Davies recog- nizes this:

Rather than deny our embodied mortality and our material embeddedness in nature, I seek – paradoxically through a highly technologicalized art form – to return people to their bodies and to the earth, by using VR to refresh perception of their own embodied being-in-the world, to return them to a perceptual wonder at being here.41

We have come to the end of a rather lengthy perusal of Heidegger’s philosophizing about essence, art, technology, and Being in order to consider how Davies has responded to technology in the digital age. Has she – through her notion of subversion, which is based among other dynamics on ambiguous transparent imagery – identified an essence of technology? It should be apparent to the reader by now that we have made an important transition from Heidegger’s notion of substantial essence tethered to Being in temporality or history to my own thesis, that Davies’ virtual art introduces us to a biological version of substantial essence. More important, we have unearthed a common overarching essence linking them – Heidegger’s originating earthly essence and Davies’ wish to ‘return people to their bodies and the earth’ share the same perspectives of the importance of recognizing earth as harbouring substantial essence.

Feelings for Spatiality

Davies’ digital art provides us with a venue for transcendent feelings that could take us into heavenly space but do not. Davies’ desire is to return people ‘to their bodies and to the earth’ and not to entice them into some abstract earthly or heavenly dimension. We know that these feelings occur in immersants because they are attested to by video recordings and written testimony of some of the 30,000 immersants who have experienced Davies’ work since 1995 and who have described ‘feelings for transcendence,’ as ‘out-of-body-feelings,’ and so on.42 So how can immersants’ reported feelings for transcendence or out-of-body-feelings43 co-exist with Davies’ desire to have them stay this side of an idealistic neoromanticism? Because, true to say, some of Davies’ translucent dynamics fall in line with Richard Coyne’s allegations that virtual art which evokes idealistic notions should be labelled as part of the neoromantic school. How, then, when her immersive virtual 3D artwork incorporates so many images that appear to take on these ethereal perspectives, does her work, instead, assume substance? The an- 56 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art swer to this is simple and needs to be emphasized: the transcendence immersants experience has everything to do with feelings for spatiality, and these feelings originate in the body and are generated by it, not by abstract or intellectual thought. Davies, remarkably, has managed to subsume the neoromantic content in her virtual art to the instincts of the body and not to disembodied thought.

Virtual Art as Truth-Bearing Vehicle

Even though we relate to Davies’ art more through feelings than through thinking, this does not mean that important intellectual, moral, and ethical insights cannot be reaped through her virtual art. Her inspired use of the medium of immersive virtual space demonstrates to us that technology is subservient to her and not the other way around. The technological essence revealed through her art points to an important truth – that such technological 3D art, employing imagery evoking the natural world, does not have to seduce us into preferring virtual nature. Instead, it can make us objective and discerning by alerting us to the irretrievability of the real, actual nature we are destroying at every turn. Hegel’s claim that art is finished as a truth-bearing vehicle is challenged by Davies’ art in this digital age. Today Hegel would surely have to revise the statements he made during his lifetime, that:

Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth obtains existence for itself. One may well hope that art will continue to advance and perfect itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit. In all these relationships art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.44

Hegel claimed that images no longer belonged to the ‘highest need of the spirit,’ which could, instead, be fulfilled by thought itself. He did not want reason con- taminated by images, so his philosophy set out to prove how logical thought could sublate emotionally produced images. Considering the imageful age we live in, Hegel’s philosophical, long-term aspirations for reason’s ability to think Absolute Concept have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, today it is arguable that images inspire moral, ethical, and even daemonic perspectives more than pure thought does, or at least equally as well. More and more one reads in newspapers or hears on television that ‘we live in an iconic age.’ More than ever before images have a profound effect on us, whether they are aesthetic and belong to a work of art or are simply of the ordinary news- reporting variety. One has only to recall the horrific images of jetliners crashing into the Twin Towers in New York or the photographed atrocities committed against Iraqi prisoners during the war in Iraq or the destructive power of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia to understand the power of images. (To be fair, Hegel is referring specifically to artistic and not to media images.) Today, ‘essential knowing’ readily occurs through images, and Davies’ immersive virtual art is turning out to be a vehicle that facilitates our understanding of how this ‘essential know- Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence 57 ing’ works. Furthermore, ‘essential knowing’ is more likely to happen through feelings45 created because of the potent images seen in a film or on TV, or, as in the case of Osmose and Éphèmére, in an immersive virtual work of art. We will continue to address essentiality in Davies’ art, in its various manifestations, in the ensuing chapters. After a brief consideration of substantial essence in Heidegger’s work, we will venture into the seemingly unrelated worlds of mythology and religion, often bracketed by philosophical perspectives. We will open the doors to understanding essential spatiality more fully in later chapters by investigating the biological aspects of the image in instincts and emotions. We do this in order to further examine how Davies manages to keep herself and us from entering into a pact with the dehumanizing aspects of technology or, for that matter, with the ideal perspectives of neoromanticism. 58 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art 4 Substantial Essence

In the previous chapter I used Heidegger’s work to introduce an essence that was derived from earth, that had substance to it instead of the usual Platonic or spiritual connotations we are more philosophically accustomed to in the West. Against Heidegger’s essence that was substantial, we examined whether Davies’ digital art was a vehicle for substantial essence. Linked to truth, Heidegger understands essence as something that is concealed by earth or unconcealed by it whenever it is ready to give up its secrets. I argued that in Osmose and Ephémère truth is uncovered when an immersant discovers a substantial essence in nature through the auspices of feelings that are evoked by immersion in a virtual 3D spatiality filled with art that depicts nature. This is not to say that the feelings evoked have nothing to do with thinking, but it would be wrong to bracket them in the same category as Heidegger’s ‘new kind of thinking.’ Since Heidegger’s substantial essence does not meet all of the criteria we need to set up my definition of it, we will examine another way to approach the meaning of substantial essence, one that is no longer framed in Heideggerian overtones. To add to and clarify substantial essence, we will compare Davies’ 3D virtual art to the two-dimensional religious icon. In so doing, we will indirectly throw more light on the notion of how subversion works in Davies’ art.

An ‘Inverse’ Two-Dimensional Technique

An icon painter paints an altered reality instead of a real one because he,1 not unlike Davies, wishes to ‘refresh and intensify’ the meaning of humanism. To address how the icon painter does this, we will need to resort to religious terms momentarily, first to describe what substantial essence is in the icon and, second, what it is in Davies’ art. The icon of Christ attempts to capture his human-divine hypostasis (personhood) while the icons of saints are meant to honour a saint’s efforts to become like Christ. From the Byzantine and modern Greek Orthodox perspectives, the icon of Christ can never depict the essence of God, which remains part of an unknown mystery. At best, the icon can only represent a likeness, a facsimile of Christ’s human-divine natures. The personhood of Christ is a most important concept in orthodoxy.2 Too complex to delve into here, the idea of three natures in one person has been subject of much theological discussion and dissent over the centuries. Substantial Essence 59

Heidegger reminds us that as Greek words were translated into Latin their meanings were altered, and hence a kind of rootlessness took hold:

Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation [of Greek words such as hypostasis, which becomes the Latin substantia] there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say, without the Greek word.3

In his book Being as Communion John D. Zizioulas, like Heidegger, points out that the word hypostasis, as used by orthodoxy today, stems from the Greek concept ousia, which to the early Greeks meant substance, nature. However, when hypostasis was combined with patristic theology’s concept of person in the fourth century, incorporating the Biblical sense of God, its meaning changed.4 A more complicated interpretation of substance took over and the Greek church, seeking to include God’s divine nature to Christ’s human one, split from the Roman church. In Heidegger’s use of essence as substantial, it is important to remember that he represents it as manifesting itself in a temporal, earthly aspect.5 An icon painter means to paint-in much more, because he wants to capture both the earthly and divine aspects of Christ’s hypostasis. The iconist attempts to paint-in a living truth as though it were made without hands. Yet, even though both succeed in establishing substance out of essence, the substance is always one that retains an essential quality. Zizioulas explains6 that if one reads the iconological language of the Greek fathers, keeping in mind the early apocalyptic theology developed by the Syro- Palestinian tradition, which penetrated the eucharistic liturgies of the East, we find that these traditions have truth not emerging out of the mind but falling upon it as a visit or dwelling.7 These ancient traditions present us with ‘an eschatological reality entering history to open it up in a communion-event.’8 There is nothing mystical or Platonic to be experienced in this event. Rather, what is experienced is practically experienced: a new world, a new set of relationships, a new community, and a new destiny. What is interesting is that one finds in orthodoxy the same kind of ‘language of dwelling’ with much the same concentration on ‘destiny’ and a ‘new thinking’ as in Heidegger. In many ways, Heidegger’s Dasein parallels orthodoxy’s idea of the manifestation of Christ’s human-divine nature in the icon. Vincent Vycinas in Earth and Gods succinctly explains that ‘Dasein is not man, but rather that in which the essence of man is rooted.’ 9 Later, on the same page, he quotes Heidegger: ‘Man “essentiates” in such a way that he is the Da, i.e., the manifestation of Being.’ Vycinas advises: ‘Primarily Dasein does not express the essence of man, but, rather, this bringing into the light of Being, the revelation of Being.’10 (Interestingly, every icon of Christ contains a cruciferous nimbus surrounding his face [three branches of the Cross on which are painted the three Greek letters representing the divine name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14]. The divine name in the Greek Bible translated into English by orthodoxy is ‘The Being.’) In fact, like orthodoxy, which seeks to establish ‘The Being’ or unknown God as part of the nature of Christ’s humanity, so, too, does Heidegger establish Being as an openness to which only man through Dasein has access. 60 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

If orthodoxy’s goal is described in terms of a new kind of thinking that believes ‘God became man so that man should become God,’11 Heidegger’s goal of Dasein’s opening up to the light of Being widely suggests the same kind of dynamic. Thematic to orthodoxy is the unfolding of The Being in history. We see the same kind of unfolding of Being taking place in history in Heidegger’s work. In this respect, substantial essence, as found in both Heidegger and in the icon, is bound to the earthly plane and, therefore, to human beings, who have within themselves essential aspects through which they can reveal Being.

Painting-in Essence

Heidegger, as does the icon painter, wants to ‘paint’ us a picture of what he means by substantial essence through the use of poetry, particularly Hölderlin’s. None- theless, establishing how the dynamics of essence, Dasein, and Being work is far more complex than establishing the dynamics of the icon. Iconist theology is more revealing of how substance manifests itself in temporality than Heidegger can hope to show through the use of poetic language. Icons are extremely subtle in their construction. To help the mind retain a detachment from an unknown God or heaven, icons are painted in an inverse two-dimensionality, a technique that forces the painting’s contents to leap out at people and ground them in temporality rather than entice them into some heavenly virtual reality. When the geometric perspective is inversed – that is, when two parallel lines meet at a vanishing point close to the foreground instead of the background – the effect is one of collapsing space, of making the focal point of the painting bounce toward the viewer. The mirror perspective of these dynamics takes the viewer into the background of the painting but below its horizon and thus produces the effect of converging and unifying all the figures and objects in the icon. Either way the geometric effect is meant to ground the viewer in time and not in an idea of eternity. In the case of faces, they are painted with human features slightly distorted; noses are too thin, eyes are too large, the face is darkly coloured but neither black, white, nor yellow and often somehow a combination of all three. Not understanding the underlying reasons for icon construction, most art histo- rians, even today, still retain the view that 2D icons are the result of the inability of the artist to grasp 3D perspectives. They do not consider, for example, that icon painters might have preferred to paint in 2D for religious reasons, in an attempt to subvert illusion, by using a method of image construction that accomplished these goals.

Entering Other Realities

With respect to Davies’ immersive art, and her intent to create illusion as a means of dehabituating perception, she constructs an unreality using the elements of nature as a way to get in touch with one’s own essential existence or being in the real world. Oliver Grau points out that some critics of her immersive virtual art find this method of subversion somewhat convoluted and might ask, Why the immense technological effort in order to return, after a gigantic detour, to the real? Substantial Essence 61

One such critic Grau cites refers to her methods as ‘contrived technoblindness.’12 Yet, though art is meant to seduce, it is also meant to invite one into reflective territory. Three-dimensional immersive virtual art such as Davies’ is by far the most seductive art we have ever created because immersion in it is not just a mental exercise but a physical experience. If icons serve to remind us of the divine nature that we see reflected in the faces of our fellow human beings, then Davies’ immersive virtual art reminds us that we are slowly destroying nature. The digitized images in Osmose/Ephémère confront the unconscious psyche and facilitate an osmotic merging or intermingling of out- ward and inward dynamics, namely between exterior nature or world and interior self. Sensations play an important role in the experience of such immersive virtual art, and it is through these sensations, particularly when confronted by the artifici- ality of a virtual 3D nature, that one may realize a greater appreciation of actual nature. In orthodoxy, the need to achieve personal saintliness on earth is, ideally, not supposed to occur through a subjective descent into sensations, but rather through objective reflection on the human condition

Adding Substance to Digitality

We ought to recall at this point how frustrated Char Davies was in the early 1980s when she could not effectively represent her concept of ‘osmosis’ in her two- dimensional art, particularly when she could not depict how self could penetrate an enveloping environment and vice versa. Accordingly, she sought to go beyond the limits of two-dimensionality by exploring 3D digital technology. She ended up depicting, through this new technological medium, an osmotic reality where the elements of nature can penetrate one’s very pores. Davies never refers to her 3D portrayal of nature as a vehicle of essentiality in her writings. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, Davies’ idea or concept of osmosis is not limited to a narrow version of self and nature, but embraces the much larger horizons of self, nature, and all beings in the physical world. Paradoxically, because she chooses to use the symbols of nature to depict the idea of osmosis, she achieves her goal more efficiently than she would have had she used other non-natural elements that could not strike such an immediate emotional response in immersants. For example, Davies might not refer to what I am calling the essence of nature as life flow. She has put it this way:

I certainly would never call it [life flow] God and I don’t see it in Christian terms or in terms of any of the traditional religious systems I know. It is that life flow, an awareness of being immersed in that extraordinary life flow, that I wish to communicate to others.13

We cannot pretend that Davies is purporting to accomplish anything as grandi- osely temporal and spiritual as icon painters aspire to. She does not purposefully begin her project with the idea of producing a digitized hypostasis, one that represents nature’s essence; still, her idea of ‘life flow’ connotes a sense of spirituality that is Buddhist or Eastern in persuasion. Nor does she contrive to entice a 62 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art person, immersed in her computer-based art, to enter into a transcendent ‘other worldliness,’ although in many cases such a transcendent experience happens anyway. So, is Davies’ goal substantially different from that of the icon painter? The icon painter wants to both ground you in reality and open windows onto a human nature that contains within it this otherworldly divinity. Davies, on the other hand, takes a person into the heart of a digitized three-dimensional spatiality and invites her to physically experience a spatiality that turns out containing within it overtones of the transcendent – a mind-altering experience in its own right. She does not achieve this by praying, like the icon painter does; rather, she tells us, ‘it is a very solitary conversation I’m having with the universe.’14 One might think that icon painters and Davies would be opposed in their dynamic goals (2D inverted aspects versus 3D immersive ones), but on closer examination one finds, instead, that they are both bent on capturing and unconcealing essences that, like Heidegger’s, are embedded in earthly substance. Whereas the icon painter attempts to dissolve the boundaries between human and divine, Davies dissolves boundaries between ourselves and the elements of nature, or any other dualities that immersants might experience, something she refers to as the slip/sliding of the virtual and the real.15

I-It, I-Thou Dynamics

Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to describe what these two contrary but similar dynamic works of art achieve is to say that they introduce one to the ‘I- Thou’ or ‘I-It’ Buberian categories. Whereas the icon painter relies on the faith of the individual worshipper to fill in the I-Thou dynamics for him, Davies produces in us feelings for the natural world (I-It dynamics) by producing skeletal, semi- abstract, or ambiguous images of it and invites us to help fill in the I-It dynamics interactively. In effect, she is in a more difficult position then the icon painter because she needs to ‘digitize’ her version of ‘hypostasis’ in order ‘to suggest that the earth is our body, that we are one and the same.’16 Yet, although her working notebooks reveal that her art is influenced by the ideas of particular philosophers and poets, as well as her own, she cannot rely on immersants, or theatre viewers, to be cognizant of the philosophical dynamics she is trying to convey through these images. The immersive environment she sets up must experientially affect participants in such a way that they begin to question their perceptions of the artistic images they encounter in these remarkable new surroundings of virtual space and experience, the changing of psychological space in the sense meant by Bachelard.17

Artist as Conduit, as Translator

Davies’ art employs subversive dynamics that are well hidden by the novelty of the three-dimensionality of her work. As noted several times, she does not attempt to represent through her art a nature that is virtually real, but rather to depict an artificial nature quite different from real nature. Through the use of semi-transparency she achieves spatial paradox, which creates the ephemeral effects she desires: Substantial Essence 63 habitual notions of space are erased and objects melt into each other as well as into immersants (see plate BW-3). She puts it this way:

Another characteristic of my work is the semi-transparency of the visuals, whereby everything is soft and luminous. By enabling people to see through things, and float through them as well, I’ve tried to evoke a perceptual ambiguity of figure and ground – dissolving the culturally learned, habitually perceived boundaries between subject and object, inside and out – this has been an essential aspect of my work for a long time, beginning with painting. It’s another strategy for subverting the domi- nantly visual aesthetic in VR and 3D computer graphics which strives for ever greater photo realism or what I call hard-edged-objects-in-empty-space, reinforcing the Cartesian divide between dominating subject and passive object ... etc. I feel a great need to subvert these conventions ... because my experience of the world is other than this.18

While the icon painter tries to evoke feelings for a human nature that are related to divine nature, Davies, I submit, evokes feelings for an essence of nature. I need to be very clear here. This notion that Davies’ art acts as a conduit for an essence of nature is my own interpretation of her ‘life force,’ not hers. I interpret it this way because her use of nature’s elements permeates throughout both artworks, and her reverence for it is obvious. When she speaks about producing Ephémère, she points out how deeply she relates to the land she owns in Quebec that she has named Reverie,19 and how profoundly this land inspires her work. ‘Ephémère is very much this land, flowed through me and re-manifested in virtual space. It is a strange feeling.’20 She explains in another way:

Ephémère, in particular, is very much this land, not a literal representation, not its surface appearance but a virtual manifestation of the elements of the land, i.e., its flowing springs and creeks, its ponds, its trees and roots and rocks, its crumpling leaves in the fall, its waiting seeds in the earth, its nesting birds, its beaver, bear and deer – all as numinous presences – the flows and forces of the land coming through me. The artist as conduit, as translator.21

The Power of Virtual Space

The icon is supposed to keep a worshipper this side of heavenly space, bound to earth. Whether or not it succeeds is another story. In Osmose/Ephémère one is invited into and held captive in a virtual space, making it that much easier to eschew the mundane. The paradoxical, transcendent feelings produced of being physically present in virtual space can sometimes overwhelm the immersant. Despite the fact that the immersant rationally knows that these are just virtual images in three-dimensional space, the computerized work of art still mesmerizes, still tends to shift her into quite another sense of space/time. As one seemingly floats through aesthetically complex virtual environments, through a variety of forms that are mainly representative of nature’s forms, one is continuously tres- 64 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art passing on illusory grounds. As Grau points out, by utilizing potent digital technology artists working in the immersive arena can create images so powerful that subjects cannot distance themselves objectively from them; this kind of art threatens to become dangerous.22

Skeletal Essentiality

Why does the experience of transcendence occur at all? The most obvious reason is that we float in a novel sense of spatiality, an experience that differs from the three- dimensional spatiality we live in. Another reason is that in Osmose/Ephémère, the translucent, semi-transparent art forms appear to be dressed in a skeletal essentiality, a framework which gives them a formal, unearthly air. When we see the tree, for example, what we see is a tree created strictly out of a digitized mathematical essence.23 This essential quality, this skeletal, translucent, mathematical construction of the mundane, is part of all the images in all the worlds that Davies creates. Essentiality extends itself to some degree over the words in her text world, so that even the words seem clothed in its atmosphere. When I showed the tape of Osmose to an audience at the Canadian Learned Societies Conference in the late 1990s while reading them a paper that now, revised, constitutes part of chapter 3, a student in the audience during the question period commented that some of the frames featuring trees in Osmose conjured up images of bomb-blasted and blackened skeletal trees that she had seen in a previous session on ‘Art and the Holocaust.’ In Osmose there can, indeed, be a brief encounter with what seem to be skeletal trees that appear foreboding, that are dark and ominous (they are there, too, in Ephémère). Since these scenes are fortified with a strobelike lightning effect and flash by very quickly, I was surprised that the student had been astute enough, in one brief video flythrough, to hold onto these images. Still, contrary to the point she thought she was making, that the Osmosian tree represents an ominous negativity, what she was, in fact, confirming, was that the tree represents essence, and essence need be neither positive nor negative. It is simply essence which can be encountered through human feelings for nature or for the divine or, for that matter, anything else (e.g., redness).

Evoking Transcendent Feelings

While Davies stays within Aristotelian boundaries, meeting his criteria for representing temporal essentiality, an immersant, ‘high’ on the ‘tripping’ space of virtual reality, might believe herself to have experienced a transcendence into an essential spatiality filled with Ideal forms. Many who experience Davies’ works of art report such transcendent experiences, not necessarily because the nature they encounter is magically represented but most likely because of the virtual space they find themselves in. This spatial experience may coincide with previously imagined ideas of what transcendence into another worldly spatiality might be like. It is the reason why artists, whether creating cave art or immersive virtual art, deal with illusionary techniques whereby they attempt to entice a person to enter into the space of the artwork.24 Substantial Essence 65

Icon painters, as does Davies, do not wish to transgress into abstract Ideal domains. All they wish to do, in respect to the Ideal form, is to create openings in the mind while all the time keeping it bound to a temporal place where reflection on human nature, graced with divinity, can occur. Still, the icon’s dynamics, coupled with belief, with faith, can also evoke transcendent feelings in the worshipper, making her feel as though she had travelled to some heavenly spatiality. In this respect, both the icon and Davies’ virtual art do, indeed, tempt the worshipper or immersant to embrace God or nature as an Ideal form; in fact, the tree is often referred to by others and even by Davies herself as the ‘Archetypal Tree,’ which really draws on an inherited idea or predisposition toward imagining something Ideal but not real. John Baggley points out that in the construction of many icons, trees and mountain peaks are common:

The tree is a symbol of the Tree of life (Genesis 2:9; 3:24 and Revelation 22:1–2) and spiritual growth, while the mountain top, as in the Bible, is a symbol of an event of profound spiritual significance. Often these symbols are much distorted, as if to reinforce their symbolic function and their place in the whole visual language of iconography.25

Avoiding Ideal Domains

The depiction of nature is never intended to be realistic in Osmose even though the tree is undeniably a tree by virtue of its shape. Some might ask, why then is its skeletal translucency so enticing that it makes us think of an Ideal form of tree? While this impression may arise, Davies is, nonetheless, on Aristotle’s wavelength for she is artistically depicting only the essence of nature, attempting to digitally ‘paint-in’ nature’s essentiality (life force) rather than depict exact representations of nature. What easily leads her into these essential frameworks, I propose, is the fact that she is working with mathematical formulas and software programs that can produce virtual images that are very ethereal. Although the dynamics differ, the premise that both icon painters and Davies start from is that only an abstract or distorted version of either the unknown God or nature is to be depicted; thus the actual image of nature or Christ is never attempted. To always ‘paint-in’ abstraction is their goal. Neither the icon painter nor Davies wants to achieve a simulation of a virtual reality; rather they wish to create a false idea or conception, a misleading appearance, an unreality. Their works of art are not meant to create virtually real ideas of God or nature.

From Philosophical Concepts to Images

Unlike Plato, Davies begins from the perspective of philosophical concepts, rather than, as he does, with myths and pictorial thinking. He translated the dynamics operative in myths, which encouraged pictorial or illusionary thinking, into abstract thought.26 Her artistic endeavours focus on constructing images out of philosophical concepts although she does not intend to create myth. While Plato’s was an intellectual exercise that drew substantially on inherited mythological 66 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art structures, Davies’ three-dimensional art is influenced by philosophical concepts that are translated into 3D digitized images. She does the opposite of what Plato did: she attempts to convert philosophical categories to abstract images.27 In her early notes Davies describes how her intended artwork will be about trying to get immersants to see and experience the dynamics of certain philosophical concepts. She wants us to feel a life flow, as if the essence of nature could enter into our bodies and physically dissolve the boundaries between it and ourselves. She envisions the direction the visual elements will move in and how they will initiate encounters with us. Her life flow ends up depicted by the elements of nature, and these elements surreptitiously invite us to experience nature as ‘thou.’ Because of the immersant’s bodily participation in virtual art, it is possible to evoke an emotional state that could end up catapulting one into what has been termed by philosophers in the past as ‘an ecstasy of knowing.’ Granted I am pushing the envelope here a bit, but it is interesting to consider what is meant by ‘knowing’ through images rather than through reason. In the previous chapter, we saw that Heidegger perceived such a ‘knowing,’ in his concept of Dasein, as something already there, an essence ready to be uncovered by the human being. In the case of Davies’ virtual art such a ‘knowing’ would be the result of feelings that are evoked when nature’s essence is experienced through digitally produced 3D visual elements that float in virtual space. For example, one can compare the experienced dynamics of Davies’ art with that of the later Schelling, whose philosophical dynamics expounded negative and positive philosophy. Negatively, reason in Schelling’s later philosophy could only concede that it had come up against its own impenetrable theoretical wall. Positively, this wall of negativity effected a metaphorical quantum leap into a practical realm of existence. It required recognizing the real nature of God in the world, not an ideal form of God.28 Schelling, too, attempts to reintroduce substance to modern philosophy – bring it back to earth, so to speak. A similar experience is created through 3D virtual images when one is immersed in Davies’ Osmose. Even though reason does not encounter an Ideal Nature but only an essence of nature, the imageful encounters in Osmose can still confront reason with ‘Ideal’ skeletal forms that, left unexamined by the mind, could be interpreted by some as neoplatonic images. Granted, these neoplatonic categories of essence would probably never occur to an immersant during immersion and maybe never at all since most people are not trained in doing philosophy. But if one reads accounts of people’s immersions, one finds abundant evidence of philosophical expressions as they describe the images seen. The breakthrough – the leap beyond the categories of reason that could be hijacked in favour of idealizing nature – never occurs. The ‘ah-ha’ of insight slowly creeps into the mind of the immersant, usually upon reflection some days later, as the feelings for real nature instead of the mesmerizing 3D virtual nature encountered in virtual space take hold. True, I cannot endorse this ‘ah-ha’ experience as the great moment of ‘ecstasy’ that Schelling had in mind – in his case it was Divine Nature (God) that was suddenly revealed or known. Nor do I wish to suggest that every immersion in Osmose/Ephémère Substantial Essence 67 produces an earth-shattering event or ‘eureka’-type insight. Rather, immersion is an experience that evokes in some a renewed reverence for all of life. It is a truly philosophical experience of knowing for the first time spawned on the wings of immaterial images.

Different Dynamics, Similar Goals

At this point we need to summarize by refocusing once more on the icon’s dynamics and Davies’ 3D virtual dynamics and on how the artists achieve their goals of subversion. Thus we will ask again the question we left dangling above: why is it that both art forms succeed in depicting substantial essentiality despite the fact that they differ so radically in their use of spatial dynamics? If an icon painter were to bring a worshipper into a three-dimensional virtual reality where he could encounter an unknown God, it would defeat the icon’s intent. If Davies’ renditions of the elements of nature were real, she would never have aroused the feelings for being-in-the world which she did. Icons keep one out of virtual imaginary space, while immersive virtual art invites one to enter into it; yet we can access this-worldly essentiality through both of them because of the knowing that they evoke in us. Davies, dealing with known nature, and not with an unknown God, might not have succeeded in capturing the essence of nature, osmotically, had she continued to paint on a flat surface. True, her earlier two-dimensional works had already succeeded in partially suggesting a breakdown or erosion of subject/object boundaries, but only immersive virtual art afforded her the luxury of depicting osmotic dynamics kinetically. Her use of virtual nature in virtual space is unique because her philosophical agenda in respect to digital virtual images marches to its own drummer; no other artist I am aware of is doing anything like this. In this respect, Oliver Grau states:

Osmose is an art work whose status is gradually emerging. Notwithstanding the rather polemic references to kitsch and esotericism, Osmose does represent a signpost in the history of the media, like the films of the Lumière brothers or the early panoramas, not least because of its aesthetic utilization of new technologies of immersion and illusion.29

Nonetheless, the fact that the new technologies of immersion and illusion are sometimes intended to entertain, three-dimensionality is not used by Davies for sheer sensational, illusory entertainment, but with a sober goal in mind. Granted there are uses for virtual space that are educationally oriented which are evident in VR applications designed for military and medical usages – for example, for simulating airplane flying or immersion into virtual models of molecules or blood- streams in order to learn and even feel their structure more readily. These kinds of applications of virtual reality serve useful educational purposes,30 although video games can train the brain in adverse ways, something we will discuss in a later chapter. 68 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

John Harrison’s Programming of 3D

Having considered the construction of the icon and its subversive tactics, we need to examine at this point how 3D virtual computer images are created and what happens when they are presented to the visual system. In the immersive virtual art experience, the final product, a stereoscopic image, begins as two separate 2D images. When the participant is wearing a stereoscopic headmounted display (HMD), these 2D images are then reconverted into 3D by the visual brain. Funda- mentally, where digital images are concerned, the visual brain continues to process parallax images as it normally would. John Harrison explained it to me this way:

A simplistic explanation (though not complete) is that we project the 3D space through a 2D plane that is placed in front of each eye. Since each of these 2D planes are slightly offset from each other, we end up with a slightly different image. If we do everything right, your brain will fuse the two 2D images into a 3D image. You can also think of the back of the retina of the eye as an essentially 2D image plane. If we arrange for the correct 2D images to be projected by the eye onto the back of the retina, your brain will do all the rest and make you think you’re looking at a 3D scene ... So the space is always virtual; everything exists in the computer’s representation of 3D space, and we convert those 3D coordinates to the appropriate 2D images to create the sense of immersion.31

Harrison times the individual binocular images in order that the two images are received at exactly the same time so that very little disorientation occurs in brain timing, and the stereoscopic effect is instantaneous without time-lag distortion caused by mistimed images. This is not to say that some distortion does not occur, mainly because immersive art is digitally constructed. However, such distortion allows us a way of retaining a grasp on reality.32

Creating Computer Spaces: Programming 3D Computer Dynamics

Programming 3D immersive scenarios requires considerable knowledge and understanding of mathematics, geometry, and optics. Many 3D software programs (such as Softimage, Alias/Wavefront Explore, PowerAnimator and 3D Art Composer) are designed to automatically fill in the formulaic data necessary to create three-dimensional scenes and the volumetric 3D models within them, and of course to do much more. However, the fundamental human ability to think mathematically and logically and visualize objects in 3D ‘brain space’ is prerequi- site for anyone entering this field as a potential programmer. The ability to abstractly imagine spatial rotations – that is, to know how an object looks from every perceivable angle – is of paramount importance to a programmer working in 3D. It is a proven fact that men naturally excel in these imaginary spatial skills, doubtless the reason why the computer field abounds with male programmers, who, for a brief time in the 1990s, often became overnight millionaires if they happened to create an outstanding software program.33 Substantial Essence 69

Three-dimensional computer images depend upon the use of linear perspective. Unlike the inverted perspective of geometrical dynamics, which produces 2D icons meant to leap out at you, 3D geometry creates a perception of illusionary depth that invites you into its depths. This representation of depth became possible when we began to understand the laws of vision – that parallel lines appear to cross in infinity at a point called the vanishing point. In order to create the illusion of infinite space, the relationship between the eye, the vanishing point, and the plane of the canvas had to be understood and established. The discovery of perspective is attributed to Renaissance sculptor and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), although we ought to note that the precise notion of the vanishing point was not known by Renaissance artists. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries people believed that because of the discovery of these laws of perspective they could construct a realistic, objective world; that psychological space could be transposed onto mathematical space; that art could be raised to the level of science. Were Brunelleschi to visit us today he would probably agree that our technological artists have accomplished this feat. They create virtual worlds that can be very real; they immerse us into a 3D space created out of mathematical grids that not only represents infinite space but often, as I have been arguing here, feels transcendent from the perspective of the immersant.

Headmounted Displays (HMDs) and Optical Systems

Understanding the laws of vision has allowed us to construct artificial optical systems that immerse us in virtual reality. Constructing optical systems that repro- duce infinite depth is possible because our eyes see the world from slightly different perspectives (this is referred to as binocular parallax). The sense of depth depends on this slight difference, and even if all other depth clues were removed, because of binocular parallax, our eyes would still be able to discern a depth field. There are, of course, other depth clues such as the accommodation of the lenses of the eyes – the ability of the eyes to converge slightly inward. The eye can also guess the size of an object far away because it can compare it with a similar object that has been stored by the visual brain for just such comparative purposes. Optical effects were known by Aristotle and the Chinese, who observed that when sunlight came in through an opening in a wall into a darkened room it projected a small upside-down image of the outside, inside. To facilitate such projection optical devices were invented using mirrors and lenses or both and existed as early as the sixteenth century. The camera obscura was the forerunner of the camera. In the eighteenth century the camera lucida was invented and is still used today by artists who wish to make a virtually real copy of their subject matter. David Hockney argues in a recently published book, Secret Knowledge,34 that certain artists such as Ingres, Moroni, Bronzino, van Dyck, and Giorgione, to name a few, used the camera obscura or lucida to represent the world around them as virtually real. They painted remarkable, lifelike portraits that were for the most part perfect in facial perspective and expression, wearing beautifully and intri- cately patterned clothes. Hockney, an accomplished draftsman and painter, believes that optical aids were used to achieve these effects and writes that it would 70 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art have been virtually impossible for someone to paint such masterpieces just by ‘eyeballing’ the subjects, by which he means looking at and then drawing what one sees. He offers many proofs to support his thesis, which some disagree with. Proofs we cannot go into here.35 The camera lucida is still used today and the virtually real 2D paintings produced through it are like photographs. Mirrors are used to create a reflected image of the subject. When an artist looks down through the head of the instrument he can use optical accuracy to create drawings which display convincing realism. With one eye the artist looks at the scene and with the other through the prism of the device at the sheet of paper he is drawing on. He sees the image he will be creating as a translucent overlay on his paper or canvas. The 3D images produced through digital technology are today’s paramount ‘optical device,’ capable of creating the ultimate virtual reality, although as with Davies’ art this is not always the goal. The two technologies cannot be compared except to say that in both cases artists are using the technology available to them to try to create representations that are, or can be seen as, virtually real. Today, as already pointed out above, most HMD optical systems are constructed with a pair of screens made with a combination of lenses or mirrors which can be as close to the eyes as 50–70 mm. By means of these two screens, two 2D images can be projected, enabling the eyes to see two minutely different scenes at the same time that when seen together create stereoscopic depths. Because the stereoscopic fusion of images takes place within the brain, an impression of depth is created. A digitally produced stereoscopic image on a book’s page forces a viewer to converge or diverge his or her eyes, sometimes painfully, and many cannot acheive this unaided stereovision. In the optical systems designed for HMDs, by contrast, the stereoscopic effect imposed on the visual brain happens effortlessly.36

Programming 3D in Osmose and Ephémère

A software programmer such as John Harrison begins by visualizing objects in virtual space. He imagines the centre of the eye’s pupil as the point from which to draw a line to a particular position in virtual space. He creates two positions for each object, one for each eye, to produce 3D stereoscopic images.37 As already noted, he is careful about timing his images so that when two images with different content are being produced he holds one back to allow the other to catch up and both to be transmitted to the eyes at exactly the same time. Harrison focuses on timing the images closely. This manoeuvre, he explained to me, differs, for example, from the IMAX system, where images are purposefully mistimed to produce another type of desired effect.38 Readers should appreciate that, in the early 1990s, the processes involved in producing the required images were very complex. In order to process 3D graphics in real-time for Osmose and Ephémère, a Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine2 employed three graphic pipes. The first two pipes sent images independently to each eye at 20–30 frames per second.39 The third pipe, dedicated to real-time stereo projection (intended for the viewing audience in the theatre, as was the case for the earliest exhibitions of Osmose), had to incorporate both views that the immersant Substantial Essence 71 was seeing. Because this third pipe needed to process two sets of images (one from each eye) it could only operate at half the speed. Thus the third pipe processed the images the immersant saw at 10–15 frames per second or at half the speed that the immersant was seeing. In the 1995 exhibitions of Osmose, the 3D virtual images seen by the immersant in the HMD were projected into the theatre by two separate video projectors so that the viewing audience could also watch a stereoscopic image that was made possible by the wearing of 3D glasses. In later exhibitions this stereoscopic theatre viewing was abandoned.40

3D Virtual Images and the Visual System

What we know about the visual brain’s operative dynamics is aptly described by neurologist Semir Zeki, whose work on the subject is well known and which we will encounter again in a later chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that it is the visual cortex which measures and mathematically creates the images that are being seen by an individual. In the case of artificially produced images (and here I follow Zeki’s thesis on art and vision which will be explained below) we would need only to activate the visual cortex’s automatic measuring equipment and not the cognitive part of the visual cortex that deals in judgment, comparison, and memory. As in a dream, virtual images, if they are abstract instead of virtually real, leave the eyes/brain with little cognitive work to do; all one has to do is watch what is unfolding. The visual brain is charged with mathematically calculating the information and converting the 2D images into 3D virtual images, allowing them to descend ‘the royal gateway from the retina to the visual areas.’41 If Zeki’s thesis is correct, when the cognitive part of the brain is not activated, the digital experience generates a dreamlike quality similar to that experienced in dreams and in drug-induced visions. Focused on the tiny screens in the HMD helmet, the eyes end up seeing three- dimensional images that do not need to be identified cognitively, or as Zeki points out in respect to 2D art, they do not need to be cognitively compared to anything in memory because they are not real but abstract images. He opines that in experiments with recognizable natural objects and abstract objects, the abstract objects ‘seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes.’42 With the unreal virtual artwork in Osmose, the mind has no ‘dispositional image’43 available to it against which to compile the image of, say, the archetypal tree. The only dispositional image it has is one of a real tree. According to this logic (and this would have to be confirmed through research), the visual brain would store this new digital image for dispositional comparison and retrieval at some future time.

Controlling the Visual System

No adequate scientific information yet exists about how artificially created 3D virtual reality images might manipulate the visual brain, or for that matter how inverted iconic perspectives do. We know, however, that the visual brain engages in complicated mathematical/geometrical/optical calculations to decide an object’s 72 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art distance and analyses countless mathematical formulas just to determine the owner of a face. So with 3D virtual images projected inches away from the retina I think it is safe to proffer that the visual system is responding to them in some unique way that still needs to be addressed neurologically.44 By substituting illusionary images for real ones, virtual reality images probably interfere with a person’s visual processing system in some way. Artists from the Renaissance era up to today have been masters at manipulating the eye through their geometrical constructions, whether 2D or 3D. Two- dimensional iconic images control the brain through moderate manipulation of the visual system, but not enough to distress the visual brain. Digitally produced 3D virtual images, superimposed on the visual system, create time-lag distortion because they interfere with natural image processing. Some degree of time lag occurs because of the difficulty involved in synchronizing stereo images that are computer-fed into the headmounted display. What we know at present is that immersants’ visual systems are very sensitive to the processing of stereo images. Digitally produced images, distorted by even the slightest mistiming of stereo images, can be misappropriated by the brain – that is, stored (wired) in a manner that later interferes with the retrieval of naturally made images – something that Michael Heim writes about in his books and articles.45 How a computer’s mistiming of stereo images, amplified by a simulta- neous deliberate distortion of images, affects the visual system we cannot say for sure. There is evidence, however, that purposefully abstracted images help the visual system process time-lag distortions more efficiently, allowing the brain to better identify them as virtual images and to store them as unreal.

Disorienting Experiences in Virtual Reality

In considering the disorienting phenomenon in immersive virtual art, Howard Rheingold writes about his own experience in a virtual reality scenario as he suddenly comes face to face with a computerized version of himself:

The strangest moment was when Dr. Tachi told me to look to my right. There was a guy in a dark blue suit and light blue painted shoes reclining in a dentist’s chair. He was looking to his right, so I could see the bald spot on the back of his head. He looked like me, and abstractedly I understood that he was me, but I know who me is, and me is here. He, on the other hand, was there. It doesn’t take a high degree of sensory verisimilitude to create a sense of remote presence. The fact that the goniom- eter and the control computer made for very close coupling between my movements and the robot’s movements was more important than high-resolution video or 3D audio. It was an out-of-the-body experience, no doubt about it.46

Computer scientist Frederick Brooks, Rheingold reports, has several concerns that are related to simulation in general:

First, although the educational value of simulation is very high, because it is ‘learning by doing,’ many phenomena require firsthand experience in order to know the difference between theory and practice. He is also concerned that as VR simulations Substantial Essence 73

grow more realistic, their potential for being dangerously misleading also increases. No model can ever be as complex as the phenomena it models, no map can ever be as detailed as the territory it describes.47

As Brooks puts it, there is a need to understand the difference between a virtual reality scenario’s apparent realism and its truthfulness. He emphasizes the problem originates when one attempts to copy a phenomenon and make it as real as the actual one. The Greek church fathers as well as Plato also objected to copies that represented the real.48 Icon painters and Davies get around this problem by abstracting or distorting their images (and Davies the sound too). They do not attempt to copy anything; they intuitively seem to understand the role abstraction/distortion play and they avoid creating ‘perfect’ images.49 Well aware of the significance of ‘virtual abstraction,’ Davies has her team work and rework visual elements to meet her subversive artistic goals. The upshot of all this is that whether viewing icons or virtual art, the brain is not asked to substitute or conflate the virtual image with the real image. In fact, the brain is always being reminded that the virtual image should not and cannot be substituted for reality.

The Power of Distortion

French hologram maker Yves Gentet, who has perfected the art of holographic photography, framed a holographic portrait of his father only to find himself disturbed and unable to sleep with his father’s head next to him in a box.50 Alvy Ray Smith, another expert in simulation, gets around this dilemma by ‘stylizing his characters.’ He advises that unless we can simulate life exactly, so that the simulation looks flawlessly human, we should stylize the character: ‘a creature that’s almost human looks intensely disturbing.’51 He has learned through experience that moderate or only slight distortion of representations of the human being achieves disturbing results in the viewer, while more obvious or blatant abstraction does not. If Osmose/Ephémère are any indication, it appears that abstraction of images does work to alleviate possible disturbing results. Distortion (or, as Davies calls it, ‘perceptual cognitive ambiguity’), created by the deliberate abstraction of images, appears to help the brain in processing images as unreal. A three-dimensional scenario purposefully constructed with images that speak to the unreal rather than to the real allows vision and thus the brain to store them as unreal (we shall discuss this in more depth in chapter 7). If Davies’ virtual elements of nature were processed as real by the immersant there would be no reflection at all about the value of nature-as-it-is. If the immersant were to continue to mix illusionary perspectives of nature with real nature, then immersion in a virtual reality nature would surely be dangerous. A great deal is demanded of immersants in any virtual reality situation if they are to stave off conflating reality with something unreal, particularly if they immerse themselves frequently in 3D scenarios. Because they are so artfully created, Davies’ essential but ambiguous images of nature can be very seductive. Had Davies attempted to simulate real nature, she might, indeed, have fallen prey to the dangerous aspects of Heidegger’s ‘enframing’ ground. 74 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Substantial Essence

In this chapter we have examined different aspects of two- and three-dimensionality and their ability to produce feelings of substantial essence. We used Davies’ digital art as a barometer and compared it with the icon and its depiction of the dynamics of hypostasis. Iconists would have us confront, in Christ’s face, a humanity that harbours divine nature, a ‘painted-in’ essence of the Being that can never be known. Davies, in her art, also manages to evoke substantial essence primarily because of her fascination with the natural world, whose elemental images permeate her work almost completely. There is a difference, however. Davies’ human–nature osmosis is interactively experienced during immersion, while the icon’s human–divine tango is passively experienced. Immersants are not simply confronted with images of nature that are unreal, but they are invited to interact with them. Whether or not Davies was aware of the positive feelings she would create by such bodily interaction with virtual images we cannot know. She, nonetheless, constructed her art to maximize the immersant’s negotiation of 3D space and the unreal elements within it. As noted in the first chapter, she always had in mind just how her 3D virtual images might interact with immersants. As a result, her dynamics do not just flow in one direction, as occurs with iconic dynamics, but in two directions. I submit that Davies succeeds with her plan to create osmosis between self and world; that immersants do respond to a substantial essence which flows into them and they into it. Feelings, and through them the negotiation of substantial essence, take on new meaning in Davies’ virtual art. Immersants benefit from this osmosis of being-in-the-natural-world, however unreal nature is in Osmose and Ephémère. No longer do immersants stand outside of the world of nature; rather, they can osmotically permeate its essence, which, at least in part, is what the artist set out to accomplish. In summation, then, substantial essence is seen by Heidegger as originating from an earth in a dialectical hide and seek with a world that both conceals and unconceals Being and its Truth. It is as though Heidegger wants to break through into the category of biology but cannot entirely shake off the inherited baggage of metaphysical elements, hence limiting his own framework of temporality and historicity. Even the iconist does not manage to leave metaphysical elements behind because of the hovering ‘ghostly’ essence of God in the personhood of Christ. Both Heidegger and the iconist flirt with biological grounds, leaving us suspended in categories of substantial essence that do not suggest anything to do with bodily feelings for essence. Only Davies’ immersive virtual art makes a transition beyond Heidegger’s temporal idea of essence and goes beyond the icon’s ideas of personhood. She surpasses them both with her idea of osmosis and presents us with an essence that is truly substantial since it is bathed in ‘molecules of emotion’ (something we discuss in depth in chapter 7), or as she might put it, bathed in all of life. In the next chapter, we examine the nature of the human psyche and its preference for up-down themes found in the historical mythology of humankind. The question we will ask is, does immersive virtual art such as Davies’ fall into these historical patterns, or is something else going on? Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 75 5 On Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’

Introduction

In this chapter we will address the essence of spatiality and two categories of space in Davies’ immersive virtual art. First is the space that must be navigated within the up/down dynamics that dominate both Osmose and Ephémère. (Horizontal dynamics are also present in these works, but they are less apparent sensorially.) Second are the feelings immersants experience in immersive virtual spatiality that changes their notion of space ‘forever.’

Mythological/Conceptual Space

Northrop Frye, who has been called the architect of the spiritual world, explains up/down dynamics from a mythological viewpoint that represents movement through an imaginative vertical universe. The space we encounter in mythological universes differs uniquely from mathematical and cosmological space and can be categorized as poetical, metaphorical, or dreamlike space. Frye does not concern himself with the idea of space in the mythological universes he describes. Mytho- logical and dreamlike spaces are not seen by him as operating against or within mathematical versions of absolute, abstract, or relativistic space. We, on the other hand, are going to concern ourselves with both genres of space, since they trespass on each other’s terrain when bridged by immersive virtual art. The dominant creation myth has caught humankind’s imagination for a reason. Such a myth explains that the world was originally created by a sky father rather than sexually reproduced by an earth mother.1 The reason this sky–earth schema pervades the human imagination, Frye tells us, is because it proffers the only plausible way out of the cyclic patterns of nature in which human beings are otherwise embedded. More optimistically, he theorizes that we may be on the brink of shifting our horizons to embrace some new myth, but he gives us no clue as to what this new myth might be. We can deduce, however, that it will not be bound to cyclic nature, although Frye does not speculate about this. I will not attempt to reiterate here Frye’s interpretation of the dominant creation myths (it makes fascinating reading). His hope, however, is that when we decode these up/down themes, when we unveil the reasons underlying our extant myths, 76 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art then we will authenticate the driving force behind them. Frye’s lifelong project was to show how myths continually break through their horizons and are repeatedly absorbed and recreated as new myths within the same underlying structure of up/down dynamics. If Frye is right and we are innately programmed to imagine these up/down motifs, then what is to free us from these embedded patterns? Indeed, will we ever be free of them? Perhaps Frye’s claim, that they are innate to the psyche, means just that: that they can never be overcome. He purports that these stories have been told with such intensity by humankind that even he wonders whether there is something more to them than sheer human imagination.2 Char Davies did not purposefully set out to pursue or develop up/down themes – one sees them evolve naturally in her writings and sketches, and later in her immersive virtual art, as though to prove Frye right. In an earlier chapter, we saw how she charted the dynamics she had in mind for her works, structuring them either vertically or circularly in drawings (plates BW-12, BW-13). Although there are no obviously circular patterns that participants are aware of during immersion in either work, circularity exists in the recurring images found in the horizontal, time-based planes and in the enforced circularity of the up/down motifs. Writing about Osmose, Davies states:

Osmose consists of nearly a dozen realms; of forest, pond, subterranean earth and so on, all situated around a central clearing. The spatial structure of the work has a strong vertical axis (rather than the conventional horizontal plane of most VR works) – amplified by the use of breath to buoyantly rise or descend. Vertically, there is a kind of spatial recycling, whereby if the participant ascends to the very heights of the space she will be returned to its depths, and vice versa.3

Having claimed in a previous chapter that Davies did not unwittingly become ‘a tool of technology’ but rather intended through her technologically based art to subvert its mainstream use, we will now show how she is also involved with yet another dynamic, one that is innate to the human psyche. My claim is that Davies has discovered a physiological way into the heart of these innate up/down spatial dynamics that might turn out to be the breakthrough we need to leap out of the old and into the new imagination that Frye talks about. In order to understand how these up/down themes work in Osmose and Ephémère, dynamically and physiologically, we need to revisit them more fully.

Constructing Space in Osmose

As already noted, the opening scenario in Osmose presents one with a Cartesian three-dimensional grid. This immerses a person into a space that is perceived through mathematical prisms, initially alerting the cognitive part of the brain. The lines one sees extend into infinity, both horizontally and vertically, against a background environment of artificial light that is visually jarring. Since one has to start somewhere when one begins a project like this, a mathematical spatial grid is as good a starting point as any.4 The sharply lined opening scene more than Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 77 adequately provides the right contrast for the soft, translucent, edgeless scenes that follow. John Harrison explains the grid scene, upon which he later superimposed a forest scene (plate C-4), this way:

The grid at the beginning of Osmose was not necessary for the work – in fact, I had to create it using a different technique than I used for everything else! But it’s meant to evoke the idea of 3D Cartesian space, which dissolves into the more interesting and abstract space that is Osmose. Something that is a little confusing is that ‘under the hood’ we do use Cartesian coordinates for everything in Osmose and Ephémère – but I try to create the illusion for the viewer of it actually being some sort of non-Cartesian space (by doing things like having objects that are further away appear to move in front of objects that are closer, for example).5

Personally, when I first experienced virtual spatiality in Osmose I thought that my odyssey was one-directional – that I was only ascending to the different worlds I was encountering. I seemed not to notice that the descents were there, too. In fact, I confess that some time went by before I could appreciate Davies’ referral to some of these worlds as ‘underworlds’ or ‘subterranean’ worlds because the worlds in question were quite beautiful and hardly evocative of what I imagined a subterranean world to be. To me an underworld was something that belonged to the descent of Christ into hell, to Dante’s hell in the Divine Comedy, or to Persephone’s descent into the netherworld. The underworld was dark, evil, undesirable, and ominous. The first scene one encounters in Osmose after the mathematical starkness of the three-dimensional grid is a Clearing in which one drifts toward a glorious version of the ‘cosmic tree’ (as I like to refer to it). This scenario almost immediately disengages the left hemisphere, plunging one into dreamy worlds, and almost instantaneously engages the right hemisphere. Once within the Clearing, Davies writes,

the immersant will soon realize she has entered a non-Cartesian place, very unlike the ‘real world’: here, everything is dematerialized and semi-transparent – there are no solid surfaces, no hard-edges, no separate objects in empty space. Instead the immersant can see through everything – through the body of the tree, through the ground, the roots below.6

One floats into subsequent worlds by shifting bodily direction and concentrating on breathing. Hence one can float into a Forest, finding oneself amidst a canopy of leaves, and even enter the leaf itself. It was more difficult for me to go up than it was to go down in these realms, presumably because exhaling took me longer than inhaling, which meant that more descent took place during my journey than ascent.7 If a person does manage to control breathing and remain still while in the Tree world, the great cosmic tree mesmerizes her by its magical presence. When my attention was not sufficiently focused on breathing, I floated downward, eventually to encounter the more than 78 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

20,000 lines of John Harrison’s customized Osmosian code. It, along with computer-produced sound composed of phonetic sampling of male and female voices, playfully interrupted my right-brained reveries.

Assaulting the Senses

What does it mean to find oneself suddenly grounded in an underworld made up of scrolling walls of green-lit software code, the lines of code producing all the images one sees in the artwork? To the creator of the work of art, the code is what runs the artistic production. It has been introduced purposefully as one of the worlds in Osmose to remind people that computer code is foundational to such immersive virtual art, that it creates Osmose with all its resplendent images. We must extract ourselves physically from this codified ground by a lot of deep inhaling in order to free ourselves from its ‘conceptual grasp.’ The significance of the meaning of this descent into the cognitive dimensions of the mind manifests itself (at least to some) in the conscious wish to leave the realm of code. We struggle with inhaling in order to ascend into the imageful worlds that we know await us somewhere above in digital space. The desire to leave the noisy cognitive brain behind, to soar instead into silent, symbolic worlds was pivotal for me. After my descent into the realm of Code, the next world I ascended to was an unexpected Text world. The philosophical and poetical words, appearing as walls of text, spread out to infinity, in all directions up, down, and horizontally. However appealing words can be to a literary person such as Frye, words can also assault the senses, particularly when one has been negotiating images and expects, perhaps, the image of the tree to reappear. But if words are not exactly what some immersants wish to encounter, others relish these realms of Text and Codes. Joseph Nechvatal, in his dissertation on immersive virtual spaces and virtual reality idioms through the ages, describes his impressions of the Code world in Osmose this way:

The deepest, and most aesthetically satisfying (for me), substratum is Code World, where the 20,000 lines of ‘C’ code of which Osmose is constructed rise up in great columns. Osmose is exemplary in that it attempts to explore the inter-relation between exterior nature and interior self.8 (plate C-6)

Technically, the ascent into the realm of Text happens the way it does because there is no other way for the program to run smoothly, John Harrison, the code writer, explained to me. Once the immersant reaches the ‘bottom’ of the work, it automatically cycles her to the ‘top’ realm again.9 Davies chose the realms she wanted, relegating the upper stratosphere to the Text realm and the substratum to the Code realm. While in the Text world, she once explained to me, if one breathes in very deeply, one can experience being ‘cycled’ into the deepest depths of the subterranean earth, where one finds oneself suddenly underneath the Code world looking up. Unless alerted to what is going to happen beforehand, the immersant is literally taken by surprise by the Text world. The cognitive mind, somewhat mollified by an environment of images, is suddenly snapped to attention and forced to decipher what is going on during this ascent, which provokes areas of the mind where Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 79 reason resides.10 Harrison’s computer formulas and Davies’ selection of philosophical or poetic texts end up cradling the translucent worlds of nature, keeping us outside of it, if only temporarily. Many immersants respond by inhaling deeply to exit these worlds, as I did, in an attempt to expedite entrance into dreamlike stratospheres. Some people, it would seem, are naturally attracted to ethereal, resplendent, imageful environments.11

Digital ‘Mythological’ Dynamics

Although, Osmose may not have been conceived deliberately to emphasize dynamics of ascent and descent, nevertheless, it ends up doing so because of the breathing requirements which take one either up or down into the different life worlds. But rather than go down to a mythological underworld fraught with disdainful monsters and other unappealing beings, in Osmose one goes down into an underworld of Code. In the same way that Dante wanted us to develop a healthy aversion to the fires of hell, so, too, Davies forces us to leave behind the Code or Text worlds that unwillingly bind them to the cognitive parts of their brains. In lieu of meeting underworld demons and devils that prevail in other epochs’ imaginative mythological descents – creatures we need to defeat to move forward psychologically – in Osmose we are introduced to another kind of survival test, one more fitting for the mythology of our times. In the depths of the cave we meet a formerly unknown ‘monster,’ digital mythology, the code responsible for the mesmerizing, ethereal artistic forms of Osmose. But what are we to make of the ‘digital dragon’ that creates them? Frye reminds us that dragons must be slain in Christian mythology if we are to rise, spiritually, to an upper world.12 So, is this journey to the ‘underworld’ of Code necessary (in the sense that Frye expounds) in order to open the mind to later ‘transcendent feelings’ experienced in upper worlds? As one immersant writes, ‘Still, the code jolts one back into a reality ... but while the code reminds me that Osmose’s “natural world” is a technological construct, I desperately wanted to return to the seductive images above.’13 Nowhere does the artist profess that there is something other than a realm of Code that she aspires to depict – her project has no overtures that point to anything as intentional as transcendence into a heavenly spatiality. Indeed, what is fascinating about Davies’ artistry is her interest in stressing the positive value of the subterranean zones because in her view they help us relate to a sense of spatiality that is not necessarily otherworldly (in a transcendent sense) but different. And so, in the subterranean worlds (except for the Code world), we can also find ourselves in translucent undergrounds that Davies describes as ‘aurally resonant populated by the ghostly forms of semi-transparent and semi-abstracted roots and boulders and luminous particle streams.’14

Ephémère’s Dynamics

Thus far we have concentrated on the up/down dynamics found in Osmose. They occur also in Ephémère’s three levels of worlds: Landscape (somewhat like the Clearing of Osmose), which includes Winterswamp and Spring metamorphosing 80 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art through Summer into Autumn (blooming, leafing, falling leaves); UnderEarth, which includes the metamorphosis of a germinating Seed, its fruition and decay; and Interior Body, with its metamorphoses into eggs, bones, and finally dust (plates C-12, C-13, C-14). The work itself is more sophisticated in its conception than Osmose because dominating its dynamics are the transitions of ‘coming into being, lingering and passing away’ (plate BW-14). This phrase, which Davies repeats often in her notebooks on Ephémère, and the imagery it evokes, is resonant with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. The metamorphosing images, much like Rilke’s words, are meant to simultaneously depict ephemerality and temporality. Because their boundaries blur into each other, these images create a sense of time that captures an eternal present. The difficulty of manifesting a sense of life’s ephemerality in a virtual environment as coming, lingering, fading away, should not to be underestimated. As Davies explains it,

throughout the experience [of Ephémère], various elements come into being, linger and pass away, the timing of their appearings dependent on the immersant’s position, slowness of movement, and steadiness/duration of gaze. A striking example are the dormant seeds which, when activated by gaze, allow entry into their blooming’s luminous space. The river (also underground stream or vein/artery) has a gravitational pull that propels the immersant along while randomly transforming the surrounding spatial realm.15

To accomplish this flux, Davies has made the horizontal dynamics in Ephémère time-based. Some events are choreographed so that diurnal/nocturnal and seasonal cycles continually transform, regardless of what the immersant does, while others, such as the germinating of the seeds or opening of boulders, are dependent on the immersant’s behaviour, particularly her gaze (plate C-11). In another example, as Davies explains, if one does not resist the ‘gravitational pull’ of the flowing river one encounters in the Landscape forest (plate C-9), one can float down with it, eventually arriving in the Interior Body, a world of pulsating organs, or in the subterranean earth. More so than in Osmose, where we float into scenes that await us like familiar stage sets, in Ephémère, it is as if we float through a complexly choreographed dance with everything in motion all the time, some of it oblivious to the immersant and some of it completely interdependent. Whether rock, boulder, or seed – opening, blooming, dying – these interior spatial realms are in the process of transforming, just as they are in nature (plate C-8). According to Davies, Osmose is like ‘a perceptually mesmerizing stage set’ and Ephémère ‘more like a virtual opera.’16 In Ephémère it is not likely that a person will encounter the same elements twice during an immersion; some immersants who have been in Ephémère dozens of times report never encountering identical scenes.17 For example, if one happens upon a seed floating in dark space, and gazes at it steadily, it will begin to flicker and swell, and one can enter into its blossoming and literally feel as though one is part of it, inside of it (plate C-10). In Ephémère as in Osmose, it is possible to cycle endlessly both horizontally and vertically either by letting oneself go with the Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 81

‘flow,’ participating in the various metamorphoses, or by actively controlling one’s breathing and delivering oneself into another vertical world.

Recurring Elements in Ephémère and Mythology

We should address at this point what Davies means, or does not mean, by the recurring elements of nature in her work. Nature to her is a phenomenon of the physical world, including plants, animals, and landscape, which sometimes appears to be distinct from human beings and the biology of ‘interior body.’ This can be confusing for people who include Homo sapiens as part of the ‘realm of nature.’ She confesses that she has never sought to ‘analyze the recurring elements in [her] works for fear of lessening their mystery.’ These themes include ‘landscapes with curved enveloping horizons’; ‘trees with branches and roots, some skeletally bare, others lush with leaves’; ‘subterranean realms of “under-earth” containing roots and streams,’ etc. (plate BW-15). She continues: ‘Other recurring elements refer to the “interior body,” including translucent body organs, luminous shafts of bones, and blood streams.’ Davies states: ‘Together, these elemental groupings, of landscape/ nature and interior body, express a primary theme in my work, that of the metaphorical correspondence or co-equivalency between body and earth.’ So, although Davies seems to distinguish body from earth, she also writes that these natural elements are meant to be ‘co-equivalent’ and representative of the ‘isness’ or ‘suchness’ we all share.18 Keeping in mind the literary mythological themes recounted by Frye in his appraisal of myth, to what degree can we determine whether the symbols we meet in Ephémère and Osmose are universal in content? From Frye’s analysis of literature we can pull out a few elements (symbols) in Davies’ works that recur in classical mythologies, such as the rivers and trees in Osmose and the seed and bones in Ephémère. Waters symbolize death and rebirth, while trees and seeds, cyclical regeneration. We could spend more time analysing all the elements and their symbolic values, but it is not really the symbols and their mythological values alone that are of concern to us, but the role they play in Davies’ up/down dynamics and how they involve us with the essence of spatiality.

Sanctioning Up/Down Dynamics

We have made much of these up/down themes so far, but what do they mean in Davies’ work? Up/down themes are there, suggesting that these dynamics came together for Davies intuitively, despite the computer’s in-built operative sequences and its ‘bottom-line’ flipovers to the top worlds. (We ought to note that Davies concentrates on the ephemerality of life and therefore focuses on time-based horizontal dynamics in Ephémère as much as on vertical up/down ones.) Even as early as 1974 she was painting scenes from below looking up (plate C- 2), confirming Frye’s claim that these kinds of up/down dynamics are inherent not only in cultures but in the psyche of individuals. And, of course, we must not forget the influence of the up/down dynamics that occur during scuba diving. As already noted, Frye advises that old myths continually break through their horizons and 82 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art are absorbed and recreated as new myths, while all the time retaining the same underlying structure – a kind of eternal rerun of up/down themes. He goes so far as to label this genre of dynamics that prevails in myths ‘formulaic units’ because they are predictable in their content. It is as though the imagination has no choice but to create stories that, although different in content, always consist of the same essential dynamics.19 Psychologically, descent myths have to do with losing one’s identity because in them consciousness is lowered as in a dream. Ascent myths have to do with recovering identity. Significantly, the sky father myth belongs to the descent series and in Frye’s view is concerned with establishing order, authority, and hierarchy.20 The descending sky father myth stirs up human psyches so that a recovery of identity can take place through an ascent. Frye explains that recovery of identity takes place through the recovery of a sacred myth, which, closely examined, proffers an intellectualized view of transcending into a spiritual or ethical life.21 He states:

At the bottom of the mythological universe is a death and rebirth process which cares nothing for the individual; at the top is the individual’s regained identity. At the bottom is a memory which can only be returned to, a closed circle of recurrence: at the top is the recreation of memory ... As we go up, we find ourselves surrounded by images of increased participation: with human society, in the festive endings of comedy; with nature, in pastoral and Arcadian imagery; with aspects of divinity, in myths of redemption. The conception of evolution is an ascending metamorphosis myth of this kind, attaching us to the whole family of living things.22

In Frye’s analysis of universal myths, as found in literature, in the Bible, and in cultural myths, he seeks to uncover the intellectual aspects of human nature as it cycles up and down and eventually individuates into a higher ethical life. These literary mythological ascents and descents are part of the imaginative, intellectual faculty and should be interpreted from this perspective. Because he presents his case from a literary perspective, Frye is inclined to focus on the importance of actions, on words and their meanings in stories, rather than on the feelings or emotions of the characters as they travel downward or upward in spatial ter- rains. The literary mythological imagination Frye presents us with operates as though outside of the body, engaging the ghostly body of the collective psyche instead. In Osmose and Ephémère something quite different happens. Yet Davies’ up/ down dynamics in Osmose strike themes that have beginnings and endings that resonate with Frye’s literary mythological universes in respect to odysseys intended to describe (1) descent and the establishment of order, and (2) ascent and the recovery of identity. For example, the descent into the Code realm conjures up the ‘establishment of order’ in the not-so-neutral patriarchal paradigm that Davies seeks to sublate – a realm which threatens our loss of identities to ‘enframement.’ Cycling into the highest realm of Text, one is confronted with a literary dimension, which infers the recovery of intellect. True, Frye’s literary world of mythology is very complex, and it would be nonsensical to compare it with the ‘digital mythological worlds’ that Davies creates. However, certain dynamics described by Frye, Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 83 coincidently, prevail here. In Davies’ work a participant can also testify to a momentary loss of identity that takes place during descent through the elements of nature, sandwiched between the Code and Text realms, as he loses his sense of self to the enveloping spatiality. The ascents and descents do, indeed, take one through mythological realms, but they have to do with the elements of nature and happen through the kinetic involvement of bodily instincts. And even when the intellectual faculty is engaged, there is always this feeling, this balancing, this suspension, in digital space, of body, which dominates. In Ephémère the emphasis is more on descent than ascent (at least this was my experience), and the narrative differs. There is a downward descent through the top world of Landscape into the UnderEarth and beneath this into the InteriorBody world. Floating even further down, one encounters a place, constructed of elon- gated crimson brush strokes, intended by Davies to suggest blood-red nerves or even thorns, which turn to green as one finds oneself cycled back into the upper realms of the Landscape world, and the cycle of descent begins again. The downward thrust of Ephémère and the symbols one sees on the way down signify the need to get in touch with the roots of everything biological on earth. In Davies’ view, the comings and goings, and in the end the disintegration of ‘Body’ into bones and dust represent a dissolving of human being into the Earth; it signifies that a kind of equalization, an entropy of being, has occurred. With the emphasis on nature there is a feeling that a disintegration of identity is underway as descent from Landscape into UnderEarth and Interior Body takes place. We do, indeed, lose ourselves in the comings and goings of the cycles of the natural world and in the ephemerality of life, as we find ourselves dissolving not into intellectual space but into this novel 3D space. Appropriately, a floating downward occurs naturally in Ephémère, allowing for any transcendent sense of spatiality to metamorphose into a full-bodied sensation that finds substance in the essence of space. This is not to say that Davies planned Ephémère to gain momentum downwardly (upward thrusts can also be achieved by breathing in, and for some people this is easy to do). Whether in Osmose or Ephémère, the physical experience of ascending or descending in 3D space, or just succumbing to it, and floating freely among its flows (e.g., there is a gravitational ‘pull’ programmed for the river), involves bodily impulses and sensations in a unique way that before the digital age could never have been imagined or experienced except through drugs or meditation.

The Bible and Heavenly Ascent

The Bible is renowned for its ascending/descending themes, and there is much speculation about why they prevail in early apocalyptic Judaism and Christianity. As a method of inducing trance, these ascents to God’s heaven offered ways of experiencing another spatial dimension, of soaring outside of time.23 The most familiar such stories recounted in the Bible tell of the heavenly ascent experiences of the prophets Enoch, Isaiah, and Moses. Some scholars maintain that these ascents simply constitute an imaginative retelling of dreams, and it is not difficult to acknowledge that today we can easily categorize as dreamlike the kind of spatial environment recounted by the prophets. One is also tempted to describe 84 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art these ascents into heaven, in modern language, as self-induced, one-of-a-kind, ‘virtual reality’ scenarios. Moshe Idel contends that Jewish mystics induced these visionary realms by lamenting and swaying themselves into dreamlike or trance- like states in order to produce these experiences and then recount the ensuing visions to their followers.24 Of course, if Frye is right, Jewish mystics would have had no choice but to produce this genre of mythological theme because the themes are innately embedded in the personal and hence cultural imagination of any era (e.g., consider the current up/down themes of being kidnapped by aliens).25 Frye puts it this way: ‘Everything man has that seems most profoundly himself is thought of as coming to him from outside, descending from the most ancient days in time, coming down from the remotest heights in space.’26 The Jewish mystic’s dreamlike state was achieved to a great degree by the act of controlled breathing (used also in yoga, Sufism, and fourteenth-century Hesychasm) during the recitation of combinations of the ‘ineffable Name.’27 (Curiously, in hekhalot texts, the heavenly ascent begins first with a descent to the Merkavah, which in Hebrew means chariot, throne, crown of God.28) The Enochian account of ascents to the different heavens are thought by some scholars to be one of the earliest accounts of transcendent experiences. Noteworthy is the fact that these were not necessarily described as ‘out-of-body experiences’ but as spatial experiences. As Margaret Wertheim points out, in Jewish mysticism there is a long tradition of associating God with space,29 a space that is not related to the later notions of space produced by mathematical imaginations. In the Bible, there are no systematic evolutionary stages of worlds that are reached; evolution is not the issue here. Of the seven worlds usually described, many of them are earthlike in their appearance and not necessarily progressively impressive or resplendent. The journey to the seven worlds always implies up/down dynamics (for example, in order to reach a world one often goes down into valleys as well as high up to mountain tops, with the terrain in many of the worlds described in earthlike terms). Only the last world is ‘heavenly’ and different from earth, confirming the sought-after beatific goal that occurs when the mystic is granted a vision of God on his throne. Later Jewish visionaries continued to embellish Enochian and Rabbinic Merkavah accounts while recounting their own versions of mystical experiences. Some of the heavens visited became more and more fantastic, with gloriously lit, crystalline temples that contained fabulously jewelled throne rooms – matching the imagination of any modern virtual reality set designer. When we examine the dreamlike immersive experiences of the early prophets and other Jewish mystics, some of their descriptions of how they experienced space are reminiscent of the experiences related by immersants in Osmose. In the same way that some Osmosian immersants breathe hard to leave behind the Code world that creates the very work of art they are immersed in, so, too, did the biblical voyagers, ascending to heaven from earth, to the world of God, work at breath control. If Idel is right and ancient prophets induced these dreamlike experiences, then perhaps they enjoyed travelling to heaven ‘on their wings,’ in the same way that immersants in Osmose enjoy ascending or descending into one of its realms. It appears that these ancient ‘immersants,’ like Osmosian immersants, Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 85 relished being in touch with that part of their nature that, I contend, gives access to an essential space, and makes one feel that one is entering the depths of a biologically eternal space and time. It is a feeling that is free from the control of the cognitive brain and the rule of logic and time. Ostensibly, if the mystical ‘ascents’ to heaven and the reported feelings of transcendence in Osmose are any indication, experiencing otherworldly bliss appears to be based on stimulating spatial imagination. Whether or not one concurs that the mystical ascents to heaven are based on unconscious desires to experience a spatial transcendence, one can still appreciate why the practice of this kind of mysticism was considered antithetical to the teachings of mainstream religions. Religious leaders, who preferred to intellectualize their ideas of God, worked hard to suppress this mythological or Merkavah-type imagination. As a result, in the West, both Jews and Christians drove forward the rational entrainment of the brain at the price of deeply embedding unconscious, spatially-biased religious feelings and sublating ‘the molecules of emotions,’ to use Candace Pert’s terminology.30

Breath-Controlled Trances

We could say, then, that these examples of travelling through space to generate ‘a heavenly experience’ that provokes dreamlike or transcendent dimensions, whether they are induced by a mystic’s breath-controlled trance or by an immersant’s breath-controlled trance, have everything to do with the body, with instincts, and with emotions. Candace Pert, a neuroscientist, whom we will meet again in a later chapter, believes that the flow of peptides throughout the body connects mind to body:

Conscious breathing, the technique employed by both the yogi and the woman in labour, is extremely powerful. There is a wealth of data showing that changes in the rate and depth of breathing produce changes in the quantity and kind of peptides that are released from the brain stem. And vice versa! By bringing this process into consciousness and doing something to alter it – either holding your breath or breathing extra fast – you cause the peptides to diffuse rapidly throughout the cerebrospinal fluid, in an attempt to restore homeostasis, the body’s feedback mechanism for restoring and maintaining balance. And since many of these peptides are endorphins, the body’s natural opiates, as well as other kinds of pain-relieving substances, you soon achieve a diminution of your pain. So it’s no wonder that so many modali- ties both ancient and New Age, have discovered the power of controlled breathing. The peptide-respiratory link is well documented: virtually any peptide found any- where else can be found in the respiratory center. This peptide substrate may provide the scientific rationale for the powerful healing effects of consciously controlled breath patterns.31

Delving into Bodily Instincts

Involving the body or ‘instincts of emotion’ in her artworks was a result of Davies’ deliberate choice to avoid using a device such as a joystick, or a hand-held game 86 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art controller, which is the most conventional method of user interaction in video games and other virtual reality art. She puts it this way:

This strategy, of having the immersive experience dependent on the intuitive visceral processes of breath and balance, was intended to counter conventional ways of navigating and interacting in virtual space. (Such techniques, by relying on hand- based devices such as joysticks, pointers or data gloves, tend to reinforce an instru- mental, dominating stance towards the world.) Our approach was intended to counter the medium’s bias with ‘a vision of the medium as a channel for communion rather than control.’32

Looking around for an alternative way to interact with space, Davies fortu- itously discovered the powerful effects of the interface vest. This breath/body participation would, along with a stereoscopic viewing helmet (HMD), provide immersants with a unique spatial sensation. To a great degree the breathing apparatus/HMD used to view Davies’ work reinforces dreamlike floating in both Osmose and Ephémère. Davies states:

Use of an HMD is a classic virtual reality method. The present cumbersomeness of such equipment has led many in the field to embrace other VR display methods such as rooms (known as CAVEs) where the graphics are displayed on walls: I however continue to believe that an HMD with a wide field of view is a more effective means of enabling a solitary participant to experience sensations of full-body immersion in an all-encompassing space. To me, the inconvenience of wearing such a device is minor given the spatial experience it provides access to.33

Digital Spatiality

The up/down themes in literature and the Bible are set against a backdrop of abstract spatiality. Davies’ art embraces what appears to be the same innate sense of up/down dynamics also set in an abstract spatiality; what is different is that these up/down dynamics are combined with feelings for space that are experienced as virtually real. It is as though Davies has travelled back in time and embraced a medieval sense of spatiality, one that is physical and spiritual in its dual connotations of terrestrial and celestial worlds.34 Simultaneously, she has brought forward a new concept of physical and spiritual space that has to do with neurobiology and the essence of space as the brain experiences it. In actuality, Davies’ immersive virtual art propels us into the future and puts us in touch with an essence of spatiality that transcends even the much-lauded, sophisticated aspects of a relative spatiality, foundational for mathematicians today. The inspiration for creating art in a different spatiality came largely out of her scuba diving experiences. The world she encountered beneath the waters enthralled her, and 3D digital technology provided her with the tools to convey the impact of her encounter with watery spatiality. This different sense of spatiality is what she wished to capture and not necessarily a spatiality that sought to evoke the feelings of transcendence that immersants report. Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 87

Indisputably, Davies’ idea to use breathing and balance as a motility device is quintessential in her work. It connects us instinctively to the biological spatiality within us, to a space profoundly different from the relativistic idea of space that today’s scientists espouse. If, as Frye argues, the artificial (sky father) up/down myth was meant to sublate the cyclic pattern of nature myths, then Frye would not have liked Davies’ interface vest because it reintroduces and reaffirms cyclical nature and negotiates a biological interaction with digital space. In my view, Davies’ is an important achievement because it can help us understand the role that innate feelings of space can play in counterbalancing the pragmatic conceptions of mathematical space that still rule our imagination and create our world. By focusing on the essence of spatiality we are bound to throw revolutionary light on the spatiality to be found in dreams as well as on the mythologically imagined spaces we have been addressing – extracting, perhaps, new energy and directions from them.

Feelings of Transcendence and the Essence of Spatiality

At this point, we must confront the issue of why so many people experience feelings of transcendence during immersion and why these feelings may better be described as feelings for an essence of spatiality. When mystics, yogis, and members of other religious sects practise precise breathing techniques, they do so in order to be transported to another spatial/spiritual realm, one more in line with ancient or even present-day aboriginal versions of ‘dream space.’ Immersants, on the other hand, with no training in any particular breathing technique, and after only fifteen minutes of immersion, also report mystical feelings of transcendence. In the case of immersants hooked up to a computer, their breathing and movement allow them to seemingly float and manoeuvre through artistically constructed realms of a spatiality that appears visually infinite to them in any direction. Three-dimensional space is an abstract concept. ‘The space is always virtual,’ Harrison reminds us, ‘until we convert those 3D [Cartesian] coordinates to the appropriate 2D images to create the sense of immersion.’35 The seemingly borderless, boundless space that immersants experience has dimension, depth, and width, only after Davies’ and Mauro’s 3D visuals are projected through a 2D plane that is placed in front of each eye. Harrison, responsible for this conversion, has explained (see chapter 4) how the brain re-fuses these computer-created 2D images into a 3D image in 3D space, hence creating the feeling that one is immersed in infinite space. It is as though idealized or abstract ways of relating to a ‘heavenly space’ take hold of an immersant’s imagination, as sensations of floating in infinite space take control. Neurological circuits, which have been trained to relate best to mathematical versions of space, are jarred into activating neural connections used, most likely, during dreams. Astronauts do not see space three-dimensionally when they circle the earth in their spaceships; rather, the sky, even though limitless, appears 2D to them because there is no horizon in space upon which the visual brain can focus in order to make space appear three-dimensional. Would this change an astronaut’s feelings of space? I cannot begin to speculate on this, although most astronauts usually admit 88 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art that their feelings for the universe or God have been changed by being in space. Perhaps this might have something to do with differentiating between abstract mathematical space and feelings for innate biological space. It could be that the feelings of transcendence experienced in Osmose, for example, take root at the outset of the odyssey and have something to do with the mathematical grid’s projection of infinite space. In and of itself, it is ironic that these strong feelings for space are produced by images constructed of mathematical formulas. In fact, the mathematical underpinnings of 3D virtual art can be compared to Heidegger’s perusal of mathematics through which he sought to explain what essence is. In comparing Heidegger’s essence of technology to Davies’ mathematically produced immersive virtual art in chapter 3, I aimed to examine whether the dynamics of technological essence were carried forth in Davies’ artwork. As though to condone the importance of the mathematical domain, we noted that the visual brain also operates geometrically and mathematically to assess, process, and sort all incoming visual information. Whether we see images in physical or virtual space, the processing of natural images and/or 3D virtual images through the visual system occurs in similar ways with both being in tune with the ‘mathematical essence’ of the universe. Without a doubt, mathematics and geometry play a key role in the processing of naturally or artificially produced 3D virtual images and speak to the universality of their nature.36 This mathematical and geometrical function of the universe as we understand it today is only part of the mystery. This aside, Davies’ art probably has more to teach us about the essence of spatiality then any other essences we might encounter in traditional art. Just like the ‘artists who found a way to give coherent meaning to the idea of an extended physical void,’37 so, too, does Davies venture onto new grounds with digital spatiality. Like Renaissance painters, her main inspiration has been how she sees the world. Central to the linear perspectives of Renaissance art is an artistic perspective that wishes to reflect the world perfectly. Not so with Davies’ far from visually perfect perspectives. She puts it this way:

Many of the strategies and aesthetic principles I have employed in my work are grounded in my own physiological experience of vision. My eyes are extremely myopic (at –17 ‘diopters,’ in layman’s terms they require a thickness of 17 corrective lenses to see the world in focus with the same 20/20 ‘Mc-vision’ [as in McDonald’s] acuity like everyone else). When ‘uncorrected,’ through prescription lenses, I encounter a radically different spatiality in which normally perceived boundaries between objects and surrounding space are dissolved in light. Here all semblance of hard edges, all sense of solid-surfaced separate objects, all distinctions between things, including figure and ground, near and far – the usual perceptual cues by which we objectify the world – simply disappear, dissolved into an ambiguous enveloping spatiality of soft, semi-transparent, intermingling volumes of varying hues and lumi- nosities.38

In almost every aspect of her work and in all her writings, Davies re-emphasizes the importance of creating images with no sharp edges or hard boundaries that Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 89 are characterized by translucent ambiguity. (Davies explained to me how because of her myopic vision, she actually also feels the space she sees as blurry.)39 Ostensi- bly, her eyes play a pivotal role in her immersive virtual art. She dares to use her less-than-perfect vision to paint what she sees. (She is not alone here – other artists have also confessed to painting what they see with weak vision.) Davies writes:

We use transparency and luminous particles to ‘desolidify’ things and dissolve spatial distinctions. When the immersants move within the space, multiplicities of semi-transparent three-dimensional forms as well as abstract foreground ‘flecks’ combine to create spatial ambiguity and slippages between figure and ground, near and far, inside and out.40

Viewing the world myopically inspires her to create layers upon layers of translucent objects floating through space; streams of luminous particles; abstract symbols representing underground roots, rocks, boulders, seeds, blood, bones, and so on. Space is not something to be taken for granted in such work – it becomes an enveloping virtual place within which one can float and interact with the art itself. Davies states:

In Osmose and Ephémère, the immersants can unexpectedly experience floating, levita- tion, and seeing and passing through things. The unusualness of this creates room for other modes of perception: Instead of the mind being on autopilot, it begins to pay attention – in the present, to what is unusual and unknown.41

Astronauts, as we have noted above, are quick to proclaim any ‘feelings for the transcendent’ that they may have had during their sojourn in space. Many claim that they are changed forever by the experience. Immersants do not make claims of the latter sort but they do testify to what amounts to ‘feelings of transcendence.’ Despite the differences between the cosmic space experienced by the astronauts and the virtual space experienced in immersive virtual art, the transcendence reportedly felt while in these vibrant theatres of space can have only one common foundational element: a shared experience that evokes an essence of spatiality embedded deep within the brain. (In later chapters we will explore the dynamics of vision and spatiality in the hopes of throwing more light on why feelings of transcendence occur in virtual space.)

Davies’ Descent into Bodily Instincts

Davies’ descent into bodily unconsciousness constitutes a fascinating example of the evolution of her artistic desire to express what she instinctively feels is the right epochal direction to move in by intentionally involving the subjectively experienced physical body in her art. We know by her own account those thinkers who have kept her company. No doubt the deconstructionist movement, and its preoccupation with an absent, abstract (feminine) body, has also inadvertently played a role in her artistic endeavours. The involvement of the body in her immersive works of art, however, emerged in a unique way and surpasses deconstructionists’ 90 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art abstract views of body and spatiality. Davies’ art presents us with a way to retrain the willful Western mind. It is a retraining that allows the mind to grasp longed-for lost dimensions of itself that are found in an essential spatiality deep within our brains. Maurice Blanchot describes how he perceives such an essential spatiality by quoting from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus:

Space exceeds us and translates things: That the tree’s being may succeed for you, cast around it the inner space, that space which announces itself in you. Surround it with restraint It [Il] knows not how to limit itself. Only in taking form from your renunciation does it truly become a tree.

Blanchot continues to explain his ideas of space by searching out comings and goings in the space of poetry (e.g., Orpheus seeking out Eurydice):

The space where everything returns to deep being, where there is infinite passage between the two domains, where all [tout] dies but where death is the knowing companion of life ... where celebration laments and lamentation glorifies – the very space toward which ‘all worlds hasten as toward their nearest and truest reality,’ the space of the greatest circle and of incessant metamorphosis – this is the space of the poem. This is the Orphic space to which the poet doubtless has no access, where he can penetrate only to disappear, which he attains only when he is united with the intimacy of laceration [déchirure], which makes him a mouth without understanding, just as it makes him the one who hears and understands the weight of silence. The Open is the work, but the work as origin.42

Unlike the space of poetry, where according to Blanchot we disappear, we do not disappear when we enter into the space of either Osmose or Ephémère. Through it we experience new dimensions of spatiality; through it we find a spatiality deep within our bodies that confirms space in a way that poetry cannot. I have argued here that in the process of making our bodies an integral part of the dynamics of the artworks, of ‘embodying’ Osmose and Ephémère, so to speak, Davies has also incorporated many of the natural narrative dynamics inherent in the human psyche, such as the up/down themes we have focused on in this chapter. Frye believes these themes – repeatable mythological themes – are embedded forever in cultural story patterns.43 If Frye is right, Davies is revisiting a mythological sense of spatiality by using the same genre of dynamics that the artist/poet has always used in the past.44 But is Frye entirely right about these formulaic mythological dynamics or has he provided us with too narrow and masculine a viewpoint of the spiritual meaning underlying these up/down themes? Granted the psychological authenticity of ascent/descent themes, would Frye’s viewpoint adequately describe what Davies has accomplished in her digital mythology? Should we acknowledge the authenticity of these digital up/down themes by recognizing that they represent more than just an abstract sense of innate but, rather, that they are also innate because they so easily integrate with our instincts? Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’ 91

The Body Entraining the Brain

An artist engaged in creating immersive dynamics appears to have opened up the possibility for bodily entrainment of consciousness in a way that was never possible before. She asks us to participate in, to recreate with her, an ongoing artistic endeavour at every instant. She links immersants not only to herself and her art but to each other because of the way she has ‘hoodwinked’ their bodily instincts and enhanced their experience of space. The body, in this immersive experience, is no longer just a vehicle in which consciousness resides, or out of which consciousness controls reality; rather, it is a body interactive with computer dynamics. Together they control the visual dynamic going forward and the continual reinven- tion of the art itself. Osmose/Ephémère take us into digitally created mythological worlds that incorporate and engage bodily instincts because of the computer’s ability to create an immersive environment for us. As an immersant responds to the 3D environment so, too, does the computer respond to these responses. Again, the entire dynamic has to do with the merging of computer and bodily instincts. Together, computer and human instincts create for vision, almost, but not quite instantaneously, real- time computerized images. If we are on the verge of learning how to entrain our brains by tuning into a new instinctive mode of knowing, then we have to look at what happens to our knowing when we allow the computer to process our instinctive responses. As early as 1992, the artists Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss were experimenting with ‘the possibilities of interactivity and an interface that reacted with the human body.’45 Their The Home of the Brain – Stoa of Berlin was an immersive and interactive environment that used data glove and HMD and had essentially the same installation set-up as Davies’ – one immersant at a time, with a viewing room for other visitors.46 Although the technology then was quite rudimentary, their ideas of interactivity between immersants and work of art were quite avant garde. To quote them:

We are turning the theory on its head that man is losing his body to technology. In our opinion, the interactive media are supporting the multisensory mechanism of the body and are thus extending man’s space for play and action.47

Interestingly, Fleischmann and Strauss base the themes in their work on Plato’s four elements (fire, air, earth, water) and on Jungian archetypes. At the same time they embrace the Stoic’s ideas that God-Nature was part of humankind. They believe, as does Davies, that virtual reality is an appropriate tool with which to reference the real world. Grau does not agree that two such disparate ideas, one based on Plato’s elements (with a mathematical structure) and the other on Jung’s archetypes (with a biological structure), could ever complement each other through virtual reality scenarios. As he puts it, ‘Essentially, virtual reality stands for the complete divorce of the human sensorium from nature and matter.’48 Yet, contrary to what he thinks impossible, this is what is happening today. As a tool of ‘technological essence,’ Davies and her works of art also reinforce the Platonic ideals of mathematical and geometrical forms in a peculiar way. 92 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Mathematically and bodily involved in an unlikely symphony of intertwining, her works of art have certainly accomplished what Fleischmann and Strauss set out to do. It is entirely possible that Davies’ immersive virtual artworks and the dynamics encountered in them can help us break through archaic up/down mythological barriers set up for us in the past by our cultural stories – a breakthrough dynamic that Frye claimed would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Breaking out of our present mythological entrapments will have a lot to do with embodiment, with breath control, with vision and spatiality, with the release of endorphins, with the production and control of theta rhythms – in short, it will involve our entire biochemical natures.

Bio-psychology and the Essence of Spatiality

Frye’s hunch that up/down myths are innate to the psyche and are the reasons underlying the cultural stories we produce needs a little biological modification. Might it be that up/down myths are more than just innate in the proffered abstract psychological sense but, rather, genetically encoded in our DNA? That is to say, in order for us to experience the essence of spatiality, do we also need to physically experience up/down spatial themes? Frye, limited perhaps by his ‘left- hemisphere’ upbringing, presented these themes in literature and the Bible as confined to a bodiless, imaginative domain, one that operated within an abstract spatiality. Today an artist like Davies evokes what appear to be the same mythological dynamics but does so by combining images and sound, breathing and digital space, and, most important, by evoking feelings of spatiality in us never before experienced through a work of art. Without a doubt, Davies has brought us to the edge of breaking through the purely mathematical and intellectual aspects of spatiality to reach a biological spatiality that resides deep within the body and brain. Arguably, Davies’ body- harness breathing and balancing apparatus, which allows us to move about in her immersive virtual art, connects us not only to the computer but to that place in the brain where essential spatiality resides. Frye’s idea of innate mythological themes has to do with an abstract-pseudo-spiritual movement undertaken by the imagination in order to break away from the body. Davies’ art has to do with bodily affirmation and its need to get in touch with an archaic sense of spatiality. If, as Frye believed, the artificial (sky father) up/down myth replaced the cyclic pattern of nature myths, then Davies’ immersive virtual art not only makes it possible to begin to grasp an innate spatiality but also reintroduces and reaffirms a cyclic temporality. It does so by focusing on nature’s comings and goings and by using symbolic and thematic contexts. Even the idea of including the temporal dimension in her art by time-basing Ephémère really amounts to incorporating what scientists today refer to as mind-time – that ephemeral sense of time that tells us to slow down when anxious and speed up when happy.49 Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 93 6 The Essence of Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality

Margaret Wertheim: Cyberspace

In the preceding chapter we identified the innate up/down themes in the mythological history of humankind and concluded that Char Davies’ artwork falls into this perennial pattern with one major difference: her works do not focus entirely on the vertical aspects of up/down dynamics but are bound to the body and nature and therefore also engage cyclical rhythms. In this chapter we will look at the differences between cyberspace and immersive virtual space, and hence throw more light onto the meaning of essential spatiality. We will begin with a brief look at Margaret Wertheim’s overview on the subject of the Western world’s relationship to space, from the medieval ages to our present-day romance with cyberspace.1 Wertheim has written a fascinating history of the story of space, beginning with Dante’s medieval encounter with up/down spatial themes and that epoch’s ability to relate to the co-existence of physical and celestial spaces, a dualism she believes we are now recapturing in this cyberage. Wertheim recounts the gradual take-over of physical space by artists, which is eventually reinforced by mathematicians. In so doing, she tackles the difficult subjects of the relativeness of Einstein’s four- dimensional models of spacetime and discusses physicists’ curled-up spatial hyperspace models which are devoid of time. Wertheim, who lectures and writes about science, has an electric way of explaining the history of the Western world’s relationship to spatiality. As a result we are treated to an excellent survey of spatial models that incorporate poetic and metaphysical, as well as mathematical, imaginations. She does not attempt to distinguish the different digital spaces created by the marriage of machine and space. Rather, she stays within the framework of a computer-produced cyberspace.

Self, Cyberspace, and Extensions of Self

Cyberspace, Wertheim suggests, is as dualistic a sense of space, in its own way, as was the spatial dualism of the Middle Ages. In that period, Christians believed in a physical space (natural philosophy) and a non-physical space that paralleled the physical but was outside of it. Wertheim contends that cyberspace returns us to this ‘dualistic theater of reality.’2 Cyberspace fascinates us because it takes us 94 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art beyond the physical world and into ‘a collective mental arena’ which we can share with other minds.3 In cyberspace the self has the potential to leave behind its physicality and expand its notion of self so that the self ‘becomes a kind of infinitely flexible psychic plasticine.’4 Essentially, Wertheim’s position is not as radical as those who that might see cyberspace as a place which encourages the development of a multiplicity of pseudo-selves. Still, she believes that there exists some sort of ‘self-space.’ As we will see, this ‘self-space’ differs considerably from the theory of ‘essential space’ which I am positing. Even though ‘self-space’ is connected to the physical body, it cannot be explained in terms of materialistic neurological models, according to Wertheim. She paraphrases Christine Wertheim: ‘It [the self-space] becomes almost like a fluid, leaking out around us all the time and joining each of us into a vast ocean, or web, of relationships with other leaky selves.’5 We need to quote Margaret Wertheim more fully here:

After three hundred years of physicalism, cyberspace helps to make explicit once more some of the nonphysical extensions of human beingness, suggesting again the inherent limitations of a strictly reductionist, materialist conception of reality. Again it challenges us to look beyond physicalist dogma to a more complex and nuanced conception both of ourselves and of the world around us.6

Running through a gamut of writers on the subject of cyberspace, Wertheim identifies an ‘ether’ for cyber soul-space. Using her survey of other people’s work and words, I will create a tapestry out of this ‘ether’ by quoting and paraphrasing them.7 First, we learn that there is a common thread running through cyberspace, that of dream, hallucination, and mysticism. It is a kind of new spiritual space, a ‘realm for the soul.’ It can be likened to Eliade’s sacred space since profane space it is not. It is ‘[a] potential creative cybernetic godhead,’ resulting in a ‘religious valorization’ of the digital domain; it is a Christian vision of a heavenly city where transcendence or the dream of it is possible; it is a new immaterial space where techno-spiritual dreaming can occur. It is a place for cyber-religiosity; a fantasy place where one can abandon the flesh and download oneself into ‘cyber-immortality’ or into ‘digital eternity’; a place where one can be embodied and disembodied at the same time. It is where a cybernetic body can exist, where, just as Christ’s body returns in glorified form, the cyber-body returns in ‘hypercorporeal synthesis.’ It is a place where the dreams of cyber-immortalists such as Rudy Rucker, Mike Kelly and Hans Moravec, who dream of their metamorphosis into 0–1 codes, can be fulfilled; a place where dematerialized bodies exist in immortal bodiless minds as patterns of data. Wertheim reminds us that the ‘mind download champions’ relate to the entire metamorphosis project personally, as an ultimate achievement of an immortal mathematical state. She is concerned more about this focus on the personal salva- tional aspects of the project than about its mathematical reduction of flesh and blood. Basically, this view is related to the ‘problematic aspects of Gnostic- Manichaean-Platonist dualism,’ she states, with a new religious quest to find the mystical ‘All’ of cyberspace.8 In the pursuit of cyber-immortality, these cyber- cognoscenti neglect to consider the social implications and communal aspects Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 95 of cyberspace, which to her mind hold the greatest promise for the ‘immaterial’ cyberspace, the soul-space she posits. When Wertheim moves away from the actual examples of operative communities in cyberspace and shifts back to a discussion of metaphysical ideas of space, her thesis becomes more relevant in respect to mine. She reminds us that cultural communities in the past also conceived their own versions of dualistic-parallel space, particularly in medieval times. Whether it be medieval, relativistic, or physicalist ideas of space, Wertheim alleges, all notions of space need their own kind of language, and such language changes our world as a result. Our own epoch has tired of the physicalist conception of space and hence is seeking a new version of immaterialist space. This is seen in the new-age groups whose ‘psychic hot lines are flourishing.’ There is widespread belief in an ‘astral plane,’ and ‘spirit channeling is on the rise.’9 She concedes, however, that a co-existence between the two notions of spatiality will certainly need to continue. Wertheim’s version of cyber-utopia does not catch one by surprise; it is predictable, as it has to do primarily with how community ‘soul-spirit’ works through cyberspace, and she provides apt examples based on surveying what goes on in multiuser domains (MUDs). Because of the anonymity of the user, in cyberspace, we accept each other as faceless, but there is value to be reaped in this very facelessness. Ideally, we ought to bring to cyberspace no biases (although this does not always happen) while allowing the vibrant supremacy of a global ‘spirit-soul’ to dominate instead. This is part of the magical allure of cyberspace, and Wertheim believes it has the potential to change worldviews. According to Wertheim, how we conceive space reflects how we think about ourselves, since they mirror each other. ‘In a very real sense, we are the products of our spatial schemes.’10 She believes our new notion of space, cyberspace, is already being reflected in the culture and when coupled with other cultures’ versions of space is destined to change how we view our world, although what that change may be she does not predict. Wertheim makes no mention about the spatiality we experience during immersion in 3D virtual reality, although she has written several articles on immersion in Osmose and Ephémère.11 She has rightly limited her history of imaginary space and had it culminate with the electric dynamics operative in cyberspace between computer users. There is a difference, however, between Wertheim’s version of a computer user’s cyberspace, which is based strictly on imagination (as she says it cannot be described physically by formulas), and immersive virtual space. Cyberspace is, indeed, a product of the imagination; it cannot be spatially reproduced. Immersive virtual space, on the other hand, is an enveloping space which can almost be physically felt. Let me clarify the distinction between the two spaces even more: Wertheim’s soul-space is, strictly speaking, based in the imagination, while immersive virtual space engages our visual systems, which must process the space and images we encounter in it, forcing us to respond to the spatial experience in a different, almost material, way. It is apparent, moreover, that in respect to the experience of immersive virtual space, we have to delve beyond the ‘immaterial’ imaginative notions of cyberspace and investigate specific areas related to space in the brain itself. Wertheim’s history of ‘soul space’ aptly prepares us for the notions of spatiality 96 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art that we need to appraise next. For we now must consider the difference between immersive virtual space, as instinctively accessed essential space, and mathematical or cognitively imagined space, and why both can produce ideas of, or feelings for, ‘transcendent’ space. To further expound our thesis on the essence of spatiality, we need to differentiate it from an ephemeral transcendent sense of space, one still based on a mathematical bias but one that does not suggest we succumb to ideas of AI immortalist existence. To throw light on these subjects, we will weigh the difference between virtual forms in virtual art that are Platonic in essence and those that, although digitally created, are not. We need to do this if we are to grasp the difference between Davies’ immersive virtual art and other virtual reality art. At this point, then, we must make a transition from Wertheim’s Internet-based cyberspace to another philosophical perspective of cyberspace, which focuses primarily on the space of virtual reality.

Heim on Plato and Cyberforms

Michael Heim’s book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality12 introduces us to a notion of a cyberspace filled with Platonic forms out of which cyberartists, or the cyberpoet, are destined to mould meaningful reality. Reflecting upon Heim’s theory, we discover a means by which we can differentiate between his notion of cyberspace and Davies’ immersive virtual space. I would classify Heim as a philosopher who is a technoromanticist. For him the computer’s allure is like an erotic experience, yet quite obviously, in his other role as tai chi teacher, he is just as engaged with bodily life force. Still, as Heim puts it, this ‘affair with information machines announces a symbiotic relationship and ultimately a mental marriage to technology.’13 The erotic experience Heim has in mind does not speak to the inner state of being or consciousness. Rather it explains an erotic symbiosis of human/machine. Although Heim waxes poetic here and there throughout the book, lamenting that because of this interface with the mechanical we may lose touch with ‘our inner states,’14 he does not elaborate on what the loss of these inner states would entail. He suggests, instead, that we compare what he means by an erotic relationship to the mystical experiences of St John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, sixteenth-century Spanish mystics. Their experiences of God describe the kind of sexual erotic tension he has in mind for cyberspace. It is as though Heim wishes to confer a mystical dimension on cyberspace. For those of us who are not familiar with these aforementioned saintly mystical experiences, I might point out that the ‘eroticism’ these saints experienced is based on an ‘intellectual knowing’ of God, and not one of feelings for God. So, too, Heim’s notion of cyberspace is eroticism directed toward an intellectual plane.15 Heim’s interpretation of ‘Platonic cyberforms’ necessarily elaborates on an essence of cyberspace which he sees as a ‘useful metaphysical laboratory.’16 The mathematical bias that we are concerned with throughout the book is circumvented by Heim’s notion that ‘cyberspace is Platonism as a working product.’17 He sets himself apart from William Gibson’s originary vision of cyberspace, which is mathematical in nature. Gibson defines it as ‘a consensual hallucination experi- Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 97 enced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.’18 Heim, on the other hand, describes what he means by a Platonic experience: ‘The cybernaut seated before us, strapped into sensory-input devices, appears to be, and is indeed, lost to this world. Suspended in computer space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges in a world of digital sensation.’19 Moreover, Heim reminds us that Platonic forms are not to be thought of as ideal numbers in space but as forms of beauty, beauty that is as inherent in cyberspace as it is in Platonic space. Following Heim’s thesis, therefore, one has to grasp cyberspace as sensational, as well as aesthetic, a space where cyberart can be moulded.

The Essence of Virtual Reality

How does Heim go from Platonic forms to cyberforms in the first place? To understand the analogy he is making we have to consider all of the dynamics he incorporates to produce the metaphysics for his version of virtual reality. This includes the notions of non-linearity, interface, erotic symbiosis, cyberforms, and beauty. His rather reluctant definition of virtual reality resorts to two separate dictionary definitions of virtual and reality, culminating with this statement: ‘Virtual reality is an event or entity that is real in effect but not in fact.’20 Heim also addresses an esoteric sense of virtual reality when he quotes David Zeltzer as saying that ‘virtual reality serves as the Holy Grail of the research.’21 It represents the ongoing human quest for a greater awareness of reality, something that he, like Heidegger, attributes to the work of art. Heim puts it like this:

Perhaps the essence of VR ultimately lies not in technology but in art, perhaps art of the highest order. Rather than control or escape or entertain or communicate, the ultimate promise of VR may be to transform, to redeem our awareness of reality – something that the highest art has attempted to do and something hinted at in the very label virtual reality, a label that has stuck, despite all objections, and that sums up a century of technological innovation.22

To make this new world of virtual reality a concrete reality Heim suspects we are going to need artists who are cybersages.23 In proceeding from Leibnitz’s mathematical to Heidegger’s ethereal metaphysics, Heim describes the underlying dynamics that cyberspace has inherited from them. To these he adds Platonic forms, borrowing from them the sense of ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ that will be needed if ‘forms’ of cyberspace are to be valid entities. It is this Platonic twist that provides Heim with a way to frame his cyber-metaphysical dynamics, just as physicists today invoke a postmodern Platonism by their ten or more dimensional spaces in hyperspace.24

Forms in Information

In Heim’s cyberspace, forms of information float randomly and non-linearly, waiting to be connected to the humans who sit mesmerized, rarely blinking, in 98 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art front of their computer screens. If, in Neoplatonic times, souls grabbed onto and connected with bodies in a bid to eventually return to the mother soul and escape reincarnation, now it is digitized (or eroticized) sensation that longs to be connected to bodies, albeit for other, less soulful reasons. The dynamics of virtual reality, as extracted by Heim from past metaphysicians, can be summarized like this: we are dealing with non-linear dynamics that control the language through which we are destined to create new worlds. Heim’s Platonic dimension adds to this an ethereal sense of the space in which the forms of cyberspace, forms that we must not interpret as strictly part of the mathematical realm, float. As Heim puts it, ‘the dream of perfect FORMS becomes the dream of information.’25 The digital revolution has provided classical and even neoclassical Platonic forms the empirical content (data and information = knowledge) they never had before. In Plato the drive is to understand the divine principles, to deliver one’s soul back to the source of being, by rejoining the world soul. The experience appeals primarily to the intellect as it reaches out for Ideal Forms, which we on earth can only see copies of. We, too, are copies of the divine (recall the iconic dynamics in chapter 4), and we must strive to recollect our previous, now-forgotten, existence as part of this divine whole. Today’s physicists endeavour to discover a theory of everything by lumping physical concepts together under one umbrella that harbours a complex of lawful formulas that constitute a simple absolute law. Their quest remains bound to numbers and perfect formulas that strive to describe how the laws of physical reality work.26 Virtual realists, according to Heim, build virtual worlds by pushing their imaginations to limits of the yet unimaginable but possible worlds out there waiting to be realized. I do not believe that Heim means us to perceive these kinds of virtual worlds as attempts to transcend into some ultimate Truth. The imperative seems to be: first create a virtual world, and from there go on to create the next reality. This, then, is world-making through the patronage of virtual reality.

Virtual Reality as a Philosophical Event

Unlike his colleagues, who yearn to metamorphose into disembodied AI, Heim believes the ultimate virtual reality experience is a philosophical one, and he yearns for his beloved philosophia to grant us her ethereal presence in cyberspace. She is the reason why philosophical perspectives underlie his claims that cyberspace constitutes an aesthetically beautiful sense of space that can be likened to the ultimate work of art. It is a world where one can lift his or her anchors and drift and explore.27 There is another worldliness to it, and out of this sense of other- worldliness we will be able to create new and yet unimaginable worlds, presumably made up of more than disembodied intelligences. But what of the cyberartist who Heim professes is destined to create the next reality? Is Davies such a ‘cyberartist’? Do Davies’ Osmose and Ephémère qualify as ‘cyberart’? Do they engage Platonic forms as cyberforms? Or is there a substantial difference in perspective between Heim’s version of cyberspace and Davies’ immersive virtual space? Heim has this to say about Osmose: Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 99

Osmose makes profound contributions to cyberspace. At a time when VRML and 3-D graphics are about to enrich the global visual language, Osmose extends the range of design and sets higher standards for VR. Unlike VRML, however, Osmose is not about communication but about self-transformation and about design that challenges communication technology to get outside of itself. For virtual realists, Osmose means fresh air.28

Osmose and Platonic Forms

If Michael Heim’s Platonic cyberspace, replete with information, can be moulded by an artist, then how close to accomplishing something like this does Davies come? Does her art extend beyond what Heim intends with his idea of information, his aesthetic role for Platonic forms, and his ‘ethereal’ version of virtual reality? Ironically, immersive virtual art is, indeed, moulded out of mathematical space and digital information, but, as we will see, the space proffers much more than Heim’s conception of cyberspace and the art forms that he perceives as moulded out of it. For starters immersive virtual art goes beyond the implied aesthetics of Platonic form and links us instead to emotions through images, not just abstract forms. It goes beyond sensational imaginative ideas and unites us with our feelings. And it even goes beyond all this and connects our senses to nature, or to our own being in the world, as Davies would put it. If one were to dissect the artistry underlying the image of the tree in Osmose, what one would see is pure geometry. Minute triangles of every conceivable dimension have created the tree.29 One of the reasons this virtual art is saved from an overall collaboration with neoplatonic forms, as we have pointed out, is Davies’ use of semi-transparency and ensuing spatial ambiguity which collapses figure/ ground dichotomies. Immersed in Davies’ art, we forget the geometric underpinnings of virtual art. Although the tree in its resplendent luminosity is essentially geometrical in construction, its ‘strange phosphorescence,’ to use Margaret Wertheim’s phrase, makes one forget that it is geometrically created.30 This is not necessarily true of other artists’ virtual environments, where the various 3D elements remain essentially geometric in appearance (see Heim’s account, below, of Dancing with the Virtual Dervish). But, we are slightly ahead of ourselves in the comparison of Heim’s Platonic cyberspace and Davies’ immersive virtual space and the respective role of forms and images in them.

Comparing Platonic and Osmosian Dynamics

The computer-generated images in Osmose represent the artist’s interpretation of nature.31 We do not see anything that looks real or like nature itself; in fact, we are almost, but not quite, prisoners of a computer’s rendition of formal Platonic ideas of nature. Fortunately, two things save us: the artist’s deliberate, stylized, abstracted representations and the fact that we know what real nature looks like. If we did not, we would be no different from the cave people in the parable that Plato recounts in the Republic. Prisoners in the cave could see, reflected by a fire, shad- 100 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art ows of puppets, statutes, and artifacts that were being paraded behind them. Since they knew no other reality and could see neither the parade of objects nor the fire, they believed the shadow world reflected in front of them was the one true world. Living in a cave world, they were trapped in a world of sensation. To escape what Plato considered to be an illusionary existence, cave people needed to leave their sensational world behind, recognize the obstacles an imaginary life imposed on them, and enter into the higher realms of an intellectual life. In Osmose, we are, at some point in our immersive experience, led down into the shadowy world of a digital cave. For in many ways immersants do descend into a digital cave, invited there by the artfully produced computer images. Interpreting Osmosian dynamics from the perspective of Plato’s cave dynamics, we would have to ask what it means to watch images on the small 2D screens in front of one’s eyes in the HMD which are digitally created. How does this immersive experience differ from that of the cave dwellers?32 These are interesting philosophical and neurological questions that would take another book to answer. At this point we need to pause and differentiate the ‘Platonic’ and ‘Osmosian’ computer cave we have been discussing from that of the virtual reality environment called ‘CAVE’ (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) that involves physically standing or walking around wearing just lightweight stereo glasses and holding a wandlike device to grab or point at things. There is only one active viewer who controls the 3D environment in a ten-foot-cube space – the others are accompanying observers. Here, in a multi-person room, the 3D virtual images are projected onto the surrounding screen-walls as well as onto ceiling and floor by extremely powerful computers, often networked in tandem with remote computers. The 3D input device carried by one of the participants is tracked by computers and is the apparatus through which correct stereo and positional perspectives are achieved. To the participants the projection screens become transparent and the 3D space infinite.33 While the virtual environment we have been describing in Osmose presents itself to our eyes stereoscopically through the HMD, with the images a few inches from our eyes, the CAVE does so through stereo glasses and constitutes a walk-around immersive 3D experience of another sort. Unlike Davies’ virtual art, or Plato’s cave where shadows bind the prisoners to illusion, in this cubed CAVE room the virtual reality projected on the walls is often, but not always, meant to appear as real as possible. The CAVE, as well as other immersive visualization mediums, has been adapted for use by scientific and technological firms to present their products in more effective ways. For example, the medical profession utilizes CAVE-like environments to allow students to learn about cells, molecules, and genes as though they were virtually immersed in them. There is thus a substantial difference between the virtual reality CAVE experience and the Platonic cave experience of ‘shadowy forms’; the former can simulate real life while the latter reflects real life but only in shadows. Still, with respect to a digitized world of artful forms, a world of purely ‘illusionary’ forms, as Oliver Grau puts it, we might as well be in Plato’s cave when we are immersed in Davies’ art. We do, indeed, leave our intellects behind and descend into sensations. This immersive work is perfectly capable of leading one into the ‘abysmally’ glowing cave of code, of mathematically and geometrically produced Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 101 shadow images of nature. And moreover, we do so not just through ordinary senses, but by way of ‘digitized senses.’

Seeing Essence in ‘Skeletal Forms’

Immersion in Osmose and Ephémère leaves us pondering how the mathematical and geometrical can create forms of nature that contain the information necessary for the imagination to make that leap ‘out of the cave’ and seek the true meaning of real nature. Only when we see nature bared in form, stripped of its natural foliage, and camouflaged instead in glittering splendour and luminescence, are we able to delve beyond its superficial appearance and consider its real ‘presence.’ In the end we know that our encounter with this immersive work of art has been another form of intellectual encounter. The limits of an unreal nature, set up by an artist and a computer, force us to mentally leap out of this cave of artful, ‘formal,’ skeletal images of nature into the light of reality. Osmose and Ephémère surreptitiously succeed in making us more appreciative of all life. Plato, on the other hand, had the opposite agenda in mind. He begins with his sensation-bound people already there in the cave. Unlike Davies’ descent into the ‘digital cave’ and sensations, Plato’s promised life in the mental realm is upwardly bound and achieved slowly through the education of the intellect. He means us to work our way out of the world of shadows and sensations into the real world in an overtly intellectual way. It is in Plato’s real world that forms are materialized due to the courtesy of the mathematical world above. Because of this pull from above, there is a striving upward toward an intuitive grasp of a bodiless Truth, a Truth that is to be found in the realm of Ideal Forms that can never be known.

Forms Translated into Images

Thus far, inspired by Heim’s theories of the substance of cyberspace and its Platonic implications, I have argued that because of their digitized mathematical forms, Davies’ virtual works of art naturally evoke Plato’s metaphysical dynamics. We have seen how Heim’s catchy turn of phrase, ‘The dream of perfect FORMS becomes the dream of information,’ has been transformed by Davies from forms and information into images and imagination. She shifts the intellectually bound source of information to information bound to feelings and sensation. Heim’s claim that ‘the ultimate promise of VR may be to transform, to redeem our awareness of reality’ may, indeed, have been achieved by Davies using quite another technique. The dynamics in her virtual art move us beyond Heim’s idea of Platonic aesthetic dynamics carved out of an ethereal, ghostly cyberspace by a cyberartist. Her images are, indeed, loaded with inFORMation, but the information is derived through feelings magnified by the impact that floating in 3D spatiality has on the immersant – this cannot be underestimated. The essence of spatiality, the feelings for space that are experienced by many during immersion in Davies’ art, has everything to do with the newly developed phenomenon of digital virtual space. Floating in this previously unexperienced and unknown spatiality among 3D ‘elements’ which in themselves have an extraordinary effect on the 102 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art immersant because they are translucent and ephemeral, one feels that one has transcended the limits of Einsteinian space and time, particularly because general relativity is above all a geometric theory of space,34 and entered into a totally different experience of spatiality. Immersive virtual space in Davies’ work, by virtue of its digital-biological- interface connections, breaks bonds with Heim’s almost sterile Platonic space and its classically framed transcendent implications. Davies’ virtual art tunes into an innate, biologically based spatiality within us, one which differs considerably from that spatiality which Heim experienced in another immersive work of art that we will now consider.

Heim on Virtual Realism and Transhuman Feelings

In Virtual Realism35 Heim expounds on the dynamics of a philosophy that seeks to mediate between cyberspace idealists and naive realists, something that we cannot delve into here.36 We will, however, comment on how he relates to ‘Platonic space’ (if we may call it this) during an immersive experience. We ought to begin by stating that Heim, purposefully I think, does not use any terminology that might bring to mind ideas of spiritual transcendence. Instead he uses words like transhuman and inhuman. What he means by transhuman is not clearly explained. I took it to indicate his wish to avoid references to anything like a divine element combined with a human one and to leave us instead with an image of human-linked-to- machine. Feeling transhuman is what Heim experiences while immersed in the ‘trans- Architectural’ virtual art production Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress.37 The virtual reality space, and the structures within it through which Heim is travelling (wearing an HMD and using a handheld device or joystick), seems to overpower his human nature and leaves him at times bewildered and perhaps even eerily afraid of the spaces he finds himself in. He states:

You need to know what these structures look like, from a distance, from a place where they do not dwarf or contain you. Still, you do not turn around, not yet. You wait until you can catch them all in a single view. Finally, you feel yourself at the edge of the black universe, or at least as far as time will allow you to go. Slowly, you turn around. For the first time you see them [the structures] from a distance – and you are alarmed!

He continues:

The blue structure appears forbidding and alien, like a semi-organic beast. It looks oddly inhuman, lacking all the warmth you had come to feel for it, all the intimacy you felt as you crawled over its lattices one after another along its warm blue hue, inspecting and even fondling its strong lines. Now you see it for the first time in distance perspective and you feel the transhuman nature of your experience. And there too is the white ethereal cube, the center of this universe, and the surrounding heavenly pinkish white cotton now looks cold and geometrical in space.38 Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 103

Significantly, the forms that provoke these ‘inhuman’ feelings as Heim describes them (and when one sees them in pictures) are strictly geometrical in structure: cubes, triangles, squares, and so on.

Kant’s ‘Mathematical Sublime’

Heim’s response to the forms that pervade Novak, Gromala, and Sharir’s digital architecture during his immersion in Virtual Dervish is to ruminate about what Kant referred to as ‘the mathematical sublime.’ Implicating Kant’s ‘mathematical sublime’ constitutes an apt clue as to the kinds of feelings Heim experienced when encountering the forms in this artistic 3D environment. These are ‘feelings’ that arise, Heim tells us, when one cannot synthesize the incoming information quickly enough, as for example when ‘the dimensions of blue-white structure elude you with their warping curves, and as you try to grasp where you are, your senses are at a loss to hold together all the parts of the building in a single shape.’39 Virtual Dervish is totally unlike Davies’ productions, which can hardly be described in terms of ‘liquid architecture.’40 Immersion in Ephémère, to differentiate between the two, is like being immersed part of the time in warm flesh and blood, in the liquidness of biological forms, even though they are abstractly represented. Suspension in the virtual space of Davies’ art with flowing, rounded, transparent, translucent forms produces feelings for nature and the biological and not the sharp-edged architectural forms evoked by the Kantian-mathematical-sublime that Heim experiences.41

Marcos Novak: Working toward ‘Space Transmission’

It is Marcos Novak who refers to his part (Part I) of the multi-world art piece Virtual Dervish as ‘liquid architecture.’ Algorithmically controlled, the architecturally filled virtual spaces are described as interconnected rooms opening up to realms of other rooms in open-ended, never-ending kaleidoscope fashion. In fact, one suspects Benoit Mandelbrot’s algorithmic formulas inspired Novak’s liquid architecture, just as one suspects that Mandelbrot influenced Jacques Derrida’s ‘liquid philosophy.’ Novak uses deconstructionist words like dis/embodied, dis/ integrated/subatomized/dis/continuity, dis/incarnate to reinforce his view of an influx cyberspace reality (including the actual, virtual, and cyborg aspects of it) and to denote ever-changing, ever-moving, non-horizontal spaces. For example, he imagines, dancing is destined to become a disembodied experience while music will be a ‘navigable’ experience through sounds that are visual/behavioural; it will be like hearing a landscape. Cinemas will be habitable, space-time, disincarnate proximity, and, somewhat reminiscent of Margaret Wertheim’s view, self will be discontinuous and ‘being’ distributed in space. Architecture will be transArchitec- ture – that is, cities will be transmissible.42 Novak relates to space in a functional, futuristic way that is hardly depictive or imaginable. As he describes it, he is ‘transmitting spaces of consciousness.’ His evolving work seems to have more to do with ‘world-making’ than ‘consciousness-making’ and appears to have progressed from simply producing 104 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art architectural art to creating the technological innovations necessary to bring distant places together into a cross-linked space. The further step would be to train people to touch and feel each other in these virtual interfering spaces.43 Novak writes:

The invention of technologies that transmit signal, image, letter, sound, moving image, live sound, live image, sense and action, intersense and interaction, presence, interpresence, telepresence, underscores our desire to transcend the narrow here- and-now. However, until this moment, the technologies that would allow the transmission of space have been unimaginable. A barrier was broken: not only have we created virtual communities within nonlocal, transphysical, public realms, we are now able to exercise the most radical gesture: distributing space, transmitting architecture.44

Novak has progressed from dealing primarily with impersonal space that is always to be found outside of himself, or outside of us, to dealing with transmitting actual places in space. This is not to say that his imaginative architectural forms and transmissible spaces do not inspire scientists’ and technologists’ imagination; they may also be in the process of experimenting with such ideas. Moreover, Novak’s imagination, as well as imagination in general, does not operate in a vacuum; it is influenced and invigorated through a collaboration of current philosophical and technological paradigms. In any epoch, more than one person ‘catches’ onto the same idea – some, like Darwin, just publish faster.

Right Hemisphere, Left Hemisphere

Having addressed Novak’s digital architecture, we are now in a better position to understand the vibrations that Heim was picking up from Novak’s work that made him feel transhuman in this virtual space, which is said to evoke in people ‘monumental loneliness’ and ‘uneasiness’ in what appears to them as an ‘unusable space.’ It could be that Heim responded, as logically as he did, to the inhuman abstractness of these geometrical/mathematical forms because of his innate male- oriented cognitive spatiality that can tune in more succinctly to this kind of spatial experience than a female’s spatiality can. Men, as we have already noted, do better in tests that involve mentally rotating or manipulating an object. They do better in finding hidden shapes in a complex of angular designs (not unlike those found in Virtual Dervish), and they do better in tests of mathematical reasoning; hence, perhaps they more easily produce art based on architecturally inspired structures.45 Women, on the other hand, identify matching items more quickly (a perceptual skill) and use visual clues as landmarks that rely on memory when giving directions instead of depending, as men do, on spatial clues such as distance and direction. Scientists believe that differences in the spatial imaginations of men and women are due to hormonal and neural bases. From this evidence it would appear that there is a biochemical aspect of spatiality that affects different types of spatial skills in men and women. Today we know that the early exposure to the influence of the hormone androgen enhances spatial functions in males (and can do so in women if they are exposed to the hormone at an early age).46 Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 105

Virtual Space and Feelings of Transcendence

We have examined two different responses to immersive virtual art. Virtual Dervish has to do with virtual forms that are ‘architecturally’ constructed and conspicu- ously advertise its underlying algorithmic formulas; it has to do with participants manoeuvring through virtual space with a dataglove, hooked up to virtual space through an HMD. Osmose and Ephémère are also created out of mathematical/ geometrical formulas, but, as I have been arguing, their dynamics differ considerably from other immersive, interactive art and hence create feelings that are of a transpersonal nature. These feelings are sensationally connected to the computer and experienced by the entire body. Does Davies’ work, therefore, manage to ‘transubstantiate’ 3D space from impersonal to biological space? Does it kindle in the immersant feelings for a deeply familiar archaic space? Could it be that the trans-spatial connections we feel in her immersive virtual space are programmed in our genomes and therefore readily felt as an essence of space? I submit that this is, indeed, what happens; hence, what is important in Davies’ art is that it enables people to overcome the prelearned bias for geometric space – that abstract mathematical/geometrical realm where artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness hope to dominate and allows them to delve, instead, into a biological experience of space.47 Actually, Davies puts it best:

For a long time, I have been interested in conveying a sense of being enveloped in an all-encompassing, all-surrounding space, a subjective embodied experience that is very different from the Cartesian notion of absolute, empty, abstract space. As an artist, I am interested in recreating a sense of lived, felt space that encircles one with an enveloping horizon and presses closely upon the skin, a sensuous space, subjectively, bodily perceived. Some might interpret this as a uterine or womb-like space. Perhaps the desire to recreate, to communicate this sensibility, my sensibility, of such space is because I am female: I would leave that up to interpreters of my work.48

Transhuman versus Transpersonal Images

Heim would probably agree that images such as those experienced in Davies’ art could be likened to what Ira Progoff called transpersonal images rather than to the transhuman ones he described experiencing in Novak’s work. By transpersonal images, Progoff means images like those encountered in dreams that extend beyond a person’s cognitive ability and reach into the so-called mythic aspects of the psyche.49 Heim’s definition of transhuman images does not fit into these classical archetypal categories, and if one attends closely to what he is saying, there really appears to be no existent categories into which these transhuman feelings he experienced would fall, unless they are categorized as feelings for cyborgness, for human–machine integration, something we discussed in chapter 2.

Philosophical Musings

The images and spatiality encountered in Osmose and/or Ephémère provoke peace- ful, philosophical musings and kindle a heightened sense of perception. These 106 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art kinds of philosophical perspectives are not provoked by Novak’s Virtual Dervish, and, in the case of Heim, the kinds of feelings that arose for him appear to be part of the limbic and cognitive brain. (Recall Isabel Delmotte’s account in chapter 2, which described how her epileptic seizures left her stranded in an eerie, scary space replete with frightening images.) Heim comes close to agreeing that biological feelings should be part of experiencing virtual reality when he states: ‘To be touched [emotionally], we need to introduce more sensory awareness. VR may develop a kind of feedback in which presence includes an openness and sensitivity of the whole body.’50 Intuitively, as though he were adhering to neurologist Antonio Damasio’s findings, whose work we address in chapter 7,51 Heim implies that what he would like to happen during an immersive experience are feelings harvested from the entire body. Likewise, our claim that Davies’ art inspires thought processes that work through images also falls in line with Heim’s suggestion that the cyberartist is, indeed, in a position to inspire, and even to arrive at ‘the power to transform societies.’52

Thinking outside Metaphysical Frameworks

And so we have come to a pivotal point in this chapter when we must reflect upon the role that images play in our lives, and how powerfully they connect us to feelings and emotions that in turn challenge us into thinking through them whether we know we are doing so or not. We will conclude by considering whether philosophizing from the point of view of images is how we will do philosophy in the future.53 Is there ‘thinking’ outside of a framework of metaphysical logic, and if so how can we describe it? David Michael Levin provides us with an excellent recapitulation of how we can distinguish between abstract and biological ‘thinking’ in his book The Body’s Recol- lection of Being.54 The phrase ‘biological thinking’ is my own, but Levin’s thesis implicates biology when he suggests ‘thinking through feeling.’ Actually Levin is referring to Medard Boss’s work, a philosopher whom Heiddeger approved and supported. Here I quote Levin on Boss:

The problem is this: when ‘thinking’ frames the question of ‘essence,’ it tends to stand opposite the body, secretly detaching itself from ‘the body’ in a move that only perpetuates the conflict already inherent in dualism. ‘Thinking,’ spellbound by the authority it wields during the rule of metaphysics, is itself part of the problem. We must let go, finally, of our metaphysical conception of ‘thinking.’ We must simply give our thought to the body. We must learn to think through the body. We must learn to think with the body. Thinking is not a question of ‘bracketing’ the body (Husserl’s epoche), but a question of integrating awareness, living well-focused ‘in the body.’ For once, we should listen in silence to our bodily felt experience. Thinking needs to learn by feeling, by just being with our bodily being. Are we ready to let this body of experience tell us how to think its ‘essence’? Are we, as thinkers, ready to quiet the conceptualizing mind in order to listen to the body’s own speech, its own logos? To be sure, our ‘thinking’ will sound, and be radically different. That however, is precisely my point. I can see no other way for ‘thinking’ to break out of the history of Western metaphysics.55 Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality 107

Immersing thought in essence is what Davies’ immersive virtual art is all about. It is about learning to give our thought to the body; about finding ‘space for thought.’ It is what thinking through essential nucleus, essential substance, and the essence of spatiality is all about. It is not difficult to surmise, at this point in our account, that the dynamics evoked by an immersive virtual artist’s computerized images can, indeed, be utilized to manipulate consciousness positively or negatively. Moreover, we can say, with a degree of certainty, that Davies’ immersive virtual art, corroborating with images rather than concepts, is fated to play a greater and greater role in the future by providing a new-but-archaic space for cultivating consciousness. Art of this quality can be developed to help people recognize that a different spatiality exists within them, a place where memories and emotions reside, a training place for ‘the making of consciousness.’ 108 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art 7 Instincts and the Unconscious: Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality

Instinct as Archetype

Examining the dynamics in Osmose and Ephémère, one cannot help but marvel that an artist has intuitively created an immersive dynamic that is destined to end up engaging feelings and the brain’s silent spaces. We have just to recall Davies’ words quoted in the previous chapter, that as an artist she is ‘interested in recreating a sense of lived, felt space that encircles one with an enveloping horizon and presses closely upon the skin, a sensuous space, subjectively, bodily perceived.’ It is this ‘lived, felt space’ that I examine next from the point of view of the work of three prominent neuroscientists working in biochemistry and in the neu- rology of mind and body and the visual brain. Just how close has Davies come to conveying a sense of being enveloped in an all-encompassing, all-surrounding space, a subjective embodied experience? To understand how feelings for this ‘felt space’ operate, we need to consider the neurological workings of the brain and its relationship to feelings. In this respect, we will deal with feelings of submersion into the depths of our instinctive natures – what I have interpreted as a ‘felt’ archaic sense of ‘being-in-the-world.’1 What philosophers in the past described in conceptual language now constitutes a basis for some neurologists to proceed ‘alchemically’ as they ‘transform’ concepts into matter. Through their biochemical/neurological language, we will consider the basic structure of the primitive brain, the brainstem or reptilian brain, which is responsible for maintaining our automatic bodily functions, and the limbic system, which arcs the top of the brainstem and harbours the seat of our emotions. The limbic system has long been known to contain the seat of emotions and dream life. Neurologist Antonio Damasio, whose work we will discuss in more depth below, points out that the limbic region of the brain, the most primal area and the first part that developed in mammals, is where the raw stuff of emotions resides. It is where instincts and drives arise, and where they exist in a potential state waiting to be processed by the neocortex, first into images and then into concepts.2 We concentrate on emotions in this chapter rather than on concepts, because a Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 109 great work of art attempts to evoke ‘instinctive being’ and not reason. A philosopher such as Heidegger was inclined to use the word ‘essence’ instead of instincts. He was, in his own way, as wary as Hegel in using the word instinct, or anything like it that smacked of animalistic categories. He might have posited the idea of archaic being, but it still appeared to carry overtones of something ‘conceptual’ for him. Someone like Jung, on the other hand, was not averse to the use of the word ‘instinct’; to him instinct was archetype. Moreover, he pointed out that if we were to locate the place in the brain where the archetype ‘self’ resided, it would no doubt turn out to be in the most primitive or archaic part of the brainstem, the part that supposedly evolved before the other strata of the modern brain. ‘If one could locate such a basic fact as the self at all, the brainstem would be the most likely spot ... I am not surprised that the highest would be associated with the lowest.’3

The Language of Dreams

Jung’s ‘guess’ is being vindicated more and more as sophisticated research like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) maps the workings of the brain. Researchers recently used positron emission tomography scans to determine precisely which parts of the brain became active in ten men while they slept. During rapid-eye-movement-sleep, when the most intense dreaming happens,4 activity occurred in the more primitive parts of the brain – that is, the limbic system, which is known to house emotions and long-term memories. At the same time, an area like the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in higher-order mental processing, remained completely shut down. As Jung predicted, scientists now believe that with the higher-order regions of the brain closed down, dreams occur only in the emotional or instinctive part of the brain. It is no wonder that the language of dreams comes to us in strange, symbolic images that reside outside the realm of logic and reason and trigger such strong emotions, particularly in those of us who, upon awakening, remember them. Osmose and Ephémère have the same dreamlike effects on people who are immersed in them, despite the fact that the immersion does not last much longer than fifteen minutes. Studies have not yet been done on the dreamlike effect that immersive virtual art has on the psyche, and whether or not it actually evokes the limbic or the instinctive part of the brain. (Current neurobiological evidence in related research seems to point to the fact that this may be confirmed scientifically in the near future.) Why is it important to recognize that Osmose and Ephémère rouse the instinctive part of the brain? Because they represent not only works of art evoking what works of art have always evoked – our emotions – they offer a way of cultivating a dimension of ourselves that is mainly lost to us except when we dream. The significance of aesthetically produced immersive works of art is that they could be used not simply to entertain but to educate and open up new insights into self. They could provide us with a way into our unconscious spaces and free us from our repressed fears. Through the right kind of immersive virtual art experience, we could begin to understand the basis of our emotions and what our instincts are all about. Immersive virtual works of art could serve as the vehicles that actually confirm Jung’s dictum that ‘instinct is archetype.’ 110 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Instincts and Dreams

Theories abound about why dreams are necessary for the health of the mind.5 Some, like Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, who posited a theory of reverse learning in 1983, proclaimed that dreams were simply a clearing house for the excess baggage accumulated during the day, a way of storing, retaining, and discarding information that is valuable to us. We dream in order to review and imprint this information. Freud believed that dreams were the result of a suppressed libido; Jung that their meanings alluded to spiritual aspirations for the self. Today we know that there is no one correct way to decipher the meaning of dreams. To truly understand what is going on in our dream life we have to keep two diaries: one for the events of the day and another for the events in our dreams. Neuroscientist Candace Pert, to whom we have referred in earlier chapters, has an interesting approach to dreams. She states in her book Molecules of Emotion:

What is happening when you dream? Different parts of your body-mind are exchanging information, the content of which reaches your awareness as a story, complete with plot and characters drawn in the language of your everyday consciousness. On a physiological level, the psychosomatic network is retuning itself each night for the next day. Shifts are occurring in feedback loops as peptides spill out into the system (in greater or lesser numbers) and bind to receptors to cause activities necessary for homeostasis, or return to normalcy. Information about these readjust- ments enters your consciousness in the form of a dream, and since these are the biochemicals of emotion, the dream has not only content but feeling as well.6

Consciously Experiencing the Unconscious

If dreams are basically survival mechanisms alerting us symbolically to the conscious events we need to heed if we are to survive in the real world, then would immersion in Osmose/Ephémère allow us to experience the instinctive dimension consciously? Has Davies provided us with tools for ‘survival’ in the real world? Immersive virtual art may also have something to do with provoking certain biochemical responses in us. One does not have to fall asleep and dream in order to access the limbic region of one’s brain; rather, when we are immersed in the appropriate artistic 3D milieu, the same dreamlike frequency of brainwaves would be evoked and hence the intuitive, primal ‘instinct for survival’ would surface. Have we discovered a way of consciously entraining our brain’s unconscious dimensions while in the spatiality of Osmose/Ephémère and/or future productions of other artists’ immersive virtual spatialities?

Impersonal and Personal Instincts for Survival

What is meant by a non-dreaming sense of an instinct for survival? How is it that a digitally produced work of art can provoke such profoundly archaic instincts in the limbic region of the brain? And how are these instincts translated into both personal and impersonal desires? Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 111

Osmose and Ephémère enable immersants to encounter such a conscious instinct for survival through feelings by engaging the brain in dialogue between its cognitive and emotional components – in Osmose by immersing the brain into worlds of code and words and then into soft-edged, spatially ambiguous images of nature. During my own immersion, the sceptical side of my brain warned me that there was something to be wary about in this rendition of digitized nature. Later, I reflected that although I had enjoyed this participation in a nature that was unreal, its ‘afterimage’ had left me with a desire to safeguard the survival of real nature. There was yet another, more important, ‘survival instinct’ (which we will discuss below) to come to grips with, one far more personal, possibly because of the impact on me of Davies’ ‘Lifeworld,’ a world with both cosmic and womblike dimensions to it. It provoked in me the instinct for personal survival in some otherworldly dimension in the same way that religious art does for some people.7 Not only I, but others, reported that the transcendent aspect of their immersive experience provided them insight into what eternal existence might be like when one dies and becomes part of a cosmic dynamic. The fact that Osmose (in particular) elicits feelings of self-transcendence out of digitized space happens because of the sensation of being wholly immersed in its space. Floating around in a strange spatial environment among the company of beautifully rendered abstract and archetypal images, while losing all contact with time, evokes a dreamlike experience.

Entraining the Brain

From the foregoing, it would appear that during immersion in a 3D virtual spatiality a person can intuitively access her instinctive nature. The fact that a digital dynamic provides a way for someone to experience one’s instinctive nature while awake could prove to be very beneficial in the entrainment of the brain, yet also dangerous if brain entrainment is used for the wrong reasons. Still, if the positive side prevails, as I am suggesting, then we might be on the brink of rediscovering a way to access and perhaps begin to understand an instinctive dimension of ourselves which for the most part we seem to have lost touch with. In the past we tried to access this instinctive dimension by ingesting drugs or studying our dreams, the latter usually with the guidance of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. Guided by a therapist, a patient struggles to interpret his or her life through dream interpretation. This kind of one-on-one therapy is still in use. Valuable as it may be, the process takes a long time – often many years. More recently, there has been a trend toward using medication as a remedy for all psychological ills because pills are quicker, easier, and cheaper then ‘talk’ therapy. We are regularly discovering the positive and/or negative effects of ‘chemical cocktails’ on the brain and experimenting with their control of our personalities. While understanding the biochemical natures of our brains and bodies can help us understand our instinctive natures, do we need more than just chemical manipulation through drug therapy? Do we not need to understand what happens at the instinctive level of our beings from bioneurological perspectives if we are to understand more intimately the nature of ‘self’? 112 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

In the past, philosophers could only write conceptually about such psychological dynamics, while psychiatrists and psychologists struggled to take their clients ‘down’ into unconscious, archetypal depths using whatever psychoanalytic methods they favoured. The exciting new field of psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was meant to help unearth a patient’s psychosis, neuro- sis, or simply their deep dilemmas about ‘being-in-the-world.’ We now appear to have not only the biochemical but the digital means to enter into dialogue with the unconscious from other hitherto-unknown perspectives. Neuroscientists are our allies in this project because they are at the forefront of this exploration. They seem destined to open up new doors of perception for us which could lead to the discovery of how the unconscious generates consciousness.

Molecules of Emotion

In her work on peptides, neuroscientist Candace Pert unknowingly confirms how an Osmosian/Ephémèrian type of immersive experience, which we have referred to as a kind of ‘tripping’ on instincts, is related to hormones and molecules of emotion. (Since theta rhythms are not part of her expertise, she does not broach this subject at all. Yet we should not ignore the evidence presented above, that theta rhythms are also part of this instinctive dance.) Along with other scientists, Pert is still in the process of studying the complexity of the ramifications that her neurological investigations are uncovering. Interestingly, she has concluded through her research that the network of peptides and receptors in the limbic region are the molecular basis of emotion that unites body and brain. Pert states:

The mind as we experience it is immaterial, yet it has a physical substrate, which is both the body and the brain. It may also be said to have a nonmaterial, nonphysical substrate that has to do with the flow of that information. The mind, then, is that which holds the network together, often acting below our consciousness, linking and coordinating the major systems and their organs and cells in an intelligently orchestrated symphony of life. Thus, we might refer to the whole system as a psychosomatic information network, linking psyche, which comprises all that is of an ostensibly nonmaterial nature, such as mind, emotion, and soul, to soma, which is the material world of molecules, cells, and organs. Mind and body, psyche and soma.8

Pert is not interested in ‘one-sided’ theories of electrically stimulated synapses in the brain which run the body in a mechanical way. Rather, she states, ‘with [psychosomatic] information added to the process, we see that there is an intelligence running things. It’s not a matter of energy acting on matter to create behavior, but of intelligence in the form of information running all the systems and creating behavior.’9 And how might one define what this intelligence or information that runs things is? Pert puts it this way:

So, if the flow of our molecules is not directed by the brain, and the brain is just another nodal point in the network, then we must ask – Where does the intelligence, Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 113

the information that runs our bodymind, come from? We know that information has an infinite capability to expand and increase, and that it is beyond time and place, matter and energy. Therefore, it cannot belong to the material world we apprehend with our senses, but must belong to its own realm, one that we can experience as emotion, the mind, the spirit – an inforealm!10

Instincts and Emotions: A Retrospective Look

Before we examine neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work, let us set the scene looking at some of the philosophers who inspired him. The philosophical approaches of the empiricists, particularly Hume and Kant, considered instincts and passions, imagination, and reason, from conceptual perspectives. Both men theo- rized about whether these characteristics were innate or acquired, arguments that are in essence continued by the nurture versus nature debate.11 Science is fast answering these questions for us as it continues to uncover biochemical data about the workings of the human body that can leave little doubt that genetic endow- ment plays a much greater role in the development of person than a nurturing environment.12 Hume, writing in the eighteenth century, dissected ‘impressions’ and how these arose from sensation and reflection. His Treatise of Human Nature13 is devoted to considering how we understand the world through our impressions (images) of it. Although Hume does not suggest impressions are representative of anything molecular, when we read his treatise we cannot help but conjure up ‘molecular’ impressions running through the body in the same way that Pert’s peptides do. Consider his statement:

As to those impressions, which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ’twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind, or are deriv’d from the author of our being.14

To Hume it did not seem to matter whether he could answer his questions about impressions. He was interested in setting them up for future generations. He was, of course, limited scientifically to his time and only interested in pursuing philosophical arguments. Kant wanted to go beyond the empiricists’ points of view and proposed a radical new synthesis through which he would incorporate both experience and reason, the ‘is’ of sense experience and the ‘must’ of necessary and universal truth. He thought it a mistake to go beyond sense experience in order to define concepts of God, freedom, or the immortal soul; somehow these concepts had to run silently through our flesh and blood. In one of his most famous essays,15 he argued in favour of an innate ground – an impulse for evil and/or good:

When we say, then, Man is by nature good, or, Man is by nature evil, this means only that there is in him an ultimate ground (inscrutable to us) of the adoption of good maxims or of evil maxims (i.e., those contrary to law), and this he has, being a man: and hence he thereby expresses the character of his species.16 114 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Until recently, students still argued about what Kant meant by ‘innate.’ Today, with our genome mapped, we can condone and justify what Kant, in a time when medical knowledge was very limited and genetic science unknown, was trying to put across by ‘an ultimate ground.’17

Antonio Damasio: Picking Up Where Kant Left Off

Philosophers throughout the ages have at one time or another stumbled intuitively on vital truths that they could not prove. From these hypotheses, they developed their philosophical theories. Hume and Kant have to some degree been vindicated today by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who has amassed years of clinical evidence to prove that ‘instincts,’ ‘impressions,’ ‘images,’ and ‘impulses for evil and good,’ are not just idle philosophical musings but have their biological coun- terparts embedded in the brain and body.18 What Damasio does that Hume and Kant could not is to outline concretely the neurological dynamics of how the processing of images occurs in the brain. Damasio’s topological and biological mapping of the brain’s dynamics, when viewed from a philosophical perspective, provides philosophers with a physical picture of their concepts, something long denied philosophers of empirical metaphysics. Mapping the dynamics of the brain gives a biological concreteness to what up until now were posited as hypotheti- cally formulated philosophical dynamics of thought. By itself this constitutes an exciting contribution to the field of philosophy. Because we are dealing with imagistic symbols in Davies’ work (what she calls ‘recurring elements’), we will look at some of Damasio’s key ideas on how he believes instincts and images work in the body and brain. So armed, we can continue our analysis of immersive dynamics and their influence on an immersant’s physiology.19 Damasio’s research sets out to establish how somatic markings work to create bodily feelings for emotions. He differentiates feelings and emotions as two separate dynamics – all emotions generate feelings but not all feelings generate emotions. Both play, or sometimes do not play, a vital role in the reasoning process.20

Bodily Images

It is important to understand the biological drives that Damasio is proposing: that bodily images are ‘powerful manifestations’ created by instincts and drives which generate our emotions, namely, our feelings.21 He believes that there is a connection between our primitive flight/fight response (the survival instinct) and our brain/body evolution; that the flight/fight dynamic controls the biological drives responsible for creating our images, and hence our intellectual capacities.22 To sum, Damasio believes that biological regulation controls human behaviour. He states: ‘The process of emotion and feeling are part and parcel of the neural machinery for biological regulation, whose core is constituted by homeostatic controls, drives and instincts.’23 All this somatic-image making is a necessary part of the generation of images through which we create the concepts that are the basis for normal, social accept- Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 115 able reasoning. Perceptual image-making is a result of outside-world input and inside-world input, with all neural activity taking place in the early sensory cortices.24 Aside from creating perceptual images, we constantly recreate other images from a lifetime of acquired dispositional neural patterns stored all over our brain.25 Here they reside until we need to access the memories to recall or make a particular image. Damasio explains that dispositional images are really just a commune of synapses which work together in order to reconstitute a ‘picture’ or memory for us. This complex neural machinery is fuelled by perception, memory, and reasoning. As memories of images are called up from all over the brain, what emerges is the potential not only for constructing images but for developing concepts. Faint at first, these potential concepts become more focused as the person contemplates the images that have been produced by the interaction of the body/brain. Anyone who has ever read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason26 will recognize the same dynamics explained in different words. As Kant puts it, ‘Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts ... The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance.’27 Damasio argues along the same lines, that feelings and images constitute the underlying ground for reason and its socially acceptable development.

Emotions and Feelings: Has Their Value Been Diminished?

Many in our Western culture believe, as does Damasio, that we are downgrading ‘the value of emotions and feelings in the acquisition and deployment of adaptive social behavior.’28 Kant referred to these kinds of feelings as non-moral, as physical propensity grounded in sensuous impulses. It was willkûr (choice) falling out of alignment with Wille (the notion of a greater Good), falling instead toward a propensity to do evil.29 Those who are in the business of studying the nature of the new kind of violence that has seeped into our culture do not recognize why such violence may be occurring. Damasio argues that without the mediation of feelings and images, reason is impeded. We could take this further and say that without this mediation of feelings and images people can become demonic and take unbridled and dangerous directions. By providing us with neurological evidence, Damasio underlines the importance of the input of bodily sensations in the formation of concepts. The body is the initial entranceway for sensations along with the primary visual, auditory, and olfactory regions of the brain, through which feelings and emotions are first embodied. These feelings and emotions make images that are then readied for second-order cognitive processing. Without the embodiment of images, mind is not conceivable; Damasio states this repeatedly and emphatically. By mind he means reason, a reason that cannot be formulated without the input of images. As he points out, primitive organisms were often just pure body (some still are) responding to the environment with the brain evolving later. Philosopher David Hume, as we have already noted, had a name for these entrance hits of sensation upon the body, he called them impressions: 116 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

The first kind arises in the soul originally from unknown causes. The second is derived in a great measure from our ideas ... Of this [first] impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea.30

Feelings for Transcendence

In philosophical circles in the past there was much talk in the abstract about the notion of transcendence, and today there still is, particularly when it comes to out- of-body accounts by people who, for example, have survived a near-death situation. But, if we had a difficult time contemplating transcendence in its conceptual sense, just what is a biological transcendence?31 One way to approach this question is to begin with Damasio’s contention that the self is continually in the process of establishing a new bodily image. Collec- tively, the early sensory cortical images, referred to as neural representations, constitute what we think of as ‘self.’ At the same time, as the new input of somatic images is occurring, information is being integrated and appropriated by the self, a self that is continually in the process of being recreated neurobiologically.32 Actu- ally, one can think of this bodily image of self as a phantom one, because it is constantly being created and recreated in order that the ongoing input of information has the most recent self-image against which a newly created image of self can be formulated.33

Losing Touch with the Body: A Digital Phenomenon

Immersed in a virtual space without a sense of time, and except for the necessity to control one’s breathing and balance, a person can lose touch with his body and also with his ‘self.’34 This could be the reason why immersants experience transcendence. The prefrontal (cognitive) sectors may somehow be temporarily discon- nected from the lower brain, and from the body, because the image of ‘self’ is no longer being generated. For example, in the case of Osmose and Ephémère, the frontal cortices are not receiving factual signals related to incoming imageful information from the external world. Instead, the brain is receiving images from a digitally produced, unreal environment enabled by the HMD and the person wearing it; at the same time, the brain experiences an entirely new sensation, one of floating in a 3D virtual spatiality. The instinctive/impressive information received would be different from any dispositional neuronal references previously stored by the brain. At best, the brain would be receiving signals from phantom bodily sensations, from a body that believes itself to be temporally immaterial and soul-like because it is floating in space. Add to this equation brainwaves that have slowed down considerably because of controlled deep breathing, and one has the makings of a euphoric out- of-body experience. One could speculate that these feelings are produced primarily because any neurological match that can be made of these new sensations of spatiality is made from what is already in memory, most likely by a comparison with the dreamlike spatiality already in the storehouse of experience.35 Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 117

Locating the Essence of Spatiality

So where is the essence of spatiality located? Is it located in the limbic region deep in the hippocampus where fMRIs have shown spatial memory to exist? Since we know that dreams take place in the hippocampus it might be logical to assume that the transcendent sense of spatiality we are addressing would have to be found there too. The parietal lobe, at the back of the brain, is also involved in orienting a person in space and time because it is involved with sensation (integrating sensory input) and perception (the visual system). We cannot, here, in any scientific way account for where in the brain the sense of essential space can be found. All we can do is surmise that perhaps during all this ‘disembodied-but-embodied’ spatial sensation, coupled with abstract images the brain has never seen before, we are dealing with the limbic and parietal areas of the brain.

The Neurobiological Implications of Immersive Virtual Art

So far in this chapter we have focused on the necessity of recognizing the important role played by the instinctive part of the brain. We have examined the role of instincts and supported Damasio’s and Pert’s theses that bodily instincts play a vital role in linking body to mind. Up until now I have argued that Osmose/ Ephémère are digital works of art evoking what works of art have always evoked – our feelings, our emotions. I wish to take this a step further at this point and propose that these immersive environments constitute a way of cultivating an instinctive dimension within ourselves that is mainly lost to us except when we dream. Damasio’s careful comparison of patients with brain injuries and normal patients provides us with evidence that we can use as markers from which to hypothesize about what may or may not be going on in respect to the physiology of immersants. If we couple his neurological evidence about how feelings and emotions are produced with Pert’s claim that peptides running throughout the organism play a huge role in linking body to mind, then we have even more evidence to affirm what may be happening to immersants in Osmose and Ephémère, not only in a physiological way but in a psychological way. To be sure, resorting to Hume’s language once more, impressions that arise from bodily sensations to form images need to be considered in more depth, along with with artistic images that are ‘fed’ into the visual system. Clearly, we also need to determine what role, if any, vision plays in processing the symbolic language of immersive virtual art. How does it translate artificial images into a dispositional memory image to be stored by the brain? Further, we need to consider how the visual system integrates digital virtual images with incoming sensations of bodily floating in a three-dimensional spatiality if we are to understand how this syner- getic combination affects the immersant’s instincts and emotions. We need to ask, more specifically, whether, and how, these kinds of digital images affect the instincts being processed by the body. Do virtual images uniquely affect the bodily image being formed? So far, we have devoted this chapter to considering how the biochemical aspects 118 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art of our brains might respond when we are immersed in computer-produced works of art such as Davies’. To make our point we have focused on the survival instinct and on theta rhythms in conscious and unconscious states. We have examined how primary instincts produce feelings, Pert’s so-called ‘molecules of emotions,’ and how they in turn can be linked to Damasio’s bodily images, which he claims are foundational for conceptual thinking. In respect to feelings of transcendence, we have concluded that works of art such as Osmose/Ephémère can be used not simply to entertain an immersant’s visual brain but to open up a new level of self-understanding. In other words, something physiologically different happens to immersants in 3D virtual spatiality that evokes in them feelings for transcendence. I am suggesting that these unique ‘feelings of transcendence’ immerse us in biological spatiality and open up new ways for us to understand how our unconsciousnesses operate in the silent spaces of our limbic brains, where, according to Damasio, our emotions give birth to our instinctive feelings. The upshot of all this is that immersive virtual art allows us a way to compare the symbolic language of dreams with the symbolic language of art – a way to consciously appreciate what experiencing a non-geometric spatiality, closely related to that found in dreams, is all about. In the case of Osmose/Ephémère, that felt dimension of ‘otherness,’ produced by the unreal images of nature, coupled with feelings of transcendence, has nothing to do with some abstract version of an ‘unknown’ God but everything to do with ‘divine instincts’ trapped in bodily sensations. This constitutes an important step forward in our quest to understand a spatiality that is deeply embedded not only in our brains, but also in our DNA.

Absorbing Environmental Space

As we continue in our quest to identify ‘a biological spatiality,’ I want to turn to new-media philosopher Mark Hansen36 and his interpretation of spatiality in Char Davies’ work. Putting aside the primacy of vision and sound in her work, Hansen investigates instead the concepts of touch, proprioception, and psychasthenia. The latter, a word once used by scientists to describe phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and other such disorders, has resurfaced and now defines the cultural mass identification with images and technology. Celeste Olalquiaga explains it as ‘a distur- bance in the relation between self and surrounding territory: psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s own body is confused with represented space.’37 Hansen has in mind a new ‘subverted’ version of psychasthenia inspired by Davies’ achievement of the sense of bodily immersion in 360° space. His new view of psychasthenia is a positively embodying one, one in which the body ‘absorbs’ environmental spatiality rather than disappears into it. To be fair, Hansen explains he is only using Davies’ work as a catalyst to prove his version of psychasthenia, which means, I suppose, that he does not intend to include the dynamics of her work in his analysis. If we were to use Damasio’s dynamics of instincts and images in respect to Hansen, we would say that the body plays a key role in sublating the surrounding spatial environment, making external space its own. In fact, one could say that Hansen would not be Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 119 philosophically averse to appropriating Damasio’s neurobiological bodily dynamics.38 By giving supremacy to the ‘felt-touch’ of an artificial environmental spatiality at the expense of ‘seeing’ and the response of the visual system, Hansen not only avoids discussing Davies’ artistry but ignores the important fact that the environmental space he is talking about is created by individuals’ brains. This most important aspect of Davies’ artworks must prioritize the visual brain, since without it there would be no 3D environment. As already discussed in chapter 5, 3D space is produced by one’s brain, not by the HMD or the computer or even the artist they are simply facilitators who bring about its reality. Also, the sense of touch discussed by Hansen cannot be taken literally in respect to Davies’ artworks since nothing in them can be touched, nor can they touch one physically. On the other hand, one’s proprioceptive response, the feeling of being in space with one’s body moving through it, is physiologically a real sensation because it is connecting with one’s biologically programmed feelings for space. (How feelings would arise during immersion in this 3D environmental space, using Damasio’s criteria, would make for an interesting discussion, but this will have to wait for another time.) We should not, however, overlook Davies’ intentions in creating her spatial environment, which, unlike either Hansen’s or Olalquiaga’s, is founded on a concept of osmosis that operates both ways, from body to environment and vice versa and encompasses a different philosophical agenda. In explaining a personal experience of osmosis Davies writes: ‘All duality, all difference, had vanished. I, myself had expanded to encompass the horizon and the dome of sky above: indeed, I was the landscape and the landscape was me. Self and world, perceiver and perceived had become one and the same.’39 Her project is not about touching or feeling space but about collapsing ‘oppositional categories of interior and exterior, object and subject, so that they might be experienced as interpenetrating, occupying the same space at the same time.’40 And while the immersant’s bodily motility in space and feelings about space during immersion are important factors, without Davies’ specifically constructed 3D virtual images, being immersed in a mundane 3D space would differ little from the initial opening scene of Osmose’s 3D Cartesian grid. There would be a 3D spatial environment but no extraordinary images in the space to evoke the deep ‘feelings’ of osmosis with them – the wonder that participants report (plate C-4). Spatiality exists in the brain’s genetic makeup and is experienced during dreams, when no sensation 0–1 3D spatial data are bombarding and dissolving themselves into the body. Space itself is innately felt whether projected inside or outside of us, and because it is produced by us it does not need to be otherwise appropriated by the body, just rediscovered in a new way – as Davies frequently reminds us. (For example, one can see the brain’s ability to create 3D space in the learned skill of viewing stereograms.)41 If Hansen’s interpretation of environmental space is understood in biological terms as penetrating the very pores of one’s body, then, when combined with Davies’ ephemeral imagery, it is a move in the right direction toward the understanding of dream space and the unconscious – what I refer to as biological spatiality and from which I derive the essence of spatiality. 120 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Kindling Personal/Impersonal Instincts for Survival

Philosophical discussions about felt space and its touch aside, this is only one aspect of the artworks which involves our ‘feelings’ – the other involves our reason. Hence it is time to return to Damasio’s thesis – that concepts arise because of the initial effects on the body of penetrating instincts that create emotions, that create feelings that create images. If this is the case, then surely, even though Davies’ images straddle the dangerous grounds of illusion, we should be able, nonetheless, to derive concepts from them, and so far these concepts appear to be very positive. Aside from feelings of transcendence that can be very powerful, I propose that Osmose and Ephémère kindle personal and impersonal instincts for ‘survival’ and that their images can make us rethink our role in the world. In the case of these particular artworks, the instinct for survival that surfaces is most profoundly evident in the elements of nature that dominate Davies’ work even though they are not necessarily meant to represent being-in-nature but are her attempts to stimulate feelings for ‘self’ and ‘being-in-the-world.’ (I related to these depictions of the elements of nature as an all-encompassing nature which included the cosmos;42 others might view these elements from more abstract perspectives that have nothing to do with nature.) Although we may not be called upon by Davies to save nature as it is, we can respond and think about the very unreality of this artistically produced artificial nature in a sober manner. We are not necessarily left to identify, thoughtlessly and without objective reflection, with an illusionary world, as Grau suggests. Depending on the ethical, moral, and/or intellectual maturity of the person, these unreal images of nature can inspire a person to consciously and seriously reconsider his role in the world in respect to acting in an ecologically or globally responsible manner. Confronted with the unreal virtual artwork in Osmose and Ephémère, the mind has no dispositional image (no memory image) available against which to compare the abstract art image (for example, that of the archetypal tree). The only dispositional image it has available which looks like a tree is that of a memory of a real tree. Hence, all it can do is store the image of the digital tree in memory for dispositional comparison and retrieval at some future time.43 What probably happens to catapult us from the realm of emotion and images into the realm of reason and reality is the imposition of real images of nature as they reappear in the mind after being displaced by Osmosian/Ephémèrian unreal ones. The 3D unreal images of nature must somehow be reconciled by the visual brain if the brain is to function normally again. Hence, unreal images are compared with the brain’s storehouse of real images. After these unreal images are weighed and processed in this manner, the by-product could be that an immersant may realize that the latter, or real nature, is what she wants to live in after all.

Inner Vision

In his book Inner Vision, Semir Zeki provides us with a way to tie together the foregoing discussion. He describes what occurs in the brain when we visually process abstract images. His descriptions fit in nicely with Pert’s and Damasio’s Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 121 theories and provide yet another piece of the neurological puzzle in respect to feelings and art. Zeki, a neurologist who has done pioneer work in the exploration of the dynamics of the visual system, has also been a ‘passionate’ art aficionado for most of his life. Curious as to how we respond both aesthetically and neurologically to art, he set up complex visual experiments to determine how our visual brains work. One of the things he discovered using sophisticated brain imaging technique is what part of the visual brain is activated by seeing natural scenes, and what part is activated by seeing abstract ones.44 This includes the influence of both shapes and colours on specific parts of the brain. The visual cortex consists of five channels that process incoming data. The first, V1, admits all the raw materials to be processed by the visual cortex and appears to have a mature anatomy at birth. As Zeki puts it, V1 constitutes ‘the royal gateway from the retina to the visual areas.’45 While V1 appears to be ready at birth to receive visual impressions formed on the retina, the prestriate cortex that surrounds V1 (this includes V2, which processes black and white images; V3, which processes dynamic forms; V4, which processes colour and form with colour; and V5, which processes motion) appears to mature only after birth as though it must first acquire visual experience.46 In the case of abstract paintings such as those by Mondrian, the middle frontal convolution (areas V1 and V4) is affected; in the case of painting that depicts natural colours and objects, the inferior frontal convolution lights up. Taking his research even further, Zeki discovered that there are also neurological differences in the kinds of cells that are activated between abstract and natural scenes.47 His conclusion: different modes of painting make use of different cerebral systems.48 Zeki’s book provides us with pictorial evidence of what parts of the brain are activated when one is viewing natural and abstract objects. Abstract objects, he writes, ‘seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes.’49 Two different parts of the brain are used. Abstract images previously never seen by the dispositional system are directed to that part of the early visual system where no comparisons to real images are undertaken. Natural scenes find their way to another part of the brain that requires, judgment, classification, and so forth. Zeki does not consider what the emotional outcome of seeing abstract paintings versus natural ones might be. He does, however, wonder about the roles that ‘love’ and ‘eros’ have in the creation of art; do they play a part in creating the aesthetics of art?50 Interestingly, at the end of a scientific neurological discussion about the processing of art by the brain, we are returned to the aesthetic, abstract ‘Platonic’ realm of love and eros. Zeki, when reaching the limits of his neurological investigation, slips back to the refuge of classical ideas of aesthetics, but not without leaving us his considerable insights into the brain and art. Suggesting that art can be formulaically reduced by the visual system (for example, V5 responds only to motion and ignores colour and form), Zeki points out that all healthy human brains process images almost identically, hence imply- ing that a language of constancy is seen in imagery.51 Such constancy gives people a common ground from which to admire and compare works of art. With regard to immersive virtual art, we have a twofold process to consider: abstract art that is formulaically created and that is formulaically processed by the brain.52 So whether 122 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art we deliberate on Zeki’s theories of abstract or naturally represented art or on Davies’ immersive virtual art, the starting point for such a discussion would be ‘formulaically produced images.’ Although I have referred to Davies’ art in terms such as ‘skeletal forms of nature’ or ‘abstract forms of nature’ she herself points out that she has gone to great lengths to keep her representations somewhere between recognizable figuration and the abstract, with the goal of maintaining perceptual cognitive ambiguity.53 How Davies’ deliberate artistic oscillations on in-between ground would fit into Zeki’s theories about which part of the brain is being activated is something only he could address; much, of course, would depend on how an immersant relates to the images from her point of view. Zeki is not dealing with computer-based 3D space, which would introduce another essential element in the visual ‘formulaic’ equation. Would he conclude that Davies has achieved a biological osmosis by activating those parts of the brain required to process both natural and abstract images? Is this what keeps her work from falling into either Grau’s illusionary percepts or Hansen’s notion of psychasthenia? Another intriguing issue, best left to Zeki, is whether the healthy human brain would appreciate the aesthetic quality of virtual images in Osmose/Ephémère in the same manner that it does in traditionally made art. From the rather large parcel of evidence that we have on the aesthetic responses to Davies’ art we would have to conclude that art influences the brain aesthetically in the same manner, whether it is conventionally or digitally produced. The difference would lie in the 360° immersion itself. During immersion we get more than just aesthetic pleasure from the images; we derive sensational feelings for transcendence because of the body- enveloping spatiality we find ourselves in. As Davies has put it, we are no longer ‘looking’ at images, we are effectively immersed inside of them, which, of course, places the issue of aesthetic pleasure onto substantially different grounds. Consider this mission statement from Zeki:

My aim in writing this book has been really to convey my feeling that aesthetic theories will only become intelligible and profound once based on the workings of the brain, and that no theory of aesthetics which does not have strong biological foundations is likely to be complete, let alone profound.54

The unrealistic images of nature in Osmose and Ephémère affect our emotions in a unique way. They sensitize our feelings for nature-as-it-is and/or being-in-the- world. Is this because, like dream images, the abstract images of nature in Osmose and Ephémère are ‘instinctively’ bound to the unconscious level and require no ‘intellectual’ processing? Zeki points out that there are neurologists who believe that anything that flows through the V1 area is processed by the silent spaces of the unconscious, that in their first encounter with the visual system (V1) images flow unimpeded by consciousness and automatically infiltrate the unconscious.55

Artistic Productions and the Evolution of ‘Seeing’

Finally, we need to consider the thesis with which Zeki ends his book because it brings us into the realm of visionary ‘seeing’ in respect to the artist. Zeki believes Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality 123 that the works of art we view in art galleries are a mirror image of those aspects of the brain that have created it. The image is, so to speak, a blueprint of the creative processes going on in the artist’s brain, which are then reproduced by her on canvas. Zeki is worth quoting on this:

But the fact also remains that when one considers the entire brain system that is engaged when one views two different versions of colored representational art – one in which objects are invested with natural, the other with unnatural colors – one finds that the two systems differ markedly from the V4 complex onwards. This finding supports the general view I have put forward here and elsewhere, that artists are neurologists, studying the organisation of the visual brain with techniques unique to them and that their work, when exploited scientifically, uncovers laws of cerebral organisation which scientists were previously ignorant of.56

Undoubtedly, Davies’ immersive virtual art reflects, through its dreamlike spatiality and imagery, the ‘laws of cerebral organization’ manifest in her brain. We are fortunate to have had her substantiate in her working notebooks accounts of what particular concepts have inspired her to visualize and integrate motion, colour, shape, atmosphere, and sound. She has left us many pages of notes referring to Osmose and Ephémère that reveal just how her visualization of these works proceeded, as one can see in the illustrations provided here.57 Most recently, for example, she has written theoretically about the difficulty involved in keeping her images hovering between figurative and abstract representation in her effort to evoke perceptual and cognitive ambiguity.58 From a psychological perspective, one could say that her immersive virtual art confirms Jung’s notion that symbols live ‘eternally’ in instincts. From a modern biological perspective, one could say that her work confirms how our instincts, our emotions, and our unconsciousnesses work at a primal level. But most of all, her work contributes to our evolving understanding of how 3D virtual images are translated into brain waves and chemical substances, not only in the case of immersive virtual art, but in other digitally created imaginative spaces such as cyberspace and video game space. So, does Davies’ work also confirm Zeki’s claim ‘that artists are neurologists, studying the organization of the visual brain with techniques unique to them’? Does Davies create and produce digital images that she sees inside her mind, just like Zeki says all artists do? To a neurologist like Zeki, she might, indeed, reveal how her visual brain organizes itself neurologically, how she relates to and re- spects the silent language of internally moving images in essential spatiality, and how she is able to create these images in immersive virtual space.59 Susanne K. Langer, in her book Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling,60 writes that in the transition from the animal state, humans first had to discover that the phenomena we were seeing did not live inside of our eyes but that we ourselves projected these images to create our reality. We need to keep in mind that there is also an evolutionary process going on in the visual brain.61 Such an evolutionary process is evident in the work of artists, like Char Davies, who utilize technology. Some of their artistic creations have gone beyond being imagined in 2D and embrace an evolutionary way of visualizing and depicting art in 3D. 124 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Finally, there is something more to be reaped from Zeki’s insights. It would appear that artists like Davies are inspiring us to visualize our world not as something strictly outside of us but as a world to which we have deep biological connections. These neural connections are not unlike the primitive’s ideas that images ‘live’ inside our eyes. If we think of 3D images within the immersive virtual environments as osmotically permeating our body and soul, then the primitive’s idea can also be translated into the more complex idea of ‘biological images’ deeply rooted in our genes. These are the images visualized by an artist steeped in essential spatiality and these are the kinds of images Char Davies creates. Speculative Inquiries 125 8 Speculative Inquiries into the Elements of Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Consciously Experiencing the Unconscious

Because my approach to Davies’ work is multifaceted, I could not, while researching, ignore the related issues that infringe on the subject, particularly those relating to light, vision, colour, wavelengths, dreams, and drugged states. In this last chapter I want to examine how the dynamics of Osmose and Ephémère employ them, and what role immersive virtual art might play in the creation of consciousness. If dreams are basically survival mechanisms, alerting us symbolically to the underlying problems we need to attend to in the real world, then has Davies discovered a way to experience the instinctive survival dimension, not as hunters of food, but as hunters of higher-order consciousness? Does her art provoke certain biochemical responses in us? Is it possible that we do not have to fall asleep and dream in order to access the limbic region of our brains? Could we simply immerse ourselves in the appropriate artistic 3D milieu and evoke the same dreamlike frequency of brainwaves and hence the mediating influence of theta rhythms? Have we, through immersive virtual art, or for that matter through video games, stumbled across a way of consciously entraining our brain’s unconscious dimensions?1 Throughout this book we have cited Char Davies’ preoccupation with her myopic vision and with light in general, and how they have influenced her art. In chapter 1, we quoted from Davies’ earliest writings on Ephémère as Numina, where, when outside at night, she reported seeing ‘auras of light around trees. Trees that are black black, floating silhouettes – even their leaves are graphic, the trunk more solid and black.’ To a great degree we concentrated on her art’s ephemerality, its transparent qualities, her emphasis on dissolving boundaries, and her intent to merge subject/object and other dualities into ambiguous representations. And while Davies does not attempt to analyse her preoccupation with light, or its effects on her art, it is apparent that light has played a substantial role in inspiring her. It seems right, therefore, to begin the last chapter of this book by focusing on light’s role as it hits the eye, travels through the visual brain, and contributes to the production of mind-altering chemicals in the brain. Humans cannot photosynthe- size light as plants do, yet we most likely have profited directly from the energy of 126 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art light in ways we have yet to discover.2 Considering how vital light is to all life, not much is known about it, especially its biochemical control of the brain and its role in consciousness and unconsciousness.3 What we do know is that different kinds of light, during visually stimulating circumstances, can induce specific wavelengths and biochemicals to create certain states of mind, either consciously or unconsciously. In this chapter we will focus on the visual brain, on the brainwaves and biochemicals produced by light, and how they are involved in producing altered states of consciousness. By examining what we know about dreams and hallucinatory or dreamlike states, and comparing them with the experience of Davies’ immersive virtual art, I hope to continue to shed light on the essence of spatiality.

Immersive Virtual Art and Dream Sleep?

Dream sleep sublates or restrains reason and judgment because the aminergic chemicals serotonin and norepinephrine, necessary to activate them, are suppressed. These are the chemicals that are active in waking consciousness, making us the reasoning, thinking creatures we are. During the immersive virtual art experience a sublation of reason occurs in some immersants; it is not, however, like the intensity of the sublation that occurs during a dream. (We will revisit the sublation of reason, from yet another perspective, when we discuss once more Semir Zeki’s work on the visual brain.) Because serotonin is an active ingredient of consciousness, and because we remain conscious during the immersive experience, serotonin and norepinephrine probably continue to play a leading role in that environment. There is also reason to believe that acetylcholine plays a substantial role during immersion in Davies’ art. In order to verify this suspicion, and since there really is no other route we could take at this point, we must turn to the topic of drug-induced hallucinatory experiences in an attempt to establish what happens to our brain’s biochemical balances when chemicals are deliberately ingested.

Doors of Perception

People who engage in drug-induced sessions or rituals believe that they have opened up ‘doors to perception,’ that they have transgressed somehow into another dimension beyond that which we experience in reality. Davies thinks of her work with immersive virtual space as doing just that, opening ‘doors to perception.’ Actually, an opening of vision to a new kind of perception is a better way of describing it, for the entire experience of consciousness or unconsciousness begins with the retina. The retina absorbs light and manufactures the different chemicals that we will refer to from time to time, chemicals that we know play a role in waking consciousness, sleeping unconsciousness, and REM sleep.4 When we dream, we often encounter the same kind of transcendent experience reported in drug-induced states, especially if our dreams are crowded with angels who show us beautiful jewels or take us into superb realms of crystalline palaces, and so on. When we enter into an artist’s rendition of a dreamlike realm such as Speculative Inquiries 127

Davies’ immersive virtual art, most of us report a similar feeling of having transcended space and time, of having entered into a special realm beyond the three dimensions that we know in normal waking life.

Biology, the Visual Brain, and Consciousness

Sorely needed at this time is a collaborative scientific investigation of what I refer to as the ‘making of consciousness.’ A broad-based investigation would begin the process of collating, categorizing, and comparing all of the information we have in respect to light, the visual brain, proteins (including the role of vitamin A), photo- synthesis, and much more. We need to determine how all this is processed by the brain biochemically. We need to find a way to identify the role that natural light, its offshoot, endogenous light (cellular light), and artificial light play in creating consciousness.5 And while it is imperative to pay attention to the biochemical (DNA) production of endogenous light, and whether, or how, it affects or produces brainwave rhythms during REM sleep, and whether, or how it, lights up our dreams and even drugged states, we cannot do so here.

Spatiality and Biochemical Connections

Instead, I will continue our investigation by focusing on the essence of spatiality – including the spatiality experienced during dreams and dreamlike states, whether drug-produced or computer-enabled – in order to determine whether all these states access a common essence of spatiality that can be identified with the help of biochemicals and brainwaves. A good way to do this is by investigating what we know about theta rhythms in conscious and unconscious states. We know, for example, that they appear during drug-induced hallucinatory imagery, which speaks to people in universal symbols, and that this imagery can be compared to the language of dreams, which also speaks to people in universal symbols. Theta rhythms have to do with spatiality and the making of memory. When they are not present, we can surmise that spatial memory is not being made.6 Theta rhythms and the biochemicals serotonin and acetylcholine are found in the right frontal lobe and in the limbic region of the brain, which includes the hippocampus and amygdala.

Theta Rhythms and Dreamlike Consciousness

While human beings were thought, until recently, to have no direct access to their limbic and hence instinctive systems except through dreams, animals, we have discovered, exude theta rhythms not only while they dream but also in their most alert conscious states – for example, when they are hunting or fleeing for their lives. This finding has lead some researchers to assume that our own dreaming may be the result of our instincts for survival, instincts which we access in symbolic language only during sleep. Theories abound about why dreams are necessary for the health of the mind although this is not the place to address them.7 128 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Flickering Light and Hallucinations

The fact that flickering light can cause mysterious visual hallucinations and alter- ations in consciousness is something that humans have known ever since the discovery of fire but has only recently been used as a form of brain entrainment. We have but to sit in front of a fire and gaze into its ‘fractal’ flames to appreciate the state of reverie that it draws us into. There are also other types of natural brainwave entrainment that can be experienced by a person, such as the flickering of sunlight through leaves or on water, or the dotted lines on the road that flick by us when we are driving a car. This kind of light rhythm creates alpha and/or theta rhythms in our brain which tune into our meditative or dream frequency wavelengths. Semir Zeki has written about this phenomenon: ‘why unpredictability in motion (the tongues of fire and the waves of the sea) should have such a powerful effect on most people remains a question unanswered by physiology; it is part of a larger question, also unanswered and indeed untackled by neurological research: how and where does the brain impart an aesthetic component to a work of art?’8 And, lest we continue the myth that each of us is unique, let me cite Semir Zeki’s views on what happens in the brain at an elementary perceptual level when we view works of art:

At an elementary level, what happens in the brain of one individual when he or she looks at works of art is very similar to what happens in the brain of another, which is one reason why we can communicate about art and, more significantly, communicate through art without recourse to the spoken or written word, often inadequate to communicate with the same intensity.9

With Zeki’s reminder that human brains respond in the same way to colours in a work of art,10 let us turn to another use of colour and brainwaves, this time in the entrainment of the brain. If it is possible to entrain a brain through sounds, colours, and brainwaves, then should we not be wary of the new technologies involved in such entrainment, including immersive virtual art? Questions about light and motion in respect to aesthetics and the immersive virtual work of art do, indeed, need to be tackled, as well as questions about the technological manipulation of light and motion in video games, and their effects on consciousness.

Photic Stimulation

A few years ago, Japan found itself combating ‘TV Pocket Monsters’ sickness after a video game show mysteriously sparked epilepsy-like seizures in more than 700 viewers, mostly children. The children suffered these seizures after watching an explosion scene with red and blue flashing lights. Medical experts suspect that a scene featuring rhythmic bursts of brightly coloured red light five times a second was so rapid and intense that it interrupted normal brain function.11 TV Tokyo cancelled the program until the cause of the reactions became clear, and it urged video stores to stop renting all episodes of the show. As long ago as 1970 at the Tohoku University School of Medicine in Japan, Speculative Inquiries 129 researchers were engaged in studying the influence of colour on the photo-convulsive response (PCR).12 While measuring the effects of white, red, yellow, blue, and green photic stimulation on the photo-convulsive response, they noted that the colour red, at a frequency of 15 Hz, was most likely to cause a PCR. They also noted that this photo-convulsive response could be inhibited by introducing low levels of blue light at the same time.13 There have been other reported cases of red light setting off seizures, such as the use of a brainwave synchronizer.14 At present, the biological implications of colour on the molecular level, and our understanding of its impact on the consciousnesses of human beings, are still being investigated. However, more and more evidence is being amassed to prove that light and colour have a significant effect on consciousness.15

Artificial Light

In its natural state, light is not dangerous to human beings, the exception being ultraviolet (UV) light’s short waves. Artificially produced light can also emit harmful UV rays that must be filtered for inside use. On the positive side, artificial light can be hybridized for maximum energy efficiency by mixing naturally stored sunlight and artificially produced light. Regardless of how light is stored and/or produced, the intensity of the light is controllable. A perusal of the many Internet sites advertising headmounted displays provides good examples of the variety of models available. Their relative strengths and weaknesses are discussed in respect to light – from cathode ray tube displays, to active matrix liquid crystal displays, to the newer fast-switching ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) atop a silicon VLSI active-matrix backplane (FLC/VLSI) – along with the degree of the programmed intensity of colour that the units can handle.16 Since light can be intensified and flashed in particular rhythms and colours (consider the recent cases in which laser lights were beamed by people on the ground at incoming pilots who are landing), it can become a dangerous weapon when directed through vision at a human being’s brain.17 Photic response, therefore, can be manipulated when artificially produced coloured light is flashed at certain speeds, as described in the earlier example of the Japanese children who had seizures when exposed to flickering coloured lights on a television program. But a similar kind of experience can also occur in people with photosensitive epilepsy when artificial light or sunlight flashes quickly by while they are driving at certain speeds. We have thus far cited the negative implications of artificial light. There are, of course, positive aspects, such as those created in the digital works of art we are discussing here, but even these positive aspects have to do with the control of brainwaves through light and colour. Artificially produced light can, indeed, control vision and the brain and hence, by extension, control or influence consciousness. For example, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) uses a light bar flashing horizontally to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome such as that suffered by soldiers in Vietnam.18 In addition, brainwave entrainment (BWE) or photic stimulation uses flickering light and pulsating sound as therapeutic tools. 130 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Headmounted Displays and Photons

From the above discussion, it can be argued that when photons created by electronic light in an immersive virtual work of computer-based art hit the eye, they can evoke a different realm of consciousness. Most probably this would be caused by the light and the colour waves produced that set up certain brainwave patterns, which could be controlled in a particular manner for a specific result. If this is the case, do the artificially produced photons within the HMD, worn to view immersive virtual art, act to alter consciousness in predetermined ways that we know little about? Would the photons differ from or be the same as those employed in EMDR and BWE? The difference between an immersive virtual work of art and brainwave entrainment (the latter deals in transmissions of light and sound at certain predetermined frequencies) is that BWE cannot literally alter the ground of consciousness, while an immersive work of art may be able to do so. BWE is designed to mesmerize or calm consciousness through rhythmic sounds and lights, while a work such as Davies’ is designed to do what the best works of art should do, heighten awareness of being in the world. Essentially, however, this immersive virtual art employs rhythmic sounds and lights just as BWE does, with the added advantage of allowing immersants to float and interact in artificially constructed virtual spatiality with aesthetically pleasing 3D images.

Immersive Virtual Art, Innocent Transgressions

Unlike photic stimulation in brain entrainment, which purposefully attempts to control brainwaves, Osmose and Ephémère have transgressed – with their flickering lights, pulsating sounds, and use of subdued or vibrant colours – into the realm of the making of consciousness. Although the artist had the tools necessary to deliberately and/or scientifically manipulate waves of consciousness (as occurs in BWE), Davies’ approach was motivated by the desire to create seamless osmotic fluidity between estranged dualities in an all-encompassing spatiality. The artistic results appear to have immersed consciousness into what, I suspect, cannot be other than theta or alpha wave consciousness, although this supposition needs to be confirmed scientifically. Moreover, these immersive works of art evoke unique, dreamlike spatial dimensions in the subject, enabling her to transcend the intellectual sequential-horizontal-logical dimensions utilized by the left hemisphere and to enter into a simulated sense of dreamlike consciousness. Mark Pesce (co- inventor of virtual reality modelling language, or VRML) has referred to his experience in Osmose as ‘virtual kundalini, an expression of philosophy without any words, a state of holy being which reminds us that, indeed, we are all angels.’19

Light-Produced Consciousness and Electromagnetic Waves

Evidence is mounting in support of a light-produced consciousness that can be a product of either natural light, endogenous (cellular) light, artificial light, or all three combined. Each kind of light in its own way can induce the release of Speculative Inquiries 131 different combinations of chemicals in the brain, and not necessarily, as we have noted, in a beneficial way. Since light, and even radio waves, travel at the speed of electromagnetic waves, it is difficult to know how to assess the impact of the latter’s waves on the immersant wearing an HMD during immersion. Light travels at the same speed as electromagnetism, so concluded Michael Faraday, who discovered electromagnetism, and James Clerk Maxwell, who discovered that light travelled in electromagnetic undulation.20 But to what degree would brainwaves generated by the act of seeing digitally produced images while hearing binaurally produced sounds, along with electromagnetic waves generated by the HMD, cumulatively compound the electromagnetic effect? Light, colour, electromagnetism, and sound all play a role in affecting and creating brainwaves. However, to collate them, and lump them into one brainwave- biochemical ‘theory of everything’ would be impossible to do – at least at this time. It would be nice to find scientific evidence associating colour, light, electromagnetic waves, and theta rhythms, but I could find no body of knowledge available on this particular quaternity and how they might collectively affect consciousness. As well, my research revealed that cyberspace was full of useful, very current, information about electromagnetism and its effects on the brain’s alpha and theta rhythms. The research literature available on this subject on the Internet often has to do with health hazards, espionage work (brain entrainment), UFO abductee accounts, and smatterings of highly specialized scientific data on brainwaves. Suffice it to say that significant, although not nearly enough, work is being done to investigate electromagnetic effects (particularly extremely low-frequency effects) on the hippocampus and right temporal lobe and associated limbic lobe, structures of the brain that have to do with transcendent feelings.21 Since the investigations on low-frequency electromagnetism more often than not cite Michael Persinger’s work, we need to pause and examine it.

Electromagnetic Dreaming?

In recent years we have amassed much literature that speaks to the well-known fact that emotional life is located in the right frontal lobes. More often than not the much-revered neuroscientist Wilder Penfield’s work is cited. He verified, in his original research at the Montreal Neurological Institute, that the right temporal lobe was the seat of ‘feelings of great peace, of deep understanding, of consciousness of another being, of sensations of taste, smell, sight or sound, and so on.’22 When Davies conceived Osmose she had no idea that these feelings of peace, of understanding, of transcendence, would be part of most immersants’ experiences. After more than twenty years of research, Michael Persinger23 confirmed that when the right frontal lobe of a normal person is electronically stimulated, feelings of wellness or transcendence occur. Persinger’s research includes ‘applying electromagnetic signals to the brain from the outside, by setting up magnetic fields around the head.’24 Persinger used a self-designed head helmet to set up his electromagnetic experiments. Since an immersant’s head movements in Osmose and Ephémère must be tracked 132 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art in order to create the images they see in real time, electromagnetic and kinematic principles are, indeed, involved in the design of the HMD. Sensors today can use low-frequency magnetic fields, ultrasound, radar, or infrared cameras to detect motion. And these in turn, like the commercial wavelength machines used to tranquillize people, no doubt do interfere with normal brainwaves. We do not know whether, while viewing Osmose and/or Ephémère, the HMD transmits sensory data to the computer, data used to generate images in real time; nor do we know whether it also distributes a frequency of wavelengths that transmit wavelength sequences similar to those used by Persinger in his research. Also unknown is whether in Osmose and/or Ephémère wavelengths result that produce theta/ alpha patterns in the brain and hence dreamlike states; nor do we know whether or not the stereoscopic helmet used in Davies’ art is itself partially responsible for activating the transcendent mood experienced, with the art itself only a secondary contributor in creating this mood. Davies believes, as we have noted throughout this book, that the created effect is a result of the ambiguity designed into the imagery through the use of semi-transparency and the effects of enveloping spatiality. We need to further study the inter-dynamics of the entire phenomenon. A good guess would be that all of these aspects contribute to creating these feelings of transcendence. Consider the following:

Persinger and his group set about creating electromagnetic fields (generated by computers) with very specific shapes and time intervals, and then fed these pulsed signals to a solenoid (cylindrical coils of wire acting as magnets when carrying electric current), thus creating electromagnetic fields. The solenoids were then mounted in pairs, one placed opposite the other in a helmet that the volunteer wore.25

When low-intensity electromagnetic fields were concentrated over the right temporal lobe, the volunteers experienced

sensations [that] were visual or auditory; sometimes they were complex experiences; sometimes they were based on actual memories; sometimes they were fundamental and deep-rooted feelings. Many of them, however, had to do with a feeling of peace, of serenity, of being at one with nature and often of being in the presence of another consciousness (another being). Some people felt they were near the presence of aliens. Others experienced deeply spiritual or religious feelings. Some reported that they felt they were in the presence of god, and some heard his voice.26

Without scientific monitoring of immersants’ brainwaves during Osmose, we can only speculate about why feelings of transcendence occur in so many immersants. What the comments of more than 30,000 immersants suggest, however, is that computer-based immersive art may provide a venue to study esoteric feelings. It may, indeed, be possible to begin to understand how, where, and why deep feelings for transcendence arise in an individual’s brain and to what degree these feelings may be caused by the artwork and/or by the electromagnetism transmitted through the helmet itself. To this end, digital works of art such as Osmose and Ephémère (and other virtual worlds – see Epilogue) will provide scientific researchers an accelerated beginning. Speculative Inquiries 133

HMD and Electromagnetism

We have been questioning how the HMD with its weak low-frequency electromagnetism might contribute to the dreamlike, transcendent feelings experienced during immersion in Davies’ works. Do electromagnetic waves penetrate the frontal lobes of the brain during immersion, as they do in Michael Persinger’s experiments? His experiments, for example, confirm that electromagnetic charges ostensibly penetrate the right frontal lobes because volunteers consistently report that deep-rooted feelings are evoked: feelings of peace and serenity, of being one with nature. Although we cannot at present determine the effects of light during immersion in virtual art and the brainwaves it creates in an immersant, we need to remember that the HMD, while it processes all the light, binaural sound, and 3D virtual images that are seen during an immersion in 3D art, also generates its own electromagnetic frequencies.27 While the 3D virtual images and 3D sound function in a work of art to affect the brain visually and aurally, without a doubt electromagnetic waves also contribute to the altered state of consciousness reported by many immersants.28 We need to keep in mind that artificially produced light, like natural light, is also a progenitor of brainwaves and biochemical responses in the brain. Artificially generated light and colours, and the energy they produce, can be controlled to influence brainwaves much more dramatically than the colours seen by natural light and hence operate at an advantage that natural light does not possess. By managing the intensity of wavelengths that enter the individual’s visual pathways, the biochemicals that influence consciousness could presumably be controlled in a work of computer-based art just as they are in brainwave entrainment. Such carefully contrived control during spatial immersion in a virtual environment could be more manipulative of brainwaves than either drugs or dreams or Persinger’s electromagnetic waves.

Speculations on Colour in Osmose and Ephémère

In Osmose colour is used sparingly. It is muted and soft, consisting mostly of ochres, siennas, sap greens, greys, whites, and blacks. Ephémère, on the other hand, is very colourful, although some muted colours are employed, especially those carried over from the symbolic elements used in Osmose. Does this mean anything? I think it might. Osmose could be engaging visual channels related to the black and white realm (rods) of the visual system. Therefore, immersion in Osmose could evoke a rod-oriented experience. As such, it could encourage the production of rhodopsin and the slow theta wavelengths that rhodopsin evokes. If rods were being activated rather than colour-detecting cones, this would theoretically favour a greater but slower input of temporal information, helping to produce an overall dreamlike quality. The slow wave forms of rod signals are easily distinguished from the rapid wave forms of cone signals. Ephémère’s more colourful composition might favour the production of opsin and evoke the rapid wave forms of cone signals. This might mean that theta rhythms and acetylcholine 134 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art are being produced in Osmose but not in Ephémère, perhaps the reason why immersants do not report the same quality of dreamlike experience in the latter. If we cannot yet offer decisive proof that the brain is seduced into a state of theta or alpha dreamlike consciousness through a work of art such as Osmose or Ephémère, we can, I think, confidently state that something similar to this must occur. To what degree this occurs because the HMD electromagnetically generates low-frequency alpha/theta brainwaves and to what degree the kinds of artistically produced images and ‘non-linearly’ composed binaural sound (of sampled human voices or other sounds) that are being seen and heard generate brainwaves – to say nothing about the novelty of being in immersive virtual spatiality – must remain a moot point. Again, the evidence that we have for postulating the possibly important role that the low-frequency electromagnetic waves generated by the HMD plays in transcendent experiences appears to be limited to Persinger’s research and the science of brain entrainment, which in both cases depend on artificially produced wavelengths. Below, we will examine entrainment that controls wavelengths in the brain such as alpha or theta rhythms in order to change and/or control a person’s mood.

The Dynamics of Dreams, Drugs, and Dreamlike Experiences

In all three cases – when we dream, when we take drugs, and during the dreamlike sequences that we experience in Davies’ art – we find ourselves watching images. In the case of dream images or drug-produced images, we do not know how they are produced, but recent scientific evidence has uncovered that biochemical processes in the brain can, indeed, produce images.29 Are they first seen separately in 2D by each eye, and then processed into 3D by the visual system, as happens in immersive virtual art? Is it possible that even in a REM dream state 2D images are fed onto the retina of each eye and the visual brain does what it always does to create 3D reality? Are they, then, simply projected on the screen of the mind? My hunch is that dream images are biochemically produced images, ‘ready-made’ in 3D, pieced together from the storage bins of the visual brain, while the eyes just watch them as they do a movie. It is difficult not to notice that the dynamics experienced during immersion are similar to those that happen in a REM state of sleep, where one is also immersed in three-dimensional space while viewing images one has no control over. In the case of dreams, one is immersed in entire scenarios played out in symbolic/archetypal language. During the four periods of REM sleep one simply watches as the dream scenarios unfold with images that appear to be ready-made just as they do in an immersive work of art. (We should note that some people are lucid dreamers and can interact with what they are seeing just as in Ephémère immersants can interact with various visual elements and become an active participant in the immersive space.) The same, of course, can be said of the ayahuasca experience, in which a dreamlike experience, filled with archetypes and symbols, unfolds before one’s eyes.30 Images in Davies’ immersive virtual art are also comparable to those produced naturally, say, in the hypnagogic state that occurs just before dropping off into slow-wave sleep, during which large holographic images often arise. Speculative Inquiries 135

Dreams and dreamlike experiences are produced in ways still unknown to us, ways that in the case of dreams and ayahuasca experiences appear to be biochemically spawned. In the case of Davies’ art, the artistically created images also affect the mind as though the brain were being altered biochemically. Although one cannot always recall dreams and not all people dream in colour, ayahuasca users seem to be able to recall in elaborate detail the images they saw while intoxicated and the vibrant colours that these images were composed of. Immersants in Davies’ 3D works also have very little difficulty recalling the images they have seen, probably because during immersion they were in a conscious but instinctive theta rhythm brainwave state. The most likely reason why immersants in Davies’ virtual art and drug takers remember the images they have seen may have been uncovered by recent research with epileptic teenagers, something we will discuss below. As we will see, if immersants are experiencing theta rhythms consciously, then they should have no trouble remembering what they have seen. Consciously experienced theta rhythms provide one with lucid recall of what one has seen and seem to differ from theta rhythms produced during REM sleep in this respect. While memories of the dream or other related information may be stored spontaneously in the brain by the dreamer, who is in an unconscious mode, remembering a dream occurs with great difficulty, or, more often than not, it is not remembered at all. After enough dream episodes of the unfolding dream story are played out over a period of months (sometimes more) and stored somewhere in the brain, the unconscious mind will eventually respond to them with a conscious insight. When this happens, it also ends the dream series.

Brain Entrainment

Light can act as a common denominator for the dream, drug, and dreamlike states that we have been considering, and it does not appear to matter whether the light is natural light, cellularly produced light, or artificial light. Natural light empow- ers the visual brain and the entire body. All visible light is eventually reduced to biochemicals. Artificial light, used for brain entrainment, can also stimulate biochemical energies that exploit or create dreamlike moods. Scientists engaged in light and sound research wish to understand what happens in the brains of people when their natural biochemical rhythms are interrupted and controlled by a manipulated frequency input of light and sound. Bruce Harah-Conforth says this about brain entrainment:

I have little doubt that brain entrainment technology is a highly effective means of inducing changes in consciousness. Brain entrainment, at least within my own research, has shown itself to be virtually foolproof and does indeed facilitate whole brain experiences ... the early indications are strong that this now-developing technology will profoundly revolutionize both our concepts of, and interaction with, our consciousness ... The evolution of human consciousness is a tangibly manipulable process. We can control our destiny ... It would appear as though brain entrainment will be among the technologies leading the way.31 136 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Technologies such as brain entrainment need to be monitored closely because they speak to a ‘manipulation of consciousness’ and not to a growth in consciousness that involves a special kind of knowing and that characterizes the works of art we are addressing here.32

Theta Rhythms and ‘Instinctive Consciousness’

We come now to a discussion about theta rhythms, which can help us identify what may be happening in the brain during immersion. At present, most researchers are still comfortable citing the limbic region (including the hippocampus and right frontal lobe) as the area of the brain that is activated during dreams and drug ingestion. The limbic region is not only involved in the automatic control of basic vital functions, it is also the locus of what I will refer to as ‘instinctive consciousness,’ not only in humans but also in animals. Significantly, scientists have been able to confirm that theta rhythms exist consciously in a hunting animal by comparing these rhythms to the animal’s unconscious theta rhythms in the REM dream state. By carefully studying the response of the animal’s neurons in a conscious state and in REM sleep, scientists have been able to identify that theta rhythms exist in both states.33 Theta rhythms, which until recently were only associated with meditative or dream states in human beings, signify the activation of acetylcholine and serotonin in the brain, along with other biochemicals such as tryptamines. Theta rhythms that occur during REM states originate in the instinctive realm and are part of the unconscious state. Those that occur during conscious states also appear to originate in the same instinctive realm but cross over into consciousness. If theta rhythms originate in the lower brain region during REM states, and if theta rhythms are connected with instinctive but wakeful consciousness, could they also be occurring during drug-induced states and during Davies’ 3D immersion? I suggest that they are and that they also point to the existence of an essence of spatiality and a locus for memory.

Theta Rhythms and Memory in Human Beings

In the late 1990s video games were designed specifically to research how the epileptic brain responds to situations in which memory is involved. Neuroscientists at Brandeis University and Children’s Hospital in Boston studied the brainwaves of severely affected epileptic teenagers in the hopes of determining exactly which parts of the brain were most associated with memory; the hypothesis was that epileptic seizures may originate in the temporal lobe, which is linked with memory. It was hoped that eventually the brain’s rhythmic activity would be understood and that the treatment of epilepsy using surgery and other methods would be advanced. Attaching wires to numerous parts of the teenagers’ brains, researchers carefully monitored electrical activity. They found that different parts of the brain responded to different segments of the video games. For example, memory functions had to play a substantial role if these teenagers were to find their way out of the mazes in Speculative Inquiries 137 the game. Unless they remembered how they got to a specific place in the game, it was almost impossible to find their way out. Of interest to us is the fact that during these experiments, scientists discovered that slower types of electrical activity – theta waves – were associated with spatiality, learning, and memory. Prior to this discovery, as we have noted above, theta waves in humans were associated only with REM sleep. Because theta waves were produced by the brain when these teenagers sought to remember their way out of mazes, neuroscientists believed that they had identified the locus of spatial learning and memories in human beings. This was already known about spatial learning in rats and other animals, but until now it had not been confirmed in human beings. Identifying spatial learning and memory functions (and, more important, the link between them) with the slow waves of theta rhythms confirms that conscious human beings and conscious animals can experience theta rhythms. Since dreams also manifest the slow wavelengths of theta as well as alpha rhythms, we can surmise that dreams probably engage the memory and spatial areas of the brain as well as instinctive areas in the limbic brain. And this is precisely what we find when we examine the scientific data on the subject. More theta rhythms are found in the hippocampus – the memory region of the brain where acetylcholine and serotonin act as modulators – than in other regions of the brain. Light- induced chemicals, because their traces are also found in theta rhythms in unconscious and in conscious states, also constitute an important piece of the puzzle. Research on the subject of theta waves continues to be done, and while most of it is too technical to address here, the less complicated research is useful to note.34

Experiments with Alpha Brainwaves

Alpha rhythms (oscillating between nine and thirteen times per second) are associated with a relaxed, sometimes floating sense of feeling where one does not think particular thoughts but yet is submerged in them at the same time. Alpha waves trace calm, lucid mental states; they appear when people are not using problem- solving or other types of cognitive skills; they are often detected, along with theta waves, during REM sleep. Dale Foster set out to investigate whether visual alpha-frequency brainwave biofeedback, when combined with alpha-frequency binaural-beat stimulation, would help facilitate and promote what he refers to as ‘self-regulation and man- agement of consciousness.’35 He wanted to determine whether subjects could be trained to learn to use alpha waves therapeutically, to enter into what is known as an ‘alpha state,’ or altered state of consciousness. What Foster found was that the combination of visual and binaural stimulation resulted in significantly more alpha production in brainwave feedback. In these circumstances, volunteers were able to produce considerably more alpha waves than those who were in control groups that featured one or the other method, or were simply exposed to sounds of ocean surf. All four groups exposed to the alpha rhythms reported feelings of peace and calmness, dissociation with the body and with time, and dissolving into the environment. 138 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

Experiments with Theta Brainwaves

It is apparent from the Foster study that alpha waves develop during meditative states, particularly during Zen meditation. Aside from producing alpha brain waves, research shows that Zen masters, with more than twenty years’ meditative experience, can also produce theta waves in what is considered to be the final stage, or stage four, of meditation.36 While in most people the appearance of theta waves indicates that they have fallen asleep, in the monks’ case they not only remain conscious but are in a more lucid mode than normal. In fact the theta mode they find themselves in has been shown to be conducive to insightful learning; solutions for what were previously only hypotheses suddenly spring to mind. It is as though unconscious intuition opens up to offer the conscious mind previously unavailable insights. When biofeedback researchers Elmer and Alyce Green at the Menniger Clinic began studying theta rhythms, they found them to be associated with deeply internalized states of being during which hypnagogic images arose in the minds of subjects.37 People who experienced the most hypnagogic images also turned out to be those who were ‘psychologically healthier,’ better adjusted socially, self-accept- ing, and more creative. The Greens have concluded that people who learn to quiet their minds and emotions, and achieve theta status, experience a new kind of bodily consciousness that affects their entire well-being. Theta rhythms have also been known to arise in people floating in salt-laden flotation tanks.38 Floaters, whose EEGs are measured after floating, are found to generate far more theta rhythms then meditators left to meditate in dark, quiet rooms. Floaters also describe deep insights into self and the ability to communicate thoughts and experience previously unattainable feelings.

The Seduction of Alpha/Theta Rhythms

I suspect that consciousness, and the biochemicals underlying it, could be studied in the EEGs, fMRIs, and chemical analysis39 of immersants’ brains during and after immersion in Osmose and Ephémère. As far as I know, no actual neurological testing of subjects’ brainwaves has taken place for people who have been immersed in either work of art. There are scientific studies underway that examine dynamics in the visual brain that include real movement or the close approximation of real movement. The flashing of light across a computer screen creates specific alpha or theta rhythms in the volunteers watching it. Research along these and related lines will be necessary to establish the kind of brain rhythms that are produced by an immersant while floating in Osmose or Ephémère.40 It is highly likely that theta/alpha waves will be shown to rule the brain during the 3D immersive art experience since so much of the data collected by neuroscience to date seems to confirm this. In the case of Osmose the more somniferous theta waves may prevail over alpha waves, while in the case of Ephémère alpha waves might prevail because of the intense use of colour, which could affect biochemical production and hence the brainwaves. Like the epileptic teenagers Speculative Inquiries 139 cited above who had to navigate through mazes and remember where they had been in order to get out, an immersant in Davies’ works is consciously floating and manoeuvring in spatiality and often purposefully remembering where she has been in order to return there. As with the epileptic teenagers who tap into the spaces in the brain where spatial memory-making takes place, people who are immersed only once in Osmose recall their travels through its worlds very accu- rately and in great detail, probably because it has a stable structure; this does not appear to happen to the same degree with Ephémère because everything is meant to be in a state of flux so that people can surrender to its flow.

Immersive Virtual Art and the Generation of Alpha/Theta Rhythms

There are three possibilities that I believe could be found responsible for generating alpha/theta waves in Davies’ immersive virtual art. The first one is obvious. It has to do with bodily breathing and the floating sensation one experiences in immersive virtual spatiality. The second concerns the electromagnetism generated by the HMD. The third, and possibly the most important, is Davies’ artistic digital realization of real-time ambiguous images and binaural sound, which leaves immersants grounded in ephemerality.41 All three, ineluctably bound, play an important role in Davies’ art. Let us look first at the effects of breathing and floating in immersive virtual spatiality. As noted above, floaters whose EEGs are taken after or during flotation show an abundance of theta waves, more so than do meditators in darkened, quiet rooms. Here let us make an analogy to immersants who, as floaters in immersive virtual spatiality, often report psychological and spiritual experiences similar to those of tank floaters. We have already noted in previous chapters that immersants in Osmose and Ephémère experience all of the dreamlike and exotic sensations of being in another world. To a person such as myself, who knew nothing about these ‘saltwater floaters’ before researching and writing this chapter, the coincidences of the experiences of floaters and immersants were stunning and could hardly be ignored. The second and third points can be addressed together. Since Davies’ immersive virtual art is laced in visual and spatial ambiguity, my guess is that it most likely ends up stimulating the visual system biochemically – not unlike what goes on during brain entrainment. From the biochemical point of view, it appears that this art likely produces theta brainwaves that are then reinforced by the electromagnetism that issues from the HMD itself. (What we call the visual cortex may not be tied exclusively to the eyes but has been more recently defined as the area of the brain able to differentiate spatial relationships, including any input of the senses given to it – for example, binaural sound.) Whether these reinforced brainwaves would produce biochemicals that evoke a deeply rooted memory of an essence of spatiality is not exactly a hypothetical proposition since the hippocampus is involved in producing theta waves that have to do with spatiality and memory. I purport, however, that the genre of consciousness produced by Davies’ ephemeral art, when combined with electromagnetism, would be different from dream con- 140 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art sciousness. The reason I say this is because the ‘instincts’ that arise during immersion in virtual space are not unconsciously experienced as they are in a dream. We have seen how theta rhythms have appeared in the brains of consciously function- ing individuals, in epileptic teenagers, in Zen-practising monks, in floaters, and in other meditating people, suggesting that in the limbic region of the brain a bridge exists over which theta rhythms can cross and engage unconscious instincts without it being necessary for an individual to be asleep. Once the conscious mind crosses over into ‘archaic’ memory and space, based on the above premises, it should also be able to carry these instincts back into consciousness. They would then become ‘conscious instincts’ carrying information to and from the limbic region and the essence of spatiality.

Essential Space and Dreamlike States

There is yet another reason for citing the existence of theta rhythms in immersants. If dreams arise in the brain’s primal limbic regions, is it not plausible to assume that an ethereal, dreamlike environment such as Davies’ could also plunge a conscious person into an instinctive sense of consciousness? Not unlike the theta rhythms that manifest themselves during predatory behaviour in a conscious animal, theta rhythms in conscious human beings could provoke a dreamlike state in immersants and heighten their feelings for essential space. Research is beginning to shed light on how our visual brain works when we are conscious and during dreams when we are unconscious; how it works consciously during immersion in a virtual environment; and even how it works consciously during hallucinatory states. We do not have enough scientific data (really only Persinger’s) about the HMD and how its electromagnetic interference may influence the brain. Nor do we know, from the perspective of brain rhythms, how the images in immersive virtual art compare with those generated during dreams and drugged states. All of this needs to be studied further, along with careful assess- ment as to what kind of consciousness is being produced during these states. Thus far the scientific evidence that is available, some of which I have tried to assemble here, points to similarities in respect to the biochemicals and brainwaves produced in the dream or dreamlike states we have been considering. By continuing to investigate visual dynamics, and by testing brainwave similarities and/or differences in dreams and dreamlike states, we will provide ourselves with a more extensive platform from which to understand how being immersed in a different spatiality influences a conscious state, or as I like to refer to it, ‘makes consciousness.’

Conclusion

What can we conclude from all these data? I have addressed several key issues here. Most important is the need today, more than ever in the past, for the individual to access a higher conscious state of mind, one that differs from the normal conscious state of mind associated with everyday living. There is much evidence Speculative Inquiries 141 pointing to the fact that individuals often derive their most creative scientific formulas or ideas for works of art during dreams and/or drug ingestion. To these dream/dreamlike categories I would add participation in immersive virtual art as a way to enhance and grow the ground of aesthetic-ethical consciousness in individuals who either cannot access their dreams easily or do not wish to ingest drugs. Like animals who must hunt for food in a ‘dreamlike theta rhythm state,’ so, too, must human beings derive food for thought through an ‘instinctive-conscious mode.’ When an individual is forced to stay awake for long periods of time and denied his dreams, he can be driven to the brink of insanity. But when the conditions for dreamlike experiences are enhanced and new aesthetic ways for an individual to experience dreamlike dimensions are produced, he will be able to access higher orders of consciousness. Immersive virtual art such as Osmose and Ephémère are at the forefront of providing a new way to access a higher order of consciousness. Even though the artworks were not intended to evoke particular dreamlike conditions, nonetheless, these works of art seem to produce the same kind of consciousness-raising as that found in dreams and drugged states. Immersive virtual works of art have (or will have in the future) a substantial advantage over dreams and drugged states in transcending a normal state of mind. Artists who use digital technology will be able to enhance in specific ways the immersive virtual experience by deliberately controlling its content, and thus its effects on brain waves. On the one hand, such artistic control simultaneously opens the door to other kinds of mind control by filmmakers and video game creators – something we have already examined in chapter 3. On the other hand, it allows an individual to gain access more readily to those parts of the brain which control feelings in general. In particular it allows him to access feelings for transcendence, hence opening up ‘the doors of perception.’ There is little doubt that our cyberage generation is presently engaged in fine-tuning the digital dynamics needed to control ‘the making of consciousness.’ We cannot sit back, however, and pretend we have no other recourse but to wait and see just how far digital control of consciousness can be taken, and whether it is used positively or negatively. We need to begin to understand just what is going on in digital technology that is destined to affect our states of mind. Acknowledging the instinctive mode in consciousness would be a powerful step toward getting in touch with a new way of thinking through intuitive consciousness. Such a process should be studied and appreciated, since it involves the making of a new kind of consciousness. UFO abductee literature, for example, aptly confirms an impersonal survival instinct that reveals itself in the details of the abductees’ impregnation stories.42 It is as though abductees unconsciously wish to give birth biologically to a new state of consciousness, to ‘a new being,’ and to do so through this fantastic and universally reported archetypal scenario that details their alien- induced impregnation experience. Becoming consciously aware of instinctive elements and harnessing them for the benefit of oneself and humankind would result in an alternative state of consciousness. Individuals who learn to actively channel this new experience of instinctive consciousness would profit from the experience 142 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art by reinforcing themselves with a new way of thinking and being-in-the-world. Of course, this is all reminiscent of Heidegger’s wishes for a ‘new kind of thinking.’ This, then, is what this book has been about: how, through immersive virtual spatiality and the works of art within it, we can be taught to reach deep within ourselves to the essential spatiality coded in our genes, and hence begin a new way of seeing our earth and our universe through a new dimension of space and time. Epilogue 143 Epilogue

By virtue of its evolving nature, this book was not written with a presupposed ending in mind. The major thesis is that essential spatiality, a spatiality and time different from the Einsteinian relativistic notion of space and time, can be experienced through Char Davies’ immersive virtual art. I have argued that Davies’ art has proven to be a good way to access a genre of consciousness usually unavailable to us except in dreams, through drug ingestion, or during meditative states. Hence, I proposed that since immersive virtual spatiality evokes essential spatiality and since it is part of instinctive consciousness, we need to recognize the value of insights into a consciousness about which we know little and which can be derived through this new art form. I did not discuss other artists working in the same medium except in passing, although I presume this genre of virtual art, and its uplifting transcendent nature, will someday be achieved by other artists who follow in Davies’ footsteps. There were no scientific experiments with immersive virtual reality that I knew about and could cite as evidence when I began working on the book some seven or eight years ago; therefore, I could not include any definitive scientific data which supported my arguments, especially those that came mainly at the end of the book. Nor could I qualify the major claim that essential spatiality was genetically programmed in our genes. Then, in late 2004, I came across scientific evidence that supported all of my claims, but this was only after the book was written; hence the need for this epilogue, where I can confirm at least some of the speculative questions raised in the last two chapters of the book. For example, will it be possible to locate essential spatiality as a trait on one of our genes? Are my theories about the effects of virtual reality on the brain and hence on consciousness on the right track? What role does magnetism play in affecting the brain? Let me begin with newly found evidence for the genetic significance of the essence of spatiality. While this particular trait has not yet been identified or studied, Dean Hamer, a molecular biologist and Chief of Gene Structure at the National Cancer Institute in the United States, is studying another genetic trait, a trait for spirituality, which I consider to be closely related to the essence of spatiality. In his recent book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes,1 Hamer identifies a specific gene that plays a role in spirituality. He has tested more than a thousand people using psychiatrist Robert Cloninger’s measures for self-transcendence against 144 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art established DNA patterns. (Cloninger defines self-transcendence as a capacity to feel one with life and the universe. This excludes feelings of religiosity.) Hamer, well known for having discovered the ‘gay gene’ (Xq28) some years ago, now proposes that the ‘God gene,’ labelled VMAT2, is the gene involved in spirituality (there may be others, he admits). The gene links to a protein that controls the brain’s neurotransmitters. These are the chemicals (monoamines: serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine) that can help alleviate depression or induce mystical or transcendent states in people. They are also the chemicals that influence our spirituality by altering our sense of reality or consciousness, how we think, and how we perceive the universe and ourselves. Hamer believes that the evolution of this gene, now hardwired into our genome, was naturally selected because it laid the ground for courage, purpose, and optimism and promoted the natural desire to live and procreate despite the inevitability of death. How essential spatiality fits into the genome may have to remain unanswered until researchers such as Hamer provide us with evidence that can pinpoint its location on a special gene. There is a common link, as I see it, between Hamer’s God gene and my own essence of spatiality, which lies, I suspect, in the chemicals produced by the brain that generate feelings of self-transcendence. Hence it seems plausible to suggest that the gene for spatiality probably is, like Hamer’s, part of the sequence of chromosome 10 and acts in concert with it.2 An article on Hamer and the God gene in Time magazine offers more information concerning others who are also working on the subject of how the brain processes feelings of spirituality:

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medi- cine has used several types of imaging systems to watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood flow, he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing is the fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important region – the parietal lobe at the back of the brain – goes dim. It’s this lobe that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the boundaries of the self fall away creating the feeling of being at one with the universe. Combine that with what’s going on in the other two lobes, and you can put together a profound religious experience.3

Andrew Newberg, radiologist and psychiatrist, and his associate Eugene d’Aquili, a psychiatrist and pioneer in neurological research until his recent death, proceed from different directions and perspectives. They have probed the biology of the mystical mind by mapping the brain during mystical states, thus providing a way for us to understand consciousness from a religious perspective.4 Mathematician Roger Penrose, on the other hand, has developed a physically based quantum theory of the ‘making of consciousness’ with the help of American anesthesiologist Stuart Hamroff’s theory of microtubules as the biological seat of consciousness.5 Epilogue 145

Aside from genes and brain chemistry, we also need to consider the effects of magnetism on the brain. The new material available on this subject confirms that my theories about electromagnetism are more than just speculative and corrobo- rate that Davies’ use of the HMD probably adds an unknown degree of magnetism to the immersive experience. For example, from the written comments of immersants we know that immersion affects them positively and that this mood comes on very quickly. The work with magnetism’s effects on the brain is relatively new, although magnetism has been touted for hundreds of years as a hidden force in the universe. The newest method of stimulating the brain uses a train of magnetically stimulated pulses and is called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), on the other hand, administers only a single or paired pulse. Distinct from electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which can have side effects such as seizures of the brain and occasional loss of memory, to say nothing of the fact that it is administered under general anesthesia, rTMS sets off electrical discharges inside the brain safely. Since it is a relatively new field, little is known about how much stimulation should be administered to the brain at any one time. For example, should the impulses be ten, eighteen, or fifteen pulses per second? This is still being researched and there are many questions being asked by researchers including what shape the pulses should have – a curvy wave going either up or down, a square wave, or a triangular one. Sorely needed are well-controlled larger studies, comparing rTMS with a sham treatment, antidepressants, or ECT.6 Thomas Paus, a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute, offers a course on rTMS. His syllabus allows us an insight into what researchers are doing in this area:

Major depression is a common disorder with a lifetime prevalence of about 5%. Over the past five years, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the prefrontal cortex has been established as a potential treatment of drug-refractory depression. Mechanisms of action are largely unknown, however. There are at least two possible mechanisms: (1) rTMS may modulate activity in neural circuits that mediate information processing within a given cognitive domain; (2) rTMS effects may be due to facilitation of monoaminergic neurotransmission. Our research is aimed at investigating the first of these possibilities in relation to the behavioural effects of rTMS, namely those on volition. We are carrying out a series of behavioural and imaging studies that take advantage of our expertise both in combining rTMS with positron emission tomography (PET), and in blood-flow activation studies of the human prefrontal and cingulate cortices.7

Eric Wasserman of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS) in Bethesda, Maryland, uses TMS for other reasons. Wasserman states: ‘We can use TMS to prevent people from seeing a visual stimulus or make it hard for them to speak.’8 Researchers can also make limbs move involuntarily. Another interesting development has to do with creating genius. Using the brainwaves found in autistic savants, scientists have been able to duplicate creativity in sub- 146 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art jects – for example, in fifteen minutes seventeen subjects were able to draw better than they had before. Apparently the most promising application of TMS lies not in curing depression, but in releasing potential or creativity in the brain. Most scientists stimulate the left temporal hemisphere in a rapid or repetitive firing of impulses, because essentially they are treating depression, and stimulating this region appears to produce an antidepressant effect. Michael Persinger, on the other hand, stimulates the right hemisphere in an attempt to induce mystical states in volunteers; we have already considered his results in chapter 8. We live in a wireless age, in a soupy, overloaded atmosphere of electromagnetic waves. Tapping into magnetic fields was introduced in the 1770s by Franz Anton Mesmer, who posited (amid a great controversy with Jesuit Maximillian Hell, who accused Mesmer of plagiarizing his ideas) that the magnetic fluid flowing through our bodies when disturbed could be restored to its proper flow.9 Today’s theory is reminiscent of Mesmer’s in that brain disorders, particularly in bipolar disease, are thought to be caused by a misalignment of neurons in the brain; hence the need to align them or shock them into place by the application of electromagnetic waves. There is much to gain from exploring repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and its role in restoring balance to neurons in depressed brains. On the popular front, the power of magnetism still fascinates the general public; witness the number of Web pages that advertise magnetic bracelets and other wearable magnetic gadgets that can presumably tap into the energy of cosmic magnetic waves. Hunter Hoffman writes about another interesting development in the medical profession which has embraced the use of virtual reality software to alleviate pain in burn victims.10 For some years, doctors have entertained the notion that distracting patients might help them overcome their dread of painful wound procedures. Due to the cost of such experiments in the past most of these doctors or scientists, working on tight hospital budgets, could not afford to pursue their aspirations. Fortunately, the cost of equipping a laboratory with virtual reality software is much lower today. Companies specializing in software for medical applications produce simple virtual reality scenarios which are then leased to the medical profession.11 In some cases, doctors create their own software to minister to their patients’ needs.12 One such scenario immerses the burn patient into an icy-cold virtual reality where he or she can cruise around using a joystick. Burn patients become totally mesmerized by this frozen world and report feeling very little pain. It should be noted that opiates are still used since wound care is extremely painful to endure. Since images of the brain can be recorded through magnetic resonance imaging during wound care, doctors can see whether pain is present in the brain and are experimenting with lowering opiate dependence. One has to marvel, for example, at the determination of scientists at the Wash- ington School of Medicine, who created virtual reality goggles that were incorporated into an fMRI machine so that they could capture images of the brain while a patient was immersed in virtual reality. They had to develop a fibre-optic headset free of ferrous and conducting materials that might be affected by the powerful magnetic fields inside the fMRI tube.13 The images taken of the brain when patients were using these goggles show an amazing difference in pain experienced during wound care with and without virtual reality as a distraction.14 Epilogue 147

Why this alleviation of feelings of pain occurs when a patient is immersed in virtual reality is still subject to study. Doctors involved in this particular project refer to what is happening during virtual reality immersion as a distraction, not for the feeling brain, but for the thinking brain. Hoffman writes:

Pain has a strong psychological component. The same incoming pain signal can be interpreted as more or less painful depending on what the patient is thinking. In addition to influencing the way patients interpret such signals, psychological factors can even influence the amount of pain signals allowed to enter the brain’s cortex.15

It is more likely that the pain factor is controlled by more than just distracting the patient’s thinking processes. Antonio Damasio’s research reveals that the substrate of consciousness is composed of feelings, and that this is the foundation upon which all thinking is based. So well before thinking arises we have consciousness, and before that feelings, and before that emotions. The nurse attending to wound care touches the patient with her sterile instruments so that he can actually feel the pressure and pain of someone touching his body, but since he is distracted by the virtual reality experience, these feelings of painful touch are somehow interfered with. Immersing a patient into a different spatial arena appears to lock out intense feelings of pain because she has entered another level or dimension of consciousness where the processing of painful feelings does not occur at all. (This is also a transcendence of self but not arrived at in the same manner as during immersion in Davies’ art.) Damasio’s explanation of how pain can be circumvented is that one has to block out all of the underlying biological, emotional aspects of the pain (recall that all emotions produce feelings but not all feelings generate emotions). Damasio explains that pain and emotion can be blocked out by interfering with the brain chemically or via certain nerve fibres.16 The pain still remains, but since emotions are interfered with, the feelings for pain and hence consciousness of the pain are short-circuited. Damasio’s neurobiological explanation of pain is complex and covers important biological and neurological processes.17 Alleviating pain through virtual reality no doubt has something to do with the essence of spatiality that burn patients find themselves in. In the case of medical virtual reality software, patients are capable of abstracting themselves from their felt bodily pains. They can block their brain’s processing of pain, and I submit that they do so by losing themselves in the new spatiality they are encountering rather than focusing on their pain, hence circumventing or rechannelling the pain they should be feeling. Of course, it is much more complex than this, but I think Damasio’s overall approach to emotions and feelings has given us a head start in understanding what happens during a consciousness-changing immersion experience.

I began this Epilogue by stating my overall thesis: that accessing essential spatiality in instinctive consciousness can influence us positively and creatively, as demonstrated in Char Davies’ immersive virtual art. In order to provide evidence that this does indeed happen, our concluding considerations of recent scientific evidence have centred on the discovery of a God gene, magnetic influence on the 148 Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art brain, and virtual reality software designed to alter the feelings of either depressed or badly burned patients. The information in this epilogue has been more concerned about the changing or diverting, rather than the making, of consciousness (adding conscious dimensions to previously unacknowledged unconscious elements), which this book celebrates. Given the number of scientists in diverse disciplines involved in this research, we are, indeed, on our way to advancing a science that will explain, from many biological perspectives, the ‘making of consciousness.’ So is Char Davies an instrument of technology or has she taken us into the very heart of Heidegger’s notion of the essence of technology? Has she revealed it in a way that Heidegger would not have believed possible? My answer to this should be obvious by now. She has, indeed, cajoled us into heeding the beginnings of a new way of understanding and educating the unconscious-but-conscious dimensions of the brain. We have noted in the book how classical, literal, and biblical dynamics prevail naturally in her dynamic works, from up/down themes to cyclic ones. We have also seen how the dynamics of spatial inversion operate in the icon and have compared them with the ambiguous spatiality operative in Davies’ immersive virtual works of art. I am sure many more classical themes could be addressed in relation to Davies’ digitally produced themes with just as interesting results. In this respect she adds no new archetypal symbols to virtual art but, rather, follows traditional paradigms established in the past; her work reinforces spatial themes innate to our human psyche yet uniquely presented to meet the needs of our time.18 Has Davies subverted the conventions of immersive virtual art by introducing subjective embodiment? It would appear that not only has she done so, but, as previously cited, her artworks, according to Grau, ‘represent signposts in the history of the media.’19 Davies, it seems, has achieved what she set out to do and is one of the true innovators in this area of technologically based art. She is destined to change the way we relate to technology, to the unconscious, and to our instinctive, conscious natures. Appendix 149 Appendix

Char Davies’ Past Exhibitions

1984. Behind the Veil (painting). Solo exhibition. Powerhouse Gallery, Montreal, Canada. 1987. Espaces Entrelacés (painting). Solo exhibition. Powerhouse Gallery, Montreal, Canada. 1990. Vision Interface: Through the Medium of the Computer. Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada. 1992. 3rd International Symposium on Electronic Art. Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia. 1992. Imagina: 11th International Forum on New Images. Monte Carlo, Monaco. 1993. State of the Image, New Tendencies in the Field of the Image. Centrum voor Beeldcultuur, Antwerp, Belgium. 1993. The New Images, Montage ’93: International Festival of the Image. George Eastman House, Rochester, USA. 1993. Prix Ars Electronica, Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria. 1995. Image Electronic. Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, USA. 1995. Osmose. Solo exhibition. Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal, Canada. Publication. 1995. Osmose, Code. Ricco-Maresca Gallery, New York City, USA. 1996–7. Osmose, Serious Games. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Publication. 1997. Osmose, Serious Games. Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK. 1997. Osmose, Art Virtual Realidad Plural. Museum of Monterrey, Mexico. Publi- cation. 1998. Ephémère. Solo exhibition. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada. Publication. 2001. Osmose and Ephémère, 010101: Art in Technological Times. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA. Publication. 2002. Osmose and Ephémère, Biennale of Electronic Art: Immersion. John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Australia. 2003–4. Osmose and Ephémère, Transfigure. Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, Australia. 150 Appendix

Char Davies’ Published Articles

‘Natural Artifice.’ In The BioApparatus: A Virtual Seminar, ed. Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf, 16. Banff, AB: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991. ‘The Yearning.’ In Der Prix Ars Electronica: International Compendium of the Com- puter Arts, ed. Hannes Leospoldseder et al., 26–9. Linz, Austria: Veritas-Verlag, 1993. ‘Osmose: Notes on Being in Immersive Virtual Space.’ In Digital Creativity: A Reader, Innovations in Art and Design, ed. Colin Beardon and Lone Malmborg, 101–10. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2002. Illus. [Also published in Digital Creativity 9, 2 (1998): 65–74. First published in Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Arts Conference Proceedings, Montreal, 1995.] With John Harrison. ‘Osmose: Towards Broadening the Aesthetics of Virtual Reality.’ ACM Computer Graphics: Virtual Reality 30, 4 (1996): 25–8. ‘Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being.’ In Multimedia, From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, 293–300. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Illus. [Also published under the revised title ‘Changing Space: VR as an Arena of Being,’ in The Virtual Dimension: Architec- ture, Representation and Crash Culture, ed. John Beckman, 144–55. Boston: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. First published in Consciousness Reframed. Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era: Proceedings of the First International CAiiA Research Conference, ed. Roy Ascott. Newport: University of Wales College, Centre for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, 1997.] ‘Ephémère: Landscape, Earth, Body and Time in Immersive Virtual Space.’ In Reframing Consciousness, ed. Roy Ascott, 196–201. Exeter: Intellect Books, 1999. [First published in Reframing Consciousness. Art and Consciousness in the Post- Biological Era: Proceedings of the Second International CAiiA Research Conference, ed. Roy Ascott. Newport: University of Wales College, Centre for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts, 1998.] ‘Landscape, Earth, Body, Being, Space and Time in the Immersive Virtual Envi- ronments Osmose and Ephémère.’ In Women, Art and Technology, ed. Judy Malloy, 322–37. London: MIT Press, 2003. Illus. [First published in Emergent Futures: Art, Interactivity and New Media, ed. Angela Molina and Kepa Landa, 47–58. Valencia, Spain: Institució Alfonse el Magnànim, Diputació de València, 2000. Illus.] ‘Espaces Entrelacés: VR as Poeisis.’ In Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, ed. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, 192–3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Illus. ‘Rethinking VR: Key Concepts and Concerns.’ In Hybrid Reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor, ed. Hal Thaites, 253–62. Ninth International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. Montreal: International Society in Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 2003. ‘Virtual Space.’ In Space in Science, Art and Society, ed. Francois Penz, Gregory Radick and Robert Howell, 69–104. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2004. Illus.

For a bibliography on Char Davies’ work, visit www.immersence.com. Notes

Introduction

1 Ivan E. Sutherland, ‘The Ultimate Display,’ proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Congress (IFIP), vol. 2, 1965, 506–8. http:// www.cise.ufl.edu/ ~lok/teaching/dcvef05/papers/ultimate_display.html (accessed 16 November 2005). 2 Brenda Laurel, ed., The Art of Human Computer Interface Design (New York: Addison- Wesley, 1991). See Scott S. Fischer’s article entitled ‘Virtual Interface Environments,’ where he lists the team members as C. Coler, S. Fisher, M. McGreevy, W. Robinett, and E. Wenzel. The supporting team at Serling Software consisted of S. Bryson, J. Humphries, R. Jacoby, D. Kaiser, D. Kerr, and P. Stone (424). 3 It should be noted that Davies has come to value the ‘low-resolution’ quality of the images produced through the screens of the HMD helmets she began using in 1994. She believes that the resulting softness or lack of detail causes the immersants to let go of their habitual reliance on sharply focused vision and begin to ‘feel’ space instead. She has stated to me that if she were to use HMDs with a much higher image resolution, she would no doubt add a ‘compensatory’ softening filter. 4 Laurel, Art of Human Computer Interface Design, 430, 431. 5 Quoted from www.immersence.com’s home page when Osmose is accessed. Readers should note that Davies’ words on her Web page are changed from time to time and might not be phrased exactly as I have them here. 6 Quoted from www.immersence.com’s home page when Ephémère is accessed. 7 Anthony Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 1998), chap. 1. 8 Ibid., front outside cover. 9 In an e-mail to me (11 October 2002) John Harrison writes that he had access to the Softimage code when he worked at Softimage and that some of the particles (splines or curvy lines in Osmose) were animated in real-time by the Softimage software when using SGIs. When Osmose and Ephémère are run on Linux, however, ‘there’s not much that uses the actual Softimage software.’ 10 Bliss Carman, Editor-in-Chief, The World’s Best Poetry, 5 vols. (New York: Bigelow, Smith, 1904), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, vol. 1, 381. 11 McCagie Brooks Rogers is presently developing Mythseeker software that will immerse people in what he calls ‘primal virtual space’ – a kind of ‘sacred space’ he 152 Notes to pages 7–12

describes as ‘an ultimate cosmic intelligence’ – through interactive depth systems that explore Egyptian, Greek, shamanic, and other mythologies. The program is designed so that this interaction happens through personal encounters and enactments with well-known mythic agents. These enactments are envisioned as dreamlike experiences in primal virtual space that will allow the immersant to renew and revise her personal myth in a positive manner. For more information, see http://www.mythseeker.com. 12 Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds, eds, Explorations in Art and Technology (London: Springer, 2002); see 197, 107, 173, 200–1. 13 Ibid., 200–1. 14 Ibid., 263. 15 Ibid., 264. 16 Steven Weinberg, ‘A Unified Physics by 2050,’ Scientific American, December 1999. 17 Stephen Wolfram is a controversial physicist who claims that the patterns we see in nature prevail throughout all of it, including the brain, and spring from the same universal computational processes. His A New Kind of Science (New York: Wolfram Media, 2002) is a monumental work, replete with pages of computational images of patterns of algorithms rather than formulas. Simply put, his claim is that the infinite complexity of nature can be generated from a few black dots. He claims that what the book has to say requires a fairly major shift in intuition and thinking.

1: The Dynamics of Immersive Virtual Art

1 Marilyn Burgess, ‘Support for New Media Arts in Canada: What Place for Artists?’ Site Street, an online journal (Fall 2002). http://www.immersence.com/publications. 2 Ibid. Click on the sidebar to Burgess’s article for her interview with Davies in which the artist talks about her inability to get research grants during her early artistic life. 3 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace,’ a working draft (2002), from a section entitled ‘Beyond the Picture Plane,’ 28. Davies later integrated some of this material into her PhD dissertation entitled ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Exploration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception’ for the University of Plymouth in 2005. I thank Davies for sharing early drafts of her PhD dissertation and allowing me to quote from them. 4 Burgess, ‘Support for New Media Arts in Canada.’ Davies’ grant requests to do research in 3D art failed and she was told to work instead with simpler 2D paint systems readily available in university design courses. It seems the council jury completely missed her point that she wished to work with 3D software in order to create three-dimensional art. 5 Davies won various awards for these 3D digital images, for example, the Ars Electronica in Linz, 1994. 6 Quoted from a postcard advertising the exhibition. 7 Davies joined Softimage in late 1987, when it was a start-up company with three employees. She became a member of its board as a founding director and its first vice- president. It was not until 1989 that she began to experiment with the fledgling software for her own artistic purposes. 8 I remember visiting with Davies in her cabin overlooking the Vermont hills one day in Notes to pages 13–17 153

late November 1999. During our conversation she casually mentioned that she had kept working notebooks during the conception and development of Osmose and Ephémère. I was more than astounded when she rescued them from a book shelf in the cabin and we began to leaf through their pages. There were at least five of these notebooks filled with sketches and details of possible ways to execute her artistic ideas in immersive virtual space . She offered to let me peruse them, although she retained the right to edit any material from the notebooks that I used. 9 The reader should note that I only had access to Davies’ notebooks. I did not have access to her journals, which are separate, more private records. 10 Carol Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère: Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies,’ n.paradoxa 9 (Eco)Logical (2002): 66. 11 Ibid. 12 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Exploration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Computing, Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, 2004), 95. 13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 179. 14 Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace.’ Davies includes excerpts of her white paper, 139ff. 15 Char Davies, Osmose Working Notebook #1, 6 (hereafter Notebook #1). 16 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 204 (my italics). 17 Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère.’ 18 Davies, Osmore 1993 Notebook #1, 8. I stress again that sound is a very important aspect of her work. As I noted earlier I do not address in any detail this most complex of areas as it would require a major study of an area that is not my expertise. 19 Ibid., 8–11. 20 Ibid.,16. 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Ibid., 13. I was delighted to find this reference to the biological since I had already adopted the thesis that Davies’ virtual art, especially Ephémère, had resonant biological overtones to it. 23 The poem is quoted from Rilke’s Poèmes français. I found this reference in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space; see 238ff. 24 Ibid., 241. 25 Ibid., 240. 26 Davies, Osmose Notebook #2, 16, contains a typed list of categories outlining the ‘Environmental Context with Life-Forms.’ 27 Ibid., diagram on 21. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Making Osmose in 1994–5 required a costly high-end computer, specifically a Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine to handle the graphics in the work, made particularly complex because of the many layers of transparency that needed to be computed in real-time. As of 2002 Osmose has run successfully on a $5,000 PC. 30 Davies, Osmose Notebook #2, 24. 31 Ibid., 26–7. 154 Notes to pages 17–26

32 Ibid., 30. There is a diagram with Talisman depicted lurking behind the clearing – although it is not at all clear where this idea comes from. 33 Ibid., 27. 34 Ibid., 32. 35 Ibid.; see diagrams on 36–9. 36 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 206. 37 Ibid., 206. 38 Ibid., 202. 39 Ibid., 239, 241. 40 Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds, eds, Explorations in Art and Technology (London: Springer, 2002), 72. 41 See Char Davies’ Web page at http://www.immersence.com for a list of essays and links on the subject of Osmose and Ephémère. Here one can also find descriptions of how her works are created, what computers are used, and so on. 42 Char Davies, John Harrison, and Georges Mauro designed the vest (1994–5) that is used in Osmose and Ephémère. Grau, Virtual Art, refers to this interface as ‘the ideology of a natural interface,’ which is beginning to ‘unfold its full psychological and manipulative influence’ (203). 43 A Division DVisorHMD is placed on the immersant’s head while several polhemus Fastrack sensors track the position of the immersant’s head and tilt of her spine. 44 In reference to sound equipment, a Macintosh computer controlled the various MIDI devices receiving instructions via a serial connector to the Silicon Graphics Onyx. A Crystal River Acoustetion localized up to eight sounds in 3D. A pair of Kurzweil samples, an effects box, and a Mackie automated mixer were also used. 45 See Char Davies and John Harrison’s essay ‘Osmose: Towards Broadening the Aesthetics of Virtual Reality,’ ACM Computer Graphics: Virtual Reality 30, no. 4 (1996). The essay is also available at http://www.immersence.com. 46 This was during the 1995 ISEA conference in Montreal, Quebec. 47 David Liss, Montreal Gazette, 9 September 1995, Arts and Books section. 48 Montreal Gazette, 23 September 1995, 2, quoting techno-artists Rob Lovell and John Mitchell. 49 Char Davies, Numina Notebook #1 (1996). It is not always easy to decipher Davies’ handwriting. In the reference to the lost garden she writes not ‘machine in the garden’ but ‘Garden in the machine – lost paradise!’ (24). 50 Char Davies, Numina Notebook #3 (1997), 67. Davies refers to these notebooks in her later writings as Ephémère. 51 Davies, Numina Notebook #1, 8–10. 52 Ibid., 8–10. 53 Ibid., 16. 54 Ibid.,18. 55 Ibid., 20. The reader should note that this quote refers to the key strategy in Osmose and Ephémère. It clearly reveals her trademark signature, the use of transparency in her work. Transparency and her innovative use of breathing to navigate through immersive virtual space were at this time unique to the medium and possibly will remain so. Notes to pages 26–9 155

56 Ibid., 21. Here she references Yi-Fu Tuan’s book on topology (probably Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values) and Joseph Mallord William Turner, the English painter (1775–1851), whose later abstract scenes she greatly admires. She refers to Laurie McRobert’s article on Osmose and Heidegger and the essence of technology and wonders whether McRobert is right ‘that technology is expressing its essence through me – whether I am aware of it or not’ (22). See McRobert, ‘Immersive Art and the Essence of Technology,’ Explorations: A Journal for Adventurous Thought 15, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 5–18. 57 Davies, Numina Notebook #1, 26. 58 Ibid., 30. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 40. 61 Ibid., 41. 62 Ibid., 31. 63 Ibid., 45. I have only analysed the first notebook to do with the making of Ephémère. There are three more filled with minute details that Davies has excerpted and discussed in her as-yet-unpublished PhD dissertation, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace’ (2004). 64 Davies and Harrison, ‘Publications,’ www.immersence.com. 65 Ibid. John Harrison advises that he wrote the software with the aid of Softimage Saaphire and DKit development libraries. He also used SGI’s Performer and GL Graphics libraries. ‘The software runs using a parallel processing model with the usual separation of application, cull and draw processes, as well as many more processes for computing the particle animations, reading/writing to the various VR devices.’ ‘Publications,’ www.immersence.com. 66 Joseph Nechvatal, ‘Introduction to: Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances, A Study of the Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms’ (PhD dissertation, Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), University of Wales College, 1999), 39. 67 Harrison, in an e-mail to me, September 2002. 68 ‘Publications,’ www.immersence.com. 69 Ibid. 70 See Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D, 121, for the actual description of how rendering works. Software programs allow programmers a choice of elements so that they can create a unique digital object. Digital elements, such as those used in Davies’ artwork, that merge into or emerge out of each other are first modelled and their initial properties applied. The steps involve the use of texture maps and transparency effects (layering of objects) and choosing different levels of reflectivity by appropriately lighting the elements, after which the scene is ready to be animated and rendered. This combination of procedures helps to dissolve the hard pixel edges of these objects, leaving the scene looking translucent. 71 Sidney Perkowitz, Empire of Light (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 32–3. Perkowitz describes an experience similar to one Char Davies related to me about the ‘magic’ that happens with light in particular when she doesn’t wear her contact lenses and lets her myopic vision take over at dusk. 156 Notes to pages 30–2

2: Digital Knowing versus Digital Being

1 Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 2 Ibid., 21. 3 Richard Coyne, ‘Cyberspace and Heidegger’s Pragmatics,’ Information Technology and People 2, no. 4 (1988): 338–50. http://is.lse.ac.uk/staff/whitley/resources/heidegger/ (accessed 9 November 2005). 4 Laurie McRobert, ‘Breakdowns and Philosophy: On Deconstruction and Chaos,’ in Breakdowns: The Destiny of the Twentieth Century, ed. Bruce A. Butterfield and Jügen Kleist (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 57–72. 5 Coyne, Technoromanticism, 280. 6 Stelarc, ‘From Zombies to Cyborg Bodies: Extra Ear, Exoskeleton and Avatars,’ in Explorations in Art and Technology, ed. Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds (London: Springer, 2002), 115–24. See picture of wired-up Stelarc, 120. 7 The video was provided to me by Softimage. 8 The recent film Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks, is an example of the use of this digital technology, now called motion capture process. Hanks plays five different roles in the film, all cartoon characters that he animates with his bodily actions which are captured and recorded by a computer. Hanks wore a sensor suit, which he did not change from character to character. He changed his shoes, however, in order to get himself into the mood of the roles. Most recently, and revolutionary in its technology, is a company called NaturalMotion Ltd., which, with its breakthrough software Endorphin 2.0, combines artificial intelligence, biomechanics, and dynamics simulation that models robotic characters with specific behaviour so that they anticipate and interact with each other. 9 Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Cam- bridge: MA: MIT Press, 2002), 549–52. 10 See Stelarc’s Web page at http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/ for diagrams showing how his body is wired and other pertinent information relating to his work that is as much in alliance with scientific research as it is art. Stelarc calls his system ‘Movatar – Inverse Motion Capture System.’ The description on his Web page states: ‘Motion Capture allows a physical body to animate a 3D computer-generated virtual body to perform in computer space or cyberspace. This is usually done by markers on the body which are tracked by cameras, their motions analyzed by a computer and mapped onto the virtual actor. Or it can be done using electromagnetic sensors (like Polhemus or Flock-of-Birds) which indicate position/orientation of limbs and head. Consider, though, a virtual body or an avatar that can access a physical body, actuating its performance in the real world. If the avatar is imbued with an artificial intelligence, becoming increasingly autonomous and unpredictable, then it would become more an AL (Artificial Life) entity performing with a human body in physical space.’ 11 Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2000). 12 Stelarc, http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/. Science has recently picked up on Stelarc’s experiments by implanting an array of electrodes in several areas of a monkey’s brain known to be involved in motor function – an artificial neural system is linked into the Notes to pages 32–4 157

animal’s head. As it moves its arms, the monkey’s brain signals are analysed by a computer. The information is sent over the Net to drive robotic arms 950 km away. Pure brain power, or the power of thought, is driving these robotic arms. The hope is that some day paralyzed patients will be able to move prosthetic limbs that, literally, have been wired into their brains.The researchers involved in these experiments are Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. I spotted this information on the net – BBC news page, http://news.bbc.co.uk (accessed 16 November 2000). 13 Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,’ Wired, 2 April 2000, 238ff. 14 Mike King, ‘Artificial Consciousness-Artificial Art,’ a paper presented at ISEA, London Guildhall University, London, UK, 1995. http://www.isea.qc.ca/symposium/ archives/abstracts95/abs3.l.html. 15 New-age schools of thought embrace this idea of quantum consciousness as a new way of contacting other dimensional beings – see, for example, The Golden Thread (http://www.ramtha.com/golden). But in the most interesting attempt to understand consciousness physically, two prominent scientists from two diverse disciplines, mathematics and medicine, are trying to open up new horizons in the field of consciousness studies. Roger Penrose, world-renowned mathematician, Platonic in his approach, brings his ideas of quantum physics into the biological domain by incorporating anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff’s hypothesis that microtubules are responsible for turning consciousness on or off. Penrose, ostensibly hard to wean from purely mathematical paradigms, probes the biological using quantum physics and the role of gravity in an attempt to bridge forms and matter and account mathematically for the emergence of consciousness through microtubules. See Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 369, sec. 7.6, ‘Microtubules and Consciousness.’ See also Stuart Hameroff’s website, http://www.u.arizona.edu/ ~hameroff, where he posts the articles he has written on this subject. 16 Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1995), 24. 17 Pablo Baler, ‘The Doors of Expression: The Work of Art in the Age of Quantum Processing Power,’ Sculpture 21, no. 4 (May 2002), ‘Publications,’ http://www. immersence.com. His quotations below are all excerpted from this article. 18 Consider the difference between Davies’ immersive virtual art, which involves the biological, and Eduardo Kac’s (http://www.ekac.org) biotech art (or what he calls ‘transgenic art’), which involves manipulating an animal’s genetic code. Following the newest epochal paradigm, Kac has hit upon the rather sorry idea of biotech art. Kac produced an ‘artwork’ consisting of a florescent green bunny bred by a laboratory in France that added a jellyfish florescent protein to its DNA. Kac reasons that if the GFP bunny lives with his family and is accepted as a ‘norm’ by those who see ‘it,’ he (Kac) will prove to the world that any kind of genetic manipulation can become mundane. Kac believes that this kind of genetic manipulation is an art form and that he can raise consciousness through it. ‘My goal is to produce an image that synthesizes this passage into a new kind of environment, one in which romantic notions of what is “natural” have to be questioned and the human role in the evolutionary history of other species (and vice versa) has to be acknowledged, while at the same time respect- fully and humbly marveling at this amazing phenomenon we call “life.”’ See GFP Bunny on Kac’s Web page. 158 Notes to pages 34–41

19 Roy Ascott of the University of Wales at that time (now at the University of Plymouth, UK), sponsored a conference in August 1998 whose participants were invited to read papers on consciousness as post-biological. 20 Joan Truckenbrod, ‘Women and the Social Construction of the Computer Culture: Evolving New Forms of Computing,’ in Artificial Intelligence and Society 7, no. 4 (1993): 345–57. 21 Ibid., 354. 22 Ibid., 354, 355. 23 Ibid., 356. 24 Candace B. Pert, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner, 1997). 25 Carol Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère: Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies,’ n.paradoxa 9 (Eco)Logical (2002): 65. 26 Hofstadter’s paper has been published in David Cope, ed., Virtual Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 27 Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 28 Douglas Hofstadter, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 29 Isabelle Delmotte, Epileptograph: The Internal Journey (Sydney, Australia: Artspace, 1995). Her images can be seen at http://www.isabelledelmotte.net/ when ‘digital gallery’ is accessed, and her paper ‘Epileptograh: The Internal Journey’ can be found under ‘Other Interests’ at the same site. 30 The images were disturbingly unique in their construction, both in shapes and colours, and one could almost call them beautiful, with one exception – within her digital 2D images I could usually see the face of the devil or a shape resembling ‘him,’ something that I found very unsettling. The artist claimed that before the advent of computer-based art she was unable to express in painting the intense fear she experienced while in this ‘in-between’; interestingly, that fear clearly manifests itself in her computer art. 31 Delmotte, Epileptograph. 32 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 24–8, 118. 33 I am only surmising that Richard Coyne has not read any of Davies’ published essays or articles posted on her website, www.immersence.com. 34 Coyne, Technoromanticism, chap. 5, ‘Pragmatics of Cyberspace,’ 145–81. 35 Ibid., 159 (my italics). 36 Doreen Kimura, ‘Sex, Sexual Orientation and Sex Hormones Influence Human Cognitive Function,’ Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6, no. 2 (April 1996). 259–63. Coyne’s response to spatiality supports Doreen Kimura’s research, which demonstrates that hormones influence a male’s cognitive spatial abilities. The May 2005 Scientific American contains an article entitled ‘His Brain, Her Brain,’ (40–7) which outlines the differences between female and male brains especially in regard to emotional memories. 37 The dictionary definition of Dasein is ‘presence,’ ‘existence,’ ‘life,’ ‘being.’ Cassell’s German Dictionary, ed. Harold T. Betteridge (London: Cassell, 1978). 38 Coyne, ‘Cyberspace and Heidegger’s Pragmatics,’ 1. Notes to pages 42–5 159

3: Heidegger, Davies, and Technological Essence

1 Carol Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère: Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies,’ n.paradoxa 9 (Eco)Logical (2002), 66. 2 Richard Wisser, ed., Martin Heidegger in Conversation, trans. Srinivasa Murthy (New Delhi: Rakesh Press, 1977), 43–4. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 283–317. 4 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 143–87. 5 Martin Heidegger ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,’ in Basic Writings, ed. Krell, 247–82. 6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). Kant used examples of this kind of ‘knowing’ to set up his transcendental aesthetic. Heidegger quotes Kant’s often-referred to, little-understood sentence, ‘However, I maintain that in any particular doctrine of nature only so much genuine science can be found as there is mathematics to be found in it.’ (Basic Writings, 249) Ta mathemata is hence isolated from science itself. Heidegger also uses the example of Descartes’ cogito sum – I know because I identify my knowing in the same way that I do the essence of ta mathemata. Descartes arrives at this conclusion because, in the end, he cannot doubt his own existence. Individuals, even today, arrive at their ‘I’ by reasoning in the same manner. This reasoning brings one to a certain knowing of one’s ‘I,’ and this ‘I’s’ existence, Heidegger points out, and is based on mathematical principles. That is to say that even ‘pure reason’ employs ‘a certain special formation of the mathematical’ (Heidegger, Basic Writings, 282). 7 Thinking in terms of a mathematical essence leaves us with a better sense of what Heidegger means by an overarching origin. We all experience the sense of the overarching ‘origin’ of mathematical/geometrical forms when, early in life, we first grasp the essence that underlies geometrical axioms or the essence to be found in universal formulas. Heidegger employs this mathematical sense of essence to explain how the ‘I’ knows it is an ‘I.’ He hopes to show us the way to an easy transition from a formal, objective knowing to a subjective one. Using this mathematical example, he is much closer to demystifying for us what a substantial essence is. It is something innate, with no beginning or end. 8 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 310. From the poem ‘Patmos’ by Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), 462–3. Admittedly, Heidegger’s use of language, and therefore ours, is convoluted; ‘dangerous’ essence and ‘saving power,’ for example, stem from the language of poetry and are borrowed from Hölderlin. Nonetheless, they are the key words Heidegger uses to build his thesis in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (in Basic Writings, 283–317) 9 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 301. Heidegger resorts to the image of a skeletal framework, Gestell, to describe what an enframing scaffolding is. Enframing can both conceal or reveal the essence hidden in technology; it can produce either positive or negative results. The negative connotations of enframing can turn into positive ones. As 160 Notes to pages 45–7

Heidegger puts it: ‘Enframing, as a challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of revealing. Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing. Bringing-forth, poiesis, is also a destining in this sense’ (306). 10 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 304. Heidegger defines this dangerous sense of enframing as something that sets itself upon people as an ‘ordering principle.’ By ‘ordering principle’ he means something akin to enslavement of people by things and concepts. He tells us that technology does not itself do the ordering but rather it is the ‘rule of enframing’ that orders. Modern physics offers a good example of that which ‘is challenged forth by the rule of enframing, which demands that nature be orderable as a standing-reserve’ (304). This type of enframing of human beings who must function as ‘standing reserve’ for something they do not understand has nothing to do with the will of human beings and everything to do with the ‘rule of enframing’ that sees nature as orderable. But however much technology tends toward a dangerous ordering that can dehumanize us, the ordering principle that aims to enframe also harbours within itself the seeds that can open us to truth. 11 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Boston: MIT Press, 2003), 193–211. 12 Ibid., 207. 13 Jeremy Turner, ‘Myron Krueger Live,’ http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=328 (accessed 9 November 2005). 14 Michio Kaku, Hyperspace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Scientists like Michio Kaku fall in line with Krueger. Kaku cagily reveals his godlike position when he states: ‘However, it seems to me that being blessed with the intellect to divine the ultimate secrets of nature gives meaning enough to life.’ Even though we find mathematicians and physicists eagerly awaiting the anticipated discovery someday of the theory of everything (TOE), under whose umbrella all formulas would fall, they do not necessarily identify this ultimate formula as having anything to do with human essence. More often than not they continue to identify TOE with absolute concepts such as the beautiful; the sublime; perfection; and allude in their own way to the essence of God’ (334). 15 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 293. Heidegger tells us that technology stems from the Greek word technikon and has something to do with techne. The word technology has its roots in the Greek’s fourfold causality schemata that most of us learn about as first-year philosophy students (causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis, and causa efficiens). The Greeks had a name for fourfold causality which they saw as the revealing of truth, aletheia. 16 I obtained this information from an article by Charles Mandel in the Globe and Mail, 5 September 1998. One video game he cites is Thrill, Kill, described as a ‘viciously violent fight game ... which promises to be among the more shocking titles this fall.’ Interestingly, Virgin Interactive, the company producing this video game, later with- drew this title. Some countries like Australia and Canada are banning certain sequences and reassessing their standards for future release of violent and explicit games. 17 Grand Theft Auto 3 embraces all these daemonic aspects. 18 A team lead by John Murray, a psychiatry professor at Kansas State University examined the working brains of five game players, girls and boys aged eight to thirteen. Among their findings: video game images were more effective than identical images in movies; blood flow increased in the right hemisphere, indicating emotional Notes to pages 47–53 161

arousal; those brain areas prepared for fight or flight lit up; the prefrontal cortex was alerted to go into action; the posterior cingulate showed that images were being ‘burnt’ into memory. The group concluded that the children would retain these violent video images and that these images would influence their future behaviour. William Illsey Atkinson, ‘Video Mind Games,’ Globe and Mail, 13 March 2004. 19 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 20 The cover of Discover (March 2002) reads: ‘Can We Find another Earth? NASA Is Betting We Can, and It May Be Remarkably Nearby,’ while a BBC News on-line headline (18 February 2002) reads ‘Humans Will “Sail to the Stars.”’ The Discover article goes on to describe how we earthlings must move on to a new home, how we can do it by sailing through space, and that in the process of arriving at our destina- tion we ourselves will probably have become a new species. 21 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 288. 22 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Exploration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Computing, Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, 2004) (draft 6/12/02), 87. 23 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 314. 24 Ibid., 317. 25 Ibid., 315. 26 David Liss, Montreal Gazette, 9 September 1995, Arts and Books section. 27 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 293. Techne itself incorporates two meanings: (1) the skills of the artisan or craftsman and (2) the bringing forth of poiesis. The Greeks conceived episteme and physis as part of techne. They believed physis to be the highest form of poiesis . When an artist accomplished the bringing forth of presence through physis she accomplished a physical reaction of sorts, like the physical dynamics involved in the opening of a flower bud. 28 Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace’ (2002). 29 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 315. 30 Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère,’ 66–7; my italics. 31 I could find no direct evidence in her working notebooks that she was using her virtual art as a way to alert people to the dangers of technology. More overt early evidence appears in artist’s statements she writes or in interviews she gives in 1989, 1991, 2002, and in her 2004 PhD dissertation (as well as in early drafts). The working notebooks are saturated with thoughts about how much she loves nature and prefers the countryside to cities. She is aware of the damage to the land around her home by logging and development companies (see chapter 1). 32 Char Davies, ‘Natural Artifice,’ a statement in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, ed. Catherine Richards and Nell Tenhaaf (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991), 16. 33 ‘Originating essence’ as Heidegger uses it does not imply that it is ‘innate’ to something or someone. Yet ‘origin’ cannot be exactly like ‘innate’ or Heidegger would have used the word innate rather than the word ‘origin.’ Our present knowledge of DNA were not part of Heidegger’s philosophical horizon when he chose to use the language he did. Still, when Heidegger speaks of an ‘originating essence,’ we cannot avoid the biological implications. 34 Heidegger, Basic Writings. In answering his own questions on the nature of the 162 Notes to pages 53–4

‘origins’ of the work of art Heidegger sometimes employs the image of the earth ‘jutting up’ its potential at the overarching, downward-reaching world culture. In so doing he utilizes the inverse of the usual perspective of ‘origin’ that implies a ‘sky- god’ creator. Here we do best by quoting Heidegger: ‘The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. But the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there’ (172). 35 Microsoft and Sony have added sensory technology to video games that allows players to feel explosions, steering wheels, gunfire, etc. This technology (tactile feedback) is felt through the joystick or other peripheral devices. 36 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 162ff. 37 Feelings and biology are never considered by Heidegger, who, in my view, continues to stay within the metaphysical tradition he tries to overcome despite the fact that his philosophical project attempts to circumvent conceptual thinking in favour of a new kind of thinking. Edmund Husserl brings us slightly closer to biology, feelings, and the body because he involves consciousness. He argues for an eidetic essence that exits ‘originally’ as a precursor of intentional consciousness. He is interested in an imaginative act of consciousness, not a sensation of consciousness, but he still interprets imagination abstractly and not substantially as fodder for the intellect. For Husserl intentional or eidetic imagination is produced by possible or potential images that exist uncreated in consciousness until activated by an individual (think quantum physics here). In my view, both Heidegger and Husserl stay bracketed within essences that are meant to activate thinking, thus influencing history in Heidegger’s case while activating intentionality in Husserl’s. Both philosophers, however, are still stuck on the event horizon of the epochal metaphysics that undergirded their education. It would be difficult to argue that they really break through into a new way of thinking. In respect to Husserl, see Richard Kearney, ‘The Phenomenological Imagination (Husserl),’ chap. 1 of Poetics of Imagining (London: HarperCollinsAcademic, 1991). 38 To create the digital image, geometric and mathematical calculations consisting of thousands of minute triangles are all interconnected through yes/no logic. See Gates, ‘The Beginning of the Information Age,’ chap. 2 of The Road Ahead, which constitutes an accessible introduction to the logic that underlies digitality. 39 If we superimpose technological essence translucently over the essence of art and at the same time over the essence of mathematics, as Heidegger suggests we do, and if we examine these layers of essences as though they were opaquely stacked substances, what common denominator would we discover penetrating these layers? How would they relate to one another? We grasp the essence that permeates mathematics because its formulaic truths are constant. A right angle is always a right angle and sums always add, subtract, divide, multiply in the same way; even fractal geometry has constants by virtue of its strange attractors. Grasping the truth or essence in a work of Notes to pages 54–9 163

art, on the other hand, is a very subjective experience, although as we shall see in a later chapter, we all process art visually in the same way. 40 Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: David R. Godine, 1977). Just as computer programmers use points on a screen that are filled out by geometric triangles to create virtual images, so, too, the ancients used points in the sky to join lines and create images of gods and creatures that became part of their mythology. A software program’s mathematical formulas do not overtly possess mathematical essence any more than the sky’s geometric grid against which stars manifest possesses mathematical essence. Still, for the ancients, the sky projected its own version of ‘essence’ involving complex astrological formulas. 41 Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère.’ 42 Some of these attestations are available at www.immersence.com. 43 ‘Maneuvering beyond tangible forms, one enters a realm of affect that evokes an out- of-body experience. Objects are transparent, as if it is their subtle rather than actual bodies that are observed. The poetics of the piece pivot on thresholds: the shift in awareness between outer and inner space, the change of seasons in a landscape, the shift in perception external and internal to the body. One begins the journey floating disembodied through starry outer space.’ Jennifer Fisher, ‘Char Davies,’ Parachute, April–June 1999, 53–4. The article is posted at www.immersence.com/publications. 44 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 80. 45 James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2001). The author has compiled personal testimonies of reactions to viewing a wide range of paintings. He believes that even in this sceptical age people still respond to paintings in traditional ways. They report religious responses, feelings of ecstasy or transcendence, and the sensation of timeless presence.

4: Substantial Essence

1 In the past, women were not icon painters. Today there are some women who paint icons. In this chapter I deal with early Christian icon painters and therefore refer to them with the masculine pronoun. 2 Michel Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press,1991), 40. 3 Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 153–4. Original text has been modified by me to include the bracketed Greek and Latin words; the rest of the italics were in the original text. 4 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), chap. 1, 40–1. 5 I thank one of the anonymous readers of this manuscript, who pointed out that these distinctions needed to be made clear in order that Heidegger’s ‘essence’ not be confused with non-temporal ‘essences’ such as idea and eidos. 6 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 100. I am not the first person to notice a ‘poetic’ co- incidence of language and dynamics. Although I respect Zizioulas’s opinion that theologically Heidegger and the patristic fathers cannot be reconciled, I think one has to look further into some of the clues Zizioulas provides. In a footnote on 44–6, 164 Notes to pages 59–65

Zizioulas points out that three Heideggerian issues cannot be reconciled with patristic beliefs. Theologians such as Christos Yannaras (whose book on the subject has not been translated into English from Greek) have also tried to reconcile Heidegger with orthodoxy. From my perspective it would appear (using Zizioulas’s information) that Heidegger had a source of inspiration, namely early Greek or Syrian writings that used similar themes and words as his. They were influences that he did not reveal or footnote and that provide the basis for future research. 7 Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1961), chap. 8, ‘Dwelling.’ 8 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 100. 9 Vycinas, Earth and Gods, 68. 10 Ibid., 69; my italics. 11 Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 36. In orthodoxy this is referred to as the deification of man. See also John Baggley, Doors of Perception (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 89. 12 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Boston: MIT Press, 2003), 201. Grau is quoting Brian d’Amato, ‘Virtual Kitsch,’ Art Forum 34, no. 5 (1996): 35ff. 13 Carol Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère: Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies,’ n.paradoxa 9 (Eco)Logical (2002), 67. 14 Ibid., 73. 15 Ibid., 70. 16 Ibid., 73. 17 Ibid., 70. 18 Ibid., 65. 19 The name of her home and extensive land holdings in Quebec, Reverie, was probably inspired by the Poetics of Reverie, by Gaston Bachelard. 20 Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère,’ 70. 21 Ibid., 70; my italics. 22 Grau, Virtual Art, 202, 203, 347. 23 Like the icon, which is geometrically constructed, Davies’ computer-based art uses a 3D software program that works on the principle of a Cartesian grid of three coordinate points, x, y, and z. Both works of art ‘emit’ mathematical essence, which Heidegger asks us to connect with if we are having difficulty grasping what he means by technological essence. In the same way that mathematical essence ‘artfully’ underlies the basic truths of the universe, it ought not surprise us that it also underlies the more mundanely beautiful, as found in iconic and digital works of art. 24 Grau, Virtual Art, gives us an excellent historical overview of immersion from early Greek paintings to Char Davies’ immersive virtual art. He views her immersive virtual art as a prime example of how efficiently digital technology can create coercive illusionary environments (347). 25 Baggley, Doors of Perception, 83. Baggley directs us to one of the icons in his book, plate 4, of Rublev’s ‘The Holy Trinity,’ a copy by the Novgorod School late fifteenth century, which depicts distorted mountains. 26 T.M. Robinson, Plato’s Psychology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970; 1995). See p. xvii for his reasons for not taking Plato’s use of myth only figuratively. Notes to pages 66–70 165

27 By the time Davies had finished writing her PhD dissertation in 2004, she had written extensively about her artistic processes and, in effect, ‘deconstructed’ the images back into concepts. 28 During the height of Hegel’s powerful philosophical reign (Hegel borrowed freely from Schelling’s early philosophy of transcendentalism, the philosophy of nature and aesthetics) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) wrote much but published little after his early philosophy. He published his later two-pronged philosophy only after Hegel’s death in 1831. The first part of his philosophy described dynamics that operated through reason’s categories. But Reason could reason only up to a point. Rather than arrive at an Absolute Idea (or Concept or Spirit) as Hegel had done, Schelling’s later philosophy reached a wall of reason, a so-called point of negative feedback, where a leap of reason had to be made if one were to live a practical life. 29 Grau, Virtual Art, 204. 30 Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1991). Rheingold states: ‘I had travelled to North Carolina because I had heard about people who are already creating medicines by using their eyes, ears, and muscles as well as their minds to invent new chemical compounds. I tried my hand at puzzling out a molecular docking problem with the ARM, the same way chemists at this lab do’ (15). 31 In a private e-mail to me on 3 April 2002 (my italics). 32 Research is now underway to correct for the distortion caused by HMD optics. See Ben Watson and Larry F. Hodges, ‘Using Texture Maps to Correct for Optical Distortions in Head-Mounted Displays’ presented at the Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS), 1995, 172–8. For a technological review of HMDs, see http:// vr.isdale.com/vrTechReviews/HMD_199b.htm (accessed 16 November 2005). 33 Doreen Kimura, ‘Sex Differences in the Brain,’ Scientific American, Special Issue on Mind and Brain, September 1992. The subject is too large to delve into here. For an account of male/female, right/left hemispheres, see 119ff. 34 David Hockney, Secret Knowledge (New York: Penguin Putman, 2001). 35 An interesting research project would be to map the technological evolution of visual dynamics from the single viewpoint of the camera lucida or camera obscura, with which artists were able to create such lifelike 2D pictures, to present-day HMD technology, which allows artists to immerse people in 3D art that seems virtually real. 36 See Seiji Horibuchi and Yuki Inoue, eds, Stereogram (San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1994), for explanations of how the brain actually creates 3D. In respect to HMDs, most helmets feature room for adjustment between the inter-pupillary distance as this varies from individual to individual sometimes to a considerable degree. If the inter- pupillary distance for a viewer is incorrectly set in the HMD the virtual image will be off-centre. This can cause changes to oculomotor balance (heterophoria) and result in headaches, eyestrain, and, if abused, lead to permanent changes in the oculomotor system. Three-dimensional technology and its execution are fascinating subjects that we cannot hope to cover in a few short paragraphs. See Peter Alan Howarth, ‘Oculo- motor Changes within Virtual Environments’ at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/depart- ments/hu/groups/viserg/haeoff.htm (accessed 23 October 2005). 37 In private correspondence John Harrison, who created the custom VR program for Osmose and Ephémère, explained it to me this way: ‘When I’m generating the 3D virtual images, I do the reverse of what you do when seeing. Imagine a corner of a cube in a 166 Notes to pages 70–3

virtual space. I know the position of that corner of the cube in space, the position of the screens from the HMD (or for the video projection) in the virtual space, and I know approximately where the centre of the user’s pupil is in the 3D space. I essentially draw a line from the corner of the cube to the centre of each of the user’s eyes and see where that intersects each of the LCD screens. I know, then, exactly where on the LCD screen to draw the corner. It’s simply a matter of 3D projection, and if you imagine this process, you’ll see that the position of the corner will be different on each of the LCD screens.’ 38 IMAX’s system has advanced from the use of polarized glasses in 1986 to the present use of electronic liquid-crystal shutter glasses that alternately blink at a rate of forty- eight times a second. Each eye sees the images from one of two distinct copies of the film, thus allowing for the brain to simulate a natural perception of depth. 39 As Harrison explained, the retina responds to incoming visual information through incrementally framed static images following quickly one after the other and not through a flowing stream of seamless images. 3D computer-imaging software like Softimage also produces such individually framed images. For a sense of immersion in virtual reality, consecutive display of images needs to go well beyond the frame rate of thirty frames per second. 40 It should be noted that the stereoscopic glasses were used only in the first two public exhibitions of Osmose in Montreal and New York City in 1995. Subsequently, because of lack of corporate support – Silicon Graphics would no longer loan Davies the necessary hardware – she had no option but to offer a single-view projection for the audience based on what the immersant was seeing but only through one eye. 41 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 60. 42 Ibid., 201. 43 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994). By this phrase Damasio means an image created by bodily instincts that eventually becomes the substrate of reason. 44 Microvision, a company in Bothell, WA, is developing optical scanning systems, mainly for military, medical, industrial, and other purposes, that scan an image directly onto the user’s retina to achieve a broad range of display and imaging applications. The development of a personal display system allows the individual to ‘see through’ in the same way a camera obscura does, two images at the same time. It augments the viewers vision by superimposing electronic information onto his field of view. 45 Michael Heim, ‘The “Dark Side” of Virtual Reality,’ UFO 9, no.6 (1994): 36ff. 46 Rheingold, Virtual Reality, 264. 47 Ibid., 44. 48 To the Greek fathers an idol was a three-dimensional representation of a Greek deity. To get away from three-dimensional idols they turned to two-dimensional icons to express likeness, or prototype. In so doing, they followed the teachings of Genesis 1:26: ‘Let us make man according to our icon (Kat’eikona) and according to our likeness.’ By developing the iconic technique for representing the human aspect of divinity (in the image of Christ) the early church could have it both ways. They could have a 2D image of the human-divine without engaging in an illusionary form of ‘3D virtual reality.’ Notes to pages 73–8 167

49 G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990). Enough research has been done to establish just why the icon was constructed in two dimensions and why it was designed to engage the visual brain the way it does. We know that the Greek fathers borrowed heavily from the Greek world in whose culture they were still immersed in the early centuries after Christ, particularly from the Greeks’ mathematical and geometric skills, which the fathers admired. The icon also reflects Egyptian nuances perhaps in part due to the early Coptic influences on orthodoxy. One has only to walk through the British Museum’s excellent collection of mummy sarcophagus cases and examine the portraits on them – the faces are similar to those we see on religious icons. The orthodox portrait-like icons of Christ appear to be copies of images that combine the remnants of both worlds. (We are uncertain as to the role that Egyptian iconography played in establishing iconic dynamics.) 50 Discover, February 2002, 55–7. 51 Charles Platt, ‘Microsoft 3–D,’ Wired, July 1996, 164.

5: On Up/Down Paradigms and the ‘Essence of Spatiality’

1 Northrop Frye, The Great Code (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982), 106ff. The myth itself is interesting. At this time in history, when producing babies in vitro and cloning human beings are possible, this myth would fit in quite nicely. In fact, artificial reproduction is part of the mythology of the ancient Sumerian and Mayan cultures. 2 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 182ff. Can we add to Frye’s wonderment and ask whether it might be that up/ down themes are more than just innately experienced in the abstract psychological sense but genetically encoded in our DNA, the way Steven Pinker argues that the language instinct is? See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperPerennial Library, 2000). That is, is it advantageous to bodily experience up/down spatial themes in order to delve into our culturally embedded DNA memories of them, instead of just objectively appraising them? 3 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Exploration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Computing, Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, 2004) (draft 6/12/02), 38. 4 Anthony Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 1998), chap. 1. The Softimage program, like many other 3D software packages, begins with a screen area that is divided into four grids of 3D space setting up virtual 3D space which is organized according to the Cartesian coordinate system (x, y, and z axes). 5 In an e-mail to me, 3 October 2002. 6 Char Davies, ‘Virtual Space,’ in Space in Science, Art and Society, ed. F. Penz, G. Radick, and R. Howell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16. www.immersence.com. 7 I write here only about my own experience. I should note, however, that the Softimage program has a ‘gravity’ feature which can add gravity to the 3D world (Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D, 682), although this gravity feature was not employed by Davies. 8 Joseph Nechvatal, ‘Introduction,’ ‘Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances: A Study of the 168 Notes to pages 78–84

Affinity between Artistic Ideologies Based in Virtual Reality and Previous Immersive Idioms’ (PhD dissertation, Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, 1999)), 368. 9 Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D, 73ff. Rosanno explains how an artist can set up hierar- chies: ‘The very first object, the top object, of the tree is called root. That root splits off into individual branches and those branches may have other branches below them. Each object in the tree is called a node, although a better term is leaf (sometimes, the last node in a tree is called a leaf node).’ This language of tree, root, leaf is also used by Davies. 10 More and more scientific evidence identifies where in the brain intelligence resides, and always it has to do with the part of the brain called the frontal lateral cortex. It is here that blood flow increases when volunteers tackle complicated sequences of symbols and letters and other puzzles. This was reported (July 2000) by Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University (and also Dusseldorf University). Both used brain scanning techniques to arrive at their conclusions. http://www.mrc-cb4.cam.ac.uk (accessed 24 October 2005). 11 Philosophers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and subsequently Franz Rosenzweig, who was influenced by the former’s philosophical dynamics, write about the repulsive-attractive forces in the world and use these philosophical dynamics advantageously to describe subjective/objective forces at work in the individual as well. These repulsive-attractive dynamics are not unlike those experienced by an immersant in Osmose – although not in a philosophical, impersonal, objective way, but in an aesthetic, personal, and subjective one. 12 Frye, Secular Scripture, 163. 13 Erik Davis, ‘Osmose,’ Wired, August 1996, 139. 14 Davies, ‘Virtual Space,’ 17. 15 Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace,’ 47. 16 Ibid., 44. 17 The attendants who run Osmose and Ephémère during museum installations usually take advantage of any free time and ‘immerse’ themselves in the artworks as often as they can. 18 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace,’ 186–7. 19 Frye, Secular Scripture, 36. 20 Ibid., 182. Frye wonders if the sky father myth involves more than human imagination because we seem to be creating myths that are outside of nature (184). 21 Frye states: ‘By naive romance I mean the kind of story that is found in collections of folk tales and märchen, like Grimms’ Fairy Tales. By sentimental romance I mean a more extended and literary development of the formulas of naive romance. Most of this, in early and modern times has been in prose narrative’ (ibid., 3). 22 Ibid., 183–4. Frye’s interpretation of an ‘ascending metamorphosis myth’ parallels the stratospheres of the brain: from base brain and homeostasis control (life and death), to the middle brain hippocampus amygdala (memory) and hypothalamus (emotion), to the cognitive top layer of our brain (identity and individuation). 23 Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 24 Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988). Notes to pages 84–91 169

25 John E. Mack, Abduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994). 26 Frye, Secular Scripture, 182. 27 Idel, Mystical Experience, 24ff. 28 Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven, 108. It is not clearly understood by scholars in this field why the descent must occur before the ascent to the Merkavah begins, although this would also concur with Frye’s contention that both descent and ascent dynamics are part of the innate dynamics of this imaginative schema. 29 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 103. 30 Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner, 1997). 31 Pert, Molecules of Emotion, 187. 32 Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace’ (2002), 58. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Wertheim, Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. The first chapter sets out this concept of dualistic space conceived in medieval times. See particularly 38. 35 E-mail communication, 30 September 2002. 36 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). See chapters 7 and 8, where his work is discussed in more detail. Professor of neurobiology at the Univer- sity of London, Zeki pioneered the modern study of the visual brain. Zeki’s thesis is that artists automatically paint the kinds of forms that the visual brain’s cells are already programmed to respond to. He provides the reader with pictures of cells firing in response to different lines and colours taken during experiments on animal and human subjects. His neurological analysis of the paintings of famous artists and the visual brain’s response to these paintings in respect to forms and colours is unique. 37 Wertheim, Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 105. 38 Davies, ‘Virtual Space,’ 5–6. Her use of ‘Mc-vision/McDonald’s’ was clarified for me in a private conversation. 39 In a conversation with me on 29 September 2003. 40 Davies, ‘Virtual Space,’ very early draft version. 41 Ibid. 42 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 142, 146, cited in Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: The Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1987), 237. 43 Frye, Secular Scripture, 8–9. 44 Ibid., 38. 45 See Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 218, 219, for a much broader write-up and history. Fleischmann together with Strauss founded Media Art Research Studies (MARS) in 1997. Fleischmann is the first woman to hold, simultaneously, the posts of permanent member of GMD (Institute of Media Communication at the Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik) research staff and professor at the Hochschule für Kunst and Gestaltung in Zurich. Strauss, an architect, works in the field of installations and performance art and joined GMD in 1993. He became professor for Media Art and Design at the Media Lab of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Saarbrücken, in 1995. 46 Ibid., 219 and 264–6. 47 Ibid., 219. Grau is quoting them from a private e-mail communication. 48 Ibid., 231. 170 Notes to pages 91–9

49 Antonio R. Damasio, ‘Remembering When,’ Scientific American, September 2002, Special Issue, 66ff.

6: The Essence of Cyberspace and Immersive Virtual Spatiality

1 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 2 Ibid., 229. 3 Ibid., 233. 4 Ibid., 249. Here Wertheim is discussing some of the views in Sherry Turkle’s book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 5 Wertheim, Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 251. 6 Ibid., 252. 7 Ibid., 253–82. I have quoted or paraphrased phrases from the entire chapter ‘Cyber Soul-Space’ without actually citing each place in the chapter where the words came from. 8 Ibid., 282. Wertheim cites Michael Heim’s referral to Gibson’s contempt of earthly existence (281). She notes Heim’s ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedkt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 75. 9 Ibid., 233. 10 Ibid., 308. 11 See Wertheim’s review of Davies’ digital art: ‘Out of This World,’ New Scientist February 1999, 38–41. Other articles on Osmose and Ephémère that she has written are posted at www.immersence.com. 12 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13 Ibid., 85 (my italics). 14 Ibid., 81. 15 This does not mean that Heim does not appreciate the role of the body. He is a tai chi teacher after all. It is just that at first glance he does not seem to integrate the actual body into cyberspace in any apparent way unless one looks to his extensive experiments with on-line avatars or graphic representations of the physical body. See Heim’s website at www.mheim.com. 16 Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 84. 17 Ibid., 89. 18 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51. 19 Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 89. 20 Ibid., 108. 21 Ibid., 123 (my italics). 22 Ibid., 124. 23 Ibid.,128. 24 Michio Kaku, Hyperspace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 25 Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 89. 26 Michio Kaku and Jennifer Thompson, Beyond Einstein (New York: Anchor Books, 1987). 27 Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 137. 28 Michael Heim, Virtual Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167. Notes to pages 99–103 171

29 Anthony Rossano, Inside Softimage 3D (Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 1998), 46ff. and chap. 7, ‘Polygon Modeling.’ 30 Wertheim, ‘Out of This World.’ 31 For the sake of brevity and clarity we shall only consider the hierarchal structure of Osmose in this comparison. 32 Davies, ‘Natural Artifice,’ a statement in Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus, ed. Catherine Richards and Neil Tenhaaf (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991). Davies speaks of ‘a pre-Columbian culture in South America [that] educated its priests by keeping them in a cave from birth. For nearly a decade the children lived in darkness and silence, contemplating the internal reality of the world. They were then released into the light of day and the flowing reality of nature with its myriad of life forms. This experience must have given them a profound reverence for life – not exactly Plato’s allegory. Western culture, on the other hand, has denied its embeddedness in nature for centuries, valuing mind over body, and humans (western, white, male) over every living creature, categorizing the world as a collection of objects to be subjugated for human use. With such a worldview, it is not surprising that we have made a mess.’ www.immersence.com. 33 The 3D immersion is marred, however, according to Davies, because the immersant in a CAVE is usually aware of her feet and the corners of the wall. For this reason, stated very simply here, Davies has always declined participation in a CAVE production. Private conversation with me, on 29 September 2003. 34 Wertheim, Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 167. 35 Heim, Virtual Realism. 36 Peter Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). See Heim’s essay, ‘The Cyberspace Dialectic,’ 24ff. The virtual philosophical space that Heim introduces us to is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s abyssful space. Heim’s virtual space is able to tease out calcified notions of truth, making them flexible again. The idea is that the notions must remain forever virtual. Heim, it appears, has conceived his idea of virtual realism by merging the realist’s philosophical approach with a concept of cyberspace dynamics that deals primarily with computer cyberspace. 37 Part I of this production was by Marcos Novak. His co-producers for Part II were Diane Gromala, designer, and Yacov Sharir, choreographer. The work was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, with support from the University of Texas (1995). 38 Heim, Virtual Realism, 62 (my italics). 39 Ibid., 59, 60. 40 Although Heim also writes about Char Davies’ work in Virtual Realism, she is not aware of his ever having experienced it personally, although, of course, he may have done so. I, alas, must confess to having to write about Virtual Dervish without experiencing it. 41 Fredric Schiffer, Of Two Minds (New York: Free Press, 1998). Supposedly the right hemisphere is being called upon to process all this ‘sublimity’ because that is the hemisphere that deals with spatiality and, some psychologists advise, with ‘sadness.’ Heim’s ‘sublime’ moment oozes with uneasiness and so suggests some anxiety-ridden memories might have been evoked. If this is so, then one can understand why these thoughts of ‘inhumanness,’ or feelings of ‘alarm,’ arise in Heim. The fact is that during 172 Notes to pages 103–5

immersion, the left hemisphere need not be involved at all; the right hemisphere, all by itself, contains the necessary neurons to process the forms and analyse them. Furthermore, we now have, because of MRI, fairly accurate pictures of where thinking, reasoning, dreaming, emotions, etc., light up in the brain. We have accumulated a fairly sophisticated body of research in this respect. 42 Aside from his virtual art productions, it is worth noting that Novak is also accomplishing the feat of transmitting images of the ‘spaces of consciousness’ (as he refers to it) from one location to another many miles away. He is on his way to conquering the physical barriers of space by hooking up participants in different cities and allowing them to interact in a world of art he creates in cyberspace courtesy of powerful computers and the Internet, headmounted displays, and video boards. This was demonstrated at one of the Electronic Café International meetings (founded in 1984) and billed as ‘a fully shared, totally immersive, tele-VR art environment with real-world/ real-person video input.’ The demonstration required two Onyx Reality Engines linked over the Internet, Sirius video boards to allow video to be transmitted real-time from each place, headmounted displays linked to Polhemus Fastrack position, and orientation sensors. http://www.artstechsymposium.utah.edu/novak.html. Transmitting image-bound space is a project that takes us into the realm of transposing and linking real spaces with virtual reality techniques achieved through a profusion of technological equipment. Virtual reality shared space is an entirely different project with ultimate goals that presumably have to do with transporting worlds through space, for example, from Earth to Mars. But this kind of technological project involving transpositioning of space lies well beyond our conceived biological essence of space. Novak’s project does underline how his virtual art is proceeding. It appears to be a vastly different teleological goal from that with which he began. 43 Novak tells us the dancers in Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies have an ominous feat as they must manoeuvre between ‘feet’ in real space with boundaries, while the mind and the rest of the body are in virtual space, without boundaries. As well, there are other impediments such as the ‘mystic robe’ that clothes them, an HMD, a dataglove, and a tangle of wires. 44 Marcos Novak, ‘transArchitecture: Transmitting the Spaces of Consciousness,’ Dutch Electronic Art Festival 1995, www.v2.nl/DEAF/persona/novak.html, 2. 45 Doreen Kimura, ‘Sex Differences in the Brain,’ Scientific American, Special Issue on Mind and Brain, September 1992. 46 Most of this information was collated from articles on Doreen Kimura’s website, for example, ‘Sex, Sexual Orientation and Sex Hormones Influence Human Cognitive Function,’ Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6 (1996): 259–63. Kimura is with the Depart- ment of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC. See also Doreen Kimura, Sex and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 47 One wonders whether or not men, who relate to space abstractly, would be influenced by Davies’ art and hence relate to space in a more biological way. Davies writes: ‘Other people have told me that afterwards they had sat down and wept. Most of those who told me this were men, interestingly enough; [they wept] from some sense of nostalgia and loss that they could not articulate.’ Gigliotti, ‘Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère: Carol Gigliotti interviews Char Davies,’ n.paradoxa 9 (Eco)Logical (2002), 63. Notes to pages 105–9 173

48 Ibid., 64. 49 Heim, Virtual Realism, 63. 50 Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 128. I have added the word ‘emotionally’; it really is not implied in Heim’s context. 51 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994). 52 Ibid., 128. 53 In fact, these initial musings about imageful philosophical dynamics began when I gave a course at Thomas More Institute, Montreal, Quebec, that pitted chaos theory against deconstructionism. See ‘Breakdowns and Philosophy: On Deconstruction and Chaos,’ in Breakdowns: The Destiny of the Twentieth Century, ed. Bruce A. Butterfield and Jügen Kleist (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 57–72, where I outline the course. The idea was to let the ‘abysmal’ dynamics evoked by deconstructionism be grasped through the fractal images provided by chaos theory. I was surprised at how easily students could understand the concepts that deconstructionists were positing when they (the students) juxtaposed them against the images of fractal science. 54 David Michael Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). 55 Ibid., 60–1.

7: Instincts and the Unconscious: Digital Transcendence and Essential Spatiality

1 Heidegger was often accused of being pagan in his philosophical approach and certainly was not considered a Christian by his peers. Heidegger did get one dynamic right in respect to human nature. His vehicle for experiencing authentic ‘being’ in the world was the work of art, through which one could hope, perhaps, to grasp a ‘Being’ that was archaically transcendent and that pointed to ‘being.’ 2 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), 84. See also Scientific American, Mind and Brain, Special Issue, September 1992, for a still up-to-date account of our knowledge of the workings of the brain and mind. Damasio points out that between the five main sensory input areas in the brain and three output areas are the associated cortices, the basal ganglia, the thalamus, the limbic system cortices and the limbic nuclei, and the brain stem and cerebellum. This collection of systems becomes the ‘organ’ of information of both innate potential and experiential input/output to and from the outside world (94). Damasio believes that the images that inform our thoughts lie in this in-between area – in between these input/output brain sectors – and thus work in conjunction with the sensory and motor cortices of the system at large. The prefrontal area that he believes is the location of the integration of feelings and reason includes the right cerebral hemisphere, which processes several cortices’ body signals and the structures of the limbic system such as the amygdala. Damasio states with authority that there are regions in the brain where reason and emotion interact ‘so intimately that they constitute the source for the energy of both external action (movement) and internal action (thought animation, reasoning). This fountainhead region is the anterior or cingulate cortex, another piece of the limbic system puzzle’ (71). 3 James P. Henry, Instincts, Archetypes and Symbols: An Approach to the Physiology of 174 Notes to pages 109–14

Religious Experience (Dayton, OH: College Press, 1992), 62. The quotation was a personal communication to Henry from Carl Jung. 4 It is argued by some that rapid eye movement may have to do with oxygenating the eye rather than with dreams. Scientific American, May 1998, 26. 5 Jonathan Winson, ‘The Meaning of Dreams,’ Scientific American special issue, Mysteries of the Mind, Special Issue, 1997, 60. The information in this paragraph is based on this article. 6 Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner, 1997), 290. 7 Art has always pointed to the truth of ‘being-in-the-world.’ All cultures throughout the ages have given witness through art, whether it be in the form of enormous carved stone heads, stelae, cave art, or other monuments found all over the globe. These ancient works of art were static creations that relied upon the viewing person to animate the spirit/soul in them. Some of them like the cave art in France and Spain can also be classified as immersive experiences. Not surprisingly, our world is still bound to ideas of god even though postmodernism, and particularly deconstructionism, has sought, most desperately, to ‘carnally’ overcome them. Despite these decon- structing philosophical movements, religious art continues to extend into the postmodern age, e.g., Salvador Dali’s unique interpretation of stereoscopy, particularly his ‘Christ of Gala’ painted in 1978. In many ways, religious art also evokes an instinct for ‘psychic’ survival, even though it is a survival that would have to take place in eternity. An icon, as we have already discussed in a previous chapter, can also utilize the same genre of dynamics that an immersive work of art does because both employ the dynamics of spatiality in unique ways. 8 Pert, Molecules of Emotion, 185. 9 Ibid., 185. 10 Ibid. Pert likes the word inforealm because it has a scientific ring. Pert relates how during the taping of a PBS special, Healing the Mind, host Bill Moyers asked her what she meant by inforealm and whether it would be equivalent to Holy Spirit running instinctively through the body. She later admitted to a cameraman that it would (310). 11 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 2002). 12 Robert Plomin and John DeFries, ‘The Genetics of Cognitive Abilities and Disabilities,’ Scientific American, May 1998, 62ff. 13 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 14 Ibid., 84. 15 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 20. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson, eds, Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). See my essay ‘Kant and Radical Evil,’ 18–47. 18 Damasio, Descartes’ Error. 19 The following paragraphs about Damasio’s work are modified and paraphrased from a book review I did for Explorations: Journal for Adventurous Thought 13, no. 3 (Spring 1995). I thank the editor Dr William P. Frost, for his kind permission to use them. 20 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 143, 162, 178.To cite Damasio: ‘If an emotion is a collection of Notes to pages 114–16 175

changes in body state connected to particular mental images that have activated a specific brain system, the essence of feeling an emotion is the experience of such changes in juxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle. In other words, feeling depends on the juxtaposition of an image of the body proper to an image of something else, such as the visual image of a face or the auditory image of a melody. The substrate of a feeling is completed by the changes in cognitive processes that are simultaneously induced by neurochemical substances (for instance, by neurotransmitters at a variety of neural sites, resulting from the activation in neurotransmitter nuclei which was part of the initial emotional response)’ (145–6). 21 Ibid., 115. 22 Ibid. Damasio states: ‘In human societies there are social conventions and ethical rules over and above those that biology already provides ... Although such conventions and rules need be transmitted only through education and socialization, from generation to generation, I suspect that the neural representations of the wisdom they embody, and of the means to implement that wisdom are inextricably linked to the neural representation of innate regulatory biological processes. I see a “trail” connecting the brain that represents one, to the brain that represents the other. Naturally, that trail is made up of connections among neurons’ (124–5). 23 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 84. 24 Ibid., 97–8. 25 There is no big Cartesian screen in the mind where all input automatically flows and plays out as though one were viewing a movie. Rather, we are told, recent studies confirm that the brain is a composite of a multitude of systems none of which is necessarily stored proximately to the other. Information concerning your beloved’s face may be stored all over the brain. His eyes in one part, his hair colour in another, his nose, mouth, the contour of the face, etc., in yet other areas. When you call up the vision of his face all this information comes together in the frontal lobe regions of the brain. But since what is recalled is only a copy of the original memory it sometimes takes a while for the mind to focus on recapturing all the pieces of what was stored perhaps many, many years ago. Nor is all this information processed linearly by the brain. Rather, it is as though, Damasio states, ‘signals in the stream move both forward and backward. Instead of a forward-only-moving stream, one finds loops of feed- forward and feedback projections, which can create a perpetual recurrence.’ Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 93. 26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). 27 Ibid., 65. 28 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 247. 29 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper Torch- books, 1960), Book One, ‘Radical Evil in Human Nature.’ 30 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 7. 31 Without these feelings of floating within the essence of spatiality, which I suggest are biologically innate and thus available to all of us, I doubt whether the reported transcendence in near-death situations, where the ‘I’ ‘detaches’ itself from the body, would occur. Deep within the recesses of the brain there is an escape hatch where a disparity between the ‘I’ and ‘me’ can occur, most probably through delayed bodily 176 Notes to pages 116–20

image transmission. Hidden in the brain is a place, a parcel of essential spatiality, where consciousness, the ‘I,’ can retreat during the body’s desperately painful, unbearable near-death moments. 32 Ibid., 100. 33 In addressing the problem of anosognosia (Descartes’ Error, 154), Damasio gives us the clue that we need in respect to the creating and recreating of self-images. People who are injured in a particular area of the brain cannot form a new self-image and therefore must rely on the last one they had stored for the rest of their lives. This is why anosognosics deny that there is anything physically wrong with them after a stroke. Noteworthy is the fact that the regions of the brain that are damaged lie in the right hemisphere, although these regions do receive input from both right and left sides of the body. Anosognosics are not at all concerned about their physical states, even though they are paralyzed on the left side. They remain rather complacent, fairly happy, and completely out of touch with historical time. 34 The body can at times feel enormous as when one looks down into the cavernous spaces of the grid, code world, or text world. Or there can be no sense of body at all, as though it had melted away completely. It is as though the stored concept of self were on hold or, in Damasio’s language, that the input of ‘impressions’ hitting the skin have stopped producing the bodily images necessary to over-imprint an also emerging ‘self’ in the brain in order that a person can function normally. 35 We need to know more about the role dopamine plays in this kind of ‘transcendent’ situation. It is interesting to note that even in sleep dopamine is never turned off and is always accessible to the dreaming brain. Dopamine also appears to be responsible for creating the dreamlike space where the ‘I’ locates itself while awaiting the body’s time-lag images. 36 Mark Hansen, ‘Embodying Virtual Reality: Touch and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies,’ in Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender and Culture 12, nos. 1–2 (2001): 112–47. www.immersence.com. 37 Ibid. Hansen is quoting Celeste Olalquiaga from her book Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). www.immersence.com 38 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In this recently published book Hansen argues that the entire body (think bodily perception) processes computer-based digital images, and hence the human being is indispensable in the act of creating images in this digital era. 39 Char Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace: A Painter’s Exploration of Immersive Virtual Space as a Medium for Transforming Perception’ (PhD dissertation, Department of Computing, Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth, 2004), 73. 40 Ibid., 284. 41 Howard Rheingold, ‘Foreword,’ in Stereogram, ed. Seiji Horibuchi and Yuki Inoue (San Francisco: Cadence Books, 1994): ‘Just as virtual reality uses two computer displays, one for each eye, to imitate human binocular vision, stereograms use one image for each eye to fool the brain into thinking it is seeing a single three-dimensional scene’ (8). 42 Christian de Duve, Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative (New York: BasicBooks, 1995). New evidence is uncovering the fact that the building blocks of life are everywhere to be found in ‘cosmic dust.’ 43 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 100ff. Notes to pages 121–5 177

44 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 199. By a ‘natural’ scene, object, or colour Zeki means the natural environment we see around us, and therefore a natural painting would be a realistic representation of something one is familiar with. He provides us with a definition for his use of abstract art: ‘I use it here in its simplest sense, to mean art which does not represent or symbolize any features or objects of our visual world (non-iconic abstraction)’ (200). I employ Zeki’s language for consistency, even though artists might not like his choice of words like ‘natural painting.’ Sophisticated brain imaging includes anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (aMRI), while brain physiology is imaged using positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), or functional MRI (fMRI) 45 For a diagram of the visual cortex and other examples cited in this section, see Zeki, Inner Vision, chap. 1, 16. For the reference to royal gateway, see chap. 7, 60. 46 Ibid., 199ff. 47 Ibid., 203. 48 Ibid., 215. 49 Ibid., 201. 50 Ibid., 218. 51 Ibid., 210. 52 Ibid., 216. 53 Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace’ (2004): ‘The creation of true ambiguity, whereby an image perpetually hovers midway between recognition and abstraction, whereby meaning is evoked rather than illustrated, became one of my greatest challenges as a painter, and remains so today’ (102). 54 Zeki, Inner Vision, 217. 55 Ibid., 191. 56 Ibid., 202 (my italics). 57 See Davies’ website, www.immersence.com, for a comprehensive list of publications. 58 Davies, ‘Landscape of Ephmeral Embrace’ (2004), in a section entitled ‘Evoking Perceptual and Cognitive Ambiguity,’ 102. 59 In private conversation on 29 September 2003, Davies told me that during the con- ceptualization of her imagery she just gets a feeling or intuition that resonates for her symbolically and that she ‘coaxes it into fruition.’ 60 Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 1: 138. She is citing J.C. Biederman in his book Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (Red Wing, MN: published by the author, 1948). 61 Damasio would agree with Biederman. Damasio points out in Descartes’ Error that ‘an observer looking at the stimulus presented to an experimental animal, who subsequently would look at the activation caused by the stimulus in the animal’s visual cortex, would discover a remarkable consistency between the shape of the stimulus and the shape of the neural activity pattern in one of the layers of the primary visual cortex [layer 4C]’ (104). He speculates that someday we will prove that people looking at the same object produce the same visual imprint in the visual cortex.

8: Speculative Inquiries into the Elements of Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art

1 For a very interesting Web page which covers many of the areas we will be discussing below, particularly theta rhythms, see Christopher McPeck’s research at http:// 178 Notes to pages 126–7

pages.prodigy.net/unohu/theories.htm and follow his links (accessed 16 November 2005). 2 Researchers in Russia (see note 17 below) point out that while everyone knows that hemoglobin transfers oxygen for breathing, not many pay attention to the fact that it also serves to convert UV and the whole visible range of solar light into heat for the body. Hemoglobin controls the intensity of the light the body receives in order to modulate its thermal load. What molecules absorb the light of the sun and hence play important roles in sustaining body heat has not been adequately addressed by scientists and is a most urgent problem. 3 Dr Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University, credited with stopping light a few years ago, was able to slow light to 60 kph (328 mph) by passing it through chilled sodium gas. Last year she slowed light to 1.6 kph (1 mph). Now, utilizing a method that cools a gas of magnetically trapped sodium atoms to within a few millionths of a degree of absolute zero, in a process known as ‘electromagnetically induced transparency,’ she has stopped light and stored it. The other researcher involved is Dr Ronald Walsworth of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The implications of this feat are mind-boggling since it could pave the way for quantum computing and quantum communication. 4 Three biochemicals play a role in all three categories under discussion. Serotonin, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine are ingredients of waking consciousness, deep sleep (unconsciousness), and REM sleep. In waking consciousness aminergic (serotonin and norepinephrine) and cholinergic (acetylcholine) agents are proportionately dispersed in metronomic regularity. It is this rhythmic release of chemicals in different proportions that produces wakeful consciousness or sleeping/dreaming unconsciousness. In deep sleep these modulating factors decline to at least one-half of waking consciousness requirements and one sleeps away in an oblivion of deep unconsciousness. When we enter REM sleep something different happens. Aminergic agents are reduced to one-tenth (or one-hundredth) of their alert consciousness strength and face a very strong 100 per cent cholinergic agent. This produces a considerable shift in the biochemical rhythms of the brain. As we drift from deep sleep into dream sleep we cycle through different types of metronomic combinations of aminergic and cholinergic agents with the greatest amount of pure acetylcholine substance in our brains occurring during REM sleep. Once the brainstem’s acetylcholine system is aroused in REM sleep a rush of this chemical occurs. The activation of acetylcholine reactivates the release of enough norepinephrine and serotonin to once again suppress the REM dream sleep, enabling the person to fall back into deep sleep once again. The cycle repeats itself throughout the night. The fact that acetylcholine is involved in REM sleep does not necessarily provide us with an easy clue as to what may be happening in the brain of a person who is immersed in immersive virtual art. 5 Karl Simanonok offers a most interesting theory. His thesis, ‘A Theory of Physiologi- cally Functional Endogenous Light and a Proposed Mechanism for Consciousness,’ can be found at http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/karl/consciousness.html (accessed 9 November 2005). 6 Mysteries of the Mind, Scientific American, Special Issue, 1997, 62. 7 Winson, ‘The Meaning of Dreams,’ Mysteries of the Mind, Scientific American, Special Notes to pages 128–9 179

Issue, 1997, 60. The information in this paragraph is based on this article. Freud believed that dreams were the result of suppressed libido; Jung that their meanings alluded to spiritual aspirations for the self. No doubt there are many ways to decipher the meaning of dreams. In 1983 Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison posited a theory of reverse learning, proclaiming that dreams are a clearing house for the excess baggage accumulated during the day and for storing, retaining, and discarding information that is valuable to us. Others maintain that we dream to review and embed information that is important to us. 8 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159. 9 Ibid., 218. 10 The study of colour ontology at the moment is very rudimentary. Discovering gene- related colours would mean that there is a genetically innate range of cellular colours outside of the visual cortex that we have inherited. We know that individual cells display their own oscillatory biochemical pathways, leading us to believe that many, if not all, cells have individual biological clocks. In the visual cortex we know that cells respond electromagnetically to different wavelengths. Recent research confirms that among men 60 per cent of the population responds to one kind of orange-red pigment, while 40 per cent responds to another orange-red pigment, substantiating that two versions of seeing these colours are genetically present. Sidney Perkowitz, Empire of Light (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 27. 11 The incident took place in December 1997. More than 200 viewers with symptoms including blackouts, nausea, and convulsions, had to be kept at the hospital overnight. Italian researchers have since found that a strobe light of 10, 13, or 15 cycles per second can induce seizures in certain people. A flashing light of intense red is the most effective stimulus. It is interesting to note that Isabelle Delmotte, whose work we discussed in chapter 2, could not be immersed in Osmose for fear the flickering in the HMD might trigger an epileptic seizure. 12 T. Takahasi and Y. Tsukahara, ‘Influence of Colour on the Photo-Convulsive Response,’ Department of Neuropsychiatry and Department of Physiology, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan, 1976. I accessed this article on the Internet in 2002 but it is no longer available as a free download. It can be purchased at http:// www.mindalive.com/2_0/Biblio.pdf. 13 For other information on photo-convulsive response, see Dave Siever, http:// mindalive.com/2_0/Rediscovery.htm for a history of audio-visual entrainment. 14 The U.S. government, for example, regulates the intensity of laser light sold for entertainment purposes, and some video games now come with a warning that the game could trigger an attack in people prone to photosensitive epilepsy. See http:// www.epilepsytoronto.org/ and click on ‘List of Epilepsy Topics.’ Then access ‘Photo- sensitive Epilepsy’ (accessed 26 October 2005). 15 Jules Davidoff, Cognition through Color (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 1991), 113–14. According to Davidoff there is considerable belief that colour can ‘produce a direct effect on the endocrine system via the pituitary gland; its action [colour’s] is to increase aggressive behaviour under long-wave (red) light and reduce it under short- wave (blue/violet) light,’ but Davidoff cautions us to proceed slowly since, in his opinion [in 1991] there is no substantial accumulated body of scientific research on the subject of biochemical responses to colour. 180 Notes to pages 129–33

16 The information regarding headmounted displays (HMDs) is readily available on the Internet under this heading combined with any other subcategory such as light, visual acuity, optics, etc. 17 Vladimire V. Ryl’kov, Robert P. Ogurtsov, Valentina P. Puzirjova, Peter G. Nazarov, and Alexander N. Stukov, ‘Effect of Light Treatment Conditions on Immunological Mechanisms of Anti-Tumor Resistance.’ http://photobiology.com/photobiolgy99/ index2.htm (accessed 26 October 2005). See page 68. Not enough information exists on the difference between natural light and artificial light, although one such difference has been documented in scientific studies in Russia in respect to the photodynamic effects of white light and red light upon cancer cells. In this experiment with light, researchers pointed out that certain cells have adapted evolutionarily to light and can be greatly influenced by natural light especially when photosensitizers are used. (The photosensitizer they use is Photsan-3.) The research demonstrates that natural light reinforced by photosensitizers, in this case, can produce positive responses in tumour cells while artificially produced light accelerates only a narrow set of biochemical responses, disrupting the natural balance of biochemical processes for the negative affect of stimulating growth in tumours. 18 During EMDR treatment brain scans show increased activity in two areas: the anterior cingulate, which acts as a filter for emotional experiences as they are integrated into conscious memory, and the right prefrontal cortex, which acts as a supervisory system for the integration of experience. This suggests that recovery may depend on the capacity of higher brain functions to override the input of limbic structures in charge of the initial appraisal of the degree of threat posed by incoming sensory stimuli. (Dr van der Kolk, Dr Margaret Scheck Dr Francine Shapiro. I could not locate the reference or the location of this group of scientists but have included the information anyway.) 19 Erik Davis, ‘Osmose,’ Wired, August 1996, 140. 20 Perkowitz, Empire of Light, 44ff. It was Maxwell who discovered that the formula for the speed of light was identical to the formula for electromagnetic waves. Both travel at 186,000 miles per second. 21 See Melvin Morce, MD, ‘The Right Temporal Lobe and Associated Limbic Lobe Structures as the Biological Interface with an Interconnected Universe,’ at http:// www.melvinmorse.com/e-tlp.htm. 22 Robert Buckman, Can We Be Good without God? (Toronto: Viking, 2000), 122. 23 M.A. Persinger, ‘Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis,’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 1 (1983): 255–62. Dr Persinger conducts his research at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. 24 Buckman, Can We Be Good, 123. 25 Ibid., 125. 26 Ibid., 126. 27 Hudak Druck Munchen, ‘Ergonomic Issues of Virtual Reality Systems: Head-Mounted Displays,’ Virtual Reality World, conference documentation, 1996. The article can also be seen at http://vr.iao.fhg.de/papers/hci/ergonomi-en.htm (accessed 9 November 2005). All HMDs on the market up until now have fixed eye-to-picture distance of approximately 8 cm. 28 Ibid. In this report it is also mentioned that the flickering of displays of 8 to 12 Hz can cause ‘attacks’ in some people. David S. Walonich, at the University of Sheffield in Notes to pages 133–7 181

England, is an electronics researcher who found (as early as 1985) that at 8 Hz the conscious brain slides into dreamlike alpha states (12 Hz is the normal beta state). Scientists are studying the problem of electric and magnetic fields in HMDs and damage to the eyes that may result due to the permanent setting of the lens system in front of the eyes. They are concerned with long-term use. In immersive virtual art these kinds of problems are mainly avoided since no immersant stays immersed in the work of art for any considerable length of time. 29 The recent discoveries of neuroscientists working with a cat’s visual system demonstrate that the thalamus region of the visual cortex and possibly the higher visual cortex utilizes a biochemical process to produce images. The neuroscientists in question are Yan Dan, Fei Li and Garrett Stanley of the University of California, Berkeley, and the information was posted on ‘Wired News’ on the internet, ‘A Cat’s Eye Marvel’ by Leander Kahnev, Oct. 7th, 1999. 30 Many people have experimented with ayahuasca to determine what happens to their consciousnesses during hallucinatory episodes. We have countless reports of the heightened awareness of colours; of seeing strange, beautiful shapes, including serpent symbols; of splendid geometric designs; of out-of-this-world beings – to say nothing about the out-of-body experience. Serotonin, a consciousness ingredient, and dimethyltryptamine, an active ingredient in ayahuasca, are practically identical in molecular construction. Noteworthy is that dimethyltryptamine found in ayahuasca is also produced naturally by the brain. People who take the drug say they feel that they have been transported out of this world to a different state of consciousness during which they feel disembodied and that they have little control over their mind or body. Some report that they encounter aliens who are elflike in appearance, while others report meeting with slithery, serpent-like creatures about which we will have more to say below. Consistent in these accounts is the reported transcendence of space/time; this, together with the supernatural genre of beings, and the magnificent power in the symbols, gives witness to the experience of a different order of consciousness. 31 Megabrain Report 1, no. 2 (1990); my italics. See http://mindmodulations.com/ resources/General-clinicalguide.html (accessed 27 October 2005). We might wonder whether imagistic rather than digital information can be transferred through a similarly structured dynamic of bioluminescence in human cells and whether transferring information proceeds through images rather than through an abstract language, which is what is suggested now. 32 Brain entrainment cannot be considered to be part of an authentic ‘making of consciousness’ because it is designed to be hypnotic and repetitive in order to soothe and placate consciousness rather than nourish and expand it. A mind-expanding experience, as I understand it, would involve an individuation process during which, over time, a greater notion of self would evolve. When this happens, a person would become aware of something greater than himself, something that pervades consciousness and connects his consciousness biologically to a cosmic consciousness. 33 Winson, ‘The Mysteries of the Mind.’ Winson argues that dreams are the mechanism through which we store the information learned during the day. He claims that his research team has identified neurons that have coded survival information during the day and relive this coding during REM sleep to store it (62–3). 34 See Hiroshi Asada and Fumnio Yamado, ‘Attention and Eyeblinking Activity during 182 Notes to pages 137–44

Different Types of Video Games’ at http://www.el.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp/~asada/ gamepaper.htm. This research paper, no longer available on the Web, claims that a different state of ‘thinking’ exists while subjects are concentrating on video games and are not interrupted by any sounds or commands. The continuous, focused attention engages the frontal midline theta rhythm (Fmq) in an electroencephalogram (EEG). For related articles still available, see Fumnio Yamado, ‘Frontal Midline Theta Rhythm and Eyeblinking Activity during VDF Task and a Video Game,’ http://www.ncbi.nlm .nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9613228&dopt= Abstract. See also http://www.causeof.org. 35 Dale S. Foster, ‘EEG and Subjective Correlates of Alpha-Frequency Binaural-Beat Stimulation Combined with Alpha Biofeedback,’ Memphis State University, May 1990. http://www.brain.web-us.com/foster.htm (accessed 9 November 2005). 36 Akira Kasamatsu and Tomio Hirai, ‘An Electroencephalographic Study on Zen Meditation (Zazen)’ in Altered States of Consciousness, ed. Charles T. Tart (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), chap. 33. 37 This information was found at http://www.floatdreams.com/brainwaves.htm. 38 Pathfinder Floatation Systems operate what they describe as ‘a microprocessor- controlled environmental chamber, insulated for light, sound and temperature,’ where people can engage in therapeutic or relaxation sessions that can include specially designed light and sound. See http://www.floatworks.com (accessed 9 November 2005). 39 These tests, from urine samples, reveal the relative ratios and concentrations of epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, GABA (gamma-amino butyric acid), PEA (phenylethylamine) and other insomnia-related data for cortisol and melatonin. See http://www.modernherbalist.com/neuro1.html (accessed 9 November 2005). Some researchers investigate brain chemistry and the structure of the brain through neuroimaging. See http://depts.washington,edu/chdd. Click ‘Neuroscience Core’ on sidebar (accessed 9 November 2005). 40 Glenn F. Carwright and Caroline A. Zanni, ‘Human Brains in Virtual Worlds,’ Depart- ment of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University, Montreal. A paper presented at the Eighth General Assembly of the World Future Society, Wash- ington, DC, 16 July 1996. http://www.education.mcgill.ca/profs/cartwright/papers/ wash96.htm (accessed 11 November 2005). The study cited here deals with two kinds of brain rhythms: alpha and theta. The effect of sound would be an interesting subject for further study since sound is very much a part of the consciousness-producing rhythms of Osmose and Ephémère. 41 For Davies, this is the most important point to her work – the use of spatial ambiguity and transparency – which she believes has not yet been fully appreciated by her critics. As far as she is concerned, this alone may be responsible for the feelings of transcendence experienced during immersence. See Davies, ‘Landscapes of Ephemeral Embrace’ (2004), 291, 298. 42 John E. Mack, Abduction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 132ff.

Epilogue

1 Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 2 Ibid., 73. Notes to pages 144–6 183

3 Jeffrey Kluger, ‘Is God in Our Genes?’ Time, 25 October 2004, 44–52. 4 See Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aqiuli, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), and Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg, The Mystical Mind (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), for a detailed account of the scientific experiments that offer proof for the neurological basis of spiritual experience. 5 Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Stuart Hameroff is best known perhaps for his theory of microtubles as being the physical seat of consciousness. See his Web page at http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/. 6 Ralph Hoffman of the Yale–New Haven Psychiatric Hospital is conducting research into ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation as an Investigational Treatment for Halluci- nated “Voices.”’ See data concerning this research at http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/ clinics/rTMS.html (accessed 8 November 2005). Hoffman explained to me in an e-mail that whereas TMS alone ‘could be a single or paired pulse, repetitive TMS is a given train of pulses at a designated frequency.’ 7 Excerpted from Thomas Paus’s website, which is found at http://www.mni.mcgill.ca/ cog/paus/research.htm. Paus’s collaborators are Drs Leonard and Beaulieu and the research is funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (accessed 8 Novem- ber 2005) 8 The quoted data are from an article on the Web by Grant Balfour entitled ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation – An introduction.’ See http://www.erowid.org/spirit/devices/ devices_article1.shtml. 9 The most famous theory is perhaps that of Franz Mesmer, who introduced the idea of ‘animal magnetism’ in his doctoral thesis which a Jesuit priest Maximilian Hell claimed he had stolen from his ideas about the use of magnetism (circa 1766). The thesis had to do with the influence of planets on the human body and how such influence was related to magnetism. Today magnetic bracelets and other objects are worn by people who believe in extraterrestrial magnetic energy. Myriad websites promote products sold by companies under the category of ‘magnetic therapy.’ 10 Hunter G. Hoffman, ‘Virtual-Reality Therapy,’ Scientific American, Special Issue, August 2004, 58–65. Hoffman is a director of the Virtual Reality Analgesia Research Center at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITLab) in Seattle. He has helped create the virtual reality software Snow World described in this article. Virtual reality software is also being used at the Mayo Clinic to help stroke victims learn how to walk. 11 Virtually Better, based in Decatur, Georgia, is a software company that leases virtual reality software to psychologists and psychiatrists for $400 a month. It is heartening to note that the Hearst Burn Center, whose director is Roger W. Yurt, is helping to fund a newer version of Snow World called SuperSnow World, which will be offered free of charge to medical centers by the Hearst and Harborview burn centers. 12 Hoffman, ‘Virtual-Reality Therapy.’ Hoffman states: ‘To increase the effectiveness of the virtual therapy, our team created Snow World, a program specifically customized for use with burn patients during wound care. Developed with funding from Micro- soft co-founder Paul G. Allen and the National Institutes of Health, Snow World produces the illusion of flying through an icy canyon with a frigid river and waterfall, as snowflakes drift down. Because patients often report that they are reliving their original burn experience during wound care, we designed a glacial landscape to help put out the fire’ (62). 184 Notes to pages 146–8

13 Ibid., 63. 14 Ibid., 61. The pictures shown are of the brains of healthy people when pain was induced. It should be noted that using Nintendo games did not produce relief; patients still reported severe to excruciating pain while playing them. 15 Ibid., 60; my italics. 16 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 76. 17 Ibid., 71–81. 18 Steven Pinker, ‘The Blank Slate,’ Discover, October 2002. Steven Pinker states: ‘the modern sciences of mind, brain, genes and evolution are showing that there is something to the commonsense idea of human nature’ (36). 19 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 204. Index 185 Index

abductees, 131–4, 137–9, 141. See also UFOs Brooks, Frederick, 72 AC (artificial consciousness), 32–3, 41, 105 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 6 AI (artificial intelligence), 41, 34, 96, 105 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 69 AL (artificial life), 347 Buber, Martin, 23, 62–3 aliens, 84, 185, 296, 407 BWE (brain wave entrainment), 129, 130 Alighieri, Dante, 77, 79, 170, 174, 208 alpha brainwaves, 130–2, 134, 137–9 Candy, Linda, 152n12 altered state of consciousness, 126, 133, 137 Cartesian grid, 21, 19, 54, 76–7, 119, 164n23 archaic being, 108–10 cave, 171n32; art, 174n7; digital, 100–1 Aristotle, 65, 69 CAVE (cave automatic virtual environ- ayahuasca, 134–5, 181n30 ment), 4, 100–1, 171n32 conscious instincts, 140. See also instinct for Bachelard, Gaston, 13–14, 16–19, 62 survival Baggley, John, 65 consciousness, making of, 140–1, 148 Baler, Pablo, 34 Cope, David, 36 Bible, 59, 65, 83–4, 86, 93 Coyne, Richard, 30–1, 34, 40–1, 55 Bidlack, Rick, 12 Crick, Francis, 110 biological themes: biological drives, 114; cyberspace, 93, 94, 96, 171n36; physically biological images, 124; osmosis, 122; felt, 95, 97–8; Platonic, 99. See also Heim; spatiality, 118; transcendence, 116 Wertheim Blanchot, Maurice, 90 Blaszczak, Dorota, 12 Damasio, Antonio R., 108, 113–20, 147, bodily image, 116 173n2, 175n20 Borges, Jorge Luis, 16 D’Aquili, Eugene, 77, 79, 144 brain: and alpha rhythms, 137–8, 180– Davies, Char 1n28, 182n40 (see also alpha brainwaves); about artworks: on clearing, 17–8, 21–2, dispositional image, 71, 115–7, 120–1; 76–7, 79; essential nucleus, 37, 39; felt entrainment of, 128, 131, 133–4, 135–6, space, 5, 105; mythological dynamics, 139, 181n32; fMRI scans of, 109; struc- 79, 90, 92; osmosis; 61, 74, 119, 122; ture of, 173n2 (see also Damasio); theta translucent, 5; vision, 29, 88–9 rhythms, 136–9; visual brain, 87–8 background, 7–8; Reverie, 63; Softimage, breathing and balance, 85–7; body vest, 4; 7, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 43 controlled, 84–5; and mystics, 84, 87 on concepts: cyborgian future, 43; 186 Index

descent into bodily unconsciousness; in Winter Swamp, Ephémère, 6, 28, 89; on life-flow; 61, 66; on non- C-7; Tree and Pond, Osmose, 23, C-3; Cartesian, 77; on notion of absolute; Winter Clearing (Swamp), 42, BW-4; Win- 105; on subversion, 14, 30, 36, 43, 48, ter Swamp, 11, 63, BW-3; Yearning, 15 81, 52, 60, 63; and uterine waters, 4 C-2 as cyberartist, 98, 101; as deus ex Davis, Erik, 139 machina; 39; as instrumentum, 48; deconstructionism, 31, 103 and laws of cerebral organization, Delmott, Isabelle, 37–9, 106, 179n11. See 123; and molecules of emotion; 85; as also epilepsy technoromantic, 14, 43; as tool of Derrida, Jacques, 31, 103 technology, 76 (see also Heidegger) deus ex machina. See Davies digital interfaces: Cartesian boundaries, digital team, 12 48; Cartesian divide, 63; Cartesian disembodied consciousness, 31 space, 51, 77; digital cave, 100; digital DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 10, 16, 32, mythology; 90–1; HMD, 17, 21, 23, 86, 47, 92, 118, 127, 144, 157n18 165n3 (see also HMD); interface vest, dreams: and dreamlike experiences, 75, 79, 35, 86–7; transparency map, 6; up/ 83–6 109, 134–5, 141; and REM sleep, down themes, 64, 76, 81–2, 84, 86, 90 126–7, 134–7, 178n4, 181n33; and sym- on method: ambiguous images, 88, 123, bolic language, 127; as survival mecha- 139; cognitive ambiguity, 28, 63, 73, nisms, 125, 127, 141; and transcendent 122, 177n53, 177n58; perceptual am- experience; 126, 134 biguity, 63; semi-transparency, 4, 28, 62–3; spatial ambiguity, 4, 15, 89, 99, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), 145 139, 182n41; spatial paradox, 62 (see EEGs, 138 also essential spatiality) Einstein, Albert, 93, 102, 143 Davies, Char, works appearing in this electroencephalograph, and emotions, 108, book: Blue World-Space, 15, C-1; Bones 112, 114 in the Interior Body, Ephémère, 80, C-13; electromagnetic dreaming, 131 Cup, 14, BW-1, Eggs in the Interior Body, electromagnetic waves, 130–1, 133–4, Ephémère, 80, C-14; Ephémère, 18, 20 27, 180n20 76, 80, 81, C-15, 16, and 17, BW-13, 14, EMDR (eye movement desensitization 15, 16, and 17: Forest with Cartesian Grid, reprocessing), 180n18 Osmose, 77, 119, C-4; Germinating (Bloom- EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), ing) Seed in the Under-Earth, Ephémère, 80, 36 C-11; Glass Jars on Mirror, 14, BW-2; In- entrainment of the brain. See brain terior Body, Ephémère, 80, C-12; Interior Ephémère: colour in, 133, 135, 138; existen- Landscape (Arctic) Appearing inside Boul- tial vertigo, 25; gravitational pull, 80; as der in the Winter Swamp, Ephémère, 80, Numina, 24–7, 125; seed in, 80–1, 89; C-8; Leaf, Light, 13, BW-5; Osmose, 17, 18, three levels of worlds, 79; as time-based, 22, 76, BW-8, 9, 10, 11, and 12; Root, 13, 76, 80–1 BW-6; Roots, Rocks and Particle Flow in the epilepsy: epileptic-like seizures, 128; Under-Earth, Osmose, 22, C-5; Scrolling epileptic twilight, 37; teenagers with, Walls of Code, Osmose, 22, 78, C-6; Season- 135–6, 138–40 al Transformation in the Forest Landscape, essence: human, 31, 33, 35–7, 41; substan- Ephémère, 80, C-9; Seed, 13, BW-7; Seeds, tial; 37, 42, 58, 60, 42; skeletal forms, 62, Ephémère, 80, C-10; Semi-transparent Trees 64–6, 101, 122 Index 187 essence, mathematical. See mathematical Harrison, John, 6, 12, 19, 22, 24; on essence Cartesian grid, 77–9, 87; executing essence of technology, 52–4, 56–7; techno- graphics, 28–9, 68–70, 151n9, 155n65, logical essence, 42–5, 47–52; technologi- 165–6n37, 166n39, 185n65; on HMD, cal frontiers, 36; video games, 33 (see 69–71, 165–6n37 video games) Hegel, G.W.F., 53–4, 56 essential spatiality, 57, 64, 90, 92, 101, 105, Heidegger, Martin 109, 117, 123–4, 127, 139, 142, 175n31; Coyne on Heidegger’s practicality, 30–1, bodily based, 53, 106–7; essential nature; 41 (see also Coyne) 53, 61; essential nucleus; 32, 36–7, 39 on Hölderin, 54 ethical consciousness, 39, 141 on notions: dangerous truth, 48–51; Dasein, 45–6, 59–60, 66; earth/world, Faraday, Michael, 131 74; enframement, 45, 49, 73, 160n10; feelings: and biological transcendence, 8, Greek notions, 44, 160n15, 161n27; 116, 118; bodily, 56, 106, 162n37, 163n45, hypostasis, 5, 8–9, 59; on light of being, 173n2, 174–5n20, 182n41; felt spatiality, 50–60; ordering principle, 45, 47–9; 108, 119; felt touch, 119; Frye and, 82; skeletal framework, 159n9 (see also for innate biological space, 88; thinking Davies); standing reserves, 160n10 through, 106–7; for transcendence, 5, 64, on technology: essence of technology, 9, 85–9, 96, 105–79, 116, 118, 120, 122, 133; 45, 54, 88, 160n15 (see also essence); transhuman feelings, 105 essential substance, 53–5; mathemati- Fleischman, Monika, 91–2, 169n45 cal essence, 44, 54, 159n7, 162n39 floaters, 138–40 Heim, Michael, 72, 97–103, 105; and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance cyberartist, 106. See also Davies imaging), 109, 117, 138 hesychasm, 84 Foster, Dale, 137 Himmelfarb, Martha, 168n23 Freud, Sigmund, 110 HMD (headmounted display), 4, 21, 23, Frye, Northrop, 75, 82–4, 87, 90, 92, 86–91, 100, 102, 105, 116; and brain, 116; 168n21 versus cave system, 4, 86, 100 (see also CAVE); and electromagnetism, 131–3, Gates, Bill, 33 139; optical systems, 4–5, 69–70, 165n32, gene trait, 143 165n36, 180n16; and photons, 130; Gentet, Yves, 73 stereoscopic effects, 17 geometric perspective, 60 Hockney, David, 69 Gibson, William, 96, 170n8 Hoffman, Hunter G., 146–7, 183n12 Gigliotti, Carol, 15, 35 Hoffman, Ralph, 183n6 Grau Oliver, 45, 60–1, 64, 67, 100, 120, 122, Hofstadter, Douglas, 37–7 148, 154n42, 164n24 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 54 Graves, Robert, 16 Hume, David, 113–15, 117 Greek Orthodox, 58 Husserl, Edmund, 162n37 Green, Elmer and Alyce, 138 hypostasis: and Davies, 58–61; and personhood, 58–9 Hamer, Dean, 143–4 Hameroff, Stuart, 157n15 icon painters: and construction of icon, Hansen, Mark, 118–19, 122, 176n38 61–2, 65; on distortion, 73; on hypostasis, Harah-Conforth, Bruce, 135 59, 74 (see also hypostasis); iconic dynam- 188 Index

ics, 74; and inverted perspective, 69; light: artificial, 129, 130–5 180n17; body opening windows, 62 and, 129–135, 178n2; electromagnetism, Ideal forms, 65 8, 130–1; flickering light, 128–9; night- Idel, Moshe, 84 light and fog, 25–6, 29 (see also Davies); IMAX, 70, 166n38 role in conciousness, 135; strobe, 179n11; immersive art: Coyne on, 40–1, 156; stopping, 178n3 dangerous implications of, 43, 45, 64, 73, limbic system, 38, 108–9 144, 173n2; and 111, 120, 159n8; and ephemerality, 5, 14, archaic instincts, 110; and dreams, 137, 25, 27, 54, 62, 80–1, 83, 119, 125, 139; and 140 essence of technology, 45, 47–9, 50–2, 55, Lunenfield, Peter, 171n36 88, 148; power of images, 7, 56 immersive technology: creating effects, Mack, John, E., 169n25 28–9; mathematical algorithms, 27; Onyx magnetism, 145 Reality Engine, 17, 28, 70; on rendering, Mandelbrot, Benoit, 103 29; rounding geometric lines, 28; semi- mathematical essence, 33, 44, 54, 159n7, transparency, 28 162n38, 163n40, 164n23, 167n49; and impulses for evil, 114–15 formulas, 27, 44, 46, 54, 88; grid, 29, 54; inforealm, 113 space, 75, 87–8, 99, 100; structure, 103–5 information technology (IT), 30, 33, 41, 96 Mauro, Georges, 6, 12, 17, 19, 21, 24 instinct for survival, 110–11, 120 Maxwell, James Clerk, 131 instinctive consciousness: and animal McRobert, Laurie, 155n56 instincts, 9, 38; instinct as archetype, 38, Mesmer, Franz, 146 109. See also Jung Mitchison, Gaeme, 110 instinctive dimension, 110–11, 117 Moravec, Hans, 32–3, 94. See also AI ISEA (International Symposium on multi-user domains (MUDs), 7, 95 Electronic Art), 11–12, 20–1 mythological dynamics: in creation myths, 75; descent myths, 77–9, 82–4, 89–90; Jewish mystics, 83–4; and merkavah, 84–5 digital mythology, 79, 92; in Divine Jung, Carl G.: archetypes, 91; instinct as Comedy, 77; embedded patterns, 76; in archetype, 109; on instincts, 123; on self, heavenly ascents, 83–5; and Jewish 109–10, 123 mystics, 84; sky-father myth, 75, 82, 87, 92; underworld, 77–9; universal myths, Kac, Eduardo, 157n18 82; up/down themes, 75–6, 81–2, 84, 86, Kaku, Michio, 160n14 90; vertical universe, 75 Kant, Immanuel, 103, 113–15 King, Mike, 32 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Kluger, Jeffrey, 183n3 Administration), 4, 161n20 knowing: ecstasy of, 66, 163n45; essential, National Film Board of Canada, 11 56–7; through feelings; 56–7; quantum nature: cyclic patterns of, 75; osmosis with, leap into, 66 74, 50; real, 49, 51–2, 73; virtual, 49, 50, Krueger, Myron, 46 52, 56, 73 Nechvatal, Joseph, 28, 78 Langer, Susanne K., 123 neoplatonism: See Plato Lanier, Jaron, 48 neoromanticism, 30, 38, 41–2, 55, 57 Laurel, Brenda, 151n2 neural representations, and bodily images, Levin, David Michael, 106 116 Index 189

Newberg, Andrew B., 144 Snow World, 183nn10–12. See also Hoffman non-Cartesian. See Davis; Harrison; space Softimage: ambiguous images, 12, 19; on Novak, Marcos, 103–6, 172nn42–3 blurring lines, 6, 28, 80, 111; edges and Numina, 24–7; as lament, 25 boundaries in, 14, 28–9; geometric formula, 54; gravity feature in, 167n7. Osmose: and clearing 17–18, 21–2, 76–9, See also Davies; Harrison; Rossano 154n32; and codes, 21, 78; colours in, sound, in art works, 154n44 133–4; dynamics of, 42, 49–51, 55; flip- space overs in, 81; Grau’s definition of, 60–1; biological, 104, 118–19; archaic, 140; lifeworld, 23, 17; pond, 21; subterranean different spatiality, 79; dream, 116, world, 79; text world, 22, 78–9; tree, 119, 123; innate spatiality, 92; self, 21–7, 77; world structures, 22–5, 27 soul, 94–6, 98–9, 103; uterine, 4, 105 out-of-body experience, 116. See also digital: computer; 7; cyberspace, 7 (see transcendence also Wertheim); immersive, 3–5; mathematical, 96–7, 99, 101, 104–5; Paus, Thomas, 145 space transmission, 103–4 (see also PCR (photo-convulsive response), 129 Novak); spatial schemes, 95; up/down Penrose, Roger, 144, 157n15 spatial dynamics, 76, 81–3 (see also peptides, 110, 112–13, 117. See also Pert Davies); virtual, 64, 66, 77, 104, 166 Persinger, Michael, 131–3 poetic: Bachelard on, 18–19; enveloping, Pert, Candace, 24, 85, 110, 117, 174n10 5; essence of (see essence); essential, Pesce, Mark, 130 34, 57, 117–23, 142; feelings for, 55–6 PET (positron emission tomography), 145, (see also Davies); felt, 5, 96, 104–5, 108, 177n44 120 Pinker, Steven, 167n2 practical: Coyne on; 40; relativistic, 75, Plato: and cave, 100–1; and cyberspace 87 forms, 91, 98–9, 101; and eros, 97–8, 121; sacred, 15–16; astronauts and, 87, 89; and Heim’s Platonism, 99 (see also and God, 83–5, 88; heavenly, 55; Heim); ideal forms, 44, 53, 101; illusion- mystical, 15; of poetry, 90 ary existence, 100; neoplatonic views, Stelarc, 31, 39, 156n10, 156n12 30, 66, 98–9 stereogram, 165n36. See also Rheingold Progoff, Ira, 105 stereoscopic vision, 5, 17, 21, 24, 55, 68, psychoasthenia, 118, 122. See also Hansen 70–1, 132, 166n40 Strauss, Wolfgang, 91–2, 169n45 reason, leaping beyond, 66 subversion: politically subtle, 36; subver- REM sleep, 134. See also dreams; theta sive intents, 14, 60, 63; and techno- rhythms romanticism, 36; Western patriarchal, 45 Rheingold, Howard, 72, 165n30, 176n41 survival instinct. See instinct for survival Rilke, Rainer Maria, 13, 16–19, 21, 80, 90 Sutherland, Ivan E., 3–4 Rossano, Anthony, 155n70, 168n9 rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic talisman symbol, 17 stimulation), 145–6 technology: daemonic, 43, 46–7, 56; dangerous aspects of, 43, 49–51; Schelling, F.W.J. von, 66, 165n28, 168n11 disembodiedness of, 30, 39; instrument Schiffer, Fredric, 171n41 of, 148 (see also Davies); technological SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.), 153n29, 155n65 essence, 42–5, 47–52; technological 190 Index

frontiers, 36 (see also essence; Hei- video games, 46, 125, 128, 136, 141, 160n16, degger); technoromantic movement, 160n18, 181–2n34 30–2, 36, 40; tripping on, 49 virtual dervish. See Heim; Novak theta rhythms: and animals, 136–7, 141; virtual realists, 98–9. See also Heim consciousness and, 140; and dreamlike virtual reality: equipment used, 17; in consciousness, 127, 136, 138; instinctive medical use, 146, 183n11 consciousness, 136 virtual space, 12–13, 15, 21–4, 62–4, 66–7, TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), 70 145–6, 183n6 vision: artistic images, 62; binocular TOE (theory of everything), 98, 160n14. See images, 68; controlling visual system, also Kaku 71; HMD and, 68–9, 70–1; mechanics transcendence: biological, 8, 116; of self, of vision, 71, 120–1; stereoscopic (see 116, 144 stereoscopic vision); 3D dynamics, 71; transcendent feelings, 111, 116, 132. See also time-lag distortion, 72; visual brain, 123, feelings 125–7, 134–5, 138, 140, 169n36, 181n29 transcending consciousness, 141 (see also Zeki) translucent forms, 89, 102–3 VRML (virtual reality modelling lan- transparency, 132 guage), 99, 130. See also Pesce transpersonal images, 105 Vycinas, Vincent, 59 tree: archetypal, 17, 23; geometrical, 99; as lung of the earth, 16; primary image, 16; Weinberg, Steven, 10 sacred, 16; skeletal, 64, 66; tree of life, 16, Wertheim, Margaret, 94–7, 103 65 Winson, Jonathan, 174n5, 178n7, 181n33 Truckenbrod, Joan, 34–5 Wolfram, Stephen, 152n17 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 13–14, 25–6 Zeki, Semir, 71, 120–4, 126, 128, 169n36, UFOs (unidentified flying objects), 63, 141. 177n44 See also abductees Zen meditation, 138, 140 uterine waters, 4 Zizioulas, John D., 59, 163–4n6 UV (ultraviolet light), 129, 178n2