Davies' Osmose is, in the words of another commentator, “the first major immersive VR environment toresist' simulation of perspectival space and to attempt to heal the rift between vision and body inherent in conventional virtual reality."² Davies herself is credited, by no less an authority than (VMRL inventor) Mark Pesce, with “redefin[ing] our place in cyberspace and mak[ing] the virtual world seem more human than our own."³ Davies likens her work's difference from more traditional VR environments to the difference between illustration and evocation: "When art evokes," she says, “it's drawing on the experiences of the user. It becomes interactive on a much more subtle level. To me, Osmose looks at immersive space as a place where we can explore what it means to be embodied conscious beings."4
My aim in this chapter is to draw out further what makes Davies' art atypical, if not in fact unique, for work that invests in the concrete technology of virtual reality as a means of constituting (one kind of) bodyin-code. By purposely deploying low resolution in the HMD, Davies work actively counters the conventional VR emphasis on vision: indeed, as we shall see, her work compels the viewer-participant to reconfigure her sensory economy, such that (at the very least) vision becomes thoroughly permeated by tactility and proprioception. In the process, Davies successfully deploys the virtual reality interface toward an end—contemplative engagement—that moves it away from the instrumentalism associated with it (and for good reason, as we have seen) by prescient skeptics like Myron Krueger. Indeed, if Davies thus goes as far as possible, within the VR interface, in rendering irrelevant those elements that make it cumbersome and artificial, that is because she deploys VR toward an end that is thoroughly noninstrumental, meaning that it entirely eschews the interface with the physical world seemingly constitutive of today's mixed reality aesthetic. Yet, if Davies' work nonetheless supports the maxim that all VR is mixed reality, that is because it exposes the underlying constitution of the experience of the virtual in embodiment and, more specifically, in proprioception and tactility.
BODIES IN CODE
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