The attention you have been lending to your breathing makes you feel angelic and fleshy: while you float dreamlike, unencumbered by the drag of gravity, your actions are syncopated with your breathing in a way that makes your bodily presence palpable, insistent. Meanwhile, you find yourself floating back down to the clearing, no longer driven to explore, but meditative, content simply to float wherever your bodily leaning and breathing patterns will take you. Now acclimated to the new sensorimotor demands of this interactional domain, you can effortlessly explore the different spaces contained in this world, choosing to follow the river of lights as if swept along by a swarm of fireflies or, alternately, to step into the big oak tree and see its blood-red sap coursing around you or, again, to dive into a pool of shimmering water and let yourself sink into its engulfing embrace.
Yet just at that point when you begin to see the fuzzy pixelated organic forms around you morph into a field of resonant luminosity, you are suddenly thrust outside the world, looking upon what now appears as a gray, bean-shaped blob floating against an empty background. When you realize that you cannot return, you are flooded with a combination of resignation and melancholy which soon gives way to a sense of awe, to a wonder that you have somehow lived the immaterial
If your experience is anything like that of the many thousands of other "immersants," you will feel that you have lived through sonething vastly different from what normal life brings and also quite different from what other forms of "virtual reality" afford or, at least, what you imagined them to afford. Here you have lived in harmony with a virtual lifeworld and have felt the dissolution of the hard boundary of the skin that, in ordinary experience and most certainly in most forms of virtual experience, so insistently prevents fluid interchange with the surrounding space. You have let your visual faculty become subordinate as you gained confidence in maneuvering with body movement and breathing. Perhaps most strikingly, you have let the experience of spatial navigation penetrate into your body via the immediately felt physiological modifications produced by the inhalation and exhalation that triggered your vertical movement as well as the bodily leaning that triggered your horizontal movement.i
As several commentators have pointed out, the work just described— Char Davies' Osmose (1995)—is highly atypical for what currently goes under the rubric "virtual reality art."ii Davies' work eschews many of the familiar trappings of computer-based worlds, virtual reality, and game environments, including the primacy normally accorded to detached vision, the use of a joystick or other manipulable navigational tool, the orientation toward a goal, and the hard-edged simulation of a perspectival space. What results is a tactile aesthetics that, as Jennifer Fisher puts it, strives to “deepen the sense of subjective embodiment" by foregrounding the function of bodily modes of experience. “At a time when much VR technology effects a visual dominance and corporeal abstraction, Fisher continues, Davies' solicitation of tactility “both implicates and creates anembodied' spectator."1
EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY
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