Presented at
33C3 (2016),
Dec. 28, 2016, 4 p.m.
(60 minutes)
Inspired by a long history of bold reality hacks this talk considers the kinds of potentials opening up through emerging Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality technologies. In this current moment of climate crisis and structural metamorphosis how can we work with powerful immersive technologies to understand our own perceptual systems, to radically communicate and to innovate new ways of being together?
Our physical body and the spaces we inhabit seem very real, but what is this sense of reality – of presence in the world – and is it simply a story told to us by our brain, a neural fiction? Just over a decade ago, neuroscientists at Princeton discovered the ‘rubber hand illusion’, a way of persuading the brain to incorporate a fake hand into its internal body image, so that the fake hand became a felt part of the body. Since then, scientists and virtual reality experts have developed ‘full body’ illusions showing how our attachment to our whole body is somehow provisional and flexible.
The talk will consider these strange findings and what potentials are emerging through creative VR projects. I will discuss my own work with Virtual Reality, which investigates how immersive audio, visual, touch and haptic environments enable us to "slip our moorings" and experience transformed relationships to our environment, to other people and to our own bodies. I’ll describe the interdisciplinary experimentation undertaken in the Sackler Centre's Labs and the development of visual technologies and multi-sensory techniques that invite audiences to investigate the architecture of their own subjective experience for themselves.
Our understanding of what it is to be human is undergoing a dramatic seachange: a biological, embodied, emotional and fundamentally social understanding of human subjectivity is emerging across disciplines. These powerful immersive technologies and techniques for hacking the human sensory system have uses beyond entertainment. This session will end by outlining some ways ahead for creatively working with this tech to bring us into deeper relationship with the systems we live in and distant ecosystems, other people and the vital feelings of our own bodies.
Presenters:
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Kate Genevieve
Kate Genevieve is an artist, researcher and educator at chroma.space. At chroma.space she creates media performance, interactive art, urban disruption and games experiments. She's working towards a PHD at the University of Sussex on virtual reality and touch.
chroma.space projects range from large-scale projections on buildings, intimate performances in deconsecrated churches to outdoors virtual reality events. Recent projects have shown at FACT Liverpool, Brighton Digital Festival, London’s Science Museum, SCANZ 2013, Nimes 2016 and on the streets of Paris during ArtCOP21. Kate is working on a practice-based PHD at the University of Sussex, researching emotions, sensing and virtual reality with joint supervision from the School of Media and the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. This research draws on both indigenous understandings and neuroscience research into how we feel the environment around us. Inspired by cybernetics and ecological thinking, she collaborates across disciplines, bringing in diverse perspectives - from dance to architecture, magic to neuroscience, anthropology to physics - to feel out alternatives on the horizon. chroma.space runs open labs and research, public events and workshops, exhibitions and AV happenings on the potentials that improvisation, creative technologies and open source culture have for transforming how we sense, communicate and receive information.
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