A response to Affects, Interfaces, Events (Eds. Fritsch, Kofoed & Stavning Thomsen) from Imbricate! Press
Virtual reality (VR) technology abducts attention. The fantasy may swallow you whole: Access to a new world of promised immateriality, limitlessness, disembodiment, endless expansion, renegade dreaming, traveling without friction. It’s enticing, an amped-up version of the way so many of us escape into screens, lured by their luminosity. Against these fantasies, however, the VR-using body does not escape its material surrounds- it remains fully planted on the soil of Earth. As Hayles pleas in How we Became Posthuman, “As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonisation, let us also remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced” (Hayles 1993, 91). Attending to humanity’s simultaneous presence in material and virtual space is not what the VR interface wants us to do- it wants to shut our eyes to our material surrounds, to forget that we are there, and to accept its digital virtual world as our own. So it may be an important task, to locate moments of intervention where we can disrupt the headset’s abduction of attention and stay firmly rooted in the knowledge that interfacial events are always wrapped up in all sorts of material, terrestrial externalities. To create an intervening event, a disruption, releases us from the clutch of the VR interface as it attempts to sculpt the present with certain distraction and attention-steering magnitudes. This ‘escaping edge’ can be incited by an attunement to co-presence, “attending to the difference, divergence, and differentiation that events open up” (Anderson & Harrison 2010, 22).
As a student of human geography studying experiences of ‘nature’ in virtual reality, I’m curious about how the myths and promises of VR play out within the context of the Anthropocene era in which human-environment relationships need vigorous reassessment. I wonder about how the promise of a transcendent, immaterial virtual space exists in tension with a material Earth on which our behaviors-in-place have real, material costs and implications.
My thinking alongside Affects, Interfaces, Events has taken the shape of two questions: (1) What can the virtual reality headset interface do, and (2) what can a virtual nature do in interfacial events with the VR user. The ‘doing’ I’m interested in here is the provision of experiential spaces where human-environment relationships can be contemplated, (re)imagined, practiced, and enacted. And of course, what the interface can’t do to this end.
Throughout my encounters with this book, my thoughts took on a Venn-diagram shape filled by its three title words. I found myself applying, removing, and reapplying films of the words affect, interface, and event (in layers, alone, transparent, opaque, half peeled-back) over my ruminations on VR natures. The question of what can be done, when asked through these word-films, becomes a thick turf enjoyable to sink the toes into. A composite question emerged: What affective dynamics transpire in the event when the VR-interface is used to access virtual natures? And of course, this question- too neatly succinct- folds out into endless limbs of inquiry… how do these affects resound in both virtual and material place? Where does the interface begin and end? Which bodies are implicated? What is the spatio-temporal duration of this event?
With virtual natures, we can start to ask very interesting questions about the capacity, affordances, imaginative potential of these affective virtual places to be an arena where humans are able to experience themselves differently within and among ecologies, to what extent they open-up the potential for creative re-formulations of humanity’s role in the environments it occupies. As Fristch notes in his chapter, these “catastrophic times” demand vigilance, and require us to imagine new “ontologies of ourselves” (Stengers 2019). If we are to take this as a starting point, that we must responsibly acknowledge our role in the turmoil of the Earthly present, we have to emphasize the need for an opening-up to ontological instability, and catalyze reconsiderations of humanity’s role on Earth. I believe that this project is incipient and emergent, and deeply involves the technological apparatuses that we use as mechanisms of re-sensitizing, re-imagining, re-positioning ourselves in space. We can ask how virtual natures play a role in creating affective events in which human-environment relationships are thought-out and acted-out, and wonder if an ‘ecological alter-politics’ (Fritsch 2021, 34) could be made possible in these interfacial events.
I like to think of the VR-equipped human body as a hybrid species (not quite posthuman, but a complexly emplaced human) involved in the ecologies of both digital and material worlds simultaneously. The body in VR may be more attentive-to their immediate virtual surroundings, and may temporarily forget their terrestrial embedding, but is still thoroughly in interaction with the material world through the body. Consider the materials used to build the VR headset, the bodies that assembled its parts, the charging-of the headset, the using-up of batteries, and the confinement of the VR-using body to a particular room. While seemingly less involved or engaged with the material world, these actions are still thoroughly in relation to the material milieu. Likewise, through participation in the virtual experience, the VR user inhabits it with actions, behaviors, movements, affects and enactments that incur them within the virtual environment. The relationality of the VR user is thus complex, vibrant, multi-sensual, multi-dimensional, and multi-milieu. The flexibility of this VR-using species is exemplified by the operation its body within multiple concurrent registers of interaction with the world in its constant process of becoming. Attending to co-presence can advance a non-representational geographic practice that envisions the intrarelation of a human ‘subject’ with the worlds they inhabit. Nigel Thrift comments, “The problem, now, is to try and think about these worlds again, not as hermetically sealed worlds in which flows can’t take place from one world to another but as moving processual worlds, worlds whose natures are never static but are always moving and changing and mutating and communicating” (Anderson, Harrison & Thrift 2009, 187). Attending to the flow of the body between material and virtual worlds can reveal the interconnection of all environmental presents as they are lived-in through bodies.
In the introductory chapter of Affects, Interfaces, Events, the authors write how the capacity of VR to be used for both military training and treating PTSD shows “how the (same) digital technologies/ materials can be used to serve different, even directly opposed, aims”, and how this raises questions about how our current techno-ecologies could be ethically reimagined (Fritsch, Kofoed & Stavning Thomsen 2021, 2). I attend to these virtual natures from a point of thinking that they can do a lot of different things, and wanting to work through the various ways they can and cannot work with an ecological, relational ethic.
I harbor many fears about what these VR natures can do: One of the main concerns is the way that the virtual world may provide a place of being where the complex turmoil of our environmental present, with which we are intricately enmeshed, can be comfortably ignored. In the context of the Anthropocene, VR emerges with seduction, beckoning us towards an escape from our corporeality and interdependency with our environments. It promises an escape from material Earth, which may be all too alluring in our current era of widespread awareness about impending environmental degradation.
But in attempt to not let the fears overwhelm, I foster curiosity about the potentials of the VR interface to provide spaces of alterity that can challenge our addictions to certain anthropocentric models of human-environment relationships. Within me exists a (sometimes elusive, but often electrifying) well of open space in which intrigue about this grows. In this space, I ask how these virtual places may provide a different experience of being a body in a world, where we may need to sense ourselves differently, where perception can be dishabituated, and where we can confront assumptions about the self’s relationship to nature.
So what’s the way to think this technology, to pendulate with some balance between fear and intrigue? I’d like to use the vocabulary of the book to work through some limits, some affordances, some openings, some closures, while letting both dispositions ring out:
Starting with Affect as not stopping at the skin. In chapter ten appears a wonderful quote from de Freitas, “At the juncture of the skin are mixtures of synapse, cilia, sweat, mind, and society, all percolating” (de Freitas 2018, 299). With the VR headset, which sits perched on the face-skin, I find an alluring instance through which we can think about the liquescence of boundaries between self and world occurring in interfacial events. When the VR headset is brought onto the skin, it provides experience of a new, immaterial virtual environment at the same time the corporeal self exists within a material environment. I’m very intrigued by how the VR-using body is re-organized in its capacity to sense its presence in both material and virtual worlds simultaneously, to be open to the affective intensity of realities in flux. VR researcher Kozel writes that “bodies suddenly immersed in the wash of intensity of VR worlds discover a distributed corporeality that is as immediately virtual as it is actual” (Kozel 2018, 8). The VR user is extended through ontological space as they experience a multitude of worlds through the interface. With the body affected by stimulations from multiple worlds at once, VR experience allows us to see how worlds can be potently felt even when they are not necessarily clearly sensed. The way that the body can experience the affects of a VR environment while still feeling the rhythm of the pumping heart, the digesting stomach, the pulsing entrails, the feet pressing with weight on the ground. This occurrence enables consideration of the oozing of the self between multiple coinciding environmental presents. And so VR may present an opportunity to direct our attention towards the messiness and flexibility of experienced worlds, and the ways experience shifts through mediated modes of perception, attention, participation, feeling, and enactment.
In this way, one can use the VR interface as a way of thinking through the radical flexibility and fluidity of the body as able to exist in multiple concurrent environmental presents. Just like sitting in a room while imagining tomorrow’s walk- the body is able swim-about relations to the affective potency of a multiplicity of worlds, to feel itself seeping between worlds, to remain open to its own oscillation between affective interminglings. What could attunement to co-presence in material and digital worlds do? What could it do in the Anthropocene, amidst turbulent environmental conditions, within a rapidly growing technocentric capitalism?
We can turn a critical eye towards the VR interface by noting that remaining tuned-in-to or attentive-towards the self’s relationship to both material and virtual worlds is antithetical to the aims of VR technology. The goal and promise of VR is to immerse the user in the virtual world entirely. This goal of full immersion necessitates a certain ignorance of the simultaneously existing material world. Users are encouraged to forget where they are in the material world as they are blocked-off from what is external to the VR apparatus, and attention is directed fully towards the virtual environment. I sit with these questions: How does the interface attempt to affectively overwhelm, and to what extent do we remain autonomous amidst this attempt at corporeal and psychic control?
The interface itself- Access to a digital virtual world is granted when the apparatus is strapped to the human head. The facialization occurring here is strong, an ‘overcoding of the body onto the face’ as the complexity of the sensing body is gathered onto the face that wears the VR-headset (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). A VR user is expected to feel embodied in a virtual world primarily through this ocularcentric apparatus. Hansen writes, “By endowing the user with VR goggles and helmet, VR systems deploy vision as the privileged sense endowed with the task of mapping human sensory apparatus onto new datascapes” (Hansen 2004, 161). The headset saddles vision with the creation of ‘reality’ and immersion into it, posits that vision is best way of simulating presence, and expects that the body will follow the beliefs of the eyes. This is a deteritorialization of the multisensory capacity of the body and a reterritorialization onto the face. This rips the body from its spatio-temporal coordinates, from the affective landscape and ecological present it inhabits, and encourages absorption into the digital image. This is ripe ground for making the user feel transcendent from the material realities of a terrestrial present.
We can consider the expected universality of the face, and ask what type of head is this headset meant to fit? What sort of bodies are invited into a virtual world through the headset? This interface assumes a typical face, on a typical cranium, a typical sensorium, and a neurotypical and physiotypical way of experiencing reality. This consideration invites us to question the ways in which the headset interface reconstructs a sensorial hierarchy, and thus a paradigm of how we should be bodies feeling the world. Murphie writes in this volume that,
"VR, augmented, and mixed realities intrude fully into and enclose the perceptions and actions basic to our being in the world, at the very heart of affecting and being affected. Indeed, these technics intrude into and enclose the crucial relations between perception and action in what leads to a complex series of modulated ghostings of presence" -Murphie 2021, 64
There is a serious direction of attention in the VR interface. The headset’s mechanism of ‘immersion’ relies on the idea that the sense-able is able to stimulate you into a reality or environment- there’s no attunement to the affective potency of the non-sensuous, the ephemeral, or atmospheric. Attending to the potency of non-sensuous affects, the what might be or could be felt, I think about VR’s exclusion of the expanded sensorium, which includes the extra-bodily socio-political sensorium that envelopes all bodies in societies. As Murphie writes, a media-alive interface would respect the “mobility of the nervous system, extended across the three ecologies of mind, the social, and environment” (Murphie 2021, 93). In its inattention to the expansion of the affected self across these domains, the VR headset reinstates a singular, bounded subject transcendent and separate from its ecological relationality while immersed virtual space.
In its closings-off and hyper-stimulation, the headset pulls attention away from other affective events, and the presence of the body in the socio-material world. Considering the cordoning-off the eyes, ears, and kinetic capacities of the human body into an ‘immersive’ virtual world, I ask what can the VR-using body can do to stay tuned-in to their co-composing of the world outside the headset? There are ways that people continue to experience the material world and the corporeal self while in VR, maybe counter to VR designers wishes. This is the instability of the interface. I argue that this disruption happens as the corporeal body really, completely, entirely remains when you enter VR. Forget myths of disembodiment, or transcendence, or immateriality. The body is what carries you in and out. I know this because there are sticky things that are inescapable, that linger, or carry through, bodily experiences that link up the virtual and material worlds, that bleed right in. The fact is that the body can be playing in virtual worlds while holding within it the lunch of the day, a chill from air conditioning, sickness, intoxication, the pump of endocrine systems, the resonance of love or disgust, a rash of poison ivy. This body courts the layering of sensory worlds, with co-presence in both virtual and material space, it is open to a multiplicity of worlds felt. This body creates a potential moment of intervention, against the interface, against transcendence, and towards responsible co-presence.
As a method of this intervention, I like to think about the middling space between the headset and the face, in which sensory information is intermingled and complexly welling-up affective states from multiple concurrent environmental presents. This place is the event of the ensemble. Where the headset leaves red marks and indentations on the skin, where the sweat pools up around its edges, the humid space between the eyes and the lenses of a headset, where eyes blink to adjust, where light travels, where perception becomes co-constituted. This is the infraface, the fusion of the human and the headset creating and filling a gap between things that holds and enfolds the perceptual event, the threshold where the surface between head and world dissolves, where experience is absorbed (Manning and Massumi 2021, 309). This is the event space, which has a complex ecology, as multiple environmental presents are enfolded into and within this space. This space is hard to see, dark and still, and attentively tuning-into its robust charge can be an act of defiance.
The Event of a virtual nature has to be considered not in isolation, but stretching out, having residue, and existing in relation to all other affective experiences of ‘nature’, whether material or virtual, past, present or potential: all the memories, inclinations, desires, appetites, distastes the reside within us when thinking about the self in relation to environments and ecologies of all sorts. This point recalls Annesdatter-Madsen’s consideration of how each experience of perception re-composes the body as it is added to its pool of memory. As Nancy states, ‘being a subject in general means having to become oneself’ (Nancy 2007, 41). If a body is not an entity separate from its environment, and can be understood as a dynamic and open system that undergoes continuous change in relation to their environment, we have to take presence in virtual environments as additive events to the conglomerate of the self as it develops with, in and alongside the environments it inhabits.
The fears: In virtual natures, which are often designed for human pleasure, human action does not necessarily have repercussions, other-than-humans may not be represented as agential or intrarelated, environments may endlessly grow without ever degrading, and terrestrial limits do not have to exist. VR natures might then behave as spatio-temporal events where humanity is not incited to practice kinship, and may enjoy imagining itself occupying places unhindered by the material bounds of Earth.
Murphie writes in his chapter that contemporary technics are often incapable of creating a ‘nature alive’ of “densely interwoven relational, affective events” where “everything is related to everything else at its core” and “there is constant process” (Murphie 2021, 62). The ability of a virtual nature to “Place emphasis on, and reward, the complex potentials of relation” (Stavning Thomsen, Kofoed & Fritsch 2021, 7) is a central point of interrogation when Murphie’s words are thought-out. What sort of relational, emergent world is a virtual nature able to express? As the act of putting on a headset and entering a virtual world is very individualized, a VR-user may find themselves reiterating a conception of the self as a singular, unitary, well-defined subject of the world. Further, a virtual environment exists without necessary reference or relation to others- it must be loaded-up as a distinct program, and the event of being-within it implies a choice to not be-within other environments (whether virtual or material). This creates a model of place-nodes whose interconnections, overlaps, responsibilities, reciprocities, are not necessarily felt by the user.
This challenges the VR-users capacity for the ecosophic practice of Guattari that Bertelsen considers in her chapter. The ecosophic practice rejects the sovereignty of the self-enclosed subject, and replaces it with an ecological thinking, wherein the thick communiality and relationality between bodies in place (human and non-human alike) is recognized and respected. This begets a vibrant and active world in motion. The self dissolves into an ecological constellation of component parts with a variety of materialities, positions, affects, and energies. This rings like a non-representational geographic ethos in which “There are flows of what is and is not subjectivity making their ways across fields of flesh, touching some parts and not others…it has become clear that these flows of subjectivity need to and do involve more and more actors – various kinds of things, various other biological beings, even the heft of a particular landscape – in a continuous undertow of matterings” (Thrift 2008, viii).
The work of an ecosophic practice advances a relational concept of space in which all action is understood as interaction, where “Humans are envisioned in constant relations of modification and reciprocity with their environs” (Anderson & Harrison 2010, 7). Paying attention to these ongoing processes of modification and reciprocity animates the liveliness of the world-becoming, where the ‘self’ is only one (multiplicitous, porous, fluctuating) of many participant actants. Is VR capable of being a technology of emergent experience-flow and intra-species, trans-bodily relationality and kinship? Or, does the individualized experience of a distinctly bounded environment encourage a ‘nature lifeless’ that siphons off the user into a controlled, stagnant experience of a ruptured, disconnected world?
But to tend to the openings, the potentials: I’m also very intrigued by the arguments that some VR artists have made, that these environments can provide transgressive spaces where the experience of being a body in the world is newly felt (Davies 1998). That one can be given new perspectives, new mobility, new experience of self in relation to environment, and that this may open up ontological play. This becomes especially thick if one practices tuning-into their co-presence in digital and material space.
What could VR arouse by forming counter-spaces of ecological imaginatives? Could moments of intervention be achieved? With an ecological thinking or ecosophic practice employed, VR could make experienceable the ‘counter-spaces’ of Lefebvre, where the human/nature, subject/object, internal/external dualisms are challenged through a new embodied spatial experience. In this view, VR has the potential to create wholly new kinds of space that are unrestrained by the laws of physics or geometric principles. By creating divergent spatial events in VR we may be able to press into and create embodied enactments of an open, divergent future. Elizabeth Grosz asks, “How can space function differently from the ways in which it has always functioned? What are the possibilities of inhabiting otherwise? Of being extended otherwise? Of living relations of nearness and farness differently?” (Grosz 2001, 129). The spatial flexibility of VR could free virtual environment designers to create new experiences that do not rely on a Euclidean rendering of space in which empty space is populated by subjects and objects with rigid boundaries. Instead, a certain boundlessness between subjects and objects could be achieved by representing worlds of fantastical transparency, fluidity, formlessness, ambiguity, scale-shift, blurriness, motion or mutability.
This argument is that a virtual nature can be a site of contemplation, where users may be re-sensitized to their mechanisms of being-in the world. As the VR user thinks and acts with the interface through digital natures, they may be able to envision themselves as immersed within the flows of the complex digital-ecological worlds they inhabit. And so there may exist potential for these virtual natures to provide an experiential space for play, a techno-ecological-spatial event for reconsidering our own embeddedness in the entangled interrelations of the socio-material world, for re-sensitizing us to our habitual ways of being in nature, to reconsider how we become with and through interfacial events with technology, and pay attention to how we remain embedded in Earthly environments in these ensembles.
Works cited:
Anderson, B. & Harrison, P. (2010). Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. New York, NY: Routledge.
Anderson, B., Harrison, P. & Thrift, N. (2009). “‘The 27th Letter’: An Interview with Nigel Thrift”. In B. Anderson & P. Harrison (Eds.), Taking-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography (pp. 183-198). New York, NY: Routledge.
Davies, C. (1998). "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being". In J. Beckman (Ed.), The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture (pp. 144-155). New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press.
de Freitas, E. (2018). “The Biosocial Subject: Sensor Technologies and Worldly Sensibility”. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2): 292–308.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fritsch, J. (2021). “Problematizing affective interaction design”. In J. Fritsch, J. Kofoed & B.M. Stavning Thomsen (Eds.), Affects Interfaces, Events (pp. 59-94). Lancaster, PA: Imbricate! Press.
Fritsch, J., Kofoed, J. & Stavning Thomsen, B.M. (2021). “Introduction”. In J. Fritsch, J. Kofoed & B. M. Stavning Thomsen (Eds.), Affects Interfaces, Events (pp. 1-16). Lancaster, PA: Imbricate! Press.
Grosz, E. (2001). Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hansen, M. B. N. (2003). New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Hayles, N.K. (1993). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Kozel, S. (2018). “The weird giggle: Attending to affect in virtual reality”. Transformations, 31(1): 2-24.
Manning, E. & Massumi, B. (2021). “Infrafacing”. In J. Fritsch, J. Kofoed & B.M. Stavning Thomsen (Eds.), Affects Interfaces, Events (pp. 307-326). Lancaster, PA: Imbricate! Press.
Murphie, A. (2021). “Technics lifeless and technics alive: Activity without and with content”. In J. Fritsch, J. Kofoed & B.M. Stavning Thomsen (Eds.), Affects Interfaces, Events (pp. 59-94). Lancaster, PA: Imbricate! Press.
Nancy, J.L., & Mandell, C. (2007). Listening. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Stengers, I. (2009). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Geography: Space, Politics, Affect. New York, NY: Routledge.
Σχόλια