What makes these two works singular in the present context is the way that they support the opening of virtual reality not as a technical apparatus enabling some prescripted play, but rather as a technically triggered experience of the organism's power of imaging, an experience of imaging as an inherently technical, originary element of the organism's being. Here virtual reality is not built on a virtual reality support, so each work must produce the virtual; and because they can only do so through the interaction they trigger, we can rightly conclude that human experience actualizes the virtual potential of these art works. Accordingly, what these works add to the expression of Hawkinson's Blindspot is the direct incorporation of the concrete technologies supporting mixed reality: together, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate a comprehension on the part of the observer that his or her engagement with virtual reality technology is the contemporary manifestation of what can only be an originary correlation with technics.viii
Commenting on an earlier work, Fleischmann and Strauss describe the transition from (external) image to (internal) imaging power, from the observational to the operational perspective, that informs such a comprehension. This transition renders their mixed reality works allegories of mixed reality as the minimal condition of phenomenalization:
While the observer is only the onlooker, this "looking" is a kind of movement. It embodies "active observation." From a certain moment when the observer becomes immersed in the action, his “passive onlooking" is replaced by “active observation." The observer discovers that he—and not the artist—is the one creating the situation. When the situation changes and the observer becomes a player, he suddenly begins to identify himself with the situation. Observation becomes more than merely consumption.¹⁶
By catalyzing a coincidence of observational and operational perspectives, virtual reality artwork, as Fleischmann and Strauss describe it, perfectly captures the transformation at issue in the recuperation of imaging as a fundamental, existential power. When observation ceases to be consumption, imaging takes its proper place within the organism's primordial operation as a general condition of phenomenalization.
Contrasted with Hawkinson's Blindspot, therefore, Rigid Waves and Liquid Views expand the agency of the operational perspective because they directly incorporate the concrete technologies supporting mixed reality. More precisely, by placing the organism into relation with the image as a dimension of its operation and by supporting the disiunction between embodiment and imaging (i.e., the otherness and the disintegrating function of the image), Rigid Waves and Liquid Views facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and to expand the scope of its bodily agency.
INTRODUCTION
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