Boundaries of Simulation. Staged Lives of Virtual Influencers

Piotr Fortuna
Boundaries of Simulation. Staged Lives of Virtual Influencers

In the course of the meeting, I will be exploring the topic of “virtual influencers” – computer-generated characters with full-fledged social media profiles, emulating behaviours of real-life influencers: they publish photographs and video footage, interact with other users, promote and sell goods, are featured on magazine covers and billboards, record songs, and give interviews. Virtual influencers trigger assorted responses: fear of humans being supplanted from the labour market, uncanny valley phenomena, and reflexes of awe, jealousy and empathy. 

During the workshop, I intend to consider ways of presenting virtual influencers and their associations with related (or somehow similar) constructs, such as avatars, data doubles, virtual assistants or humanoid robots. While similar in anthropomorphism, all these constructs differ in terms of function, agency mechanisms, and levels of realness or disembodiment.

We will also talk about properties constituting and/or undermining the credibility of virtual influencers; ways in which these characters are incorporated into contemporary “economy of attention” mechanisms, and how they establish relations with female digital platform users; how they address matters of corporeality, sexuality and race, provoking and exacerbating identity policy-related debates, and testing the boundaries of the allowable (and the efficient, in terms of communication). Last but not least, we will ponder the question of what the virtual influencer phenomenon can tell us about ourselves and the moment we have found ourselves at – human anxieties and fantasies in times of technological rush.

VR: New Experience of Reality. An Attempt at Recording.

Matylda Szewczyk
VR: New Experience of Reality. An Attempt at Recording.

The history of culture, of the social functioning and impact of assorted images, is filled with descriptions of new media experiences: the sense of immersion in a battlefield landscape experienced by visitors to a 19^th-century panorama, through to a sense of shock at an approaching train during early film screenings. All have become a basis for legends of the magic of the “first experience”, inaccessible to successive recipient and user generations. The tale of changes to the perception of non-media reality spawned by aforementioned experiences is equally interesting to that of impressions of early recipients of new image types. Upon exiting a cinema, the world is no longer as it used to be before we had entered. It has also changed ever since we have gained the capacity for recording it in photographs; people have most certainly altered their self-perception from the time when childhood photograph albums holiday snapshots were things unknown.

When it comes to assorted VR interfaces, we have found ourselves in rather fortunate circumstances; we are privy to the becoming of subsequent VR realisations and types of media technologies serving the purpose of evolving “virtual occurrences”; to personal exposure to “new media” experiences; and to ponderings on what we have just undergone and sensed.

On the other hand, the VR legend often as not precedes personal experience. The majority of culture participants have read about virtual reality or seen it on film before having had the opportunity of experiencing attempts at designing and delivering it in practice. Consequently, one would be hard-pressed to approach assorted types of actual VR realisations free of any expectations or bias. That, however, is not necessarily a disadvantage, as long as we allow our imaginings and expectations to become part of the experience rather than a barrier separating us from it.

In the course of the workshop, we will explore “virtual experience” as a new form of media exposure. We will try and describe its specificity with regard to individual users and broader cultural context, making it part of a more extensive history of change introduced by “new” media emerging across the years. Last but not least, we will try and imagine how the world may change – in terms of self- and identity-focused perception, our relationships with others, physicality and nature – once the virtual reality experience has become a universal one.

The Metaverse and Contemporary Dystopias: a Quest for Critical and Involved Virtual Reality Recipients

Anna Nacher

The Metaverse and Contemporary Dystopias: a Quest for Critical and Involved Virtual Reality Recipients

Main reactions to Facebook CEO’s most recent decision to transform the corporation into a company with a focus on developing a Virtual Reality platform, and change its name to “Meta”, were ones of scepticism and widespread criticism. In principle, the decision was interpreted as an escape from the critique of previous strategies, wherein the business side and desire for profit took precedent over accountability for the shape and form of communities evolving within the platform and its outreach. Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions included the introduction of the concept of “metaverse” – a term coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash (published in Poland as Śnieżyca, 2020). Zuckerberg’s decision was based on a blatant increase in VR’s importance to film, journalism and entertainment over the past five years, and on Facebook’s ownership of Oculus (a leading and hugely popular hardware platform) since 2014.

In view of experience drawn from the brief yet tempestuous history of social media impact on the process of forming social imagination, and basing on past extensive debates regarding VR and forms employing the so-called Mixed (Mode) Reality, often as not referred to jointly as XR (Extended Reality), a more profound consideration of critical, conscious and involved recipience has become a necessity. What kind of skill should a conscious recipient be equipped with when encountering dystopian metaverse announced by Facebook policies and disclosed in revelations by Frances Haugen and other whistle-blowers? What, in general, is critical VR content reception all about? Does a critical approach involve selected specific content parameters, such as topic, methods of developing the narrative, multi-sensory engagement, commencing immersive reception and affective recipient response? Such are the specific questions I intend to focus on while pointing out that the stakes in this particular discussion extend well beyond the academic realm, and may be of significance to VR evolvement in the context of its social role. 

Meeting with the community of creators associated with the 3D and Virtual Occurrences II Studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Virtual occurrences – trends and directions of developing immersive art projects – case study.

13.11.2020
Jakub Wróblewski o wykładzie:

Dokonam próby nakreślenia zestawienia współczesnych młodych działań i projektów artystycznych, które łączy użycie aktualnych narzędzi, takich jak 3D, fotogrametria, silniki gamingowe, rzeczywistość wirtualna i rozszerzona, w kontekście poszukiwań autorskich wartości estetycznych, nowych sposobów budowania storytellingu oraz rozwoju mediów immersyjnych na przykładzie wybranych realizacji. Od pierwszej kickstarterowej kampanii Oculusa (2012, konsumenckie HMD Htc vive – 2016) minęło niewiele czasu, jednak ten okres to ogromny skok jakościowy i ilościowy w projektach artystycznych adaptujących te narzędzia. Systemy szybko zaimplementowane zostały do branży filmowej, rozrywkowej, a po czasie – także artystycznej. 

Omówię również obszary tematyczne eksploatowane w Pracowni 3D i Zdarzeń Wirtualnych II, do których zalicza się: percepcja odbiorcy doświadczenia wirtualnego oraz składowe konstytuujące doświadczenie, w tym rodzaje iluzji, ucieleśnienia, propriocepcja, poczucie sprawstwa, jak i afordancje. Kluczowe jest badanie zagadnienia immersji i jej poziomu. Zakres tematyczny prac jest szeroki i wynika z poruszanych w danym czasie obszarów zainteresowań Pracowni. Obecnie eksplorowane narzędzia to: film 360, film 360 3D, symulatory 3D, silniki gamingowe, dźwięk przestrzenny i ambisoniczny, modelowanie 3D, fotogrametria, skanowanie 3D, symulacje, rzeczywistość wirtualna i rozszerzona. Pracownia otwarta jest na współczesne wykorzystanie nowych mediów w działaniach partycypacyjnych, wspólnotowych, doświadczeniach indywidualnych, interaktywnych oraz multimedialnych, z nastawieniem na poszukiwanie autorskiej estetyki – zarówno wizualnej czy audialnej, jak i interakcji.

Virtual audio spaces – trends and directions in interactive, documentary and performative activities.

17.11.2020
Przemysław Danowski on his lecture:

Antonin Artaud was the first to use the phrase “virtual reality” in his manifesto “Theatre of Cruelty” (“Le Théâtre de la cruauté”, 1932), in reference to the way of organising performative space. He also described an auteur vision of sound and musical instruments in this new type of theatre: “They will be treated as objects and as part of the set. Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into qualities and vibrations of absolutely new sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not possess and which require the revival of ancient and forgotten instruments or the invention of new ones. Research is also required, apart from music, into instruments and appliances which, based upon special combinations or new alloys of metal, can attain a new range and compass, producing sounds or noises that are unbearably piercing”. [Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre and Its Double”, translated from the French by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc., original edition: “Le Théâtre et son double”, 1938].

The popularisation of immersive technologies gave rise to a promise of new forms of sensual audiovisual work perception. In the area of sound, that promise concerns i.a. related spatial perception options. After years of loudspeaker systems – such as stereo or surround sound – the reception of audio compositions in ways resembling the natural hearing process has become taxing for numerous recipients, and troublesome for authors used to established production methods. Shortage of standardisation, poor availability of playback equipment, a limited selection of valuable productions – all are symptoms of a very early development stage in the area. Concurrently, all these difficulties mean that contemporary creators can enjoy considerable freedom and capacity in seeking new forms of expression. The abandonment of traditional models stemming from screen forms allows an untethered reach for the unknown, and an exploration of the sensory-motoric loop of experiencing sound. Virtual environments feature specific limitations associated with state-of-the-art technology capacities, as proven in particular by attempts to mimic reality – yet already today, they allow a process of creating worlds based on completely arbitrary sets of rules, owing to which artists can implement the vision proposed by Artaud by developing assorted objects simultaneously forming part of virtual sets – and musical instruments performers or participants of experiences can play in ensembles.

The presentation will showcase directions of activities organised in assorted sound-related disciplines in virtual environments, all based on the artist’s practical experience in areas of immersive documentaries, the audio layer in VR 6DoF experiences, and performances involving VRMIs (Virtual Reality Music Instruments).

Prehistories of VR. Cinema, literature, art

1.12.2020

Matylda Szewczyk on her lecture:

Similarly to practically any state-of-the-art medium, Virtual Reality has its own prehistory, rooted in a past recent or distant, depending on the person attempting to reconstruct it. The most radical researchers, such as German art historian Oliver Grau, have placed early virtual space projects in antiquity. Yet the “VR prehistory” I would like to ponder mainly concerns the 1980s and 1990s. While various appliances allowing Virtual Reality to be experienced had already existed in those days and intense works were in progress to develop others, their availability was disproportionately limited in comparison with the interest triggered by VR in the community of literature and cinema authors, artists and culture scholars.

Why had VR proven to be so significant in terms of philosophy and cultural sciences, even before we genuinely began using it? What kind of fears and hopes had Virtual Reality triggered in times of its actual prehistory? Which of these forecasts may prove essential in an era of actual VR realisations becoming relatively broadly accessible to regular media users – and which will remain nothing but a sign of their times, not that distant yet completely different to the age we call our own?

In my lecture, I will discuss imaginings and propositions of problematising VR through novels, films, and art and theoretical works created in times when Virtual Reality had been no more than a visionary perspective. Analysed works will include i.a. William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels; and films from the “summer of digital paranoia”, to reference a phrase coined by cinema researcher D.N. Rodowick for the 1999 season, when “Matrix” by the Wachowski siblings, David Cronenberg’s “eXistenZ” and Josef Rusnak’s “The Thirteenth Floor” opened in cinemas. We will also reflect on why – as Jaron Lanier claimed in 1993 – the phrase “Virtual Reality” carries a type of “magical power” within, and what that “power” could then (and still can) involve.