Moreover, because the environments involve the direct placement of the “immersant" into an atypical, indeed anti-“realistic," environment, the role of tactility or self-movement as the “reality"-generating sense becomes especially pronounced. Here, the primacy that Jonas lends touch as a sense-synthesizer helps explain why maneuvering through Osmose using bodily movements and breathing seems, in the words of one immersant, “so uncannily real" (Wettheim, 2). Indeed, whatever effect of presence the installations produce must stem not from a withdrawal from the activity of movement and the contact with “force-experience," as Davies' occasional Heideggerian rhetoric might suggest, but rather from a heightening of self-movement and of the proprioceptive and internal kinesthetic senses of the “immersant," a restoration of the primitive anchoring of sense in protosensory tactility. Again, Davies statement serves to clarify her intentions:
My interest lies in going beyond VR's conventions of photorealism and joystick interfaces which situate the user as a probing hand (with gun) and disembodied eye among passive hard-edged objects in empty space. By working with the participant's breath as primary interface (enabling them to "float"), and using semitransparency as a means of evoking cognitive ambiguity, I have sought to reaffirm the role of the subjectively lived body within the virtual realm and deeply engage the participant's sensory imagination. (Davies, Artist's Statement)
In sum, rather than being about the realist simulation of an external environment, Davies' works are about experiential possibilities that explicitly foreground the kinesthetic and proprioceptive dimensions of bodily self-movement, the way in which self-movement or infratactility serves to confer (sensory) reality on perceptual experience. "It is my hope that the paradoxical qualities of bodily immersion in virtual space might lead to an experience of being-inthe-world freshly," concludes Davies (2001). In the succinct phrasing of Mark Pesce: "What you encounter in Osmose is yourself" (Pesce, cited in Davis, "Osmose," 4).
EMBODYING VIRTUAL REALITY
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