Immersive Embodiment by Liam Jarvis

Author:Liam Jarvis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030279714
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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 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.

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