The mixed reality paradigm differs most saliently from this fantasy in its deployment of the functional homology between virtual reality technologies and perception: rather than conceiving the virtual as a total technical simulacrum and as the opening of a fully immersive, self-contained fantasy world, the mixed reality paradigm treats it as simply one more realm among others that can be accessed through embodied perception or enaction (Varela). In this way, emphasis falls less on the content of the virtual than on the means of access to it, less on what is perceived in the world than on how it comes to be perceived in the first place.
Bluntly put, the new mixed reality paradigm foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world. For today's researchers and artists, virtual reality serves to highlight the body's function as, to quote phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an “immediately given invariant," a “primary access to the world," the “vehicle of being in the world." The body forms an ultimate background, an absolute here, in relation to which all perceptual experience must be oriented. That is why virtual reality comprises something of a reality test for the body; as philosopher Alain Millon points out, it “puts into place constraining apparatuses that allow us to better understand the limits and the weakness [but also the powers] of the body."7
A further corollary of the functionalist perspective of mixed reality follows closely upon this focus on the ontological or constituting function of embodiment: the role of self-movement as the bodily—or better, the tactile—face of perception. Insofar as it yields a doubling of perception, this tactile dimension serves to confer a bodily—that is, sensory—reality on external perceptual experience (whether it is “physical" or “virtual"). It generates a felt correlate of perception that is part of the functionalist understanding of embodied agency. Together, these two corollaries—the primacy of the body as ontological access to the world and the role of tactility in the actualization of such access—effect a passage from the axiom that has been my focus thus far (all virtual reality is mixed reality) to the more general axiom that all reality is mixed reality.
In one sense, this passage simply recognizes what, with Brian Massumi, we can consider to be the priority (or the “superiority") of the analog—especially, though by no means exclusively, where digital technologies are in play.' “Always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought," sensation
INTRODUCTION
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