Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-27970-7, 978-3-030-27971-4

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’ (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 1-38
Front Matter ....Pages 39-39
Proto-Immersive Discourse and the ‘Theatrical Condition’ (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 41-72
The Immersive Promise of Becoming [with] the Other Body (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 73-98
Body-Swapping: Self-Attribution and Body Transfer Illusions (BTIs) (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 99-154
Front Matter ....Pages 155-157
‘Empathy Activism’ and Bodying Difference in Postdigital Culture: Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes and BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to Be Another (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 159-186
Touching with a Virtualized Hand: Analogue’s Transports (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 187-216
The Suffering Avatar: Vicarity and Resistance in Body-Tracked Multiplayer Gaming (Liam Jarvis)....Pages 217-239
Back Matter ....Pages 241-255

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Immersive Embodiment Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation Liam Jarvis

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology Series Editors Susan Broadhurst School of Arts Brunel University Uxbridge, UK Josephine Machon Middlesex University London, UK

This exciting and timely new series features cutting-edge books which centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, the series includes the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. Not only does the series offer fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, but it also aims to include contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. The series includes edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance. Editorial Advisory Board Philip Auslander, Carol Brown, Sita Popat, Tracey Warr We welcome all ideas for new books and have provided guidelines for submitting proposals in the Authors section of our website. To discuss project ideas and proposals for this series please contact the series editors: Susan Broadhurst: [email protected] Josephine Machon: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14604

Liam Jarvis

Immersive Embodiment Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation

Liam Jarvis Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies University of Essex Colchester, UK

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology ISBN 978-3-030-27970-7 ISBN 978-3-030-27971-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit line: Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds exhibition (2017), Somerset House, London This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

There have been many friends, colleagues, stakeholders and co-conspirators that have greatly enrichened the research journey that has culminated in this book. I am particularly grateful to my supervisor Sophie Nield for her mentorship, her unwavering support and for expanding my intellectual ­horizons over the six-year period of my part-time Ph.D. This research project would not have been possible without the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council to whom I am indebted. I am grateful for the institutional support I have received from both my alma mater, Royal Holloway and my employers and colleagues at the University of Essex. At Royal Holloway, I’d like to thank David Williams for his characteristically rigorous feedback, Helen Nicholson for her advice regarding the ethical dimensions of my research, and Chris Megson and Lynette Goddard for their supportive critical engagement with my research at my annual review meetings. At Essex, I would like to thank colleagues at the Centre for Theatre Research, Liz Kuti, Jonathan Lichtenstein, Katharine Cockin, Annecy Lax and Mary Mazzilli for their continued support and encouragement when balancing the demands of completing the book with my teaching and departmental commitments. I would also like to thank our Executive Dean for the Faculty of Humanities Andrew Le Sueur for his support in enabling a period of research leave in 2018 that afforded me a crucial period of intensive writing.

v

vi  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Adam Alston kindly took the time to read an evolved draft of the book and his thoughtful responses and provocations at various points during the writing process were invaluable. I am especially grateful to my friends and colleagues in Analogue for their support; Hannah Barker, Ric Watts and Helen Mugridge have been a continuous source of collective support to me over the years that the company has been active. Extended thanks go to the substantial network of support surrounding the company. In particular, I’d like to thank Gavin Stride and Fiona Baxter (Farnham Maltings), Nick Giles, James Pidgeon and all of the staff at Shoreditch Town Hall, Marcus Muller and Jörg Vorhaben (formerly of Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, subsequently Staatstheater Mainz), Purni Morrell and Gareth Machin (formerly at the National Theatre Studio), Monica Meyer-Bohlen, Reto Weiler and all the staff at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK). I would also like to thank the organizations and individuals that have generously supported the company’s work including Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust (who awarded Analogue a Small Arts Award in support of the Transports pilot), Parkinson’s UK’s Steve Ford, Meghan Hutchins and the numerous volunteers who made invaluable contributions to Transports research and development. Additionally, I would like to extend a special thank you to Narender Ramnani, with whom I consulted on the Transports R&D, for his advice and support throughout the process, and for his generosity in allowing me to attend his Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience lectures in Royal Holloway’s Psychology department. I would also like to thank Elaine Snell (formerly Chief Executive at the British Neuroscience Association (BNA)) for helping us to coordinate the Transports public engagement event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre entitled ‘Feeling with Another’s Hand’ (November 4, 2014), and to Ian Harrison (formerly a Ph.D. student at Imperial College) and Anna Farrer (User Involvement Adviser at Parkinson’s UK) for participating in the panel discussion. I would like to thank the other artists and craftspeople that have lent their significant talents to the Analogue projects that I have examined in Chapter 6; Tom Wilson, Max Humphries, Alex Markham, Julian Harley and actors Dan Ford, Morag Cross, Brian Martin, Alex Maher, Chris Woodley and Matt Tait. I would also like to thank the generosity of the artists who have contributed to my research, in particular Jane Gauntlett, Andrew Somerville and BeAnotherLab’s Marte Roel. Further thanks

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  

vii

go to the artists, researchers and practitioners that have provided documentation about their work and given their permission for images to be reproduced in this book. Personal thanks go to my parents, Lesley and Colin Jarvis and my sister Hayley, who have provided care, love and support and whose continued faith in me has made this challenging and inspiring interdisciplinary journey possible. Finally, I would like to thank the different audiences that have supported Analogue’s projects over the years simply by turning up and engaging with the work. It has been your participation and engagement that has made the effort immensely worthwhile.

Contents

1 Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’ 1 The Paradox of ‘Presence’ in Immersive Theatres 7 Towards Reconciling the Problem of the Spectator’s Presence ‘Elsewhere’ 11 Cognitive Studies, Theatre Scholarship and ‘Neuromania’ 16 Structure of the Book 21 References 30 Part I  2 Proto-Immersive Discourse and the ‘Theatrical Condition’ 41 Introduction: Bodily Denial in Art Theory 41 Friedian/Diderotian Anti-theatricality 42 ‘Entering’ Paintings: Absorptive and Theatrical Immersion 48 Immersed Bodies as ‘Laboratories of Doubt’: Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller, Lundahl & Seitl 54 Intersensory Conflict: Catherine Richards’ Installations 55 Staging Perplexity: Carsten Höller’s Umkehrbrille, The Pinocchio Effect and The Forests 59

ix

x 

CONTENTS

Immersant-as-‘Situated Self’: Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–2014) 64 Conclusion 65 References 68 3 The Immersive Promise of Becoming [with] the Other Body 73 Introduction 73 ‘Immersive’ and ‘Immersion’: Etymologies and Interdisciplinary Definitions 75 Conceptualizing Immersed Bodies in Performance 76 Immersed Bodies as a ‘Theatrical’ Problem 79 Immersive Technologies: Genealogies and Ontologies of ‘Immersion’ in Media Theory 82 Immersion as ‘Totalization’ 84 ‘Prioritizing’ or Transcending Bodies?: ‘Immersion’ in the Virtual 86 Conclusion 91 References 95 4 Body-Swapping: Self-Attribution and Body Transfer Illusions (BTIs) 99 Introduction: If I Were You 99 The Narratological Problem: A Survey of Body-Swapping in Fiction and Its Correlates in Digital Culture 103 Actual and Virtual Body-Swapping: Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and Subtle Bodies-as-Self Model 108 The Philosophical Problem: Bodies of ‘Certainty’? 111 The Expanded Umwelt: Adapting and Referring Human Sensations to Non-Human Others 113 ‘Knowing’ Neuroatypical and Self-Effacing Bodies? 117 The Physical Problem: Historic Body Illusions and ‘Proprioception’ 119 Proprioception, Phantom Limb Pain (PLP) and Selfhood 119 The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI): Intersensory Bias and Proprioceptive Drift 124 Risk: Cyber-Therapy, Self-Protection and Virtual Proxies 135 Conclusion 137 References 144

CONTENTS  

xi

Part II  5 ‘Empathy Activism’ and Bodying Difference in Postdigital Culture: Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes and BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to Be Another 159 Introduction: VR Performance 159 VR Auto-phenomenology: Mislocalized Sensation as Applied Perceptual Immersion 162 Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes: Origins 164 Mentoring and Facilitation—First-Person Immersion and Person-Centred Planning (PCP) 171 BeAnotherLab: The Machine to Be Another & the Library of Ourselves 174 Conclusion: ‘Empathy’, the sine qua non of Morality? 178 References 183 6 Touching with a Virtualized Hand: Analogue’s Transports 187 Introduction: Immersion and Tremor 187 Transports: The Experience 189 Transports: Genealogies 191 Action Research: Transports Research & Development Process 196 ‘Wizard of Oz’ Testing 201 User-Testing 203 Evidence Gathering/Evaluation 207 Conclusion 210 References 214 7 The Suffering Avatar: Vicarity and Resistance in Body-Tracked Multiplayer Gaming 217 Introduction: Hyper-Intercorporeality and Immersion in Anvio’s City Z (2017–) 217 Virtualized Distress: Immersive Synchrony in Videogames and Beyond 221 System Failure: Uncanny Avatars and Glitches as a Site of Recuperation 230 Conclusion 233 References 234

xii  

CONTENTS

Conclusion: The Theft of the Dragon Sabre—Bodies at Risk in Digital Reality 241 Index 247

Abbreviations

AI Artificial Intelligence APPG All-Party Parliamentary Group AR Augmented Reality AS Autoscopy BAL BeAnotherLab BCI Brain–Computer Interface BSI/BTI Body Substitution Illusions/Body Transfer Illusion CGI Computer-Generated Imagery DIY Do-It-Yourself FBI Full-Body Illusions HMD Head-Mounted Display IAT Implicit Association Tests ICD International Classification of Diseases IVR Immersive Virtual Reality LARP Live Action Role-Play MMORPG Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game MPS Minimal Phenomenal Self NPC Non-Player Character OBE Out-of-Body Experience PCP Person-Centred Planning PD Parkinson’s Disease PET Positron Emission Tomography PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Pl Place Illusions PLP Phantom Limb Pain PMLD People with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities xiii

xiv  

ABBREVIATIONS

POV Point of View Psi Plausibility Illusions PSM Phenomenal Self Model R&D Research and Development RHI Rubber Hand Illusion SCR Skin Conductance Response SoE Sense of Embodiment TBI Traumatic Brain Injury TMBA The Machine to Be Another UI Unit of Identification VB Virtual Body VR Virtual Reality VRE Virtual Reality Exposure WHO World Health Organisation YOPD Young-Onset Parkinson’s Disease

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 4.1

BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to be Another. BAL © 2 Spectral Bodies (1991). Catherine Richards in Professor Green’s Lab wearing a virtual reality headset and data glove. She is inhabiting the interactive distorted spectral hand displayed on the monitors in the background 56 Virtual Body (1993). Catherine Richards. Illustrated half section of the installation with a spectator’s hand positioned in the miniature glass room. A monitor acts as the glass floor and sensors are located at the peek hole and at the opening for the hand (Drawing: Ronald Heunick) 57 Virtual Body (1993). Catherine Richards. State of the Image, Eldorado Centrum Voor Beeldcultuur, Antwerp, Belgium. Catherine Richards testing the proprioceptive illusion in a miniature glass room that replicates the nineteenth-century Rococo room where the artwork is sited 58 Carsten Höller’s Umkehrbrille (Upside-Down Goggles) (1994–) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Pictured: Liam Jarvis) 60 Carsten Höller’s The Pinocchio Effect (1999) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Photograph: Liam Jarvis) 62 Carsten Höller’s The Forests (2002–2015) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Photograph: Liam Jarvis) 63 Designer Thomas Thwaites’ goat exoskeleton from the Wellcome Trust supported GoatMan project (Photograph: Tim Bowditch) 115

xv

xvi  

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

The Constitute’s Eyesect (2013–), created by Sebastian Piatza, Christian Zöllner and Julian Adenauer 116 Andrew Dawson’s The Articulate Hand (2010–) (Photographer: Sarah Ainslie. © Andrew Dawson and Jonathan Cole) 123 Experimental setup in Valeria I. Petkova and H. Henrik Ehrsson’s VR whole-body illusion (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008) to induce illusory ownership of an artificial body (left image). The participant wearing the HMD observes the mannequin’s torso from the ‘first-person’ perspective (right image) 129 Aaron Reeves’s Dead Arise (2014) (Photographer: Gary Hicklin) 132 The Great Spavaldos (2012–) by il pixel rosso with Geneva Foster Gluck. Photo (from a live performance) by Silvia Mercuriali. Film by Simon Wilkinson 133 Crew’s W (Double U) (2008–2009) (Picture from a performance at the Artefact Festival, STUK, Leuven, February 2009. Photographer: Marc Wathieu) 161 Crew’s W (Double U) (2008–2009) (Picture from a performance at the Artefact Festival, STUK, Leuven, February 2009. Photographer: Marc Wathieu) 161 Pictured: Jane Gauntlett 165 Screenshot from Jane Gauntlett’s Dancing with Myself (2016–) 167 BeAnotherLab’s Library of Ourselves 175 Analogue’s Transports (Production shot) (Photographer: Richard Davenport) 190 Superlatively, Actually Awake at the Barbican’s Wonder: Art & Science on the Brain season, 2013 (Pictured: Hannah Barker [Co-director, Analogue]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis) 193 Superlatively, Actually Awake at The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich’s Pulse Festival, 8 June 2013 (Photographer: Liam Jarvis) 194 Transports R&D workflow diagram 197 Transports’ ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing day. Screenshot from the Transports mini-documentary by Alex Markham/ digitalSTAGE (Pictured: Julian Harley [creative technologist]) 202 Video content on an iPad is manually activated (Pictured: Hannah Barker [Co-director, Analogue]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis) 203

LIST OF FIGURES  

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

xvii

User-testing at Shoreditch Town Hall, London (Pictured: James Pidgeon [Producer, Shoreditch Town Hall]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis) 204 User-testing at Parkinson’s UK, London (Pictured: Daiga Heisters [Head of Professional Engagement and Education at Parkinson’s UK]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis) 205 Anvio’s City Z (2017–), Whiteley’s shopping centre, London, 5 May 2018 218 Pedro G. Romero’s Habitación (Room). Part of the Archivo F. X project—a reconstruction of Alphonse Laurencic’s ‘psychotechnic’ torture cell or ‘checa’ at Valimajor de Barcelona (built in 1939). MEIAC collection (Photographer: Vicente Novillo) 223 Screenshot of Capcom’s Kitchen (2015) (a VR demo for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard) 225

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’

In 2016, I participated in a performative virtual body-swapping transaction staged by anti-disciplinary international art collective BeAnotherLab using Creative Commons technology called The Machine to be Another (see Fig. 1.1).1 Inspired by knowledge derived from neuroscientific studies in embodiment, this system uses live camera feeds and two Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) to enable a ‘user’ and a volunteer refugee performer—located in the same room but hidden behind a screen—to take up the first-person position of the other. While inhabiting the refugee’s virtual body, the user interacts with objects and the refugee mimics their physical actions in real time. The deployment of this illusion is conceptualized by the artists as a means of ‘increasing empathy’ by visually and proprioceptively occupying the position of the other (‘Understanding the Refugee Crisis via Virtual Reality’ 2016). The ethics of an expression of empathy that is conceived as an audience member’s temporary inhabitation of a virtualized other using live video feeds—one who may be vulnerable, displaced and/or disenfranchised—is a complex proposition that I have grappled with in my own practice and scholarship (Jarvis 2017). But an eccentric perceptual illusion of othering the self through virtual means is just one manifestation of a more pervasive trend. From smartphone apps that offer downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical pathological phenomena in the simulated symptoms of autism in the National Autistic Society’s Autism Too Much Information (TMI) Virtual Reality Experience (examined in Jarvis 2019), to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_1

1

2  L. JARVIS

Fig. 1.1  BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to be Another. BAL ©

that enable new visual perspectives beyond human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art engineering in Berlin-based art collective The Constitute’s Eyesect helmet (see pages 117–119). Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing scientific understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood. Correspondingly, the notion of an ‘immersed’ body is accompanied by the seductive promise of its porousness to a range of remote experiences and phenomena. ‘Immersion’ is a multifarious concept—it has been defined using a variety of analogous theories and it pertains to a diverse range of aims in different cultural practices. From levels of attention and engagement in ‘game immersion’ (Brown and Cairns 2004),2 to the state of ‘flow’ in which ‘people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990: 4).3 From the extent to which presence is felt in virtual environments (Slater et al. 1994; Witmer and Singer 1998; Di Luca 2010) to the belief that the consequences of the actions taken are unfolding as they might in reality in simulation-based training (Hagiwara et al. 2016). From empathic third sector public awareness

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

3

raising VR apps (e.g. ‘feeling’ as a mediatized other does or to enhance symptom recognition, etc.) to the intensification of affects in entertainment (e.g. feeling what we imagine a character/avatar does).4 In theatre, the temporary transformation of the spectator into something other than a ‘spectator’ might be understood, in part, as a reconciliation of the paradox that is intrinsic to many immersive theatres. Namely, the desire for an immersant’s physical presence in a circumstance beyond their immediate ‘here and now’. It is a central contention in this book that an ontological and relational desire that undergirds much immersive experience is to feel more fully with the body of another. This ‘onto-relational’ desire concerns reconciling the physical gulf between one’s being and others’—‘ontology’ deriving from the Greek ōn, ont- ‘being’ + -logy (‘Ontology’) and ‘relational’ meaning the ‘way in which two or more people/things are connected’ (‘Relational’). This notion aligns to some extent with the correspondence Rosi Braidotti identifies between ‘ontological relationality’ and the posthuman subject, epitomized by an ‘enlarged sense of connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other’ (Braidotti 2013: 49). While the desire to be other bodies is unfulfillable, it has precipitated new modes of participatory reception and interaction for different kinds of beneficiaries in actor training, gaming and applied practices in health care, etc. And one such expression of the impossible grasp towards onto-relationality is the qualitative integration of scientifically tested body transfer illusions (BTIs) in the example that started this introduction—BeAnotherLab’s ‘body-swapping’ system, The Machine to be Another.5 Immersive Embodiment examines nascent ‘layered reality’ practices at the intersection between gallery-based installations, immersive performances, scientific studies in body-ownership/self-attribution and bodily realities that are ‘postproduced’ as assimilative empathic prosthesis. Hito Steyerl has argued that with the digital proliferation of imagery in networked practices, ‘too much world’ has become available to us (Steyerl 2013). Connected to this frenzied excess, even the realm of the subjective experience of others becomes fetishized as phenomenologically accessible through reproducible and proprioceptively inhabitable mediatized body images.6 I use the term ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’ as a loose container for a plurality of artistic cultural forms that may, or may not, be situated by the artists within the paradigm

4  L. JARVIS

of ‘theatre’. Hybridized practices that draw on the combined tekhne or ‘know-how’ of different disciplines inevitably resist fixed definitions and can be framed within a multitude of presentational contexts. BeAnotherLab’s descriptor of themselves as ‘anti-disciplinary’ might be viewed as a rejection of the very idea that knowledge is discrete in digital immersive practices. But a commonality between the boundary-querying case studies that will be discussed in this book—which are situated in fields as diverse as applied practices in health care and VR multiplayer video gaming—is that they are giving new and varied expression to the unrealizable promise that we might become the other body. For example, in Jane Gauntlett’s intersensory VR documentary performances, immersion ‘in’ her virtual body (VB) is followed by de-immersive dissonances that are generated between the spectating body’s different sense modalities as a proximate reconstruction of sensory disturbances associated with her experience of epileptic seizure (discussed in Chapter 5). ‘Immersion’ in this respect implies the promise of a plenitude of knowing through virtualized conflations of the minimal phenomenal self (MPS) with the ‘other’ within what neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has described as an ‘era of experimental epistemology’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998: 3). MPS refers to the ‘experience of being a distinct, holistic entity capable of global self-control and attention, possessing a body and a location in space and time’ (Blanke and Metzinger 2009: 7). The extent to which the promise of ‘knowing’ other bodies is ever actuated within individual acts of immersion requires sustained critical scrutiny, which is a significant part of this book’s project in Part II. Perceptual quirks of different orders such as cognitive forms of ‘blindness’ have long been examined in psychology. For example, in a famous study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants were invited to count the number of passes made with a basketball between players on a video. But most viewers failed to notice the person dressed in a gorilla suit walking directly through the viewer’s field of vision as the ball was passed (Simons and Chabris 1999). This experiment in ‘inattentional blindness’ demonstrates how little viewers ‘see’ and reaffirms the notion that the brain is a prediction machine. Philosopher of mind Andy Clark similarly proposes that we see the world by ‘guessing the world’ (Clark 2016: 5), a notion that is frequently exploited in various acts of ‘misdirection’ in entertainment (e.g. magic tricks). Mislocalization might be understood as another kind of perceptual quirk. In common parlance, the verb ‘mislocalize’ means to ‘localize incorrectly […] to

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

5

make an error of perception involving the position of (a sensory stimulus)’ (‘Mislocalize’). Correspondingly, the noun ‘mislocalization’ can mean ‘mistaken, erroneous, or abnormal localization’ (‘Mislocalization’). Regarding the physical matter of bodies, the ability to identify and ‘localize’ limbs such as our hands in evolutionary terms has been described as ‘crucial for survival’ (Brozzoli et al. 2012). In scientific studies in body-ownership, localization specifically concerns attribution of self-identity to a body—‘the spatial localization of the self, or the “I” of experience and behavior’ (Olivé and Berthoz 2012). ‘Erroneous’ localization or ‘mislocalization’ of the body in a medical context can concern a variety of different phenomena—for example, disturbances in body-ownership caused by neurological conditions such as alien hand syndrome (Goldstein 1908), the mislocalization of stimuli to a phantom limb (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998) or referred sensations in ‘peripersonal space’ (the region of space immediately surrounding our bodies) (Knecht et al. 1996). Beyond neurological disorders, mislocalization also occurs in ‘healthy’ bodies in proprioceptive illusion studies such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which refers tactile sensations to a humanoid external object (Botvinick and Cohen 1998), the experimental induction of out-of-body experiences (OBE) using VR (Lenggenhager et al. 2007; Ehrsson 2007) or body substitution illusions (BSI) in which participants experience a sense of first-person ownership over a virtual surrogate body (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008; Slater et al. 2010). A wealth of scientific investigations in body-ownership has evidenced the effects and affects of ‘owning’ a body other than our own—for example, illusorily inhabiting the virtual body of a child (Banakou et al. 2013), or a rubber hand of a different ethnicity in laboratory experiments (Maister et al. 2013). Regarding the latter, objective measures using implicit association tests (IAT) have demonstrated a reduction in participants’ implicit bias against different racial body-types in the short term (Maister et al. 2013). In correspondence with these scientific developments, mixed reality and soi-disant ‘post-immersive’ theatre-makers such as ZU-UK are apprehending VR technologies associated with video game shoot ‘em ups to place audiences in a 6-year-old’s body in Goodnight, Sleep Tight (2017–). In this performance, VR’s first-person vantage point, which is routinely utilized in psychological embodiment studies, is used in an aesthetic experience to explore themes of intimacy, childhood and homesickness. Installation and multimedia artists such as Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller, and Lundahl and Seitl have also long

6  L. JARVIS

integrated body illusions of different perceptual orders into their work— not to scientifically test the mechanisms of bodily selfhood, but rather to experientially transport immersants elsewhere or provoke questions as to the parameters of being one’s body. The practices that I gather under the umbrella term of ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’ may acknowledge a debt to extant knowledge from experimental studies in embodiment and directly smuggle scientifically tested illusions into aesthetic experiences, or they may stage less conscious resonances with related sets of scientific findings. But mislocalization understood as the occupying of a position outside of one’s bodily borders or towards a virtual proxy (e.g. a rubber hand, a virtual body, a computer-generated avatar, etc.) provides a useful conceptual framework to examine a deep-rooted immersive promise that much, but not all, immersive work seeks to realize. Immersive Embodiment offers a comprehensive examination of the promise I have identified of the immersant’s self-transportation via the artwork through its corollaries with what philosopher of cognitive science Frédérique de Vignemont has described as an ‘explosion of experimental work on body representations’ over the past twenty years (2018: 2). ‘Embodiment’ is a word that has also carried innumerable distinctions, with poststructuralist commentators rejecting the notion that the body is a container of the self (Manning 2013), media theorists since the 1960s arguing that technology is itself an ‘extension’ of the human senses (McLuhan 2001 [1964]) or transhumanist discourses disavowing ‘the’ body entirely through universalizing narratives towards its post-evolutionary obsolescence (Paffrath and Stelarc 1984). Performance scholar Shaun May makes a valuable distinction between ‘bodies’ as physical matter contained within the ‘epidermal boundary’, and ‘embodiment’, as a body’s phenomenological correlate which can extend both beyond and behind the skin (May 2011). For Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina, ‘embodiment’ refers to bodies as ‘whole experiential beings in motion, both inscribed and inscribing subjectivities’ (2011: 63). For them, the ‘experiential body is both a representation of self (a “text”) as well as a mode of creation in progress (a “tool”)’ (63). But I argue that the conflation of body-as-tool here requires reconsideration in the light of studies in scientific body-ownership, which have demonstrated that a body experiences a very different sense of ownership over ‘tools’ because they are not ‘part of us’. For example, a pencil is not usually part of one’s felt experience of the world in the same way as the ­biological hand that grips it. Frédérique de Vignemont and Alessandro Farnè

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

7

argue that ‘tools are embodied but only motorically, and not perceptually’ (de Vignemont and Farnè 2010: 209). They use RHI studies to identify that when a rubber hand is threatened with a hammer, participants react ‘as if their own hand was threatened’, and correspondingly, the object ‘needs to be perceptually embodied for one to react affectively towards it’ (de Vignemont and Farnè 2010: 209). Tools do not prompt the same affective responses precisely because they are not experienced as incorporated within the body schema, despite some phenomenological discourses that predate the RHI paradigm erroneously arguing otherwise (Leder 1990: 83).7 My particular usage of ‘embodiment’ in the title ‘Immersive Embodiment’ refers explicitly to ‘perceptual embodiment’— the selection of case studies in this book places an emphasis on artists experimenting with the plasticity of the immersed participant, enabling affective experiences of a self that hyper-extends beyond the protective layer of the skin to incorporate experiences of otherness as a proposed fulfilment of the immersive promise to feel with the body of the other.

The Paradox of ‘Presence’ in Immersive Theatres Emergent trends in immersive performance have been couched in theoretical discourses that position the whole of a spectating body and its perceptual faculties as the locus of meaning-making. The centrality of the audience’s bodies has led to broader ontological claims on behalf of immersive theatre and its attendant promise that the ‘haptically incorporated’ spectator (Machon 2009: 207) might experience different phenomena ‘more fully’ (Trueman 2015). These are claims that may or may not be sustainable when subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny. As an audience-participant over the last decade, I have been cast by theatre-makers as a refugee,8 the survivor of an apocalyptic event,9 part of a trapeze double-act,10 a date,11 an attendee at a swingers party,12 a reenactor,13 a thief or grifter (con-artist),14 a rebel,15 a player,16 a user,17 a voter,18 a passenger,19 a voyeur20 and, without significant recourse to the ethical implications, a Jewish prisoner at the ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau’ concentration camp.21 The promise of such ‘immersive’ acts is that they might function as a threshold experience to transport unrehearsed audience members not just mentally, but physically inside a particular spatio-temporal circumstance or subjunctive ‘otherworldly-world’ (Machon 2013a: 63). In narratology, intrusions into a story such as an extradiegetic narrator becoming a character in a diegetic universe have

8  L. JARVIS

long been referred to as metalepsis (Genette 1988 [1983]). However, notions of physically ‘entering’ a dramatic universe have always been problematic. Keir Elam in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980) cites philosopher Nicholas Rescher to substantiate his argument that, ‘Access to all possible worlds – including the dramatic – is, naturally, conceptual and not physical, since ‘one must “begin from where one is”, and WE are placed within this actual world of ours’ (Rescher 1975: 92)’ (Elam 97).22 The ‘here and now’ of the theatrical circumstance is always the obstacle to the ‘there and then’ of a dramatic situation. Some scholars have argued that fiction in the interface of immersive theatre, as with theatre more broadly, is prone to ‘collapse’. Environmental façades that insist on authentically belonging to the fiction—and in turn insisting that the bodies within those environments might also belong— are susceptible to failure when acts of deliberate or unintentional disobedient participation can derail ‘any hope of owning, or possessing, an experience that was not ours to possess’ (Alston 2016b: 263). As Elam contends, ‘counterfactual worlds’ are only ‘actual’ for their imagined inhabitants, and audiences can never genuinely experience their ‘condition’, since it would involve a transformation of the ‘here’ of our physical context into a remote and hypothetical ‘there’ (Elam 97–98). The only exceptions Elam acknowledges are conditions through which an alternative state of affairs is perceived as more immediately real than the actual, such as ‘oneiric (‘dream world’), hallucinogenic (other-worldly ‘trips’) and psychotic (e.g. schizophrenic) experiences’ (98). Notably, all of Elam’s caveats are anomalies of perception that are produced by a body itself or through its contact with foreign substances, not by art experiences. Thus, Elam hints at the obvious limitations of any mode of cultural practice that overstates its claim towards our ‘transformation’ or physical immersion ‘inside’ a distant elsewhere. The Möbius strip of actual/virtual hyphenated selves that are performed in immersive experiences by spectators—a spectator-prisoner, for example in Badac’s The Factory—is raising ethical considerations reminiscent of historical psychological experiments—for example, Philip Zimbardo’s hastily abandoned Stanford Prison experiment (1971), which cast university students as ‘guards’ in a mock prison. The guards habituated this ‘dramatic’ situation and its inequities of power, exercising total control over fellow student-prisoners who protested by staging a real hunger strike. The ‘prisoners’ in this simulation became deindividuated others, dressed in identical smocks as ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1979 [1975]).

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

9

Zimbardo’s experiment was an early demonstration that bad fictional situations can corrupt good people and social behaviour arises from the interplay between people’s dispositions, situations (‘mock’ or otherwise) and immersion in systems that account for social behaviour (Zimbardo 2007). Recent accounts from actors in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (Jamieson 2018) and The Guild of Misrule’s The Great Gatsby suggest that they were sexually assaulted by fantasy emboldened audience members, who in Punchdrunk’s work are also ‘deindividuated’ by identical and anonymizing masks. Such incidents have prompted urgent debates about the importance of safeguarding performers from ‘immersed’ audiences (Gardner 2018), suggesting the need to revisit the ethical lessons from these earlier psychological immersive simulations. Bodily mislocalization in both embodiment illusion studies and through neurological conditions such as phantom limb pain (PLP) has demonstrated that one need not be delusional or ‘psychotic’ to unconsciously believe in a reality that is consciously known to be ‘counterfactual’. For example, PLP can be felt in a missing hand, irrespective of one’s awareness that the limb is absent. Embodiment in VR is providing a safe virtual environment in psychology for empirical studies of phenomena that is off-limits in the real world for ethical reasons, such as obedience experiments—for example, Stanley Milgram’s controversial 1960s ‘obedience’ experiment has been revisited in VR, in which subjects were instructed to administer an ‘electric shock’ to an unseen (and fictitious) human respondent when they answer questions incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time (Slater et al. 2006). Simulations such as this are often premised on one’s belief in the counterfactual circumstance. Correspondingly, body image illusions have been reappropriated in immersive performance practices to enable participants to self-deceive and proprioceptively ‘own’ the body of different kinds of others for entertainment, communication, cyber-therapy, rehabilitation in health care and other applied practices enacted for social or political change. Despite conscious awareness of being inside an illusion, neuroscientific experiments have used different measuring techniques to demonstrate the efficacy of illusions that elicit a feeling of ownership over a virtual body such as physiological measures (e.g. skin conductance response [SCR]), neural measures (e.g. positron emission tomography [PET]) and conscious behavioural measures (e.g. participants’ introspective reports). The extent to which the belief that a mediatized body image is one’s own body is also prone to being misread as understanding

10  L. JARVIS

the felt ‘experience’ of another (e.g. a refugee in BeAnotherLab’s work) raises further profound ethical considerations that are part of this book’s aim to investigate. Over the chapters that follow, I examine the interstices where science and art coalesce in different respects as attempted realizations of the immersive onto-relational promise of crossing the threshold by ‘entering’ simulated experiences. I should acknowledge that there are many examples of non-technologized immersive performance practices that implicate the audience-participant within a live encounter while not inviting them to become someone other than themselves. For example, Adrian Howells’ intimate one-to-one performances engendered what Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson have referred to as situations of ‘accelerated friendship’ through intimate acts of bathing, holding and the washing of an audience member’s hair or feet (2016: 10). Although this kind of ‘immersive’ work is not an equivalence with performances that invite the participant to experience with a virtualized body, immersion in an eclectic variety of artistic practices signal a shared desire to mobilize the injunction of ‘jumping beyond oneself’ (Heddon 98). Of this injunction, Johnson questions, ‘How does an individual take the leap to a subject-position outside of the confines of biography, of physical or emotional limitation?’ (Heddon 98). The core hypothesis of Immersive Embodiment is that immersion involves myriad strategies that seek to realize the promise of a position beyond the confines of one’s body, its immediate locale or its finite set of lived experiences. The imagined fulfilment of a ‘beyond oneself’ position has taken diverse cultural forms, from disability simulations in health care such as Wolfgang Moll’s GERontologic ‘age simulation suit’ to testimonies of an individual’s altered perception, remediated within first-person VR experiences. For example, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2016) was a VR experience released to coincide with a feature film inspired by theologian John M. Hull’s audio cassette recordings that documented his experience of going blind in 1983. Hull took listeners on his long journey from clinging to the idea of vision to an epiphanic acceptance and understanding of a world ‘beyond sight’. He articulates his need to bridge his changed perceptual experiences with others when he says that ‘to gain our full humanity, blind people and sighted people need to see each other’ (Hull in D’Apice). Hull’s cassettes were an expression of yearning towards interperceptual ‘seeing’ and the subsequent VR experience positions immersants in Hull’s imagined first-person vantage point when going outside.23 Blindness in this context is

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

11

paradoxically expressed to sighted immersants synesthetically as binaural sounds in a virtual environment that trigger visual activity and make visible the topography of the virtual surroundings. In silence, the visuals recede to blackness, when for Hull ‘the world dies’ (in Hull’s words on his tapes). Correspondingly, immersion in this book’s specific investigation constitutes acts primarily pursued as a potential onto-relational affordance towards momentarily habituating different perceptual experiences of otherness.

Towards Reconciling the Problem of the Spectator’s Presence ‘Elsewhere’ Cognizance of the particularity of one’s own immersed body, or what N. Katherine Hayles defined as the ‘resistant materialities of embodiment’ (1999: 245), can serve to counter the underlying immersive promise that one’s flesh might cross the threshold and ‘enter’ the simulacrum. In immersive theatre, various kinds of cloaking or masking of participating bodies have sought to circumvent this obstacle, akin to the way a VR HMD occludes its wearer’s body. In location-based VR, Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds (2017) restaged the world’s first major exhibition of photography, enabling visitors to walk through a minimalist whited-out space in Somerset House (and other touring locations) that was digitally reconstructed in their HMDs to revive William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 exhibition in King Edward’s School in Birmingham (see cover image). Akin to the scenographic environments in immersive theatre, participants could physically interact with bespoke glass vitrines, fixtures and experience the heat and scent of a coal fire burning. Infrared sensors tracked visitors’ movements who appear to one another in the virtual environment as ‘shadowy digital avatars’ (Ellis-Petersen 2017). The presence of anonymized co-visitors in the virtual space performed a practical purpose of avoiding unwanted collisions, while emphasizing their displacement in time as ghostly spectres that were not of the environment that was being navigated. Beyond anonymization through the obstruction of wearable HMDs in real-world spaces and abstracted graphical representations in virtual environments, a hallmark of Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre work has been the audience’s donning of masks in shows such as The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) and The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013).24 In these productions, immersants ‘free-roamed’ through Battersea Arts Centre and a

12  L. JARVIS

disused postal sorting office in Paddington, London, that had been scenographically transformed into the macabre universe of Edgar Allan Poe and 1960s ‘Temple Studios’ in Hollywood, respectively. The latter offered the promise of entry into the dramatic universe of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1879) from which the piece took inspiration.25 Adam Alston has described The Masque as ‘a delirious romp through the haunting, morbid imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe’ (2016a: 1). The word ‘delirious’ is interesting here because like the company’s name, ‘Punchdrunk’, it implies a physiological state or ‘condition’, much as Elam’s aforementioned discourse implies that physical access to the dramatic is synonymous with altered ‘oneiric’ states. Correspondingly, Goat and Monkey’s Reverence: A Tale of Abelard and Heloise (2007) cloaked its audience in robes and cowls as medieval monks to blend their bodies into the resurrected world of historical theologian, Peter Abelard (1079–1142). I would argue that strategies towards the audience’s concealment problematize scholarly claims that ‘bodies are prioritized’ in immersive theatre (Machon 2009: 207), since the audience is staged only to be anonymized as ‘part of the scenery’. The obfuscating of bodies in immersive theatres resonates more broadly with what Drew Leder had identified in The Absent Body (1990) in Western culture as ‘intrinsic tendencies towards self-concealment’ (3)—the effacement of both one’s own body in day-to-today life and its hidden internal operations. Furthermore, the promise of ‘transporting’ the audience beyond their immediate ‘here’ necessitates a transformation of the spectator that is more typically associated with the performer; as well as being ‘themselves’, immersion ‘inside’ the conceptual space of drama or re-enacted historical events often carries the further promise of their becoming someone else. The specific kind of ‘someone’ can vary significantly from a ‘character’ to the dispensation of drama and mimesis entirely through aesthetic forms such as non-matrixed performance (e.g. the removal of spectatorial distance in ‘para-theatre’) or altered behaviours inscribed through eccentric arrangements of spectating bodies in relation to their environment to prompt different ways to physically contemplate—for example, Patrick Killoran’s Observation Deck installation, consisting of a horizontal platform that partially slides the spectator out of the window of a building. In Killoran’s work, the participating body itself becomes a sculpture for passers-by on the streets below, and the vulnerability and altered perspective on the surrounding architecture for the body-as-art have been noted to prompt affective responses such as dizziness through

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

13

its ‘half-in-half-out state’ (Davis 2016). The participant in this liminal threshold situation is not someone ‘other’ as such, but nor are they entirely themselves. Immersive experiences also necessitate a return from immersion, which implies a dialectical relationship—both a turn to an altered state and a return to a more bounded and reflective one. But there are many prospective obstacles to the former, such as the spectator’s affective baggage or ‘affect disposition’—defined as ‘stable traits that have an affective quality’ (Scherer 2005)—that is brought to bear on the encounter. Or mounting empathy fatigue from over-exposure to the pervasive ontorelational promise of immersive experience to feel ‘other’. But the conflation of immersion and ‘empathy experiences’ have been critiqued on the basis of their contradictions where virtual access is offered (e.g. sing VR), resulting in isolation from the very bodies that are simulated. As designer Rose Eveleth comments when scrutinizing VR films, ‘we are alone, inside of them, at the mercy of whatever piece of their life the VR designer wants to show us. We’re harassed, beaten, yelled at, chased, hungry, scared, alone […] We always seem to be alone, if not literally, then certainly figuratively. Alone facing the world. Wearing goggles’ (Eveleth 2018). Onto-relationality as a ‘promise’ from the Latin promissum (‘something promised’) implies the potentiality of an aesthetic form to bridge isolating knowledges contained within a body. But each prospective fulfilment is a virtualization of the promise being fulfilled, never its actualization. For example, my ‘body-swap’ with a refugee in The Machine to Be Another is not a fulfilment of the desire to ‘be’ an other. But it is my contention that growing awareness of the flexibility of physical selfhood can produce a different kind of chimeric self that requires disentangling to better understand what is being actuated. I propose that the becoming ‘other’ of immersed bodies is a ‘theatrical’ problem and the crux of this book. I use the word ‘theatrical’ strictly in art critic and historian Michael Fried’s sense of the term in Art and Objecthood (1967), the defining characteristic of which is an increasing emphasis on the spectator’s experience ‘in a situation’ with the art object (both physical and virtual ‘objects’ in the context of this discussion) and an erosion of the parameters between art forms (Fried 1998 [1967]: 153). My interest in the interplay and blurring of subject-object relations in spectatorship has emerged through my own work as a practitionerresearcher. In 2011, I co-created a devised performance with my company Analogue entitled 2401 Objects, examining the life and death of

14  L. JARVIS

the famous amnesic patient, Henry Molaison (or ‘Patient HM’). Henry underwent experimental neurosurgery in 1953 as a measure to contain his intractable epilepsy, but as a result of the removal of approximately two-thirds of his hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus and amygdala, he experienced severe retrograde and anterograde amnesia throughout his lifetime.26 2401 Objects was inspired by a scientific procedure after Henry’s death in which his brain was histologically sectioned into 2401 seventy micron thin slices on 2 December 2009. The dissection, conducted by Dr. Jacopo Annese and his team at The Brain Observatory (University of California), was streamed live on the Internet to an audience of over 400,000 viewers, both to ‘permit scientific scrutiny and to foster public engagement’ (Annese 2014: 3).27 The theatre show that this online procedure inspired recreated a giant scenographic version of Annese’s cryomicrotome (the instrument used to section Henry’s brain)—a large gliding screen on tracks that could ‘section’ the stage space, slicing through the action and swallowing performers whole through a narrow aperture beneath it. The immersive desire I have articulated in the Introduction as a promise to penetrate the body of another, to get under its skin, provides a clear parallel with medicalized bodies such as Henry’s or those associated with anatomy theatre (Kuppers 2007; Bleeker 2008; Mermikides and Bouchard 2016). Medicalized technologies of clinical objectification imply different kinds of bodily access to another’s interior life (e.g. scanning and medical 3D printing of cardiovascular anatomy), much as immersion as a virtualized apprehension of a body’s first-person gaze implies a further kind of access. Ethical and political critiques have long problematized this ‘medical gaze’, which Michel Foucault argued was not the observation of just any observer, but ‘that of a doctor endowed with the power of decision and intervention’ (Foucault 1973: 89). A commonality between anatomy and immersive theatres is the insatiable human desire to get closer, which has been explored in works such as Clod Ensemble’s An Anatomie in Four Quarters (2011–), which dissects the theatre auditorium into ever nearer spectatorial positions on its performing bodies. While 2401 Objects was a multimedia stage-show and by no means ‘immersive theatre’, there is one moment in the work that corresponds with the desired illusory transformation of the spectator that I have identified as characteristic of immersive practices. An actor standing in for Dr. Jacopo Annese brings up the lights on the audience and requests that they hold out their hands in front of them. He says, ‘imagine that these are my hands. They are used to doing a lot of detailed work, you

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

15

trust them’ (Barker et al. 2011: 60). He invites the audience to place ‘his’ hands on their heads, locating for them where the anatomical structure of their hippocampi resides. This is a complex request. Beyond an invitation to enter a subjunctive world or a historical event, in this moment the audience are asked to examine their body with the skilled hands of the neuroanatomist, imaginatively relocating themselves to Jacopo’s and Henry’s perspectives, simultaneously. Other performances such as KILN’s A Journey Around My Skull (2014) have also situated a theatre audience as the subject of a neurosurgical procedure, using headphones and binaural sound to create both the symptomatic effects of auditory hallucinations and the visceral and disquieting sensation of ‘their’ head being cut open. In these moments, the spectator is momentarily asked to become both the subject and object of ‘scientific’ enquiry. In 2401 Objects, the intention beyond a cursory mapping of the location of anatomical regions in Henry’s brain on the audience’s skulls is towards empathy—a term originating from the Greek empatheia (from em-, ‘in’ and pathos, ‘feeling’) and subsequently from the German Einfühlung (‘feeling into’). In the field of aesthetics, Juliet Koss notes that in late-nineteenth-century Germany, Einfühlung described an individual spectator’s active perceptual experience. Nineteenth-century Philosopher Robert Vischer described Einfühlung in terms of fusing with artistic objects: ‘Only ostensibly do I remain the same although the object remains an other. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this Other’ (Vischer 1993 [1873]: 104). In Koss’s analysis of Vischer, Einfühlung is a process of reciprocal exchange and transformation that ‘destabilizes’ the identity of the viewer (Koss 68).28 The example that started this chapter of The Machine to be Another explicitly resonates with this nineteenth-century notion of empathic destabilizations of self. However, it stands on the shoulders of more recent scientific knowledge over the past two decades that has further demonstrated that external objects, or mediatized body representations in VR telepresence, can be experienced as physically incorporated into the body schema. While there is no unanimity around the precise meaning of ‘empathy’, ‘perspective-taking’ has provided another way of conceptualizing the term in science as a ‘kind of mind-reading that allows one person to step into the shoes of another and experience that person’s world from her or his point of view’ (McConachie 2013: 15). But can the promise that an immersant might ‘know’ another’s experience ever be realized when

16  L. JARVIS

certain kinds of knowing necessitate possessing a particular kind of body? For example, the unique ineffable experiences of neurological subjects such as Henry Molaison? Beyond representing the narratives of science onstage (as in 2401 Objects),29 this strand of questioning has shifted my research enquiry to examine methods and epistemologies of immersive embodiment that seek to recreate complex perceptual phenomena for which our own experiences can provide no correlate (e.g. non-human experiences, neurological conditions, neurodivergent subjectivities, etc.). Where our understanding of another is delimited by possessing the body that we ‘own’, strategies to mislocalize and temporarily alter our perceptual sense of selfhood are providing proposed solutions to the immersive desire that I have identified as feeling with the body of another. This book engages with this onto-relational problem through both my own practice (in Chapter 6) and my embodied acts of participation in the work of adjacent practitioners (in Chapters 5 and 7).

Cognitive Studies, Theatre Scholarship and ‘Neuromania’ Over the last decade, the ‘cognitive turn’ in theatre and performance scholarship has invigorated a wealth of research through the lens of cognitive studies, which refers to the overlapping fields of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and other disciplines that conduct ‘empirically based tests to advance our knowledge of the mind/brain’ (McConachie and Hart 2006: ix). Many theatre scholars have drawn on ‘second wave’ cognitive science research in particular—namely, the interdisciplinary field of embodied cognition that emerged from phenomenology, biology, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics (Shaughnessy 2013: 5). Embodied cognition has problematized computational mind-body dualism and transhumanist techno-dualistic gnosticism that distinguishes between ‘ourselves as software running on the hardware of our bodies’ (O’Connell 2017: 63).30 Its proponents posit that the mind is embodied and situated, as opposed to computational models of the mind that have sought to explain cognition in terms of ‘information processing and symbol manipulation’ (5). Theatre scholar Nicola Shaughnessy argues that this development has signalled a reorientation of focus on the ‘physical, sensory and neurological processes connecting action and perception’, and an examination of how our ‘interactions with the environments we explore and experience create the pathways for developing consciousness, language and memory’ (2013: 5).

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

17

A cognitive studies perspective has been applied to a highly diverse range of theatre and performance practices such as revisionist approaches to extant forms of performer training (Blair 2008; Lutterbie 2011), mask work (Meineck 2011), performer-object interactions (Paavolainen 2012), directing methodology (Mitchell 2009), analysis in Shakespeare studies (Cook 2010; Fletcher 2011; Tribble 2011), medieval theatre history (Stevenson 2010) and theatre spectatorship and reception (McConachie 2008). Of relevance to my core concern on immersive embodiment, Stephen Di Benedetto’s book The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre (2010), examines spectatorship in postdramatic,31 participatory and immersive performance practices through the lens of neurology, cognitive science and phenomenology. Benedetto’s core claim is that it is beneficial to understand the physiological basis of theatre practice to ‘affect human behaviour’ (ix). He argues that neuroscience has confirmed that the brain is ‘plastic’ and that the sensations it experiences ‘modify how it perceives the world’ (x) which, in turn, he suggests has illuminated theatre’s potential to ‘change our experience of the world and therefore […] change our ability to perceive the world in a new way’ (x). But arguably, theatre is just as prone to confirm extant biases. For Chris Frith, what we perceive is our brain’s model of the world as opposed to the actual world (2007: 135) and the phenomenon described as ‘affective realism’ has placed a focus on the way in which past feelings can influence the content of one’s present perceptual experiences (Feldman Barrett and Wormwood 2015). This leads to the possibility of misidentification based on incorrect neural guesses if ‘believing is seeing’, rather than vice versa. Dependent on one’s interpretation of scientific discoveries and hypotheses, such developments could either suggest the importance of theatre to influence better ‘predictions’, or its limited capacities as a ‘transformative’ event if the past not only biases but also constitutes our present experiences. But I argue specifically that mounting evidence in body-ownership, the integration of body illusions as a mode of immersive ‘spectatorship’ and emergent/experimental technologized forms of cultural practice are modifying our perception of the world in radically new ways. The notion of ‘experimental’ practice also takes on particular meaning in the context of artistic practices that evoke laboratory experiments, science-derived knowledge or scientific instrumentation in non-laboratory contexts as aesthetic experiences (which characterizes many of the case studies in this book). My argument, which will draw on empirically tested insights from science, is aligned to some

18  L. JARVIS

extent with rationalist strains of discourse around theatre practice. I am mindful that this is in stark contrast to a long-standing tradition of theatre avant-gardists and experimentalists, such as Antonin Artaud, who designated the term ‘science hasardeuse’ (‘fortuitous science’) to dismiss the paradigm as either logical or objectively true. However, ‘falsified’ scientific evidence is not a question of that which is ‘objectively true’. The ‘truths’ that are of interest to my enquiry are rather the subjective perceptual experiences of bodies inscribed with gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., and a postdigital blurring of virtual and actual identities conceived as a site of exchange to convey complex bodily experiences.32 The practices I discuss align with what Matthew Causey has identified as postdigital performance’s tendency towards ‘replication’ and ‘simulation’, in many instances offering the digital copy of a body as ‘another original’ (Causey 2016: 434) to be felt in place of one’s own. Bodily replications of different orders present opportunities of becoming ‘outside of traditional ordering systems’ (Causey 2016: 434), but adversely create new sets of concerns in relation to vicarious acts of avatar-self suffering (Chapter 7). I seek to examine the possibilities and far-reaching applications of emergent techniques in immersive spectatorship, which creatively draw on knowledge that has evidenced that selfhood is not hard-wired, but dynamic and contingent on the interplay between different sensory modalities—from applied practices that generate sensory conflict as a proxy for neurological conditions and proposed fulfilment of the onto-relational promise (Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes), to acts of collective hyper-intercorporeal embodiment in VR multiplayer location-based game worlds. Bruce McConachie has examined more traditional forms of theatre reception, using cognitive neuroscience to interrogate various audience dynamics such as conscious attention, mental concepts, empathy, emotion, group dynamics and culture in theatre spectatorship (McConachie 2008). McConachie problematizes the idea inherited from semiotics that the audience experience of a performance is a version of ‘reading’ (2008: 3) on the grounds that scientific evidence has suggested significant differences between ‘readers making sense of sign on a printed page and the most nonsymbolic activity of spectator cognition’ (3).33 Theatre reception, McConachie argues, is irreducible to sign-reading, much as for ‘second wave’ cognitive scientists, human cognition is irreducible to computational processes in the head.34 This book’s arguments rest on a similar distinction, since there are significant differences between

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

19

concepts such as ‘body-swapping’ expressed in literature and immersive virtual platforms that seek to position the user ‘inside’ a virtualized bodyswap transaction. But it is important to recognize that drawing on studies from the field of embodied cognition has limited application when analysing spectatorship in experiential immersive artworks because many embodied theorists in science focus primarily on what we can do with the body (Clark 1997; Thelen and Smith 1994; Gallagher and Zahavi 2007; Shapiro 2011). The interest in physical bodies in this branch of research is often only insofar as they permit a ‘fluent adaptive coupling with the environment’ (de Vignemont 2018: 3). As a result, the emphasis is on examining bodily action as opposed to a more holistic analysis of how we experience our bodies and it is the latter that is the concern of this book. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart have used cognitive studies to challenge other theoretical approaches that are widely used within performance analysis (e.g. Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, etc.). They go so far as to propose its application as a framework that might ‘heal’ institutional divisions between ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. This choice of language is both significant and ideological. Hard science is offered as a unifying solution to a paradigmatic rift that Hart and McConachie’s discourse defines in medicalized terms (e.g. as in need of ‘healing’). Their rationale for using cognitive science for epistemological justification or to discover current accepted truths about the nature of drama, acting and spectating is rooted in the discipline’s empiricism and ‘self-correcting procedures’ (ix–x)—an idea that accords with philosopher of science Karl Popper’s notion of ‘falsificationism’, which aims towards falsifying a hypothesis rather than objectively proving it to be true.35 But accordingly, the application of cognitive tools of analysis to any cultural practice must be accompanied by the significant caveat that even that which has been ‘empirically tested’ is subject to revision by new scientific evidence. I depart with Hart and McConachie in respect of their overarching epistemological agenda that proposes cognitive studies as a ‘replacement’ (as opposed to a valuable additional set of analytical tools) on the grounds that their argument reaffirms a top-down hierarchy of knowing that privileges the hard sciences as a means of validating artistic practices, rather than systemizing new methodological approaches or proposing new theatrical forms through which scientific knowledge might be critiqued, mobilized or expressed. Beyond McConachie’s banal contention in Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (2008) that it is never a bad idea ‘to get some

20  L. JARVIS

scientific confirmation for common sense’ (8)—‘banal’ in the sense that the application of science by this logic is only to confirm what we think we already know—my interest is rather in exploring through what methods of practice artists are simulating sense-making that is entirely uncommon.36 Many theatre scholars have engaged with multisensory acts of performance reception while disavowing positivistic knowledge from science as part of the analysis. For example, in Feeling Theatre (2012), Martin Welton insists that he does not wish to accrue to his thoughts ‘some intellectual cachet by association with the rigours of science’ (3)—a concern that makes the reader mindful of the potential inequities attributed to different paradigms of knowing. Instead, he argues that procedures of ‘making sense’ are shaped by our ecological perception, drawing on James J. Gibson’s notion of ‘affordances’ (2014 [1979]) in an attempt to articulate meaning in theatre in ‘more dynamic and relational terms than those of a disembodied surveillance by a separated cogito’ (11). But I would point out that Welton’s concerns are also shared within scientific disciplines. For example, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience published a study that evidenced that psychological phenomena produced more public interest when news stories contained neuroscience information, even when it was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation (Weisberg et al. 2008). The disconcerting and uncritical allure of neuroscientific explanations among this study’s sample group of participants supports the idea of a perceived top-down hierarchy of knowledge in wider culture. Websites such as ‘NeuroBollocks’ have emerged to debunk ‘neuro-quackery’ and inflated claims that deploy quasi-scientific evidence or questionable interpretations of data to intentionally mislead in popular culture. Outspoken critics of ‘neuromania’ such as Raymond Tallis, have argued against the monistic position that affords neuroscience primacy as a domain of knowing through the pervasive notion that ‘we are our brains’, challenging scientism, reductionism and the belief that humans can be understood only in biological terms (Tallis 2011). These counter-arguments represent an important cautionary tale about accepting scientific evidence unquestioningly, especially from the vantage point of a non-scientific discipline. Consequently, my interactions with the neuroscientific paradigm in this book and my underlying motivations in drawing on new knowledge to generate new artistic forms and approaches will require continued scrutiny as I proceed to illustrate the potential qualitative applications or DIY ‘hacking’ of BTIs tested in scientific studies.

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

21

Structure of the Book Following scholarly calls for more studies in spectatorial responses to performance (Freshwater 2009), recent evaluative approaches to what is valued in spectatorship have turned from more theoretical work (Bennett 1990; Blau 1990) to empirical research methods (Reinelt et al. 2014; Sedgman 2016). This study into the promise of different kinds of onto-relational reach through different interactive artworks and an analysis of what is actuated and valued in such endeavours by individual audience members necessitates elements of both methodological approaches. For this reason, Immersive Embodiment is divided into two parts. In Part I, I will contextualize the discussion of immersive contemporary practices historically, connecting immersion to Michael Fried’s critique of the ‘theatrical condition’. Having accumulated for the reader the necessary theoretical foundations and genealogies for the specific promise of immersion that I am proposing—namely, the destabilizing position of feeling through a virtual proxy as a stand in for another who is never assimilable to the self, or what Emmanuel Levinas defined as an ‘irreducible alterity’ (1969)—I will survey transdisciplinary conceptualizations of immersion in postdigital culture. Finally, I will draw on scientific illusion studies in embodiment that inspire or resonate with the aesthetic practices that will be discussed in Part II. In Chapter 2, I historically situate the contemporary yen for enveloping aesthetics and technological interventions that produce somatosensory experiences of ‘mislocalized sensation’ in postdigital culture. I propose that these developments can be read as contiguous with the concern of reconciling the departure that art critic Michael Fried had identified between the absorptive and theatrical artwork in minimalist sculpture in Art and Objecthood (1967), and subsequently in his reading of Denis Diderot’s anti-theatrical art criticism. Fried’s writing on theatricality has been a common reference point for debates on liveness (Dixon 2007) and subjective experiences of duration in performance art (Clarke et al. 2018: 44). But I argue that Fried’s polemic should be re-read as proto-immersive discourse and the defining features of theatres of mislocalized sensation are consonant with a phenomenon that he had opposed—namely, the ‘theatrical condition’. The ascendant interest in the beholder’s body as ‘part of the artwork’ provides a crucial precondition for the eclectic kinds of ‘immersive’ practices that I will analyse in Part II and from which the paradox of the spectator’s desired presence

22  L. JARVIS

inside the elsewhere phenomena of otherworldly environments and virtual bodies arises as a ‘theatrical’ problem (Ridout 2006). Developments in art criticism and experiential art-making have reflected the ubiquity of the theatrical artwork—from Nicolas Bourriaud’s proposal in Relational Aesthetics (2002) to assess art on the basis of its constructed models of sociability, to the presence of Carsten Höller’s quasi-scientific experiments in experiential exhibitions that affect altered states of perception in gallery visitors (e.g. The Pinocchio Effect [1999], The Forests [2002– 2015], Upside-Down Goggles [2015]). I contend that the hybridity and admixtures of artistic/scientific form that encompass the ‘theatrical condition’ have opened up new spaces for open-ended performance forms, which momentarily transform the beholder’s way of perceiving and shift the focus from what an artwork ‘says’, to what it ‘does’. With this shift, I will examine the important role of doubt, perplexity and ‘sense uncertainty’ in the gallery-based works of Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller and Lundahl & Seitl. These artists enable visitors to use different artworks to explore the conflicting spaces in-between their senses, calling into question the participant’s body parts as ‘inalienable entities’. Chapter 3 explores the contingency of immersion as a delegated promise from an artist-agent on behalf of the anticipated experience of an ‘immersant’ to become [with] an other body, drawing on distinctions from promise theory. As part of this analysis, I offer a transdisciplinary survey of varied understandings of how the terms ‘immersion’ and ‘immersive’ have come to be defined in common parlance and in scholarship in immersive theatre (Machon 2013a, b; Alston 2016a, b; Biggin 2017), intermedial and multimedia performance practices (Vanhoutte and Wynants 2010; Klich and Scheer 2012), virtual reality art (Woolley 1993; Bolter and Grusin 1999; Davies 2003; Grau 2003; Popper 2007), discourses on participatory theatre (White 2009, 2012, 2013) and wider digital culture (Rose 2011). Through this survey, I will highlight a recurrent ontological promise underlying the post-Friedian ‘theatrical’ artwork that we might physically ‘enter’ dramatic/virtual spaces or use an artwork to access new kinds of perceptual experiences. With the incorporation of technologies that seek to blur the borderlands of phenomenal selfhood—the self as constructed by its senses—and distinctions between physical and simulated bodies/environments, might we consider immersivity as a question of transcending or ‘prioritizing’ spectating bodies? A core claim of the chapter is that theatres of mislocalized sensation entail the self-deceptive perceptual disappearance of the participating body to

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

23

itself, which is staged as an illusory reconciliation of the immersive paradox of both being oneself, while simultaneously becoming an other. Chapter 4 will identify that the unattainable immersive desire to ‘know’ bodily experiences of others (e.g. characters, human non-neurotypical subjects, etc.) presents problems that are narratological, philosophical and physical in origin. The leitmotif of ‘body-swapping’ is correspondent with this immersive desire. In science fiction, the plot event of the body-swap has haunted the literary imagination throughout history. I will briefly examine how body-swapping has functioned narratologically as something that print media has only been able to imagine as a conceptual and not a physical act on the part of the reader, much as Friedian ‘anti-theatrical’ art denies the bodies of its spectators. To examine the philosophical problem of ‘knowing’ other bodies, I will briefly revisit key epistemological thought experiments, from George Edward Moore’s ‘here is one hand…’ argument, which located his hands as a site of ‘certainty’ (Moore 1939), to Thomas Nagel’s interrogation of the ‘subjective character’ of non-human experiences (Nagel 1974). While the direct subjective experience of other bodies is unknowable, in various fields of cultural practice it has been the attempt to know that has been crucial. For example, in health care, Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has emphasized in Phantoms in the Brain (1998) ‘it is the physician’s duty always to ask himself [or herself], “What does it feel like to be in the patient’s shoes?”. “What if I were him [or her]?”’ (7). Finally, I will explore how scientific knowledge might provide proposed aesthetic reconciliations to the paradox of the immersant’s becoming [with] other bodies by examining scientific studies in the RHI paradigm, experimental induction of Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs), Body Substitution Illusions (BSI) using VR and other Body Transfer Illusions (BTIs) in the fields of neuroscientific embodiment and experimental psychology. In Part II, I will examine case studies that exemplify emergent immersive practices that use different technologies and interaction protocols derived from, or corresponding with the scientific paradigm. I will clarify the lineage from both the Friedian ‘theatrical’ artwork and scientific knowledge from studies in embodiment and identify the nexus of interdisciplinary connecting features that characterize immersive practices that I am terming as theatres of mislocalized sensation. While I am gathering an eclectic range of cultural practices as part of my analysis in visual arts, multimedia, applied performance practices and multiplayer gaming, the

24  L. JARVIS

unifying concern that links many of the case studies discussed in Part II is methodologies that seek to refer the physical sensations of a participating immersant to mediatized and ostensibly vulnerable virtual bodies or avatars in a game world. Such referrals in art activism are primarily a strategy to attempt to transition a participant’s understanding by perceptually embodying a mediatized other, but more perniciously in wider cultural phenomena can also lead to vicarious suffering through an avatar. I will connect the former empathic applied practices to adjacent discourses in immersive theatre scholarship, but intend to refocus the debate on the respects in which these machinations that conjure the virtualized experiences of real or fictionalized others might be personally transformative or simply offer a falsification of complex experiences contained within other bodies. I will also examine the political and ethical considerations of ‘body-swapping/hopping’ in a range of cultural practices from intimate one-on-one performances to full body-tracked multiplayer VR gaming, analysing the implications of vicariously apprehending a virtual identity and being exposed to its simulated environments and bodily ‘risks’. In Chapter 5, I will investigate the auto-phenomenological work of artist Jane Gauntlett’s VR documentary performance series In My Shoes and BeAnotherLab’s (BAL) open-source immersive virtual reality (IVR) platform, The Machine to be Another, from the spectatorial vantage point of an immersant. It is my contention that both Gauntlett and BAL apply protocols from whole-body ownership illusions developed in the neuroscientific paradigm (surveyed Chapter 4) to mobilize the conceptualization of immersive onto-relationality that I have outlined as the attempt to feel more fully with the body of another. The promise of techno-actuated ‘body-swaps’ in the practices discussed is situated as applied art to cultivate self-understanding, empathy and tolerance across borderlands of race and gender, to assist in conflict resolution and as a therapeutic communication resource for patients in health care contexts, to name just a few applications. In Waking in Slough (2012) and Dancing with Myself (2016), Gauntlett utilizes BTIs to perceptually reconstruct her remote experience of epileptic seizure for a theatre-going public. In a creative process modelled on person-centred planning, Gauntlett works as a mentor/facilitator with different individuals such as traumatic brain injury patients (TBI) to create immersive pieces for public, non-public and highly targeted groups of beneficiaries (e.g. an individual’s family or professional network of medical support). I will examine the autobiographical origins of Gauntlett’s instrumentalist art and scrutinize what

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

25

is enacted through the virtual bodily replacements characterized by BAL’s telepresence virtual body (VB) transactions. These expressions of empathy activism are underpinned by an assumption that experiences inviting us to ‘feel as others do’ might engender a positive moral response. I will draw on recent critical debates on ‘empathy’ in the writing of Paul Bloom, Peter Bazalgette and Matthew Ratcliffe to scrutinize these assumptions and draw conclusions. In Chapter 6, akin to the body-swap, I will switch perspectives in my analysis from a spectator to an embedded practitioner-researcher reflecting on the ‘doing-knowing’ (Nelson 2013: 40) of my own theory imbricated praxis with my company Analogue. Here I investigate the complex proposition of becoming ‘immersed’ in virtualized sensorimotor-atypical identities in third sector and educational contexts, focusing on the research, development and reception of my company Analogue’s Wellcome Trust funded pilot project Transports—an interactive installation that invites individual immersants to participate in a first-person simulation of a fictionalized subject living with Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease (YOPD). The installation uses a Raspberry Pi and other low budget components in combination with multisensory stimulation as a methodology to engender in participants a feeling of bodily ownership over a virtual hand. The aim was to cultivate an embodied understanding and a personal sense of living with a symptom associated with YOPD. I will explore the genealogy of the project and the iterative stages of its R&D process, and evaluate the outcomes from the qualitative data gathered from participant questionnaires during the user-testing phase and testimonials from scientific/third sector collaborators on the project to assess its real-world impacts. I argue that the technology in use in Transports acts as both an intermediary between the virtual and actual hands and an intervention designed to deliberately disrupt the co-ordination of the immersant’s limbs involved in the performance of a motor skill. The destabilizing of important integrations of sensory information in the audience’s body, like the sensory disruptions staged in Gauntlett’s practice, is a strategy to make accessible the remote physical and psychical experiences of another body. The immersive ontology that is the core interest of this book is approximated in this case study using a simple BTI towards an epistemic objective in arts, science and educational contexts. In Chapter 7, I will reverse my perspective from a practitioner to a co-immersant in a multiplayer full body-tracked video game, focusing on

26  L. JARVIS

what I term as ‘hyper-intercorporeal’ encounters—a blended concept, amalgamating hyperreality with the perception-action loop between self and other/s. These encounters occur between two or more avatar-players in simultaneous real-world and computer-generated spaces. I draw on an uncanny incident of accidental avatar disfigurement that occurred inside a location-based VR zombie shooter game called City Z (2017–), using this incident to scrutinize wider ethical complexities of vicarious suffering in gaming contexts while feeling as our avatar does. Revisiting the psychotechnic cell as a cautionary historical example of the potential to weaponize sensory-assaulting enveloping aesthetics, I will progress to consider whether the postdigital enmeshment of real and simulated bodies in virtual gaming environments requires a revision of notions of avatars as delegated forms of consumption or ‘interpassive objects’ (Pfaller 1996) that feel on a player’s behalf. An avatar-self in gaming shifts the focus of body-ownership over a virtual proxy from a desire ‘know’ another’s bodied experiences to a vehicle for strategic gameplay and the heightening of affective responses in situations where our avatar is subjected to ‘physical’ threat. I argue that perceptually embodied avatars challenge the idea that the simulacrum of an avatar’s suffering is at a safe remove from the player, examining the reactions of player-avatars immersed in survival horror games. I will consider how unintended glitches and moments of system failure might provide a critical space to interrogate illusions that elicit our bodies’ acquiescence to unconsciously receive virtual scenarios in the order of the (hyper)real. I further contend that jarring glitches provide opportunities to salvage unintended and increasingly vital spaces of recuperation from the psychological exhaustion, vicarious suffering or the potential compassion fatigue of becoming avatar-selves subjugated to the frequently militaristic logic of video gameplay.

Notes



1.  I use the term ‘performative’ in Judith Butler’s sense of constitutive bodily performative acts. Much as for Butler one’s body is a doing or an ‘incessant materializing of possibilities’ (1988: 521), taking up the virtual body image of another in real time alters the perceived facticity of one’s ‘own’ biological body and creates the potential to temporarily embody other cultural and historical possibilities. 2. Brown and Cairns propose that immersion in the context of video games can be sub-divided into three different levels of gamer involvement:

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 











27

‘engagement’ (the first stage of immersion and the lowest level of involvement with a game), ‘engrossment’ (increased emotional investment by the gamer who becomes less aware of their surroundings) and ‘total immersion’ (which relates to deep engrossment and empathy with a character)—notably, total immersion in Brown and Cairns study is most commonly cited by gamers in relation to first-person perspective games. 3. The concept of flow has also formed the basis for ‘GameFlow’, a heuristic model of player enjoyment in video gaming (Sweetser and Wyeth 2005). Sweetser and Wyeth’s model consists of eight elements as a set of criteria for achieving player enjoyment in video games. ‘Immersion’ is one criterion alongside concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback and social interaction (2005: 3). 4. The study of affect theory is a vast area of research enquiry. The development of this field is largely attributed to Silvan S. Tomkins (1911–1991) who argued in Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (1962) that the affective system is the ‘primary motivational system’ (6). A resurgence of interest in the role of affect as a mediator in different kinds of behaviour was plotted by Bert S. Moore and Alice M. Isen in Affect and Social Behavior (1990). 5. A body transfer illusion is the illusion of owning a humanoid body part (e.g. a rubber hand) or a whole body (e.g. a VR avatar) other than one’s own. This field of research is sometimes referred to as ‘body-ownership’ or experimental ‘embodiment’. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, body transfer illusions are induced through the manipulation of visual perspective in combination with the distribution of correlating somatosensory signals. 6. ‘Layered reality’ is a term that has arisen in the marketing of intermedial performance practices, such as dotdotdot’s Somnai. It carries no precise definition, but can refer to the incorporation and negotiation by the participant of a range of mediums used in a single performance, such as VR, augmented and/or mixed reality, in combination with theatrical elements such as sets, live actors and physical stimuli such as temperature, taste and touch. 7.  The term ‘schema’ was first introduced by otologist Pierre Bonnier (1905) to describe the conceptual images of the body in relation to spatial organization. More recently, Frédérique de Vignemont has proposed disentangling the terms ‘body schema’ and ‘body image’ that have been used interchangeably in the field of neuropsychology. De Vignemont argues that the ‘dyadic taxonomy’ has drawn a useful distinction between the body schema, which ‘consists in sensorimotor representations of the body that guide actions’, and the body image, which ‘groups all the other representations about the body that are not used for action, whether they are perceptual, conceptual or emotional (body percept, body

28  L. JARVIS concept and body affect, cf. Gallagher 2005)’ (de Vignemont 2009: 3). My own use of the term ‘body image’ in relation to theatres of mislocalized sensation primarily concerns mediatized representations of bodies as virtual bodies (VBs) experienced from the first-person vantage point. 8. National Theatre Wales’s Bordergame (2014). 9. Punchdrunk’s “… and darkness descended” (2011), Aaron Reeves’ Dead Arise (2014), The Generation of Z: Apocalypse (2015). 10. il pixel rosso’s The Great Spavaldos (2012–). 11. Ontroerend Goed’s Internal (2007–), ZU-UK’s Binaural Dinner Date (2017). 12. Shunt’s Amato Saltone (2005–). 13. Analogue’s Re-enactments (2012–14). 14. differencEngine’s Heist (2014–) and Tarento Productions’ The Grift (2018). 15. differencEngine’s The People’s Revolt (2017). 16. Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You (2003). 17. BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to be Another (2016) at Good Chance’s Encampment as part of Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love. 18. Metis Arts’s 3rd Ring Out (2010–), Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night (2013), The Enlightenment Café’s New Atlantis (2014), Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation) (2014–). 19. You Me Bum Bum Train (2004–), Look Left Look Right’s You Once Said Yes (2011). 20. David Rosenberg’s Contains Violence (2008) and Electric Hotel (2010). 21. Badac Theatre’s The Factory (2008) immersed its theatre-going audience in an experience that simulated the individual stages of the killing process in the gas chambers, provoking fierce debate and discussion as to the theatrical limits of casting an audience as the prisoners in the re-staging of a traumatic historical event. The performance took place in a series of underground beer cellars at The Pleasance Courtyard during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I have examined this work and the ethics of positioning audiences as obedient re-enactors of the suffering of others elsewhere (Jarvis 2016). 22. Elam is quoting from Nicholas Rescher’s A Theory of Possibility (1975). 23. John M. Hull’s autobiographical account of blindness is captured in his book, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990). He later published On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness (1997), which focuses on the state of blindness rather than losing sight. 24.  More recent Punchdrunk shows such as Kabeiroi (2017), a balloted two-person experience around London, have incorporated various different modes of participation within the one event—Kabeiroi was part-tourist

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 











29

audio guide, part-treasure hunt and part-immersion in a scenographically transformed site-specific location. Notably, some theatre critics argued that unlike the earlier masked works, Kabeiroi ‘never quite captures […] the sense of total immersion in the surroundings’ (Lukowski 2017). 25. This is one of the numerous productions in which the company masks its spectators: e.g. Faust (2006), The Masque of the Red Death (2007), Sleep No More (2011), etc. 26. Memory deficits such as anterograde and retrograde amnesia have been studied by psychologists, biologists and clinicians for over 100 years (e.g. Théodule Ribot’s Les Maladies de la Mémoire [1881]). 27. The results of the procedure were later detailed in a scientific paper published in the Nature journal by Annese et al., entitled ‘Postmortem Examination of Patient H.M.’s Brain Based on Histological Sectioning and Digital 3D Reconstruction’ (2014). 28. Koss argues that the concept of Einfühlung and the ‘uncomfortable destabilization of identity along the viewer’s perceptual borders’ that were inextricably associated with the term were forcefully rejected by Wilhelm Worringer in 1908 and later by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s (2010: 67). But the plasticity of the spectator in body-ownership experiments that are subsequently framed as aesthetic acts necessitates a resurgence of the significance of the concept and a necessary re-thinking through of the problematics of bodies that are prone to distortion and manipulation. 29.  In regard to ‘science plays’, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr’s Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006) offers a useful study of play texts from the Renaissance to the present, as does Eva-Sabine Zehelein’s Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain, 1990–2007 (2009). Sue-Ellen Case’s Performing Science and the Virtual (2007) examines plays, experimental live art and cyber practices, tracing a trajectory from nineteenth-century alchemy to the twenty-first-century virtual avatar. 30.  Mark O’Connell in To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (2017) cites political philosopher John Gray’s definition of gnosticism’s contemporary resurgence through transhumanism as ‘the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines’. This gnostic position can be traced to early Christian heretical sects that rendered embodiment itself as an evil through the belief that ‘humans were divine spirits trapped in a flesh that was the very material of evil’ (O’Connell 2017: 62). 31. ‘Postdramatic theatre’ is a term that has been widely deployed by many theoreticians since its introduction by Hans Thies Lehmann and expounded in his seminal book Postdramatic Theatre (2006) to describe theatre practices that operate ‘beyond drama, at a time “after” the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre’ (Lehmann 27).

30  L. JARVIS 32. For Matthew Causey, postdigital works can be understood as ‘thinking digitally, embodying an activist strategy of critique within and against postdigital culture’s various ideological and economic strategies of control, alienation, and self-commodification’ (Causey 2016: 432). 33. McConachie defines ‘reading’ in quite narrow terms. In the late 1990s, Espen Aarseth argued in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997) that some texts place extranoematic responsibilities on their readers beyond ‘eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’ (1). For example, ‘ergodic’ texts—a term Aarseth appropriates from the Greek ergon (‘work’) and hodos (‘path’)—such as I Ching hieroglyphics require physical movement and reading visual narratives on a wall cross-spatially. 34. First wave cognitive science, which Lawrence Shapiro defines as ‘standard cognitive science’ in Embodied Cognition (2011), limited its investigations to processes within the head ‘without regard for the world outside the organism’ (Shapiro 27). 35. Popper argues towards a scientific methodology based on ‘falsifiability’ in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published as Logik der Forschung in 1934 and published in English in 1959). 36. In an essay (published in Aeon magazine) entitled ‘Your Point Is?’ by journalist Steven Poole (2003), he states that ‘it is and has always been the job and the glory of science to fly in the face of common sense. If a theory that is robustly supported with evidence conflicts your common sense, you had better adjust the latter’ (‘Your Point Is?’).

References Aarseth, Espen. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. London: John Hopkins University Press. Alston, Adam. 2016a. Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016b. The Promise of Experience: Immersive Theatre in the Experience Economy. In Reframing Immersive Theatre, ed. James Frieze, 243–264. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Annese, Jacopo, et al. 2014. Postmortem Examination of Patient H.M.’s Brain Based on Histological Sectioning and Digital 3D Reconstruction. Nature. Uploaded 28 January. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3916843/pdf/ncomms4122.pdf. Accessed 31 May 2015. Banakou, Domna, Raphaela Groten, and Mel Slater. 2013. Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Child Body Causes Overestimation of Object Sizes and Implicit Attitude Changes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (31): 12846–12851.

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

31

Barker, Hannah, Lewis Hetherington, and Liam Jarvis. 2011. 2401 Objects. London: Oberon Modern Plays. Bennett, Susan. 1990. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London and New York: Routledge. Biggin, Rose. 2017. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience. Cham: Springer International. Blair, Rhonda. 2008. The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Blanke, Olaf, and Thomas Metzinger. 2009. Full-Body Illusions and Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (1): 7–13. Bleeker, Maike (ed.). 2008. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Blau, Herbert. 1990. The Audience. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Bonnier, Pierre. 1905. L’Aschématie [Aschematia]. Revue Neurologique 13: 605–609. Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. 1998. Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See. Nature 391 (6669): 756. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London, UK: Polity Press. Brown, Emily, and Paul Cairns. 2004. A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion. In (Proceedings) ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2004, 1297–1300, ACM Press. Brozzoli, Claudio, Giovanni Gentile, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2012. That’s Near My Hand! Parietal and Premotor Coding of Hand-Centered Space Contributes to Localization and Self-Attribution of the Hand. Journal of Neuroscience 32 (42): 14573–14582. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. Case, Sue-Ellen. 2007. Performing Science and the Virtual. New York and London: Routledge. Causey, Matthew. 2016. Postdigital Performance. Theatre Journal 68 (3): 427–441. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. ———. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, Paul, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye, and Johanna Linsley. 2018. Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

32  L. JARVIS Cook, Amy. 2010. Shakespearean Neuroplay: Reinvigorating the Study of Dramatic Texts and Performance Through Cognitive Science, 1st ed., Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. London: Harper Perennial. D’Apice, Mary. Interview with John Hull, Author of Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. VisionAware. http://www.visionaware.org/info/ emotional-support/personal-stories/eye-conditions-personal-stories/interview-with-john-hull-author-of-touching-the-rock-an-experience-of-blindness/1235. Accessed 31 Aug 2018. Davies, Char. 2003. Rethinking VR: Key Concepts and Concerns. In Hybrid Reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor, ed. Hal Thwaites, 253– 262 (9th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia). Montreal, Canada: International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. Davis, Pippa. 2016. Patrick Killoran’s Observation Deck—Feeling on Edge. Ikon Gallery. Uploaded 8 September 2016. https://www.ikon-gallery.org/ blog/2016/09/08/patrick-killorans-observation-deck-feeling-on-edge/. Accessed 31 Aug 2018. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2009. Body Schema and Body Image: Pros and Cons. Neuropsychologia 48 (3): 669–680. ———. 2018. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Vignemont, Frédérique, and A. Farnè. 2010. Widening the Body to Rubber Hands and Tools: What’s the Difference? Revue de Neuropsychologie, Neurosciences Cognitives 2 (3): 203–211. Di Benedetto, Stephen. 2010. The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Di Luca, Massimiliano. 2010. New Method to Measure End-to-End Delay of Virtual Reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19 (6): 569–584. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Leonardo (Series). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ehrsson, H.H. 2007. The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences. Science 317 (5841): 1048. Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen. Ellis-Petersen, Hannah. 2017. Mat Collishaw Restages 1839 Photography Show in Virtual Reality. The Guardian. Uploaded 14 April 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/14/somerset-house-mat-collishaw-restages-1839-photography-show-in-virtual-reality. Accessed 20 Oct 2018. Eveleth, Rose. 2018. The Limits of Empathy. Topic Magazine. https://www. topic.com/the-limits-of-empathy. Accessed 2 Nov 2018.

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

33

Feldman Barrett, Lisa, and Jolie Wormwood. 2015. When a Gun Is Not a Gun. The New York Times: Gray Matter, 17 April. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/when-a-gun-is-not-a-gun.html. Accessed 18 Aug 2018. Fletcher, Angus. 2011. Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1973. Naissance de la Clinique [The Birth of the Clinic], trans. Alan M. Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1979 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freshwater, Helen. 2009. Theatre & Audience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fried, Michael. 1998 [1967]. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frith, Chris. 2007. Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2007. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge. Gardner, Lyn. 2018. Lyn Gardner: It’s Time to Discuss Protecting Performers in Immersive Shows. The Stage. Uploaded 5 March 2018. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2018/lyn-gardner-its-time-to-discuss-protecting-performers-in-immersive-shows/. Accessed 16 Mar 2018. Genette, Gérard. 1988 [1983]. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gibson, James J. 2014 [1979]. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. Classic ed. Psychology Press Classic Editions. Psychology Press. Goldstein, Kurt. 1908. Zur Lehre von der motorischen Apraxie [On the Doctrine of the Motor Apraxia]. Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie (in German) 11 (4/5): 169–187. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Hagiwara, Magnus Andersson, Per Backlund, Hanna Maurin Söderholm, Lars Lundberg, Mikael Lebram, and Henrik Engström. 2016. Measuring Participants’ Immersion in Healthcare Simulation: The Development of an Instrument. Advances in Simulation 1: 17. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heddon, Deirdre, and Dominic Johnson (eds.). 2016. It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells. Bristol: LADA and Intellect.

34  L. JARVIS Jamieson, Amber. 2018. Performers and Staffers at “Sleep No More” Say Audience Members Have Sexually Assaulted Them. BuzzFeed. Uploaded 6 February 2018. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amberjamieson/ sleep-no-more#.cgyMmDMxvr. Accessed 16 Mar 2018. Jarvis, Liam. 2016. Renegotiating Immersive Participation. In Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, eds. Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson. Great Britain: Palgrave. ———. 2017. The Ethics of Mislocalized Selfhood. Performance Research 22 (3): 30–37. ———. 2019. Theatre, Appification and VR Apps: Disability Simulations as an Intervention in ‘Affective Realism’. Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance, ed. Fintan Walsh. London and New York: Methuen Drama Engage. Klich, Rosemary, and Edward Scheer (eds.). 2012. Multimedia Performance. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan. Knecht, S., H. Henningsen, T. Elbert, H. Flor, C. Höhling, C. Pantev, and E. Taub. 1996. Reorganizational and Perceptional Changes After Amputation. Brain 119 (4): 1213–1219. Koss, Juliet. 2010. Modernism After Wagner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Kuppers, Petra. 2007. The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Lenggenhager, B., T. Tadi, T. Metzinger, and O. Blanke. 2007. Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness. Science 317 (5841): 1096–1099. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingus. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lukowski, Andrzej. 2017. Andrzej Lukowski: The Verdict on Punchdrunk’s Low-key Show Kabeiroi. The Stage. Lutterbie, John. 2011. Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance, 1st ed., Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013a. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013b. (Syn)aesthetics and Immersive Theatre: Embodied Beholding in Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, 199–216. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

35

Maister, Lara, Natalie Sebanz, Günther Knoblich, and Manos Tsakiris. 2013. Experiencing Ownership Over a Dark-Skinned Body Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. Cognition 128 (2): 170–178. Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham: Duke University Press. May, Shaun. 2011. Equipmentality, Fundamental Ontology, and the ‘Humour of the Human’. Who Do We Think We Are? Representing the Human. Conference Paper. 19 March. McConachie, Bruce. 2008. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. Theatre & Mind. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. McConachie, Bruce, and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds.). 2006. Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn. London: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall. 2001 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge. Meineck, Peter. 2011. The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. Third Series 19 (1): 113–158. Mermikides, Alex Mermikides, and Gianna Bouchard (eds.). 2016. Performance and the Medical Body. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Mislocalization. Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mislocalization. Accessed 16 Jan 2018. Mislocalize. Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ mislocalize. Accessed 16 Jan 2018. Mitchell, Katie. 2009. The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. New York: Routledge. Moore, Bert S., and Alice M. Isen. 1990. Affect and Social Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, G.E. 1939. Proof of an External World. Proceedings of the British Academy 25: 273–300. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Connell, Mark. 2017. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. London: Granta Books. Olivé, Isadora, and Alain Berthoz. 2012. Combined Induction of Rubber-Hand Illusion and Out-of-Body Experiences. Frontiers in Psychology 3. Ontology. Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ ontology. Accessed 17 Aug 2018. Paavolainen, Teemu. 2012. Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

36  L. JARVIS Paffrath, James D., and Stelarc (eds.). 1984. Obsolete Body/Suspensions/Stelarc. Davis, CA: JP Publications. Perry, M., and C. Medina. 2011. Embodiment and Performance in Pedagogy Research: Investigating the Possibility of the Body in Curriculum Experience. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 27 (3): 62–75. Petkova, Valeria I., and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2008. If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping. PLoS One 3 (12): e3832. Pfaller, Robert. 1996. Um die Ecke Gelacht. Kuratoren Nehmen uns die Kunstbetrachtung ab, Videorecorder Schauen sich unsere Lieblingsfilme an: Anmerkungen zum Paradoxon der Interpassivität. In Falter 41/96.71. Poole, Steven. 2003. Your Point Is? Aeon. Uploaded 11 February. http://aeon. co/magazine/philosophy/steven-poole-teleology. Accessed 2 Sept 2015. Popper, Frank. 2007. From Technological to Virtual Art. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Popper, Karl R. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Sandra Blakeslee. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and William Hirstein. 1998. ‘The Perception of Phantom Limbs’. The D. O. Hebb Lecture. Brain 121 (9): 1603–1630. Reinelt, Janelle (P.I.), David Edgar, Chris Megson, Dan Rebellato, Julie Wilkinson, and Jane Woddis (The British Theatre Consortium). 2014. Cultural Value—Critical Mass: Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution. http://britishtheatreconference.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ Critical-Mass-10.7.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug 2018. Relational. Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ relational. Accessed 17 Aug 2018. Rescher, Nicholas. 1975. A Theory of Possibility. Oxford: Blackwell. Ribot, Théodule. 1881. Les Maladies de la mémoire. Paris: J. B. Baillière. Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Frank. 2011. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York and London: Norton. Scherer, K.R. 2005. What Are Emotions? And How Can They Be Measured? Social Science Information 44: 693–727. Sedgman, Kirsty. 2016. Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Publishers. Shapiro, Lawrence. 2011. Embodied Cognition. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Shaughnessy, Nicola (ed.). 2013. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1  INTRODUCTION: IMMERSION AS ‘PERCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT’ 

37

Simons, Daniel J., and Christopher F. Chabris. 1999. Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events. Perception 28 (9): 1059–1074. Slater, Mel, Angus Antley, Adam Davison, David Swapp, Christoph Guger, Chris Barker, Nancy Pistrang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Aldo Rustichini. 2006. A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PLoS ONE 1 (1): e39. Slater, Mel, Bernhard Spanlang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Olaf Blanke. 2010. First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality. PLoS One 5 (5): e10564. Slater, Mel, Martin Usoh, and Anthony Steed. 1994. Depth of Presence in Virtual Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 3 (2): 130–144. Stevenson, Jill. 2010. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Steyerl, Hito. 2013. Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? E-flux. Journal #49. Uploaded November 2013. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/ too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/. Accessed 4 Nov 2018. Sweetser, Penelope, and Peta Wyeth. 2005. GameFlow: A Model for Evaluating Player Enjoyment in Games. Computers in Entertainment 3 (3): 1–24. Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing. Thelen, Esther, and Linda B. Smith. 1994. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Tomkins, Silvan S. 1962a. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affect. New York: Springer. ———. 1962b. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. Vol. 2, The Negative Affect. New York: Springer. Tribble, Evelyn B. 2011. Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre. New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Trueman, Matt. 2015. Immersive Theatre: Take Us to the Edge, but Don’t Throw Us In. The Guardian: Theatre Blog. Uploaded 7 April 2010. http:// www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/apr/07/immersive-theatreterrifyingexperience. Accessed 31 May 2015. Understanding the Refugee Crisis via Virtual Reality. 2016. BBC iPlayer Radio. Presented by Tina Daheley. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0430f89. Accessed 28 Jan 2017. Vanhoutte, Kurt, and Nele Wynants. 2010. Immersion. Mapping Intermediality in Performance, eds. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vischer, Robert. 1993 [1873]. Über das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik [On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics]. In Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds.

38  L. JARVIS Harry Francis Mailgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Weisberg, Deena Skolnick, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, and Jeremy R. Gray. 2008. The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (3): 470–477. Welton, Martin. 2012. Feeling Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. White, Gareth. 2009. Odd Anonymized Needs: Punchdrunk’s Masked Spectator. In Modes of Spectating, eds. Alison Oddey and Christine White, 219–230. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2012. On Immersive Theatre. Theatre Research International 37 (3): 221–235. ———. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Witmer, Bob G., and Michael J. Singer. 1998. Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 7 (3): 225–240. Woolley, Benjamin. 1993. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zehelein, Eva-Sabine. 2009. Science: Dramatic: Science Plays in America and Great Britain, 1990–2007, American Studies—A Monograph Series. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Zimbardo, Philip. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

PART I

CHAPTER 2

Proto-Immersive Discourse and the ‘Theatrical Condition’

Introduction: Bodily Denial in Art Theory The contemporary yen for enveloping aesthetics can be read as contiguous with historical and proto-immersive discourse in art theory—in particular, art critic and historian Michael Fried and his eighteenth-century antecedent Denis Diderot’s shared concern for ‘absorption’. In Fried’s seminal essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), he famously criticized Minimal Art, or what he termed ‘literalist’ art in the 1960s, for its inherent ‘theatricality’.1 The word ‘theatrical’ is steeped in miscellany, accruing meanings as diverse as a type of performance style, the ‘definitive condition or attitude for postmodern art and thought’, or an ‘aesthetic’ or ‘philosophical system’ (Davis and Postlewait 2003: 1). While ‘anti-theatricality’ shares in its antonym’s polysemy, Fried’s anti-theatrical concerns in ‘Art and Objecthood’ are distinct, and the specific ‘theatre’ that is challenged is characterized as a phenomenon that is both a ‘threat’ to the arts and to the practice of theatre itself. His critique was a reaction against a closing proximity between artwork and spectator and an increasing convergence between the domains of fine art, theatre and other fields. But Fried’s anti-theatrical argument accords with more enduring philosophical discourses that have sought to deny the ‘beholder’s’ bodily presence in the reception of art, and the charge against ‘theatrical’ artworks is that they acknowledge and incorporate spectating bodies. By contrast, the ontology that underlies the spectatorship of what Fried later termed as ‘absorptive’ artworks is one of © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_2

41

42  L. JARVIS

negation—the denial of its beholder’s physical presence. Fried’s hostile stance to the perceived ‘theatricality’ of Minimal Art followed in the Diderotian anti-theatrical tradition (Diderot 1995 [1757], 1995 [1758]), but beyond Minimalism, I argue that the immersive artworks and performances discussed throughout Immersive Embodiment are synonymous with what Fried has defined as the ‘theatrical condition’. By association, the artworks discussed in this chapter are symptomatic of a pervasive shift towards experience-creation that incorporates the body of the spectator within the conceptual ‘frame’ of the work, or designates the intersensory effects and affects of the experiencing body as itself the ‘art’. The integration of the spectator in the ‘theatrical’ artwork provides a necessary precondition to the ontological paradox and incongruity of the participant’s physical presence inside different kinds of ‘elsewhere’ phenomena, such as the promise of ‘entering’ dramatic universes, paintings or virtual environments. It is the illusionistic transformation of the spectator’s body in theatres of mislocalized sensation that seeks to either reconcile Fried’s paradox between mental absorption in the work and the theatrical physical presence of the beholder in their own situation, or more radically, to shift the perceived boundaries of spectating bodies themselves in order to raise productive doubts about reality as it is constructed through a body’s senses. In this chapter, I revisit Fried’s polemic on theatricality and absorption to demonstrate how the immersive practices that I am terming as theatres of mislocalized sensation are genealogically linked to the ‘theatrical’ artwork’s problematizing of the subject-object relationship—or more particularly, the relationship between body-self. I will subsequently explore the peculiar ‘being there’ of gallery visitors ‘entering’ Dali, van Gogh and Magritte paintings through their remediation in VR, the co-mingling of art and scientific instrumentation (e.g. art practices that draw on apparatus used in the study of perceptual illusions by psychologists such as George Stratton and James R. Lackner), and the manipulation of beholding bodies inside proprioceptive illusions within the gallery-based installations and performances of Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller and Lundahl & Seitl.

Friedian/Diderotian Anti-theatricality Hostility towards both ‘theatre’ and the ‘theatrical’ have been enduring from Plato’s hostility towards impersonation in the Republic, to Saint Augustine of Hippo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, William

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

43

Wilberforce and Friedrich Nietzsche’s respective anti-theatrical discourses. In The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (1981), Jonas Barish described anti-theatricality as an ‘ontological malaise’; a ‘condition inseparable from our beings, which we can no more discard than we can shed our skins’ (2). Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner more recently argued towards a less ahistorical reading of anti-theatricality in Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (2007) on the basis that there has been an abundance of anti-theatricalisms, each targeting different underlying concepts for which the word ‘theatricality’ has been a container. Rather than isolating attacks on theatre as exemplifiers of an ‘ingrained prejudice’, they argue that anti-theatrical discourses should be understood by the ‘phantasm of the theatre’ that they seek to construct and oppose and the ‘values’ that motivate the attacks (Ackerman and Puchner 2007: 12). Michael Fried’s anti-theatrical polemic is rooted specifically in the spectatorial relationship between the ‘beholder’ and the art object, arguing that a work of art—be it the art of theatre, cinema or the visual arts—should resist a consciousness of being beheld. Fried’s metaphysical axiom is that ‘a work of art is not an object’ (Levine in Beaulieu et al. 2000: 293) and it must transcend its literal physical properties. For Fried, the artwork should also remain a ‘closed system’ that supersedes the situation in which it is experienced. By this logic, a beholder’s involvement is necessarily imaginative, and not physical or delimited to the ‘here and now’ of a body’s viewing situation. Fried critiqued Minimalist Art for being both ‘theatrical’ and ‘ideological’ (1998 [1967]: 148). Beyond mere preferences of taste, he claimed that the work belonged to a ‘general and pervasive condition’ (1998 [1967]: 149). Notably, Fried’s description of theatricality here resonates with Barish’s contention that anti-theatricality is also a ‘condition’, affirming that across both art and theatre scholarship the foundations of this debate are ontological in origin and intrinsically connected to the ‘being there’ of beholding audiences. The ‘theatricality’ that Fried perceived in the works of the Minimalists radically shifted analysis in a way he did not intend by interrogating the subject-object relationship. Fried’s negative definition of the ‘theatrical’—which mirrors Diderot’s pejorative use of the term le théâtral (‘the theatrical’) to imply ‘consciousness of being beheld, as synonymous with falseness’ (Fried 1988: 100)—is perhaps most succinctly explained through his analysis of American sculptor Tony Smith’s (1912–1980) description of a car ride that he took with his students on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike

44  L. JARVIS

at night time. Fried used the following anecdote from Smith to illustrate the crux of the problematic he observes in the theatricalization of art in the 1960s: The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had an expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognised. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. (Smith qtd. in Fried 1998 [1967]: 158)

Fifty years on from Smith’s ‘unframeable’ car ride, an abundance of arts and performance practices have conceptually ‘framed’ landscapes, found spaces and scenographically transformed environments that contain the spectator as art forms; including Richard Schechner’s environmental theatre (Schechner 1973), land art/environmental art/Earthworks (Tufnell 2006; Lailach 2007), site-sympathetic/-generic/-specific performances (Wilkie 2002) and immersive theatres (Machon 2013), to name just a few eclectic examples. In the year prior to Fried’s essay, Allan Kaprow had already mapped out a developmental sequence from twodimensional images to performance art in Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (1966), beginning with framed paintings, and subsequently following a trajectory through objects pasted from the real world (e.g. collages), the protrusions of assemblages, the spilling-out of assemblages onto the gallery floor, the creation of ‘environments’ through which spectators can travel, and finally ‘happenings’ that occur in those constructed environments (Schechner 1994: ix). For Fried, it was the absence of the art object substituted for an ‘experience’ in a situation that represented a threat to art. He argued that the theatricality of Minimalist sculptures was rooted in their concern with the circumstances in which the spectator encounters the artwork. Whereas previously what was to be had from art was located ‘strictly within’ it, the experience of literalist work is rather that of ‘an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’ (1998: 125). This argument could be understood as a resistance to the closing proximity between sculptural objects and the beholding bodies viewing the work (or more broadly, between art and life), and the propensity towards participatory

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

45

forms. One problem Fried claims is exacerbated by the ‘inclusiveness’ of the beholder’s situation, is that ‘everything he [or she] observes counts as part of that situation and hence is felt to bear in some way that remains undefined on his [or her] experience of the object’ (Fried 1998 [1967]: 166). For Fried, the more effective a setting, the more superfluous the art object becomes, and both Fried and Smith’s notion of open-ended experiences or ‘situations’ replacing art objects shared in the fatalistic assumption that these developments represented the ‘end of art’.2 Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard would later use the word ‘transaesthetic’ in The Conspiracy of Art (2005) to similarly describe art’s disappearance through its loss of distinct boundaries or fundamental rules to differentiate ‘art’ from other everyday ‘objects’, resonating with Fried’s charge of the Minimalists that they had ‘hypostasized’ their sculptures’ objecthood. Fried’s pre-disposition was towards ‘ocular’ relations between the artwork and the beholder, which necessitate a fixed binary between subject-object to ensure exteriority from the artwork. But the threat of the ‘experiential’ encounter is that it draws attention to beholding as an embodied act, since embodiment is ‘how we experience, what we experience and whom we experience’ (Eccleston 2015: 260). Furthermore, the experiential collapses stable binary relations between art/beholder, art/ world and work/context. This signals a further complexity in what Fried had meant by ‘theatre’, which acquires a peculiarly singular meaning in his discourse that is primarily bound up in its relationship to an experiencing audience. The word ‘theatre’ has the same etymology as the word ‘theory’, from the Greek word thea, designating a place from which to observe, or to see. In Theatricality as a Medium (2004), Samuel Weber suggests that the ‘valorization of sight over the other senses […] often results from the desire to secure a position, from a distance that ostensibly permits one to view the object in its entirety while remaining at a safe remove from it. This desire for exteriority and control has always felt both threatened by and attracted to a certain conception of theater’ (Weber 2004: 3). Understood in this way, Fried’s ocular desire for exteriority from the artwork, far from being antagonistic, is entirely complicit with particular movements in ‘theatre’. For example, Naturalist fourth-wall dramas ‘laid out like an experiment from which the audience draw their own conclusions’ (Waters 2010: 44). And more recently, the ‘extreme Naturalism’ associated with directors such as Katie Mitchell has been understood, in part, as a recuperation of Naturalism’s avant-gardist

46  L. JARVIS

exclusion of the audience through the intervening mediation of screens/ live video feeds or sets in which the fourth-wall has been filled in to create a physical partition between audience and the action (Rebellato and Solga 2018). But through whatever means, a separation between observers and the subjects/objects of observation is implicitly encoded in the word ‘theatre’s’ etymological origins. Though as numerous scholars have contended in the wake of what has been termed as the affective (Clough and Halley 2007) and corporeal ‘turns’ (Sheets-Johnstone 2009),3 theatre has always involved more than just seeing (Welton 2011), with embodied reception or ‘theatrical feeling’ increasingly becoming a focus of study (Hurley 2010: 3). What Fried pejoratively critiques as ‘theatrical’ is more closely aligned with experiential theatre forms that do not seek to distance or deny the beholder’s presence. Notably, for Fried the act of ‘beholding’ prioritizes the visual sense and yet the word ‘behold’ pertains to the notion of ‘looking’ only in English, originating from the old English bihaldan, from bi meaning ‘thoroughly’ and haldan, meaning ‘to hold’ (‘Behold’). Parallel Germanic words rather carry the sense of ‘maintaining’ or ‘retaining’ something (‘Behold’). Thus to ‘behold’, as in to ‘thoroughly hold’, to ‘retain’ or to grasp the artwork, is a notion that is dispensed with except in a strictly metaphorical sense. Congruously, the notion of an artwork as something that might be instrumentalist, an interactive ‘tool’ with an applied usevalue or the substitution of art objects altogether for ‘scientific’ apparatus that the participant can use to act upon their own bodies in different ways (e.g. to explore how one’s mind adapts to temporary distortions of perception in Carsten Höller’s installations) is inconceivable via Fried’s discourse. Antithetically, the ‘theatrical’ art practices examined in Part II of this book use different kinds of immersive acts and illusions of bodying other’s experiences for applications as diverse as communication tools in health care settings and platforms to aid conflict resolution with different diasporas (see Chapter 5). Fried’s critique in ‘Art and Objecthood’ that theatricality was at ‘war’ with art was broken down into three propositions. Firstly, on the grounds of theatre’s incompleteness—‘incomplete’ in the sense that it is the presence of the beholder that brings about the completion of the work. Secondly, that theatre is a corrupting phenomenon and that ‘art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater’ (Fried 1998 [1967]: 164). This criticism is rooted in theatre’s synthesis, or its designation as a disparate set of activities that he suggests creates the ‘illusion’

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

47

that there are no boundaries between different art forms, or that they are sliding towards an ‘implosive, highly desirable synthesis’ (Fried 1998 [1967]: 164). Finally, Fried suggested that the quality of a work is only measurable within the individual arts, and theatre by its nature is in-between art forms. This criticism is based on quality and value, which for Fried are meaningful ‘only within the individual arts; what lies between the arts is theater’ (Fried 1998 [1967]: 164). It is the culmination of these propositions that I suggest encapsulates what I am describing as the ‘theatrical condition’, and the commonality between the three claims is that they all concern boundary disputes. Fried occupies an essentialist position, rejecting the incomplete or ‘open’ work,4 interdisciplinary enquiry and the incommensurable, respectively. But the kinds of radical acts of ‘theatrical’ immersion that represent theatres of mislocalized sensation not only problematize the barriers Fried had sought to reinforce between art forms, but the boundaries between participating bodies and physical or virtual objects. Scientific experiments that use body illusions to temporarily destabilize the phenomenal selfhood of a participant when re-conceptualized as ‘art’, problematize the binary between subject and object that characterize Fried’s anti-theatrical position. The case studies that I discuss throughout this book are synonymous with the three tenets of the theatrical condition; they are incomplete to the extent that it is beholding bodies and their intersensory effects prompted through different intervening technological apparatus that becomes itself the ‘artwork’. They are synthesised and boundary-less, both in terms of their propensity to promiscuously draw on knowledge across multiple fields of research endeavour, and to destabilize boundaries between beholding bodies and other phenomena. Finally, they are incommensurable insofar as the quality and value of the works cannot be measured by characteristics that are essential to one art form. However, the practices I discuss can draw on objective measures in adjacent research fields that take a body’s conscious and autonomic responses while inside a body illusion as ‘evidence’ for different phenomena (e.g. skin conductance responses, implicit association tests [IAT] etc.). But my interest in this chapter involves the reappropriation of body illusions in gallery contexts to explore individual bodily experience rather than to gather empirical evidence.

48  L. JARVIS

‘Entering’ Paintings: Absorptive and Theatrical Immersion Fried proposed the concept of ‘absorption’ as the antithesis of theatricality in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1988). Absorption is formulated in relation to the concerns that pre-occupied French figurative paintings of the early and mid1750s, but one that has a precursor in Denis Diderot’s Essais sur la peinture (first published in 1796).5 For Fried, absorption refers to compositional strategies used by painters within the mise-en-scène to deny, or at least not acknowledge, the existence of the beholder that is viewing the painting. As beholders, we look at the private actions of painted figures that are seemingly unaware that they are the subjects of our gaze, engrossed in absorptive acts such as reading, sleeping or praying etc. Fried provides a historical context for the emergence of ‘the primacy of absorption’, which he argues was a reaction against the decorative paintings of the Rococo that began circa 1747. The defining feature of the absorptive artwork for Fried, is the creation of a world that is ‘self-sufficient’, ‘autonomous’, a ‘closed system’ that was ‘blind’ to the world of the beholder, capturing the spectator’s gaze through what he describes as ‘a virtual trance of imaginative involvement’ (Fried 1998: 48). Fried argues that this conception of painting rested on what Diderot had classified as the ‘supreme fiction’ of the beholder’s ‘nonexistence’, and that the fiction may be thought of as a sort of ‘metaphysical illusion anterior to and necessary for dramatic illusion’ (108). This idea corresponds with Nicholas Rescher’s aforementioned argument in my ‘Introduction’ that access to dramatic worlds is necessarily ‘not physical’ (see page 8). The Friedian sense of ‘absorption’ differs from its more recent use in game studies, where Gordon Calleja disambiguates immersion as absorption—‘Absorption in some condition, action, interest’ (Calleja 2011: 26)—from immersion as transportation, which ‘refers to the idea of being present in another place’ (27). Friedian absorption is less concerned with levels of attention and engagement with an art object and more with the ontology of the beholder. I should note that Fried draws this theatrical/absorptive binary only in relation to realism in paintings of this historical period—‘absorption’ is notably omitted from the discussion in the 1960s in ‘Art and Objecthood’, which as I have discussed offered anti-theatricality as the opposition to Minimalism’s theatricality. Nonetheless, in a more recent

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

49

interview (Beaulieu et al. 2000), Fried concedes that there is a parallel between the absorptive properties he identified in pre-modernist paintings and cinema, which Fried had heralded in ‘Art and Objecthood’ as ‘escaping’ theatre on account of its absorptive properties as a medium (Fried 1998 [1967]: 164).6 The darkening of the auditorium to cloak the viewer’s body and facilitate their mental absorption in onscreen action is an ideal model for absorptive immersion, and one that implies that absorption as a concept goes beyond historical paintings. Bearing some relevance to the role of darkness in the cinema auditorium that instantiates the illusive non-existence of the beholder that Fried had desired, Claire Bishop later used the term ‘mimetic engulfment’ to describe the experience of art installations that invite visitors to step into a consuming darkness. In contrast to ‘theatrical’ Minimalist and Postminimalist artworks that heighten an awareness of the perceiving body in spaces of light, mimetic engulfment for Bishop serves to ‘dislodge or annihilate our sense of self –albeit only temporarily’ (Bishop 2005: 82) through the obscuration of spaces and bodies in dark environments—a theme that has also been explored among a cluster of different concepts pertaining to immersion, darkness and performance in Adam Alston and Martin Welton’s Theatre in the Dark (2017). But unlike Fried’s specific definition of beholder-denying absorptive paintings, the immaterial and experiential work that is ascribed the term ‘mimetic engulfment’ can make beholders more aware of their body as ‘a loss’ by reassigning emphasis to their other sense modalities (Bishop 2005: 82). It is the distance that sight affords that is crucial to absorptive art in the Friedian sense, and the ‘over-there-ness’ of cinema for its viewers both conceptually (i.e. the pre-recorded/edited ‘world’ presented through onscreen images) and physically (i.e. the distance between spectator and screen), serves to secure the viewer’s exterior position (Springer 2009: 79). In contrast, theatre spectatorship for Nicholas Ridout eschews the ‘oneness’ of absorption entirely because the action takes place ‘inbetween, neither onstage nor off, accompanied by the rattle and clatter of unseemly machinery in the wings’ (Ridout 2006: 9). Like theatricality, absorption in Fried’s lexicon has wider implications in discussions on immersion because it is concerned with the being there of an artwork’s beholder and not taxonomies of artistic style, form or medium. Therefore, it is important to crystallize a distinction between post-Friedian theatrical and absorptive immersion, which has applications across various media. Theatrical immersion entails an immersant’s

50  L. JARVIS

whole-body involvement and incorporation, while simultaneously fulfilling Fried’s three criteria of incompleteness (the immersant completes the circuit of the work), synthesis (drawing on the combined tékhnē of different disciplines), and incommensurability within individual arts. In contrast, absorptive immersion is conceived of as a mental act or state (resonating with the definition of ‘immersion’ in Oliver Grau’s Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion [2003: 13]), and is defined by an ocular emphasis and the metaphysical exclusion or denial of viewing bodies. Theatrical immersion could be viewed as anticipatory of relational concepts such as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of performance as an ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ between co-present performers and spectators (2008: 38–40).7 For Fischer-Lichte, this feedback loop strictly concerns body-to-body encounters, but theatrical immersion, deriving from bodily relations to sculptural artefacts, can also fold non-human systems, objects and technical mediums into the loop. This aligns my conception more closely to intermedial practitioner-researchers such as Joanne Scott who have contested Fischer-Lichte’s claim that mediatized performances ‘sever’ the feedback loop, since interactions through technical mediums are often interstitial within the loop (Scott 2016: 87). The opening example of BeAnotherLab’s VR body-swap is just one example of emergent modes of networked relationality, staging a dynamic negotiation between a spectator leading the movements of the co-present performer’s mediatized body image as viewed through an Oculus Rift headset from the first-person perspective. Maaike Bleeker in Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (2008) has argued that the staged character of theatrical events set them in opposition to modernist notions of authenticity. As a result, theatre is consigned to resort to presentational strategies of ‘obscuring or erasing traces of its own condition of being staged’ (2008: 3) in order to avoid the event’s inherent relationality surfacing as a ‘failure’ to modernist sensibilities. But the metaphysical illusion of absorption generates an inevitable paradox, since paintings and performances are created to be beheld. Fried suggests that this paradox ‘directs attention to the problematic character not only of the painting-beholder relationship but of something still more fundamental—the object-beholder (one is tempted to say object-“subject”) relationship which the painting-beholder relationship epitomizes’ (Fried 1988: 104). Fried goes on to offer a significant, but seemingly contradictory account of a writing technique employed by his anti-theatrical antecedent, Diderot to exemplify

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

51

his own ontological position on the subject-object relationship. He discusses Diderot’s ‘infrequent but nevertheless far from arbitrary use of the fiction of physically entering a painting or group of paintings he is reviewing’; a fiction that Fried acknowledges is ‘at odds’ with the radical exclusion of the beholder that his writings expound (Fried 1988: 118). Fried argues that Diderot’s imaginary walks inside the landscape paintings he observed were partly to enliven his reviews for his readers. But more significantly, Fried reconciles the contradiction by stating that according to this fiction, ‘the beholder is removed from in front of the painting just as surely as if his presence were negated or neutralized, indeed just as surely as if he [or she] did not exist’ (Fried 1998 [1967]: 131). This might be termed as a ‘theatro-absorptive’ reconciliation, which rests on the imagined altered presence of the beholder to transcend their body’s physical circumstance. For Fried, a beholder can mentally ‘enter’ a painting as a portal to an imagined experience but the painting/sculpture acknowledging and sharing the beholder’s physical, bodily and spatial circumstance represented a threat to art. It is this tenuous caveat that permits Diderot to wander imaginatively through eighteenth-century paintings without disapprobation, while Tony Smith’s experience driving through the incomplete artificial landscapes of 1960s America represented unacceptable ‘theatricality’. Diderot’s imaginary walks inside paintings are finding new expression in digital culture through the ubiquity of virtual reality 360° film experiences that ‘remediate’ paintings [appropriating the content of one medium into another] (Bolter and Grusin 2000) to permit their immersants new kinds of supposed ‘entry’. For example, users are invited to enter the frames of Salvador Dali’s dreamscapes in Dreams of Dalí (2016), to roam through the animated textural impasto environments of Vincent van Gogh’s post-impressionist paintings in The Night Café (2015) and The Starry Night (2016), or to hover through the surrealist juxtapositions of Rene Magritte’s paintings in Magritte VR (part of The Magritte Experience in 2017). But VR is mirroring the recreation of previously flat painted image spaces into three-dimensional scenographic environments for subsequent mediatization. For example, the Museum of Selfies in Los Angeles, which permits its visitors ‘entry’ within a reconstructed set of van Gogh’s bedroom purposely to emblematize their self-images superimposed within the environment for subsequent memetic circulation online. VR’s underlying ontological desire to position the participant physically inside the painting’s ‘frame’, expanding

52  L. JARVIS

the flat painted surface into an enveloping and animated environment, follows in a theatrical lineage. But simultaneously, the concealment of immersed bodies inside the head-mounted displays (HMDs) of these VR experiences nods to the absorptive desire to remove beholders from their own viewing situation. For example, in Dreams of Dalí, immersants float across the moonlit Ampurdan plain of a digitally remediated Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus (1935). There is no visible virtual body for the immersant to occupy, nothing to root their body proprioceptively in the remediated virtual landscape that intertextually references iconography from various other Dali artworks as the HMDwearer glides past a Lobster Telephone (1936) that endlessly rings to itself and a parade of stork-legged elephants (The Elephants [1948]) traversing the sandy dunes. We are never ‘there’, inside Dali’s paintings because there is no ‘inside’ to be experienced, but VR’s promise in obscuring our body from its gaze is that neither are we ‘here’ in our body’s circumstance. Prior to the recent resurgence of VR over the last decade, commentators such as Jonathan Crary had questioned in the 1990s the relocation of vision, and how observing bodies as a ‘component of new machines’ were constituting precarious new subjectivities (1990: 2). Fried’s argument requires pushing further since immersivity ‘inside’ remediated VR paintings represents an ontological desire to become a subject ‘inside’ of the work or different kinds of invited interlopers. This would be closer to the notion of not being denied, nor being acknowledged as a ‘beholder’, but as if positioned as another presence inside the painting, overcoming Fried’s charge of the theatrical work’s ‘literalism’ by transcending one’s immediate physical circumstance. But the ontological promise that an immersed body might become physically, and not just imaginatively ‘elsewhere’ introduces a significant new set of problems. The body is acknowledged and physically incorporated through wearable technologies (HMDs), but simultaneously must be transcended to reconcile the incongruity of one’s own bodily presence inside a conceptual elsewhere. What do we imagine an immersed body is ‘inside’ a VR rendering inspired by a Dali painting? Especially since the conceptual plains of Dali’s oeuvre depict bodies that are disaggregated into atomic particles (Galatea of the Spheres [1952]), that metamorphose into opening chests of draws (The Anthropomorphic Cabinet [1936]) or, of particular relevance to the roaming gaze in Dreams of Dalí, bodies that float weightlessly in mid-air (Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening [1944]). How can we possibly

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

53

take our bodies with us to a conceptual plain where bodies are without substance? Fried’s prioritization of absorption has prompted numerous counter-arguments that similarly viewed his position as a denial of the spectating body. Art critic Rosalind Krauss in ‘Theories of Art After Minimalism and Pop’ (1987), critiqued Fried’s ‘optical’ emphasis in the reading of abstract painting that implied the viewer was decorporealized or ‘floating in front of the work as pure optical ray’ (1987: 61). Taking in a wider view, art historian Amelia Jones identified a refusal in art history as it had developed in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onwards to acknowledge the ‘crucial role of the body in the production and reception of works of art’ (Jones 2008: 151), and Fried’s cultural tradition of art history is consistent with the bias she identifies. And yet, as Jones acknowledges, Fried’s vehement attacks (as well as those of other art critics such as Clement Greenberg) on theatrical modes of artistic production arguably ‘opened the work to the body’ (Jones 2008: 155). Over fifty years after ‘Art and Objecthood’, Fried’s conceptualization of theatricality has become ubiquitous in art-making from the experiential and wholly object-less artwork of Tino Sehgal’s ‘constructed situations’ or ‘immaterial art’ (van den Brand 2015) to socially engaged ‘dialogical aesthetics’ (Kester 2013a [2004], 2013b). In parallel, theoretical frameworks such as Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ have shifted the assessment of the value of artworks in which the beholder ‘contributes his [or her] whole body, complete with its history and behaviour, and no longer an abstract physical presence’ (Bourriaud 2002: 59). While counter-theories of socially engaged art such as Claire Bishop’s aesthetic ‘antagonism’ (Bishop 2004) have championed ‘aesthetic strategies of dissonance, subversion, disruption’ (Miller 2016), over the assumed ‘conviviality’ of relational art in Bourriaud’s discourse. My interest in ‘dissonance’ extends beyond models of sociability to the sensoriums of participating bodies. I seek to circumvent the assumed democracy of the senses frequently implied in the word ‘multi-sensory’ when applied to immersive practices, which often ignores inner conflicts or disharmonies in the way that different sensory modalities gate each other or present conflicting information within the same body. While absorptive immersion positions viewers as an ‘abstract presence’ (Krauss 1987: 61), imaginatively transporting beholders to the ‘elsewhere’ phenomena of a painted landscape, theatrical immersion has closer associations with immersive theatres, which are genealogically

54  L. JARVIS

linked to Fried’s conceptualization of the ‘theatrical’ artwork. Theatrical immersion entails the promise of a spectator’s whole-body involvement. But more so, becoming a ‘haptically incorporated’ spectator—to borrow Josephine Machon’s assignation for audiences in immersive theatres— means either to no longer be a ‘spectator’ at all, or to rethink spectatorship beyond Fried as a more holistic mode of engagement. ‘Spectating’ might be a more accurate designation for reception in absorptive acts of immersion, while theatrical immersion necessitates different orders of temporary transformation of the spectator/beholder. Correspondingly, new knowledge in the plasticity of bodily selfhood and possibilities to mislocalize the physical sense of beholding selves has seen the burgeoning of hybridized art forms that integrate entirely different sets of illusionistic architectures inside gallery-based aesthetic experiences.

Immersed Bodies as ‘Laboratories of Doubt’: Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller, Lundahl & Seitl Following Fried’s charge of the theatricalization of art, hybrid art installations blended with physiological experiments applied in science have long invited individual immersants to explore the porousness of their own bodily boundaries. My focus here is on gallery-based works since the 1990s that are exemplars of what I am calling ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’, an umbrella term that uses the word ‘theatre’ in the Friedian derivation to mean not simply the practice of theatre but work in an eclectic range of mediums that follow in a theatrical or theatro-absorptive lineage. Participatory artworks in this tradition are characterized by incompleteness, synthesis and incommensurability within one art form. But more specifically, theatres of mislocalized sensation are a subset of theatrical art that calls into question not the subject-‘object’ relationship, but more specifically the boundary of an immersant’s body-self. The term ‘laboratory of doubt’ in the title above refers to a ready-made by Carsten Höller of the same title in 1999, which was a white MercedesBenz equipped with a pair of megaphones on the roof that intended to disseminate doubt ‘without transposing it into imagery’—an artwork that perhaps offers both a theatrical echo of Tony Smith’s car ride in the 1960s that served as a provocation to Fried for his discussion on the displacement of art objects to experiences, while anticipating the information wars decades later that have been epitomized by the terms ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’. But my contention is that participating

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

55

bodies in the works of Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller and Lundahl & Seitl become themselves laboratories of doubt, as participants act upon themselves using different technologies, quasi-experiments and ‘estranging environments’ (Todolí 2016: 5) that call into question what is commonly referred to in neuroscience as ‘inalienable entities’; a category of owned ‘objects’ that include body parts (Kemmerer 2014: 189). The bodily medium involved in day-to-day tasks, such as the action of my hands when typing this book chapter, doesn’t create a vivid awareness of my fingers in relation to the keys—I experience my body in the ‘background’ of my awareness, as Frédérique de Vignemont has commented in relation to typing (2018: 5). Theatres of mislocalized sensation then, are vehicles that are intended to trouble the proposition that we ‘use the body but rarely reflect upon it’ (de Vignemont 2018: 5).

Intersensory Conflict: Catherine Richards’ Installations I should acknowledge that body illusions have pre-dated technologies such as VR by thousands of years—Aristotle’s ‘two-noses’ illusion, for example, evidenced a phenomenon known as ‘perceptual disjunction’ in which a subject can feel the physical sensation of ‘owning’ two noses by crossing one’s middle and index finger and touching the bridge of one’s nose, making contact with both fingers (Lawton 2009). The selfdeceptive feeling of owning a supernumerary nose is due to an incorrect assumption when processing sensory information about the positions of the fingers and the regions in contact with one’s nose (Gregory and Gombrich 1973). But technologies have extended on the possibilities of momentarily playing with a body’s complex sets of integrations and/or disintegrations. Since the early 1990s, visual artist Catherine Richards’ artworks have explored virtual technology’s impact on ‘where we think our bodies begin and end’ (Richards 2013). Spectral Bodies (1991–1992) is a videotape that captures her VR experiments, which integrated proprioceptive illusions. The tape captures testimonies from neurological histories, including one woman who attempts to describe what it is like when through a neurological disease, a ‘body is blind’ to where it is located in space. In an artist statement, Richards’ highlights the extent to which the proprioceptive sense is taken for granted, creating difficulty through an inadequacy of language to accurately describe it. Such testimonies are accompanied by documentation of Richards’ own interactive work, created in consultation with scientists at Brandeis University

56  L. JARVIS

in Boston and the University of Alberta in Edmonton, including James R. Lackner, a psychologist renowned for studies in intersensory and sensory-motor interactions (see Fig. 2.1). In one experiment, an immersant wore an HMD and a data glove. Their body is re-represented in their headset as a virtual body. The participant’s virtual hand and arm are seen as spectral dots in a virtual environment, and these bodily representations begin to transform and are remapped providing a physical sense that the virtual body is theirs. Richards documented one immersant describing their felt experience of the piece while inside the illusion, who commented that ‘my neck is becoming very very short […] like a bull’s neck, and slowly disappearing into my body’ (Richards 2013). This testimony gives some indication of the way that the work played with the participant’s proprioceptive sense of inhabiting their body and the destabilising feeling of losing this sense by combining illusions of impossible arm and hand transformations with VR technology. In this respect, unlike the illusory

Fig. 2.1  Spectral Bodies (1991). Catherine Richards in Professor Green’s Lab wearing a virtual reality headset and data glove. She is inhabiting the interactive distorted spectral hand displayed on the monitors in the background

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

57

passage ‘inside’ paintings as remediated environments, the transgression in Richards’ work with primitive VR technology in the 1990s tended to entail deliberate distortions of the ‘frame’ of a participating body itself, and its realm of perception. In Richards’ Virtual Body (1993) installation, the gallery visitor is confronted with a wooden case reminiscent of a nineteenth-century stereoscope with a brass viewfinder built into the top (see Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). This peep-show device provided a view ‘inside’ a miniaturized Rococo room—the eighteenth-century equivalent of immersive spectator-enveloping ‘virtual space’. The viewer inserts their hand through a hole in the side of the box which triggers a set of perceptual reactions. The ‘floor’ of the Rococo room begins to move away and the participant’s hand appears to infinitely recede into the distance along with it. The installation establishes a spectator/object relation that is intentionally problematized through the virtualization of the peeper’s hand. Whereas immersion within a decorated environment like an

Fig. 2.2  Virtual Body (1993). Catherine Richards. Illustrated half section of the installation with a spectator’s hand positioned in the miniature glass room. A monitor acts as the glass floor and sensors are located at the peek hole and at the opening for the hand (Drawing: Ronald Heunick)

58  L. JARVIS Fig. 2.3  Virtual Body (1993). Catherine Richards. State of the Image, Eldorado Centrum Voor Beeldcultuur, Antwerp, Belgium. Catherine Richards testing the proprioceptive illusion in a miniature glass room that replicates the nineteenth-century Rococo room where the artwork is sited

eighteenth-century Rococo room permits a body to remain self-contained, Richards’ illusionistic magic box evokes a body that cannot easily be distinguished from information in virtual space. As Richards says, ‘Our boundaries seem porous, in a cyborgian condition’ (Richards 2018). This work occupies an ambiguous status as both an ‘instrument’ and art object. It creates the feeling of motion in a hand that is not moving. A sense of travelling, while knowing one’s body is still. The blurring of clear distinctions between the spectator and the art object is symptomatic of Michael Fried’s notion of the subject-object disruptions encapsulated by the ‘theatrical condition’—the seeming crossing-over of the body into simulated experience offers a version of the immersive desire to ‘enter’ information. Notably, Richards’ choice to virtually resurrect an eighteenth-century Rococo room in this theatrical artwork is especially pertinent, since Fried had argued that the absorptive spectator-denying realism of French paintings was a reaction against the Rococo, which in this work envelops the immersant’s arm. Richards, in turn, departs with absorptive metaphysical illusions, using an apparatus that contains the participant’s arm and encases their eyes to stage cognitive dissonance between the visual and proprioceptive senses of the perceptually disaggregated immersant. Crucially, ‘immersion’ in this artwork is not simply ‘multi-’ or ‘poly-’ sensory. What Richards stages is the participant’s sensory conflict between proprioceptively owning an arm that feels attached, with the visual sensory feedback of seeing one’s arm

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

59

virtually drifting away from its body. Beyond collapsing the perceived distance between one’s body and the artwork, Virtual Bodies produces for the immersant playful disintegrations between their different sensory modalities that report conflicting information about the status of their immersed body. As another commentator had identified, affective experiences in this installation are heightened through the ‘dispersion of bodily location’ (Munster 2006: 88). Richards has commented that she thinks of her aesthetic territory as ‘science fiction’, or more particularly science as ‘a fiction about its own subjectivity’ (Richards 1993). The dilemmas and contradictions about bodily realities in Richards’ aesthetic systems have been prototypical to my thinking about theatres of mislocalized sensation and immersion of not just ‘bodies’, but more specifically ‘subtle bodies’ in different immersive artworks (I return more fully to the notion of ‘subtle bodies’ in Chapter 4)—artworks that prompt reflexivity about the self-narrativization of a participating body within its brain, or the story we tell ourselves about who and where we think we are.

Staging Perplexity: Carsten Höller’s Umkehrbrille, The Pinocchio Effect and The Forests There are resonances between Richards’ aesthetic experiments that stage scientifically tested body illusions in gallery spaces, and the work of German artist Carsten Höller. Höller’s training as a biologist has long informed his work as an artist, with installations and pseudo-scientific experiments inserted into gallery contexts that enable visitors to embark on self-explorations of their perception, inducing doubts about the structure of reality. Höller has noted that whereas in the controlled environment of the science lab, the scientist works to achieve a result that is repeatable under the same sets of conditions, as an artist, she or he is not obliged to produce a repetitive result. The protocols are less rigid in experiments re-contextualized in the gallery, where individual experience is unpredictable and it is this unpredictability that Höller suggests ‘offers the entrance to a completely different experience of the world’ (in Zahm 2013). For example, in early works such as Umkehrbrille (Upside-Down Goggles) (1994–), gallery visitors wear inverted lenses that flip their vision upside-down (see Fig. 2.4). This artwork was inspired by psychologist George Stratton’s classic experiments from the 1890s (Stratton 1896, 1897) in which he wore inverted lenses over the course

60  L. JARVIS

Fig. 2.4  Carsten Höller’s Umkehrbrille (Upside-Down Goggles) (1994–) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Pictured: Liam Jarvis)

of a 3-day, and subsequently 8-day period. Stratton observed that over time he had adapted and ‘things seemed normal again’ (Stratton 1896: 616), implying the self-corrective nature of perception over time. But subsequent experiments (Linden et al. 1999) have suggested that while motor adaptation occurs, which enables participants to undertake complex tasks such as riding bicycles or navigating department stores ‘upside down’, the nineteenth-century reports that hint at a return to upright vision while still inside the inverted goggles are only a myth. In Höller’s experiential recontextualization of the apparatus associated with these experiments, he dispenses with ‘scientific’ hypothesis testing, the collection of data and replication. Furthermore, participants do not spend enough time in the goggles to effectively adapt their motor skills in the way that the subjects of the original experiment had, meaning that what Höller stages is our initial perceptual disorientation and tentative first steps in habituating a newly inverted perspective. Where Höller’s goggles

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

61

intersect with my model of ‘mislocalized’ sensation is that they prompt a mismatch between vision and bodily action. One’s hands are no longer viewable in a first-person orientation to their proprioceptively felt body, creating the effect that their hands are ‘disembodied’. Actions performed automatically outside of the goggles that rely on key sensory integrations, by contrast, require considerable intellectual thought and renegotiation inside the goggles to perform even basic motor tasks. This connection between first-person orientation to its body and the sense of that body as ‘mine’, creates the conditions for more transportative acts of mislocalization to another’s bodily position as an illusionistic fulfilment of the onto-relational immersive promise (e.g. in BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to Be Another in the book’s opening example). Sharing the scientific provenance of Richards’ Spectral Bodies, Höller’s The Pinocchio Effect (1999) similarly derives from a proprioceptive experiment by psychologist James Lackner (1988), which applies vibrations to the triceps/biceps while the gallery visitor grasps their nose between the index finger and thumb, creating the false sensory impression of their nose growing outwards (see Fig. 2.5). Whereas this installation creates the illusion of the nose as corporeally extended, The Forests (2002–) uses 3D glasses to overload the viewer and disrupt stereopsis (depth perception when two images are integrated into a single one) (see Fig. 2.6). The glasses relay a journey through a snow-covered forest that is filmed using stereoscopic cameras on a dolly mounted onto a track. As the cameras approach a tree, they split apart to take the viewer’s left eye on a journey around the tree in one direction, and their right eye in the counter-direction. The two views move in increasingly separate directions, occasionally intersecting and interfering with an immersant’s ability to reconcile the separate images into a united picture. ‘Doubt’ and ‘perplexity’ are common threads connecting the otherwise disparate forms that Höller’s work takes, both of which he suggests are ‘unsightly states of mind’ that we’d ‘rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with uneasiness, with failure of values’ (Höller’s in Obrist 2012: 104). This is striking because Fried’s prioritization of absorptive immersion is bound up in modernist sensibilities of ‘conviction’; specifically, the conviction that a work can ‘support comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not in doubt’ (Fried 1967: 165). Doubt in Höller’s installations not only concerns notions of value—by all accounts, this is work that epitomizes all three tenets of the ‘theatrical condition’, since it is incomplete

62  L. JARVIS

Fig. 2.5  Carsten Höller’s The Pinocchio Effect (1999) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Photograph: Liam Jarvis)

without a body to act upon, synthesised by not only drawing on other art forms but by ‘reprogramming’ scientific instrumentation/narratives in non-science contexts,8 and it is incommensurable in terms of quality and value, since the art lies in phenomenological experiences of the bodily effects and affects it engenders that are not visible or directly comparable. For example, for me the ‘effect’ of my nose growing in The Pinocchio Effect was not felt when I had attended at the Hayward Gallery in 2015, as had also been noted by some participating art critics (Barnes 2015; R.S. 2015). This highlights not only the contingency of the work, but also that discrepancies between its supposed and actual effects can surface as a failure to fail—put differently, I didn’t feel the perplexing body illusion that the artwork tells me that I should, which

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

63

Fig. 2.6  Carsten Höller’s The Forests (2002–2015) at the Hayward Gallery, 12 August 2015 (Photograph: Liam Jarvis)

produces an entirely different kind of epistemological uneasiness and uncertainty. A scientific experiment would typically involve an ‘experimenter’ and a ‘subject’, but in The Pinocchio Effect the gallery visitor is both, administering a body illusion to themselves through the artist’s written and diagrammatic instructions. This simultaneous experimenter-experimented position corresponds with the audience invitation to become both Dr. Annese and Patient HM in 2401 Objects (discussed on page 13). Höller’s self-experimentative works highlight that theatrical immersion is not a given of a particular mode of engagement—it is not an essential property. A theatrical emphasis on the immersant’s body can be re-routed to mere procedural concerns when executed by its non-expert prosumers, who interact with tools they may be operating for the very first time (and as I had noted previously, the notion of an artwork as a ‘tool’ is inconceivable in Fried’s discourse).

64  L. JARVIS

Immersant-as-‘Situated Self’: Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–2014) Following Richards and Höller’s experiential works in the 1990s that raise questions about the immersant’s body-self, Lundahl & Seitl’s guided museum tours such as Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–2014) were conceived specifically as works in which the artists experiment with the way that gallery visitor’s look at art. The participant’s eyes are covered with whiteout goggles and multisensory stimulation in combination with binaural sound recordings steer attention away from the visible and tangible world into ‘a new perception of the self, time and space’ (‘Symphony of a Missing Room’). In the iteration of the work at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2014, immersants were asked to reach out and follow a hand that physically guides them around the gallery. The sound design palimpsestically writes over the physical environment as visitors are told while traversing a corridor lined with figurative sculptures that ‘a piece of an unseen sculpture is floating in the water […] feel with your hand’ (‘An Extra-Sensory Journey…’ 2014). Through the coupling of ocular sensory deprivation and tactile stimulation accompanied by the sound effects of running water, fixed and weighty marble sculptures can become effortlessly uprooted from the gallery floor in the immersant’s imagination. Martina Seitl has connected the duo’s approach to neuroscientist H. Henrik Ehrsson’s out-of-body VR illusions (which I discuss in Chapter 4), and notes that the process of kinaesthetic relocation that happens through body illusions when shifted from scientific enquiry to aesthetic experiences for her is about preparing the body of the participant, or what Seitl refers to as ‘situated self’. Seitl comments on the relational idea that different circumstances necessitate ‘creating a different type of self’ (Machon 2013: 186). Therefore, as opposed to the negation of the beholder that I have associated with Friedian absorptive strategies, ‘situation-based art’ focuses instead on the feedback loop between the environment—whether actual, virtual or a combination of both—and the kinds of self that it instantiates. This notion intersects with the core argument of this book, that theatres of mislocalized sensation involve primarily a spectator’s temporarily altered physical sense of selfhood—the ease with which the mind can misrepresent its own embodiment as the examples of practice discussed in this chapter have demonstrated. Lundahl & Seitl’s work might be understood as an attempt at ‘theatro-absorptive’ performance-making, since they stage a complex reconciliation of

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

65

the theatrical incorporation of beholding bodies as part of the artwork and disavowal of the ocular emphasis of absorption, with the absorptive promise that a beholder might transcend not only their body’s situation, but the defined parameters of the body itself—to wander, like Diderot, as an altered presence illusorily ‘inside’ imagined spaces.

Conclusion The eclectic practices that I define as theatres of mislocalized sensation have been historically situated in this chapter by revisiting the ontological art theory debates on reception that have given rise to key distinctions between the theatrical and absorptive artwork (the latter following in the anti-theatrical tradition of Fried and Diderot). In turn, these distinctions can be understood as a proto-immersive debate offering competing conceptualizations and ontologies of two different branches of ‘immersion’; absorptive and theatrical immersion. The subset of practices that I have discussed are part of a ‘theatrical’ genealogy in Fried’s specific understanding of the term and are characterized by the three tenets of the ‘theatrical condition’ of incompleteness, synthesis, and incommensurability. But like all the case studies examined in Immersive Embodiment, the works seek to engender a metamorphosis of the ‘spectator’ into other kinds of experiencing selves. Friedian absorption positions the beholder as an abstracted presence before the artwork, tending to valorize sight over the other senses to ensure a spectator’s exteriority and notions of ‘entry’ are imaginative, metaphysical and body-denying. Theatricality disavows ‘spectating’, since it refuses a spectatorial position at a remove from the work. Modes of engagement such as the remediation of paintings as hyper-expanded VR environments are producing peculiar subjectivities that complicate clear distinctions between a technology’s promise of ‘entry’, with absorptive strategies to obscure spectating bodies and discount them from the experience, when ‘experience’ is contingent on the very experiencing bodies that are denied. Beyond the boundary querying that Fried had identified in theatrical works, theatres of mislocalized sensation go further by deliberately drawing attention to the body by disrupting the boundaries of the body-self or altering participants’ subtle bodies. From distortions of the beholding body’s schema in Richards’ Spectral Bodies, to the foregrounding of intersensory conflict between the sight of the beholder’s virtual hand receding to the distance and the proprioceptive sense of its

66  L. JARVIS

physical stillness in Virtual Body. From Höller’s early installations that recontextualize the apparatus of scientific enquiry for gallery visitors to work upon themselves as experimenter-subjects by flipping their vision in Umkehrbrille, extending their corporeal boundaries in The Pinocchio Effect, or reconciling the sensory overload of diverging images presented to the left and right eyes in The Forest. Finally, in Lundahl & Seitl’s self-shifting whiteout goggle/binaural headphone performance, Symphony of a Missing Room, a situated selfhood is carefully instantiated through virtual and aural engulfing environments in combination with tactile stimulation in the actual environment that transport the immersant; a constructed selfhood in the artists’ work sits against, or alongside the audience’s own unique autobiography and horizon of expectations, which cannot be known in advance. Theatres of mislocalized sensation might be best understood as operating at the theatrical end of the spectrum—though some of the examples discussed in Part II of this book might be more accurately understood as theatro-absorptive on account of their reconciliation of the theatrical incorporation of beholding bodies as part of the artwork, with the absorptive promise of transcending both a body’s locale and its defined parameters through acts of eccentric perception.

Notes 1.  In Edward Strickland’s Minimalism: Origins (1993), ‘Minimalism’ is defined as ‘a movement, primarily in postwar America, towards an art – visual, musical, literary, or otherwise – that makes its statement with limited, if not the fewest possible, resources, an art that eschews abundance of compositional detail, opulence of texture, and complexity of structure’ (7). In Frances Colpitt’s Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (1990), she suggests more specifically that ‘Minimal art describes abstract, geometric painting and sculpture executed in the United States in the 1960s’ (1). Colpitt addresses a range of issues that were introduced by this movement, such as a shift in approach to the art studio process, favouring ‘industrial, non-art materials and the manufacturing process’ (7). 2. I should note that historical declarations of the ‘end of art’ have been persistent, erupting alongside the Dadaist ‘readymade’, Pop Art’s commodity-as-art form and Conceptual Art’s banal detritus. A popular anecdote seized upon by the Stuckists to illustrate the disappearance of the art from the ‘artwork’ was when Damien Hirst’s installation of piles of ashtrays, coffee cups and empty beer bottles was famously disposed of by cleaner

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

67

Emmanuel Asare who mistook the artwork for ‘rubbish’. American critic Arthur Danto declared the ‘end of art’ in his essay of the same name in 1984. Following in the Hegelian tradition, Danto argued that the post-historical nature of art post-1960s had necessitated the declaration of its end. Adjacent to these developments were pronouncements of the ‘end of art theory’ in edited volumes such as Victor Burgin’s The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-modernity (1986). Danto offered a comprehensive reformulation of his ideas in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997). Post-millennium, American critic Donald Kuspit argued that art had been replaced with what Allan Kaprow had termed as ‘postart’ in The End of Art in 2005; this book was published over twenty years after Danto’s essay which shares the same title, indicating that declarations of the ‘end of art’ are an ongoing concern. 3. In Patricia Clough and Jean Halley’s The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007), Clough suggests that the ‘affective turn’ has drawn increasing attention to bodies and emotion in the humanities and social sciences. For Clough, affect is not only theorized in terms of the human body but also in ‘relation to the technologies that are allowing us to both “see” affect and to produce affective bodily capacities beyond the body’s organic-physiological constraints’ (Clough 2007: 2). 4. Related to Fried’s charge of the artwork that lacks completion, Umberto Eco had defined The Open Work (1962) as an open-ended composition within which there are varying degrees of autonomy as to how the participant chooses to play their role. 5. Fried uses this preoccupation to analyse the works of four painters that he describes as among the most important of their generation (35); JeanBaptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), Carle Van Loo (1705–1765), Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809) and Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805). 6. Though a medium alone is not enough to guarantee its audience’s denial, and postmodern self-referentiality, ‘winks’ or asides and direct address to the camera are all acknowledgements of the filmed subject’s being beheld by an audience. 7. Fischer-Lichte’s application of autopoiesis to performance draws on the concepts from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980). 8. The word ‘reprogram’ refers to Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of art as ‘postproduction’ in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2005), in which he claims that an increasing number of artworks since the 1990s have made use of extant artworks, or other available cultural products. In Höller’s case, many artworks are not just ‘tools to probe the contemporary world’ (Bourriaud 2005: 9), but they hack scientific

68  L. JARVIS instruments and protocols from science experiments that are re-contextualized as interactive modes of self-exploration in gallery environments.

References Ackerman, A., and M. Puchner. 2007. Against Theatre Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Performance Interventions. An Extra-Sensory Journey Around the Royal Academy. 2014. BBC Arts. Uploaded 21 May 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4QL mql9rFDD7Vr1CwyS5PsQ/an-extra-sensory-journey-around-the-royal-academy. Accessed 23 Feb 2018. Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Anti-theatrical Prejudice. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Barnes, Freire. 2015. Carsten Höller: Decision. Time Out. Uploaded 11 June 2015. https://www.timeout.com/london/art/carsten-hoeller-decision. Accessed 23 Feb 2018. Baudrillard, Jean. 2005. The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e). Beaulieu, Jill, Mary Roberts, and Toni Ross (eds.). 2000. Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried. Sydney: Power Publications. Behold. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/behold. Accessed 10 Feb 2018. Bishop, Claire. 2004. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October 110: 51–79. ———. 2005. Installation: A Critical History. London: Tate. Bleeker, Maaike. 2008. Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Performance Interventions. Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002 [1998]. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel. ———. 2005. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Burgin, Victor. 1986. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-modernity. London: Macmillan. Calleja, Gordon. 2011. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto with Jean Halley. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press. Colpitt, Frances. 1990. Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective. London: UMI Research Press.

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

69

Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Danto, Arthur C. 1984. The End of Art. In The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang. New York: Haven Publishers. Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait (eds.). 2003. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2018. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Selfawareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diderot, Denis. 1995 [1757]. Entretiens sur le Fils naturel. In Diderot et le theatre. ‘Preface’ and notes by Alain M.nil. Paris: Pocket. ———. 1995 [1758]. Discours de la poésie dramatique. In Diderot et le theatre. ‘Preface’ and notes by Alain M.nil. Paris: Pocket. ———. 1984 [1796]. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture: Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Essais sur la peinture was first published in 1796). Text compiled and presented by Gita May. Paris: Hermann. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dreams of Dalí: 360º Video. The Dali Museum YouTube Channel. Published 21 January 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1eLeIocAcU. Accessed 10 Feb 2018. Eccleston, Christopher. 2015. Embodied: The Psychology of Physical Sensation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge. Fried, Michael. 1998 [1967]. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Gregory, R.L., and E.H. Gombrich (eds.). 1973. Illusion in Nature and Art. London: Duckworth. Hurley, Erin. 2010. Theatre and Feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jarvis, Liam. 2017. Creating in the Dark: Conceptualising Different Darknesses in Contemporary Practice. In Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre, ed. Adam Alston and Martin Welton. London, UK: Methuen Drama Engage. Jones, Amelia. 2008. Live Art in Art History: A Paradox? In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaprow, Allan. 1966. Assemblages, Environments and Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

70  L. JARVIS Kemmerer, David. 2014. Body Ownership and Beyond: Connections Between Cognitive Neuroscience and Linguistic Typology. Consciousness and Cognition 26: 189–196. Kershaw, Baz, and Helen Nicholson (eds.). 2011. Research Methods in Theatre and Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kester, Grant H. 2013a [2004]. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley and London: University of California. ———. 2013b. Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art. In Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, 2nd ed., ed. Zoya Kucor and Simon Leung. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 153–165. Krauss, Rosalind. 1987. Theories of Art After Minimalism and Pop. In Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press. Lackner, J.R. 1988. Some Proprioceptive Influences on the Perceptual Representation of Body Shape and Orientation. Brain 111: 281–297. Lailach, Michael. 2007. Land Art, ed. Uta Grosenick. Köln and London: Taschen. Basic Art Series. Lawton, Graham. 2009. Seven Ways to Fool Your Sense of Touch: Tactile Illusions 1: The Aristotle Illusion. New Scientist. Uploaded 11 March 2009. https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/tactile-illusions/. Accessed 18 Aug 2014. Linden, David E.J., Ulrich Kallenbach, Armin Heineckeô, Wolf Singer, and Rainer Goebel. 1999. The Myth of Upright Vision. A Psychophysical and Functional Imaging Study of Adaptation to Inverting Spectacles. Perception 28: 469–481. Lundahl & Seitl. Symphony of a Missing Room. http://www.lundahl-seitl.com/ work/symphony-of-a-missing-room. Accessed 19 Feb 2018. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Magritte VR. BDH. https://www.bdh.net/immersive/magritte-vr. Accessed 10 Feb 2018. Miller, Jason. 2016. Activism vs. Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and Beyond. In Field (3). http://field-journal.com/ issue-3/activism-vs-antagonism-socially-engaged-art-from-bourriaud-to-bishop-and-beyond. Accessed 19 Feb 2018. Munster, Anna. 2006. Materializing New Media Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth College Press/University Press. The Night Cafe: A VR Tribute to Vincent Van Gogh—Oculus Rift. EkosVR YouTube Channel. Published 4 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Si-pImnlFZs. Accessed 10 Feb 2018.

2  PROTO-IMMERSIVE DISCOURSE AND THE ‘THEATRICAL CONDITION’ 

71

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. 2012. Edge, A to Z (Pars Pro Toto). In How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future, ed. John Brockman. London: Atlantic Books. Rebellato, Dan, and Kim Solga. 2018. Katie Mitchell and the Politics of Naturalist Theatre. In The Theatre of Katie Mitchell, ed. Benjamin Fowler, 4×45, 39–71. Abingdon: Routledge. Richards, Catherine. 1993. Virtual Body: Statement from the Show Eldorado Centrum, Antwerp 1993. Emailed by the artist, 19 December 2018. ———. 2013. ‘Catherine Richards, Hybrid Bodies Presentation’. YouTube. Uploaded 24 June 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayF-c_2 C00E. Accessed 19 Jan 2018. ———. 2018. Virtual Body: Artist Statement. Catherine Richards’ website. http://www.catherinerichards.ca/artwork2/Virtual_statement.html. Accessed 20 Jan 2018. Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. R.S. 2015. Carsten Höller: Playtime. The Economist. https://www.economist. com/blogs/prospero/2015/06/carsten-h-ller. Schechner, Richard. 1994 [1973]. Environmental Theater, new expanded ed. New York: Applause. The Applause Acting Series. Scott, Joanne. 2016. Intermedial Praxis and Practice as Research: ‘DoingThinking’ in Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2009. The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Springer, William C. 2009. This Is My Body: An Existential Analysis of the Living Body. Lanham: University Press of America. The Starry Night Stereo VR Experience. VR Motion Magic YouTube Channel. Published 28 November 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Dt9 ziemYA. Accessed 10 Feb 2018. Stratton, G.M. 1896. Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image. Psychological Review 3: 611–617. ———. 1897. Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image. Psychological Review 4: 341–360, 463–481. Strickland, Edward. 1993. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ‘Symphony of a Missing Room’: Lundahl & Seitl. 2017. Kochi-Muziris Biennale YouTube Channel. Uploaded 25 February 2017. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jW26RGIlFpk. Accessed 21 Feb 2018. Todolí, Vicente. 2016. Carsten Höller: Doubt. Exhibition programme, Pirelli HangarBicocca, 7 April–31 July. Tufnell, Ben. 2006. Land Art. London: New York: Tate. Distributed in the U.S. by Harry N. Abrams.

72  L. JARVIS van den Brand, Jessica. 2015. Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity. Saarbrücken, Deutschland: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. von Hantelmann, Dorothea. 2006. I. In Carsten Höller: Test Site. London: Tate. Waters, Steve. 2010. The Secret Life of Plays. London: Nick Hern. Weber, Samuel. 2004. Theatricality as a Medium. New York: Fordham University Press. Welton, Martin. 2011. Feeling Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilkie, Fiona. 2002. Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain. New Theatre Quarterly 18 (2): 140–160. Zahm, Olivier. 2013. Carsten Höller: The Last Avant-Garde. Purple Magazine, F/W 2013 issue 20. http://purple.fr/magazine/fw-2013-issue-20/carstenholler/. Accessed 10 Feb 2018.

CHAPTER 3

The Immersive Promise of Becoming [with] the Other Body

Introduction ‘Immersion’ has been described as a key aspect of the intermedial experience in performance and digital culture (Vanhoutte and Wynants 2010: 47). Kurt Vanhoutte and Nele Wynants define immersion as ‘the sensory experience/perception of being submerged (being present) in an electronically mediated environment’ (47). They trace a genealogy of immersive performance on a trajectory through Antonin Artaud’s ‘total theatre’, Richard Schechner’s ‘environmental theatre’, the avant-garde experiments that Gene Youngblood identified as ‘expanded cinema’ in the 1970s, to the more recent use of omnidirectional video in the VR work of Belgian performance group, CREW. Furthermore, ‘immersive perspective’ is defined as enabling ‘viewers’ to see from ‘within the image’ (47). The notion of a position ‘within’ images coincides with the fact that much recent critical discourse on the ontologies of immersive theatres—both those that make use digital technologies and those that do not—tend to examine the specific claims of access made on their behalf by artists and other cultural commentators. But immersion through an aesthetic experience is contingent—we are already ‘in’ a world, much as we are already bound ‘within’ a body. The specific ‘in’ of immersion hints at a desire to reach something beyond or extranormative. Promises are similarly contingent. Mark Burgess and Jan A. Bergstra have argued that academic discourse on ‘promises’ has often been linked © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_3

73

74  L. JARVIS

to morality and the paradigm of obligation in law-making (Bergstra and Burgess 2014: 13). But beyond reducing promising to obligated acts of promise-keeping—which renders the notion of promises themselves as redundant—promise theory has reclaimed promises as a wholly independent and necessary concept. At root, a promise is a stated intention from an autonomous active agent (both human and non-human) and, in the context of promise theory, Burgess and Bergstra have argued that agents can only make promises about their own behaviour; crucially, a promise cannot be imposed by another agent. Therefore, an artist-agent’s ‘promise’ of a prospective participant’s ‘immersion’ is especially tenuous because it is a delegated promise made on behalf of the other’s anticipated experience. The other’s ‘plunge’ into an extranormative mode of engagement from our world or within a virtual body/ environment is emergent from interactive processes and not a given property of either an aesthetic experience or technological apparatus. Furthermore, the usefulness of any promise is highly dependent on a participant’s trust in the agents making the promise. The promise of immersion as a ‘becoming other’ rests on a Heraclitean-esque concept of flux and a participant’s voluntary agreement to become an immersant passing through transitory states of recreated otherness. Furthermore, the ‘promise’ of artist-agents that I have gathered under the term theatres of mislocalized sensation involves the immersant themselves becoming agentive in acts of perceptually moving towards, as opposed to ‘being’ other through temporary destabilizations of phenomenal selfhood (hence, the ‘becoming [with]’ in the chapter’s title). In this chapter, I will offer a cross-disciplinary survey of relevant etymologies, definitions and discourses on immersion in theatre and VR. I will analyse ways in which immersed bodies have been conceptualized and resurface as a post-Friedian ‘theatrical’ problem, exploring the ontologies prompted by immersive technologies in media theory. I will use this review to further tease out the persistent and radical onto-relational desire that I claim undergirds much of the immersive practice that I am terming as theatres of mislocalized sensation—namely the desire to feel more fully with the body of another. This desire is finding new expression in intimate immersive performance-making that repurposes wearable technologies associated with video gaming and scientifically pretested body transfer illusions, which are deployed in aesthetic experiences and applied practices towards real-world social applications. For example, empathy projects, communication tools or health care applications

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

75

(e.g. rehabilitation). A key claim of this chapter is that immersion of the kind that is central to the works discussed in this book, entails paradoxical acts of willing self-deception that make participating bodies disappear to themselves as a reconciliation of their ‘own’ physical presence with that of another.

‘Immersive’ and ‘Immersion’: Etymologies and Interdisciplinary Definitions Josephine Machon offered the first survey of the theory, history and practice of immersive theatre in Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013). She argued that beyond the use of the word ‘immersive’ as an adjective, there is an increasingly prevalent trend in the use of the term to describe a ‘genre’ of theatre (21). While Machon attempts to locate some defining features that might be ascribed to ‘immersive theatres’, she acknowledges that they are ultimately ‘heterogeneous’. This point is reaffirmed by the formal diversity of the practices Machon examines, which range from the large-scale site-responsive performances of companies such as Punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak, to the intimate video goggle/­ headphone performances of il pixel rosso (discussed in Chapter 4). But the specific ‘immersive’ promise that underpins what I have termed as theatres of mislocalized sensation using visuotactile/visuomotor deception will require disentangling from these broader overarching trends.1 The common usage meaning of the adjective ‘immersive’ is defined as ‘(Of a computer display or system) generating a three-dimensional image which appears to surround the user’ (‘Immersive’, Oxford Dictionaries). This definition singularly connects the word ‘immersive’ to the technological paradigm, corresponding with virtual reality or immersive multimedia, which artificially enable the physical presence of the ‘user’ in computer-simulated environments. By contrast, the noun ‘immersion’ is accompanied by more diverse and historically situated meanings. These include the ‘action of immersing someone or something in a liquid’, ‘baptism by immersing a person bodily (but not necessarily completely) in water’,2 ‘deep mental involvement in something’, a ‘method of teaching a foreign language by the exclusive use of that language’ and in astronomy the ‘disappearance of a celestial body in the shadow of or behind another’ (‘Immersion’). This suggests that unlike the singular VR connotations of the word ‘immersive’, ‘immersion’ has no unified

76  L. JARVIS

meaning and is connected, respectively, to concepts as varied as cleansing, religious ritual, mental involvement, language learning and a cosmic event. Immersion understood as ‘deep mental involvement’ is problematically diffuse, since it would be impossible via this definition to delimit the kinds of practices that might provide the basis for a focused enquiry. Beyond theatre practice, any activity that demands deep mental involvement might be considered as something in which one might become ‘immersed’ (e.g. reading a book, listening to music, or playing Candy Crush Saga on a smartphone, etc.). Furthermore, through this definition all theatre practices might be said to ‘immerse’ their spectators, including ‘absorptive’ works that deny the presence of the audience,3 when as I have established in Chapter 2, I am conceptualizing ‘immersive’ art as part of a post-Friedian ‘theatrical’ lineage. The field of immersive scholarship in performance studies is opening up in valuable and diversifying ways—for example, Royona Mitra argues for the need to decolonize immersion beyond physical interactivity on the part of the audience, focusing instead on embodied states that can be triggered vicariously through the use of non-Western cultural forms such as rasa to co-explore volatile migrant identity-politics in contemporary dance performances (Mitra 2016). But in the interest of maintaining a tight focus, my specific concern in this book is the spectator’s physical immersion in an experience, corresponding with the notion of being ‘surrounded’ or ‘dipping into’, and concomitantly, examining the accompanying ontological promises of what immersed bodies might access.

Conceptualizing Immersed Bodies in Performance In Multimedia Performance (2012), Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer argue that, in the context of performances that incorporate technologies, ‘immersion’ can pertain to ‘experiences that are both mental and physical’ (127). They differentiate two specific types of immersion: ‘cognitive’ and ‘sensory’. Cognitive immersion is defined as an ‘effect established through the presence of a fictional reality’, whereas sensory immersion ‘can be created through the corporeal and material dimension of performance’ (132). For Klich and Scheer, the former entails the ‘dislocation’ of materiality in ‘imagined space’, whereas the latter ‘forges the material and virtual to create an embodied experience of pattern and presence

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

77

within real space’ (132). But this demarcation between cognitive and sensory immersion is problematized by theatres of mislocalized sensation, precisely because the immersant’s sense of bodily selfhood is unsettled or incorporates a virtual body/avatar or extracorporeal appendage as part of their body schema. When smuggling scientifically tested body-ownership illusions into aesthetic practices, at an autonomic level the virtual is experienced as material, notwithstanding a participant’s intellectual awareness that they are only inside an ‘illusion’ (the effects and affects of neuroscientifically tested body transfer illusions in laboratory contexts are discussed further in Chapter 4). In Josephine Machon’s chapter ‘(Syn)aesthetics and Immersive Theatre’ in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science (2013), she identifies some of the defining qualities of immersive performance, arguing that bodies are ‘prioritized in this world; performing and perceiving bodies; the latter belonging to the audience members whose direct insertion in and interaction with the world shapes the outcomes of the event’ (207).4 Notably, it is the ‘perceiving’ bodies that are positioned as the ‘audience’. However, as I will illustrate with examples in Part II, the immersive practices with which my analysis is engaged cast the immersant as both performer and perceiver, and experimenter-­ subject. The immersed spectator is audience to themselves from within their unrehearsed act of performance. In this respect, one distinguishing feature of theatres of mislocalized sensation is the removal of a fixed binary between spectating-performing roles that might ensure a viewing position that is exterior from the artwork. ‘Exteriority’, as I have noted in Chapter 2, has historically been secured by artists using ‘absorptive’ metaphysical illusions (e.g. a ‘fourth-wall’, or in painting, absorptive compositional strategies that deny the spectator’s presence). But the specific modes of immersive practice that are of interest in this book hack body-ownership illusions of entirely different perceptual orders. The selected case studies discussed in this book such as BeAnotherLab’s VR telepresence body-swapping platform The Machine to be Another, problematize the Friedian prioritization of ocular relations in spectatorship, disallowing both the possibility of occupying a critical position that is at a safe remove and a situation from which one can view an artwork in its entirety. For this reason, as I have argued in Chapter 2, immersive reception is calling into question the ocular emphasis embedded in the meaning of the word ‘spectator’, from the late sixteenth century French spectateur or Latin spectator (from spectare) meaning to ‘gaze at’

78  L. JARVIS

or ‘observe’ (‘Spectator’, Oxford Dictionaries). Cultural commentators such as Frank Rose have further argued that the concept of ‘audience’ is similarly outmoded as a descriptor for the prosumer of immersive ‘deep media’ experiences; meaning narrative communicated through multiple media that is ‘non-linear’ and ‘gamelike’ (2011: 3). In the 1990s, VR artist Char Davies replaced the term ‘audience’ with the portmanteau word ‘immersant’ (‘immersed’ + ‘participants’) to describe a participant exploring a virtual environment in an HMD. I intend to pursue this descriptor, but expand its meaning for theatres of mislocalized sensation, which reterritorialize the participants’ senses to mediatized bodies that are either ‘live’ (using VR telepresence and HMDs), pre-recorded (first-person video) or computer-generated (computer game avatars).5 It is my contention that knowledge in body-ownership from neuroscience has demonstrated the porousness between virtual and actual bodies and resonates with a wider shift in intermedial critical discourse away from ‘virtual reality’ and towards what Slavoj Žižek has termed as the ‘reality of the virtual’ in the title of his documentary film in 2004. Matthew Causey has argued for theatre as the ‘test site’ or laboratory where the ‘material body and its subjectivity is extended, challenged, and reconfigured through technology’ (Causey 1999)—and in a similar spirit, this book questions how virtual bodies are being attributed to an immersant’s body schema, and what kinds of real-world transformations are being reached for through virtual acts of body-hopping. Josephine Machon argues that immersive theatres are characteristically ‘polysensorial’, stating that ‘crucial to immersive practice is the fact that there is no focus on one particular sense, rather a play within the realm of the senses’ (2013: 207). It is on these grounds that she argues that immersive theatres are ‘(syn)aesthetic in that they manipulate the explicit recreation of sensation through the visual, physical, verbal, aural, tactile, haptic, and olfactory means within the real-time, site-responsive experience of the event (via scents, textures, sounds and so on)’ (208). The compound word ‘(syn)aesthetic’ derives from ‘synaesthesia’ originating from ‘the Greek syn meaning “together”, and aisthesis meaning “sensation” or “perception”’ (2009: 13). While the medical derivation of synaesthesia describes ‘a neurological condition where a fusing of sensations occurs when one sense is stimulated which automatically and simultaneously causes a stimulation in another of the senses’ (2009: 13). The implication of defining immersive theatre as ‘(syn)aesthetic’ is that it produces an understanding of an idealized immersed participant

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

79

by reaffirming what Machon refers to as the ‘“fused” experience of the human body’ which is an ‘holistic entity – physiological, intellectual, emotional – thus prioritizing a connection of body and mind within experience’ (2009: 14). But as I will contest in Chapter 4, neuroscientific studies have evidenced that inside illusions of body-ownership, different sensory modalities do not gate each other equally—thus cognitive dissonance and sensory conflict rather than ‘fusion’ are crucial to an understanding of theatres of mislocalized sensation. There are some very direct corollaries between Machon’s description of immersive theatres and Michael Fried’s notion of the ‘theatrical’ artwork, discussed in the previous chapter. For example, the inclusion of the spectating body within the conceptual frame of the work (much like Vanhoutte and Wynants’ notion of ‘immersive perspective’ as viewing within images), hybridity and admixtures of artistic form, growing emphasis on what an artwork ‘does’ rather than what it ‘says’, and the prioritization of the whole body and its sensate experience in a situation. However, I argue that the claim that bodies are ‘prioritized’ in immersive theatres tout court requires more sustained critical scrutiny. Having established immersion as a tenuous and delegated ‘promise’ from artist-­ agent on behalf of another’s experience, or as the proposed potentiality of an artwork that necessitates the agentive input of immersants to become ‘other’ (as opposed to a ‘genre’ or given property of a form/ medium), I will consider how experiencing bodies might themselves pose an obstacle to this kind of becoming. The problem of becoming othered in an immersive artwork is indivisible from the post-Friedian ‘theatrical’ artwork’s acknowledgement of the physical presence of the immersant. Theatro-absorptive tactics are attempts to reconcile this bodily acknowledgement with a simultaneous transcending of a beholding body’s immediate physical circumstance.

Immersed Bodies as a ‘Theatrical’ Problem Josephine Machon states that the immersive event must establish a unique ‘“in-its-own-world”-ness, which is created through an adept exploration of space, scenography, sound and duration within interdisciplinary (or hybridised) practice’ (207). The ‘world’ that she is describing encompasses both the imaginative realm and the theatrical situation of the audience-participant who is ‘haptically incorporated’ into the experience (207). It is at this intersection between the imaginative realm and

80  L. JARVIS

the incorporated body of the immersant that I argue that the paradox of immersive theatre is manifested as a theatrical problem (‘theatrical’ in the Friedian sense), at least in instances where the promise of ‘entering’ the dramatic is intimated as a possibility. Accessing the ‘dramatic’ through Keir Elam/Nicholas Rescher’s discourse (see Introduction) is ‘conceptual and not physical’ (Elam 1980: 97), much as becoming ‘absorbed’ in a painting via Michael Fried/Denis Diderot’s art criticism discussed in Chapter 2 entails a strictly imaginative passage ‘inside’ the artwork (e.g. Diderot’s imagined walks inside a landscape painting) and not physical access. These arguments imply that the acknowledged presence of spectating bodies is incongruous to the inauguration of dramatic illusion. Gareth White, in his essay ‘On Immersive Theatre’, published in Theatre Research International (2012), analyses the different kinds of ‘interiors’ that immersive performance might license the spectator ‘entry’ into. He argues that the word ‘immersion’ implies ‘access to the inside of the performance’, and questions in response to his own spectatorial experiences in Shunt and Punchdrunk’s large-scale immersive performances, ‘what kinds of insides might the term [immersion] refer to?’ (221). White revisits Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (first published in 1950 as Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes), which he argues provides a way of accounting for ‘what is revealed through successful art experiences’ (232) by setting out an ontology in which art is an event of truth focused on the ‘unconcealment’ of things in their essence. He concludes that ‘immersive theatre’ is a ‘faulty term’ to ‘describe the phenomena it currently designates’ (233). The ‘phenomena’ that White refers to include the following; ‘surrounding’ the audience, the production of ‘structured interiors’ for audiences to explore, the addressing of an audience’s bodily presence and its full capacity for ‘sense-making’ (a notion that is consistent with both Fried’s ‘theatrical’ art and Machon’s concept of ‘(syn)aesthetic appreciation’), and offering the promise of ‘further depths just possibly within reach’ (233). Furthermore, White suggests that immersive theatres operate in both a ‘metaphorical’ and ‘non-metaphorical’ respect. In terms of the metaphorical, White draws on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s approach in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) to decipher the specific ‘entailments’ or structures of thought that the metaphor, ‘Art Is Immersive’, might yield.6 He argues that this metaphor ‘draws on a concept of the liquidity of experience and the interiority suggested by the container character of artworks’ (227), proposing

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

81

that the entailments that it produces are, ‘Art Experiences Are Shallow Or Deep’ and subsequently ‘Successful Art Experiences Are Deep’.7 The value that White identifies in applying Lakoff and Johnson’s approach is that it draws focus in his examination to ‘how we express what we value in phenomena’, and how ways of thinking and speaking are ‘based on foundational schemas which do not, in fact, provide the basis of the phenomena in question, but are the basis of our physical and sensorimotor understanding of our world’ (227). It is the use of interiors that White has argued justifies the use of the term ‘immersive’ in a way that is non-metaphorical, but he maintains that to be ‘surrounded’ necessitates a distinction between that which surrounds and the subject that is surrounded; ‘we move within the art work, intimately close to it, but still distinct from it’ (228). In this view, the work maintains its exteriority from the immersed participant. Although White acknowledges that immersive theatre is a ‘faulty’ term, he avoids the significant task of re-conceptualizing ‘immersivity’ in more precise terms. To focus on the spectator’s ‘separation’ from the immersive artwork is to avoid a more ontologically radical desire upon which immersion of the kind I am discussing is predicated. My interest in the delegated ‘promise’ of immersion elides to some extent with Rose Biggin’s notion of immersive experience—‘a graded, fleeting, intense and necessarily temporary state defined by an awareness of its temporal and spatial boundaries’ (Biggin 2017: 1). Biggins separates this ‘temporary’ state from immersive theatre as a theatrical ‘genre’ in which immersive experience might occur but cannot be guaranteed. The disaggregation of a genre from its underlying promise similarly emphasizes that immersion is not an essential property of any performance form. Theatres of mislocalized sensation more specifically attempt to actualize a conception of immersivity that places the participant in a position outside of their habitual bodily experience and within virtualized subjects without separation, and VR body transfer illusions typically occur on the borderlines of the real and the metaphorical. For example, are scientifically tested whole-body ownership illusions ‘metaphorical’ or ‘non-metaphorical’ when a subject’s sympathetic responses evidence increased stress levels when they perceive a threat to their virtual body/external humanoid appendage in the scientific experiments of H. Henrik Ehrsson (discussed Chapter 4)? Beyond the strategy of cloaking, masking or costuming spectators, theatres of mislocalized sensation go further by temporarily shifting the perceived physical boundaries of the immersant’s

82  L. JARVIS

exteroceptive body—a term that neuroscientist Manos Tsakiris has defined as encompassing ‘body ownership’, ‘agency’ and ‘social cognition (e.g. mirror neurons)’ (Tsakiris 2016). In this respect, they are quintessentially ‘bio-virtual’—a term that Matthew Causey ascribes to ‘interaction between the biological and the virtual’ (Causey 2015: 4). Consequently, White’s analysis of foundational schemas underlying ‘immersive’ discourses has limited application to works that attempt to operationalize the promise of accessing the ‘ineffable’ using body-change illusions. This is because the particular ‘inside’ that the work in Part II of this book promises might be accessed are knowledges that are held within other bodies. The remediated first-person view of another and receipt of sensory information that correlates with what the participant observes are core components of a technique through which to reconstruct and communicate another’s experiences that cannot be reformulated through language. Put differently, the ‘truth’ that practitioners attempt to reveal through these techniques (or what Heidegger, refers to as the ‘moment of strife’) is predicated on a paradox; the deployment of varying degrees of concealment or sensory occlusion (using headphones, HMDs, etc.)8 in the theatrical circumstance is a technique to elicit the sensation of dis-owning an immersed body, while integrating the unique physical experiences of ‘another’ as part of the bodily self. The Heideggerian ‘unconcealment’ that might be attained via these specific kinds of immersive art experiences are ‘truths’ that are contingent on the kind of body that one possesses. For this reason, my conceptualization of ‘immersion’ concerns the grouping of diverse but related methodological strategies deployed by artists to attempt to bridge epistemic divides and feel with the body of another.

Immersive Technologies: Genealogies and Ontologies of ‘Immersion’ in Media Theory So far, I have mapped concepts gathered around the terms ‘immersive’ and ‘immersion’ insofar as they relate to theatre practice. But what correspondences exist between the promise of the ‘immersive’ in theatre and wider digital culture? What are the inferences as to what might be ‘entered’, and what implications do they present as to how immersed bodies are conceptualized in intermedial performances? Some theatre scholars have highlighted the historical congruencies between theatre and the development of immersive media, such as

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

83

Steve Dixon in Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007). Dixon defines media such as virtual reality as an extension of theatre practice, arguing that theatre has ‘always been a virtual reality where actors imaginatively conspire with audiences to conjure a belief’ (363). This aligns the concept of the ‘virtual’ more broadly with phenomena such as dramatic illusion. But it is crucial to identify the distinct sets of ontological claims that are specific to the development of immersive media in relation to the bodies interfacing with these technologies—much as the ideas that congregate around ‘immersive theatre’ and the kinds of immersed selves that they seek to constitute (e.g. a ‘(syn)aesthetic’ subjects) have required distillation. Frank Rose associates the concept of ‘immersive’ with a desire to delve ever deeper into an alternate reality or to ‘jump the screen’ (Rose 2011: 15). He illustrates this point by referring to post-millennial marketing stunts such as Why So Serious? that enabled participants to ‘step into the fiction’ of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) movie prior to its release through an elaborate transmedial treasure hunt. Participants followed cryptic clues from ‘the Joker’ online that led them to different real-world geographical locations. For example, picking up a joker themed cake from a pastry shop, only for the ‘cake’ to ring and the participants to find a cellphone hidden inside. Retrieving the phone led to further instructions and further depths of participatory involvement in an unfolding live-action quest. ‘Immersion’ for Rose, much like the problematic promise of ‘entering’ the dramatic space of immersive theatres, concerns indulging the impulse to enter an ‘alternate reality’ in task-based experiences, and he argues that the ability to gratify this impulse ‘grows with each new medium’ (7). Parallel developments have long been occurring in interactive theatre-making, both as auxiliary works that expand the universe of more culturally dominant media products (e.g. the now-liquidated differencENGINE’s immersive theatre piece Battlefield Hardline: Live [2015], which coincided with the launch of the video game by Electronic Arts), but also as the main event itself. For example, Blast Theory’s locative cinema and immersive theatre work (e.g. A Machine to See With [2011], Operation Black Antler [2016]), Circumstance’s interactive ‘subtlemobs’, mobile apps and in-ear stories (e.g. our broken voice [2010]/A Hollow Body [2014]/Six Conversations [2016]) and Coney’s online/offline gaming experiences (e.g. online: What’s She Like [2016]/offline: Early Days [of a better

84  L. JARVIS

nation] [2014–’15]). The ‘virtual’ is not partitioned discretely to screenbased media alone in any of these examples as a site of escape from the ‘real’, but rather real-life and real-world locations are augmented through performances in the context of ‘post-cinematic’ works (Woycicki 2014) that deconstruct cinematic culture and position audience members as active agents in constructed realities that are anything but ideologically neutral—for example, Coney’ Early Days (of a better nation) places participants in the fictionalized failed state of Dacia and invites them to re-imagine the nation, gamifying the task of establishing new and competing political systems. This kind of role-playing enables participants to co-explore Slavoj Žižek’s claim that ideology itself works as a kind of ‘augmented reality’ and that the real is ‘always supplemented by a virtual element’ (Žižek 2017). Where Rose’s immersive discourse on ‘deep media’ and what I am terming as theatres of mislocalized sensation coalesce is that they interpellate the immersant into subjectivities derived from other media. For example, the logic of being a protagonist in screen-based media (e.g. action films), or the promise seeing through another’s eyes in VR/first-person gaming. But furthermore, they carry these subjectivities across into real-world interactions. It is the unintended consequences embedded in these modes of subjectivity that require particularly close attention.

Immersion as ‘Totalization’ ‘Immersion’ as the term relates to media such as VR has long been associated with ‘totalization’, and techno-determinist discourse tends to characterize immersion as a ‘doing to’ a medium’s user. Oliver Grau describes immersion in VR as a calculated moment of ‘totalization’, when ‘the artwork is extinguished as an autonomously perceived aesthetic object for a limited period of time’ (Grau: 339–340). Similarly, Frank Popper argues that immersive images in interactive digital installations that situate the observer in a ‘360-degree space of illusion’ might be understood as ‘extreme variants of image media that on account of their totality, offer a completely alternative reality’ (2007: 181–182). This desire towards ‘totality’ in different media has been linked to sensibilities evolving from Richard Wagner’s notion of the gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’), expressed in his paper Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) (1849). Josephine Machon has similarly traced immersive theatres’ inherited sensibility of ‘totality’ from

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

85

the gesamtkunstwerk and the Modernist period (2013: 29). However, beyond Wagner’s notion of unifying different artistic formal elements,9 Grau’s conception of ‘totalization’ in VR relates more precisely to the principle of concealing ‘the appearance of the actual illusion medium by keeping it beneath the perceptive threshold of the observer to maximise the intensity of the messages that are being conveyed’ (Grau: 340). In this view, ‘immersion’ in VR introduces a paradox in which the medium seeks to bring about its own disappearance. While Grau delimits ‘immersion’ to describe a ‘passage from one mental state to another’ (2003: 13), I would argue that the underlying desire to position the participant ‘inside’ the frame—a notion that has been critiqued in game design as the ‘immersive fallacy’ (Salen and Zimmerman 2003: 451–452)—corresponds with the ‘theatrical’ artwork (e.g. Minimalism’s incorporation of the ‘beholder’), deep media (gamelike experiences that ‘jump the screen’) and ‘immersive theatre’ (which ‘haptically incorporates’ participants while often bringing about their concealment). It is important to clarify that the notion of ‘totalization’ as a medium erasing itself towards seemingly ‘unmediated’ access to different content is an idea that is incompatible with particularized notions of ‘intermediality’ in contemporary theatre practice. Ágnes Pethő has argued that the ‘inter’ that prefixes ‘intermediality’ indicates theorizing that is focused on ‘relationships, rather than structures, on something that “happens” in-between media’ (2011: 1). ‘Intermedial theatre’ operates precisely within these ‘in-between’ spaces, the theatre becoming a conceptual and ostensibly postmodern space to deconstruct the effects of different media on the way that meaning is constructed and disseminated. As Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt argue in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006), ‘intermediality is associated with the blurring of generic boundaries […] a self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance in performance’ (2006: 11). ‘Intermedial theatre’ might be understood as a space of ‘unconcealment’ in the Heideggerian sense, where truths emerge in-between the staged mediums, with live performers entering into a dialogue with, or forensic deconstruction of the realities, or ‘hyperrealities’ that different media introduce into meaning-making.10 However, the integration of apparatus associated with VR in performance presents different sets of concerns because the medium is typically concerned with engendering its disappearance towards the possibility that one might travel ‘beyond’ representations.11 Within a VR body transfer illusion that is framed as an aesthetic experience as opposed

86  L. JARVIS

to a laboratory experiment, it is the self-deceptive perceptual disappearance of the participating body to itself that is staged as an illusory reconciliation of the immersive paradox of being oneself, but simultaneously becoming another.

‘Prioritizing’ or Transcending Bodies?: ‘Immersion’ in the Virtual In Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet H. Murray influentially examined the relationship between the computer and narrative form, arguing that computers have three characteristic affordances in particular: ‘immersion’, ‘agency’ and ‘transformation’. Murray applies the familiar metaphor of submersion in water to immersion in VR, and correspondingly the ‘sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus’ (98). Unlike Grau’s emphasis on ‘mental absorption’, Murray’s focus precedes and anticipates Machon in aligning immersive spectatorship with the concept of whole bodily participation in an experience and, in the context of VR, polysensorial engagement with an artificial environment. She develops her thinking on the topic by suggesting that in any participatory medium, immersion creates new affordances and ‘implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible’ (99). In accordance with the idea of ‘submersion’ inside an ‘other reality’, Oliver Grau argues that with the ‘advent of new techniques for generating, distributing, and presenting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests that it is possible to “enter” it. Thus, it has laid foundations for virtual reality as a core medium of the merging “information society”’ (3).12 Through this understanding, evolving immersive technologies seek to mobilize the promise that immersants might be situated ‘inside’ information. This notion implies something more complex than ‘a passage from one mental state to another’, but rather suggests a passage inside the simulated—an ontology that corresponds with the problematic conception via immersive theatre of one’s physical passage inside a ‘dramatic’ world. The promise that the flesh of the spectating body might cross the threshold and enter the simulacrum is an irreconcilable desire that has, nonetheless, sought reconciliation both in VR practices and in the philosophy of simulation.

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

87

In Benjamin Woolley’s quest in Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (1993) to locate the origins of virtual reality, popularized by Jaron Lanier and others in the 1980s, he devotes little explicit analysis to the term ‘immersion’. Woolley cites Ivan Sutherland as a key proponent of VR in his influential papers ‘The Ultimate Display’ (1965) and ‘A Head-mounted Three-dimensional Display’ (1968). Sutherland’s ‘ultimate display’ is of relevance to developing an understanding of the ‘immersive’ desires that are historically entrenched in virtual media, and it has significant resonances with the immersive promise of passage ‘inside’ the computer or information. The ultimate display was imagined as ‘a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal’ (qtd. in Woolley, 41). This imagining of a virtual space that might generate simulation-as-matter (evoking associations with popular science fiction concepts such as the ‘holodeck’)13 serves as a radical reconciliation of a desirable convergence that subsequent commentators in philosophy have expressed between the body and ‘information’.14 For example, in Hans Moravec’s ‘Simulation, Consciousness, Existence’ (1998) in which he reflects on the possibility of living as ‘pure computer simulations in virtual worlds’ (Moravec, par. 4). This idea inverts the promise of the ‘ultimate display’ since the matter of the body itself is transcended, becoming ‘information’. Correspondingly, Philosopher Nick Bostrom’s discourse might be situated as part of a similarly gnostic tradition when he forwards three propositions in ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’ (2003: 243–255) of which he argues at least one is ‘true’. His third proposition is that ‘we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation’ (2003: 243). In Bostrom’s radical view, as a consequence of technological advancements, we may already be ‘inside’ a simulated environment as ‘ancestor-simulations’ produced by posthuman descendants—a counterintuitive notion that would render technologies such as VR a peculiar tautology, since in this view our bodies are already ‘virtual’.15 Evidently, philosophical discourses associated with simulation and the gnostic utopian ideal of ‘leaving the body behind’ connect with related antecedent concepts such as Cartesian mind-body dualism. It is important to note, however, that these discourses that occupy an extreme variation of the ‘immersive’ desire to ‘enter information’ by dispossessing the body are entirely at odds with conceptualization of the prioritized ‘embodied minds’ that

88  L. JARVIS

constitute the immersed participant via Josephine Machon’s ‘(syn)aesthetic’ understanding of immersive theatres. This signals that in developing a cross-disciplinary understanding of immersive promises of ‘entry’, concepts accrued around the term are broad enough to encompass radically oppositional philosophies, including those that ‘prioritize’ and those that troublingly dispense with what N. Katherine Hayles had termed as the body’s ‘insistent materiality’. In Gabriella Giannachi’s examination of intersections between theatre, performance and digital arts in Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (2004), she advances the notion of the ‘hypersurface’ as the site in which virtual performance takes place. This is defined as the interchange ‘where the real and the virtual meet each other. It is materiality and textuality, real and representation’ (95).16 Giannachi’s hypersurface is defined as a ‘liminal space’, paralleling Murray’s definition of VR, through which the viewer can ‘enter’ the work of art, to become ‘part of it’ and ‘interact with it’ (95).17 Thus, Giannachi’s evocation of the common trope of ‘entering’ the art in performances that incorporate virtual technologies is congruent with the promise in immersive theatre practices that one might find oneself transported to another world. However, in Giannachi’s lexicon the illusion of ‘crossing the threshold’ and ‘entering’ the artwork does not equate with ‘immersiveness’. Theatre of the hypersurface, she contends, is ‘not immersive but it simulates immersiveness’ (95). Precisely what is meant by ‘immersive’ in Giannachi’s discourse must be discerned through close reading, but perhaps the most compelling interpretation is that while hypersurface theatre doubles the viewer’s presence, situating them simultaneously in the real and the virtual environment, immersivity would mean total subsumption in a simulated environment, ‘entering’ the simulacrum. Immersion through this understanding alludes to phenomena such as simulation theory (e.g. transcending the flesh) and cyberpunk romanticism in which virtual reality ‘replaces the realm of physical existence’ (Calleja 2011: 25). In Giannachi’s vocabulary, it is hard to conceive of a medium in which the ‘immersive’ could be realizable, although body transfer illusions that enable the immersant to experience virtual body parts as integrated within the phenomenal self may be a step closer. Giannachi further suggests that ‘virtual theatre’ has implications for the participating self, since it ‘takes place within a real location and, because of remediatization, produces dislocation’. Therefore, ‘not only does the artwork exist in multiple locations, the viewer too is able to become translocal in that they too are part

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

89

of the work of art’ (11). Consequently, the apparatus of VR multiplies the immersant who is present simultaneously in real and virtual environments since they are participating in both the ‘realm of the image and the sphere of the real, and may modify one through the other’ (95). By this logic, theatres of mislocalized sensation are not wholly ‘immersive’ in the way that Giannachi designates the term, but they simulate immersivity and produce not only a ‘translocal’ immersant, but one who occupies a dual reality status, eliciting a sense of proprioceptive drift towards mediatized body images, while intellectually knowing that their ‘transformation’ is a fiction. Postmodern and feminist media scholars in the 1990s were suspicious of the kind of ‘immersion’ that VR entailed and its corollaries with Cartesian dualism, arguing that a true alternative to René Descartes’s rejection of the body is an ‘embodied knowledge’ that virtual reality cannot achieve18; a notion that I will seek to challenge through the philosophical problem of ‘knowing’ the unique embodied knowledge of neurological subjects in Chapter 4. Historically, commentators have argued against discourses that accompanied VR’s development towards either ‘forgetting the body’,19 the ‘replacement’ of the corpus with a ‘body image’,20 or the body’s technological ‘repression’.21 It is the potential threat of detachment that VR introduces between a body and its gaze that has prompted claims of resonances with mind–body dualism. However, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that VR has always been ambivalent, both Cartesian and anti-Cartesian— ‘anti-Cartesian’ in the respect that the desire to experience the world ‘as others do’ is key to many VR practices and, I would add, crucial to the immersive performance forms in Part II. As these authors suggest, ‘the virtual self repeatedly denies its own identity, its separateness from others and from the world. It does not learn by scientific study in a subject-­ object relationship, but by “immersion”, which produces empathy and identification’ (251). Notably, ‘separation’ has been identified as the primary feature of what Martin Jay called ‘Cartesian perspectivalism’, which concerns a peculiar but historically prevalent way of seeing in Western culture that prioritizes the ocular and affords the Cartesian subject control over space from a single vantage point, enabling the viewer to see the whole picture (which I have demonstrated in Chapter 2 is a Friedian preoccupation with the ‘complete’ artwork).22 In contrast, Bolter and Grusin suggest that in VR, perspective becomes the locus of all knowledge, because a virtual world is a simulacrum in which there is nothing

90  L. JARVIS

to be known apart from the senses; there is nothing ‘behind’ the images (249). What is known is only what can be perceived and interacted with, thus ‘knowledge is sense perception’ (249). Similarly, Char Davies, in ‘Rethinking VR: Key Concepts and Concerns’ (2003), draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Eye and Mind’ (1964), citing his contention that ‘I do not see [space] according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it […] the world is all around me, not in front of me’ (qtd. in Baldwin 309). Davies distils from this philosophical discourse the idea that immersion relates to the relinquishing of distance, the ‘frontal gaze’ and of the immersant’s position as a ‘disinterested so-called objective observer surveying a world separate from one’s self’ (Davies, par. 17). Theatres of mislocalized sensation push this idea further by producing different kinds of altered subjectivities in the attempt to collapse the distance between one’s bodily sense of ‘self’ and the sense perception of others. The practices discussed in Part II support the rejection of the Cartesian self as bodies are ‘remediated’ but not denied. Denial of the body, I would suggest, finds greater correspondence between Cartesian dualism and the Friedian ‘absorptive’ artwork that seeks to negate its ‘beholder’. Theatres of mislocalized sensation represent a plurality of forms branching from the theatrical immersive practices that integrate apparatus such as VR to make use of the medium’s embedded promise of empathic learning (or rather promise made on behalf of the medium). It is in the desire to generate empathy using telepresence technologies that the integrity of the physical self is temporarily compromised—the illusory dissolution of the borders of an immersed body is intended to provide an opportunity to mislocalize proprioception elsewhere, to occupy a different position and ‘experience the problems facing others’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 247). Thus, as I will argue in Chapter 4, the porousness and plasticity of the particular ‘self’ that constitutes an immersed body in the VR paradigm correspond with the ‘theatrical’ immersive case studies in Part II. Furthermore, I also intend to draw a parallel with neuroscientific embodiment studies that identify that perception is not demarcated by the skin. While Chapter 2 has argued towards the extended boundary of the ‘theatrical’ artwork, Chapter 4 will parallel these developments with the shifting boundaries of bodily selfhood via neuroscientific studies in body-ownership and self-attribution.

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

91

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored transdisciplinary understandings of ‘immersive’ and ‘immersion’, highlighting that the delegated ‘promise’ of another’s immersion is a tenuous notion since promise theory has illuminated that agents can only make promises about their own behaviour, and not others’. The acknowledged presence of the immersant’s incorporated body produces a theatrical paradox that necessitates reconciliation. An audience member ‘dips into’ a polysensorial experience, and yet the presence of their participating body is both indispensable to the work and incongruous to dramatic illusion. The promise of bodily access ‘inside’ the elsewhere phenomena of fiction represents an irreconcilable theatrical problem that nonetheless seeks reconciliation within ‘immersive theatres’. As I have identified, there is a corollary between the ontological promise from an artist-agent that one might physically ‘enter’ a dramatic situation through immersive theatre and ‘information’, which is foundational to understanding the development of immersive media in the technological paradigm. Whether physically crossing the threshold ‘inside’ the dramatic (a problematic notion if we accept Gareth’s White’s argument that drama is an insubstantial ‘surface’) or ‘beyond’ representation in the virtual (which is similarly problematic since there is nothing ‘behind’ the image), the audience is never entirely subsumed inside the counterfactual (as per Giannachi’s definition of ‘immersive’). Instead, their presence is doubled; they occupy both real and dramatic or virtual spaces as a participant-character. However, as I will go on to suggest, scientifically tested body transfer illusions have demonstrated the possibility of projecting the proprioceptive sense of bodily ownership onto virtual bodies and extracorporeal objects. My research interests in the chapters that follow concern ‘immersion’ in performance, conceived of as the sensation of ‘dipping into’ a virtual body (VB) and, to varying degrees, the concealment of one’s own participating body (analogous to the astronomical derivation of ‘immersion’ as a ‘disappearance’ behind celestial bodies) to generate the sensation of bodily transference. ‘Immersion’ in this sense connects with the perception of crossing the boundary of one’s own skin and becoming [with] the other body via an illusionistic transaction. Crucially, unlike the Friedian critical lens or Cartesian separation of mind from body, participating bodies are ‘remediated’ and not denied in the subset of practices that are my focus. This represents a strategy to generate illusory

92  L. JARVIS

ownership over virtual bodies towards empathic learning. As I will establish in Chapter 4, the neuroscientific paradigm has evidenced that VR body transfer illusions problematize binary delineations between the ‘metaphorical’ and the ‘non-metaphorical’. The virtual is incorporated as part of the exteroceptive self while the immersant is never unaware of their real-world situation within an illusion. Thus, body transfer illusions are framed in performance as a reconciliation to the paradox of immersive theatres constituted by the idea that the presence of the audience’s physical self in a physical or mediatized environment is both demanded and effaced. As I have clarified, ‘intermedial’ as I am applying the term in the context of immersive practices does not simply orient theatre as a space to deconstruct the effects of media, but stages VR and associated technologies while assimilating to varying degrees the ontologies of ‘transparency’ (inherent to the medium) and concealment (of the participating body). As this survey illustrates, theatre and media scholars have argued that immersive spectatorship presupposes different kinds of participating selves; from the immersant as a ‘(syn)aesthetic’ subject, which focuses our attention on the ‘fused’ perceptual experience of participants as ‘embodied minds’, to radical discourses emerging alongside the virtual. The latter have ranged from gnostic simulationist or transhumanist claims of transcending bodies, to opposing anti-Cartesian notions affirming that the ‘virtual self’ denies separation and precludes the possibility of ‘exteriority’ from the artwork. Having identified these contradictory notions of immersed selves, I have questioned the notion that ‘immersive’ practices ‘prioritize’ bodies tout court. It is my contention that while VR body transfer illusions could be understood to imply a desirable Cartesian liberation of mind from body, the necessity of these illusions to access the ineffable is predicated precisely on the notion of mind-as-body. Illusionism is deployed as one solution to attempt to access remote bodied knowledges that are otherwise inaccessible. The practices in Part II incorporate technologies that engender different kinds of body transfer illusions, which operate in correspondence with VR’s undergirding promise that one might ‘do as others do’, producing the illusion of being other bodies without separation. For this reason, my particular conceptualization of ‘immersion’ concerns the grouping of related methodological strategies deployed by artists in the attempt to bridge epistemic divides and mobilize immersive experience as feeling with the body of another.

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

93

Notes











1. I use the word ‘theatrical’ throughout this chapter strictly in the Friedian sense of the ‘theatrical artwork’ (see Chapter 2 for a comprehensive definition). 2. For example, in Judaism the ritual washing of the hands (netilat yadayim) or full body immersion (tevilah) in a bath, or mikveh. The one-on-one performances of Adrian Howells speak directly to this derivation of ‘immersion’ through acts of washing or bathing audience participants (in Foot Washing for the Sole [2008], The Pleasure of Being: Washing/Feeding/ Holding [2011], etc.). 3. As discussed in Chapter 2, for Fried ‘absorption’ is the antonym of the ‘theatrical’—representing compositional strategies deployed by artists to deny the existence of beholders. 4.  Machon’s emphasis on the spectating body elides with Maurice MerleauPonty’s ‘experiencing body’ in Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945); ‘Perceptual perspective is bodily perspective. We have a world only by having a body: “the body is our anchorage in the world”’ (qtd. in Carman 2008: 11). 5. In Mapping Intermediality (2010), Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink draws on Ronald Bogue to argue that ‘reterritorialisation implies the reorganisation of elements within new assemblages, in which components acquire new functions within the newly created territory (Bogue 1997: 475)’ (BayCheng et al. 2010: 98). Thus, reterritorialization concerns the reconfiguration of spatial relations which can not only be applied to intermedial relationships as Groot Nibbelink argues, but also perceptual relationships in theatres of mislocalized sensation in which the proprioception of the immersant is mislocalized. 6. Lakoff and Johnson analyse the metaphor ‘Love is a Journey’ in Metaphors We Live By (2003 [1980]), arguing that the expression conflates three primary metaphors: ‘A Relationship is an Enclosure’, ‘Intimacy is Closeness’ and ‘A Purposeful Life is a Journey’. 7. Theatre critic Matt Trueman’s blog post ‘Lazy Audiences Don’t Deserve to See Punchdrunk’ (2009) critiqued the now defunct The London Paper newspaper for disclosing details of Tunnel 228, an event that was deliberately enshrouded in secrecy. His critique was in defence of the philosophy that he identified as important to the work; ‘the more you look, the more you will find’ (Trueman 2009). In this view, the ‘depths’ of the experience must be discovered through the spectator’s commitment to seek them out. 8. In game studies, some commentators have equated immersion with the extent to which the player’s senses are blocked from accepting input from outside the immersive activity (Thierren 2013: 451).

94  L. JARVIS

9. The three fundamental arts for Wagner were ‘dance’, ‘tone’ and ‘poetry’. 10. The term ‘hyperreality’ commonly identifies a crisis in semiotics in which consciousness is unable to distinguish reality from simulation, or fakes from originals. Notable commentators and theorists on this topic have included Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Albert Borgmann, Daniel J. Boorstin and Neil Postman. 11. In the parallel field of video gaming, developer Ernest W. Adams critiqued the postmodern self-referential trend in games that include ‘winking’ references to remind the viewer of the medium with which they are engaged in an article entitled ‘Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion’ for industry website Gamasutra (e.g. an AI character referring to ‘buttons’ on a player’s control pad amidst a life and death combat situation) (Adams 2004). Medial self-referentiality might be seen as a strategy that re-­surfaces the ‘user’ from the game-world. Thus, ‘immersion’ in video gaming has similarly been concerned with the audience’s mental absorption in an imaginary universe (resonating with Friedian ‘absorption’ and Grau’s classification of immersion as ‘a passage from one mental state to another’). 12. In Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality (1992), ‘immersion’ is defined as ‘perceptual technology’ that creates the illusion that the operator is inside a simulated ‘three-dimensional environment that surrounds him or her’ (100). For Rheingold, it is an illusion via which one might ‘enter the computer’ (113). Ken Pimentel and Kevin Teixeira have similarly argued that the primary defining characteristic of VR is ‘immersion’ in Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass (1993). The authors equate immersion in this context with ‘inclusion, being surrounded by an environment’ and placing a participant ‘inside information’ (8). 13. In science fiction (e.g. Star Trek), the ‘holodeck’ is a room that places characters inside a simulated reality. 14.  Other commentators had already conceived of the human as bodiless information, such Norbert Wiener’s discussion of the possibility of translating humankind into code that can be transmitted across telephone lines in God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964). 15. Notions of the ‘posthuman’ have been abundantly theorised. For Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013), posthuman theory is a ‘generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as “anthropocene”’ (5). For N. Katherine Hayles, the posthuman is a ‘point of view’ characterised by four assumptions, that ‘embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life’, that consciousness is regarded as an ‘epiphenomenon’, that the body is the ‘original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate’ and that there are no ‘absolute demarcations between bodily

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

95

existence and computer simulation’ (1999: 2–3). The latter assumption particularly resonates with Bostrom’s simulation argument, while the manipulation of the body as ‘prosthesis’ intersects with knowledge in body ownership that underpins theatres of mislocalized sensations. 16.  Put differently, the hypersurface is the ‘surface which brings together materiality and simulation and thereby constitutes the perfect viewing space of the real’ (10). 17. I would note that theatre scholar Susan Broadhurst identified liminal performance in the late 1990s as a ‘genre’ of experimental forms in Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory (1999). For Broadhurst, the liminal ‘performs to the edge of the possible’ and is typified by work that combines ‘digitized technology with corporeal prominence’ (168). 18. For example, N. Katherine Hayles’ ‘The Materiality of Informatics’ (1993), ‘Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics’ (1994), and ‘Embodied Virtuality, Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture’ (1996). 19. In Allucquére Rosanne Stone’s ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?’ (1991). 20. In Simon Penny’s ‘Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project’ (1994). 21.  In Anne Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (1996). 22. In Martin Jay’s ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ (1988).

References Adams, Ernest. 2004. Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion. Gamasutra, July 9. http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/063_ Postmodernism/063_postmodernism.htm. Accessed 12 Jan 2017. Balsamo, Anne. 1996. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson (eds.). 2010. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bergstra, Jan A., and Mark Burgess. 2014. Promise Theory: Principles and Applications. Oslo, Norway: XtAxis Press. Biggin, Rose. 2017. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience. Cham: Springer. Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Bostrom, Nick. 2003. Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211): 243–255. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

96  L. JARVIS Broadhurst, Susan. 1999. Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory. London: Cassell. Calleja, Gordon. 2011. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Carman, Taylor. 2008. Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge. Causey, Matthew. 1999. The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology. Theatre Journal 51 (4): 383–394. ———. 2015. The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual, Towards the Real, ed. Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan, and Néill O’Dwyer. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt (eds.). 2006. Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Rodopi: Amsterdam and New York. Davies, Char. 2003. Rethinking VR: Key Concepts and Concerns. In Hybrid Reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor, ed. Hal Thwaites, 253– 262 (9th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia). Montreal, Canada: International Society on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen. Giannachi, Gabriella. 2004. Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1993. The Materiality of Informatics. Configurations 1 (1): 147–170. ———. 1994. Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics. Configurations 2 (3): 441–467. ———. 1996. Embodied Virtuality: Or How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture. In Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, ed. M.A. Moser, 1–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Immersion. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/immersion. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. Immersive. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/immersive. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. Jay, Martin. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, 3–23. Seattle: Bay Press. Klich, Rosemary, and Edward Scheer (eds.). 2012. Multimedia Performance. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003 [1980]. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

3  THE IMMERSIVE PROMISE OF BECOMING [WITH] THE OTHER BODY 

97

Machon, Josephine. 2013. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2009. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ——–. 2013. (Syn)aesthetics and Immersive Theatre: Embodied Beholding in Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, 199–216. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1964. Eye and Mind. The Primacy of Perception, ed. James E. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, 159–190. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mitra, Royona. 2016. Decolonizing Immersion: Translation, Spectatorship, Rasa Theory and Contemporary British Dance. Performance Research 21 (5): 89–100. Moravec, Hans. 1998. Simulation, Consciousness, Existence. In Field Robotics Center at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. http://www.frc.ri.cmu. edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html. Accessed Apr 2015. Murray, Janet Horowitz. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Penny, Simon. 1994. Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment Project. In Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, ed. Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckrey’s, 231–248. Seattle: Bay Press. Pethő, Ágnes. 2011. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Pimentel, Ken, and Kevin Teixeira. 1993. Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass. New York: Intel/Windcrest. Popper, Frank. 2007. From Technological to Virtual Art. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Rheingold, Howard. 1992. Virtual Reality. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rose, Frank. 2011. The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. New York and London: Norton. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spectator. Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ spectator. Accessed 1 Apr 2017. Stone, Allucquére Rosanne. 1991. Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt, 81–118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thierren, Carl. 2013. Immersion. In The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 451–458. New York: Routledge.

98  L. JARVIS Trueman, Matt. 2009. Lazy Audiences Don’t Deserve to See Punchdrunk. The Guardian: Theatre Blog. Uploaded on May 8. http://www.theguardian. com/stage/theatreblog/2009/may/08/theatre-punchdrunk-tunnel-228. Accessed 24 Mar 2015. Tsakiris, Manos. 2016. The Neurocognitive Mechanism of Embodiment & Selfidentity. East London Centre. 12 September 2016. Lecture. Vanhoutte, Kurt, and Nele Wynants. 2010. Immersion. In Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. White, Gareth. 2009. Odd Anonymized Needs: Punchdrunk’s Masked Spectator. In Modes of Spectating, ed. Alison Oddey and Christine White. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2012. On Immersive Theatre. Theatre Research International 37 (3): 221–235. ———. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiener, Norbert. 1964. God & Golem Inc: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. London: MIT Press. Woolley, Benjamin. 1993. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Woycicki, Piotr. 2014. Post-cinematic Theatre and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Žižek, Slavoj. 2017. Slavoj Zizek on Video Games. YouTube. Uploaded on 26 October 2017. Accessed 21 Mar 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Body-Swapping: Self-Attribution and Body Transfer Illusions (BTIs)

Introduction: If I Were You The unattainable immersive desire to feel with the body of another presents problems that are narratological, philosophical and physical in origin. The leitmotif of ‘body-swapping’ is correspondent with this desire. In science fiction, the plot event of the body-swap is an enduring one; it has haunted the literary imagination throughout history. I will briefly examine how body-swapping has functioned narratologically as something that print media has only been able to imagine as a conceptual, and not a physical act on the part of the reader. To examine the philosophical problem of ‘knowing’ other bodies, I revisit key epistemological thought experiments—from George Edward Moore’s ‘here is one hand…’ argument to Thomas Nagel’s interrogation of the ‘subjective character’ of non-human experience (Nagel 1974). While the direct subjective experience of other bodies is unknowable, in various fields of cultural practice it has been the attempt to know that has been crucial. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran emphasized in Phantoms in the Brain (1998) that within health care, ‘it is the physician’s duty always to ask himself [or herself], “What does it feel like to be in the patient’s shoes?”. I will explore how scientific knowledge might provide proposed aesthetic reconciliations to the paradox of the immersant’s becoming [with] other bodies by examining Botvinick and Cohen’s scientific studies in the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm, H. Henrik Ehrsson et al.’s experimental induction of out-of-body experiences (OBE), body © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_4

99

100  L. JARVIS

substitution illusions (BSI) using VR and other body transfer illusions in the fields of neuroscientific embodiment and experimental psychology. Studies in both neurological and psychiatric bodily disorders and body transfer illusions (BTI)—namely illusions of owning a humanoid body part or full-body other than one’s own—have demonstrated the subjective and objectively measurable sense of ownership over a virtual or prosthetic body part (Botvinick and Cohen 1998) and the neurobiological basis of bodily self-consciousness (Blanke 2012; Blanke et al. 2015). One of the propositions of Immersive Embodiment is that an explosion of scientific research in body-ownership since the 1990s is increasingly informing evolving understandings of immersion in a variety of performance practices. The deployment of body illusions or acts of ‘virtual embodiment’ (Vindenes 2018) that abstract one’s sense of physical self by instating a virtual body/body part or avatar might be understood as a reconciliation of the paradox of an immersant’s physical presence elsewhere through their illusory perceptual transformation. A particular focus in Part II of this book is the application of different BTIs by artists as expressions of actuating the immersive onto-relational desire in performance that I have identified as feeling more fully through the virtualized body of another. In this chapter, I will explore this performance-science imbrication, examining knowledge from empirically tested illusory embodiment techniques that have subsequently been used qualitatively and experientially in arts, applied arts (e.g. in health care) and other contexts. As such, this chapter will provide critical foundations to a fuller understanding of knowledge that underpins the different kinds of immersed selves that are constituted by the practices that I am describing as theatres of mislocalized sensation. I argue that the reach to become ‘othered’ through apparatus that brings about perceptual distortions of different kinds is inherently unstable—a not ‘me’, nor wholly the ‘other’ position. ‘Body-swapping’ as a concept expressed in fiction is correspondent with the conceptualization of immersivity I am advancing through which the participating bodily self is illusorily transformed into the body of an other. It is the desire to mobilize a transaction of experiences between different bodies that has surfaced as a tripartite problem that is narratological, philosophical and physical in origin. In response to the first of these problems, I will briefly examine how the body-swap has functioned in storytelling, surveying different representations and identifying common themes. The importance of this undertaking is to first understand

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

101

how fictional acts of body-swapping have shaped popular perceptions around what might be valued in such an exchange. I contend that body-swapping and its metaphorical entailments are correlative with empathic acts of perspective-taking, and this notion is foundational to the rationale for the more recent trend of applying body transfer illusions in performances/installations as an attempted virtual exchange of bodily knowledge. Though precisely what knowledge is actually being exchanged in different instances of performance will require further scrutiny in a detailed analysis of specific examples of practice in Part II. Body-swapping is a phenomenon that literature has only been able to imagine as a conceptual act, much as Diderotian/Friedian anti-theatrical art seeks to exclude reading, viewing or beholding bodies from the very process of empathic learning that a medium contains. The narratological ‘problem’ is rooted in the idea that body-swapping in representational media cannot supersede the status of a ‘plot device’. Conversely, performance practices that integrate body transfer illusions are predicated on the immersant’s placement ‘inside’ the body-swap transaction, which creates measurable effects and affects associated with incorporating a virtual other’s body, while never truly fulfilling the switch. Turning to the scientific paradigm enables us to develop an evidential understanding of the physiological and behavioural dimensions of body transfer illusions to clarify precisely what makes the promise of self-deceiving body-ownership illusions different to other kinds of imagined ‘as if’ experiences? ‘Evidential’ insights from a scientific paradigm require careful critical negotiation, humility when interpreting wider implications for the study of immersion in performance and parsimony in my explanations as to what the available open-source data might mean. This aspect of the chapter’s focus necessarily places an emphasis on the causal effects of what an illusion ‘does to’ a body. But this aspect of my investigation is accompanied by the caveat that there are many other variables at play when a body illusion is deployed in an aesthetic experience. For example, the kinds of virtual bodies offered for illusory occupation (and those that are absent), the way those bodies may be culturally or socially marked in the location of reception, how they are represented, the manner in which virtual acts of embodiment are framed/entered into, and the stated intention of the artist-agent underlying a virtualized act of othering the immersed self. The philosophical problem concerns the difficulty of ‘knowing’ embodied knowledges that exist outside of what can be subjectively

102  L. JARVIS

experienced. In philosopher G. E. Moore’s anti-idealist lecture paper, Proof of an External World (1939),1 he famously drew on his own presenting body as a site of epistemological ‘certainty’ to advance a ‘common-sense’ proposition. I will test this bodily epistemology by re-examining subsequent thought experiments in the philosophy of mind and more recent body-ownership experiments that interrogate the subjective character of experience. I propose that knowledges that are particular to, and contained within, other bodies are anything but ‘common sense’. And while the direct subjective experience of others is unknowable, the attempt to know has been crucial in both arts and medical contexts. For example, the desire to bridge the epistemic divide between the embodied experiences of neurological patients and those around them (e.g. in Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes series of VR performances in Chapter 5). I will consider the ‘self-effacing’ body as both an obstacle to knowing and the locus of meaning-making, examining the philosophical barriers to understanding both non-human bodies (e.g. animals) and the experience of neurological disorders or neuroatypical phenomena. Finally, any reach towards ‘knowing’ the embodied experiences of different subjectivities presents a physical problem that necessitates a profound transformation of the participating self. It is my contention in Part II, that research in body-ownership is providing illusion-generating techniques to simulate a body’s crossing-over into not only virtual space, but to incorporate a mediatized body image as part of the body schema. I will briefly trace the origination of studies in proprioception (Sherrington 1906) and phantom limb pain (PLP) (Weir Mitchell 1872), which formulated foundations for subsequent research in body illusions for ‘healthy’ participants that demonstrate the plasticity of physical selfhood. Of particular relevance to notions of ‘body-swapping’ is the artificial induction of extended human perception to incorporate inanimate objects as part of the self in the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm and VR body substitution illusions (BSI). The latter can be further subdivided into categories of experimentally inducing out-of-body experiences (OBE) or autoscopy (AS) (the ‘experience of seeing one’s body in extrapersonal space’ [Blanke et al. 2004: 243]) and full-body illusions (FBI). A growing corpus of evidence from laboratory experiments studying the mechanisms of body illusions have shown that subjects can temporarily disown their real bodies (Guterstam and Ehrsson 2012), while reporting incorporation of alien/virtual limbs at phenomenological, behavioural and physiological levels (de Vignemont 2018: 207). Surveying key demonstrations of the

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

103

malleability of bodily selfhood will enable a detailed thinking-through as to the methodological implications of this knowledge for emergent immersive performance practices that seek to engender empathic learning between bodies in different contexts.

The Narratological Problem: A Survey of Body-Swapping in Fiction and Its Correlates in Digital Culture Body-swapping is an ancient and persistent concept that spans many cultures and historic periods, bearing some correspondence with other phenomena that entails a departure from physical bodies, such as out-ofbody experiences or the shamanic notion of ‘soul flight’ (Shields 1978). In storytelling, the body-swap is a device in fiction in which two organisms exchange minds and/or bodies. The event of a body-swap is a plot device, and its presence within a heterogeneity of literary sub-genres makes it difficult to confine to any one style of storytelling, with examples in science fiction, romantic comedy, horror, crime thrillers, etc. As a plot contrivance, body-swapping often serves a dual function, both as an inciting incident and a moment of reversal when a protagonist ‘returns’ to their body. Its deployments can range from creating farcical situations through misrecognitions—sometimes termed as ‘body-switch’ comedy—to evoking the uncanny in horror (e.g. the coercive apprehension of a body as a ‘host’).2 Body-swapping principally concerns a two-way exchange, but some narratives depict a ‘body-hop’, or a one-way transferral from one body to another (e.g. romantic fantasy film Every Day [2018]). There is an abundance of other phenomena akin to body-swapping in fiction that I should acknowledge but do not intend to discuss, such as possessions,3 transmigration or reincarnation,4 age transformations,5 avatars (as the term specifically relates to Hindu culture),6 impostors,7 clones,8 duplicates,9 head/brain transplants, regenerations and doppelgängers.10 Examples of body-swapping are innumerable across a variety of media. A casual search on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) alone using the keyword ‘body-swap’ generates a list of 204 titles, with 107 further titles found under the keyword ‘body-switching’ (in an online search on 25 September 2019). This brief survey will not seek to cover the entire gamut, but aims to capture some of the key values that underlie the narrative function of body-swapping in fiction and its metaphorical entailments—put differently, body-swapping’s relationship to, and fulfilment of,

104  L. JARVIS

the promise embedded in accompanying metaphors of ‘walking in another’s shoes’. This well-worn expression derives from the proverb to not judge a person until ‘you have walked a mile in their shoes’, which is widely understood to originate from the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that metaphors structure what we perceive, and that the ‘essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of a thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5). Body-swapping as an imagined act of displacing the mind to feel with other bodies not only resonates with the Greek definition of ‘metaphor’, which means to ‘carry across’, but also tends to be commonly paired with metaphors of empathic learning by doing as other’s do. It is my contention that the immersive desire to feel with the body of another has significant resonances with the value perceived in the radical transformation of body-swapping as a fictional exchange. Understanding the promise embedded in virtual acts that artificially mislocalize a participant’s sense of bodily selfhood requires first examining how such promises may have been shaped by acts of body-swapping represented in fiction. Scientific studies in body-ownership have suggested that the feeling of having a body is made up of ownership, location and agency (Metzinger 2010: 77). Correspondingly, body-swaps in fiction have reassigned the sense of a character’s ‘me-ness’ to another body, physically shifting their location and producing simultaneous agency/loss of agency—more specifically, agency over another body and loss of agency over their ‘old’ body. In literature, an early example of the body-swap appears in Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers first published in 1882 (and written under the pseudonym ‘F. Anstey’), in which a businessman exchanges bodies with his son and must begin the term at his boarding school in a carnivalesque ‘world upside-down’ reversal (the word ‘vice versa’ is from the early seventeenth-century Latin, meaning ‘in-turned position’).11 The return to their respective bodies functions as an act of reparation, with both characters having cultivated a greater appreciation for the other’s struggles. This story has received various updated retellings, with a mother and daughter body-swap in Mary Rodgers Freaky Friday (1972).12 Other stories have used body-swapping to compel a protagonist to confront historically and culturally specific social injustices. For example, body-swapping as the exchange of wealth for poverty in Walter Besant’s The Doubts of Dives (1889), the exchange of race between a white and a black man in late nineteenth-century South Carolina in Ignatius Donnelly’s Doctor Huguet (published under

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

105

the pseudonym of Edmund Boisgilbert in 1891), or switches across gender lines (Newte 1911; Smith 1931; Lucas 1988; Ayckbourn 2011; Nelson 2006). Gender-related mind transference in science fiction has been examined as ‘trans incidents’ in recent scholarship as a way of analysing the treatment of gender diverse people and the extent to which gender binaries have been challenged or reaffirmed in body-swap narratives (Eldridge 2016). Matthew Causey has connected the radical mutability afforded by technological duplications of the self in postdigital culture to posthuman, trans-identities and queer identities as ‘models of performing the self that are states of becoming outside of traditional ordering systems, biological imperatives, or binary restrictions’ (Causey 2016: 434). Correspondingly, virtual reality is giving new expression to the coalescence between gender body-swap narratives, trans-identities and postdigital aesthetics. For example, art collective BeAnotherLab’s (BAL) VR gender-swap performance experiment, which uses Oculus Rift HMDs and live first-person video to enable users to feel that they inhabit the body of a different gender using full-body illusions (FBI) (‘Gender Swap’). BAL’s work is inspired by scientific studies that have been conducted by organizations such as the Brain, Body and Self Laboratory (Group Ehrsson) at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and Event Lab in Barcelona. The artists align this practice with feminist technoscience, and VR body-swapping might be understood as an applied performance practice manifested to co-explore situated knowledges by transplanting vision between ‘complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured’ bodies (Haraway 1988: 589). In BAL’s work, this includes the bodies of refugees (analyzed in Jarvis 2017), disabled bodies, differently gendered bodies or bodies that have transitioned from one gender identity to another (examined in Chapter 5). There is a pattern in fiction, especially psychological horror, of mind transference as a manifestation of the self-serving ambition of scientists or occultists that is pursued through untested, immoral or unethical pseudo-scientific practices. For example, hijacking a subject’s body against their will to pursue a rival’s love interest (Fawcett 1887), enslaving or taking physical possession of a relative’s body (Lovecraft 2013), body-swapping as a means of cheating mortality (Wells 1896), or an unintended switch occurring as a by-product of a reckless experiment to prove supernatural phenomena (Conan Doyle 1885). Elsewhere, the body-swap plot event has functioned as the peripeteia in fiction with a tragic structure—a moment when the fortunes of a character change

106  L. JARVIS

irrevocably for the worse. In Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls (1911), scientist Dr. Daniel Myas fashions a machine to ‘switch souls’ between bodies. The peripeteia is brought about when Myas uses the machine to exchange bodies with his fiancée, Alice Lade. An accident destroys Myas’ body leaving him imprisoned inside his fiancée, which renders the transaction tragically incomplete and Lade’s disembodied soul to wander in limbo. Notably, it was a body-swap play that Aleks Sierz had claimed marked the defining moment of a ‘new sensibility’ and dominant style of playwriting in the 1990s/early noughties that he famously termed ‘in-yer-face’ theatre (Sierz 2001). Sierz’s cites Peter Rose’s Snatch (1998) as a significant moment of arrival for the selected plays he gathers under this taxonomy. Snatch stages the brutal rape of Beth at the hands of students Paul and Simon. The body-swap plot event in Rose’s play instigates an unfolding revenge drama in which Beth, in Paul’s body, ties up Paul-asBeth and gags him. ‘She’ subsequently invites a returning Simon to rape ‘Beth’ (his friend Paul in Beth’s body) and castrates Paul’s body before returning to her own. A defining feature of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre according to Sierz is a visceral and experiential ‘getting under our skin’ (Sierz 2001: 4), which beyond the affective quality of witnessing unyieldingly brutal acts is simultaneously the function of the body-swap in fiction. The ‘in’ of ‘in-yer-face’ implies a radical collapsing of physical proximity—an extreme close-up on the action and a querying of boundaries that the plot event of body-swapping encapsulates as a position ‘inside’ the face of the other. Hence, the defining moment of Sierz’s conceptualization of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre coalesced, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a body-swap narrative. The coupling of the body-swap with pseudo-technologically expedited tragedy is another well-worn trope. Since the 1980s, the cyberization of body-swapping in cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk literature and other media has produced new ‘future-shock’ variations on the bodyswap’s gnostic theme.13 For example, the technological reproduction of consciousness (Rucker 1982; Gibson 1984; Egan 1994), post-cyberpunk transpositions of mind to full-body prosthesis (Shirow 1989), artificial intelligence’s harvesting of physical bodies and pacifying of subjects in a shared virtual simulation (The Wachowskis 1999), consciousness as a digital download that enables interstellar travel between bodies or ‘sleeves’ (Morgan 2002), to medical procedures of ‘shedding’ that transfer consciousness from dying bodies into either artificially grown

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

107

healthy ones (The Pastors 2015), or post-death simulated utopias/afterlives maintained in server farms (Brooker 2016). Some literary criticism has acknowledged a tendency among male cyberpunk writers to privilege ‘disembodiment’ as a strategy to leave masculinity ‘undisturbed’ (Nayar 2004: 307). But my interest is less in ‘transcending’ materiality than understanding body-swapping as a concept to mobilize the desire to know other physical and bodied knowledges through acts of virtual re-embodiment—including taking up the position of fragile, diverse, disenfranchised and disempowered bodies. In addition to body-swapping, fiction has long anticipated a plethora of new kinds of disembodied or extended presence from cyberspatial nicknames (Vinge 1981), to avatars in virtual reality-based evolutions of the Internet (or the ‘metaverse’ in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash [1992]). More recently, the imagined surveillance technologies that reoccur in Charlie Brooker’s techno-dystopian Netflix series Black Mirror enable users to monitor others using neural implants that detect geolocation and live stream another’s first-person vision to other users on a computer or tablet (e.g. the ‘Z-Eye’ and ‘Arkangel’ technologies in Brooker 2014, 2017). The commonality between these fictional articulations of technological first-person surveillance is that they enable their users to hijack another’s vision as if first-hand, minus the body-swap’s reciprocity and trade-off of acquiring agency over another body’s actions, while relinquishing control over their ‘own’. Outside of fiction, ‘deepfake’ technology has involved the mixing of artificial intelligence with facial-mapping software to enable online memetic acts of face-swapping, digitally replacing the face of one person with another (examined in relation to ‘post-fact performance’ in Fletcher 2018). But far from empathic acts of physical transformation that concerns my focus here, insidious use of this software is posing unique sets of challenges to lawmakers as a result of the rise in manipulating the online presence of others to influence electoral systems or apprehend facial images of celebrities for use in DIY non-consensual pornography, etc. Despite the culturally and historically diverse corporeal borderlands that are crossed in fiction, this brief survey illustrates that body-swap narratives without a tragic structure typically (but not always) share in the recurrent trope that the body-swap plot event causally produces understanding with another’s troubles. ‘Empathy’ in this context is conceptualized as an extreme variant of ‘perspective-taking’ by process of profound physical transformation. While it is important not to conflate science fiction with science fact, there are elisions between the empathic

108  L. JARVIS

promise underlying fictional acts of body-swapping that I have identified and knowledge from recent studies in how bodily representations of the self might alter people’s implicit attitudes towards different racial groups by proprioceptively owning a rubber hand or VR avatar of a different skin tone (Farmer et al. 2012, 2014; Peck et al. 2013), age or sex (Maister et al. 2015). Such studies increasingly suggest that a different kind of identification with the other occurs through body-ownership illusions. In my discussion of body-swapping as a physical problem (page 121), I will offer a more detailed account of scientific body transfer illusion (BTI) studies that corroborate the hypothesis that the representation of the self through a body’s multisensory processing plays a crucial part in shaping social attitudes towards others. This will underscore resonances between the fictional body-swap as a plot event that incites behavioural change and body ownership as a scientific field of study. Subsequently, I will progress to examine the evidential rationale for virtual body-swapping in immersive aesthetic/applied practices. An ethical risk accompanying virtual acts of embodiment is the possibility of techno-fetishizing other bodies as exoticized and visitable ‘destinations’. Also, the illusion of dispensing with irreducible alterity might uphold an unhelpful fantasy that there are no human concepts that are beyond the reach of other humans, when inevitably complex embodied experiences such as racial discrimination are shaped by the perceptual apparatus that a particular body owns. Immersion of this kind treads a line that can easily slip into a kind of voyeuristic cyber-tourism that misaligns experiential knowledge in the experience industry, with an empathic understanding of the horrors of others from a sanitized position of relative privilege.

Actual and Virtual Body-Swapping: Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and Subtle Bodies-as-Self Model It is important to unpack the incongruences that arise between fictional representations of body-swapping in relation to current scientific understandings. In a Guardian article, ‘Body Swapping: The Science Behind the Switch’ (2014), neuroscientist Dean Burnett argues that if body-swapping were possible—which, outside of body illusions, it is not—the consequences would be traumatic. Even in what he describes as ‘body-type to same body-type’ swaps, the mind would occupy ‘a brain it hasn’t developed alongside/from, so the brain has a lot of features that will be unfamiliar’. For example, there would exist two sets of memories,

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

109

those physically stored in the brain and memories carried over from the inhabiting other—an idea that hinges on an assumption that memories could exist independent of the anatomy of particular brain regions. These competing sets of memories would make body-swapping a highly disorienting experience. Furthermore, Burnett suggests that the architecture of the brain would be shaped by its previous owner, and the incoming consciousness would be located inside a brain that would have certain regions enlarged and more active than its own. Finally, he suggests that ‘the brain maps the body very precisely via the cortical homunculus,14 so if you’re in a different body then you’re going to have a differently configured cortical homunculus, which could only prove debilitating’ (Burnett, par. 9). While the techno-transcendence associated with fullbody prosthesis in popular cyber-fiction such as Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell remains a fantasy, extrapolating from current technology, it is clear that there are new possibilities to replace body parts with artificial biotechnologies such as the 3D-printing or ‘bioprinting’ of bone, muscle and cartilage (Kirkpatrick 2017) or body organs (Cho et al. 2015)—developments that are particularly associated with advancements in the field of regenerative medicine. Beyond the hypothetical concerns that an actual body-swap could introduce, body-swapping is also premised on a dualistic philosophy of mind, in which mind and body are separable entities. Embodied cognition has rather assumed a monistic position, contending that the mind is embodied and situated. Lawrence Shapiro has identified three core themes with embodied cognition as a research field; it tends to place an emphasis on how a body shapes the concepts through which it understands the world (‘conceptualization’), it replaces the need for representational processes with a body’s interaction with its environment (‘replacement’), and the body/world is constitutive of cognitive processing that is not merely causal (‘constitution’) (Shapiro 2011: 4). For phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the embodied cognitivists that his work subsequently inspired such as Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, ‘embodiment’ encompasses both the body as lived as an ‘experiential structure’ and ‘the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms’ (Varela et al. 1993: xvi). But how might the dualistic experiences associated with body-swapping be reconciled in the light of more contemporary understandings of a mind-as-embodied? For philosopher Thomas Metzinger, the ‘self-model’ describes the single general mechanism that generates ‘an integrated

110  L. JARVIS

representation of the organism as a whole in the brain’ (Metzinger 2010: 81–82). Metzinger has discussed a real-world phenomenon that I have suggested bears some relation to body-swapping, namely out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which have also led to notions of dualism and the idea of a ‘second body’—an idea that Metzinger associates with both its folk-phenomenological ancestor the ‘soul’, and a proto-concept of the mind (85). This notion of a second body or ‘subtle body’ that is independent of the physical body has been replicated in many cultures, but for Metzinger OBEs are the product of a culturally invariant neuropsychological potential that all humans possess (86). For Metzinger, the subtle body exists, but as information processing rather than through a spiritual or mystical understanding. In other words, the subtle body is the brain’s self model (86). But the representation associated with the ‘phenomenal self model’ (PSM) (Metzinger 2003) is an ‘ongoing process’ that is flexible and can be constantly updated (82). For Metzinger, the PSM is made up of three distinct properties—‘mineness’ or the idea of ownership, ‘perspectivalness’ or the ecological self at the centre of perception and ‘selfhood’, which concerns the idea of the self over time. The combination of these properties plays a vital role in creating the first-person perspective. But under certain conditions, all human beings can generate OBEs of different orders when conscious representations of the body and the sense of selfhood are disturbed by multisensory disintegrations that can be prompted by conditions such as brain tumours, epilepsy, interaction with foreign substances and, of particular relevance to the practices discussed in Part II, through temporary VR-induced BTIs. Fictional body-swapping narratives might be thought of as creative and pluralistic expressions of disturbances of the self model, and the manner in which they are purported to have been executed can prop up different philosophical positions on what constitutes ‘selfhood’. Where live performance practices that incorporate virtual bodyswapping differ from deployments of the body-swap in fiction is that the former conceives of the transaction as a mode of reception and transformation of the immersed participants’ subtle bodies, while the latter never supersedes the status of a narrative plot device. ‘Reading’ bodies—which I have associated with Fried’s discourse on absorptive immersion in my Introduction—always remain exterior to the bodyswap transaction that is symbolically represented in writing, whereas artists that deploy a body transfer illusion within their practice have a different duty of care-taking when inviting an immersant to lend their

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

111

whole body to an aesthetic experience.15 There is some overlap in this respect between acts of virtual embodiment and other diversifying participatory fields such as Live Action Role-Play (LARP), where people immerse themselves in fictional worlds to experience how others might live. For example, Danish LARP designer Nina Runa Essendrop’s Human Experience (Menneskelig Oplevelse) (2016–) involved participants who play ‘Ancient Consciousnesses’. The players’ imagined co-inhabiting of their body enabled a fictionalized ‘them’ to experiment with the players’ movements and senses, sharing in their Ancient Consciousness’s imagined wonder of encountering bodily sensations as if for the first time. While Josephine Machon’s conceptualization of immersive theatre’s ‘(syn)aesthetic’ audience member is constituted by fused sensory perceptual experience (Machon 2009: 14)—a concept that might also relate to many LARP experiences—immersants inside virtual body-ownership illusions are reconstituted more specifically through strategic disintegrations of their senses, with the experiencing body as a stage-space to subsequently reconstruct the sensate experience of other bodies.

The Philosophical Problem: Bodies of ‘Certainty’? The fictional concept of body-swapping introduces a philosophical problem concerning the extent to which one can ‘know’ knowledge that is embodied by others. Philosopher George Edward Moore had famously used his body as a site of epistemological ‘certainty’ in defence of ‘common sense’. Moore set himself the task of proving the existence of external objects (much like Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781).16 By ‘external objects’, he meant ‘things whose existence is not dependent upon our experience’ (Baldwin, par. 28). Moore argued that if he could provide such proof, by association he would have also proved the existence of an ‘external world’. Significantly, he demonstrated this evidence by holding up his hand and proclaiming: ‘Here is one hand […] and here is another’ (1993: 166). From this sequence of gestures, he concluded that since there are at least two external objects in the world—his right and left hands—that he had provided proof of the existence of external objects. Moore’s ‘proof’ depends on what counts as ‘external’ (Baldwin 2004). Manifestly, the idea that Moore’s hands could be conceived of as independent of his thought or experience is questionable outside of neurological conditions such as alien hand syndrome (first coined

112  L. JARVIS

in Goldstein 1908) or conditions that are characterized by rejection, misidentification or denial a body part such as asomatognosia (Vié 1930, 1944a, b, c). Perhaps more agreeable is the idea that his hands are external to the bodies of the audience members that received his lecture. Nonetheless, the truism that he had hands does not qualify as an analysis of the truism. Moore’s claim was subsequently scrutinized in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1972 [1969]), which examined the place of claims to know in our knowledge. Wittgenstein states that ‘from its seeming to me—or to everyone—to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it’ (2e). While I do not intend to intervene in the historical idealist/anti-idealist debates as to the existence or non-existence of material things, I use Moore’s claim as a point of departure. Does it make sense to doubt one’s bodily experience as a site of ‘certainty’? And if a body’s sense of external/ internal has the capacity for greater porousness than Moore had recognized in his ‘here is one hand’ argument, what kinds of interventions, modifications or forms of temporary adaptation are enabling immersants to feel sensations akin to those contained within non-human or neuroatypical bodies? The practices in Part II to some degree conflate knowledge associated with the reactive shock of more frivolous scientific experiments of body-ownership—for example, the response to recoil when a perceptually embodied rubber hand is smashed with a hammer— to affects transmitted through the first-person vantage point of virtualized neuroatypical bodies, etc. The latter is inevitably more ‘difficult’ as an example because of what happens to knowledge claims when embodiment experiments are transposed as a form of empathy activism. Bodies and their hands can be ‘marked’ differently and as Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotions has identified, words for feelings can circulate and signs can generate effects by ‘sticking’ to particular kinds of bodies. For example, ‘when others become “hateful”, then actions of “hate” are directed against them’ (Ahmed 2014: 13). The potential efficacy of body transfer illusions as a form of empathy activism, or ‘Æfficacy’—a compound word that encompasses both art’s potential to stimulate affects and activism’s desire to produce positive social effects (Duncombe 2016: 117–120)—might be located in the potential in individual acts to dislodge signs from body-types in affective economies, displacing one’s proprioceptive feeling to objects (rubber or virtual hands) that are not felt as ‘objects’ but as bodily integrations. In addition, theatres of mislocalized sensation and the generating of autonomic reactions

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

113

through an immersant’s virtualized body subvert the prevalent hierarchies of feeling in Western culture as identified by Erin Hurley, in which ‘emotion ranks over affect, human over animal, and mind over body’ (2010: 53).

The Expanded Umwelt: Adapting and Referring Human Sensations to Non-Human Others Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously posed the question, ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ (Nagel 1974) as a thought experiment to demonstrate the centrality of a body in knowledge creation and the ‘subjective character of experience’ (436). Nagel argued that the kind of experiences available to a body is contingent on the perceptual faculties that it possesses.17 As such, how might a human extrapolate what the experience of a bat’s sense of echolocation might be?18 According to this argument, there are facts that are ‘beyond the reach of human concepts’ (441), which are shaped by the perceptual apparatus that a body owns. Daniel Dennett has extended the problem to non-human experiences, questioning whether a robot’s so-called first-person point of view could be anything like ours, and by extension how can we know that we are all conscious in the same way? (2007: 265). Neuroscientist David Eagleman has drawn on biologist Jakob von Uexküll concept of the  umwelt (Uexküll 1909) from biosemiotics meaning ‘the surrounding world’, which highlights that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. The umwelt is the small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect through its sensorium, and the ungraspable ‘objective’ reality beyond that which is perceivable is the umgebung. For Eagleman, each organism is perceptually biased to assume that its umwelt is ‘the entire objective reality “out there”’ (2012: 143–145). However, much information exists on channels to which our bodies have no natural access. For example, Eagleman has noted that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans is less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic field, and therefore much goes undetected in our lives apart from a ‘shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality’ (2012: 143–145). But Eagleman says that the reason we tend to suffer no feeling of absence is because we can’t conceive of what’s missing from the limited experience of reality constructed through our senses. For Eagleman, the umwelt not only captures the idea of ‘unobtainable information’, but also instils

114  L. JARVIS

an intellectual humility that comes from an appreciation for the amount of information that is hidden from our finite bodily experiences. Our body is all we have with which to ‘know’ our world, but simultaneously it’s the obstacle to both the vast an inaccessible reality of the umgebung and, more specifically in the context of this discussion, the onto-relational desire epitomized by the body-swap’s promise of feeling the radical alterity of another organism. As Nagel contends, it is impossible to disentangle ‘experience’ from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, ‘what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?’ (443). More recently, ethologists have drawn on a vast array of studies in animal cognition to challenge those traits that were previously thought to separate human from animal minds, from designing tools to possessing a sense of self (De Waal 2016). Charles Foster’s Being a Beast (2016) draws on science to understand what it would be like to be a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox or a swift, to test the existential isolation of understanding otherness as something that is ‘wholly inaccessible’ (208). He criticizes the tendency in traditional nature writing of anthropocentrism (representing the natural world only as it appears to humans) and anthropomorphism (conceiving of animals as having human-like sense receptors and cognition) on the basis that ‘every organism creates a different world in its brain’ (Foster 2016: xi–xii). While direct access to ontologies of bodily otherness is impossible, expanding the umwelt of a body is wholly possible as studies in sensory substitution and sensory extension have demonstrated (Macpherson 2019). But how are artists finding immersive approaches to extend a body’s umwelt or overcome different kinds of human perceptual bias? Following Nagel’s proposition, practices that couple immersion explicitly with the body-swap concept have sought to bridge interspecial divides by attempting to actuate the desire to become non-human bodies. Recent design and engineering projects have modified and adapted the human form to reconstruct animal experiences through new kinds of body-world interfaces. Designer Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human (2016) documents his Wellcome Trust-funded research project, which developed different iterations of a goat exoskeleton and prosthetics that enabled his human anatomy to occupy a quadrupedal position (see Fig. 4.1). He tested the exoskeleton by living among a herd of goats in the Swiss Alps. Thwaites research involved consultation with a shaman, neuroscientists, prosthetists, animal

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

115

Fig. 4.1  Designer Thomas Thwaites’ goat exoskeleton from the Wellcome Trust supported GoatMan project (Photograph: Tim Bowditch)

behaviourists/ethologists and goat herders, to develop an understanding from a variety of perspectives about what connects and separates human from goat behaviour.19 While Thwaites’ project represents a form of ‘emic’ ethnographic study of accelerated adaptation, interspecial interactions, behaviours and the attempt to embody an animal’s perceptions, it was not framed as a participatory experience intended for access to public audiences. However, there are other exemplars that seek to modify the body of a participating public such as the Eyesect (2013–) by Berlin-based design company The Constitute, who describe themselves as a ‘transdisciplinary laboratory for interactive public experiences’. The Eyesect (2013–) is a wearable interactive installation that permits acts

116  L. JARVIS

of ‘Out-of-Bodiment’ in gallery and festival contexts by shifting the human-centric stereoscopic perspective of the immersant using a virtual reality helmet that projects an individual camera feed to each of the user’s eyes using an Oculus Rift HMD (see Fig. 4.2). The immersant can detach each camera module from the helmet, extending the reach of their gaze like two periscopes that can independently be pointed in any direction. This uncoupling of binocular vision shares resonances with Carsten Höller’s The Forests installation that takes each of the immersant’s left and right eyes on a separate journey (discussed on pages 63–65). The aim was for the ‘arm and fingertips to become new sensory muscles for the vision senses’ (‘EYESECT’)—to literally enable participants to take their sight into their own hands. The installation enables two experiencing positions: from inside the helmet to navigate its affordances, and from the outside, observing individuals taking their first tentative steps to navigate through a public space. While the installation’s title ‘eyesect’ implies an insect-like perspective, it is less explicit in its aims to reconstruct the feeling of becoming a different organism than Thwaites’ GoatMan project. Michael Friedman

Fig. 4.2  The Constitute’s Eyesect (2013–), created by Sebastian Piatza, Christian Zöllner and Julian Adenauer

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

117

has argued that the experience is ‘not akin’ to seeing with insect eyes because the cameras can be positioned in non-fixed and unconventional positions (Friedman 2016: 134). Furthermore, most insects have ‘compound eyes’ that generate a mosaic-like image of the world, which Eyesect does not. For Friedman, the installation is rather a nomadic apparatus that destabilizes ‘sense-certainty’. By this logic, Eyesect is not immersive from a media studies perspective, which commonly conceptualizes immersion as an equivalence with technical procedures that instate sense-certainty through both the synchronization of mechanics and imaging and reduction of discrepancies between movement and vision (e.g. reducing latency and motion sickness in VR, etc.).20 While the notion of ‘mislocalizing’ the senses corresponds to some degree with technical operations that instil sense certainty to enable an immersant to more acutely feel elsewhere, when coupling immersion with the underlying logic of the body-swap, I would argue that attempts to become another are always an inherently unstable and indeterminate position since I cannot wholly be ‘me’, nor can I wholly be the ‘other’—immersion in the context of the GoatMan project and Eyesect is a process of modifying the body one owns rather than ever becoming an other body. Nonetheless, the destabilizing of one’s sense of bodily self is always in operation through my particular conceptualization of the immersive promise. The technological desire to reduce disjunctures, doubt or asynchronicities between bodily sensation and virtual environments conceals the underlying principle that all immersion that promises access to a bodily elsewhere is unstable and paradoxical.

‘Knowing’ Neuroatypical and Self-Effacing Bodies? The philosophical problem of knowing the experience of bodies of a different species could be substituted for other kinds of human experiences that have a particularly unique embodied understanding of their world. For example, what is it like to be an epileptic or an anterograde amnesic? How might I ‘know’ the latter’s experience of moment-to-moment consciousness without the neurological conditions that precipitate that mode of ‘being in the world’? The proposition could be pushed further, since even if one were to develop the associated memory ‘deficits’ of an anterograde amnesic, how might one ‘know’ one’s own amnesia? William Hirstein draws out this epistemic paradox in relation to various different neurological conditions in Confabulation: Views from Neuroscience,

118  L. JARVIS

Psychiatry, Psychology, and Philosophy (2009) when he questions of ‘confabulators’, or those who offer false knowledge reports while believing them to be true21: Why don’t they know that they don’t know? Why doesn’t the Anton’s patient know that [she/] he doesn’t know how many fingers the doctor is holding up?22 Why doesn’t the anosognosic know that [her/] his arm is paralyzed?23 Why doesn’t the split brain patient know that [she/] he doesn’t know what stimulus his right hemisphere was exposed to?24 Why doesn’t the Korsakoff’s patient know that [she/] he doesn’t remember what he did yesterday?25 Why doesn’t the Capgras’ patient know that [she/] he is misperceiving [her/] his father?’26 (12)

Beyond experiential knowledge that is dependent on owning a particular kind of body (e.g. a bat), some bodies through memory or perceptual disorders confabulate precisely because they cannot know their own experiences. For example, a subject with Korsakoff’s syndrome often cannot retain the memory of an experience that happened only minutes ago. Neurological conditions such as these have drawn attention to what Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee have described as the ‘illusory nature of self’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998: xi). Connected to Nagel’s argument of knowing experiences across interspecial divides, there are significant limits as to how ineffable and neuroatypical bodied experiences might be communicated—a problem that is examined in relation to the applied immersive practices that seek to convey embodied experiences of epileptic seizure (Chapter 5) and motor atypical experiences in Parkinsonian tremor (Chapter 6). Phenomenologist Drew Leder in The Absent Body (1990) has disputed the kind of bodily certainty that G. E. Moore’s argument espoused by investigating ways in which our bodies are ‘forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, or obscured’, a concept that Leder acknowledges is indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s examination in The Visible and the Invisible (1968). He emphasizes the body’s ‘disappearance’ from our daily interactions with the world, stating that ‘certain modes of disappearance are essential to the body’s functioning. As ecstatic/recessive being-in-theworld, the lived body is necessarily self-effacing’ (69). The notion of bodies as ‘self-effacing’ extends the philosophical problem that I have identified of knowing other bodies by foregrounding the tendency to conceal its own vital operations from conscious awareness. Beyond delusional subjects who ‘confabulate’, the disappearance of aspects of the body

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

119

from conscious attention is characteristic of so-called healthy functioning in neuroscientific discourses. For Leder, it is a body’s tendency towards self-concealment that ‘allows for the possibility of its neglect or deprecation’ (69) and wearable technologies such as head-mounted displays might be thought of as a reification of bodily self-effacement. But paradoxically, to expand the physical sense of phenomenal self to incorporate a virtual body necessitates degrees of bodily concealment and manipulation of the senses to instantiate a feeling of drifting towards a virtual proxy.

The Physical Problem: Historic Body Illusions and ‘Proprioception’ Bodily certainties have been challenged by neurological disorders and their scientific exploration in the fields of proprioception and phantom limb pain (PLP), but also laboratory experiments since the 1990s that are consistent with the classical approach in psychology of studying illusions to learn more about the processes that underlie human perception. In this section, I will map the terrain of scientific studies in body-ownership, tracing an intellectual lineage and amassing for the reader a comprehensive overview of where the VR techniques applied in the artistic practices that I will discuss in Part II originate. The distinct but interconnected fields of research in embodiment that will be examined demonstrate the plasticity of the mind and phenomenal selfhood, posing a challenge to Moorean bodily certainty. It is my contention that the artificial induction of body-swapping/hopping using body transfer illusions that mislocalize a sense of self has introduced techniques that express potential reconciliations to the physical problem that is attendant on the immersive onto-relational promise that one might feel with the body of another.

Proprioception, Phantom Limb Pain (PLP) and Selfhood Of particular relevance to body ownership are studies in ‘proprioception’—a term that was coined in the early twentieth century by English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington in The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906). The word derives from the Latin proprius meaning ‘own’ (‘Proprioceptive’) and receptive meaning ‘able to receive signals or stimuli’ (‘Receptive’). Sherrington divided the receptors into the ‘surface field’ and the ‘deep field’ (Swazey 1969: 118).27 ‘Deep receptors’ in Sherrington’s vocabulary were noted to appear adapted

120  L. JARVIS

for ‘excitation by changes going forward in the organism itself’ (Swazey 1969: 118–119). He named deep receptors as proprio-ceptors, and the deep field was understood as the field of proprioception. In contemporary science, the term has come to refer more specifically to the sense of knowing the positioning of one’s body in space, or as Shaun Gallagher states in The Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011), ‘bodily position sense which allows one to know where one’s limbs are’ (5). Correspondingly, the term concerns the detection of movement through receptors in the muscles and joints (Berthoz 2000: 26).28 Proprioception is fundamental to the sense of bodily ownership and enables us, in Sherrington’s words, to feel ‘our bodies as proper to us, as our “property”, as our own’ (qtd. in Sacks 2011 [1985]: 47). While Sherrington’s research contributed to the development of techniques for rehabilitation in humans suffering from neuromuscular disorders (Kimmel 1996: 20), there is a dark twist to his insights in the context of my previous discussion on becoming animals, because his methods enacted violence on non-human subjects. Anaesthetized animals were deprived of sensations in a limb by cutting through the sensory nerves that served it (Mott and Sherrington 1895), resulting in permanent limb loss and disability. This procedure is called ‘deafferentation’ and subsequent scientific experimenters such as Edward Taub who deafferented the Silver Spring monkeys were held to account by animal rights activists, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Bearing some relation to the fantasy of body-swapping, studies in extracorporeal awareness since the nineteenth century have demonstrated the ability to feel beyond the envelope of the skin. The term ‘phantom limb pain’ was coined by American physician Silas Weir Mitchell in Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences (1872), to describe pain in appendages that don’t physically exist. But phantom limbs are described much earlier in medieval texts as phenomena that received paranormal interpretation before becoming the subject of scientific enquiry (Wade 2009: 243) and mythologies of transcending the body may have stemmed from these kinds of early interpretations of eccentric proprioception. Individuals with a phantom limb experience a ‘discrepancy between the spatial extents of their physical and phenomenal bodies’ (Brugger 2006: 171). Elizabeth Grosz has defined the phenomena as both a kind of ‘quasi-presence’ and ‘nostalgia for the wholeness of the body’ (Grosz 1994). Scientific research on phantom limbs has enjoyed increasing popularity since the 1980s, with a growing understanding through various studies that there are many different categories

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

121

of phantom including amputation phantoms (Egyd and Janke 1967), phantoms after spinal cord injury (Curt et al. 2011), supernumerary phantoms such as a ‘third arm’ after brain damage (Rogers and Franzen 1992; Brugger 2003), phantoms of congenitally absent limbs, halfbody or ‘hemiphantoms’ (the experience of a deafferented half of one’s body)29 and whole-body phantoms (autoscopic phenomena). Recent publications have critically examined phantom limb pain in relation to biopolitics and prosthetic innovations (Crawford 2014), surveying the scientific research through which limb loss has been rendered ‘visible’ by scientists, clinicians and their patients. Following the philosophical problem of knowing knowledge that embodies a point of view, the treatment of phantom limb pain has inversely involved strategies through which a brain might ‘unknow’ unhelpful bodily states such as learned paralysis. Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s treatment of phantom pain has involved the use of mirror visual feedback or ‘mirror therapy’ (Ramachandran 1994; Ramachandran et al. 1995; Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran 1996) as a treatment in which a patient’s hand is reflected onto the phantom, creating the visual illusion of the phantom limb becoming resurrected. Whereas ‘confabulators’ cannot know the reality outside of their delusion, those living with phantom pain know that the resurrected hand is only an illusion. And yet conscious awareness of the illusion doesn’t prohibit it from relieving excruciating pain for the sufferer and sometimes leading to the disappearance of the phantom limb altogether. Ramachandran posits that this simple illusion presents a brain with ‘tremendous sensory conflict’ that it must reconcile. Visual feedback says there is an arm, but muscle signals say that there is no proprioception and the pain disappears with the phantom because you ‘can’t have disembodied pain floating out in space’ (‘VS Ramachandran: 3 Clues to Understanding Your Brain’). More recent scientific experiments have replicated Ramachandran’s mirror box in virtual reality to treat phantom limb pain using motion capture data from a patient’s stump to ‘re-embody’ the phantom with a virtual hand avatar in a VR environment (Cole et al. 2009) or using augmented reality treatments (Dunn et al. 2017). In the light of this knowledge, G. E. Moore’s claim could be problematized through the following ‘what if’ scenario; what if Moore had raised a phantom hand in his lecture as proof of an external object? Moore’s vision might communicate to him that the phantom hand is not real, but the visceral experience of ‘owning’ the hand could be profound. Crucially, intersensory conflict can instantiate contradictory

122  L. JARVIS

realities and simple body illusions are not only transforming the spectator in the immersive practices in Part II, but in health care they have represented a ‘paradigm shift’ in how physicians approach neurological disorders using non-invasive therapies (Ramachandran and Altschuler 2009). While the visual resurrection of a phantom limb in mirror therapy is not a direct equivalence to the concept of ‘body-swapping’, crucially it serves to illustrate how the brain can be deceived into incorporating a visual representation of a hand into one’s ‘own’ body schema, paving the way for the incorporation of virtual bodies in performance practices. Oliver Sacks has noted the historical confusions concerning phantoms and whether they are ‘“real”, or not’ (Sacks 2011: 73) and the phenomenon has prompted broader reflections on how a sense of ‘self’ is constructed by our brains. Psychoanalyst Arnold H. Modell has argued that because phantom limbs are unconsciously generated and do not exist in the physical world, they might be understood as ‘illusory’ (Modell 2004: par. 1), much as other embodied phenomena such as colours only exist in the physical world as objects reflecting wavelengths or frequencies of light.30 Epistemologically, this idea problematizes G. E. Moore’s ‘here is one hand’ claim further, because it is not possible to ‘know’ the external world or umgebung through subjective and mediated bodily experience. Modell goes further by arguing that what we experience as a self may be illusory, while offering the caveat that to argue that the ‘self’ is an ‘illusion’ is not an equivalence to saying that ‘the self does not exist’, which was the position of eighteenth-century philosophers such as David Hume.31 Thomas Metzinger has claimed that nobody ever had or was a ‘self’ (Metzinger 2003), but what exists are ‘phenomenal selves’ in conscious experience which is less ‘a thing’ and more of an ‘ongoing process’. For Modell, ‘self’ is a vital illusion without which one cannot live, meaning that the word ‘illusion’ in this context requires careful reconsideration. ‘Illusion’ and its accustomed entanglement with experiences that are ‘not real’ are problematic in relation to phantom limbs and more temporary body transfer illusions. Contrary to the word’s common parlance meaning as ‘an instance of a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience’ (‘Illusion’), illusion instead becomes understood as the continuous construction of ‘self’, rather than a single constitutive event. Thus, the human body constantly ‘misinterprets’, or at least ‘reinterprets’, the external world and colour is one product of this reinterpretation. Modell argues that our sense of self is paradoxical, due to a tendency to feel that we ‘experience an unchanging core identity that persists over time’,

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

123

while the self requires that it be ‘constantly altered in response to lived experience’ (Modell, par. 1).32 The study of body-ownership has demonstrated that the feeling of permanence, or what psychologist William James had referred to as the ‘same old body always there’ (James 1890: 242), can be momentarily displaced. But Modell’s hypothesis that the continuity of self might be an unconsciously generated illusion, while compelling, remains an unfalsified ‘what if’ proposition since he is inferring the entire experience of self through the particular lens of studies in phantom limb patients. Performance artist and hand model Andrew Dawson has explored the loss of ownership over a limb in The Articulate Hand (2010–), a performance project created in collaboration with neuroscientist Jonathan Cole. Dawson surveyed numerous personal testimonies of those living with hands that are impaired, including the story of Ian Waterman who ‘woke up one morning and lost his body’ (see Fig. 4.3). Waterman permanently lost all touch, movement and position sense below his neck at the age of 19. In a presentation at TEDMED, Dawson elaborates that ‘if you put your hand in the air like this, you know you’ve got a hand. If you close your eyes,

Fig. 4.3  Andrew Dawson’s The Articulate Hand (2010–) (Photographer: Sarah Ainslie. © Andrew Dawson and Jonathan Cole)

124  L. JARVIS

you still have a hand. If Ian closed his eyes, he hasn’t got a hand’ (‘Andrew Dawson at TEDMED 2011’). For Waterman, his sight alone communicated the reality observed by others that he has hands, while the lack of proprioception offers competing reports about the status of his body. Had G. E. Moore lost his sense of proprioception, could he have rooted his philosophical claim in his body with the same conviction? Which information is more correct for the person living with the phantom? Is ‘seeing believing’, even if the owner of the hand has significant cause to doubt its presence? It would be difficult to dismiss Waterman’s legitimate cause for doubt, much as it is difficult for the physician to dismiss a patient’s phantom limb pain on the basis of lack of visible evidence. Therefore, Moore’s claim hierarchizes particular schemas of knowledge over others. Any truth claim that is anchored in the body of the claimant is dependent upon the kind of body that they own, its particular sets of integrations and its capacities and affordances within its particular environment. VR body illusions in laboratory contexts have further evidenced that phantom-like sensations can be generated in non-amputees who report experiencing an invisible hand (Guterstam et al. 2013), or an invisible body (Guterstam et al. 2015). It is my contention that a growing awareness of the plasticity of bodily selfhood is presenting new possibilities for artists to explore the immersive transposing of proprioceptive feeling to sites outside of the physical body. The following sections will map out the evolution from the studies in neurological disorders I have discussed, to body illusions that relocate either a subject’s sense of body-ownership to an external object or a whole-body virtual proxy. The studies that I discuss represent cumulative developments in the research field of embodiment, which begin to highlight the possibility of illusorily incorporating the body images of others as a part of the self in creative expressions of ‘body-swapping’.

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI): Intersensory Bias and Proprioceptive Drift Psychologist Manos Tsakiris argues that scientific research on the bodily self ‘has only recently started to investigate how the link between a body and the experience of this body as mine is developed, maintained, or disturbed’ (in Gallagher 2011: 181). The rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm has played a crucial role in this field because it allows controlled manipulation of body ownership in which an external humanoid object

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

125

is ‘treated, rather than simply recognized’ as part of a subject’s own body under experimental control (182). As a paradigmatic model, RHIs parallel neurological syndromes such as asomatognosia, through which an individual does not recognize their own body parts, and somatoparaphrenia, which leads to denial of ownership over a limb or one half of an individual’s body.33 In the latter case, even when presented with undeniable evidence to the contrary, patients confabulate to account for who the body part ‘really’ belongs to and how it came to be attached to them.34 Both the RHI paradigm and these neurological syndromes problematize G. E. Moore’s ‘certainty’ further, since bodies can incorporate external objects as part of the body schema while others who experience monothematic delusions misrecognize or repudiate limbs despite overwhelming visual evidence to the contrary. The RHI paradigm originates from Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen’s scientific paper ‘Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See’ (1998), in which the authors reported the results of an experiment that referred tactile sensations to an alien limb. This experiment demonstrated a ‘three-way interaction between vision, touch and proprioception’ (756). Ten subjects were seated with their left arm resting on a table. A screen positioned beside the participant’s arm concealed it from the subject’s vision, while a rubber life-sized model of a left hand was positioned in front of them on the visible side of the partition. Both their real hand and the artificial hand were stroked with two paintbrushes synchronously. After ten minutes, participants completed questionnaires about the perceptual effects of the experiment. Botvinick and Cohen reported that the responses indicated that ‘subjects experienced an illusion in which they seemed to feel the touch not of the hidden brush but that of the viewed brush, as if the rubber hand had sensed the touch’ (756). This experiment is closely related to Ramachandran’s work with mirror visual feedback, belonging to a class of perceptual effects that they suggest involves intersensory bias and intermodal perceptual correlation that distinguishes a body from external objects (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1979; Bahrick and Watson 1985). The mislocalization of the perceived position of one’s own hand towards the rubber hand can be measured both objectively in terms of ‘proprioceptive drift’ (Tsakiris and Haggard 2005) and subjectively by participants rating the strength of the illusion’s effects on Likert scales. The methodology of gathering objective and subjective measures coincides with Sam Harris’s claim that understandings of consciousness cannot be reduced

126  L. JARVIS

to objective measures independent of first-person experience (Harris 2014). In theatre scholarship, Stephen Di Benedetto has drawn on the RHI paradigm to illustrate the ability of theatre audiences to ‘accept fiction as fact’ (Di Benedetto and Dawsonera 2010: 11), comparing the illusion’s effect to the attribution of a ventriloquist’s voice to a dummy through the synchronization of lips and voice. But the perceived mislocalization of an external voice to an external object doesn’t alter the self model of the audience members in the same way as a participant inside a rubber hand illusion, nor does it implicate the external object as a part of their own body schema. My interest is more specifically in the ways in which RHI’s perceptual effects have formed foundations for new modes of theatrical immersion. While phenomenology offers useful descriptive characterizations of embodiment, psychological research in self-attribution and body ownership has provided new tools to generate empirically tested findings.35 Consequently, the RHI experiment has been replicated and modified many times by scientific researchers to test different aspects of cognition, affect and behaviour (Armel and Ramachandran 2003; Ehrsson et al. 2004; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005; Longo et al. 2008). Related experiments have demonstrated that body-ownership illusions are not confined to hands, such as ‘enfacement illusions’, in which a partner’s facial features can become incorporated into the representation of a participant’s own face (Sforza et al. 2010). But how does ownership over a new body part in an enfacement or RHI illusion serve to alter the experience of one’s own body? Tsakiris has argued that behavioural/ introspective measures suggest that the rubber hand ‘replaces’ the real hand ‘in terms of both phenomenal experience and physiological regulation’ (in Gallagher 2011: 183–184). Participants in RHI experiments do not report that they had an extra hand but ‘felt as if their own hand disappeared’ (in Gallagher 2011: 184), meaning that the RHI brings about incorporation/replacement rather than ‘extension’. Though recent studies have suggested that participants can also experience owning a supernumerary hands/fingers (Guterstam et al. 2011; Hoyet et al. 2016), multiple rubber hands simultaneously (Chen et al. 2018), or a virtual ‘third hand’, which the subjects of one experiment had believed that they were able to control using a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) (Bashford and Mehring 2016). Additionally, the plausible orientation of a fake hand relative to the body has repeatedly been shown to determine the extent to which the illusion is felt (Costantini and Haggard 2007;

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

127

Ehrsson et al. 2004; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005), which is just one of a number of ‘cues’ that can influence the induction of the illusion. The notion of one’s hand feeling as though it has been replaced with a hand-like object located outside of the body has resonances with the concept of body-swapping, while not partaking in the body-swap’s spectacular reciprocal act of relational bodily exchange between the self and an other. Nonetheless, it is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates the capacity to feel that the immersive onto-relational situation of becoming another body has been fulfilled, even when it has not. The role of ‘illusion’ is as a device to bridge the lacuna across subject experiences as a kind of faux merger. The relevance of the RHI paradigm to my argument is that it distinguishes simple experimental approaches through which participants might perceive that they are feeling beyond their skin courtesy of proprioceptive drift towards an external humanoid object. Crucially, in the field of experimental psychology, the RHI has been used to investigate the potential social impacts of body-ownership illusions. For example, different experiments have suggested that participants’ self model is flexible enough to incorporate a fake hand of a different race. While the onset time for the illusion to take effect tends to be greater when the rubber hand is of a different skin tone to the participant (Lira et al. 2017), some experiments have evidenced that it’s possible to alter implicit racial attitudes by increasing self-other bodily overlap using darkskinned rubber hands/virtual bodies, with results that suggest positive short-term effects to change negative implicit attitudes towards different racial body-types (Maister et al. 2013; Hasler et al. 2017).36 There is a growing understanding of the potential relationship between unconscious bias and body ownership, and the way in which temporarily incorporating different kinds of fake hands might transition the way that body-types that are different to one’s own are viewed or understood. In this respect, scientific evidence resonates with the bodyswap plot event’s depiction of radical empathic learning across different corporeal borderlands. However, there are notable limitations using the RHI—non-human objects such as blocks of wood do not elicit the illusion (Bertamini et al. 2011), while hands that are non-biological in appearance (e.g. mechanical hands) can be experienced as incorporated, but the illusion is felt to a lesser degree (Bertamini and O’Sullivan 2014), which suggests that there is a ‘ceiling’ to body-ownership which is ineffective over external objects that are abstract or non-humanoid in appearance. Correspondingly, these techniques do not resolve the

128  L. JARVIS

challenge raised in Nagel’s thought experiment of knowing interspecific subjectivities, nor do they complete the radical exchange encompassed in fictionalized body-swapping/hopping. Full-Body Illusions (FBIs): Virtual Bodies in Neuroscience and Performance The profound physical transformation of the body-swap/hop that I am connecting to the artist-agent’s onto-relational promise of immersion in theatres of mislocalized sensation has a corollary with artificially induced out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and full-body illusions (FBI) using VR telepresence. Botvinick and Cohen’s RHI paradigm was formative to the development of scientific laboratory experiments that have since demonstrated the effects, affects and underlying mechanisms involved in the perceptual phenomena that OBEs and FBIs elicit. Increasingly, these illusions and their interaction protocols are being hacked and repurposed outside of laboratory contexts by artists as a mode of immersive reception. Therefore, it’s important to understand what kinds of temporary transformations participating audience members undergo inside illusions that are reframed as aesthetic experiences. A number of experiments have illustrated how VR body illusions can mislocalize the subject to an extracorporeal or ‘third-person’ vantage point using out-of-body experiences (OBE) (Ehrsson 2007). For example, presenting HMD wearers with a view of themselves from behind, while synchronously distributing tactile sensations that caused a feeling of proprioceptive drift towards their mediatized body image (Lenggenhager et al. 2007). OBE illusions have demonstrated a connection between feeling localized ‘inside’ a physical body and first-person visual perspective in conjunction with the distribution of synchronous multisensory information. Neuropsychologist Peter Brugger has contended that while these studies don’t fully replicate experiences in which people report ‘an enormously compelling sensation of separation from the body’ (in Miller 2007: 1021), OBE illusions may be as close as it is currently possible to get through artificial induction. Beyond OBE illusions, scientifically tested full-body illusions (FBI) over the last decade have given very particular expression to the immersive promise of becoming the other body. In the scientific paper ‘If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping’ (2008), Valeria I. Petkova and H. Henrik Ehrsson set out to evidence that whole-body ownership

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

129

can be achieved through the ‘experimental manipulation of the visual perspective in conjunction with correlated visual and sensory signals being supplied to the respondent’s body’ (2008: 1). This paper documents a series of VR experiments conducted at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm to test this hypothesis. The first experiment examined the possibility of eliciting the illusion of ownership over a life-sized mannequin, using two CCTV cameras in a position corresponding to the mannequin’s eyes (see Fig. 4.4). Through an HMD, participants in the study could see a first-person live relay of the mannequin’s torso as if it belonged to their own anatomy. A rod was used to repetitively stroke both the participant’s abdomen (concealed from direct view by the HMD) and that of the mannequin (observed in their HMD). Subjective data was gathered from participants who completed a questionnaire affirming or denying the perceptual effects,37 while objective physiological evidence for the illusion was measured through skin conductance responses (SCR) when the mannequin was subjected to a physical ‘threat’.38 These autonomic responses evidenced that the subject felt that the threat to the mannequin’s torso was to their own body. Perhaps most correlative to the conceptual plot event of the body-swap I have surveyed in fiction, Petkova and Ehrsson conducted a human-to-human

Fig. 4.4  Experimental setup in Valeria I. Petkova and H. Henrik Ehrsson’s VR whole-body illusion (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008) to induce illusory ownership of an artificial body (left image). The participant wearing the HMD observes the mannequin’s torso from the ‘first-person’ perspective (right image)

130  L. JARVIS

body-swap experience in which participants perceive themselves as ‘localized in another human’s body (the experimenter’s body) during the performance of everyday actions’ (2008: 4). Strikingly, the results of this experiment suggested that the illusion was ‘cognitively impregnable’, meaning that participants could ‘shake hands with themselves’ (2008: 4) while ‘in’ another’s body without the illusion breaking down. Furthermore, the participants’ emotional systems reacted more strongly when their ‘new body’ was threatened than when their own body was under threat (2008: 5) despite an intellectual recognition that their ‘real’ body was ‘over there’ (identifiable by their clothing, etc.). This parallels Ramachandran’s research in phantom limb paralysis, which evidenced that conscious knowledge that a limb was missing did nothing to alleviate the reality of the pain experienced in their phantom. Other experiments have suggested that beyond the use telepresence (i.e. switching perspectives using live video feeds), radical transformations in ­body-ownership can also be triggered in computer-generated immersive virtual reality (IVR), in which bottom-up perceptual mechanisms temporarily override top-down knowledge (Slater et al. 2010). While multiple perspectives are available to users in immersive virtual environments (IVE), studies of the first-person perspective have demonstrated that it not only plays a vital role in the sense of body-ownership, but improves the effectiveness of accurate interactions with virtual objects due to better perception of an avatars’ arms and hands (Gorisse et al. 2017). Fullbody illusions reconnect to some degree with the nineteenth-century concept of ‘empathy’, discussed in my Introduction (on page 15), as a destabilization of self-identity with exterior objects and as a transformative act—embodying an object’s (the mannequin’s), another’s human’s, or even in more recent experiments, multi-locational humanoid robots’ perspectives concurrently (Kishore et al. 2016). Scientific studies have reiterated the importance of first-person visual feedback to body ownership, which is reaffirmed by evidence that suggests that RHI experiments have limited effect in altering the sense of body ownership in blind participants (Petkova et al. 2012).39 Ehrsson and Petkova suggest that there are three critical conditions for eliciting the perceptual illusion of owning a body using telepresence: ‘(i) a continuous match between visual and somatosensory information about the state of the body; (ii) the usage of a sufficiently humanoid body; and (iii) the adoption of a first-person visual perspective of the body’ (6). Only by incorporating all three conditions can a subject fully experience the

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

131

illusion of full-body transfer. Notably, the first condition that emphasizes sensory synchronization corresponds with the aforementioned notion in media studies of immersion as an equivalence with ‘sense-certainty’— reducing perceived discrepancies between movement and vision that might infringe on the feeling of being there in a virtual environment. In addition to visual and tactile signals, recent studies suggest that manipulations of interoceptive signals [which concern sensations from within], such as a participant’s heartbeat, can also influence a subject’s experience of embodiment (Aspell et al. 2013; Seth 2013). Outside of laboratory contexts, immersive performance practices have knowingly or unknowingly integrated the three critical conditions that Ehrsson and Petkova have identified as essential to FB illusions. A practice-led research project by Lorna Ann Moore called In[bodi]mental (2011) draws directly on Ehrsson’s studies to investigate real-time virtualized body-swapping in performance. Moore used webcams to live stream and switch two participants’ views, synchronizing their movements while they undertook physical tasks to co-explore what Moore describes as a ‘third space’ between body and world (2015: 38). In the overlapping field of gaming, Sita Popat has argued that avatars are the way in which a player enters and experiences a game world, becoming ‘an extension of the physical self’ (Pitches and Popat 2011: 118). But FBIs in performance and full-body tracked avatars in VR gaming (discussed in Chapter 7) have invited audience members to take up digital bodies that are not simply an ‘extension’ of the physical self but are experienced as a replacement of their own by their phenomenal self model (PSM). The quasi-threats in scientific experiments that are used to measure the extent to which a virtual body is felt as one’s own have resurfaced in theatres of mislocalized sensation to elicit a heightened sense of physical risk in dramatic situations of jeopardy. For example, owning the body of a vulnerable hospital patient in a ‘zombie apocalypse’ experience in Aaron Reeves’ Dead Arise (2014), or performing impromptu daredevil stunts while cast in the virtual bodies of a flying trapeze act in il pixel rosso’s video goggle performance The Great Spavaldos (2012–), created by Silvia Mercuriali and Simon Wilkinson. Dead Arise is an immersive performance for two isolated participants who each wear headphones, hospital gowns and video goggles.40 In their HMDs, the immersants are transported to a pre-recorded hospital populated by military personnel and the living dead. Participants are instructed to follow the cues for action by mimicking their mediatized

132  L. JARVIS

Fig. 4.5  Aaron Reeves’s Dead Arise (2014) (Photographer: Gary Hicklin)

body image seen from the first-person perspective, while theatre-makers Aaron Reeves and Ruth Adams guide each immersant on simultaneous routes around the ‘hospital’ (in actuality, the basement of Camden People’s Theatre, London). Reeves and Adams provide physical props and multisensory stimulation that synchronously corresponds with the action in the two overlapping films (see Fig. 4.5). In one moment, I copied my virtual body and reached for a door handle, while in the real world Ruth manoeuvered a piece of door scenery in place to construct the illusion of a door battering, arm clutching assault from the ‘undead’ around the door frame. Aligned with the subjective measures in many of Ehrsson’s experiments, the arm observed in my HMD rather than ‘my’ arm in the theatre’s basement was experienced as my ‘own’. Il pixel rosso’s The Great Spavaldos is another piece for two immersants that distributes different sets of risks to their digital body doubles.41 Two audience members are fitted with video goggles and headphones. They are choreographed through instructions and physical guidance to navigate the circus space seen in their HMDs (see Fig. 4.6). In their goggles and through multisensory stimulation, participants perceive that they are

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

133

being hoisted to dizzying heights up to a small precarious platform, but in reality, ushers use a simple lift system and seat each audience member on a trapeze bar rigged less than a meter off the ground. Both examples transpose risk to the immersant by eliciting a perceptual FBI, which the scientific experiments I have surveyed demonstrate is received by the unconscious in the order of the real. But unlike these experiments and Moore’s In[bodi]mental, both performances invite the immersant to follow cues for bodily action in a pre-recorded film that removes the agency to make different choices in response to the ‘myness’ of their virtual body substitute. Therefore, it’s harder to assess the impacts of the virtual body on audience behaviour. While Josephine Machon has grouped the video goggle performances of il pixel rosso with other divergent modes of immersive theatres, I argue that FBIs as a mode of immersive reception require disentangling from other aesthetic forms because they place immersants within

Fig. 4.6  The Great Spavaldos (2012–) by il pixel rosso with Geneva Foster Gluck. Photo (from a live performance) by Silvia Mercuriali. Film by Simon Wilkinson

134  L. JARVIS

a different perceptual order of ‘as if’ situation through virtual embodiment. The immersants’ inhabitation of virtual bodies resonates with the notion of ‘real virtuality’ (Žižek 1997). This term recalls Slavoj Žižek’s discourse in the late 1990s describing the effects of cyberspace as producing an external materialization of the subject’s ego into the symbolic regime. For Žižek, agency online is relocated to a detachable ‘surrogate self’ that is vulnerable to interception and manipulation by others. However, the term takes on a slightly different meaning in the light of the psychological studies in embodiment using VR that followed decades later, in which virtual appendages have been demonstrated through objective measures to be felt as part of the body schema. One’s externalized virtual doppelgänger is not only a ‘detached’ self ‘out there’, but through FBIs the body image of another becomes an internalized ‘me’, co-exposed along with the participating body to all kinds of virtual and viscerally felt ‘threats’. Casting audience members as a quasi-presence within pre-filmed events, while heightening the level of arousal felt over their virtual body is raising distinct sets of ethical questions. Mel Slater’s research on presence in artificially created VR simulations—a field that emerged from tele-operator systems in the 1990s—defines ‘presence’, or Slater’s preferred definition of ‘pretence’, as something that the immersant responds to as if it’s real (‘Conversations on Presence—Mel Slater’). Slater states that ‘there is some level of the brain that doesn’t distinguish between reality and virtual reality. A typical example is, you see a precipice and you jump back and your heart starts racing. You react very fast because it’s the safe thing for the brain to do’ (Hattenstone 2017). Both in Slater’s example and in my circumstance as an untrained circus act standing on The Great Spavaldos’ trapeze platform, the immersant’s autonomic system creates a strong level of arousal regardless of knowing that the precipice is not ‘real’ on the basis that for survival it is safer to assume a situation’s reality as a strategy for self-protection. When fullbody illusions are framed as architectures of reception in performance they problematize binary delineations between the actual/counterfactual, conscious/unconscious and self/remediated other. FBIs also pose a challenge to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s oft-cited notion of an audience’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in Biographia Literaria (1817), since ‘disbelief’ can no longer be understood as a default position when affective reactions elicited at a non-conscious level make little distinction between reality and artifice.42

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

135

A growing corpus of evidence is showing that full-body illusions of different orders can influence emotional and behavioural responses. Some studies have shown that FBIs can influence an immersant’s non-virtual encounters. For example, inhabiting a virtual body that is older in appearance in one study was found to influence decision-making about how much money participants would subsequently allocate for their retirement after leaving the virtual environment (Hershfield et al. 2011). Altered self-representation has also been shown to influence behaviours while in virtual environments. For example, Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have used the term the ‘proteus effect’ to describe their observations of the way in which an Internet user modifies their behaviour online to conform to other’s expectations based on the appearance of their avatar (Yee and Bailenson 2007: 274; Kilteni et al. 2012). In their study, users with taller avatars tended to undertake tasks with greater confidence. Taking up a virtual body of a particular kind doesn’t guarantee the kind of empathic learning commonly associated with fictional ‘body-swapping’ tout court. This is because it can lead to potentially erroneous assumptions or projections as to how an immersant thinks a body should act, as opposed to how it might choose to act voluntarily through its own agency.

Risk: Cyber-Therapy, Self-Protection and Virtual Proxies Related FBI techniques to those that heighten affects in interactive performances are also being applied in cyber-therapy for social, medical and psychological rehabilitation. For example, to foster identification with a virtual body to heighten self-compassion (Caygill 2014; Falconer et al. 2014), to examine actions and judgements when presented with life or death moral virtual dilemmas (Pan et al. 2011; Francis et al. 2016), to ethically study the ‘bystander’ problem in violent attacks within the field of social psychology (Slater et al. 2013),43 to improve body satisfaction in individuals with eating disorders (Preston and Ehrsson 2014), or using augmented reality (AR) to alter food intake and combat obesity by manipulating the visual size of food to trick the brain into satiety (Narumi et al. 2012). One example of VR self-counselling or ‘self-talk’ enabled users to inhabit the virtual body of a ‘Sigmund Freud’ avatar, while looking back at a 3D scanned image of their own likeness and hearing ‘them’ express ‘their’ problems, or concerns. As ‘Freud’, the user could propose suggestions from a subjective third-person position, before ‘returning’ to their body (Osimo et al. 2015). A growing

136  L. JARVIS

awareness of the psychological impacts of immersion in body transfer illusions and the potential risks of misuse that accompany technology’s ‘dual use dilemma’, such as the apprehension of FBIs for military purposes such as torture or teleoperated weapon systems (Miller and Selgelid 2008), has prompted philosophers and ethicists such as Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger to develop a code of ethical conduct for VR technology in both scientific research and personal use (Madary and Metzinger 2016). They consider the four most salient risks to be the effects of long-term immersion (e.g. addiction, mental illness, etc.), neglect of embodied interaction and the physical environment (e.g. what the Japanese Ministry of Health have defined as hikikomori to describe social withdrawal [Itou 2003]), exposure to risky content (e.g. violent pornography, or virtual worlds that reward the ‘dark triad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy [Paulus and Williams 2002]) and issues relating to user privacy, especially in relation to convergence between VR tech. and social networks. While FBIs may be framed as an illusionistic solution to the physical problem that one might ‘know’ an other body, no body-swapping exchange takes place. Furthermore, narcissistic self-protection is vital to many of the responses elicited while inside a virtual body. Frédérique de Vignemont makes a distinction in the space that immediately surrounds a body (‘peripersonal space’) between working and protective space (179–180). The former is exploratory and concerns taking advantage of opportunities, and the latter is about rapid detection to protect the body from threats. The ‘protective body map’ draws the boundary of the body in order to defend it (188), representing both the body to be defended and the bodyguard itself (188). Bodily boundaries in Vignemont’s bodyguard hypothesis are a matter of survival, and the protective body map ascribes narcissistic value to the particular body that one experiences. Immersive theatre scholar Adam Alston has introduced the notion of ‘narcissistic participation’, which concerns the prompting of introspection by being staged inside an immersive environment and projecting attention, or being absorbed by the prospect of involvement with the surrounding aesthetic (Alston 2016: 35). Theatres of mislocalized sensation add a new dimension to this idea by drawing attention to sensory systems that have a ‘narcissistic function’ to secure what is in the interests of an organism (Akins 1996), but use illusionistic strategies to attempt to relocate this perspectival prioritization to a virtual proxy. In other words, a kind of transposed narcissism that is staged through a temporary

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

137

malfunctioning of the immersant’s protective body map within a performance. Body illusions don’t inherently solve the physical problem of ‘knowing’ another body, but they instate a particular affective phenomenology that encourages unconscious responses to guard and protect a virtual other.

Conclusion The desire to stage a transaction of experiences across alterities of different human-to-human and human-to-non-human subjectivities has been examined as correlative with the spectacularized and persistent fictional concept of body-swapping. I have extracted the narratological, philosophical and physical problems associated with this branch of immersion that integrates body illusions, derived from experimental scientific studies in embodiment, as a pseudo-fulfilment of the promise of the body-swap, while mobilizing no such thing in actuality. Modifications of participating bodies and augmentations of their perceptual faculties have been used to attempt to expand their umwelt as a reach towards different kinds of bodily epistemologies. I have argued that attempts to become ‘other’ through distortions of minimal phenomenal selfhood are always an inherently unstable and indeterminate position, since an immersant cannot wholly be ‘them’, nor can they be the ‘other’ through full-body illusions. The experience of a physical self when understood as a continual process of construction has opened up the possibility of different kinds of technological interventions and disruptions that temporarily alter the experience of one’s phenomenal selfhood. Virtual embodiment and the inhabitation of a virtual environment in a VB commonly seek to ‘mislocalize’ a real body’s senses, instilling ‘sense certainty’ through synchronized correlations between visual and somatosensory information about the state of a body. But the technological desire to reduce disjunctures, doubt or asynchronicities between bodily sensation and virtual environments conceals the underlying principle that all immersion promising access to a bodily elsewhere is unstable and paradoxical. The notion of occupying a virtual body enters into correspondence with nineteenth-century understandings of empathy as a destabilization of self, but such acts don’t resolve the physical and epistemological problem of ‘knowing’ other bodies. Instead, they instate a particular affective phenomenology that encourages unconscious responses to guard and protect a virtual proxy as a kind of transposed narcissism that

138  L. JARVIS

is staged through a temporary malfunctioning of the immersant’s protective body map. Furthermore, empathic learning commonly associated with fictional ‘body-swapping’ cannot be guaranteed through virtual embodiment. Where immersants have agency over a VB, they can make erroneous assumptions about how a body should act based on extant biases smuggled into the experience. At the same time, some scientific experiments have implied a short-term reduction in implicit bias towards body-types that have been experienced as virtually incorporated within the body schema. Individual deployments of body transfer illusions in performance require close analysis, especially in relation to their ethical dimensions because as my survey of FBIs and treatments in cyber-therapy have demonstrated, behaviours performed in a virtual body can have real-world implications on participants’ non-virtual physical lives. Part II will probe some of these implications in relation to specific case studies in greater detail.

Notes





1. ‘Idealism’ represents a grouping of philosophies that broadly asserted that reality is immaterial, or a mental construction. 2.  The ‘uncanny’ has been extensively examined in numerous fields, from psychology and psychoanalysis in Ernst Jentsch’s essay, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906) and Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), to robotics in Masahiro Mori’s article ‘The Uncanny Valley’ (1970). Of particular relevance to the uncanny as it pertains to horror is Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). 3. In which spirits, gods or other forces assume control of a human body (e.g. The Exorcist [1971] by William Peter Blatty, The Devil in Drag [1999] by Dario Fo, Twin Peaks [1990–1991] by Mark Frost and David Lynch etc.). 4. The spiritual or philosophical concept of a soul continuing life beyond death in a new body. 5. When a body undergoes a metamorphosis through which it becomes older or younger (e.g. Alan Ayckbourn’s play for children, The Jollies [2002], and films such as Da grande [1987], Big [1988], 17 Again [2009]). 6. For example, in Bhāgavata Purāṇa the stories of Vishnu in the form of his different avatars (e.g. Rama, Krishna etc.) 7. When a familiar person is replaced by an impostor who is identical in appearance (e.g. The Body Snatchers [1955] by Jack Finney, adapted for film in 1956, 1978, 1993 and 2007).

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 









139

8. Genetically identical individuals manufactured artificially (e.g. the characters of Bernard 1 and Bernard 2 in Caryl Churchill’s play, A Number [2002]). 9. Copies of a person created out of inanimate matter (e.g. the golem in Jewish folklore, David Brin’s Kiln People [2002] etc.). 10.  The double of a living person (e.g. The Double [1846] by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on which the film The Double [2013] is based; and Who Goes There? [1938] by John W. Campbell, adapted for film as The Thing [1982 and 2011]). 11. I use the word ‘carnivalesque’ in the Bakhtinian sense, which was most notably explicated in Rabelais and His World (completed in 1940 and published in 1965). The body-swap sometimes performs a similar function to the inversions of social hierarchies that take place in carnival (which Bakhtin traced back to the medieval festival of the Feast of Fools). Through the carnivalesque, individuals cease to be themselves and via the ritual wearing of costumes and masks, an individual temporarily exchanges their identity for that of another. 12. Freaky Friday was subsequently adapted for new audiences across various media, including television (Krieger 1995) and film (Rodgers 1976; Hach and Dixon 2003). 13. A term coined by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock (1970) to mean ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’. 14. Neurosurgeons Wilder Graves Penfield and Edwin Boldrey were the first to articulate the somatosensory map or cortical homunculus in their paper ‘Somatic Motor and Sensory Representation in the Cerebral Cortex of Man as Studied by Electrical Stimulation’ (1937); ‘homunculus’ means ‘little man’, deriving from the seventeenth-century Latin homin (‘man’), the diminutive form of homo. According to Richard Frackowiak et al. in Human Brain Function (2004), Penfield and Boldrey’s research in human subjects using direct stimulation of the exposed cortical surface was ‘one of the first examples of cartographic electrophysiology in the somatosensory system, in which the primary aim was to examine the spatial layout of receptive fields, or how the body’s surface was represented in the brain’. Penfield’s homuncular figure represented in his famous diagrammatic ‘became the standard by which all other investigations of localisation in the postcentral gyrus were compared’ (85). 15. I should note the caveat that some neuroscientific studies have sought to evidence that the act of reading a novel can invoke neural activity that is associated with bodily sensations, such as Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and Antonio Damasio’s theory of ‘embodied semantics’ in ‘Embodied Semantics for Actions: Findings from Functional Brain Imaging’ (published in The Journal of Physiology in 2008). Other scientific papers have suggested that reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of

140  L. JARVIS











the brain; see, for example, Gregory S. Berns (et al.’s) ‘Short- and LongTerm Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain’ (published in the Brain Connectivity journal in 2013). However, the precise ‘transformation’ to which I refer is the audience’s sense of feeling ownership over the body of another. ‘Reading’ as a cognitive process of decoding symbols does not provoke the sensation of perceptually owning a character’s body. 16. Moore had previously critiqued the tenets of idealism in his paper ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903). 17. This idea was posed by British idealist philosopher Timothy L. S. Sprigge in his 1971 essay ‘Final Causes’, when he wrote: ‘One is wondering about the consciousness which an object possesses whenever one wonders what it must be like being that object […] To wonder what it is like being an object is to concern oneself with a question different from any scientific or practical question about the observable properties or behavior of that object or about the mechanisms which underlie such properties or behaviour’ (35). 18. This philosophical position is occupied in various other fields and works of literature. For example, author Anaïs Nin wrote in her novel The Seduction of the Minotaur (1961); ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are’ (124). Related concepts include Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and George Koopman’s ‘reality tunnel’, which was coined in Neuropolitique (1988), and refers to the idea that access to truth is mediated by our senses, experiences, beliefs, and other non-objective factors. Related to this, Peter Wason coined the term ‘confirmation bias’ in his paper ‘On The Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task’ published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (1960), through which significance is assigned to observations that simply confirm one’s pre-existing beliefs. 19. In relation to the presence and representation of non-human animals in performance, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Lourdes Orozco and Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca are key theorists in this area, examining phenomena such as animal ontologies, robotics and puppets (Parker-Starbuck 2013), animals in socially engaged performance practices (Orozco 2018) and interspecies collaborations (Cull Ó Maoilearca 2015). 20. Latency is the ‘time delay between the cause and the effect of a physical change in the system’ (Friedman 2016: 125). 21. In Hirstein’s ‘Introduction: What is confabulation?’ he states that the traditional definition of ‘confabulation’ contains three criteria: ‘confabulations are (1) false (2) reports (3) about memories’ (3). Critically, a confabulation is ‘to make a false claim without an intent to deceive’ (3). 22. Anton syndrome is a symptom of brain damage occurring in the occipital lobe. Anton’s patients although cortically blind are unaware of their

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 













141

blindness, ‘typically either guessing at the appearance of objects from non-visual cues while believing that they are being perceived visually’ (Colman). The syndrome is named after Czech neurologist and psychiatrist Gabriel Anton (1858–1933), who first described it in a case study published in the journal Wiener klinische Wochenschrift in 1899. 23. The term ‘anosognosia’ indicates the ‘denial of one’s own disease or deficit’ and can be associated with different pathological conditions (Berti, ‘Anosognosia’, par. 1). According to Edoardo Bisiach and Giuliano Geminiani (1991), the first historical description of anosognosia was reported by Seneca in Liber V, Epistula IX (‘Anosognosia Related to Hemiplegia and Hemianopia’). Anna Berti identifies that the first appearance of the term ‘anosognosia’ in neurological literature was in J. Babinski’s ‘Contribution à l’étude des Troubles Mentaux dans l’hémiplégie Organique Cérébrale (Anosognosie)’ (1914). 24. Split brain syndrome is produced by a surgical procedure that was first performed on humans in the 1930s and involved ‘severing the corpus callosum in order to prevent epileptic seizures spreading from one hemisphere to another’ (Bayne 277). 25.  Korsakoff syndrome is named after Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff (1854–1900) who published several papers in 1887 on a disorder which occurs in conjunction with peripheral neuritis. According to Derek Russell Davis, in modern use ‘Korsakoff syndrome’ refers to ‘a group of symptoms—known alternatively as the amnesic syndrome— which includes inattentiveness, memory defect for recent events, retrograde amnesia and other disorders of recall and recognition, and disorientation in time, place, and situation’ (Davis, par. 1). 26.  Capgras syndrome is the ‘delusional misidentification of familiar people, usually relatives or friends, who are believed to have been replaced by exact doubles or impostors’ (Colman). The syndrome is named after French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras (1873–1950) and is first described in a paper co-authored with Jean Marie Joseph ReboulLachaux (1894–1935) called ‘L’llusion des “Sosies” dans un Délire Systématisé Chronique’ (1923). 27. The surface field was further subdivided into ‘exteroception’ (receptors that are sensate to stimuli external to an organism) and ‘interoception’ (receptors that are sensate to internal bodily operations that are largely alimentary in function). 28. Alain Berthoz suggests that there are five key sensory receptors that contribute to one’s sense of movement; visual receptors (which detect ‘shifting images of the visual world on the retina, the position of objects in space, shape, color, and so on’), vestibular receptors (located in the inner ear and comprised of three semi-circular canals (horizontal, anterior

142  L. JARVIS









vertical and posterior vertical) and the otoliths), cutaneous receptors (which detect skin pressure and friction), muscle receptors and joint receptors (Berthoz 2000: 26). 29. In biology, ‘deafferentation’ refers to the ‘interruption or destruction of the afferent connections of nerve cells, performed especially in animal experiments to demonstrate the spontaneity of locomotor movement’ (‘deafferentation’). In neuroscience, the term is more broadly used to refer to a disorder of bodily awareness that involves the ‘loss of tactile and proprioceptive information’ (de Vignemont, Table 1). 30. Modell argues that the self could be described as an ‘illusion’ constructed by the mind/brain, although an illusion of a very different kind to ‘colour’, which is experienced via something invariant in the physical world. 31. This is most notably explored in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Hume’s position was more recently occupied by commentators such as Daniel M. Wegner in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002), in which he offers the radical hypothesis that bodily senses of agency and ownership could be illusory. A series of seminal neuroscientific experiments were conducted in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet. Libet examined the readiness-potential (RP) or ‘Bereitschaftspotential’ in live human subjects; RP is the measure of activity in the motor cortex in the lead up to voluntary muscle movement. Libet discovered that the unconscious brain activity of the RP leading up to subjects’ movements began on average around 800 milliseconds before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move. His findings are documented in ‘Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (ReadinessPotential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act’ (1983) and ‘Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action’ (1985). Some commentators have used Libet’s findings to argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal. 32. In William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890). 33.  More comprehensive studies on these neurological syndromes can be found in S. Nightingale’s ‘Somatoparaphrenia: A Case Report’ (1982), Edoardo Bisiach, Maria Luisa Rusconi, Giuseppe Vallar’s ‘Remission of Somatoparaphrenic Delusion Through Vestibular Stimulation’ (1991), Peter W. Halligan, John C. Marshall and Derick T. Wade’s ‘Unilateral Somatoparaphrenia After Right Hemisphere Stroke: A Case Description’ (1995), and G. Vallar and R. Ronchi’s ‘Somatoparaphrenia: A Body Delusion. A Review of Neuropyschological Literature’ (2009). 34.  Todd E. Feinberg et al. report in their paper, ‘The Neuroanatomy of Asomatognosia and Somatoparaphrenia’ (2010), that in some cases, bodyparts of somatoparaphrenia patients may be ‘treated like a child, given a nickname, or treated like a separate person with a separate identity’ (276).

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

143

35. Beyond the RHI paradigm, other embodiment experiments have sought to test whether humans and non-human primates could judge if what they are seeing is their own body part or another’s by presenting body parts as an external object projected onto a screen: for example, in Marc Jeannerod et al.’s experiments of self-recognition reported in ‘The Mechanism of Self-Recognition in Humans’ (2003). Other related experiments sought to make the task of self-attribution more complex by introducing delays between the movement and visual feedback (Franck et al. 2001), or by rotating the viewed image of the subject’s body part (Van den Bos and Jeannerod 2002). 36. In ‘Experiencing Ownership Over a Dark-Skinned Body Reduces Implicit Racial Bias’ (2013), Lara Maister, Natalie Sebanz, Günther Knoblich and Manos Tsakiris report the results of two RHI experiments in which Caucasian participants experienced the feeling that a dark-skinned hand belonged to them. The researchers subsequently measured whether this could change their implicit racial bias against people with dark skin. The results published in this paper suggest that illusory ownership can be an effective way to change negative implicit attitudes towards certain marginalized groups. This is one example of how RHI is being tested for its potential to mobilize positive behavioural changes by precipitating the kind of embodied learning that fiction has only been able to represent (e.g. the protagonist of Ignatius Donnelly’s novel Doctor Huguet [1891] cited in 3.2). A related scientific experiment was conducted by Tabitha C. Peck et al., the results of which were published in a paper entitled ‘Putting Yourself In the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias’ (2013). 37. A Likert scale, named after psychologist Rensis Likert (1903–1981), is a psychometric scale used in research that employs questionnaires. 38. Sweating is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system and is an indication of psychological or physiological arousal to a stimulus. Skin conductance response (SCR) (sometimes termed as galvanic skin response) is a method of testing that provides a measure of emotional and sympathetic responses. 39. This study tested a group of blind and sighted (but blindfolded) subjects via a multisensory body illusion called the ‘somatic rubber hand illusion’. Participants experience that they are touching their own right hand with their left index finger, when they are touching a rubber hand with their left index finger while the experimenter synchronously touches their right hand. The results suggested that ‘the sighted participants experienced a strong illusion, whereas the blind participants experienced no illusion at all’ (Petkova et al. 2012: 1). 40. I participated in Dead Arise on 31 October 2014 at Camden People’s Theatre in London.

144  L. JARVIS 41. I participated in The Great Spavaldos on 21 November 2014 at Jacksons Lane, London. 42.  Amy Cook has similarly challenged Coleridge’s axiom in relation to theatre spectatorship on the basis that it ‘presumes that disbelief is the default position from which we depart in order to make sense of the fiction onstage’ (2013: 86). She argues that the truth-value of a story is not assessed prior to reacting (2013: 86). 43. This study tested the hypothesis that social identity plays a role in influencing whether a bystander will intervene to try to stop a violent attack on another person. VR affords the conditions to test this hypothesis ethically through simulation (Slater et al. 2013).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Akins, Kathleen. 1996. Of Sensory Systems and the “Aboutness” of Mental States. The Journal of Philosophy 93 (7): 337–372. Alston, Adam. 2016. Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Andrew Dawson at TEDMED 2011. 2012. TEDMED Channel. Uploaded 6 February. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNbhq5_GhDU. Accessed 8 Mar 2018. Anstey, F. 1883. Vice Versa, or a Lesson to Fathers. London: Smith, Elder. Armel, K. C., and V. S. Ramachandran. 2003. Projecting Sensations to External Objects: Evidence from Skin Conductance Response. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 270 (1523): 1499–1506. Aspell, J.E., L. Heydrich, G. Marillier, T. Lavanchy, B. Herbelin, and O. Blanke. 2013. Turning Body and Self Inside Out Visualized Heartbeats Alter Bodily Self-Consciousness and Tactile Perception. Psychological Science 24 (12): 2445–2453. Ayckbourn, Alan. 2002. The Jollies. London: Faber. ———. 2011. Plays Five (Contemporary Classics). London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2011 [2006]. If I Were You. London: Samuel French. Bahrick, Lorraine E., and John S. Watson. 1985. Detection of Intermodal Proprioceptive-Visual Contingency as a Basis of Self Perception in Infancy. Developmental Psychology 21 (6): 963–973. Baldwin, Thomas. 2004. George Edward Moore: Common Sense and Certainty. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First Published 26 March. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/moore. Bashford, Luke, and Carsten Mehring. 2016. Ownership and Agency of an Independent Supernumerary Hand Induced by an Imitation Brain-Computer Interface. PLoS One 11 (6): e0156591.

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

145

Bertamini, Marco, Nausicaa Berselli, Carole Bode, Rebecca Lawson, and Li Ting Wong. 2011. The Rubber Hand Illusion in a Mirror. Consciousness and Cognition 20 (4): 1108–1119. Bertamini, Marco, and Noreen O’Sullivan. 2014. The Use of Realistic and Mechanical Hands in the Rubber Hand Illusion, and the Relationship to Hemispheric Differences. Consciousness and Cognition 27: 89–99. Berthoz, Alain. 2000. The Brain’s Sense of Movement, trans. Giselle Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Besant, Walter. 1889. The Doubts of Dives. Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith. Bisiach, Edoardo, and Giuliano Geminiani. 1991. Anosognosia Related to Hemiplegia and Hemianopia. In Awareness of Deficit After Brain Injury, ed. George P. Prigatano and Daniel L. Schacter, 17–39. New York: Oxford University Press. Bisiach, Edoardo, Maria Luisa Rusconi, and Giuseppe Vallar. 1991. Remission of Somatoparaphrenic Delusion Through Vestibular Stimulation. Neuropsychologia 29 (10): 1029–1031. Blanke, Olaf. 2012. Multisensory Brain Mechanisms of Bodily SelfConsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13: 556–571. Blanke, Olaf, Mel Slater, and Andrea Serino. 2015. Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness. Neuron 88: 145–166. Blanke, Olaf, Theodor Landis, Laurent Spinelli, and Margitta Seeck. 2004. Out‐ of‐body Experience and Autoscopy of Neurological Origin. Brain 127 (2): 243–258. Boisgilbert, Edmund. 1891. Doctor Huguet. Chicago: F. J. Schulte. Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. 1998. Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See. Nature 391 (6669): 756. Brooker, Charlie. 2014. White Christmas. Black Mirror. Netflix. Directed by Carl Tibbetts. Accessed 9 Jan 2018. ———. 2016. San Junipero. Black Mirror. Netflix. Directed by Owen Harris. Accessed 10 Jan 2018. ———. 2017. Arkangel. Black Mirror. Netflix. Directed by Jodie Foster. Accessed 10 Jan 2018. Brugger, Peter. 2003. Supernumerary Phantoms: A Comment on Grossi, et al.’s (2002) Spare Thoughts on Spare Limbs. Perceptual and Motor Skills 97 (1): 3–10. ———. 2006. From Phantom Limb to Phantom Body: Varieties of Extracorporeal Awareness. In Human Body Perception from the Inside Out, ed. G. Knoblich, I. M. Thornton, M. Grosjean, and M. Shiffrar, 171–209. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnett, Dean. 2014. Body Swapping: The Science Behind the Switch. Guardian: Science: Brainflapping. Uploaded 2 April 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/apr/02/body-swapping-the-science-behind-the-switch. Accessed 18 Mar 2014.

146  L. JARVIS Causey, Matthew. 2016. Postdigital Performance. Theatre Journal 68 (3): 427–441. Caygill, Bex. 2014. Virtual Reality Helps People to Comfort and Accept Themselves. UCL News. Uploaded 12 November 2014. http://www.ucl. ac.uk/news/news-articles/1114/121114_virtual-reality. Accessed 25 Feb 2018. Chen, Wen-Yeo, Hsu-Chia Huang, Yen-Tung Lee, and Caleb Liang. 2018. Body Ownership and the Four-Hand Illusion. Nature: Scientific Reports 8: 2153. Cho, Dong-Woo, Jung-Seob Lee, Jinah Jang, Jin Woo Jung, Jeong Hun Park, Falguni Pati. 2015. Organ Printing. IOP (Ser.). Release 2. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Cole, Jonathan, Simon Crowle, Greg Austwick, and David Henderson Slater. 2009. Exploratory Findings with Virtual Reality for Phantom Limb Pain: From Stump Motion to Agency and Analgesia. Disability and Rehabilitation 31 (10): 846–854. Conversations on Presence—Mel Slater. 2016. Starlab Barcelona YouTube Channel. Uploaded on 1 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7 ZX6I7YyaA. Accessed 25 Feb 2018. Cook, Amy. 2013. Introduction: Texts and Embodied Performance. In Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, ed. Nicola Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Costantini, Marcello, and Patrick Haggard. 2007. The Rubber Hand Illusion: Sensitivity and Reference Frame for Body Ownership. Consciousness and Cognition 16 (2): 229–240. Crawford, Cassandra S. 2014. Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology. New York: New York University Press. Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura. 2015. From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration: Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals. In Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practice, ed. Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, 19–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Curt, Armin, C. Ngo Yengue, L.M. Hilti, and Peter Brugger. 2011. Supernumerary Phantom Limbs in Spinal Cord Injury. Spinal Cord 49 (5): 588–595. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2018. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily SelfAwareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Volder, Anne G., Hinako Toyama, Yuichi Kimura, Motohiro Kiyosawa, Hideki Nakano, Annick Vanlierde, Marie-Chantal Wanet-Defalque, Masahiro Mishina, Keiichi Oda, Kiichi Ishiwata, and Michio Senda. 2001. Auditory Triggered Mental Imagery of Shape Involves Visual Association Areas in Early Blind Humans. NeuroImage 14: 129–139. De Waal, Frans B.M. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York and London: Granta Books. Dennett, Daniel. 2007. Heterophenomenology Reconsidered. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1): 247–270.

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

147

Di Benedetto, Stephen, and Dawsonera. 2010. The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. New York and London: Routledge. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 1993 [1885]. The Great Keinplatz Experiment. The Great Tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Magpie. Duncombe, Stephen. 2016. Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art. Social Research: An International Quarterly 83 (1): 115–134, Spring. Johns Hopkins University Press. Dunn, Justin, Elizabeth Yeo, Parisah Moghaddampour, Brian Chau, and Sarah Humbert. 2017. Virtual and Augmented Reality in the Treatment of Phantom Limb Pain: A Literature Review. NeuroRehabilitation 40 (4): 595–601. Eagleman, David. 2012. The Umwelt. In This Will Make You Smarter, ed. John Brockman, 143–145. London, UK: Doubleday. Egan, Greg. 1994. Permutation City. London: Millennium Orion Publishing Group. Egyd, B., and M. Janke. 1967. Experience with Phantom Gymnastics in the Rehabilitation of Amputees [Article in German]. Beitr Orthop Traumatol 14 (9): 521–529. Ehrsson, H. Henrik. 2007. The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences. Science 317: 1048. Ehrsson, H. Henrik, C. Spence, and R.E. Passingham. 2004. That’s My Hand! Activity in Premotor Cortex Reflects Feeling of Ownership in a Limb. Science 305 (5685): 875–877. Eldridge, J. J. 2016. The Science of Sci-fi: Mind/Body Swapping and Gender Diversity. MonashPhysicsAndAstronomy YouTube Channel. Talk at the University of Auckland, New Zealand 30 June 2016. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=SAMiWRi7_Yo. Accessed 28 Feb 2018. Eyesect. The Constitute. http://theconstitute.org/eyesect/. Accessed 5 Mar 2018. Falconer, Caroline J., Mel Slater, Aitor Rovira, John A. King, Paul Gilbert, Angus Antley, and Chris R. Brewin. 2014. Embodying Compassion: A Virtual Reality Paradigm for Overcoming Excessive Self-Criticism. PLoS One 9 (11): E111933. Farmer, Harry, Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, and Manos Tsakiris. 2012. Beyond the Colour of My Skin: How Skin Colour Affects the Sense of Body-Ownership. Consciousness and Cognition 21 (3): 1242–1256. Farmer, Harry, Lara Maister, and Manos Tsakiris. 2014. Change My Body, Change My Mind: The Effects of Illusory Ownership of an Outgroup Hand on Implicit Attitudes Toward That Outgroup. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 10106. Fawcett, Edgar. 1887. Douglas Duane: A Romance. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott. Feinberg, Todd E., Annalena Venneri, Anna Maria Simone, et al. 2010. The Neuroanatomy of Asomatognosia and Somatoparaphrenia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 81: 276–281.

148  L. JARVIS Fletcher, John. 2018. Deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, and Some Kind of Dystopia: The New Faces of Online Post-Fact Performance. Theatre Journal 70 (4): 455–471. Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast. London, UK: Profile Books. Francis, Kathryn B., Charles Howard, Ian S. Howard, Michaela Gummerum, Giorgio Ganis, Grace Anderson, Sylvia Terbeck, and Xiaoang Wan. 2016. Virtual Morality: Transitioning from Moral Judgment to Moral Action? PLoS One 11 (10): e0164374. Franck, Nicolas, Chloe Farrer, Nicolas Georgieff, Michel Marie-Cardine, Jean Dalery, Thierry D’Amato, and Marc Jeannerod. 2001. Defective Recognition of One’s Own Actions in Patients with Schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry 158 (3): 454–459. Friedman, Michael. 2016. Head-Mounted Display Screens: A (De)Construction of Sense Certainty? MediaTropes eJournal 1: 114–136. Frackowiak, Richard, and ScienceDirect. 2004. Human Brain Function, 2nd ed. Amsterdam and Boston: Elsevier Academic Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gender Swap—Experiment with The Machine to Be Another. The Machine to be Another. BeAnotherLab. http://www.themachinetobeanother.org/?p=1025# comment-374. Accessed 25 Sept 2014. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Goldstein, Kurt. 1908. Zur Lehre von der Motorischen Apraxie. Journal Für Psychologie Und Neurologie 11: 169–187. Gorisse, Geoffrey, Olivier Christmann, Etienne Armand Amato, and Simon Richir. 2017. First- and Third-Person Perspectives in Immersive Virtual Environments: Presence and Performance Analysis of Embodied Users. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 4: 33. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guterstam, Arvid, Giovanni Gentile, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2013. The Invisible Hand Illusion: Multisensory Integration Leads to the Embodiment of a Discrete Volume of Empty Space. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25 (7): 1078–1099. Guterstam, Arvid, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2012. Disowning One’s Seen Real Body During an Out-of-Body Illusion. Consciousness and Cognition 21: 1037– 1042. http://130.237.111.254/ehrsson/pdfs/guterstam_ehrsson_2012.PDF. Guterstam, Arvid, Valeria I. Petkova, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2011. The Illusion of Owning a Third Arm. PLoS One 6 (2): e17208. http://www.plosone.org/ article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017208. Guterstam, Arvid, Zakaryah Abdulkarim, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2015. Illusory Ownership of an Invisible Body Reduces Autonomic and Subjective Social

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

149

Anxiety Responses. Nature: Scientific Reports 5 (9831). http://www.nature. com/articles/srep09831. Hach, Heather, and Leslie Dixon. 2003. Freaky Friday. Directed by Mark Waters. Walt Disney Pictures. Halligan, Peter W., John C. Marshall, and Derick T. Wade. 1995. Unilateral Somatoparaphrenia After Right Hemisphere Stroke: A Case Description. Cortex 31 (1): 173–182. Hamilton-Giachritsis, Catherine, Domna Banakou, Manuela Garcia Quiroga, Christos Giachritsis, and Mel Slater. 2018. Reducing Risk and Improving Maternal Perspective-Taking and Empathy Using Virtual Embodiment. Scientific Reports 8 (1): 2975. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Harris, Sam. 2014. Sam Harris: The Self Is an Illusion. Big Think YouTube Channel. Uploaded 16 September 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Hasler, Béatrice S., Bernhard Spanlang, and Mel Slater. 2017. Virtual Race Transformation Reverses Racial In-Group Bias. PLoS One 12 (4): E0174965. Hattenstone, Simon. 2017. ‘After, I Feel Ecstatic and Emotional’: Could Virtual Reality Replace Therapy? The Guardian. Uploaded 7 October 2017. https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/07/virtual-reality-acrophobia-paranoia-fear-of-flying-ptsd-depression-mental-health. Accessed 15 Mar 2018. Hershfield, H., D. Goldstein, W. Sharpe, J. Fox, L. Yeykelis, L. Carstensen, et al. 2011. Increasing Saving Behavior Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self. Journal of Marketing Research 48: S23–S37. Hoyet, Ludovic, Ferran Argelaguet, Corentin Nicole, and Anatole Lécuyer. 2016. “Wow! I Have Six Fingers!”: Would You Accept Structural Changes of Your Hand in VR? Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3. Hurley, Erin. 2010. Theatre & Feeling. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Itou, Junichirou. 2003. Shakaiteki Hikikomori Wo Meguru Tiiki Seisin Hoken Katudou No Guide-line [Guideline on Mental Health Activities in Communities for Social Withdrawal] (in Japanese). Tokyo: Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare. James, William (ed.). 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Co., Electronic book. Jarvis, Liam. 2017. The Ethics of Mislocalized Selfhood: Proprioceptive Drifting Towards the Virtual Other. The ‘On Proximity’ Special Edition of Performance Research 22 (4): 32–39. Kant, Immanuel. 1998 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

150  L. JARVIS Kilteni, Konstantina, Raphaela Groten, and Mel Slater. 2012. The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Presence Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 21 (4): 373–387. Kimmel, Allan J. 2007 [1996]. Ethical Issues in Behavioral Research: Basic and Applied Perspectives, 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell. Kirkpatrick, Keith. 2017. 3D-printing Human Body Parts. Communications of the ACM 60 (10): 15–17. Kishore, Sameer, Xavier Navarro Muncunill, Pierre Bourdin, Keren Or-Berkers, Doron Friedman, and Mel Slater. 2016. Multi-Destination Beaming: Apparently Being in Three Places at Once Through Robotic and Virtual Embodiment. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3: 65. Krieger, Stu. 1995. Freaky Friday. Walt Disney Television: Directed by Melanie Mayron. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago. Lenggenhager, Bigna, Tej Tadi, Thomas Metzinger, and Olaf Blanke. 2007. Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness. Science 317 (5841): 1096–1099. New York, NY. Lewis, Michael, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. 1979. Social Cognition and the Acquisition of the Self. New York: Plenum. Lira, Marilia, Julia H. Egito, Patricia A. Dall’Agnol, David M. Amodio, Óscar F. Gonçalves, and Paulo S. Boggio. 2017. The Influence of Skin Colour on the Experience of Ownership in the Rubber Hand Illusion. Scientific Reports 7 (1): 1–13. Longo, Matthew R., Friederike Schüür, Marjolein P. M. Kammers, Manos Tsakiris, and Patrick Haggard. 2008. What is Embodiment? A Psychometric Approach. Cognition 107 (3): 978–998. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. 2013 [1937]. The Thing on the Doorstep. London: Penguin Books. Lucas, Craig. 2000 [1988]. Prelude to a Kiss. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macpherson, Fiona (ed.). 2019. Sensory Substitution and Augmentation. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madary, Michael, and Thomas K. Metzinger. 2016. Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3: 3. Maister, Lara, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Mano Tsakiris. 2015. Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19 (1): 6–12.

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

151

Maister, Lara, Natalie Sebanz, Günther Knoblich, and Manos Tsakiris. 2013. Experiencing Ownership Over a Dark-Skinned Body Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. Cognition 128 (2): 170–178. Metzinger, Thomas. 2003. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2010. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books. Miller, Greg. 2007. Out-of-Body Experiences Enter the Laboratory. Science 317: 1020–1021. Miller, Seumas, and Michael J. Selgelid. 2008. Ethical and Philosophical Consideration of the Dual-Use Dilemma in the Biological Sciences. New York: Springer. Modell, Arnold H. 2004. The Sense of Agency and the Illusion of the Self. Artbrain: Journal of Neuroaesthetic Theory: Phantom Limb. http://www.artbrain. org/the-sense-of-agency-and-the-illusion-of-the-self/. Accessed 6 Apr 2018. Moore, G.E. 1903. The Refutation of Idealism. Mind 12: 433–453. Reprinted in Philosophical Studies and in G. E. Moore: Selected Writings (23–44). ———. 1939. Proof of an External World. London: British Academy. ———. 1993. Proof of an External World. In G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin. London and New York: Routledge. Moore, Lorna Ann. 2015. Be[ing] You: In[bodi]mental a Real-Time Body Swapping Video Performance. In Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies. Morgan, Richard K. 2002. Altered Carbon. London, UK: Gollancz. Mott, Frederick Walker, and Charles Scott Sherrington. 1895. Experiments on the Influence of Sensory Nerves upon Movement and Nutrition of the Limbs. Proceedings of the Royal Society 57: 481–488. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like To Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Narumi, Takuji, Yuki Ban, Tomohiro Tanikawa, and Michitaka Hirose. 2012. Augmented Satiety: Interactive Nutritional Intake Controller. In SIGGRAPH Conference Asia 2012 Emerging Technologies, 1–3. Nayar, Pramod K. 2004. Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cyber Technology. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage. Nelson, Blake. 2006. Gender Blender. New York: Random House. Newte, Horace. 1911. The Ealing Miracle: A Realistic Story. London: Mills & Boon. Nightingale, S. 1982. Somatoparaphrenia: A Case Report. Cortex 18 (3): 463–467. Orozco, Lourdes. 2018. Animals in Socially Engaged Performance Practice: Becomings on the Edges of Extinction. Studies in Theatre and Performance 38 (2): 176–189.

152  L. JARVIS Osimo, Sofia Adelaide, Rodrigo Pizarro, Bernhard Spanlang, and Mel Slater. 2015. Conversations Between Self and Self as Sigmund Freud—A Virtual Body Ownership Paradigm for Self Counselling. Scientific Reports 5 (1): 13899. Pan, Xueni, Domna Banakou, and Mel Slater. 2011. Computer Based Video and Virtual Environments in the Study of the Role of Emotions in Moral Behavior. Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. Pain, Barry. 1911. An Exchange of Souls. London: E. Nash. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. 2013. Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse. Theatre Journal 65 (3): 373–393. Pastor, Alex and David. 2015. Self/less. Directed by Tarsem Singh. Endgame Entertainment/Ram Bergman Productions. Paulus, Delroy L., and Kevin M. Williams. 2002. The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality 36: 556–563. Peck, Tabitha C., Sofia Seinfeld, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, and Mel Slater. 2013. Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. Consciousness and Cognition 22 (3): 779–787. Penfield, Wilder, and Edwin Boldrey. 1937. Somatic Motor and Sensory Representation in the Cerebral Cortex of Man as Studied by Electrical Stimulation. Brain 60 (4): 389–443. Petkova, Valeria I., and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2008. If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping. PLoS One 3 (12): e3832. www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003832. Petkova, Valeria I., Hedvig Zetterberg, and Henrik Ehrsson. 2012. Rubber Hands Feel Touch but Not in Blind Individuals. PLoS One 7 (4): e35912. http://130.237.111.254/ehrsson/pdfs/Petkova-et-al-2012.pdf. Pitches, Jonathan, and Sita Popat. 2011. Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Preston, Catherine, and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2014. Illusory Changes in Body Size Modulate Body Satisfaction in a Way That Is Related to Non-clinical Eating Disorder Psychopathology. PLoS One 9 (1): E85773. Proprioceptive. Oxford Dictionaries. 18 March 2014. www.oxforddictionaries. com/definition/english/proprioceptive. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. 1994. Phantom Limbs, Neglect Syndromes, Repressed Memories, and Freudian Psychology. International Review of Neurobiology 37: 291–333. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Eric L. Altschuler. 2009. The Use of Visual Feedback, in Particular Mirror Visual Feedback, in Restoring Brain Function. Brain: A Journal of Neurology 132 (7): 1693–1710. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and D. Rogers-Ramachandran. 1996. Synaesthesia in Phantom Limbs Induced with Mirrors. The Royal Society Proceedings: Biological Sciences 263: 377–386.

4  BODY-SWAPPING: SELF-ATTRIBUTION … 

153

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., D. Rogers-Ramachandran, and S. Cobb. 1995. Touching the Phantom Limb. Nature 377: 489–490. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Sandra Blakeslee. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate. Receptive. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/receptive. Accessed 17 Jan 2018. Rodgers, Mary. 1972. Freaky Friday. Logan, USA: Perfection Learning. ———. 1976. Freaky Friday. Directed by Gary Nelson. United States: Walt Disney Productions. Rogers, Marcus J.C., and Michael D. Franzen. 1992. Delusional Reduplication Following Closed-Head Injury. Brain Injury 6 (5): 469–476. Rucker, Rudy. 1982. Software. New York: Ace Books. Sacks, Oliver. 2011 [1985]. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Seth, Anil K. 2013. Interoceptive Inference, Emotion, and the Embodied Self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17 (11): 565–573. Sforza, Anna, Ilaria Bufalari, Patrick Haggard, and Salvatore M. Aglioti. 2010. My Face in Yours: Visuo-Tactile Facial Stimulation Influences Sense of Identity. Social Neuroscience 5 (2): 148–162. Shapiro, Lawrence. 2011. Embodied Cognition. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Sherrington, Charles S. 1906. The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. London: Constable. Shields, Dean. 1978. A Cross-Cultural Study of Out-of-Body Experiences, Waking, and Sleeping. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 49 (775): 697–741. Shirow, Masamune. 1989. Ghost in the Shell. London, UK: Titan Books. Sierz, Aleks. 2001. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. Slater, Mel, Aitor Rovira, Richard Southern, David Swapp, Jian J. Zhang, Claire Campbell, and Mark Levine. 2013. Bystander Responses to a Violent Incident in an Immersive Virtual Environment. PLoS One 1–13. Slater, Mel, Bernhard Spanlang, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Olaf Blanke. 2010. First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality. PLoS One 5 (5): e10564. Smith, Thorne. 1931. Turnabout. New York: Sun Dial Press. Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books. Swazey, Judith P. 1969. Reflexes and Motor Integration: Sherrington’s Concept of Integrative Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. New York: Random House. Tsakiris, Manos, and Patrick Haggard. 2005. The Rubber Hand Illusion Revisited: Visuotactile Integration and Self-Attribution. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 31: 80–91.

154  L. JARVIS Uexküll, Jakob Johann von. 1909. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. Vallar, Giuseppe, and Roberta Ronchi. 2009. Somatoparaphrenia: A Body Delusion. A Review of Neuropyschological Literature. Experimental Brain Research 192 (3): 533–551. Van den Bos, Esther, and Marc Jeannerod. 2002. Sense of Body and Sense of Action Both Contribute to Self-Recognition. Cognition 85 (2): 177–187. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1993. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vié, Jacques. 1930. Un Trouble de l’identification des Personnes: L’illusion des Sosies. Annales Médico- Psycologiques (Paris) 88: 214–237. ———. 1944a. Les Meconnaissances sytematiques. Annales Médico- Psycologiques (Paris) 102: 410–455. ———. 1944b. Le Substratum Morbide et les Stades Evolutifs des Meconnaissances Systematiques. Annales Médico- Psycologiques (Paris) 102: 410–455. ———. 1944c. Etude Psychopathologique des Meconnaissances. Annales Médico- Psycologiques (Paris) 102: 1–15. Vindenes, Joakim. 2018. Matrise: VR, Science and Philosophy Blog. Uploaded 22 July 2018. https://www.matrise.no/2018/07/virtual-embodiment/. Accessed 28 Oct 2018. Vinge, Vernor. 1981. True Names. New York: Bluejay Books. Wachowski, Lana and Lilly. 1999. The Matrix. Village Roadshow Pictures/ Groucho II Film Partnership/Silver Pictures. Wade, Nicholas J. 2009. Beyond Body Experiences: Phantom Limbs, Pain and the Locus of Sensation. Cortex 45 (2): 243–255. Weir Mitchell, Silas. 1872. Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Wells, H. G. 1924 [1896]. The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham. In The Works of H. G. Wells: The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, and Other Stories, 379– 402. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1972 [1969]. On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York and London: Harper Torchbooks. Yee, Nick, and Jeremy Bailenson. 2007. The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior. Human Communication Research 33: 271–290. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

PART II

Overview Akin to the switch of perspectives encapsulated by the ‘body-swap’, methodologically I oscillate in my analyses of different cultural practices in Part II between the positions of immersant in Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes and BeAnotherLab’s auto-phenomenological body-change/ body-swap performance experiments, to a practitioner-researcher on a pilot R&D project called Transports, created with my company Analogue in collaboration with UK-based charity, Parkinson’s UK. My research enquiry follows a trajectory from creative applied practices that express an epistemic reach between the alterity of bodies towards different kinds of empathic onto-relational knowing courtesy of virtualized proxies, to participation in multiplayer location-based VR gaming experiences, such as Anvio’s City Z in which CGI avatars abstract their real-world counterparts. My interest in the latter concerns the mounting ethical considerations of perceptually embodied humanoid CGI avatars when exposed to ‘hyper-real’ vicarious acts of suffering; in an inverted logic, I argue that the players’ bodies become surrogates for the delegated feeling of digital objects that cannot feel. I investigate the de-immersive event of unintended glitches in game-based body illusions as a site of critical reflection and recuperation from empathy fatigue. Spilling over from my interdisciplinary examination of the signifi­ cance of the first-person vantage point to the sense of body-­ownership in Chapter 4, the breadth of practices that encompass Theatres of

156  Part II: 

Mislocalized Sensation in Part II of this book places an emphasis specifically on the transportation of the spectating bodily perspective. The illusionistic architectures used by different artists represent different aesthetic expressions of the reconciliation of the immersive onto-relational paradox of becoming the other body, while ‘being’ no such thing. My contention is that falsifying acts of becoming ‘other’ through virtual bodies (VBs), creates uncertain identities and confused bodily parameters that necessitate sustained scrutiny as to what is being actuated, if not the delegated immersive promise that mediatized acts of ‘body-swapping’ proffer. Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation that use different forms of technologized and embodied perspective-shifting have necessitated the transmedial and physiological understandings accumulated in Part I as an underpinning framework to my analyses in the remainder of the book. I should note the caveat that expressions of first-person perspective-taking in literature, screen culture and remediated forms of live interactive performance such as locative cinema, headphone theatre, immersive/ layered reality and pervasive theatres are nothing new. In film-making, the partial use of the point-of-view shot, sometimes termed as ‘subjective camera’, has been near ubiquitous since the medium’s inception as a cinematic remediation of literary first-person narration, especially in novel-to-film adaptations. More recently, the adoption of first-person perspective in films such as Ilya Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry (2015) and Louis Leterrier’s The Brothers Grimsby (2016) have departed with remediating literature, instead hijacking the mode of spectatorship from the culturally and economically dominant products of the video games industry (the history of which has been well documented in games studies [Therrien 2015])—in particular, ‘First-Person-Shooter’ (FPS) games. Naishuller‘s film was shot with GoPro cameras mounted on a wearable mask that designer Sergey Valyaev termed as the ‘adventure mask’. The cinema goer’s vicarious ‘participation’—or rather, the ‘as if’ of their participation—through Valyaev’s adventure mask has coincided with ­ related trends in alternative theatre-making practices. For example, the use of VR/video goggles in intimate two-person or ‘one-on-one’ performances in correlation with the distribution of multisensory stimulation to construct the sensate impression of transforming the audience into different kinds of interlopers in a virtual narrative world. This mode of immersion in aesthetic practices that prompts bodies to misrecognize virtualized others as integrated prosthetics of the self

Part II:    157

coincides with a proliferating trend to research VR’s real-world applications—the application of techniques in virtual embodiment towards empathic learning and intersubjective explorations of the unknowable bodily experiences of others, such as communities in health care who have undergone profound physical changes post-injury and who may struggle to communicate altered bodily experiences to their extended circles of support. While VBs in performance cannot offer a ‘first-hand’ experience that another body lives, the second-hand experience of a virtual proxy offers different kinds of interstitial spaces of learning—Part II of this book examines the nature of these second-hand experiences.

Reference Therrien, Carl. 2015. Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre. http://gamestudies. org/1502/articles/therrien. Accessed 12 Sept 2018.

CHAPTER 5

‘Empathy Activism’ and Bodying Difference in Postdigital Culture: Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes and BeAnotherLab’s The Machine to Be Another Introduction: VR Performance Recent commercial applications of VR have planted immersants in a dizzying array of virtual crises, with various claims as to the kinds of real-world benefits that multisensory simulations might afford their users. From drinks manufacturer Diageo’s public awareness raising campaign Decisions, positioning participants in a virtual drink driving car crash (2016), to video games publisher Bandai Namco’s pop-up installation, Project I Can (2016), which helped participants tackle their fear of heights by rescuing a virtual kitten balanced on a plank precariously jutting out from a skyscraper. But increasingly, artists and partner organizations such as charities have collaborated around a particular ontorelational conception of immersion in postdigital culture understood as a means of bodying different subjective and pathological experiences of otherness; ‘onto-relationality’ concerning the desire for increasingly networked posthuman subjects to overcome self-centred individualism by finding approaches to bridge ineffable knowledges and bodily differences. For example, downloadable apps on smartphones that simulate first-person experiences of conditions such as autism in the National Autistic Society’s Too Much Information app, or dementia in Alzheimer’s Research UK’s A Walk Through Dementia app (Jarvis 2019). The descriptor ‘immersive’, which I have identified in Chapter 3 as correlative with the concept of becoming [with] the body of another, implies the possibility of access to different kinds of the inaccessible bodied knowledges © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_5

159

160  L. JARVIS

through virtual bodies (VB) as proximate mediatized reconstructions. Body transfer illusions (BTI) conceptualized in this way by artists offer the promise that users might ‘know’ something of the first-hand non-normative experiences of otherness presented through digitized first-person narratives. In nascent performance practices, the integration of what Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan have defined as ‘visceral’ or ‘sense technologies’ in Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance (2012) has signalled a wider shift in artistic practice and its analysis towards the affects of the virtual. Theatres of mislocalized sensation, in correspondence with these pervasive shifts, are often conceptualized as instrumentalist art by their makers. They represent applied acts of perceptual immersion that situate participants in VBs to engender empathic acts of perspective-taking.1 Such practices when deployed for the purposes of campaigning, advocating or seeking to bring about personal political change might be further understood as a form of ‘empathy activism’—a notion that has gained currency since 2006, when Barack Obama announced that to meet the moral tests of our times we need to address ‘the empathy deficit […] the ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes’. Following the global financial and migration crises, worldwide uprisings in populism and politics of intolerance, ‘empathy’ has arguably gained traction as a concept in politics and the arts alike, and discourse surrounding this concept have defined it as foundational to addressing mounting social challenges. But these claims have prompted counter-arguments as to the value of empathy as a potentially tribalistic phenomenon that might simply reinforce extant biases. It is the bodyswap as a specific figuration of ‘empathy’ that will require particularly careful disentangling in this chapter. Virtual body-swapping transactions that conflate audience members’ real bodies with mediatized counterparts using telepresence technologies have manifested in various recent performance experiments. Belgianbased experimental performance group CREW’s W (Double U) (2008– 2009) (see Figs. 5.1 and 5.2) and HeadSwap (2013) have both enabled immersants to see the world through another person’s ‘eyes’, the latter involving ‘swapping heads’—or more precisely, a telematic exchange of viewpoints between individuals located in two different continents (Japan and New York City).2 But beyond these experiments, there is a burgeoning trend to use first-person telepresence in performance as a vehicle to actuate the techno-utopian promise of engendering positive

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

161

Fig. 5.1  Crew’s W (Double U) (2008–2009) (Picture from a performance at the Artefact Festival, STUK, Leuven, February 2009. Photographer: Marc Wathieu)

Fig. 5.2  Crew’s W (Double U) (2008–2009) (Picture from a performance at the Artefact Festival, STUK, Leuven, February 2009. Photographer: Marc Wathieu)

162  L. JARVIS

real-world change for designated communities of interest in arts, health care and other sociocultural contexts. I argue that BTIs deployed in the service of empathy activism are raising distinct ethical and epistemological questions that require unpacking; precisely what kinds of knowledge transmissions are taking place through immersive proprioceptive ‘ownership’ of simulated bodies in performance, what benefits might be afforded to the mediatized body’s real counterpart (the trained, or untrained ‘performer’ whose body is replicated as a body image within the aesthetic experience) and what are the affects and effects on the audience members that have habituated the virtualized other? This chapter focuses on the relationship between empathy and virtual body-hopping as applied acts of immersion in Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes first-person VR series of performances and international art collective BeAnotherLab’s open-source art project entitled The Machine To Be Another (TMBA). I will critically scrutinize the implications of an immersant lending their body to theatrical participatory artworks as expressions of an onto-relational reach to feel through virtualized bodies. The intervening technological interfaces in the works I discuss attempt to convey a range of complex lived experiences, such as the remembrance of seizure in order for ‘patient’-artists to take ownership over medical discourse, to providing utility as a tool for conflict resolution and cyber-therapy, such as rehabilitation in health care.3

VR Auto-phenomenology: Mislocalized Sensation as Applied Perceptual Immersion Theatre scholar Helen Nicholson has argued that applied performance is best defined as a ‘way of conceptualizing and interpreting theatrical and cultural practices that are motivated by the desire to make a difference to the lives of others’ (2005: 16). Jane Gauntlett’s and BAL’s interdisciplinary practices, while not framed by the artists explicitly as ‘applied theatre’, are consistent with Nicholson’s definition. Gauntlett’s In My Shoes is an ever-expanding collection of first-person documentary video goggle performances, intended to re-enact third-person inaccessible experiences by taking up the perspective of the VBs of individuals with whom she has collaborated— from astronaut’s to politicians, paramedics to dominatrices. Gauntlett’s collaborations have involved reconstructing diverse neurological conditions and experiences associated with traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), Tourette’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, stroke and

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

163

post-traumatic stress disorder for public, non-public and often highly targeted beneficiaries, such as an individual’s family or extended network of medical support. In My Shoes emerged both as a pragmatic solution for Gauntlett as an artist-patient to communicate her embodied experiences of epileptic seizure to medical professionals and subsequently as a way of facilitating others through a creative process modelled on person-centred planning (PCP) in health care.4 BAL’s embodiment system is an apparatus that has been used by a range of different local communities internationally, such as a UN workshop on intergenerational trauma for young leaders in the Somali diaspora (Masood 2014), a performance experiment proposed by wheelchair using dancers to enable them to dance on virtual legs (BeAnotherLab 2013b), or to enable a mother to experience the gestural vocabulary of her daughter from a first-person perspective (BeAnotherLab 2013a). It is my contention that both Gauntlett and BAL’s epistemic approaches to ‘knowing’ certain kinds of embodied knowledges are ‘auto-phenomenological’. Daniel Dennett has used this term in his critique of classical phenomenology (Dennett 1987: 153), a research field that emphasizes the importance of the first-person description of the subjective contents of an individual’s mental life. Auto-phenomenology for Dennett is the description of introspective knowledge—the contents of consciousness, taken by a subject to be infallible. But conscious experiences are only ever ‘seemings’ that are taken as authoritative. Dennett argues that the problem with auto-phenomenology is ‘not that it is (always, or typically) victim to illusion and distortion but that it is (always) vulnerable to illusion and distortion’ (Dennett 2007: 264). ‘Heterophenomenology’ represents his proposed solution to bridge these ‘seemings’ with scientific third-person methods (Dennett 1987: 154–158; 1991: 70), which involve an external observer contrasting testimonies with processes occurring at a subpersonal level. In the context of auto-phenomenological performance-making, Gauntlett makes no claim to be ‘scientific’ in her approach to the personal truths expressed. Her artistic practice creatively repurposes consumer technologies as a vehicle to relay auto-phenomenological narratives of those touched by ill health. It would be disempowering for patients to relinquish authority over the authorship of an autobiographical work to a ‘scientific’ third party, especially when that work is intended to communicate their indescribable bodily experiences to medical professionals. Furthermore, Dennett’s stance in consciousness research has limited application to the

164  L. JARVIS

attempted re-enactment of a remembered bodily event that Gauntlett experienced in the lead-up and aftermath of losing consciousness as a result of a seizure. Consequently, In My Shoes recreates unverifiable first-person phenomena in the absence of any adequate ‘description’ for that subjective content. BAL more explicitly align their methodology with the scientific paradigm. The collective is a network that includes cognitive scientists, artists and technologists, and the embodiment research of Group Ehrsson and Event Lab (discussed in Chapter 4) is cited by the collective as a direct influence on their approach (‘Research Concept’). Scientifically pretested illusions in BAL’s work function as a kind of ready-made, repurposed primarily for qualitative performance experiments. For BAL member Marte Roel, ‘science’ and ‘arts-science’ are best understood as different ways of knowing, so delimiting BAL’s hybridized practice to one paradigm or the other is unimportant for him (Roel in Jarvis 2015). TMBA has been used in clinical contexts to investigate a range of phenomena such as increasing tolerance to pain, with initial experimentation suggesting that VBs might be used to creatively distract the mind from physical distress (Coxon 2014)—an application that corresponds with Ramachandran’s use of body illusions as a treatment to reconcile sensory conflict associated with phantom limb pain (see page 123). But the collective’s emphasis on the co-creation of ‘embodied narratives’ places greater emphasis on experience-­ creation rather than objective statistical models for how people react within embodiment illusions. Both In My Shoes and TMBA playfully destabilize the immersant’s sense of phenomenal selfhood and generate content through creative processes that disrupt perceived disciplinary boundaries between an eclectic range of research interests including, but not limited to applied performance, intermediality, ethnography, immersive theatre, theatre and intimacy, community theatre, drama therapy, health care and ‘narrative medicine’.5

Jane Gauntlett’s In My Shoes: Origins In 2007, theatre producer Jane Gauntlett (see Fig. 5.3) suffered a traumatic brain injury and was left in a critical condition when a gang of moped riders stole her bag while she was cycling in West London. In an online interview, Gauntlett’s partner at the time Andrew Somerville recalled the extent of her brain injuries, which were so extensive that her family were warned that ‘she would never be the same person’ again

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

165

Fig. 5.3  Pictured: Jane Gauntlett

(Reiff-Pasarew 2013). Both the incident and Gauntlett’s recovery were documented through national media coverage in the UK.6 As a direct consequence of this life-changing event, Gauntlett regularly experiences epileptic seizures and short-term memory and communication problems. In a personal interview, Gauntlett explained the complexity of communicating her post-injury experience to others: I was constantly asked what it was like. I was often frustrated because I felt like people didn’t understand where I was coming from. I felt very judged. I found it really hard to communicate. I really struggled with my verbal skills […] I wanted to suss out ways that I could get people to understand where I was coming from and what was going on. (Gauntlett in Jarvis 2014)

166  L. JARVIS

In My Shoes emerged in 2011 both as a means to overcome the hindrances she had encountered in transmitting her experience of epileptic seizure to others, and as a methodology to facilitate ‘people in extreme, unique and difficult situations communicate their experiences to wider society through art and first-person documentary’ (‘About’, Sublime & Ridiculous). Waking in Slough was the first piece in the series, which is a reconstruction of Gauntlett’s memory of losing and regaining consciousness on a train following an epileptic seizure. The experience used low-cost technologies and multisensory stimulation to reconstruct her disorienting embodied sensations associated with the pre-ictal, ictal and post-ictal brain states of her seizure.7 Participants in Waking in Slough are greeted by Jane, who furnishes them with objects she had on her at the time of the events reconstructed (e.g. her handbag, a pen, a bottle of water and a watch). An Apple iPod Touch is strapped to the immersant’s arm to distribute pre-recorded video/audio content to a pair of wrap-around Vuzix Video Glasses and earbud headphones. Interactions are guided by a combination of audio commands, Jane’s conscious ‘inner’ thoughts, onscreen camera movements in the pre-recorded video, and the movement of Jane’s VB seen from the first-person point-of-view. The audience member is transported to the platform of a train station in their video goggles/headphones.8 Somatosensory cues such as the feeling of displaced air, created by the artist using a fan, corresponded with the visual information of the train pulling into the station to create alignment between the events in the video and the felt sensations of the spectating body. The ‘sense-certainty’ produced by this synchronization corresponds with neuroscientists H. Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria I. Petkova’s three critical conditions for eliciting a VR whole-body ownership illusion (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008—discussed on page 132), namely a correlation between visual and somatosensory information about the state of the body, use of a humanoid body image and the adoption of a first-person visual perspective. But Gauntlett strategically disrupts these sensory integrations, generating intersensory conflict and false self-reports in the audience member’s body with the onset of a simulated ‘seizure’. The water in the bottle develops a peculiar metallic taste when the artist, unseen by the immersant, adds lemon juice. Objects that the immersant has interacted with dematerialize as their hand passes through the visible bottle on the carriage table in front of them. White noise underscores Jane’s internal thoughts and she questions what is happening to her. The

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

167

immersant’s head is gently, but firmly, pinned back in their chair, which begins to shake violently underneath them as their vision of the train lapses into darkness. The audience member’s video goggles/headphones are suddenly removed and a man in a paramedic’s uniform asks, ‘Do you know who you are?’. This jolting moment of de-immersion—the participant resurfacing from ‘the plunge’ into the video space—created perceptual confusion as to which ‘self’ should reply. Minus the video goggles, is the immersant still ‘Jane’? The physical encounter with the ‘paramedic’ creates deliberate disorientation by transitioning audience members abruptly between different perceptual levels of reality. This carefully constructed confusion becomes a proxy for Gauntlett regaining consciousness, expressed through the peculiar demand on an immersant to maintain their virtual identity, even when their goggles have been removed. In a more recent iteration of Gauntlett’s first-person auto-phenomenological work called Dancing with Myself (2016) (see Figs. 5.3 and 5.4), she collaborated with VR production studios, Visualise. In partnership, they created a 360° video filmed using a custom made first-person POV rig for Oculus DK2, Samsung Gear VR headsets and binaural audio production techniques, using non-spatial and spatial 360° sound to create the impression of Jane’s inner thoughts and the outer ambient sounds

Fig. 5.4  Screenshot from Jane Gauntlett’s Dancing with Myself (2016–)

168  L. JARVIS

that place the immersant at the centre of the action. This more advanced technical set-up premiered at the American Epilepsy Society 69th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, giving immersants heightened agency to look around the virtual space in the HMD. Both Waking in Slough and Dancing with Myself are techno-progressive insofar as they conceive of the technology deployed as a tool to provoke positive change in the participant—transitioning their understanding in contexts as varied as education, medical institutions, charities, the Houses of Parliament and at the United Nations headquarters (to name just a few presentational contexts). Additionally, ‘empathy’ is conceptualized as an ex machina phenomenon with technologized interventions intending to bring about change on a continuum ranging from interpersonal experience—to increase tolerance and compassion for different kinds of otherness—to the level of policy-making (hence, the deployment of In My Shoes with politicians and at the UN’s HQ). The aspiration of this applied immersive work, which provides an interstice between neurological subjects and others, is congruent with neuroscientist Oliver Sacks’s invocation of Michel Foucault when he says, ‘In addition to the objective approach of the scientist […] we must employ an intersubjective approach too, leaping, as Foucault writes, “into the interior of morbid consciousness, [trying] to see the pathological world with the eyes of the patient himself [or herself]”’ (Sacks 1995: xvi–xvii). Sacks emphasizes the importance of understanding the ‘inner worlds’ of patients that are incommunicable precisely because they are either imperceptible from outside observation alone, or remote from the lived experiences of others. Helen Nicholson has argued that thought and action in applied drama concerns ‘transportation’, not ‘transformation’, drawing on Richard Schechner’s distinction that ‘transformation’ associated with performative events initiates permanent or lasting change often associated with ritual or rites of passage, whereas ‘transportation’ entails more temporary transformations (for example, actor-as-character), returning more or less to where they started after the fact (Nicholson 2005: 12). Lasting transformation might be more readily associated with the phenomena that Gauntlett herself experienced post-injury, while Waking in Slough and Dancing with Myself conceive of the immersive transportative event as an effective method to attempt to bridge an epistemic and ontological divide between the body that ‘knows’ an experience, and the body that cannot know without occupying its unique point-of-view. French feminist writer, philosopher and literary critic Hélène Cixous used the word

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

169

‘entredeux’ to designate a ‘true in-between—between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning’ (1997: 9). She contended that: Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. (9)

A traumatic brain injury has some correspondence with the notion of entredeux as a passage between a life ending and beginning, between the end of pre-injury and beginning of post-injury life. Neurologist Alejandro Scaramelli notes that during the pre-ictal phase of a seizure individuals can display symptoms of cognitive disturbance such as ‘slow thinking’ or ‘indecision’ (Scaramelli et al. 2009). Correspondingly, the seizure re-enacted in Waking in Slough might be understood as the resurfacing remnants of a historic trauma for Gauntlett, imposing the kind of unaccustomed ‘space-time’ that Cixous describes. Gauntlett uses a body transfer illusion to position the participant as a surrogate, deputizing for her within a mediatized reconstruction that corresponds with the kinds of non-delusional, artificially induced VR full-body illusions (FBI) tested in laboratory contexts (see Chapter 4). More profound and lasting anomalies of body ownership caused by neurological delusions that lead subjects to ‘confabulate’ (Hirstein 2009) or offer false knowledge reports while believing them to be true (e.g. a subject believing that their arm does not belong to them, despite visible evidence to the contrary) differ greatly in this respect, since the subject cannot ‘know’ the truth of their physical bodies. By contrast, body illusions inserted into aesthetic experiences enable immersants to consciously act upon themselves—to self-deceive, elicit affective responses and generate an embodied understanding of the event of Gauntlett’s seizure. The epistemic aim of Waking in Slough is accompanied by a legitimate concern—namely the plenitude of ‘knowing’ that can be had from a simulated seizure. Cixous suggests that ‘ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they eliminate it—and it’s settled’ (51–52). In contrast, Cixous argues that instability, uncertainty or what Jacques Derrida called the ‘undecidable’ is ‘indissociable from human life’ (51–52). This idea resonates with the association Carsten Höller

170  L. JARVIS

identifies between perceptual ‘doubt’ or ‘perplexity’ in his quasi-scientific art gallery experiments and a ‘failure of values’ (see page 63). The participatory model created from Gauntlett’s remembrance and its description by the artist as a ‘tool’ of communication could be critiqued on the basis of making a certainty of a perplexing experience that is characterized by chaos. However, I argue that Waking in Slough connects with the ‘trans-’, ‘the passage’ or entredeux. It is an illusion through which individual participants are caringly ‘thrown into strangeness’ (Cixous 10) by the artist and offered a detailed recreation of an experience that they may never have first-hand. Participants aren’t cast as ‘witnesses’ or medical professionals in In My Shoes. They are implicated at the centre of the not-yet-‘patient’s’ experience. The Foucauldian locus of knowledge-making is Gauntlett herself, not medical professionals. Concurrently, ‘expertise’ in this auto-phenomenological context is not only renegotiated, but inverted. The specialist becomes the layperson, and the artist becomes the expert engaged in an artistic process to relate their physical experiences accurately—or as accurately as conscious ‘seemings’ allow—to others. The isolation that those living with epilepsy often experience as a result of their seizures is well documented on online forums such as the ‘Community Forum’ on Epilepsy.com. Immersion in the context of In My Shoes elides with the neuroscientific protocols of embodiment experiments, but subverts them to make the disorienting changes in another’s perception accessible and reduce isolation felt through others’ lack of understanding. While a simulation can never be an equivalence with Gauntlett’s lived experience, it’s perhaps as close as immersive performance can take its audience members while protecting their wellbeing. Interviews archived on Jane Gauntlett’s Vimeo channel document qualitative audience feedback on Waking in Slough. Audience member Simon Sinek commented that with other mediums such as video art or interactive art, it is possible to ‘engage with separation’, whereas bodily incorporation in this work prompted an intense ‘emotional’ engagement (‘Simon Sinek on In My Shoes’ 2013). In response to the onset of ‘seizure’ in Waking in Slough, Sinek’s testimonial indicates that he thought he had gained greater awareness of physiological processes that cannot be prevented through conscious thought. The loss of agency and sensation of ‘losing control’ recreated within the work, despite intellectual awareness that it was a performance, enables audiences to share in the artist’s moment of vulnerability courtesy of an immersive re-enactment. Immersion in this context constructs for individual participants the

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

171

subjective perceptual illusion of a virtualized subject without separation. In this way, Gauntlett’s work is part of a post-Friedian ‘theatrical’ lineage (discussed in Chapter 2) that is antagonistic to the ‘exteriority’ and critical distance from the artwork that Michael Fried’s polemic had argued towards. In My Shoes’ participant experiences the ‘trans-’ of Jane’s simulated seizure in an experience that mislocalizes their sense of phenomenal selfhood, proprioceptively transporting them to ostensibly fragile bodies undergoing transformative and disorienting physiological changes. Gauntlett’s participants for her interactive film resonates with Vivian Sobchack’s ‘cinesthetic subject’—a neologism combining ‘synaesthesia’ (the stimulation of one sense, causing a perception in another) and ‘coenaesthesia’ (perception of one’s whole sensorial being)—to emphasize bodily experiences of cinema, using vision and hearing to ‘speak’ to our other senses (Sobchack 2004: 67). For Sobchack, the carnal spectating body is able to be ‘literally’ touched by onscreen characters in cinema by the ‘substance and texture of images’ (65). But Gauntlett appears to us multiply in Waking in Slough. She is both a pre-filmed replacement for our own body image and a simultaneous physical co-presence in the shared space and time of the live event. Gauntlett is an active agent in her distribution of the sensory stimuli that enables us to be ‘touched’ by the environment through the film, to feel that we might be touched by her bodily condition and to reciprocally touch back with ‘her’ hands.

Mentoring and Facilitation—First-Person Immersion and Person-Centred Planning (PCP) Jane Gauntlett regularly works as a mentor and artist-facilitator for young people who are recovering from traumatic experiences, applying techniques developed through In My Shoes to support them in communicating their post-injury experiences to others. Gauntlett identifies that this is especially crucial for individuals whose injuries carry ‘no physical trace’, making them ‘easy for others to overlook’ (McConnell 2014). Immersivity in this context represents a departure with prevalent observational modes of theatre reception precisely to make perceptible these hidden traces. Gauntlett designates her method of facilitation as an ‘experiment’, finding different ways to aid traumatic brain injury recoverees to relay individual post-traumatic experiences to relatives and carers. The facilitation is a tripartite collaboration between mentee, mentor and carer/

172  L. JARVIS

relative, with the artwork created by the mentee, under the supervision of the mentor, in consideration of an intended audience. Each process is responsive to the needs and interests of the mentee, and Gauntlett engages in an active process of ‘sussing out what works’ for different individuals (Gauntlett 2014). This reflexivity is consistent with applied drama, which is ‘contaminated by context and is intended to be sufficiently fluid to address the concerns of local audiences and participants’ (Nicholson 2005: 12). Gauntlett’s creative process corresponds with both maker culture—the peer-led hacking of existing technologies towards different social applications—and what neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran defined in the context of neuroscience as an era of ‘experimental epistemology’ (1998: 3), encompassed by his low-tech experimental methods of treating patients with phantom limb pain using body illusions such as mirror therapy.9 However, Gauntlett’s work is not intended to have a clinical purpose and is not designated as ‘therapy’ on the grounds that she is not a clinician, nor has any formal training to ‘treat’ individuals. Accordingly, she does not pathologize her collaborators by describing them as ‘patients’. The mentor–mentee relationship is unlike the clinician–patient relationship because it is rooted in equity and mutuality of experience. As a TBI survivor, Gauntlett’s understanding is commensurate with those with whom she works. She enters an exchange with her mentees, answering questions about her own recovery process and engages in two-way ‘story sharing’, which she notes can have a ‘cathartic’ and ‘empowering’ effect (Gauntlett in Jarvis 2014). The tailoring of the creative process for different individuals is crucial because some have difficulty in communicating post-trauma. The appropriate methods, forms and modalities used to tell their stories evolve dialogically and the techniques used in Waking in Slough or Dancing with Myself may, or may not, be reused with others. While BTIs can provide an effective technique towards empathy of a kind, virtual embodiment is not the end in, and of, itself. Gauntlett’s personal interest in a particular mode of performance does not take precedence over the needs and abilities of the individual with whom she collaborates. Concomitantly, the platforms of dissemination emerging from the creative process can vary considerably, from an intimate live performance that the mentee stages for others, to a downloadable audio file that can be shared with invited users online or accessed on a playback device. Gauntlett reports that audio pieces are most frequently created by the mentee since they do not require the advanced technical skills associated with VR. However,

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

173

irrespective of the selected medium, the desired outcome is consistently to place specific audience groups in the mentees’ ‘shoes’. ‘Camaraderie’ is a word that Gauntlett uses to define this relationship, indicating the importance of developing trust and understanding to enable the mentee to enter a dialogue and subsequently reconstruct their experiences for others. In regard to authorship, this branch of Gauntlett’s work prioritizes the mentee as the lead artist and the work is created on their terms. As Gauntlett states, ‘they have control over it […] They own it’ (Gauntlett in Jarvis 2014). The artwork is confidential and is never exposed to public audiences beyond the target audience for whom the work is intended. Furthermore, in a personal interview with Gauntlett she elucidated that her copies of the files are deleted after they are forwarded to the participant (Gauntlett in Jarvis 2014). Complete control over the work is entrusted to the mentee. Gauntlett’s facilitation in creating immersive artworks with different individuals is an exchange involving multiple stages of activity. The process initially involves a sharing of In My Shoes as a case study, inviting participants to feedback on their experience of Gauntlett’s work. Subsequently, the process entails the mentee sharing objects, stories and pictures that have significance for them. These resources and the expressed aspirations of the individual are then mapped out diagrammatically. Gauntlett states that this approach to facilitating those with TBI has been influenced by ‘person-centred planning’ (PCP), which was used when she was Carer & Activities Co-ordinator at Mencap.10 In 2008, the charity published an online document entitled ‘Person Centred Planning (PCP) and People with PMLD [People with profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities]’ (2008), which comprehensively outlines why PCP is important and how a plan can be developed and implemented.11 The keys aims of PCP are defined as ‘building a shared understanding of a person and their life’, supporting people to be ‘part of their community’, positioning the person ‘at the centre of the planning process’ (while professionals take a ‘background support role’) and focusing the process on someone’s gifts and the ‘positive effects they have on others’ (‘PCP’). PCPs are concerned with enabling people to dream about their possible futures before defining the individual’s ‘circle of support’ (those closest to the person with PMLD who can advocate for them) to subsequently implement the plan. I would argue that applied immersive art-making understood as a nexus of DIY strategies to simulate feeling with the body of another is wholly compatible with PCP in its core objectives. Both are

174  L. JARVIS

strategies that are focused on understanding a subject from their vantage point. PCP provides the methodological foundations to co-create an artwork for others and generate a proposal for achieving a better quality of life from the perspective of the individual. Concomitantly, illusionistic VR embodiment, while not always appropriate for all mentees, is an available strategy to improve understanding and subsequently ‘enable participants to use what they learn to inform communications and care’ (‘In My Shoes’).

BeAnotherLab: The Machine to Be Another & the Library of Ourselves TMBA shares commonalities with In My Shoes, but BAL’s ethnographic practice is oriented less on the recreation of ineffable physical states and more as an intersubjective tool to try and ‘understand others and ourselves as part of a complex system’ (Roel in Jarvis 2015). TMBA consists of a pair of Oculus Rifts, wireless headphones (for the ‘user’), a wide-angle webcam (for the ‘performer’), a Machine to Be Another kit, three servomotors, a computer/BAL’s computer code programmed in openFrameworks, Pure Data, and OSC mobile apps (TouchOSC and Control). TMBA provides two modes of participation; ‘body-change’ and ‘body-swap’ interaction protocols. Body-change is defined as a oneway exchange in which the user wearing a HMD, takes proprioceptive ownership over a live video feed of the performer’s body image. The word ‘performer’ in BAL’s practice refers indexically to the mediatized body over which the ‘user’ feels a sense of proprioceptive ownership. Body-change experiments enable an immersant to lead the movements of ‘their’ VB, as the performer imitates the user’s actions in real-time. In contrast, the body-swap protocol involves a two-way exchange in which both HMD wearers have their point-of-view reversed to that of the other. To maintain the illusion requires mutuality and continual spatial negotiation between both users who must reach a constant ‘agreement’ for each gesture. This level of agency differs from In My Shoes’ pre-recorded structure in which immersants take their cues for movement from the video and cannot influence the outcome of the action; a restriction that echoes the loss of agency intrinsic to Gauntlett’s experience of seizure. BAL’s Library of Ourselves (see Fig. 5.5), like In My Shoes, offers a growing archive of first-person VR films that use TMBA in their

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

175

Fig. 5.5  BeAnotherLab’s Library of Ourselves

reception to help participants to learn about socially vulnerable communities and migrants from ‘wars, climate change or extreme poverty seeking asylum’ (BeAnotherLab 2017). Funded by the EU Social Innovation Competition the Library is not just a repository for disseminating video content, but an ongoing project to gather stories in collaboration with grassroots communities and develop audiences with local cultural institutions. Early examples included first-person perspective films with the relatives of victims of violence as a result of conflict between police, traffic dealers and militia in Cidade de Deus, Rio de Janeiro. These films were presented at the FLUPP literary festival in 2016, enabling pairs of participants to alternate between the role of ‘user’ and ‘guide’, engaging subsequently with one another in a dialogic reflection on their experiences. In tandem, immersants can also take part in live ‘body swaps’ with those whose lives have been directly affected by violence; Luciene Silva’s 17-year-old son Raphael was killed by police in 2005 and she has

176  L. JARVIS

actively campaigned for justice from violence directed predominantly against groups that she identifies as ‘poor people and black people, youths from favelas and the outskirts, who are marginalized by the state’ (Silva in BeAnotherLab 2016). Body-swap participant Alexandre Faria comments in BeAnotherLab’s documentation of the event that for him TMBA de-trivialized violence in a way that traditional media does not, enabling the person who has suffered the loss to be heard and the user to reciprocate in their subsequent face-to-face encounter with ‘a hug, a contact, a recognition’ (Faria in BeAnotherLab 2016). The expressed wider goal of the collective is to convert this kind of compassionate impulse into measurable social change in local communities by offering the Library as a scalable tool to exchange visual perspectives around issues of ‘migration and marginalization’ (BeAnotherLab, ‘Library of Ourselves’). Participants can also take part in a process of scientific data collection after their experience, answering questions about their impressions and beliefs. This data is then used to ‘analyse and improve the efficiency of the system in promoting empathy-related behaviors’ (BeAnotherLab 2017). The interpersonal encounters through TMBA and the pre-recorded VR archive are accompanied by other forms of dissemination aligning with DIY maker subcultures. TMBA is licensed under a Creative Commons licence and BAL make the system available to other communities and independent researchers who wish to reconstruct it for non-commercial applications, providing online technical guidance and downloadable files to 3D print the system’s components (‘General Overview TMTBA Vest’). In an interview I conducted with Roel, he expressed his philosophy on authorship, commenting that ‘we all have thought of The Machine To Be Another in a way. I think it’s an idea that is out there—we are not the first ones to use this technological setup’ (Roel in Jarvis 2015). Both my historical survey of body-swapping narratives and techniques derived from scientific embodiment research in Chapter 4 corroborate this point. But where BAL make an important and original contribution is their technical innovation, the origination of replicable ‘body-change’ and ‘body-swap’ interaction protocols and open-access propagation of the components for their IVR platform for non-commercial use. But considered from a wider cultural perspective, 3D printable components for apparatus intended to foster compassion for victims of police shootings are entering into online

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

177

circulation alongside less benevolent virtualized artefacts, such as Defense Distributed’s 3D-printable gun—sometimes termed as the ‘ghost gun’ on account of its untraceability. The Trump administration initially permitted the online legal publishing of this downloadable firearm’s blueprints, which were subsequently blocked by a US federal judge in Seattle in 2018 (Associated Press in Seattle 2018). Inevitably, when campaigning against gun violence using BAL’s approach, the wider dual-use dilemma of technologies related to the collective’s hardware dissemination also necessitates consideration beyond more altruistic applications. Both Gauntlett and BAL engage with the philosophical problem of ‘knowing’ other bodies, and body ownership studies are foundational to the intended social impacts of these practices across borderlands of race, gender, disability, age, etc. These artists seek to use intimate acts of perceptual immersion where appropriate for their beneficiaries to communicate, advocate and heighten empathy through the interplay between virtual and actual encounters. While audiences take proprioceptive ‘ownership’ over another’s VB, the marginalized or vulnerable collaborating communities/mentees retain creative control and ownership over the theatrical artwork’s contents. In Gauntlett’s own practice, she effectively ‘gifts’ ownership over her reconstructed subjective experience to participants, while in BAL’s practice, the collective act as intermediaries between audience participants and volunteer performers. BAL’s VR telepresence system, akin to Gauntlett’s notion of In My Shoes as an alternative communication device, is not purposed towards building new virtual worlds, but focuses on carrying embodied learning across into real-world contexts. BAL’s white paper cites a range of scientific evidence from embodiment studies as foundational to the rationale for their approach (Bertrand et al. 2014). In particular, scientific papers hypothesizing that embodied simulation mechanisms might have deep implications to both understanding empathy and, more fundamentally, to the very formation of concepts (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). Both artistic approaches rest on an assumption that empathy conceptualized as feeling as the other does is a positive thing. But this underpinning assumption and the technologies at play require scrutiny in the light of both recent discourse on ‘empathy’ and its discontents, and critiques of technological advancements that have prompted disinhibition, disrespect and a lack of empathetic concern for others (Terry and Cain 2016).

178  L. JARVIS

Conclusion: ‘Empathy’, the sine qua non of Morality? Is ‘empathy’ of the kind that In My Shoes and TMBA offer the sine qua non of morality? Put differently, do experiences that invite us to feel as others do necessarily engender a response that might empower those whose ‘shoes’ we’ve occupied? Bertolt Brecht famously critiqued ‘crude empathy’ as identification with another through artworks that attempt to engender the assimilation of the other’s experience to the self (Brecht 1976 [1948]: 518). More recently, in relation to transmitting understandings of trauma in contemporary art, Jill Bennett discussed the possibility of works that transform perception through conjoining affect with critical awareness, calling for an empathy not grounded in ‘affinity’—an imagined ‘being the other’—but as a ‘feeling for’ that entails an encounter with ‘something irreducible and different, often inaccessible’ (2005: 10). In Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Paul Bloom has argued that feeling as others do is not necessarily the best prompt for an effective moral response. Notwithstanding the epistemological problem of assuming that we can truly ‘know’ what another feels (the ‘ineffable’), he argues that over-identification with another’s circumstances or condition could lead to paralysis, inaction or woe replicated—the doctor who feels their patient’s pain would be unlikely to be able to do their job. For Bloom, emotional empathy, or feeling as others do, is too narrow in its focus. Empathy of this kind is susceptible to a person’s biases or prejudices, not least of all in terms of the conscious or unconscious selection of whom we choose to empathize with. Furthermore, it is the safety and control underlying simulated experiences that can be freely exited at any time that ‘transform unpleasant experiences into loads of fun’ (Bloom 2017), which for Bloom accounts for the reason why people pay to play war games, visit haunted house attractions, or engage in masochistic sexual activities. Bloom argues against this conception of empathy towards more distanced ‘rational compassion’ and ‘cost-benefit analysis’ (2016: 39). Though implicit in his view—which notably lapses into quantitative language associated with appraising the desirability of a governmental policy, functional business decisions or commercial transactions—is a suspicion of the arousal of bodily sensation as a legitimate form of ‘knowing’. ‘Rational compassion’ privileges certain kinds of knowledges over others. But empathy as something manifested through a virtual proxy that is habituated for a short duration of time is my specific site of questioning in relation to Gauntlett and BAL’s work.

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

179

Elsewhere, I have connected the use of VBs in applied contexts to Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ‘obscene immortality’ in gaming (Jarvis 2018). For Žižek, in the ‘undead’ space of video games after every destruction the player can return to the beginning and start again (Žižek 2017). While VR empathy experiences are not video games per se, first-person engagement in enveloping environments is a subjectivity that derives from the medium of gaming. The paradoxical vulnerability experienced through an ‘obscene immortality’ raises the following question; does an ‘undead’ virtual identity both touched by illness, but simultaneously impervious to death diminish or greaten our sense of responsibility for the virtual body whose position we take up? I would argue that the known unconscious effects of embodiment illusions on which much of the argument for this work rests, and conscious responses of audiences in this chapter are suggestive of the potency of such approaches to attempt to embody otherness. In My Shoes and TMBA provide neither a direct equivalence of other’s physical experiences nor thrill-seeking simulations, but holistic processes designed to bring their beneficiaries into important face-to-face dialogues; to empower marginalized individuals to feel that they’ve been both heard and understood. In The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society (2017), Peter Bazalgette differs from Bloom by arguing that the capacity to put oneself ‘in another’s shoes’ is crucial to moral decision-making, but he also acknowledges that empathy can produce negative effects: Empathy is strongest among groups where people identify with each other; family, friends, clubs, gangs, religions or races. When empathy operates beyond those groups it’s our most civilizing force. But, as a powerful bond within a tribe, it can result in hostility towards outsiders. (2017: 7)

Gauntlett and BAL’s empathy activism offers a compelling counterargument to Bloom’s position. The ‘narrow’ focus that the spotlight of our empathy illuminates can be widened through this kind of work (at least once an individual has elected to participate) by creating memories associated with marginalized individuals with whom we may have little in common in terms of our own experiences of the world. Gauntlett’s work seeks out alternative strategies to communicate the unspeakable through the deputizing bodies of her audience. In My Shoes invites its audiences to empathize beyond their ‘tribe’, or outside of the narrow groups that Bazalgette identifies, using virtual body-hopping to mislocalize their

180  L. JARVIS

sense of physical selfhood and accelerate identification with bodies that may be entirely different from our own—not as a ‘totalized’ understanding, but as a caring act of being ‘thrown into strangeness’ courtesy of the artwork. Philosophy scholar Matthew Ratcliffe has observed that many first-person accounts of conditions defy description or understanding to those that have not experienced them, posing a distinct phenomenological challenge—a proposition that echoes Jane Gauntlett’s initial difficulty in communicating her post-injury experiences to others. He proposes that adopting a Husserlian ‘phenomenological stance’ can enable a ‘distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere’ (2012: 473). Such a stance for Ratcliffe requires the suspension of one’s own habitual understanding of the world to better contemplate structurally alternate ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’. He defines empathy of this kind as ‘radical empathy’ (2012: 473). Ratcliffe argues that in recent philosophical discourse some commentators have equated cognitive simulation—‘the ability to use our own cognitive resources to model the mental states of other people’ (474)—with empathy. He further notes that there are two distinct kinds of cognitive simulation; explicit simulation, ‘which occurs when we imaginatively and knowingly project ourselves into the situation or psychological predicament of another person’, and implicit simulation, where ‘simulation of the other person’s cognitive states is a non-conscious process’ (474–475). Correspondingly, Karsten Stueber has identified two specific kinds of empathy; ‘basic empathy’—perceiving another’s emotion without knowingly simulating her emotional state—and ‘re-enactive empathy’—a conscious reconstruction of another’s experience, enabling a more sophisticated appreciation of her mental life and behaviour (2010: 131–172).12 I argue that the BTIs in In My Shoes and TMBA engender explicit simulation that produces unconscious effects, in turn, generating re-enactive empathy. Participants are proprioceptively transported into another’s predicament knowingly through the artwork, but the illusion of occupying their body produces affects that are not disrupted by their intellectual awareness of the illusion in service of the experience. It would be delusional for a participant to question while inside In My Shoes, ‘where has my body gone?’! While first-person recreation of an experience is not the only mode of empathic ‘access’, Ratcliffe argues that we frequently and imaginatively ‘replicate’ the experiences of others in the first-person (consciously and

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

181

non-consciously) when trying to understand them. In this sense, it could be argued that the virtual reconstructions in In My Shoes and BAL’s Library of Ourselves tautologically emulate a process of replication that may already occur for many imaginatively. However, crucially this work rests on the logic that it is easier to empathize with another when the perceptual interstice between two bodies—one that knows and one that cannot know the alien world of the other directly—has been narrowed care of the artwork, and especially the auto-phenomenological artwork. It is the reach to know on one side of the transaction and the sense of empowerment that arises from feeling understood on the other that remains vital.

Notes





1. Perspective-taking in science is widely considered to be a system for empathy, but some theorists dispute the notion that it is a prerequisite (Sober and Wilson 1998). 2.  The empathetic implications of CREW’s Head-Swap technology were examined by Sigrid Merx in Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (Merx 2015: 204–221). 3.  ‘Remediation’ in David J. Bolter and Richard Grusin’s use of the term, refers to the ‘formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 273); but in relation to VR body transfer illusions, the ‘remediation’ of bodies more specifically concerns the concealment of the participating body and the instating of a mediatized body image or ‘avatar’. 4. Sandra Dowling, Jill Manthorpe and Sarah Cowley identified that the development of person-centred planning (PCP) emerged as a policy goal in England over the last few decades (Dowling et al. 2007). PCP encompasses a range of methods that provides a framework for those who use social care to design their own services to meet their current needs and desires, and move towards future goals (Stalker and Campbell 1998). Dowling et al. contend that PCP developed in response to critiques that the ‘needs of the disabled’ have been determined on the false assumption that disability-related needs are universal (Stainton 2002: 757), shifting to a more pluralized approach that considers the specific needs of the individual. 5. ‘Narrative medicine’ is defined by medical student Lara Crystal-Ornelas from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as ‘an approach to understanding medicine through the stories that are told by patients and health-care workers […] encompassing the cultural context of disease as well as the personal experiences of those whose lives are most affected’ (Reiff-Pasarew 2013).



182  L. JARVIS 6. The Mail Online and BBC News reported of the robbery which left Jane critically injured in articles published on 5 March 2007 (‘Cyclist Jane Wakes from Coma After Moped Muggers’ Attack’) and 6 March 2007, respectively (‘Moped Robbery Appeal Sparks Calls’). Subsequently, a television appeal to find Jane’s muggers was broadcast on the BBC’s Crimewatch UK programme. 7. According to Sheryl Haut et al. (2012), those with epilepsy spend the majority of the time in the ‘interictal’ or bassline brain state. It is prior to the onset of seizure that a pre-ictal or ‘prodromal’ state may occur which can lead to clinical seizure (‘ictal state’) and is frequently followed by a post-ictal state (415). 8. Immersion as transportation to the train environment in Gauntlett’s practice is reminiscent of historical novelty attractions and multisensory filmic experiences in the early twentieth century, such as Hale’s Tours of the World, which intended to simulate a railway journey in amusement park contexts through the use of projected film footage and realistic feelings of movement. Though in Gauntlett’s work it is not the virtual environment that is foregrounded, but the altered perception of the VB within that environment. 9.  Mirror therapy (MT) was invented by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran to alleviate pain experienced in a phantom limb (which he termed as ‘learned paralysis’) using an illusion to resurrect the missing limb and exercise the cramp. 10.  Mencap is a UK-based charity founded in 1946 whose mission is to improve the quality of life for people with a learning disability. 11. The PMLD Network is an organization in the UK committed to ‘improving the lives of children and adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities’ (‘About Us’). The organization’s website provides a downloadable PDF document which offers a definition of profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) (‘About Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities’). PMLD is characterized by individuals who have more than one disability, a profound learning disability, additional sensory or physical disabilities, difficulty communicating, complex health needs or mental health difficulties, and who may require high levels of support and present challenging behaviours (‘Who Are We Campaigning For?’). 12. Frédérique de Vignemont makes a similar distinction to Stueber, using the terms ‘mirror empathy’ and ‘reconstructive empathy’ (2010).

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

183

References About. 2015. Sublime & Ridiculous. http://www.sublimeandridiculous.org/ home/about/. Accessed 29 Jan. About Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities. PMLD Network. http:// pmldnetwork.org/PMLD%20Definition%20factsheet%20-%20standard.pdf. Accessed 9 Feb 2015. About Us. PMLD Network. http://pmldnetwork.org/about_us/index.asp. Accessed 9 Feb 2015. Associated Press in Seattle. 2018. US Judge Blocks Release of Blueprints for 3D Printed Guns. The Guardian. Uploaded 1 August 2018. https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/31/seattle-judge-blocks-release-ofblueprints-for-3d-printed-guns. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. Bazalgette, Peter. 2017. The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society. London, UK: John Murray. BeAnotherLab. 2013a. “The Girl of Blood Tears”—Performance by (Mother and Daughter) Anna and Sarah Recasens. BeAnotherLab. http://www. themachinetobeanother.org/?p=745. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. ———. 2013b. Dancing on the Feet—Embodied Dance Investigation with The Machine to Be Another. Vimeo: BeAnotherLab Channel. Presented at L’estruch, June. Choreography by Victoria Martínez Alés and Cristina Roca. Uploaded 10 September 2013. http://vimeo.com/74254297. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. ———. 2016. Library of Ourselves—TMTBA FLUPP—City of God. Vimeo. Uploaded 28 December 2016. https://vimeo.com/197316435. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. ———. 2017. Library of Ourselves with the Machine to Be Another— Project Description. Vimeo. Uploaded 23 August 2017. https://vimeo. com/230830279. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. ———. Library of Ourselves. BeAnotherLab Wordpress. https://beanotherlabalreadyexists.wordpress.com/library-of-ourselves. Accessed 25 Aug 2018. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bertrand, Philippe, Daniel Gonzalez-Franco, Christian Cherene, and Arthur Pointeau. 2014. ‘The Machine to Be Another’: Embodiment Performance to Promote Empathy Among Individuals. http://www.themachinetobeanother.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/THE_MACHINE_TO_BE_ ANOTHER_PAPER_2014.pdf. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. Bertrand, Philippe, Jérôme Guegan, Léonore Robieux, Cade Andrew McCall, and Franck Zenasni. 2018. Learning Empathy Through Virtual Reality: Multiple Strategies for Training Empathy-Related Abilities Using Body Ownership Illusions in Embodied Virtual Reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Uploaded 22 March

184  L. JARVIS 2018. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00026/full. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. Bloom, Paul. 2016. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. London: The Bodley Head. ———. 2017. It’s Ridiculous to Use Virtual Reality to Empathize with Refugees. The Atlantic. Uploaded 3 February 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/virtual-reality-wont-make-you-moreempathetic/515511/. Accessed 25 Aug 2018. Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Brecht, Bertolt. 1976 [1948]. A Short Organum for the Theatre. In Avant-garde Drama, 1918–1939, trans. John Willett, ed. Bernard F. Dukore and Daniel C. Gerould. New York: Crowell. Chatzichristodoulou, Maria, and Rachel Zerihan (eds.). 2012. Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cixous, Hélène. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gubar. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge. Coxon, Ian. 2014. Experiment on Pain Tolerance—The Machine to Be Another by Daily Planet—Discovery Channel Canada. Vimeo: BeAnotherLab Channel. Uploaded 9 December 2014. http://vimeo.com/114015731. Accessed 22 Jan 2015. Dennett, Daniel. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown. ———. 2007. Heterophenomenology Reconsidered. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1): 247–270. de Vignemont, F. 2010. Knowing Other People’s Mental States as If They Were One’s Own. In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. S. Gallagher and D. Schmicking, 283–299. Dordrecht: Springer. Dowling, S., J. Manthorpe, and S. Cowley. 2007. Working on Person-Centred Planning. Journal of Intellectual Disabilities 11 (1): 65–82. Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff. 2005. The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22: 455–479. Gauntlett, Jane. 2014. Waking in Slough. By Jane Gauntlett. Perf. Andrew Somerville, 27 May, Shoreditch Town Hall, London, . ———. 2016. Dancing with Myself. Haut, Sheryl R., Charles B. Hall, Thomas Borkowski, Howard Tennen, and Richard B. Lipton. 2012. Clinical Features of the Pre-ictal State: Mood Changes and Premonitory Symptoms. Epilepsy & Behavior 23 (4): 415–421. Hirstein, William. 2009. Confabulation: Views from Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

5  ‘EMPATHY ACTIVISM’ AND BODYING DIFFERENCE IN POSTDIGITAL … 

185

In My Shoes. 2014. Sublime & Ridiculous. http://www.sublimeandridiculous. org/in-my-shoes/. Accessed 15 Nov. Jarvis, Liam. 2014. Personal Interview with Jane Gauntlett (Sublime & Ridiculous), 19 August. ———. 2015. Personal Interview with BeAnotherLab’s Marte Roel, 7 May. ———. 2019. Theatre, Appification & VR Apps: Disability Simulations as an Intervention in ‘Affective Realism’. In Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance, ed. Fintan Walsh. Methuen Drama: Engage. Masood, Daanish. 2014. Daanish Masood Culturunners MIT. Vimeo. Uploaded 27 December 2014. http://vimeo.com/115491591. Accessed 24 Aug 2018. McConnell, Fred. 2014. Virtual Reality Theatre Puts Experience of Brain Damage Centre Stage. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2014/jan/15/virtualreality-theatre-puts-first-hand-experience-of-brain-damage-centre-stage. Accessed 15 Jan. Merx, Sigrid. 2015. Doing Phenomenology: The Empathetic Implications of CREW’s Head-Swap Technology in ‘W’ (Double U). In Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, 204–221. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Nicholson, Helen. 2005. Applied Drama the Gift of Theatre (Theatre and Performance Practices). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Person Centred Planning (PCP) and People with PMLD. 2008. Mencap. https://www.mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2008-04/ Person%20Centred%Planning%20(PCP)%20and%20People%20with%20 PMLD%20-%20designed.pdf. Accessed 8 Feb 2015. Petkova, Valeria I., and H. Henrik Ehrsson. 2008. If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping. PLoS One 3 (12): e3832. www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003832. Pregnable. Oxford Dictionaries. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pregnable. Accessed 3 Aug 2017. Ramachandran, V.S., and Sandra Blakeslee. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2012. Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy. Inquiry 55 (5): 473–495. Reiff-Pasarew, Faye. Episode 05: In My Shoes. The Art of Medicine Podcast. Apple iTunes. Uploaded 19 December 2013. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ podcast/the-art-of-medicine-podcast/id663176307. Accessed 8 Feb 2015. Sacks, Oliver. 1995. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. London: Picador. Scaramelli, Alejandro, Patricia Braga, Andrea Avellanal, Alicia Bogacz, Claudia Camejo, Isabel Rega, Tamara Messano, and Beatriz Arciere. 2009. Prodromal

186  L. JARVIS Symptoms in Epileptic Patients: Clinical Characterization of the Pre-ictal Phase. Seizure—European Journal of Epilepsy 18 (4): 246–250. Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performers and Spectators Transported and Transformed. In Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, ed. P. Auslander. London: Routledge. Simon Sinek on In My Shoes. 2013. Vimeo: Sublime & Ridiculous Channel. Uploaded 21 October. http://vimeo.com/77419611. Accessed 2 Feb 2015. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Sober, Elliott, and David Sloan Wilson. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stainton, Tim. 2002. Taking Rights Structurally: Disability Rights and Social Worker Responses to Direct Payments. British Journal of Social Work 32: 751–763. Stalker, K., and V. Campbell. 1998. Person-Centred Planning: An Evaluation of a Training Programme. Health and Social Care in the Community 6 (2): 130–142. Stueber, Karsten. 2010. Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press. Terry, Christopher, and Jeff Cain. 2016. The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 80 (4): 58. Virtual Reality Video Simulates Drink Driving Car Crash. BBC News: Technology. Uploaded 21 November 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ technology-38050910. Accessed 16 June 2017. Who Are We Campaigning For? PMLD Network. http://pmldnetwork.org/ what_do_we_want/who_are_we_campaigning_for.htm. Accessed 9 Feb 2015. Žižek, Slavoj. 2017. The Obscene Immortality and Its Discontents. International Journal of Žižek Studies 11: 2.

CHAPTER 6

Touching with a Virtualized Hand: Analogue’s Transports

Introduction: Immersion and Tremor In this chapter, I will examine the process and outcomes of Analogue’s research and development pilot, Transports—a project funded by the Wellcome Trust that explored new approaches to communicating complex third-person inaccessible embodied experiences associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD) using simple wearable technologies. The pilot culminated in the creation and testing of an interactive installation made in collaboration with volunteers at the charity Parkinson’s UK. The Transports installation aimed to construct a 15-minute sensate impression of a fictionalized subject living with Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease (YOPD) for individual participants. The application of a body transfer illusion in this context was to prompt a feeling of bodily ownership over a virtual hand in order to cultivate a personal sense of living with symptoms associated with YOPD. The epistemic aim of reconstructing another’s ineffable experiences from reported testimonies presents an inevitable problem when there is no direct access to bodied phenomena that gives rise to auto-phenomenological reports. And there is further difficulty in articulating the result of being audience to a simulation of complex bodily experiences. In regard to the former, my justification for pursuing this project was to foster new collaborations with those who felt that their physical experiences of YOPD were under-represented for a wider public through a sandbox testing process of trial and error. The installation itself accounts for the tacit knowledge creation it produced © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_6

187

188  L. JARVIS

by externally inducing a tremor in the participating bodies that have experienced it—Robin Nelson associates the ‘doing-knowing’ of practice-as-research (Nelson 2013: 40) primarily with the practitioner, but in this case ‘insider’ embodied knowledges also extend to the immersant who lends their body to the experience. My interest in this critical exegesis is to highlight both the methodologies and the crucial interdisciplinary networks of collaboration that circulate around this kind of knowledge creation with the aim of formulating a systemized approach to deploying body transfer techniques in performance. Transports thrusts one of this book’s keywords—‘theatres’—into sharp relief. Prior to the ‘liveness’ debates of past decades (e.g. Auslander 1999), some scholars had defined a ‘theatrical presentation’ as a unique offering that ‘cannot be replicated but must be in the presence of the audience for the presentational act to occur’ (Beckerman 1990: 5). This definition is unaccommodating of theatres of mislocalized sensation, since mediatized copies of bodies, illusionistic quasi-presences ‘elsewhere’ and sensory dislocations of audience members’ phenomenal selves are constitutive of this kind of practice, which is not simply ‘presentational’. Bodies that are replicated may also be physically co-present with their audiences (as in Jane Gauntlett and BAL’s work in Chapter 5), but they may also be in absentia—physically unable or unwilling to tour for practical or medical reasons etc. Transports is indicative of ‘theatre’ as an expanded field. The task of this chapter is to begin to establish what encompasses best practice in the nascent but burgeoning field of immersive embodiment. Notably, my account of Transports’ making process signals a shift in viewpoint in this book from my role as a participating immersant engaging critically with the work of adjacent makers, to a practitioner who is accountable for the artistic output and embedded in a practice-driven research process. The word ‘transports’ derives from Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and refers to phenomena in which the presenting feature is ‘reminiscence, altered perception, imagination, “dream”’ (136). Sacks’ particular use of the term emphasizes ‘psychical’ phenomena rather than conditions that might be understood as ‘medical’ or ‘neurological’ where there is ‘something (physically) the matter’ (136) (as could be said of Parkinson’s disease). But the word does usefully encompass my research interest in exploring the personal sense of living with, and through, different kinds of bodily experiences that have organic determinants and alter the experiencer’s sense of presence. ‘Transportation’

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

189

is also key to the intended effect of technologies such as virtual reality (as discussed in Chapter 3), an immersive concept in game studies (Gordan Calleja’s notion of ‘immersion as transportation’, discussed on page 50) and the analyses of material environments dubbed ‘immersive’. While Transports does not integrate VR HMDs, it similarly conceals aspects of the participating body as a strategy to instate a body image. The artificial induction of a temporary tremor in a participant’s hand while prompting them to undertake simple motor tasks is offered as a safe, but playfully disruptive intervention intended to destabilize important integrations of sensory information in a participant’s body. Aligned with the immersive desire to feel with the body of another, the aim of Transports was to collaborate with communities of interest to create a kinaesthetic sense of how interactions with the local environment and one’s experience of being present are altered by the onset of symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease. I will expand on the genealogies of the Transports pilot, explicating the different stages of the R&D process and offering an analysis of the qualitative data gathered through user-testing with different audience beneficiaries in four presentational contexts to evaluate how successfully the pilot met its aims; in arts festival contexts at Shoreditch Town Hall (London) and Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), at a public engagement event at the Science Museum (London), with carers, researchers, those living with Parkinson’s disease and staff at Parkinson’s UK’s headquarters. Finally, Transports was tested in an educational context with third-year BSc Psychology students on the Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience course at Royal Holloway University. In regard to the latter context, the aim was to explore the work’s efficacy as an applied experiential and pedagogic tool for students who may go on to treat individuals with Parkinson’s disease in their professional lives. Crucially, the R&D was understood by all stakeholders to be an exploratory process of perpetual beta testing to develop an installation that was not intended to replace human-to-human interactions, but to serve as a complimentary empathic learning platform to open up and share remote and potentially isolating bodily experiences in order to facilitate better communication and understanding.

Transports: The Experience The Transports installation was comprised of a number of technical components that were housed inside an unfolding white acrylic specimen case—an aesthetic object that upon first encounter has the appearance

190  L. JARVIS

of ‘scientific’ instrumentation (perhaps reminiscent of the arts-science ‘instrumentation’ of Richards and Höller’s installations in Chapter 2). But the case is a transforming object that intends to subvert this initial impression and transition the participant from the ‘scientific’ observational mode to the personal and experiential. The case contained a hidden Raspberry Pi computer that controlled a motorized glove and distributed pre-recorded point-of-view video footage displayed on a hand-held monitor, binaural sound heard through headphones and tactile objects. These components were used in combination to create the illusion that the onscreen hand might be felt as the participant’s virtual double (see Fig. 6.1), resonating with the perceptual embodiment effect of the RHI paradigm (discussed in Chapter 4). As the participant sat on the chair, audio instructions were triggered from a speaker inside the case that invited the immersant to wear the headphones and place the custom-made glove on their hand with the assistance of a facilitator. They opened the case which triggers a mechanism to ‘pop-up’ its contents and lay a dinner table in front of them, revealing the props with which

Fig. 6.1  Analogue’s Transports (Production shot) (Photographer: Richard Davenport)

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

191

they would later interact (a spoon, a bowl, a wine glass etc.). The immersant was cast as Andrew, a man living with YOPD in his early thirties. Within a 15-minute experience, Transports stages a re-enactment of his remembered experience of the onset of his symptoms at the head table of a wedding reception just before he was due to deliver his best man’s speech. The immersant follows the cues in the video to mimic the tasks that Andrew’s hand undertakes, while hearing his inner thoughts as he rehearses his imminent address to the reception guests. As the immersant witnessed the virtual hand develop a tremor and struggle to balance soup on their spoon, the involuntary kinaesthetic sensation was synchronously felt in the participant’s own hand while they held a real spoon behind the one onscreen. A spinning counter-weight mounted onto the glove produced a tremor that was activated at time-codes that were preprogrammed to correspond with the events occurring in the video footage. On the video screen, minestrone soup soiled the pristine white table cloth, making it hard for Andrew to hide the visible effects of his action tremor. The audio communicated his inner struggle to control his movement and conceal symptoms from the other wedding guests and his process of rationalizing what was happening to his body pre-diagnosis. Andrew’s sense-making of what was taking place was also inscribed by the judging gaze of others in the experience. For example, a waiter that notices his behaviour pours carbonated water into his empty glass, inferring that he has had too much to drink.1 The ‘clink’ of the groom’s champagne flute ushers Andrew to stand in front of a roomful of expectant guests, underscored by a stream of anxious thoughts as the experience’s conflated Andrew-immersant simultaneously grip the best man’s notes (both a virtual onscreen object, and a real object for the participant to hold) which trembled at a frequency that made the words on the page impossible to read.

Transports: Genealogies The Transports pilot was an extension of research interests that emerged through another Analogue piece that sought to immerse theatre audiences inside the fragile and unknowable subjectivity of a musician living through profound anterograde amnesia. In 2013, Analogue was initially approached to stage 2401 Objects (discussed on page 13) as part of the Wonder: Art & Science on the Brain season programmed by the Barbican and the Wellcome Trust and inspired by the British Neuroscience

192  L. JARVIS

Association’s BNA 2013: Festival of Neuroscience: a scientific conference that hosted over 1700 neuroscientists from across the globe. This became unworkable due to the significant demands that a multimedia stage-show would have placed on the limited spaces that the conference organizers had to host the various talks and events. Instead, we pitched to create a short incidental audio piece for the Wonder Street Fair in the Barbican foyer that was free to the public and incorporated 25 exhibits presented by artists and scientists that explored the workings of the brain. Analogue created a short looping 9-minute headphone piece entitled Superlatively, Actually Awake, which subsequently toured to the Pulse Festival at the New Wolsey Theatre (8 June 2013), the Latitude Festival (19–21 July 2013) and the Transform festival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (29 March 2014). This work sought to position individual participants in the first-person vantage point of an amnesic musicologist called Clive Wearing. Wearing was diagnosed in 1985 with herpes viral encephalitis which destroyed his left hippocampus and parts of his right hippocampus in the limbic system. The left temporal lobe and the frontal lobe in Wearing’s cerebral cortex were also damaged and as a consequence, he suffered acute and long-lasting anterograde and retrograde amnesia, leaving him unable to form new memories or recall aspects of his past.2 While the effects of Wearing’s condition are similar to that of Henry Molaison (the amnesic subject of Analogue’s stageshow, 2401 Objects), both the cause that precipitated his amnesia and the way that the condition was experienced in his particular sociopolitical context in the UK were very different. Since the 1980s, Wearing had lived a life of moment-to-moment consciousness that was recorded in a journal that he kept, detailing his many repeated claims of being ‘superlatively, actually awake’. The headphone piece began as a reconstruction of a psychological memory test called the Doors and People test, which took place between neuropsychologist Professor Barbara A. Wilson and Wearing.3 The audience member sat on a piano stool at a table, upon which an open photo album displayed a photograph of a door (see Figs. 6.2 and 6.3). In a set of wireless headphones, a voice asked the audience member4: ‘Can you see it, Mr. Wearing? Can you see the door in front of you? […] This is a front door. Turn the page’. The audience member was invited to leaf through several further pages in the album, each presenting photographs of different doors. They were then asked if they could remember the ‘garage door’—an intentionally jarring prompt, since no such image

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

193

Fig. 6.2  Superlatively, Actually Awake at the Barbican’s Wonder: Art & Science on the Brain season, 2013 (Pictured: Hannah Barker [Co-director, Analogue]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis)

had been presented. However, when asked to flick back through the pages they had previously viewed, the garage door suddenly appeared. This trick photo album was a small attempt to momentarily position the audience member inside the slippages in Clive’s unstable perception of events in which he was ‘constantly surrounded by strangers in a strange place, with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him’ (Wearing 2005). Subsequently, the album acted as a flip book enabling the audience member to animate a photo of a closed church door open by flicking through the following pages, as the audio design took them on an aural journey inside the church where Wearing sat on a piano stool at an organ and begins to play. The story unfolds that while Clive had no memory of his musical education, he was able to play the piano because

194  L. JARVIS

Fig. 6.3  Superlatively, Actually Awake at The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich’s Pulse Festival, 8 June 2013 (Photographer: Liam Jarvis)

his procedural memory remained intact. He also continued to remember his wife Deborah, which she documented in an article in which she recalls that ‘every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging. It was a fierce reunion’ (Wearing 2005). Referring back to the philosophical problem that I examined in Chapter 4 in relation to Thomas Nagel’s ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ thought experiment, there are facts that are beyond the reach of those who do not possess certain kinds of bodies. Correspondingly, there is no correlate for Wearing’s moment-to-moment consciousness in the body of the participating audience, and even if there were, how could anyone ‘know’ their own amnesia? Oliver Sacks commented in an article entitled ‘The Abyss: Music and Amnesia’ (2007) that although a person with

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

195

amnesia cannot have any direct knowledge of it, there may be ways to infer it. For example, finding one’s coffee cup empty with no recollection of having drunk its contents, or seeing diary entries in one’s own handwriting with no memory of having written them. According to Sacks, because amnesics lack direct experiential knowledge they have to ‘make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones’ (2007). Superlatively, Actually Awake attempted to explore the remoteness of Wearing’s unique mode of being in his world and sought to create empathic comprehension by offering analogous self-deceptive cues such as the missing ‘garage door’ as a small inference of the absence of his recollection. But simultaneously, the work communicates to the audience Deborah’s reality to which Clive himself had no access—namely, the remembrance of Deborah’s very last visit or the renewal of their wedding vowels, which Clive did not have the physical capacity to retain. Superlatively, Actually Awake formed conceptual foundations for the Transports pilot, but whereas the former was only presented in arts and art-science festival contexts, the Transports R&D sought to explore wider-reaching applications of first-person experiential installations in relation to public awareness, education and care for those living with Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease. The initial rationale for the project was an enmeshment of personal and professional interests in the subjective experiences of individuals living with Parkinson’s. My personal connection to the disease’s effects was through my grandmother Iris Beacher, who was diagnosed in 1983 after experiencing problems gripping objects in her hand. My co-director Hannah Barker had a professional interest in the experiences of those living with PD, having previously worked part-time for Parkinson’s UK alongside our work with Analogue to help develop and grow their volunteering strategy. As participatory action research, our process followed in the tradition of Paolo Freire as practitioner-researchers facilitating a process of inquiry involving multiple stakeholders who are also involved in the ‘research design, data gathering, data analysis, and implementation of action steps resulting from the research’ (Bentz and Shapiro 1998: 128). The Transports R&D was undertaken in consultation with behavioural neuropsychologist Professor Narender Ramnani (Royal Holloway University) and Parkinson’s UK. Both the project’s scientific advisors and the charity played a significant role in aiding Analogue’s research by deepening our understanding of both the pathology and lived experience of Parkinson’s. They brokered key relationships with volunteers to support the installation’s

196  L. JARVIS

development and participate in the testing process and advised the company on best ethical practice when collaborating alongside individuals living with YOPD. The 9-month R&D process was divided into eight different phases of activity; namely, contextual research, charity consultation, storyboard development, panel feedback/storyboard re-drafting, ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing, filming, user-testing and evaluation. I will examine some of the key activities and outcomes associated with these different phases of the creative process. The specific tasks pertaining to each phase of activity are outlined in Analogue’s workflow diagram (see Fig. 6.4).

Action Research: Transports Research & Development Process Action research has been defined by Stephen Kemmis, Robin McTaggart and John Retallick as a spiral process of successive cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. A plan is implemented (to improve what is happening), researchers act on the plan, observe the effect of action in context and then reflect on these effects for subsequent planning (Kemmis et al. 2004). These indicative four ‘moments’ of action research occurred throughout the Transports R&D within a larger eightstage process designed by Analogue in consultation with our stakeholder, Parkinson’s UK. The contextual research that contributed to the script development process involved exploring scientific research materials that expanded on the pathology of PD, for which we consulted a range of sources,5 and attended two of Professor Narender Ramnani’s Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience lectures at Royal Holloway University.6 This research enabled us to understand the anatomical structures in the brain that become affected through PD and how the damage to a pathway within the basal ganglia (a collection of nuclei in the brain) called the striatum and the substantia nigra manifests in terms of loss of motor control, particularly in relation to physical phenomena such as tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity. One article noted that Parkinsonian tremor is characterized by a ‘frequency of 4 to 6 Hz and a medium amplitude’ (Charles et al. 1999).7 But this research was limited for our purposes because empirical data offers knowledge that is abstracted from its bodies of origin—the design brief for a prototype glove for participants to re-embody a felt sense of this data was one outcome of this

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

Fig. 6.4  Transports R&D workflow diagram

197

198  L. JARVIS

research. Consultation with Parkinson’s UK had indicated that the prevalence of YOPD is less widely known,8 so experiences of PD among individuals under 50 years of age became a particular focus to both test, and raise, public awareness. Furthermore, there are a number of less widely recognized PD symptoms such as vocal tremor or weakness where an individual’s speech becomes quieter (Little 2012).9 This learning was incorporated in the narrative treatment, which explored the impacts of vocal impairments and action or kinetic tremor—a tremor which occurs ‘when the limb or body part is being moved’ (‘Types of Tremor’)—on a protagonist’s ability to undertake physical tasks and diminished agentive feelings in a situation of social performance at a wedding. ‘Agentive feelings’ are defined by Frédérique de Vignemont as the feeling of control one has over one’s own body (de Vignemont 2018: 170).10 To establish Parkinson’s UK’s prospective involvement in the Transports pilot, and as part of the initial charity consultation, Analogue provided a document outlining the project’s aims, key milestones, an early iteration of ideas for the storyboard, a breakdown of the specific support we were requesting and an overview of how the pilot might benefit one of the charity’s core aims to communicate the perspective of those living with the disease. Once the charity had reviewed these documents, we met with Parkinson’s UK’s Creative Arts Project Manager Meghan Hutchins who agreed to be our main point of contact at the charity over the duration of the R&D to ensure consistency and a shared understanding of the project throughout the process. As part of the storyboard development, we had produced a design brief for the installation, and prop maker Max Humphries created initial ground plans, cardboard mock-ups and sourced material samples for the specimen case in preparation for a meeting with the full creative team. Design meetings throughout provided opportunities to share ideas and consider how the technical components in relation to sound, video and the installation’s operating system might be integrated into the final design. Once a complete first draft of the Transports storyboard had been written, Parkinson’s UK assembled a panel of three volunteers living with YOPD to read the first treatment and were invited to provide critical feedback that was collated by the charity anonymously to enable contributors to offer a candid and robust critique. The panel were invited to address the following questions:

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

199

1. Did our representation of Andrew’s story resonate with your own experiences? 2.  How accurate did you perceive the representation of Andrew’s experience of YOPD to be? 3. How do you feel about the underlying aims of Transports to recreate immersive empathic experiences of an individual living with YOPD? A summary of each anonymous panel member’s feedback is included below: Panel member #1: A male living with Parkinson’s, diagnosed at the age of 44 • ‘I do have a couple of comments […] With Parkinson’s residual tension remains in the muscle that is releasing and the movements become staccato. There is an exercise in the user involvement staff guidelines that gives you an insight into this’. • ‘When things like this are happening to you [the onset of symptoms], the mind goes into what I would describe as freefall, spending very little time in the present moment, as your mind flits looking for a match from the past. Then projecting the concern into the future and imagining all the different ways it could affect you’ (Meghan Hutchins, 25 June 2014, email). Panel member #2: A woman living with Parkinson’s who is 44 • ‘I’ve looked at the script and I think it’s brilliant - funny enough I had a similar experience last May whilst on holiday. […] I was away for 3 weeks drinking alcohol everyday […] what I did not realise was that daily consumption was cancelling out my medication. My left arm started to get weaker and weaker to the point I was struggling to put a fork in my food. The thought of my husband cutting up my food for me in a restaurant was too embarrassing and there was also no way I would ask the waiter to do it for me’. Panel member #3: A woman living with Parkinson’s who is 44, diagnosed at the age of 39 • ‘It’s absolutely fantastic, it feels like it’s exactly how I felt [sic] – trying to hide it from people. It’s really amazing; it really touches on your

200  L. JARVIS

heart. It touched a nerve. I felt it […] My husband and I had just been discussing how we were going to do something similar at our local fete – create something where you had Velcro on your shoes and invite people to walk a day in my shoes’. Panel member 1’s feedback contributed to the Transports ongoing development in two specific ways. Firstly, his comment about the muscular tension experienced in his arm during the onset of his tremor influenced my approach to working with the actor playing Andrew’s hand (Chris Woodley) in the rehearsal on our filming day. I adapted the exercise signposted in the Parkinson’s UK user involvement staff guidelines to enable the actors in the film to try and embody the felt residual tension.11 I should note that the rationale for using a professional actor instead of a volunteer with YOPD was in part a result of the physical demands and pro-longed discomfort involved when wearing a head-mounted camera rig. Secondly, the mental ‘freefall’ that panel member #1 describes experiencing with the onset of his tremor contributed to both the storyboard development and audio design; we developed a backstory for Andrew to establish memories that the physical symptoms might trigger and introduced his imminent fatherhood as a way of exploring how he might project his concerns into his future (e.g. how he might perceive his action tremor to impact on his ability to hold his baby). The pathological physiology of Parkinson’s tends to be discussed by those with a medical interest in the disease in relation to ‘losses’ or ‘deficits’ (e.g. restricted movement through bradykinesia, rigidity and postural instability [West 1991: 3]) and conversely, ‘excesses’ (e.g. excessive movement).12 Physician Ivy McKenzie has described the study of the Parkinsonian syndrome as a study of ‘organised chaos’ induced by the destruction of important integrations in a body (qtd. in Sacks 2011: 7). While the technical execution of the installation sought to artificially recreate something akin to this ‘organised chaos’ by inducing physical sensations to the participant’s hand externally, the narrative drawn from these amalgamated testimonies sought to couple the somatic experience with another’s personal sense of how their symptoms might be experienced in thought and action. The second draft of the storyboard incorporated more detailed learning from the panel’s feedback such as how domestic tasks like using cutlery can become an obstacle and a source of embarrassment in social contexts (in panel member #2’s description).

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

201

Meghan Hutchins had reported that in a follow-up phone call with panel member #2, she described the storyboard as ‘incredibly accurate. It actually made me feel sick at one point. It felt so accurate and actually brought my tremor on. Extremely well done’ (Meghan Hutchins, 27 June 2014, email). This comment that reading the Transports storyboard activated the volunteer’s tremor raised an important ethical consideration. If simply reading a draft treatment can trigger a physical symptom, then the installation itself that engenders a physical correlate for tremor in non-YOPD participants might similarly induce or double the symptoms of those who already have PD. It was during the user-testing phase of the R&D that we had to negotiate this tension in our action research between the fact that the intended audience for Transports were those without an embodied understanding of YOPD, and yet to ensure accuracy when reconstructing a sensate impression of the motor symptoms necessitated the participation and validation of those with embodied knowledge of YOPD. This concern also influenced the disclosures and protocols surrounding how the installation would be introduced in public contexts, providing clarity as to what the experience ‘does’, underscoring the audience member’s right to opt-out at any point, and ensuring transparency as to precisely what kind of audience participation it entailed—or what Astrid Breel has referred to as the ‘demand characteristic’ of being a participant (Breel 2017).

‘Wizard of Oz’ Testing The term ‘Wizard of Oz’ in the field of human–computer interaction was first used by engineering psychologist John F. Kelley (Kelley 1983a, b, 1984) to describe an iterative methodology used in the early phases of design to test a product or service through the observation of interactions between a ‘user’ and the ‘object’, without revealing the evaluator’s presence—much as the ‘wizard’ is concealed behind the curtain in Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). For Kelley, the ‘experimenter’ (the ‘wizard’) fills in the missing system functionality that may be implemented in later iterations of a system. This process is sometimes undertaken with the participant’s a priori knowledge (the ‘curtain’ is left open throughout), but occasionally low-level deceit is employed to encourage natural behaviours in the participant (the ‘curtain’ is closed until after the experiment has been completed). Significantly, the goal of a ‘Wizard of Oz’ test is to observe the

202  L. JARVIS

effectiveness of an interface while test participants undertake the interactions that an experience produces. Analogue had first been introduced to this method of structuring the testing of an interactive interface while participating in the Theatre Sandbox development scheme in 2010 to create a participatory performance called Living Film Set that used Microsoft multitouch Surface technology (discussed in Jarvis 2017). Wizard of Oz testing in the Transports R&D was an inexpensive DIY method of evaluating an audience member’s user-technology interactions without the entire system needing to be in place from the beginning (see Figs. 6.5 and 6.6). In preparation, designer Max Humphries constructed a prototype glove and an inexpensive mock-up version of the specimen case. A rough edit of the storyboard was filmed on an iPad prior to the filming day to test out a low-quality version of the POV video in situ, and string was attached to the different devices to stand in for cables that will eventually be present to see how they influenced or inhibited participants’ movements. For our purposes, testing was undertaken in the presence of the entire creative team with the ‘curtain open’ to allow them collectively to observe how intuitively different individuals interacted with the elements of the installation, as well as participating first-hand. Knowledge derived from this experiential mode of testing then productively fed back into enhancing the user experience and aided Julian

Fig. 6.5  Transports’ ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing day. Screenshot from the Transports mini-documentary by Alex Markham/digitalSTAGE (Pictured: Julian Harley [creative technologist])

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

203

Fig. 6.6  Video content on an iPad is manually activated (Pictured: Hannah Barker [Co-director, Analogue]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis)

Harley to develop the electronics and the coding for the Raspberry Pi to make the final installation automated/self-running.

User-Testing The user-testing phase of the R&D involved trialling an advanced prototype of the installation in different contexts. The first tests were undertaken with volunteers at Shoreditch Town Hall (see Fig. 6.7), Forest Fringe and the London headquarters of Parkinson’s UK on 29 July 2014 (see Fig. 6.8). As part of this process, nine participants took part, ranging from those with a professional interest in YOPD (e.g. nurses, researchers, campaigners etc.), to individuals who had a lived experience of the disease, including those that had been diagnosed with YOPD and their relatives. The charity provided space for the user-testing, while all expenses associated with the volunteer’s participation were factored into Analogue’s project budget. In advance of their participation, we sought ethical approval from Royal Holloway University and each volunteer

204  L. JARVIS

Fig. 6.7  User-testing at Shoreditch Town Hall, London (Pictured: James Pidgeon [Producer, Shoreditch Town Hall]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis)

received an ‘Information Sheet for Participants’, outlining the pilot’s research aims, the nature of the data being collected, information as to how this data would be used and stored, and a consent form to giving their written permission to participate in the study and to have their qualitative feedback recorded on camera after taking part. The questions that were asked focused on the perceived accuracy of the experience, the extent to which they believed that this immersive approach to empathic learning might cultivate a more accurate understanding of YOPD among the public, and further ways in which they could imagine

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

205

Fig. 6.8  User-testing at Parkinson’s UK, London (Pictured: Daiga Heisters [Head of Professional Engagement and Education at Parkinson’s UK]. Photographer: Liam Jarvis)

similar approaches towards virtual embodiment being applied. This latter question was intended to aid us in identifying other key audiences that might benefit from this kind of participatory experience. Volunteers Sharon Martin (diagnosed with Parkinson’s aged 39) and Jason Batup (diagnosed with Parkinson’s aged 41) provided the following feedback immediately after their experiences of Transports during the user-testing phase: It was like me going back in time to five years ago, before I was diagnosed. You get all these little things and you don’t realise what they are. You say those things in your head as well like ‘Stop, stop doing it, stop doing it’. You’re willing yourself to stop doing it, so it was bang on really […] the weird thing was when the tremor came on that hand, this hand stopped. And that was really, really weird. It was such a weird feeling to have this hand semi-normal. It didn’t stop altogether, but it was really calm. It was really surreal. —Sharon Martin, ‘Personal Interview’, 29 July 2014

206  L. JARVIS I can’t put it into words. [Transports] is so close to what it’s like. I was thinking ‘how long have I got to go with this?’. Not that I wasn’t enthralled by it, but it was tiring. And that’s exactly what it’s like […] we all get tired. But it’s a different tired. It’s a tired that you don’t expect because you’re just standing up. It’s not like you’re going out running or anything. And it gives you that experience within 15 minutes, which is really very clever. —Jason Batup, ‘Personal Interview’, 29 July 2014

Batup’s testimony suggests that the Transports installation had recreated something of the particular kind of tiredness that accounts for his own felt sense of his Parkinsonian symptoms that is difficult to put into words. In contrast, Martin’s comments identified with the involuntary excess of movement that the glove introduces and the introspection that can accompany a physical symptom when it enters an individual’s conscious field of attention. Martin’s response also flagged an outcome that we had not anticipated—namely, that the tremor induced artificially in the right hand had temporarily reduced their actual tremor in the left hand. While this effect was unintended and only occurred in one individual, it is important that this event is acknowledged; unexpected outcomes discovered in the context of embodiment illusions in an arts project can signpost further avenues of research that might illuminate the mechanisms underlying an unanticipated result. Martin’s sister who had accompanied her to the user-testing day also participated, commenting that she had found the experience an emotional one, as for the first time she felt that she was able to appreciate and physically understand the symptoms that her sister had lived with despite having been a primary carer for many years. I should acknowledge that the first-person vantage point has limitations—the most obvious is that it cannot effectively communicate a multitude of experiences. Physical symptoms manifest in different ways (e.g. one of our volunteers noted that tremor first occurred for him in his leg) and affect dispositions in conjunction with the historical, social and cultural contexts within which an experiencing body is immersed can all influence the subjective character of a pre-diagnosis experience of bodily phenomena. Drew Leder argues that we are not proto-solipsists and that body images are not constructed in isolation. Our awareness of our bodies arises through the ‘experiences of the corporeality of other people and of their gaze directed back’ upon us (1990: 92). The body image in Transports’ is, in part, defined by the social misdiagnoses from those around Andrew (i.e. the impression from a waiter that he is drunk, or his wife’s assumption that the source of his anxiety is public speaking),

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

207

and our research had suggested that the misreading of PD symptoms displayed in younger bodies is especially prevalent. Transports intended to play a small part in making visible the gaze of others directed at particular kinds of bodies through an act of virtual perspective-taking.

Evidence Gathering/Evaluation This section will focus on what has been learnt from the qualitative data gathered from participating audiences in the context of the user-testing process at Parkinson’s UK headquarters, public performances at Shoreditch Town Hall and Forest Fringe, and with third-year undergraduate BSc. Psychology students at Royal Holloway University. The questions asked were adapted slightly to reflect the different contexts in which the pilot was presented. The research methods used by Analogue invited the audience’s conscious responses, rather than measuring underlying physiological non-conscious processes or other kinds of bodily ‘proof’ that might be elicited from their participation (e.g. the objective measures used to rate the intensity of body illusions in the embodiment experiments discussed in Chapter 4). Head of Professional Engagement and Education at Parkinson’s UK Daiga Heisters reported after her participation in the user-testing that she could see this method ‘being used for health and social care professionals to understand who they are looking after. You read a text book, you listen to your patient, but you don’t necessarily get to feel like they do for a little time and that’s incredibly powerful’ (Heisters in Jarvis 2014). Emma Brodzinski has similarly identified the potential benefits of simulation to medical training, as simulated events can ‘serve to move those who witness them and engender a real response with lasting effect’ (Brodzinski 2010: 119). But whereas Brodzinski reflects on practices that prompt a response from medical professionals to ‘superficial wounds’, Heisters is commenting on the experience of a body transfer illusion that seeks to decentre the expertise of the ‘professional’ to explore the felt experience of conditions that they may go on to treat. Notably, Heisters’ view contrasts Paul Bloom’s wider assertion (discussed on page 182) that empathy conceptualized as ‘feeling as others do’ necessarily leads to inaction through woe replicated. Heisters’ testimonial aligns more particularly with Oliver Sacks’ provocation that an intersubjective leap is needed to reposition which knowledges are valued by trying to see with the eyes of the patient. Similarly, of the seven BSc. Psychology students that

208  L. JARVIS

tested Transports and completed anonymous questionnaires after their participation, all reported that they believed that immersive first-person approaches to understanding individual lived experiences of a condition would help them to acquire knowledge that empirical data alone does not communicate. Of all seven student participants that were surveyed immediately following their participation in Transports, 100% answered ‘yes’ in their responses to the following questions: • Did the experience increase your understanding of YOPD as a condition? • Did the experience give you a more empathic understanding of what it might be like to live with YOPD? • Can you imagine how this experience could impact on how you, or others, might approach working with those living with YOPD? Furthermore, all of the students confirmed that they had thought that Transports would impact on how they, as future medical practitioners, would approach working with individuals living with YOPD. Lastly, every participant in both arts and higher education contexts expressed an interest in variations of the project using immersive techniques to reconstruct different experiences of other conditions. This suggested an appetite for immersive learning both as an artistic mode of reception and as a collaborative process engaging carers, charities, scientists and those living with PD to develop communications tools to facilitate different kinds of understanding of the subjective character of third-person inaccessible bodily experiences. The student responses implied a desire to increase their knowledge from the lived experiential side of a condition, in addition to acquiring objective knowledge about the pathologies, causes and treatments of a disease. Following the user-testing stage, a live demonstration of Transports took place at a free scientific public engagement event organized by Analogue in collaboration with the British Neuroscience Association at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, entitled ‘Feeling With Another’s Hands’ on 4 November 2014. The demonstration of Transports was followed by a panel discussion with Anna Farrer (User Involvement Adviser at Parkinson’s UK), Dr. Ian Harrison (Faculty of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Imperial College), and chaired by Prof Narender Ramnani. This event concluded with an open forum for members of the public to ask questions and contribute their feedback, which was generative of new ideas and suggestions for how installations of this kind might intersect with

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

209

adjacent fields of research interest, such as occupational therapy. As part of the evaluation of the event and the installation, Analogue invited testimonials from our key advisers on the project who were well-positioned to comment on its delivery and impacts. Chief Executive of the British Neuroscience Association Elaine Snell offered the following comments: This unique installation captured the imagination of the public who attended. Even watching the volunteer and the film, people overwhelmingly thought that it gave them a much better idea of what it must be like to have Parkinson’s disease. It was notable how many young people were in the audience, and many apparently had little or no connection with Parkinson’s. I thought it was great that the event and the technology appealed to young people. Many ideas and opinions were generated by the audience and speakers which will undoubtedly lead to new ways to use the technology. I congratulate Liam and his team on such an innovative and useful project. —Elaine Snell, Chief Executive of the British Neuroscience Association (on the Dana Centre event) Usually, when an able-bodied person “understands” a physical disability at an abstract level, something is still missing. This project was interesting and exciting because so many people reported that the physical experience of the disability caused a transition in their understanding into something less abstract and much more vicarious and direct. Working on Transports was a great opportunity to develop something innovative with people completely outside my field, and create something that changes the way that people think. —Professor Narender Ramnani, Royal Holloway University

Key learning outcomes to extract from these testimonials are Ramnani’s epistemic emphasis that immersive embodiment in this context can function to engender a ‘transition’ in a participant’s understanding of physical experiences of a disability. This observation hints at the potentials of immersive techniques that seek to mobilize temporary acts of altered self-embodiment, while deploying variants of the scientifically tested body transfer illusions as a ready-made mode of reception—and simultaneously, the known unconscious effects of such illusions discussed in Chapter 4 that underpin the conscious feedback discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, Snell’s observation regarding the audience demographic in attendance at the Dana Centre event highlights that the presence of new technologies as part of the installation afforded the opportunity to reach younger audiences with no pre-existing connection to PD. This implies the broader potential reach of Transports as a public awareness-raising

210  L. JARVIS

tool, beyond its applications as a performative interstice to facilitate better communications between those with YOPD and their extended network of support. The innovative use of consumer technologies for socially engaged applications also attracted wider interest with the Raspberry Pi Foundation (Upton 2014) and New Scientist (Ceurstemont 2014), who featured articles on the Transports pilot.13

Conclusion The Transports installation creatively adapted illusion-inducing techniques inspired by neuroscientific studies in embodiment (in Chapter 4) to temporarily transform the immersed self by recreating physical experiences expressed in the testimonies of our volunteer collaborators. This chapter has located the lineage of Transports as a practice-led research enquiry within my body of work, while the wider project of Part II of this book is to position this practice among neighbouring theatres of mislocalized sensation. Transports was a multistranded research inquiry, involving skills from multiple disciplines in its collaborative network of contributors and spanning different fields of interest in its engagement with different kinds of audiences/publics. The consultation, co-planning and sustained engagement with Parkinson’s UK enabled us to increasingly shape the focus of the storyboard treatment, identifying prospective beneficiaries whose stories were particularly under-represented. The charity helped to broker our relationship with volunteers who were under 50 in a people-centred process of action research to feedback at various points through the creation process. Contextual research with our scientific partner (Ramnani) influenced the design brief to create a motorized glove to replicate a 4–6 Hz tremor, while anonymized panel feedback informed the content of the script and process of working with the actors in the rehearsal and filming process. The Wizard of Oz paradigm enabled us to test mock-ups of the case design, iterations of the film and substitute the technologies that would eventually be in service of the experience with cheaper stand-ins. Observations and direct participation with early iterations of the experience helped us to refine the user interactions and develop the final prototype that participants interacted with during the user-testing phase of the research. User feedback as part of our evaluation indicated the conscious value that participants perceived in the experience in different presentational contexts. Our approach to situate those with an embodied understanding of YOPD as

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

211

the locus of expertise, and to find an ethical model of opening up these highly subjective experiences shares resonances with the notion of radical empathy and explicit simulation (Ratcliffe 2012), discussed in the previous chapter in which we project ourselves into the predicament of another. The qualitative testimonies of our advisors on the project—both those with embodied knowledge of YOPD, and those with a professional or personal interest in the lived experience of Parkinsonian symptoms—strongly hinted at the potential applications and implementation of Transports as a pedagogic training tool in the third sector and higher education contexts. Steve Ford, CEO of Parkinson’s UK, expressed an interest in using the installation as a training tool for Parkinson’s UK staff and charity volunteers and Analogue was subsequently invited to run Transports at the UK Parkinson’s Excellence Network launch event on 3 February 2015, to share the installation as a culmination of the 9-month R&D process. The hacking of low-fi consumer technologies to reach towards the immersive onto-relational promise of becoming the other body, in the context of Transports, was intended to generate new kinds of knowledge creation and advocacy—to attempt to open up isolating physical experiences and to virtually experience the gaze that a body displaying non-normative motor interactions with their environment can experience. User Involvement Advisor at Parkinson’s UK, Anna Farrer commented in an interview that ‘we know that people with Parkinson’s feel that better public awareness about the condition would mean that they face less discrimination and have a better quality of life. Projects such as Transports have an important role educating the public, raising awareness – and we hope, changing attitudes’ (Farrer 2014).

Notes



1. A survey of more than 2000 people was commissioned by Parkinson’s UK in 2013. The BBC reported that this survey indicated that: ‘Nearly half of those with Parkinson’s face regular discrimination, such as having their symptoms mistaken for drunkenness’ (‘Parkinson’s Sufferers “Face Regular Discrimination”’). 2. In Memory and Amnesia: An Introduction (1997), Alan J. Parkin states that anterograde amnesia refers to ‘difficulty in acquiring new information’, while retrograde amnesia is a disorder via which an individual ‘cannot remember things he or she knew prior to the precipitating illness or trauma’ (1997: 68).

212  L. JARVIS







3. The Doors and People test is a research instrument developed by Alan Baddeley, Hazel Emslie and Ian Nimmo-Smith in 1994. It was designed to test the subject’s visual recognition, visual recall, verbal recognition and verbal recall. In regard to visual recognition, the subject is presented with a series of photographs of coloured doors that they must attempt to memorise. The subject’s memory is subsequently tested by their recognition of each target door from a set of four doors that vary in similarity and, consequently, in difficulty. In a documentary we referred to when making the piece, Wearing is shown a series of front doors, a stable door, a church door and a garage door. When asked if he is able to remember any of the doors he has been shown he responds, ‘No. Not at all. I can’t remember anything. It’s just like being dead […] I don’t remember anything’ (Wearing 1998). 4.  Clive Wearing’s story has featured in several televised documentaries, notably Equinox: Prisoner of Consciousness (1986) and The Man with the 7 Second Memory (2005). Deborah Wearing’s book Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia (2005) offers a personal and comprehensive account of the story of their relationship through Wearing’s life-changing illness. Neurologist Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), which investigates clinical studies to illuminate the relationship between music and unusual brain disorders, includes Wearing’s story in Chapter 15: ‘In the Moment: Music and Amnesia’ (187–213). 5.  I referred to sources such as The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence’s (NICE) clinical guidance on the diagnosis and management of PD in adults in primary and secondary care (‘Parkinson’s disease overview’). NICE’s guide is predominantly an online tool to help health care professionals and patients decide on the most appropriate treatments. However, it was also a valuable resource in an arts context to better understand and construct an informed fictionalized journey of a subject living with PD, from the early stages of displaying symptoms through to referral, diagnosis and management of the disease. 6.  The first lecture I attended on 31 October 2013, entitled ‘Nervous System Damage I: Neurodegeneration—Parkinson’s Disease’, was predominantly focused on prevalence and symptoms, degenerating pathways and neuropathology (specifically the importance of understanding the relevant systems in the brain), PD in the context of the Basal Ganglia anatomy, PD in the context of the dopamine system, MPTP-induced lesions (a drug that caused Parkinson’s-like symptoms in patients) and treatment strategies. The second lecture I attended on 14 November 2013, entitled ‘Rehabilitation I: Neural transplants and brain repair’, expanded on different PD and MPTP models, investigating transplants to replace lost dopamine and the ethics of such treatments.

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 



213

7. The article considers tremor as a symptom of many disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, orthostatic tremor, cerebellar disease, peripheral neuropathy and alcohol withdrawal. It elaborates that: ‘Frequency [of tremor] can be divided into three categories of oscillations per second: slow (3–5 Hz), intermediate (5–8 Hz) or rapid (9–12 Hz). Amplitude may be classified as fine, medium or coarse, depending on the displacement produced by the tremor about the fixed plane. A coarse tremor has a large displacement, whereas a fine tremor is barely noticeable’ (Charles et al. 1999: 1565). 8. According to Parkinson’s UK, approximately ‘10% of the 1 million people with the disease are thought to be below the age of 40.3’ (‘Young-Onset Parkinson’s Disease’), and it is when an individual is diagnosed below the age of 50 that the disorder is termed ‘Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease’. 9. The prevalence of the disease’s effect on the voice has led to the development of unconventional diagnostic tools, e.g. low-cost voice-based tests that evaluate the accuracy of speech signal processing algorithms (dysphonia measures) to predict PD symptom severity using speech signals (Tsanas et al.). Such advances represent an objective, non-invasive and self-administered tool with the aim of detecting the disease and measuring its progression. Similarly, recent research has also evidenced how in-built accelerometers in consumer smartphone technologies can afford individuals the possibility of accurately distinguishing Parkinson’s disease (PD) using self-administered tests of gait and postural sway (Arora et al.). For example, Taha Khan et al.’s ‘Quantification of Speech Impairment in Parkinson’s Disease’ (2012), ‘Cepstral Separation Difference: A Novel Approach for Speech Impairment Quantification in Parkinson’s Disease’ (2014) and Sabine Skodda et al.’s ‘Progression of Voice and Speech Impairment in the Course of Parkinson’s Disease: A Longitudinal Study’ (2013). 10. According to an online publication by Parkinson’s UK entitled ‘Symptoms and Lifestyle: Tremor and Parkinson’s’ (April 2013), tremor caused by PD can be either a ‘resting tremor’ or an ‘action tremor’. The latter occurs while undertaking a motor task, which is the kind that is replicated within Transports. 11.  This document contains a section entitled ‘What it feels like to have Parkinson’s’, which includes a simple experiment that can be undertaken to demonstrate the feeling of ‘cogging’ (staccato movements) or ‘cogwheeling’; a term coined by Camillo Negro in ‘Le Phenomena “dela Roue Dentee”’ (1928), later defined as a Parkinsonian symptom that is characterized by ‘increased resistance’ in the muscles or ‘rigidity’ (Lance et al. 1963: 98).

214  L. JARVIS 12. Richard West cites Stern and Hurtig as the original source of this information in their publication The Comprehensive Management of Parkinson’s Disease (1988). Numerous secondary manifestations of the disease are also indicated; those that relate to excessive movement include blepharospasm (‘spasm of the eyelids’), festinating gait (‘short, quick, tottering steps; appearing to constantly fall forwards’), cogwheel rigidity (‘muscle relaxes and stiffens intermittently giving a jerky movement’) and dystonia (‘muscle spasm’). Losses pertaining to movement include incoordination, micrographia (‘writing difficulties’), impaired upgaze dysphagia reflex (‘difficulty in swallowing’), masked facies or hypomimia (‘expressionless face’) and freezing (3). 13. Key coverage included a filmed report for Reuters entitled ‘Installation Simulates Parkinson’s Symptoms’ by Suzannah Butcher, published online on 7 December 2014. Sandrine Ceurstemont’s article on Transports for New Scientist entitled ‘What it’s Like to Have Parkinson’s for 15 Minutes’ was published on 19 November 2014. The YouTube video of Transports that accompanied this article online (entitled ‘Body Illusion Lets You Experience Parkinson’s’) has attracted 26,507 views as of 27 September 2019. Further articles in scientific publications included the article ‘New Technology Allows Medical Professionals to Step into their Patients’ Shoes’ in Science Daily on 3 November 2014.

References Auslander, Philip. 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge. Baddeley, Alan, Hazel Emslie, and Ian Nimmo-Smith. 1994. Doors and People. Innovact. http://www.innovact.co.za/Doors%20and%20People.htm. Beckerman, Bernard. 1990. Theatrical Presentation: Performer, Audience and Act, ed. Gloria Brim and William Coco. New York and London: Routledge. Bentz, Valerie Malhotra, and Jeremy J. Shapiro. 1998. Mindful Inquiry in Social Research. London: Sage. Breel, Astrid. 2017. ‘Explorations: What Is Participatory Performance?’, Forum on the Art of Participation: A Curated Collection of Reflections, Explorations, and Instructions. PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research. 1.2 Participation in/and Research: Ethics, Methodologies, Expectations. Brodzinski, Emma. 2010. Theatre in Health and Care. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ceurstemont, Sandrine. 2014. What It’s Like to Have Parkinson’s for 15 Minutes. New Scientist. Published on 19 November 2014.

6  TOUCHING WITH A VIRTUALIZED HAND: ANALOGUE’S TRANSPORTS 

215

Charles, P.D., G.J. Esper, T.L. Davis, R.J. Maciunas, and D. Robertson. 1999. Classification of Tremor and Update on Treatment. American Family Physician 59: 1565–1572. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2018. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily SelfAwareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farrer, Anna. 2014. New Technology Allows Medical Professionals to Step into their Patients’ Shoes. Royal Holloway website. Uploaded 3 November 2014. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/aboutus/newsandevents/news/newsarticles/newtechnologyallowsmedicalprofessionalstostepintotheirpatientsshoes. aspx. Accessed 15 Apr 2018. Hutchins, Meghan. Email to the Author (Containing Panel Member #1’s Written Feedback). 25 June 2014. TS. ———. Email to the Author (Containing Panel Member #2 & #3’s Feedback). 27 June 2014. TS. Jarvis, Liam. 2014. Personal Interview with Daiga Heisters. 29 July 2014. ———. 2017. Time-Sculptures of Terrifying Ambiguity: Staging ‘Inner Space’ and Migrating Realities in Analogue’s Living Film Set. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 13 (1): 21–38. Kelley, John F. 1983a. An Empirical Methodology for Writing User-Friendly Natural Language Computer Applications. In CHI ‘83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 193–196. Boston, MA, USA. ———. 1983b. Natural Language and Computers: Six Empirical Steps for Writing an Easy-to-Use Computer Application. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S. ———. 1984. An Iterative Design Methodology for User-Friendly Natural Language Office Information Applications. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 2 (1): 26–41. Kemmis, S., R. McTaggart, and J. Retallick (eds.). 2004. The Action Research Planner (2nd ed. rev.). Karachi: Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development. Lance, James W., Robert S. Schwab, and Elizabeth A. Peterson. 1963. Action Tremor and the Cogwheel Phenomenon in Parkinson’s Disease. Brain: A Journal of Neurology 86: 95–110. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Little, Max. 2012. Max Little: A Test for Parkinson’s with a Phone Call. TEDGlobal. Uploaded June 2012. http://www.ted.com/talks/max_little_a_ test_for_parkinson_s_with_a_phone_call. Accessed 26 Apr 2014. Negro, Camillo. 1928. Le Phénomène de la roue dentée. Encéphale 23: 203–224. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parkin, Alan J. 1997. Memory and Amnesia: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

216  L. JARVIS Parkinson’s Disease Overview. National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. http://pathways.nice.org.uk/pathways/parkinsons-disease. Accessed 31 July 2014. Parkinson’s Sufferers “Face Regular Discrimination”. BBC News: Health. Uploaded 15 April 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22121686. Accessed 20 May 2014. Ramnani, Narender. Nervous System Damage I: Neurodegeneration—Parkinson’s Disease. Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience (PS3141). Psychology Department, Windsor Building, Royal Holloway University, Egham. 31 October 2013. Lecture. ———. Rehabilitation I: Neural Transplants: Rewiring the Brain. Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience (PS3141). Psychology Department, Royal Holloway, University of London. The Bourne Lecture Theatre. 21 November 2013. Lecture. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2012. Phenomenology as a Form of Empathy. Inquiry 55 (5): 473–495. Sacks, Oliver. 2007. The Abyss: Music and Amnesia. The New Yorker. Uploaded 24 September 2007. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/09/24/ the-abyss. Accessed 25 Aug 2014. ———. 2011 [1986]. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador. Symptoms and Lifestyle: Tremor and Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s UK. April 2013. http://www.parkinsons.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/download/ english/fs94_tremorandparkinsons_0.pdf. Accessed 20 Apr 2014. Types of Tremor. The National Tremor Foundation. http://tremor.org.uk/ types-of-tremor.html. Accessed 13 Apr 2018. Upton, Liz. 2014. Parkinson’s Disease Body Illusion. Raspberry Pi Blog. Uploaded 21 November 2014. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/parkinsons-disease-body-illusion/. Accessed 14 Apr 2018. Wearing, Clive. 1998. ‘Clive Wearing, Part 2b: Living Without Memory’. YouTube. From ‘The Mind (Second Edition)—Life Without Memory: The Case of Clive Wearing’. BBC Documentary. Uploaded 11 October 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCyvzI2aVUo#t=225. Accessed 9 July 2014. Wearing, Deborah. 2006 [2005]. Forever Today: A Memoir of Love and Amnesia. Leicester: Charnwood. ———. 2005. The Man Who Keeps Falling in Love with His Wife. Telegraph. Uploaded 12 January 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3313452/ The-man-who-keeps-falling-in-love-with-his-wife.html. Accessed 30 July 2014. West, Richard. 1991. Parkinson’s Disease. London: Office of Health Economics. Young-Onset Parkinson’s. 2013. Parkinson’s Association website. Uploaded 30 May 2013. http://www.parkinsonassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/ 11/NPF-YoungOnset_Parkinsons.pdf. Accessed 6 Apr 2018.

CHAPTER 7

The Suffering Avatar: Vicarity and Resistance in Body-Tracked Multiplayer Gaming

Introduction: Hyper-Intercorporeality and Immersion in Anvio’s City Z (2017–) The previous two chapters have focused on virtual embodiment in applied arts practices, examining the selected performances/installations and their respective creative processes from the dual vantage points of immersant and practitioner-researcher. The terms of relation in each case study thus far have been between one body and another in experiences intended for either individuals or pairs of participants. In this chapter, I expand the discussion to scrutinize immersive collective feeling in the non-individual experiences of multiplayer gaming, focusing on the ethical considerations of complex avatar-self entanglements in full-body VR. On 5 May 2018, I participated in Anvio’s City Z, a zombie shooter game developed by Russian company Vortex LLC and staged in a predominantly dis-used retail outlet in Whiteley’s shopping Centre, London (see Fig. 7.1). After a short wait, my fellow participants and I were ushered into a 200 m2 studio and briefed as to our mission to ascend the ‘Helix’ skyscraper set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow. Our goal was to activate generators on each level to power the satellite communications on the roof, while defending ourselves from hordes of zombie nonplayer characters (NPCs) controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence (AI). Body-tracking cameras lined the ceiling and we were each equipped with a VR HMD, wireless Zotac backpack PC and wearable position trackers on our hands, feet and backs. Holding out our arms, the © The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_7

217

218  L. JARVIS

Fig. 7.1  Anvio’s City Z (2017–), Whiteley’s shopping centre, London, 5 May 2018

technical operators calibrated the body-tracking equipment, and from a menu screen we abruptly appeared in the computer-generated corporate lobby of a building. My glasses dug firmly into the bridge of my nose as a nagging reminder of the wearable technologies maintaining my experience. Holding out my virtual hands in front of me to receive my rifle, my sleeveless arms were now covered in military camouflage in the game space. Our avatars were rudimentary representations; the full-face masks and body armour, aside from functioning as deindividuating uniforms that cast us in a role, fulfilled the practical purpose of masking off identity features that are complex to make plausible, such as simulated facial geometry. My physical movements corresponded with my avatar’s as my motion data was used to synchronize our appendages with convincing accuracy. But my avatar’s left hand was positioned at a dislocated angle in its orientation to the virtual arm. This created an uncanny unease with my substitute body image, which would be exposed to various simulated moments of jeopardy over the next 30 minutes, with walls blasted out of the skyscraper to reveal dizzying drops and perilous walkways to be traversed. While disembarking from a lift as we ascended the skyscraper, one of my co-participant’s position trackers mounted on her backpack

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

219

accidentally fell off. Her avatar folded into a hideously contorted V-shape as the computer’s physics engine tried to make sense of the unintentionally repositioned tracking equipment lying haplessly on the floor. ‘Ahh! What’s going on?!’, Claire said, as her body representation in the game world became a twisted mess of corrupted data to other player-onlookers. I witnessed this moment with a mixture of humour and alarm, trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of Claire’s laughter and confusion with the unintended, but perceived ‘violence’ of her avatar being turned inside out by a computer making sense of the repositioned tracking hardware. In game studies, a player’s ‘incorporation’ for Gordon Calleja operates on a double axis of ‘internalizing’ the game environment into consciousness and their ‘systemically upheld embodiment’ as represented by their avatar (Calleja 2011: 169). By this logic, what took place in City Z was an act of dis-incorporation as the cohesion of the game world collapsed. De-immersion from our avatars, by association, resurfaced us from the ‘corporate’ virtual environment; thus ‘disincorporate’ carries the dual meaning of a dissolution from both a virtual and corporate body. With critical distance, the initial aesthetic concern of a virtual body gone awry in this moment of system error gave way to wider ethical considerations. Ethics is epitomized for Nicholas Ridout by the singular question ‘How shall I act?’ (Ridout 2009). But in this circumstance, the question might be rethought along the following lines; how did the preconditions of the game’s affordances and the predetermined virtual identity I was ascribed want me to act? And what feelings of responsibility were stirred towards my blended avatar-self by my queasiness at possessing an erroneously dislocated wrist, or when my co-immersant was met with an accidental and extradiegetic virtual ‘disfigurement’? I use these questions as a springboard into an investigation of the wider ethical complexities of vicarious suffering in potentially traumatic virtual situations while feeling as our avatar might. Moments of glitch can create a productive disjuncture between ours and/or other’s avatar-selves. I argue that such moments of de-immersion from both the gameplay and a virtual body provide a critical space to disentangle the complex nature of convergent identities. From the Sanskrit avatāra meaning ‘descent’, the etymological origin of the word ‘avatar’ denotes the appearance of a deity in the material world. But in City Z and other cultural forms such as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPGs) and intermedial performances that use gaming structures (e.g. Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before),

220  L. JARVIS

the word more commonly refers to computer-generated representations of a player in the game world. Avatars often have prescribed appearances but can also be user-generated projections of a self-identity that socializes with others on cyberspatial VR platforms such as Sansar. Avatar/ self-relationships vary in different cultural and online contexts, and studies in avatar communities in the field of virtual ethnography have evidenced that some users consider the networked identity that is encapsulated by their avatar to be ‘just as real as they are’ (Ikegami 2016). Some studies in addiction research have suggested that increased identification with avatars in the context of MMORPGs can be connected to negative body appraisal and self-concept impairments (Leménager et al. 2014). Avatar/player mergers can also produce ‘alterbiographies’; a term Calleja uses to describe player-generated narrative from subjective interpretation of the avatar’s appearance/actions, which can be informed by cultural/social associations or player prejudices/preferences that are ‘not supported by the simulation’ (2011: 131). In the context of team-player action games like City Z, avatars take on anthropomorphic form and are perceptually embodied by multiple players using position-tracking technologies, affording new modes of mediatized hyper-intercorporeality in the experience economy; the prefix ‘hyper-’ deriving from the postmodernist concept of ‘hyperreality’ that referred to a semiotic crisis of reality (Baudrillard 1976, 1981; Eco 1986), and ‘intercorporeality’ referring to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s perception-action loop between self and other/s (1951, 1960). As a compound word, I use ‘hyperintercorporeality’ to articulate the entangled identity of two or more avatar-players encountering one another simultaneously in real-world and computer-generated spaces with virtual bodies that can be unconsciously perceived as phenomenally incorporated. Technological developments have sought to heighten the synchronization (or ‘sense certainty’) between the movements of a player and their virtual counterpart, eradicating the undesirable effect of latency—the lag between stimulation and response referred to as ‘rubber banding’. The enmeshment of real and simulated bodies in City Z represents just one manifestation of ‘postdigital culture’ that Matthew Causey identifies as one in which the ‘biological and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, and the organic and the inorganic approach indistinction’ (Causey 2016: 432). For my purposes, it is the indistinction arising from mounting technical achievements to align real bodies with virtual ones that requires critical examination.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

221

The increasing drive to phenomenally conflate avatar-selves has prompted me to examine the ethical considerations of vicarious suffering in hyper-intercorporeal encounters, which are occurring both on home consumer consoles using motion sensors for offline/online game playing (e.g. input devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect or HTC Vive Tracker) and VR entertainment like City Z that uses precision body-tracking technologies such as OptiTrack in team-player games in a shared pop-up location. In this chapter, I first consider a historical precedent for the weaponization of enveloping aesthetics, before revisiting the notion of avatars as a delegated form of consumption, or ‘interpassive objects’ (Wilson 2003). I will challenge the idea that the simulacrum of an avatar’s suffering is at a safe remove from the player, examining the reactions of player-avatars immersed in survival horror games. Finally, I will consider how the unintended graphical disturbances of City Z discussed in this introduction made visible both the mechanics that maintained a sense of immersion within a virtual body, interrogating the new materialist premise that such moments might be interpreted as a surfacing of the machine’s hidden ‘non-human agency’ (Huuhka 2018). I propose that it is these very moments of system failure that provide a critical space to interrogate illusions that elicit our bodies’ acquiescence to unconsciously receive virtual scenarios in the order of the hyperreal. I argue that jarring glitches provide opportunities to salvage unintended and increasingly vital spaces of recuperation from the psychological exhaustion, vicarious suffering or potential empathy fatigue of becoming other bodies. Aligned with the field of ‘misperformance’—a term that has recently come to articulate performance’s negative side through concepts such as ‘non-functionality, futility and inoperativeness’ (Feldman 2010)—faulty body illusions open up a critical aperture by revealing to the player something imperceptible from within the strictures of their perceptually embodied avatar; the default position that the game’s apparatus insists that the player adopts.1

Virtualized Distress: Immersive Synchrony in Videogames and Beyond The relationship between art and well-being and the role that the arts might play in addressing issues facing the health and social care systems in the UK were set out in an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report in 2017. Similarly, VR’s potential to enhance well-being in clinical

222  L. JARVIS

and health care contexts has also been the topic of much recent discussion (Riener and Harders 2012; Rubin 2018) and has provided a focus for my case studies in Chapter 5. But it would be wrongheaded utopianism to believe that art-making has innate health-giving properties tout court when history teaches us that aesthetics, much like technology, can be weaponized. Contrary to Jacques Rancière’s claim that the ‘images of art do not supply weapons for battles’ (Rancière 2009: 103), anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1938 used turn-of-the-century perceptual concepts taken from geometric abstraction and surrealist art to invent the ‘psychotechnic’ torture cell or checa—reconstructed as an installation by Pedro G. Romero called Habitación (Room) as part of the Archivo F. X project (see Fig. 7.2).2 This environment contained beds tilted as discomforting angles, bricks jutting out of the floor to inhibit movement, and walls covered with ‘mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilized tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress’ (Tremlett 2003). Modernism and Surrealism were put to work as overt and ironic instruments of torture that were intended for General Franco’s right-wing rebel forces, backed by the Nazi regime who rejected Modernism as ‘degenerate’. More recently, the incursion of harmful design in public spaces was documented in art curator and activist Gavin Grindon’s ‘The Museum of Cruel Designs’ in Banksy’s ‘bemusement park’ Dismaland (2015). This exhibition, housed in a single-decker bus, demonstrated the way in which ‘bad’ design has been used to ‘force obedience on behalf of capitalism and the state’ (Grindon 2015), from mosquito alarms emitting an irritating noise that only young people can hear, to anti-homeless spikes and sloped anti-sitting benches; all potent illustrations that beyond Michel Foucault’s discourse on design as an apparatus of power in relation to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), objects and images continue to be used to hurt and to subjugate. The psychotechnic cell provides a valuable cautionary tale that the kinds of totalizing enveloping aesthetics that have been more recently associated with entertainment in immersive theatre and VR gaming practices, can also be used to contain a subject while maximizing their sensory disruption. An obvious key distinction is that the checas were intended to impose long-term immersion in an intentionally disquieting environment from which its incarcerated subject cannot escape. But this is just one historical example of the way in which a body can be

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

223

Fig. 7.2  Pedro G. Romero’s Habitación (Room). Part of the Archivo F. X project—a reconstruction of Alphonse Laurencic’s ‘psychotechnic’ torture cell or ‘checa’ at Valimajor de Barcelona (built in 1939). MEIAC collection (Photographer: Vicente Novillo)

subjected to extreme psychological strain when another has the means to shape its reality (as had been identifed in Bierend 2016). 360° VR provides similar affordances to place users in discomforting environments and situations of distress that could potentially prolong another’s suffering while they inhabit a virtual body. While there is evidence that therapeutic use of VR in the context of virtual reality exposure (VRE) therapy can aid the emotional processing

224  L. JARVIS

of fears in a safe environment (Rothbaum 2006; Botella et al. 2015), studies in illusions of embodiment are alerting us to their potential to pose unexpected psychological risks if misused. This has necessitated greater consideration of ethical conduct of VR usage in both clinical and wider consumer contexts (Rizzo et al. 2002; Madary and Metzinger 2016). VR embodiment researchers such as Jeremy Bailenson have argued, perhaps slightly hyperbolically, that ‘virtual reality is like uranium […] It can heat homes and it can destroy nations’ (qtd. in Novacic 2015). But its acknowledged potential for misuse has meant that the resurgence of virtual reality has coincided with the revival of imaginings from works of popular fiction that envisage VR, like the psychotechnic checa, as a potent instrument of torture. In Netflix TV series American Gods (2017–), adapted from the 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman, New God and personification of the Internet Technical Boy weaponizes a VR headset that leaps onto his prey like a facehugger from Alien to transport them to a digitized environment where virtual violence translates into real-world suffering. Similarly, Black Mirror episode ‘Playtest’ (2016) offers a horrific take on near-future HoloLens-esque augmented reality technologies that manifests its protagonist’s darkest fears; from the appearance of a giant spider sporting the remembered face of a school bully, to a familiar person from his life pursuing him with a knife and inflicting wounds felt with intense pain. But sci-fi representations of characters’ exposure to unprecedented levels of immersion inside the violent events of survival horror video games are mirroring developments in reality. For example, Capcom’s Kitchen demo (2015) for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard offered a first-person virtual reality horror scenario in which the player-character (Clancy Jarvis) is bound by the wrists and over the course of the action knifed by a maleficent undead woman in the thigh (see Fig. 7.3).3 Numerous online ‘reaction’ videos on YouTube show the real-world responses of players to Kitchen’s virtual attack, from steely faced hardcore game reviewers, to uninitiated relatives put through VR for the first time to exploit their visible petrification as entertainment. Bailenson has contended that the act of pushing a button on a game controller is ‘an entirely different experience’ from playing a first-person immersive game in which you use your virtual arms and hands to strike or stab an opponent or your virtual body is under threat (in Rothman 2018). But even though Kitchen makes use of controllers, many individuals physically recoiled while in actuality being in no immediate danger. Such reactions are an observable marker of the intensity of a player’s vicarious experience of their avatar.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

225

Fig. 7.3  Screenshot of Capcom’s Kitchen (2015) (a VR demo for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard)

Hyper-intercorporeality offers a different kind of relationality to the ‘body-swapping’ practices of BeAnotherLab and Jane Gauntlett that I have discussed in Chapter 5. In City Z, avatars are not intended as an intermediary to bridge epistemic gulfs between the immersant’s bodied experiences and that of real-world others. Avatars in this context facilitate what game designer Ernest Adams has defined as ‘strategic immersion’, which focuses a player’s attention on ‘seeking a path to victory’ or optimizing their in-game situation (Adams 2004). In other strategic board games like chess, players are not encouraged to take an interest in the backstory or felt experiences of their chess pieces (and some pieces don’t even take the form of an organism e.g. a rook), but the utility of ‘where they are and how they move’. Similarly, avatars in City Z fulfil the function of the game’s program, serving no greater onto-relational purpose. However, location-based VR systems conflate real-world and virtual proximities; virtual objects/environments choreograph physical bodies in the real-world space, and my avatar standing beside another avatar directly equates to my body standing beside another player’s body (when the tracking devices are working correctly).

226  L. JARVIS

Avatars represent what Slavoj Žižek described in his discourse in the late 1990s on cyberspace as the ‘decentered’ subject—a surrogate, or ‘stand-in’ for our real-space selves (1997: 182).4 In the early noughties, Laetitia Wilson examined the avatar as a critical site to reconsider marketable notions of ‘interactivity’ in digital play, noting that a ‘split-avatar-self’ more often concerns what both Robert Pfaller (1996, 2014 [2002]: 15–34; 2017) and Žižek (1998, 2006) had defined as interpassivity; a techno-fetishized mode of relating that ‘involves the consensual transferral of activity or emotion onto another being or object, who consequently “acts” in one’s place’ (Wilson 2003: 1). Wilson likens avatars to what Jacques Lacan had previously identified as the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy who ‘feel’ on our behalf (Lacan 1986 [1992]: 247), much as Žižek had identified canned laughter in sitcoms as an externalized proxy for the audience’s ‘appropriate’ emotive response that enables them to ‘laugh and cry through another’ (emphasis added). For Wilson, avatars are ‘displaced from the facticity of our real-space selves’ (2003: 2–3). But scientific knowledge concerning the ‘sense of embodiment’ (SoE)—which encompasses our sense of self-location, agency, and body ownership—has provided mounting evidence that the virtual embodiment of an avatar means that its properties are ‘processed as if they were the properties of one’s own biological body’ (Kilteni et al. 2012: 375). Perceptual immersion in body-tracked videogames means that avatars tend to be experienced not as ‘displaced’, but as I have discussed elsewhere, as physically incorporated. This corresponds with Gordon Calleja’s use of the term ‘incorporation’ in place of ‘immersion’ to describe the presence of the game world to the player ‘while the player is simultaneously present, via her avatar, to the virtual environment’ (Calleja 2011: 121). But where I differ to Calleja is that ‘immersion’ in my discourse on immersive embodiment is not distinct from, but synonymous with the sense of a physically incorporated artificial body representation. Under the right circumstances, I can witness the risks to my perceptually embodied avatar and react with an acute stress response to the stimuli that I expect my virtual body to feel. My positioning on the precipices of the Helix skyscraper tapped into the known psychological influences that a virtual environment can have on an immersed subject from antecedent scientific experiments such as the ‘virtual pit’ (Meehan et al. 2002), in which a chasm beneath the subject triggered bodily signs of stress (e.g. an increased heart rate) despite the known virtuality of the drop. The vertigo-inducing circumstance is also akin to the trapeze platform in il pixel rosso’s video goggle performance, The Great Spavaldos (discussed in

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

227

Chapter 4). In Kitchen, it is reasonable to assume from observations that participants who physically defended themselves from a virtual knife attack took on the threat to their avatar’s body vicariously. The preprogrammed circumstance denies the player the agency to avoid this simulated act of violence, while distributing psychological suffering that an avatar doesn’t have the capacity to feel as a non-human digital artefact—put differently, the player takes on its avatar’s suffering through their physiological stress reactions to the perceived threat, because the avatar cannot. Anvio’s City Z is just one example of a growing trend for location-based multiplayer VR games. Other companies such as The Void are immersing players in CGI bodies and environments reconstructed from popular film franchises such as Ghostbusters and Star Wars, marketing the experiences with seductive claims of ‘unmatched realism’ in artificially constructed environments (‘Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire’). Some intermedial scholars have examined The Void’s VR games as constitutive of a mode of ‘posthuman spectatorship’, in which participants navigate ‘dual reals’ (Lewis 2018). The word ‘hyperreality’ is also being resurgently deployed as a promotional term by companies such as dotdotdot, who claim that their layered reality performance Somnai (2018) provided a meeting point for ‘hyper-reality and virtual reality’ (‘Somnai’ 2018). Without further disambiguation, it is unclear what the company’s precise distinction is between these terms. The Void have gone so far as to trademark the truncated word HYPR REALITY™ to define experiences in which ‘people interact with elements that appear to be digital, in a physical way’ (‘Welcome to Hyper-reality…’ 2016). ‘Hyper-reality’ has been co-opted as an unequivocally positive promotional feature, eviscerating the term’s meaning from its postmodernist critique. In Jean Baudrillard’s discourse, hyperreality was the only possible ‘realism’ for our times from which there is no exit in any domain because consciousness is unable to determine artificial productions from originals (Baudrillard 1993 [1976], 1994 [1981]). Hyperreality for Baudrillard represents a terminal situation of artifice-as-reality that VR interfaces reiteratively promise to enact with evermore multisensory fidelity. For example, using wearable smart technologies such as the Teslasuit, which relays different kinds of sensory inputs to its wearer’s body such as in-built haptic feedback, climate control and biometric feedback systems. Umberto Eco similarly explored hyperreality as the pursuit of the real by fabricating the fake, with artifice ‘enjoyed in a situation of “fullness”, of horror vacui’ (1986: 8). The Void’s claim on its website that participants can ‘make memories of a lifetime in worlds far, far away’, both quotes Star Wars’ well-worn ‘opening

228  L. JARVIS

crawl’ title sequence and offers the promise of immersion as a kind of prosthetic memory-maker (Landsberg 2004). The entanglement of ‘immersion’ and ‘hyperreality’ in this kind of discourse is a disconcertingly uncritical celebration of the growing perceptual alignment between virtual and physical bodies and the application of illusions of presence that scientist Mel Slater has argued are encompassed by the acceptance that the scenario being depicted is actually occurring (‘plausibility illusions’ [Psi]), and a qualia associated with an illusion of feeling that you exist in a non-local place (‘place illusions’ [Pl]) (Slater 2009). Players inside simultaneously shared local/non-local spaces are able to ‘freeroam’—a term used interchangeably in immersive theatre and video gaming contexts. But this term has also been contested as misleading in game studies because players become subjected to a rule-based system in which, far from being ‘free subjects’, they are often compelled to play in certain ways according to encoded algorithms. Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that ‘all playing is a being-played’ (1989 [1960]: 106) and in our agreement to become the kinds of players that a game expects—or what ludologist Espen Aarseth calls ‘implied players’ (Aarseth 2007)—we are only ever ‘half-ourselves when we play’ (Aarseth 2007: 133). A sense of body-ownership over a computer-generated humanoid avatar is adding a new dimension to the notion of being ‘half-oneself’ in the act of videogame playing. Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger state that VR technology holds the potential to create ‘social hallucinations, to directly manipulate the sense of agency, to modulate personality traits via identification with virtual characters, or to causally interact with deeper levels of self-consciousness (UI-manipulation)’ (2016: 19). For Metzinger, the UI or ‘unit of identification’ in consciousness research is the conscious content that we experience as ‘ourselves’ (Metzinger 2013a, b), underpinning auto-phenomenological claims such as ‘I am this!’. Metzinger argues that VR is unique in the respect that it can be used to ‘manipulate the UI in our brain’ (Madary and Metzinger 2016: 5). The kinds of embodiment illusions I have surveyed in Chapter 4, cumulatively demonstrate a bottom-up construction of the conscious, bodily self-model in the brain (Metzinger 2018). Avatars experienced by the user as their ‘own’ body are signalling the creep of postdigital virtualization into the realm of actual experience. As such, Wilson’s notion of the avatar as an ‘interpassive object’ that suffers so that we don’t have to is a logic that is being troublingly inverted. Immersive experience ascribes to a hyperreal reversal that reconceptualizes their players’ bodies as the surrogates for our non-human counterpart’s often traumatic virtual experiences.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

229

Fictional representations of VR torture and the personal distress that survival horror games can engender in players who can freely exit their headsets at any time—also referred to as the ‘paratelic state’ of voluntary play (Kerr and Apter 1991)—hint at the more damaging potential psychological effects of long-term immersion in VR. For example, when used as an enhanced interrogation technique by the military. The ‘dual use’ of VR to inflict vicarious suffering has been acknowledged even by artist proponents that deploy the technologies with compassionate intent such as BeAnotherLab whose practice I have discussed in Chapter 5 (Johnson 2016). In the field of ethics and information technology, Jessica Wolfendale has argued that the distress a player can experience when their avatar is harmed suggests that ‘avatar attachment’ is just as morally significant as the player’s real-world attachments (Wolfendale 2007). Scientific studies using VR have evidenced that the vicarious sensation of an avatar’s observed pain can be triggered in laboratory contexts without any direct contact with participants’ actual bodies, eliciting stronger behavioural and physiological responses than pleasurable stimuli (Fusaro et al. 2016). The flipside of an avatar-self’s perceived vulnerability to harm is the potentially compulsive behaviour patterns that might arise from highly interconnected avatar-selves. Prior to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) classification of video game addiction as a disorder in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) in 2018, communication studies in avatar-self-identification had already linked the phenomenon of avatar attachments to uncontrollable gameplay (Zhong and Yao 2013), and the possibility that such relationships could lead to dissociation (Bartle 2003; Seligman and Kirmayer 2008). A growing corpus of knowledge illustrating the extent to which an immersant might form attachments with their avatar, serve to substantiate my claim that avatar-self entanglements require sustained critical analysis as to the ethical considerations that they raise. In their VR code of ethics, Madary and Metzinger contend that ‘torture in a virtual environment is still torture. The fact that one’s suffering occurs while one is immersed in a virtual environment does not mitigate the suffering itself’ (Madary and Metzinger 2016). Vicarious suffering through identification with an avatar has the potential to be no less ‘real’ than suffering that belongs to one’s own body. The psychological consequences of long-term exposure to vicarious pain in the hyper-corporeal situation are still widely unknown because there is no ethical way to verify or determine the consequences.

230  L. JARVIS

System Failure: Uncanny Avatars and Glitches as a Site of Recuperation Some commentators have located ‘glitch’ as an inadequacy in some immersive video game simulations that disrupts verisimilitude, acting as a kind of unmasking of the hidden realities of global conflict beyond their gamified spectacularization (Ball 2016). It is my contention that the possibility that one might suffer through a virtual body, makes accidental and deliberate disruptions to illusions of virtual embodiment an increasingly political site of resistance and recuperation. Errors and malfunctioning body illusions in gaming might seem like a strange location to seek out political efficacy, especially when the consumption and use of videogames has been described by some commentators in game studies as an act of ‘Empire’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009) that creates cultures of work-as-play, utilizes immaterial labour and thematically supports ‘military-industrial perspectives’ (Meades 2015: 5)—the virtual military ‘costume’ that City Z imposes on the bodies of its players and wilful acceptance of the ‘rifle’ as a prerequisite to the gameplay are cases in point. Alan F. Meades has argued that players of multiplayer games have increasingly become the ‘content’ of videogames, while the games themselves have become ‘exploitative’ platforms that players populate (2015: 4). Sub-cultures of ‘glitching’ and ‘counterplay’ have emerged in response as a form of antagonism to the ludic rules that govern a digital game’s ‘configurations, processes, rhythms, spaces, and structures’ (Apperley 2010: 102–103). For Meades, counterplay not only opposes the experience of play but also its ‘commercial prerogatives’ (2015: 6). Body-ownership over an avatar adds a further dimension to Meades’ argument, since the capital associated with ‘experience’ is contingent at a foundational level first on the felt possession of a body that can partake in the experience. A virtual body unconsciously felt to be ‘mine’ in the game space might be understood as another peculiar kind of imperialist acquisition, temporarily colonizing virtual bodies and environments for one’s own use and in service of the game’s permitted behaviours. But I look to expand notions of ‘counterplay’ beyond those players or player communities that deliberately violate the rules, to also include self-sabotaging machines and malfunctions as incidents of non-human counterplay. In theatre scholarship, Nicholas Ridout has argued that failure is ‘constitutive’—it is a sign that theatre is theatre and failures are experienced

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

231

as affect because ‘something of our relationship to labour and to leisure is felt every time the theatre undoes itself around the encounter between worker and consumer’ (2006: 34). For Ridout, the ‘wrongness’ of theatre that is encapsulated by the economic transaction underlying the face-to-face encounter, becomes evident when it shows its ‘hidden face’— namely, that the audience are also one of its symbolic ‘accessories’, and in seeing oneself and others in the act, we face up to the nature of our relationship with these others that ‘disquiets the mind and degrades the art’ (2006: 29). City Z doesn’t offer the face-to-face encounter commonly associated with theatre but positions the player behind the masked ‘face’ of our avatar and in front of virtually and actually masked others. Labour is distributed among a network of playing bodies, who are the content providers of both their own, and their co-player’s experiences. The ontological queasiness of this situation is dissimilar to theatre’s circumstance in which audiences pay to observe performers’ labour, but it is instead concerned with the realization that we are paying to physically labour ourselves, all the while in a body illusion communicating to our unconscious systems that we are not our ‘own’ labouring bodies. The apparatus insists we are the game’s militia, which we consciously know to be a falsehood while extensive embodiment studies suggest that we unconsciously receive the hazards of this falsification in the order of the real. ‘Immersion’ in gaming is often synonymous with the shaping of individuals into idealized players, promoting compliance through stimuli that insists that they are ‘here’ in the game world’s given scenario. However, I argue that in this context the de-immersive extradiegetic event of technical ‘bodily’ malfunction is akin to what Ridout has examined as the ‘marginal or unwanted events of the theatrical encounter’ that reveal theatre’s ‘operational guts’ (2006: 13–14). Marleena Huuhka has persuasively argued that non-human ‘performative agency’ becomes visible in video gaming through errors (Huuhka 2018). When Claire’s avatar malfunctioned while playing City Z, it ceased to become an ‘extension’ of her bodily form/movement (to use Marshall McLuhan’s term) and instead the computer’s physics engine gained agency. ‘Agency’ as the term is understood from new materialist perspectives is not anthropomorphized as the capacity to act that might be either possessed or bestowed on others, but is understood in terms of mutual response, or what Karen Barad calls ‘possibilities for worldly re-configurings’ (Barad in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 55). Barad mislocalizes agency to a position outside of the human subject, not as a radical redistribution of

232  L. JARVIS

agency to non-humans, but as a step towards taking account of power imbalances that are premised on the notion that agency is only localized within a human subject (ibid.: 55). Much as avatars have been discussed in terms of ‘decentered’ subjects, Barad decentres the notion of agency as a property of individuals, using the term ‘intra-action’ to shift focus to examine orientations of action in-between. While hyper-intercorporeal encounters use illusions that decentre the phenomenal self, paradoxically they do so to heighten an unconscious sense of bodily implicatedness in virtual situations. But possession is still fundamental in illusions of body-ownership and agency in this context is rooted firmly in one’s capacity to act through their body (as I have termed elsewhere, ‘agentive feelings’ [de Vignemont 2018: 170]). Localization, from evolutionary perspectives, is bound up in self-preservation—survival horror games present the ‘as if’ of a threat to an avatar-player’s survival by definition, and localization is a precondition for a perceived physical threat to become a property of the threatened body. When the tracking equipment in City Z failed to work in service of its intended utility, it unwittingly enabled us to witness something else; namely, the nature of our complex technological entanglements. Much as my peculiarly dislocated virtual hand offered an uncanny site of disjunct between my in-game representation and my actual hand, the avatar of a fellow participant bent out of shape is both an event that is marginal to the intended experience, but also transgressive. Unlike ‘transgressive play’—which for Espen Aarseth involves active rebellion against a lusory attitude (Suits 2005 [1978]) for a player to ‘regain their sense of identity and uniqueness’ (Aarseth 2007: 132)—glitches are nonetheless transgressive events. They run counter to the intended gameplay, disrupt VR’s expression of hyperreality and shift attention from ‘interaction’ to the intra-action of non-human agency through a system constantly working to triangulate our bodies’ positions in space via ceiling-mounted cameras. The egocentrism promoted by body-ownership illusions in City Z that place an emphasis on self-protectionism spilled over into my real-world actions. Immediately afterwards, I experienced a heightened awareness of my peripersonal space, becoming peculiarly hyper-sensitized to my body’s proximity to oncoming obstacles in the shopping centre. But the shift from strategic immersion to relationality between human and non-human others was most acutely felt in the moment of system error, when non-human agency surfaced through a graphical disturbance that insisted against the gameplay that these faceless, militaristic bodies can’t possibly be ‘ours’.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

233

Conclusion Malfunction is a non-immersionist—it’s phenomena that bring the material processes of the ‘outside’ world to the in-world of a game. Like the glasses digging into the bridge of my nose under my head-mounted display, the non-human agency that surfaces in moments of system error shifts the focus from mediatized and egocentric ‘interactions’, predicated on responses to bodies under ‘threat’, to relational intra-actions. Failure to remain immersed re-imposes the ‘frame’ that VR seeks to remove in order to render the first-person experience as a hyperreal prosthetic of our own. While the usefulness of the concept has been questioned in relation to digital games (Liebe 2008; Pargman and Jakobsson 2008; Calleja 2012), Johan Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ metaphor has still been frequently applied in games studies to focus attention on game playing as separate from ordinary life—establishing temporary worlds within an ordinary world dedicated to the performance of ‘an act apart’ (Huizinga 1938: 10). But hyper-intercorporeal encounters entail a causal coupling between motion-tracked players’ bodies and their avatar’s. The seductive fantasy of viscerally feeling our virtual counterpart’s sensations is reversing the logic of the avatar as a ‘stand-in’ for our appropriate emotional response. The user can increasingly be placed in situations where they take on their avatar’s traumatization vicariously and the encoded logic of the gameplay can have an unnoticed involuntary influence in shaping and promoting them as its idealized players. Transgressive and incidental moments of failure are constitutive disentanglements between our bodies and the virtual assets that are at once on loan and proprioceptively ‘owned’. They provide a space of simultaneous failure and recuperation from the exhaustion of vicarity in the game world. Vilém Flusser has argued that in the context of a highly programmed post-industrial world, freedom is not the product of self-ownership, but of unpredictability. It’s a counter-intuitive statement. Submission to unpredictability implies a relinquishing of some personal agency. There is something welcome about the sacrifice he proposes in self-centred neoliberal societies, but it is a sacrifice nonetheless. The resurfacing imposition of non-human agency in complex programmed systems might become an increasingly needed site of relief and humility, when video games place users in shoes that are too large, that enable us to indulge too readily in the fulfilment of ‘power fantasies’, to ‘wield deadly weapons’ or ‘wage intergalactic war’ (Bogost 2011: 18).

234  L. JARVIS

Notes 1.  ‘Misperformance’ was a theme of the fifteenth PSi conference entitled ‘Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading’, which took place in Zagreb, 24–28 June 2009. Beyond accidental mistakes and technical errors, commentators such as Sara Jane Bailes in Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011) have examined experimental performance practices that incorporate planned acts of failure, deliberate messiness and ‘undisciplined tactics’ into the live event as expressions, in part, of a ‘non-conformist ideology’ (16) in the works of companies such as Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service. 2. Art historian José Milicua discovered references to these modern-art cells built for the republican forces in court papers written by R. L. Chacon from the 1939 trial of their inventor, French anarchist Alphonse Laurencic. 3. The parallel I draw here is further substantiated by the fact that the name of ‘Playtest’s’ protagonist ‘Cooper Redfield’ has been acknowledged by Black Mirror writer and creator Charlie Brooker to be an intertextual reference to Chris Redfield, a playable character in Capcom’s Resident Evil series (Weber 2016). 4. Decentrement refers to the Lacanian subject; for Žižek, decentrement in Lacan’s discourse ‘first designates the ambiguity, the oscillation between symbolic and imaginary identification - the undecidability as to where my true point is, in my “real” self or in my external mask, with the possible implication that my symbolic mask can be “more true” than what it conceals, the “true face” behind it’ (Žižek 1997: 181–182).

References Aarseth, Espen. 2007. I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and The Implied Player. In DiGRA ’07—Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play, 130–133. The University of Tokyo. Adams, Ernest. 2004. The Designer’s Notebook: Postmodernism and the 3 Types of Immersion. Gamasutra. Uploaded 9 July 2004. https://www. gamasutra.com/view/feature/130531/the_designers_notebook_.php. Accessed 19 Aug 2018. Apperley, Thomas. 2010. Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global. Theory on Demand Series. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Bailes, Sara Jane. 2011. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. London: Routledge.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

235

Ball III, James R. 2016. Proximity to Violence: War, Games, Glitch. In Reframing Immersive Theatre, ed. James Frieze, 229–242. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bartle, Richard A. 2003. Designing Virtual Worlds. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Pub. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993 [1976]. Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. ———. 1994 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bierend, Doug. 2016. The Dark Age of Virtual Reality-Based Torture Is Approaching Fast. Vice. Uploaded 31 January 2015. https://www.vice. com/en_us/article/vvbxmm/how-virtual-reality-could-be-used-for-torture. Accessed 27 Sep 2019. Bogost, Ian. 2011. Empathy. In How to Do Things With Videogames, vol. 38. NED—New edition ed., 18–23. University of Minnesota Press. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttttmwd.5. Botella, Cristina, Berenice Serrano, Rosa M. Baños, and Azucena GarciaPalacios. 2015. Virtual Reality Exposure-Based Therapy for the Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A Review of Its Efficacy, the Adequacy of the Treatment Protocol, and Its Acceptability. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 11: 2533–2545. Calleja, Gordon. 2011. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. ———. 2012. Erasing the Magic Circle. In The Philosophy of Computer Games, ed. J.R. Sageng, T.M. Larsen, and H. Fossheim. London, UK: Springer. Causey, Matthew. 2016. Postdigital Performance. Theatre Journal 68 (3): 427–441. Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing—The Short Report. 2017. AllParty Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry Report. July 2017. http://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-inquiry/Publications/ Creative_Health_The_Short_Report.pdf. Accessed 4 Aug 2018. de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2018. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily SelfAwareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dolphjin, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver. London: Picador.

236  L. JARVIS Feldman, Lada Čale. 2010. Intro 1: PSi Mis-Performing Papers. Performance Research 15 (2): 1–5. Fusaro, Martina, Gaetano Tieri, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti. 2016. Seeing Pain and Pleasure on Self and Others: Behavioral and Psychophysiological Reactivity in Immersive Virtual Reality. Journal of Neurophysiology 116 (6): 2656–2662. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989 [1960]. Truth and Method. London: Sheed & Ward. Grindon, Gavin. 2015. The Museum of Cruel Designs. Dismaland Catalogue, ed. Banksy, Dismaland. Huizinga, Johan. 1955 [1938]. Homo ludens: Proeve ener bepaling van het spelelement der cultuur. Referred from English translation Homo Ludens: A Study of Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Huuhka, Marleena. 2018. Into the Void—Examination on Non-Human Performativity, Errors and Immersion. IFTR Conference 2018, Belgrade. Ikegami, Eiko. 2016. Visualizing the Networked Self: Agency, Reflexivity, and the Social Life of Avatars. Social Research 78 (4): 1155–1184. Johnson, Jason. 2016. We Should Be Talking About Torture in VR. Versions. Uploaded 28 March 2016. https://killscreen.com/versions/we-should-betalking-about-torture-in-vr/. Accessed 29 July 2018. Kerr, John H., and Michael J. Apter (eds.). 1991. Adult Play: A Reversal Theory Approach. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger. Kilteni, Konstantina, Raphaela Groten, and Mel Slater. 2012. The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality. Presence Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 21 (4): 373–387. Lacan, Jacques. 1992 [1986]. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Leménager, Tagrid, Julia Dieter, Holger Hill, Anne Koopmann, Iris Reinhard, Madlen Sell, Falk Kiefer, Sabine Vollstädt-Klein, and Karl Mann. 2014. Neurobiological Correlates of Physical Self-Concept and Self-Identification with Avatars in Addicted Players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Addictive Behaviors 39 (12): 1789–1797. Lewis, William W. 2018. Between Potentiality and Actuality in Corporatized Theatres of Virtual Reality. International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) Conference. 12 July 2018, Belgrade, Serbia. Liebe, Michael. 2008. There Is No Magic Circle: On the Difference Between Computer Games and Traditional Games. In Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, ed. S. Günzel, M. Liebe, and D. Mersch, 324–341. Potsdam, Germany: Potsdam University Press.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

237

Madary, Michael, and Thomas K. Metzinger. 2016. Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, vol. 3, February 1. Meades, Alan F. 2015. Understanding Counterplay in Video Games. New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Meehan, Michael, Brent Insko, Mary Whitton, and Frederick P. Brooks. 2002. Physiological Measures of Presence in Stressful Virtual Environments. ACM Transactions on Graphics 21: 645–652. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964 [1951]. The Child’s Relations with Others. In The Primacy of Perception, trans. W. Cobb, 96–155. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964 [1960]. The Philosopher and His Shadow. In Signs, trans. R.C. McLeary, 159–181. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Metzinger, Thomas. 2013a. The Myth of Cognitive Agency: Subpersonal Thinking as a Cyclically Recurring Loss of Mental Autonomy. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 931. ———. 2013b. Why Are Dreams Interesting for Philosophers? The Example of Minimal Phenomenal Selfhood, Plus an Agenda for Future Research. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 746. Metzinger, Thomas K. 2018. Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers? Frontiers in Robotics and AI 5. Novacic, Ines. 2015. How Might Virtual Reality Change the World? Stanford Lab Peers into Future. CBS News. Uploaded 18 June 2015. https://www. cbsnews.com/news/how-might-virtual-reality-change-the-world-stanfordlab-peers-into-future/. Accessed 30 July 2018. Pargman, Daniel, and Peter Jakobsson. 2008. Do You Believe in Magic? Computer Games in Everyday Life. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (2): 225–244. Pfaller, Robert. 1996. Um die Ecke Gelacht. Kuratoren Nehmen uns die Kunstbetrachtung ab, Videorecorder Schauen sich unsere Lieblingsfilme an: Anmerkungen zum Paradoxon der Interpassivität. In Falter 41/96.71. ———. 2014 [2002]. On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2017. Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Ridout, Nicholas. 2006. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Theatre & Ethics. Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Riener, Robert, and Matthias Harders. 2012. Virtual Reality in Medicine. London: Springer.

238  L. JARVIS Rizzo, Albert, Maria T. Schultheis, and Barbara O. Rothbaum. 2002. Ethical Issues for the Use of Virtual Reality in the Psychological Sciences. In Ethical Issues in Clinical Neuropsychology, ed. S. Bush and M. Drexler, 243–280. Lisse, NL: Swets & Zeitlinger. Rothbaum, B.O. (ed.). 2006. Pathological Anxiety: Emotional Processing in Etiology and Treatment. New York: Guilford Press. Rothman, Joshua. 2018. Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality? The New Yorker. Uploaded 2 April 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/ 02/are-we-already-living-in-virtual-reality. Accessed 30 Sept 2018. Rubin, Peter. 2018. Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life. New York, USA: HarperCollins Publishers. Seligman, Rebecca, and Laurence Kirmayer. 2008. Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32 (1): 31–64. Slater, Mel. 2009. Place Illusion and Plausibility Can Lead to Realistic Behaviour in Immersive Virtual Environments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 364 (1535): 3549–3557. December 12. Somnai. 2018. Somnai website. https://www.dotdot.london. Accessed 20 Aug 2018. Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire. The Void. https://www.thevoid.com. Accessed 4 Aug 2018. Suits, Bernard. 2005 [1978]. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Tremlett, Giles. 2003. Anarchists and the Fine Art of Torture. Guardian: World News. Uploaded on 27 January 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2003/jan/27/spain.arts. Accessed 29 July 2018. Weber, Rachel. 2016. “Black Mirror”: “Playtest” Episode Is Horrific Take on HoloLens, Gaming. Rolling Stone. Uploaded 21 October 2018. 20 August 2018. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/black-mirrorplaytest-episode-is-horrific-take-on-hololens-gaming-103640/. Welcome to Hyper-Reality by THE VOID. 2016. The Void: #Blog. Uploaded 27 September 2016. https://blog.thevoid.com/welcome-hyper-reality-void/?_ga= 2.9009969.587383149.1532515757-1311182332.1532515757. Accessed 2 Aug 2018. Wilson, Laetitia. 2003. Interactivity or Interpassivity: A Question of Agency in Digital Play. In DAC 2003 Proceedings. Available online at http://www.academia.edu/1367070/Interactivity_or_interpassivity_A_question_of_agency_in_digital_play. Wolfendale, Jessica. 2007. My Avatar, My Self: Virtual Harm and Attachment. Ethics and Information Technology 9 (2): 111–119.

7  THE SUFFERING AVATAR: VICARITY AND RESISTANCE IN BODY-TRACKED … 

239

Zhong, Zhi-Jin, and Mike Zhengyu Yao. 2013. Gaming Motivations, Avatar-Self Identification and Symptoms of Online Game Addiction. Asian Journal of Communication 23 (5): 555–573. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. ———. 1998. The Interpassive Subject. Slavoj Žižek. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Traverses. ———. 2006. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta.

Conclusion: The Theft of the Dragon Sabre—Bodies at Risk in Digital Reality

In 2005, a gamer in Shanghai called Qiu Chengwei committed murder in retaliation for the theft of a virtual object—a ‘dragon sabre’—in an MMORPG game entitled The Legend of Mir 3 (2004). Zhu Caoyuan had borrowed the virtual weapon, but subsequently sold it to another player without Chengwei’s consent, keeping the money for himself. Chengwei’s attempt to take the dispute to the police failed because there was no law in China at the time to protect virtual property. He had felt that the sword was his property and that a crime had been committed against him. But in law, the dragon sabre wasn’t legally recognized as ‘his’, prompting Chengwei to take the matter into his own hands by killing Caoyuan with a real blade. This tragic case highlighted increasingly manifold ambiguities over ownership and control of personal digital assets. Ethicist in emerging technologies Michael Madary in his analysis of the dragon sabre case proposes that virtual objects share a structural similarity with the way in which we experience intersubjectively available physical objects (Madary 2014: 219). ‘Property’, as I have predominantly discussed it in this book, has concerned proprioception, which is fundamental to the sense of our bodies as our ‘own’. But as I have noted, perceiving our bodies as our own is a necessary precondition to the extended capacity for external things to be felt as belonging to us. Perceptual immersion in virtual bodies raises further ethical quandaries; what further kinds of possession does proprioceptive ownership—the © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4

241

242  CONCLUSION: THE THEFT OF THE DRAGON SABRE …

feeling of a virtual body as ‘mine’—become a proxy for? Can the sense of bodily ‘ownership’ of a VB extend to a possession of that body’s reconstructed experiences through vicarious first-person participation? If virtual objects can have the same ethical significance as physical objects, and a stolen virtual sabre can produce intense feelings of loss, what are the potential consequences of a hijacked body image or avatar? Beyond the theft of a virtual ‘tool’ in a multiplayer game world, what about the  loss of something that has been viscerally experienced as an incorporated part of our phenomenal selfhood? In the latter example, unlike a CGI object with real-world economic value (e.g. the dragon sabre), something of ‘us’ has the potential to be taken. The wider concept of ‘ownership’ when the term applies to bodies outside of either our own, or virtual bodies, lapses into troubling notions of slavery. Do non-human digital artefacts that take humanoid form support the instantiation of an empathic and desirable faux merger between self and mediatized other, or do they represent the digital colonization of virtual objects and, by extension, the virtualized other’s self-image? David Chalmers has predicted that the technical accomplishment of virtual reality that is visually and auditorily ‘indistinguishable from worlds like ours’ (Chalmers 2017) may only be decades away. But beyond verisimilitudinous environments, Chalmers acknowledges that navigating the role of bodies in VR is much harder to conceptualize. Madary hypothesizes that if an ethical life is partly constituted by details of the action-perception cycle then the ‘environments in which we spend our time will play a noteworthy role in our ethics’ (Madary 2014: 224). As I have noted, virtual enveloping environments are highly ideological constructions that can be weaponized by generating different kinds of sensory disruptions. In this respect, virtual subjectivities can be vulnerable to manipulation in ways that may not yet fully be understood. By extension, might a virtual body/body part as an interface with those environments impact on our subsequent action-perception cycles in real-world environments? This book’s exploration hints at some of the potential interplays between bodies and their virtual counterparts. I have argued that eccentric and temporary body-altering perceptual illusions of different kinds, framed as modes of reception, represent varied expressions of a reach across the unbridgeable lacuna of being the other body. These events are not mobilizations of a ‘body-swap’, per se. Instead, something else occurs in this ‘third space’—different subjectivities emerge, different orders of pseudo-presence and possibilities for new kinds of ‘situated

CONCLUSION: THE THEFT OF THE DRAGON SABRE …

  243

selves’ amid the increasingly malleable phenomena of subtle bodies. A virtual body is not unreal, but part of a digital reality that enters into a consequential feedback loop with the actual bodies they conceal. I don’t seek to simply reduce immersion to a techno-determinist ‘doing to’ of a particular technology on its user, or to understand immersion only as an assemblage of objective measures that reveal unconscious underlying mechanisms and effects of technological apparatus. This is where the ‘promise’ of immersion has been especially fruitful, since promises are dependent on their respective agents and tend to concern an agent’s own behaviour. A delegated promise from an artist-agent to a participant that they might occupy a beyond-oneself position is always a tenuous and unstable proposition that necessitates the immersant voluntarily becoming agentive in the self-deceptive act of perceptually moving towards, as opposed to ‘being’ another. Immersion in these terms cannot be understood as an essential property of an aesthetic experience or technology. Instead, it entails paradoxical co-operative acts of making one’s own body disappear to itself as a reconciliation of one’s ‘own’ physical presence with that of another. The sense certainty that comes with the synchronous alignment of the immersant’s sensorium to misperceive itself as other and its location as elsewhere is a theatro-absorptive reconciliation of the post-Friedian theatrical and the absorptive ontologies. But this paradoxical onto-relational state is inherently unstable; a point I have sought to illustrate with recourse to the intersensory conflicts staged in the works of Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller’s and Lundahl & Seitl in Chapter 2. Acts of immersive embodiment reinvigorate, through new understandings of body-ownership and self-attribution, more historically persistent ideas such as the nineteenth-century notion of empathy as a destabilization of self and art as a response to a dissatisfaction with being a separate individual. Ernst Fischer once described art as striving towards a ‘fulness’ that individualism deprives the individual of (Fischer 1971). But beyond an overcoming of the isolated self that has come to epitomize the ideal neoliberal subject—ironically, an isolation that alienating technologies as the fetishized products of capitalism often instantiate—artist-activists are apprehending the rich potentials of virtual embodiment as a socially engaged practice to decentre dominant expertise, influence policy-makers and educators and dislodge privileged forms of knowing; for example, as a Foucauldian emphasis on the lived subjective experiences of ‘patients’ reconceptualized as artists who wish to share their auto-phenomenological reports to improve public awareness

244  CONCLUSION: THE THEFT OF THE DRAGON SABRE …

and communication with their extended networks of support in health care. Analysing the authenticity of different kinds of digitally mediated intersubjectivities is crucial, and virtual acts of body transfer are no exception. Theatre-maker Tim Crouch has reflected on the dangers of ‘too much reality’ in theatre when he says that ‘an obsession with the real can sometimes feel like an acquisitive or even capitalistic act: a desire to own someone else’s reality. I think of Daniel Day-Lewis now owning Abraham Lincoln, or Meryl Streep owning Margaret Thatcher, now that the real Margaret Thatcher is dead’ (Crouch 2014: par. 5). Crouch is referring specifically to the ‘ownership’ that a high-profile actor acquires over a deceased historical figure that has been resurrected through a dramatic re-enactment. But the digital resurrection of deceased actors through visual effects such as Paul Walker who died during the filming of Furious 7 (2015) and Peter Cushing in the Rogue One (2016) is raising further questions about the acquisition of others’ likeness. Debates concerning the protection of digital personas are nothing new in the context of technology law (Beard 2001). For Crouch, theatre practices widely maintain a figurative dependency in which quality is assessed on how closely representation resembles reality. The desire to ‘own someone else’s reality’ has some connection to the delegated immersive onto-relational promise of becoming [with] the body of another. Where some of the work scrutinized in Part II of this book departs with Crouch’s critique is that the ‘figurative’ finds value in comparative assessments between appearances and likenesses on the basis of what can be ‘read’ from the outside. However, an immersant cannot verify the accuracy of a simulation of another’s bodily experience with the ‘real’ thing through observation alone—indeed, if one had direct access to the subjective character of another’s ineffable experiences the reach towards simulating those embodied events wouldn’t be required in the first place. Unlike the currency and cultural value assigned to the verisimilitude of the film actor, or the blending of the image of the posthumous historical figure with that of their iconic re-enactor (e.g. a Thatcher-Streep blend), immersivity as I have defined it is not a ‘capitalistic act’ that is analogous to the acquisition of material things. The non-commercial transactions that I have explored in Chapters 5 and 6 are predicated on empowering individuals and communities to reconstruct personal experiences that carry no physical trace, or to recreate uncommon sense-making that a participating body might otherwise have difficulty grasping—predicated

CONCLUSION: THE THEFT OF THE DRAGON SABRE …

  245

on the hope that that knowledge can be carried across into subsequent real-world interactions. The example of Chengwei’s dragon sabre is one illustration of the Möbius strip conjoining virtual possessions, reality discrepancies as to how those properties are understood in law, and the resulting tragic real-world consequences. Ethical negotiations of emergent forms of intersubjective engagement and virtual vicarity are not a settled matter, but will require ongoing exploration.

References Beard, Joseph J. 2001. Clones, Bones and Twilight Zones: Protecting the Digital Persona of the Quick, the Dead and the Imaginary. Berkeley Technology Law Journal 16 (3): 1165–1271. Chalmers, David. 2017. The Mind Bleeds into the World: A Conversation with David Chalmers. Edge. Uploaded 24 January 2017. https://www.edge.org/ conversation/david_chalmers-the-mind-bleeds-into-the-world. Accessed 12 Oct 2018. Crouch, Tim. The Theatre of Reality… and Avoiding the Stage’s Kiss of Death. The Guardian. Uploaded 18 June 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/jun/18/theatre-reality-adler-and-gibb-tim-crouch-playwright. Accessed 9 Aug 2015. Fischer, Ernst. 1971 [2010]. The Necessity of Art. London and New York: Verso. Madary, Michael. 2014. Intentionality and Virtual Objects: The Case of Qiu Chengwei’s Dragon Sabre. Ethics and Information Technology 16 (3): 219–225.

Index

A Aarseth, Espen, 228, 232 absorption (Michael Fried), 48, 65 absorptive immersion, 49, 53, 61, 110 Ackerman, Alan, 43 Adams, Ernest, 94, 225 Æfficacy (Stephen Duncombe), 114 affective realism, 17 affective turn, 46, 67 agentive feelings, 198, 232 Ahmed, Sara, 112 Alston, Adam, 8, 12, 136 alterbiographies (Gordon Calleja), 220 American Gods, 224 Analogue, 155 2401 Objects, 13–16, 63, 191, 192 Living Film Set, 202 Superlatively, Actually Awake, 192, 195 Transports, 25, 187, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 202, 208, 211 anatomy theatre, 14 Annese, Jacopo, 14, 29, 63 anosognosia, 118, 141 Anstey Guthrie, Thomas, 104 anterograde amnesia, 14, 191, 211

anthropocentrism, 114 anthropomorphism, 114 anti-theatrical, 21, 23, 41, 43, 50, 101 anti-theatricality (Denis Diderot/ Michael Fried), 41, 43 anti-theatrical prejudice, 43 Anton syndrome, 118, 140 Aristotle’s ‘two-noses’ illusion, 55 Art and Objecthood, 13, 21, 41, 46, 48, 53. See also Fried, Michael Artaud, Antonin, 18, 73 asomatognosia, 112, 125 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 42 Autism TMI Virtual Reality Experience app, 1 auto-phenomenology, 163 autoscopy (AS), 102 avatar attachment, 229 avatars/avatar-selves/players, 24, 26, 103, 107, 131, 135, 138, 219– 221, 225, 226, 228, 229, 232 B Badac The Factory, 8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 L. Jarvis, Immersive Embodiment, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4

247

248  Index Bailenson, Jeremy, 135, 224 Barad, Karen, 231 Barish, Jonas, 43 Baudrillard, Jean, 45, 94, 220, 227 Bazalgette, Peter, 25, 179 BeAnotherLab (BAL), 1, 4, 24, 50, 105, 155, 162, 163, 175, 225, 229 Library of Ourselves, 174–176, 181 The Machine to be Another (TMBA), 1–3, 24, 28, 61, 77, 162, 174, 176 Beckerman, Bernard, 188 Bentham, Jeremy (Panopticon), 222 Bergstra, Jan A., 73 Besant, Walter, 104 Biggin, Rose, 81 biotechnologies/bioprinting, 109 Bishop, Claire, 49, 53 Black Mirror, 107, 224, 234 ‘Arkangel’, 107 ‘Playtest’, 224 Blair, Rhonda, 17 Blanke, Olaf, 4, 100, 128 Blast Theory, 28, 83 A Machine to See With, 83 Operation Black Antler, 83 Bleeker, Maaike, 14, 50 Bloom, Paul, 25, 178, 207 body (self-effacing), 102, 118 bodyguard hypothesis (Frederique de Vignemont), 136 body-swapping, 100, 103, 104, 108 body transfer illusions (BTI)/body substitution illusions (BSI), 3, 20, 23, 24, 27, 74, 77, 81, 88, 91, 92, 100–102, 119, 122, 136, 162, 172, 180, 181, 209 Boisgilbert, Edmund (Ignatius Donnelly), 105 Bolter, Jay David, 22, 51, 89, 90, 181

Bostrom, Nick, 87 Botvinick, Matthew, 5, 100, 125, 128 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 22, 53, 67 Braidotti, Rosi, 3, 94 Brecht, Bertolt, 29, 178 Brodzinski, Emma, 207 Brooker, Charlie, 107, 234 Brugger, Peter, 128 Burnett, Dean, 108 bystander problem, 135 C Calleja, Gordon, 48, 226 Caoyuan, Zhu, 241 Capgras syndrome, 118, 141 Cartesian perspectivalism (Martin Jay), 89 Causey, Matthew, 18, 30, 78, 82, 105, 220 Chabris, Christopher, 4 Chalmers, David, 242 Chapple, Freda, 85 Chatzichristodoulou, Maria, 160 Chengwei, Qui, 241 cinesthetic subject, 171. See also Sobchak, Vivian Circumstance A Hollow Body, 83 our broken voice, 83 Six Conversations, 83 subtlemobs, 83 City Z (Anvio), 155, 217, 218, 227 Cixous, Hélène, 168, 169. See also entredeux Clark, Andy, 4 Clod Ensemble Anatomie in Four Quarters, 14 Cohen, Jonathan, 5, 100, 125, 128 Collishaw, Mat Thresholds, 11

Index

Coney Early Days (of a better nation), 28, 84 What’s She Like, 83 confabulation, 117, 140 The Constitute Eyesect, 2, 115, 116 corporeal turn, 46 cortical homunculus, 109, 139 counterplay/non-human counterplay, 230 Crary, Jonathan, 52 CREW, 73 HeadSwap, 160 W (Double U), 160, 161 Crouch, Tim, 244 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 2 cultural politics of emotions (Sara Ahmed), 112 cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk literature, 106 cyber-therapy, 135 D Dali, Salvador, 51 Davies, Char, 78, 90 Dawson, Andrew The Articulate Hand, 123 deafferentation, 120 Decisions (Diageo), 159 deepfakes, 107 deep media (Frank Rose), 78, 84, 85 de-immersion, 167, 219 Dennett, Daniel, 113, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 169 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 19 Descartes, René, 89 de Vignemont, Frédérique, 6, 27, 55, 136, 182, 198 De Waal, Frans, 114 Di Benedetto, Stephen, 17, 126 Diderot, Denis, 21, 41, 42, 48, 80

  249

differencENGINE Battlefield Hardline: Live, 83 digital resurrection, 244 Dismaland (Banksy), 222 Dixon, Steve, 83 Doctor Huguet, 104, 143 Donnelly, Ignatius, 104, 143 dotdotdot Somnai, 27, 227 doubt, 22, 42, 54, 55, 59, 61, 112, 117, 124, 137, 170 The Doubts of Dives, 104 dragon sabre, 241, 242, 245 dual use dilemma, 136, 177 Duncombe, Stephen, 112 E Eagleman, David, 113 Eco, Umberto, 67, 94, 220, 227 ecological self (Thomas Metzinger), 110 Ehrsson, H. Henrik, 5, 64, 81, 127–132, 143 Elam, Keir, 8, 12, 28, 80 embodied cognition, 16, 19, 109 embodiment, 1, 3, 5–7, 9–11, 16–18, 21, 23, 27, 29, 42, 45, 64, 65, 90, 94, 100, 101, 108, 109, 111, 112, 119, 124, 126, 131, 134, 137, 138, 143, 163, 164, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 188, 205–207, 209, 210, 217, 219, 224, 226, 228, 230, 231, 243 empathy basic and re-enactive empathy (Karsten Stueber), 180 crude empathy (Bertolt Brecht), 178 Einfühlung, 15 empathy deficit (Barack Obama), 160 empathy fatigue, 13, 221

250  Index Husserlian phenomenological stance (Matthew Ratcliffe), 180 perspective-taking, 15, 101, 107, 160, 181, 207 radical empathy (Matthew Ratcliffe), 180, 211 entredeux (Cixous, Hélène), 168–170 Eveleth, Rose, 13 An Exchange of Souls, 106 explicit simulation (Matthew Ratcliffe), 180, 211 exteroceptive body, 82 extreme Naturalism, 45 F falsificationism, 19. See also Popper, Karl Feldman Barrett, Lisa, 17 feminist technoscience, 105 Fischer, Ernst, 243 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 50 flow/GameFlow, 2, 27. See also Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Flusser, Vilém, 233 Foster, Charles, 114 Foucault, Michel, 8, 14, 168 Freaky Friday, 104, 139 Freud, Sigmund (avatar), 135, 138 Fried, Michael, 13, 21, 41–46, 48–50, 52–54, 58, 61, 65, 67, 79, 80, 93, 110 Friedman, Michael, 116, 117 Frith, Chris, 17 full-body illusions (FBI), 102, 105, 128, 134, 135 full-body tracking (in VR), 24, 131 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 228 Gaiman, Neil, 224 game immersion, 2

Gauntlett, Jane, 4 Dancing With Myself, 24, 167, 168, 172 In My Shoes/Waking in Slough, 18, 24, 102, 162–164, 166, 168–174, 177–181 GERontologic age simulation suit, 10 gesamtkunstwerk (Richard Wagner), 84, 85 Ghost in the Shell, 109 Giannachi, Gabriella, 88 glitching, 230 Goat and Monkey Reverence: A Tale of Abelard and Heloise, 12 Grau, Oliver, 84, 86 Grindon, Gavin, 222 Grusin, Richard, 22, 51, 89, 90, 181 The Guild of Misrule The Great Gatsby, 9 H Habitación (Room) (Pedro G. Romero), 222, 223 Haraway, Donna, 105 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 16, 19 Hayles, N. Katherine, 11, 94, 95 Heddon, Deirdre, 10 Heidegger, Martin, 80, 82 heterophenomenology (Daniel Dennett), 163 hikikomori, 136 Hirstein, William, 5, 117, 140 Höller, Carsten, 5, 42, 46, 55, 59, 243 Laboratory of Doubt, 54 The Forests, 22, 59, 61, 63, 116 The Pinocchio Effect, 22, 59, 61–63, 66 Umkehrbrille (Upside-down Goggles), 59, 60, 66 Howells, Adrian, 10, 93 Huizinga, Johan, 233

Index

Hull, John M., 10, 28 Hume, David, 122, 142 Hurley, Erin, 46, 113 Husserl, Edmund, 180 hyper-intercorporeality, 220 hyperreality, 26, 87, 94, 220, 227, 228. See also Baudrillard, Jean; Eco, Umberto hypersurface (Gabriella Giannachi), 88, 95 I il pixel rosso, 28, 75 The Great Spavaldos, 131–134 Ilya Naishuller, 156 immersion, 85. See also de-immersion immersion as absorption (Gordon Calleja), 48 immersion as transportation (Gordon Calleja), 48, 189 immersive experience (Rose Biggin), 3, 8, 13, 81, 92, 228 immersive fallacy (Salen and Zimmerman), 85 theatrical immersion, 53, 63, 65, 126 implicit simulation, 180 intermediality, 85 interoceptive signals, 131 interpassivity, 226. See also Pfaller, Robert; Wilson, Laetitia; Žižek, Slavoj intersensory bias, 125 intersensory conflict, 65, 121, 166, 243 invisible hand illusion (Guterstam et al.), 124 in-yer-face theatre, 106 J Jane Gauntlett, 155 Jay, Martin, 89, 95

  251

Johnson, Dominic, 10 Johnson, Mark, 80, 81, 93, 104 K Kant, Immanuel, 111 Kaprow, Allan, 44, 67 Kattenbelt, Chiel, 85 Kelley, John F., 201 Killoran, Patrick Observation Deck, 12 KILN A Journey Around my Skull, 15 Kitchen (Resident Evil 7) (Capcom), 224, 225 Klich, Rosemary, 76 Korsakoff syndrome, 118, 141 Koss, Juliet, 15 L Lacan, Jacques, 19, 226 Lackner, James R., 42, 56 Lakoff, George, 80, 81, 93, 104, 177 Landsberg, Alison, 228 Lanier, Jaron, 87 learned paralysis, 121, 182 Leder, Drew, 7, 12, 118 Levinas, Emmanuel, 21 Live Action Role-Play (LARP), 111 liveness, 21, 188 Lundahl & Seitl, 22, 42, 55 Symphony of a Missing Room, 64, 66 lusory attitude (Suits), 232 Lutterbie, John, 17 M Machon, Josephine, 7, 12, 22, 44, 54, 64, 75, 77–80, 84, 86, 88, 93, 111, 133 Madary, Michael, 136, 224, 228, 229, 241, 242 magic circle (Johan Huizinga), 233

252  Index Magritte, Rene, 51 Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Games (MMORPGs), 220, 241 McConachie, Bruce, 15–19 McLuhan, Marshall, 6, 231 Meades, Alan F., 230 Meineck, Peter, 17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 90, 93, 109, 118, 220 metaphor, 80, 86, 93, 104, 233 metaphorical entailments, 101, 103 Metzinger, Thomas, 109, 122, 136, 228 Milgram, Stanley, 9 mimetic engulfment (Claire Bishop), 49 mind-body dualism, 16, 87 Minimalist Art, 43 mirror therapy/mirror visual feedback, 121, 122, 125, 172 misperformance, 221, 234 Mitchell, Katie, 17, 45 Mitra, Royona, 76 Modell, Arnold H., 122, 142 Modernism, 222 Molaison, Henry (Patient HM), 14 Moore, G.E., 23, 102, 111, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125 Moore, Lorna Ann In[bodi]mental, 131, 133 Moravec, Hans, 87 Murray, Janet H., 86 Museum of Selfies, 51 N Nagel, Thomas, 23, 99, 113 narcissistic participation (Adam Alston), 136 Nelson, Robin, 25, 188

neuromania, 20 new materialism, 221, 231 Nicholson, Helen, 162, 168 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43 non-human agency, 221, 232, 233 non-player characters (NPCs), 217 Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, 10 O onto-relationality, 3, 13, 24, 159. See also Braidotti, Rosi out-of-bodiment wearables, 1, 116 out-of-body experiences (OBE), 23, 99, 102, 103, 110, 128 P Pain, Barry, 106 paratelic state (Kerr and Apter), 229 Parkinson’s UK, 187, 189, 195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213 Patient HM (Henry Molaison), 13, 14, 63. See also Molaison, Henry (Patient HM) People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 120 perceptual embodiment, 7, 190 peripersonal space, 5, 136 person-centred planning (PCP), 24 Pethő, Ágnes, 85 Petkova, Valeria I., 5, 128–131, 143 Pfaller, Robert, 26, 226 phantom limb pain (PLP), 9, 102, 119–121, 124 phenomenal self model (PSM) (Thomas Metzinger), 110, 131 place illusions (Pl) (Mel Slater), 228 Plato, 42

Index

plausibility illusions (Psi) (Mel Slater), 228 Popat, Sita, 131 Popper, Frank, 84 Popper, Karl, 19 post-cinematic theatre (Piotr Woycicki), 84 postdigital aesthetics, 105 pretence (VR) (Mel Slater), 134 Project I Can (Bandai Namco), 159 promise theory, 22, 74, 91 proprioception, 90, 93, 102, 119–121, 124, 125 proprioceptive drift, 89, 124, 125, 127, 128 protective body map, 136 proteus effect (Yee and Bailenson), 135 psychotechnic checa (torture cell), 222, 224 Puchner, Martin, 43 Punchdrunk, 9, 28, 75, 80, 93 The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, 11 The Masque of the Red Death, 11 R Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., 4, 5, 23, 99, 118, 121, 125, 126, 130 Ramnani, Narender, 195, 196, 208–210 Rancière, Jacques, 222 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 25 rational compassion (Paul Bloom), 178 real virtuality, 134 Reeves, Aaron, 132 Dead Arise, 28, 131, 132 Rescher, Nicholas, 8, 28, 48, 80 Ribot, Théodule, 29

  253

Richards, Catherine, 5, 22, 42, 55 Spectral Bodies, 55, 56, 61, 65 Virtual Body, 57, 66 Ridout, Nicholas, 49, 230 Rimini Protokoll Best Before, 219 Rodgers, Mary, 104 Rosch, Eleanor, 109 Rose, Frank, 78, 83 Rose, Peter, 106 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42 rubber hand illusion (RHI), 5, 23, 99, 102, 124, 126, 143 Runa Essendrop, Nina Human Experience (Menneskelig Oplevelse), 111 S Sacks, Oliver, 122, 168, 188, 194, 212 Salen, Katie, 85 Sansar, 220 satiety illusion, 135 Scaramelli, Alejandro, 169 Schechner, Richard, 44, 73 Scheer, Edward, 76 Sehgal, Tino, 53 self-compassion, 135 sense certainty, 117, 131, 137, 220, 243 sense of embodiment (SoE), 226 Shapiro, Lawrence, 30, 109 Shaughnessy, Nicola, 16 Sherrington, Charles Scott, 102, 119 Shirow, Masamune, 106, 109 Sierz, Aleks, 106 Silver Spring monkeys, 120 Simons, Daniel, 4 simulation theory, 88 Slater, Mel, 5, 134, 144, 228 Smith, Tony, 43, 51, 54

254  Index Snatch, 106 Snow Crash, 107 somatoparaphrenia, 125, 142 Stanford Prison experiment, 8. See also Zimbardo, Philip Stephenson, Neil, 107 stereoscopic perspective/stereopsis, 61, 116 Steyerl, Hito, 3 Stratton, George, 42, 59 Stueber, Karsten, 180 subtle bodies, 110 Sutherland, Ivan, 87 synaesthesia, 78 (syn)aesthetic, 77, 78, 80, 83, 88, 92, 111. See also Machon, Josephine T Tallis, Raymond, 20 Taub, Edward, 120 Teslasuit, 227 théâtral, le, 43. See also Diderot, Denis theatrical immersion, 55, 65, 67, 128 theatro-absorptive, 51, 54, 64, 66, 79, 243 Thompson, Evan, 109 Thwaites, Thomas, 115 GoatMan, 114, 117 transaesthetic, 45. See also Baudrillard, Jean transgressive play (Espen Aarseth), 232 transposed narcissism, 136, 137 Tribble, Evelyn B., 17 Tsakiris, Manos, 82, 124 U UI-manipulation, 228 The Ultimate Display (Ivan Sutherland), 87 umgebung (von Uexküll), 113, 122

umwelt (von Uexküll), 113 undecidable (Derrida), 169 V van Gogh, Vincent, 51 Vanhoutte, Kurt, 73 Varela, Francisco J., 109 Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, 104 virtual pit (VR), 226 virtual property, 241 Vischer, Robert, 15 The Void, 227 von Uexküll, Jakob, 113 VR self-counselling/self-talk, 135 W Wagner, Richard, 84 A Walk Through Dementia app, 159 Waterman, Ian, 123, 124 Wearing, Clive, 192, 212 Wearing, Deborah, 193, 194, 212 Weber, Samuel, 45 Weir Mitchell, Silas, 102, 120 Welton, Martin, 20 White, Gareth, 22, 80–82, 91 Why So Serious?, 83. See also deep media (Frank Rose) Wilberforce, William, 42 willing suspension of disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), 134 Wilson, Barbara A., 192 Wilson, Laetitia, 221, 226 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 112 Wizard of Oz testing, 196, 201, 202, 210 Wolfendale, Jessica, 229 Woolley, Benjamin, 87 Wormwood, Jolie, 17 Wynants, Nele, 73

Index

Y Yee, Nick, 135 Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease (YOPD), 25, 187, 191, 195, 196, 198–201, 203, 204, 208, 210, 211, 213

Z Zerihan, Rachel, 160 Zimbardo, Philip, 8, 9. See also Stanford Prison experiment Zimmerman, Eric, 85 Žižek, Slavoj, 78, 84, 179, 226

  255