Entering the City – Embodied Perception and the Digital World.

In 1978 a team working at MIT[1] developed the first virtual tour of a city, Aspen, Colorado. The data was gathered from a moving vehicle which took photographs from four directions simultaneously. The resulting computer programme allowed both direction of travel and direction of viewpoint to be chosen during the virtual tour, the legacy of which can be seen in Google Street View[2] today. This project marked a shift in the way the world could be accessed and perceived. The digital age has since evolved to enable the connected explorer access to ever increasing volumes of photographs, digitally-enhanced images, interactive CGI landscapes within games, and Virtual Reality (VR) renditions of real spaces, all from the comfort of their own screens. Which raises some questions: how do we perceive the world through digital media and VR, and how does this relate to real world perception? Can gaming and VR experiences influence how we perceive real spaces?

The invention of the photograph, and perhaps more importantly, its mainstream popularity among the middle classes during the late nineteenth century, greatly influenced philosophical enquiries into how perception of the world was directed. In 1912 Henri Bergson declared that there are ‘two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing: the first implies that we move around the object. The second that we enter into it.’[3] He contrasted knowledge gained from the representation of the world in fragments, symbols and component parts, from which, he argued, only a spectre of the original can be evoked, to direct experience of the world around us. Direct experience, he states, generates an intuitive response in which the body, mind and world meet in sympathy with one another, producing knowledge that cannot be accessed through analytical thought and abstraction alone. He used the metaphor of a city to illustrate his ideas, stating that ‘were all the photographs of a town, taken from all possible points of view, to go on indefinitely completing one another, they would never be equivalent to the solid town in which we walk about.’[4]

Descartes_mind_and_body (Descartes) - Unknown, Public Domain

Arguably, exploring landscape through VR corresponds to the first way of knowing Bergson describes. In VR and gaming, no matter how realistically rendered or immersive in terms of active engagement (movements through, gaming within), perception of place is directed primarily through mediated, ocularcentric engagement. Physical engagement is similarly mediated via a control pad. As a result, perception of these environments is made up of component parts, with many sensory inputs missing. Knowledge gained through digital, VR and/or in-game exploration thus relies on a synthesis of data, and is reliant on artificial and ‘seemingly real entities that are not real’[5]. Thus, the authentic flow of physical, multi-sensual, experience as a perceptive input is excluded and warped. There is a disconnect in that the body is not in the world of VR. Even if the technology manages to include sensory details to ‘trick the mind’, the individual still knows, cognitively, that it is false.

The second way of knowing was explored further by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (1962). Merleau-Ponty argues that cognition is formed within the body before the mind, with the body reading the world around it from a position of being within it, so that ‘the perceived world and one’s own body are “two sides of a single act”’[6]. This involves a multi-sensory reading of the world, in which sensuality and thought are united within the perceptive process. His theories of embodied perception encourage a ‘plunging into the world’ that mirrors Bergson’s call to discard abstract thought and experience the environment intuitively – to enter the city instead of looking at photographs of it.

While Merleau-Ponty was publishing his theories of embodied perception, the effect of imagery and technological representations of the world were simultaneously creating a backlash among some thinkers. Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) critiques the ways in which photography, film and television - primarily occularcentric methods of perception - lead to passive, contemplative responses to the world around us, in which place is commodified and capitalism rules. This is a trend that has accelerated exponentially in the digital age: digital imagery, games and VR have become a currency, a cultural capital in themselves, promising realistic experiences and authentic depictions of landscapes and experience often beyond the physical reach of the individual. The term ‘plunge into’ can even be found in their advertising[7].

Debord’s response to the spectacle was to incite the reclamation of real spaces from the capitalist state by creating authentic situations and perceptions. His primary means of achieving this was to engage in a dérive: a drift through varied (usually urban) ambiences in a way that facilitates a multisensory reading of place - as a method of defamiliarizing spaces with which the individual may be habituated and facilitating the perception of the textures, feelings, behaviours and meanings that such a reading ignites. In this way, perhaps, Bergson’s ideal of entering into the object (the space) through sympathy and intuition can be achieved. The individual can perceive through all the senses, through the body, and connect with the landscape directly. Is embodied perception, then, the antithesis of the VR/gaming experience? 

While it might seem that these two ways of perceiving are in opposition, with one holding primacy over the other, this is not the case. Despite the temporal distance between the theories explored here and the current digital age, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty both hold the key to understanding how digital and embodied perception interact. Bergson’s theory of duration states we should stop thinking of ‘the self as made up of separate perceptions, memories and feelings and accept that our self is a continuous flux of interconnected processes, recognizing that “[t]here is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” and that “[n]o one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other” ’ (Fell, 2009: 15 quoting Bergson, 1999: 25)[8].

Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception and subjectivity take this flux further and state that perception is not only physical sensation, nor is it solely the interpretation of sensation. Instead, consciousness can be described as an active process that unites sensing and reasoning, feeling and thinking. Consciousness, the world, and the body are all intertwined, and experience of the world is rooted in bodily response – the senses experiencing situations spatially, temporally and physically. If cognition is situated within the corporality of the body and its environment, then prior/developing knowledge and perceptions influence physical engagement with the world in the moment, as much as the demands of the world itself. This heterogeneous reading of place then becomes an open system, a space for active negotiation and exchange between self and environment in which the self and the world’s spatial and temporal entireties are acknowledged.

Within a VR/gaming world, therefore, previous embodied perceptions collide with analytical understanding of the digital experience, potentially triggering physical responses, and certainly triggering behavioural and emotional ones. If you have experienced the sensation of falling in real life, then a VR ‘fall’ can command a physical and behavioural response, tapping into neural pathways laid down by embodied cognition.

And this isn’t a one-way street.

Digital experiences can also inform embodied perception of the real world. An extreme example of this can be seen in studies of gamers who then visit the landscapes depicted in games. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl [9] has gameplay based on moving through geographically accurate renditions of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone. Those familiar with the digital landscape of the game report heightened sensitivity, based on feelings of peril and vivid memory associations forged through their in-game experience, when exploring the real city of Pripyat[10]. They have ‘been there’ before, and therefore their embodied response contains the feelings and behaviours previously generated within the game, leading to an uncanny and often unnerving interaction with the real landscape.

Bolshakov, A. (2007) STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. [DVD] PC. Kiev: CSG Gameworld

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl PC Games Image 40/60 | GSC Game World | THQ Inc. | Action, FPP, Post Apocalypse, FPS, multiplayer, shooters | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl | Source

In this way we can see how the two ways of knowing that Bergson described during the age of photography are interwoven, evolving, and in flux in the digital age. They are applicable to both the real and digital cities we enter, endlessly negotiated and extending into one another. This can be used to our advantage: when planning a trip to a new place, viewing the route via Google Street View rather than the conventional satellite view before undertaking the journey can make it easier to navigate. The VR view will generate situated knowledge of place: comprising landmarks, contours and street signs as they will be perceived in real life later. Therefore, when we enter the city in real life, out digitally generated memories will guide us through it, contributing to, rather than detracting from, our embodied perception.

References

[1] Massachusetts Institute of Technology

[2] https://www.google.com/maps

[3] Bergson, H. (1998). The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Kensington Publishing Corp

[4] Bergson, H. (1998). The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Kensington Publishing Corp

[5] Harper, 2014

[6] Merleau-Ponty in Landes, D. (2013) The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary

[7] https://vironit.com/virtual-reality-game-development-plunge-into-another-world/

[8] Fell, E. (2009) ‘Beyond Bergson: the ontology of togetherness’ Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication. 1 (1), pp. 9-25

[9] https://www.stalker-game.com/

[10] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/14/in-the-zone-how-gamers-experience-the-real-chernobyl/