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Alvaro Cassinelli @alvarotwit gave a keynote at the @icat_egve conference this past week that discussed the convergence of art and science, frameworks that can help us think about how technology works and how it doesn't, and how VR complicates these things.
A thread about it!
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A thread about it!
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In a fairly typical and modern simplification, technology is any tool that helps an individual understand or enhance the world. The language is important here: the _world_ is the object for the user, and the tech is pointed toward a particular goal.
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Adhering to this framework, the tech strives for invisibility. In order to solve a task in the best/most efficient way, the user shouldn't have to think about the device they are using, only the task at hand.
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Think of videoconferencing. You want to meet with someone, and you want it to be realistic. You want to hear them, see their facial expressions, etc., all in "real-time."
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The software must capture audio and video data from your machine as fast as possible, send it through the air and over wires as far as your meeting mate, and unpack it for their display. The software must adapt to different kinds of hardware and software along the way.
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And, it has to work in as many different directions as there are meeting attendees. When it works, all that^ is all invisible to you, and for good reason--most users want to focus on the mediated social presence, not the technical details.
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But it changes when there is a glitch in the system. There's lag. The video bits get scrambled somewhere in transit. Your friend's audio drops out. Your app crashes. An error message appears. Sometimes it's helpful.
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All of a sudden, the technology itself becomes visible. You realize that you're using a system that is imperfect and not-working-the-way-it-is-supposed-to-be. The illusion breaks.
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Alvaro argues the glitch is worth our attention. It reveals the DNA of the medium. It shows us that the technology has more to it than what we perceive to be its proper existence. With that, the limitations give us new venues for expression and meaning.
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There's a lot to say about glitch art, but here is a quickstart if interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art
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Glitches become especially interesting in VR technology. With VR, it is easy to imagine a shift to the common tech framework. Rather than using tech to act on the world, the world acts on the user.* Dwell on that for a second.
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*This technological interaction perspective is not necessarily new or due to VR, but the nature of VR makes this shift a little more apparent to the user.
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Here's where _the glitch_ gets weird. When the video lags, the tracking is imperfect, or we notice the field of view is quite limited, the _user_ is what becomes visible, not the tech. We become aware of ourselves existing in the physical world rather than the virtual one.
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So, if made a certain way, this technology can give the user a window into their self. Kind of like a mirror, but a mirror with some very unexplored bounds.
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We do not yet have the language for describing what happens to consciousness in VR. It's kind of a hallucination, kind of like being in a dream. We give numerical scores for how subjectively present and embodied the user feels. We note when there are breaks in presence.
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This is the VR space I research. What happens when embodiment and disembodiment get confused? When breaks in presence happen, what exactly is going on? How entangled does the self become with the virtual world, and what can be made with that knowledge?
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The interest in observing what is made visible and what to _make of it_ is how art and science are combined in this process. Alvaro describes some aims of art as looking for opportunities and languages of a medium. Science looks for serendipity, discovery, and new questions.
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You can see how these areas are entangled.
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Industry clearly values making tech invisible, so we will continue to see higher pixel counts, refresh rates, FOV, etc. in new VR headsets. The design and engineering sides of things will solve those problems.
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Understanding the tech, its limitations, its meaning, and what we can express with it requires a departure from that goal-oriented angle. The art*science angle fills this gap.
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See this image from the MIT Media Lab and Wired. Interdisciplinary work is putting people from different corners in the same room. Perhaps a better approach is fully involving different corners in one's own studies.
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This talk clearly got me thinking. If you're interested, you can watch the hour-long keynote here:
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In many ways, this thread is a thank-you note to my undergraduate Computer Science department being housed in the College of Arts and Sciences rather than Engineering. And in many more, it is a cheers to studying under @sophist_monster.
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