The Way Forward: Virtual Reality

For some time now, the conversation surrounding virtual reality has been shifting towards virtual “embodiment”. With this technology, people enter a virtual space where their physical presence is mediated by a VR headset. Once immersed in this environment, the mind has boundless potential for reception and little chance of evading the unfamiliar place into which it has been thrust. “Experiences like these can be transformative,” says Michael Madary, a philosopher of the mind and author of the first code of ethics for VR experiments. A member of the VERE (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment) programme financed by the European Commission, he points out that such “experiences can influence us in ways we still barely understand, redefining our relationship with our minds and our world”.

Neurologists and users agree that the experience has an immediate effect on the calibration of the senses, even when the headset is removed. The texture of reality appears sharper, the colours are brighter, and everything stands out in a deeply three-dimensional way, as if in an image by Maurits Cornelis Escher.

This is the more advanced and finally controllable version of the so-called out-of-body experience (OBE), which one in ten people will experience in their lifetimes. Traditionally explained in mystical and spiritual terms, in reality OBEs are the effect of fluctuations within our psyche, the mental framework we have of the world. Virtual embodiment offers more: a journey where the consciousness remains earthbound and our own, along with a clear awareness of our body as it touches, ducks, dodges, feels and trembles.

In his Flesh and Sand project, Alejandro González Iñárritu took this technique (which many see as a new medium) to an even higher level of popular engagement. Presented at the 2017 Cannes Festival and then repeated for months at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, this 6.5-minute installation catapults you onto the border between the United States and Mexico, among the footsteps and sweating bodies of Central American immigrants attempting to make the border crossing at night. Part theatre (the scenes were reconstructed) and part documentary (Iñárritu scripted the situations by interviewing 120 people who actually made the trip), Flesh and Sand teleports viewers by first inviting them into a dark room where they physically walk barefoot on sand brought in specially from Mexico, creating a sense of proximity to these human stories that we normally only hear as distant echoes.“First of all I wanted to recreate a physical impact,” said the director, “and through that, to bridge the gap of compassion for those who experience certain tragedies.”

And this is no small ambition. After all, in this new dimension, one can touch nothing and still less be touched. But it’s precisely this blurring between awareness and non-awareness, empathically engaging with each other with heightened senses, that multiplies the possibilities of virtual voyages. They are slowly moving away from the idea that pioneers like Jaron Lanier had of them. In his cult book Dawn of the New Everything, Lanier imagined adventures in which huge amethyst-coloured octopuses gaped their mouths to reveal bedrooms where one could lie down and sleep, hoping not to be devoured by the monster. It was thought that a type of Freudian VR could become a catharsis for the repressed fears and fantasies of childhood.

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Opening picture: Icarus, by Lemieux Pilon 4D Art. Photograph courtesy of Press Office.

Read the full article in the October issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands

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