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VIEWER IN THE VIRTUAL REALITY SPACE: PLANETARY OPTICS’ FORMATION // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 3 (33). P. 73-96

This article discusses a special way of the bodily presence of the viewer in various works designed for virtual reality. In some of them, the viewer is not able to interact with the world of a virtual installation and influence the events taking place in it (although they can, for example, move through the digital space); in others, there is a limited quality of presence at the perception (but not action) level leading to a meaningful result: when the viewer is compelled to observe events as the director/artist intended – their gaze is built into the point of view of the director or camera. Finally, there is a third type of VR projects where we find an enhancing user interaction with the digital environment. Viewer’s capacities – including the ability to move in the space of the installation and interact with it – depend on the “genealogy” of a particular VR piece. There are basically two types of VR pieces that have the same image and sound output devices, but differ significantly from each other in the way moving image is produced and in the kind of effect produced on a recipient. The first type involves the creation of real-life decoration with actors in it filmed on a panoramic camera (a device with a 360-degree view). This kind of the piece is similar to panoramic cinema: it is basically a film that provides a high-quality image and a bright immersive effect, but does not provide the viewer (just like classical cinema) with the opportunity to interact with screen reality. In these cases interactivity goes down to choosing the point of observation and following the camera. Examples reviewed in the current article include such pieces as “Caves”, “Container”, “Montegelato” (demonstrated at the Venice VR Expanded, 2021 program), etc. The second type of VR is based on creation of virtual space and 3D models of characters and objects inside it (“Goliath”, “Anandala”, “Last Worker”, “Samsara”, “Lavrinthos”, also viewed in Venice). These pieces are technically part of a game-design framework since they are constructed on game “engines” and imply a high degree of interactivity. Here the emphasis is on the interaction with an artificially created world, even though authors may limit the viewer’s ability to act within the VR space and make only limited number of choices. Observing various strategies of interaction in VR, I outline three kinds of them: (1) lack of interaction; (2) limited interaction (participation at the level of perception, but not action); (3) full-fledged interaction. Artists put the very phenomenon of interactivity into question each time eliminating certain aspects of this experience. For example, a user can be deprived of an ability to move (as in the Tree VR project offering one to “be” a tree that cannot “respond” to the violence committed against it) or, conversely, granting one such “rights” and “powers” in the virtual world that are hardly imaginable in everyday practices (flight, telekinesis, etc.). The element of interactivity may either structure the project or, on the contrary, be “bracketed”, users’ actions (participation or the lack of it) turn into means of artistic expression. What kind of expression? How can we describe the experience that a viewer gets interacting with VR pieces? The current article provides an answer to these questions in a broad sociocultural context, including issues of bio- and digital ethics. I examine the VR pieces of the first and second type (where a viewer is limited in actions and cannot influence the events taking place in the installation) and explore the difference between them, conceptualize the compelled inaction of the viewer. In this regard, based on the concept of event introduced by French philosopher A. Badiou (meaning something that changes the frame of our perception of reality), I agrue that VR technologies can be considered as a machine for producing events – an apparatus for actualizing potentialities that are converted into events for the viewer and in the future may or may not become a reality. It depends on whether the viewer decides to “embed” the opportunity offered by the virtual event into their Weltbild. For example, one could take off VR-glasses and transfer the aesthetic affect into some kind of action in reality beginning to show greater social responsibility, taking part in social assistance programs, becoming more tolerant, etc. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by experiments conducted in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University (USA). Furthermore, I focus on projects that create the possibility of communicating and interacting with nonhuman agents that populate the space of VR installations. And the emphasis is shifted from the “anthrope”, who is used to seeing oneself in the center of the world (a subjective position that has been constructed in Western culture since the Renaissance) to the play of nonhuman entities. This pulls up the paradigm of anthropocentrism, basic to European culture, and provides one with an ability to think and act on a completely different level — on extra-egocentric one. In case when the viewer has freedom of movement and interaction within the VR world, the rules and restrictions that the artist/director imposes on this interaction are important, since the quality of viewer’s experience will be shaped by it. It is the need to perform motoric actions aimed at achieving a specific goal (or the impossibility of doing so, as in case of projects of the first and second types) that shapes viewer’s identity in the field. In a VR installation of the third type (“full-fledged presence”), the viewer can, like an actor in the Stanislavsky Theater, become an actor “in the proposed circumstances”. The elements of such installation and models of user’s interaction scenarios with its interface (including motoric actions) are aimed at helping the viewer get immersed into their “role”. However, if in theatrical plays and films actors were supposed to perform for a spectator to follow the plot and transfer their emotional and cognitive projections onto it, in VR these projections are turned onto the viewer. Thus, in the field of virtual reality, languages of various arts intersect: theater, cinema, game design, etc. are giving rise to multiple hybrid formats of experience. Projects of the third type can also be seen as shattering the viewer’s habitual egocentric position. Such projects, which problematize our experience as a contingent construct, make it possible to design an experience of alternative subjectivity. I argue that the development of virtual reality makes it possible to build the experience of a new sensual plane: a re-subjectivised and superhuman vision of multidimensional relationships between phenomena and events in the world. Thereby our way of thinking is being brought to a completely different level: an extra-egocentric state that forms a new optics of “planetary vision”. ”Planetary optics” does not imply a view from afar. The precise (not abstract) way of thinking is a challenging thing; it is hard to get away from reducing reality to familiar schemes, binary oppositions and common hierarchies. That is why, while analyzing the strategies of artists working with the medium of VR throughout this article, I focus on pieces where these familiar schemes get overturned. A hunter becomes a prey, an actor becomes a non-participant, and so on. The binaries of male and female, Eurocentrism and Orientalism, nature and culture, animal and machine get blurred not to erase the boundaries between them but with the aim of offering the spectator-actor a new perspective or even a set of perspectives, points of view, positions of various stakeholders, polarities and experience of a multipolar world. “Planetary optics” does assume a multipolar world (after all, we cannot block some part of it and separate ourselves from other beings, we are too intertwined with other techno- and biological actors) — and one of the ways to achieve this multipolar way of thinking can be through the experience offered by the VR medium, an artistic image that becomes personal experience. And, in turn, existing experience will allow the viewer to attain a more flexible and tuned perception, correlating it with the Weltbild, perhaps, of social groups far from it with their own interests, which however must be taken into account. Therefore, VR as a medium has not only artistic, but also social meaning, since it may concretize and focus human thinking, prone to abstraction, it may synthesize the sensual and the rational. The further development of virtual reality will perhaps make it possible to build a visual experience of a new kind: one associated with a different scale of view, different assemblage points, the experience of a hybrid space that combines the virtual and the real (what might be called a “meta screen”), so that the user will be able to look at the world with a different vision (for example, to see multidimensional connections and networks of actors in different approximations).

Keywords: VR, virtual reality, installation, contemporary art, agency, nonhuman agent, new media, media art