Notes
INTRODUCTION
i. Bach y Rita's work focuses on tactile prostheses for the blind and specifically on remapping vision through stimulation of the tongue. Krueger's work will be discussed later.
ii. “The brain is a media junkie” and "it wants the good stuff," notes venture capitalist Dan Mapes (Krantz, 24).
iii. Obviously, what Krueger means by “immersion" is a far cry from the picture of a passive media consumer dreamed of by today's media industries. Immersion here is something of a minimal condition for the establishment of a perceptuomotor circuit and, thus, for embodied human agency.
iv. What is crucial to obtaining agency in such environments, as Krueger clearly saw as early as 1974, is the capacity to interact with people in your environment exactly as you normally would. This would not be [possible] if you were wearing contemporary data goggles. This [difference] is important because most people have a variety of responsibilities and perform many different tasks. Only a few might be full-time artificial reality personnel. The rest would have to choose, moment by moment, whether to operate in an artificial reality or in the real world. [But] in fact, they will often want to be able to operate in both simultaneously. (Krueger 1993, 155)
v. According to Massumi:
Digital processing as such doesn't possibilize let alone virtualize. The digital is already exhaustively possibilistic. It can, it turns out, potentialize, but only indirectly, through the experiential relays the reception of its outcomes set in motion. Those relays may even more indirectly seed as yet uncoded possibilities: inventions.... Whatever inventiveness comes about, it is a result not of coding itself but of its detour into the analog. The processing may be digital—but the analog is the process. The virtuality involved, and any new possibility that may arise, is entirely bound up with the potentializing relay. It is not contained in the code. (Brian Massumi, “On the Superiority of the Analog," in Massumi 2002, 141-142).
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