Digital Media: Critical Perspectives (MC71075A) Justin Pickard

How does the condition of virtuality, as Hayles sees it,configure the relationship between information and materiality?

'The data's selection criteria were set and continuously refined by a natural neuralnetwork cultured from the cortical cells of a long-deceased cat, genetically predisposedand behaviourally conditioned to recognise images of death and pain. The only humanintervention required, when the images reached Beijing, was to select those mostappropriate to upload to other parasitic programs (…) which generated the phantompresence in near-Earth orbit of a so-called virtual satellite, whose principal output was theExecution Channel.' (MacLeod, 2007: 191)'[R]odents seem uncannily out of place in the sterile abstractions of computing.' (Harpoldand Philip, 2000: §7)

Mouse in Virtual Reality

Video footage: a mous

perched atop a styrofoam sphere, its head restrained by a harness. Abovethe rodent, a hemispherical mirror diffracts the light of a projector forward, onto a curved wall.Reconstituted, the projected image is that of a three-dimensional corridor, its surfaces and verticespicked out in stripes of blue and white. Reacting to the VE, the mouse scrambles forward, moving thetrackball. As the projected scene adjusts to the mouse's movements, the camera shakes slightly, drawing1

the viewer's attention to a bundle of illuminated wires at the shot's edge. (Princeton University, 2009)Part of an experiment by Princeton biologists, the purpose of the apparatus is to keep the rodentrelatively still, while recording the neural activity associated with environmental navigation; something which had proved impossible with a free-moving mouse. By substituting the physical environment with a virtual analogue, the scientists could guarantee the mouse's movements would not interrupt theirattempts at '

in vivo

whole-cell recordings' (Harvey et al., 2009). Initially, this appears as an inversion of 'immersive' virtual reality, in which various configurations of wearable computing (heads-up displays,datagloves) would somehow project the user into a different space: some kind of self-contained, self-sustaining virtual realm.Even if the precise mechanics are obscured, as a viewer of the video clip, it is possible toappreciate the Princeton assemblage as something approaching a totality. It seems plausible for thesimulated corridor to be brought to the subject, which remains resolutely

embodied

in the heart of theapparatus. From here, it's easy to cast aspersions on the hopelessly utopian predictions of cyber-immersion; the product of a flawed division of 'information and the body, spirit and matter' (Shields,2003: 79), which – faced with the peculiar technological/animal feedback of something like thePrinceton assemblage – struggles to find the place where the virtual ends, and reality resumes.In a conceptual vacuum left by the crumbling Cartesian binaries of mind/matter, Hayles (2001:69) proposes a re-evaluation of virtuality as a

condition of being

, in which 'material objects areinterpenetrated by information patterns', or – at the very least – perceived as being such. At a cursory reading, it is easier to identity these interpenetrations in the mechanics of the Princeton assemblagethan, say, the celebratory rhetoric of Nintendo's ill-fated experiment in consumer VR, as described by Boyer (2009: 29):

'Early press releases describe the system as “immersing players into their own privateuniverse”, going as far as labelling it “the first three-dimensional, virtual immersion, 32- bit video game system”. While many of these radical claims were likely an in-your-face

attempt to woo older gamers, this focus on the immersive properties of the system is alsopart of the larger association made between the Virtual Boy and virtual reality in order topush technical prowess to mature gamers.'

Here, the structural similarities between the Virtual Boy and the mouse-corridor apparatus have been all but obscured by cultural and discursive expectations. The transcendental framing of Nintendo'spromotional material diverts attention from the material configurations of the console; with 'theperceived primacy of information over materiality obscur[ing] the importance of the very infrastructuresthat make information valuable' (Hayles, 2001: 72). Approaching from the other direction, the Princetonassemblage's foregrounding of a five-inch long, non-human subject destabilises many of our coreassumptions about the virtual – introducing novel modes of scale and subjectivity, which monopolise ourattention - masking the (many) continuities with earlier manifestations of 'immersive' VR. With the mouse as a kernel at the heart of a much larger virtual system, the temptation would beto approach the Princeton assemblage as 'housing', rather than machine. Here, we can begin to sense aninteresting between two distinct approaches to the apparatus of virtual reality. Embedded within a farlarger system, the mouse – as we have already seen – is the subject of an engineered

architecture

of immersion. Nintendo's VR apparatus rejects the sedentary and the infrastructural for an approach whichforegrounds the primacy of the individual. Mimicking the form of personal electronic gadgetry andclothing, the Virtual Boy is a portable,

wearable

interface. As a mode of being, Hayles' conception of virtuality entails a fundamental refocusing of attentionon the material objects which co-constitute the virtual. As she argues, information 'must

always

beinstantiated in a medium, whether that medium is (…) the computer-generated topological maps used by the Human Genome Project, or the cathode ray tube that images the body disappearing into a goldenhaze when the

Star Trek

transporter locks onto it' (Hayles, 2001: 71) The abstraction of informationfrom a material base can only ever be a rhetorical act. So while immersive virtual technologies promisedusers the experience of their 'subjectivity (…) flowing into the space of the screen' (Hayles 2001: 92), thereality was far less impressive.3