Challenging the Individual – Perceptual Con/Fusion in Virtual Reality

Immersion is a variously shaped and fragile state of mind that is easily lost due to sensual input that ´the “I” may experience as unfitting, disturbing, improper, alien, surprising, strange, unfamiliar, errant, etc. Sometimes, irritating triggers are incorporated into the design of the user experience of a VR-world. Sometimes they originate (un)intendedly in the real world and remind us of our divided corporal condition.

In this lecture, I will comment on a selection of alienating situations that I experienced in recent VR pieces. The transformative impetus of VR on our self-concept is mind-opening and encourages speculation on the ontology of the perceptive and/or ludic self and the supposedly formative influences of media on our cognitive or even behavioral capacities. I will trace these experiences back to a model of perception derived from the field of cognitive psychology and process philosophy. Once having established a preliminary inventory of the complex perceptual situation in VR, I will switch to practical considerations concerning VR conceptualization and writing: How can spatial and interactive experiences be translated into a linear reading setup? After a short deviation into the history of scriptwriting and its condensation into a conventional format, I will share aesthetic and formal solutions for scriptwriting in VR, found during a previsualization experiment for the interactive VR-Film “The True Film” (in development) performed at the Immersive Arts Space, ZHdK.

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Live-Stream: https://blog.zhdk.ch/immersivearts/live/