Virtual Reality Theater as Intertextual Practice
Immersion and interactivity are two the most important
issues surrounding virtual reality. I am interested in the impact of the
immersive image paradigm on contemporary media culture and the meaning of this
new paradigm from the perspective of media evolution. My work is also concerned
with the applicability of virtual reality as a medium for documenting
historical events. As a practice of this academic investigation, I will discuss
the relationship between the theater stage and virtual reality.
The relationship between the theater and the space
embodied by virtual reality has been dealt with as an important topic from the
very beginning of the medium’s history. Early virtual reality experiments are
characterized by a reconnection of the Cartesian world and self, and the matter
and ego, immersing the self into the connected virtual world, rather than
expressing the outside world. This is partly due to the fact that the
technology of the time was not able to
embody contemporary time and space, but more importantly, it has to do with the
theoretical foundations of virtual reality.
Visual culture research theories
that influenced virtual reality in the late 80s and early 90s include expanded
cinema theories, intermedia studies, and cybernetics. Jaron Lanner, who coined
the term virtual reality, called virtual reality theater in the mind.
“Virtual reality is all about illusion. It’s about
computer graphics in the theater of the mind. It’s about the use of technology
to convince yourself you’re in another reality....Virtual Reality is where the
computer disappears and you become the ghost in the machine. . . . The computer
retreats behind the scenes and becomes invisible.”
In addition, the early virtual reality experiments
took an abstract form rather than representing the phenomenological space of
the world, partly due to the technical limitations of digital media, which
could not reproduce the outer world realistically. In the pre-Renaissance period, the image embodied by
the painting was closer to the symbolic representation of the spiritual
existence of objects than to the illusory representation of objects. At that
time, painters painted the image of the world seen by the inner eye, not
through their physical eyes. This tendency, however, changed following the discovery of perspective and the three-dimensional space can be
projected into the two dimensional space. In 1988 Mary Laure Ryan saw that the invention of perspective resulted in the viewer's
virtual body becoming immersed into the pictures in the canvas.
The technological development of computers and camera
equipment has enabled the viewer to feel his / her distinct sense of presence
in a space embodied by virtual reality. This situation is similar to the change
in painting after the Renaissance where the viewer became immersed in the
painting space through perspective. The viewer sees the illusory representation
of things through virtual reality, and at the same time the viewer sees himself
immersed in the phenomenological space.
This work is a Placeholder
by Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland. In this work, two participants swim in a
primitive natural space through Head Mount Display (HMD) and hand sensors within
a space of 10 feet each. Laurel described virtual reality as a spiritual space,
a space like a space in Dionysus festival or a primitive tribe ritual. In
Laurel’s doctoral thesis on virtual reality “Computers as Theatre ”,
she recognized the virtual reality as a medium to deepen the bond between the
subject and the natural world.
The revolutionary part of Char Davies' 1994 work,
osmose, is that unlike most virtual reality, which uses the hmd alone to build the user interface, osmose is immersed with more parts of the
body, even marking the immersantts breath. In the work, the immersant swims in the
primitive natural world with hmd and a motion capture vest equipped with breath
and balance sensors.
The last VR Theater work I will introduce is Mark
Leanny's digital scenography. The term VR theater was coined first in the
process of describing a work utilizing virtual reality as a digital scenography
for the theater. The Adding Machine, performed in 1995, was the first
theatrical performance to use VR. It was hard to see it as the ultimate virtual
reality in that virtual reality played only a subsidiary role in relation to
traditional theater. The space where actors performed was real time space, and
the digital scenography was virtual space.
Since the late nineties, UK research institutes have
undertaken projects that reproduce ancient theater buildings based on
historical and archaeological studies through 3d modeling for theater history
research.
Warwick University's 3D Visualization Unit team,
through its history and archaeological studies, has for many years created an
accurate and sophisticated 3D reconstruction of ancient theater buildings such
as the Dionysos Theater in Greece and the Pompeii Theater in Rome.
As we have seen, the characteristics of 90s virtual
reality research projects are that they do not represent contemporary time, no
matter how realistic it is. In the last decade, the technology of virtual
reality has made it possible to express contemporary times with the development
of computer and video equipment. The fact that the technology of VR can
represent contemporary time has several implications.
First, the illusory representation of reality was the
ultimate goal of all historical media
and the immersive paradigm of virtual reality made the distance between
Mimesis and the viewer closer than any other media that existed in history. For
this reason, I
discussed at my Ph. D thesis the
difference between the immersive paradigm and the existing semantic
representation of traditional media from the media evolutionary point of view.
Second, there is no boundary between theater and
digital scenography in vr theater.
Practice by illusory representation of VR also can represent human characters.
This can be applied not only to theatrical practice but also to the content of
virtual reality that uses the theatrical form as a significant means of
storytelling.
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| It is a scene of a movie Prometheus. It is an important scene that I think that well explained the relationship between virtual reality and reality. as you can see their is layers between audiences and panorama (actuary the character in panorama was in the same space) |
Third, as virtual reality can realistically represent
contemporary time, the viewer transforms from the position of the existing
observer of abstract inner space to the position of the explorer who finds his
existence in the world. Virtual reality becomes a source of media, hence long -
standing intellectual discussion of Western philosophy between media and
theater can be applied. For this part of study, I explored studies of Mary
Laure Ryan, Oliver Grau, Samuel Weber, Jaron Lanier among others from my Ph. D
thesis.
Howard Rheingold, one of the earliest theorists of
virtual reality, saw that virtual reality can be a medium of learning and
mimesis of the reality that Aristotle discussed from Poetics because of the
nature of empathy that the medium has. The discussion of theater in the history
of the media dates back to the discussion of the concept of Aristotle and Plato
's theater. In theater, the meaning of the text is conveyed through on-stage
experience where the actor's acting is performed. In virtual reality where
there is no such presence of the frame, the text is constructed through the
phenomenological experience of space. The lexical meaning of the theater helps
to identify the experience of a phenomenological space of virtual reality
composed of sound and image.
Theater Noun
1 A building or outdoor area in which plays and other dramatic
performances are given.
1.1often the theater The activity or profession of acting in,
producing, directing, or writing plays.
1.2 A play or other activity or presentation considered in terms
of its dramaticquality.
1.3West Indian, North American A movie theater.
1.4 A room or hall for lectures, etc., with seats in tiers.
1.5 The area in which something happens.
1.6 as modifier Denoting weapons for use in a particular
region between tactical and strategic.
Samuel Weber sees the meaning of the theater in his
book ‘Theatricality as Medium’ as extending from the space where the dramatic
performance takes place to the space where the historical events take place.
According to him, the first "Theater of history" recorded by
electronic media was the gigantic mushroom figure of the Hiroshima atomic
bombing in 1948. Global disasters, recorded via digital media and viewed
through an online platform, play a role in the theater of traditional concepts.
If giving
a phenomenological experience of a historically significant place is the role
of virtual reality as a media today, experience of the place of global disaster
today through virtual reality has significance as a theater. Just as the early
works of virtual reality linked the Cartesian world with the self, virtual
reality as media connects the world as a realistic representation with the
self, phenomenologically.
Howard Rheingold, 1992, Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds, Simon & Schuster
Jaron Lanier, 2017, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Henry Holt and CoSteve Dixon, 2015, Digital Performance:
A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, The MIT Press
A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, The MIT Press
Oliver Grau, 2004, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, The MIT Press
Mary Laure Ryan, 2000, Narrative as Virtual Reality, The Johns Hopkins University Press
Samuel Weber, 2004, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012, Phenomenology of Perception, Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge.
I have explained in general terms how the phenomenological experience of VR has undergone a change by the media's technological development.
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