VR EXPERIMENTation
Test #3-Text disintegeration/assembly
Test #2 -Hexagon distortion
In experimenting with my VR animations, I used an English-language reading from the Audible audiobook “Collected Fictions,” [7} which contains “The Library of Babel.”
In addition to this exploration of VR & the physical experience of text, other themes and preoccupations arose as I manipulated the Borges text, working haphazardly with Three.js. The subtitle of the project was “The Confession of the Librarian,” and called up a number of associations: a) The confessional, in the Catholic sense; the literary confessional (the Librarian engages in a kind of end-of-life monologue with a scent of regret, moral accounting and memoir); and the forced confessions of authoritarian regimes.
(b) The ridicule of overblown academic-speak as cover for a cynical anti-intellectualism [5];
(c) The ways in which knowledge slips away, changes shape.
(d) How knowledge has begun to shape-shift into "content", a commercialized, low-brow version of the high-brow stuff Borges ridicules [5]. How this “content” is gaining acceptance as "knowledge".
(e) How an overwhelming amount of knowledge can be lost by virtue of its sheer inaccessibility.
Needless to say, I created a project too vast for my time constraints and expertise, ending up with fragments of what was a labor-intensive abstract animation, viewable on WebVR & Oculus.
However far short this project fell, I am satisfied with the experience i gained working with three.js. I remain interested in the questions and associations I’ve mentioned, and continue to experiment, as time permits. I’d also like to spend more time developing the visual style and elements of a final piece that could be controlled or manipulated, possibly, with a manipulated version of the recorded text, or live reading of the text.
RESEARCH & RESOURCES
1. “Embodied Comprehension of Stories: Interactions Between Language Regions and Modality-Specific Neural Systems.” Ho Ming Chow, Raymond Mar, Yisheng Xu, Allen Braun, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. September 2013.
2. “The 'Book Problem' and its neural correlates”. Phil Turner, AI & Society, August 2013.
3. “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences”. Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, Psychological Science. Aug 2009.
4. Cosco, Francesco & Garre, Carlos & Bruno, Fabio & Muzzupappa, Maurizio & Otaduy, Miguel. (2009). “Augmented Touch without Visual Obtrusion”. Science & Technology Proceedings - IEEE 2009 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009, ISMAR 2009.
5. Neurofiction.net Hannu Rajaniemi, Samuel Halliday
6. Humor and Borges. Rene De Costa, Wayne University Press, 2000.
7. Cy-Borges. Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter, eds. Associated University Presse, 2009.
8. Collected Fictions. Jorge Luis Borges, (trans. by Andrew Hurley). Penguin Books, Penguin Audio, 2010.
9. Three.js (Javascript Library for 3D/WebGL/VR), Mr.Doob (Ricardo Cabello). https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
10. Oculus Bridge (Utility to link Oculus to Web browser) https://github.com/Instrument/oculus-bridge
11. 3D Game Programming for Kids. Chris Strom; Famida Y. Rashid, ed. Pragmatic Programmers LLC, 2013.
“. . .I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable...”
Can VR induce an immersive experience of “depth reading” or “embodied comprehension”?
In working on “Fictioning,” I originally set out to learn how to work with web VR, (pre-A-Frame for browser VR).
Because I had some exposure to creating projects using Javascript, I wanted to build my VR project using Javascript and Javascript-compatible and enabling capabilities: The three.js Javascript library, WebGL, & OculusBridge, a utility to enable viewing of Oculus VR content on the web created in 2014 by Ben Purdy & Instrument. (I also transformed into hex code the full text of “Library at Babel” to use as a backdrop for animation experiments.)
But I was also very interested in investigating whether or not I might, in VR, experiment with some form of text that people could more fully experience and engage with (physically and viscerally, not only as a kind of internal speech).
This challenge hit me one day after a brief conversation with an acquaintance of mine—a developer who is highly self-aware and interested in the educational and metaphorical uses of technology for art projects. I was telling him about the experience I derive from reading a piece of fiction—especially a very dense text, such as War & Peace, for example.
I tried to express the sense I have of that textual density and the heightened density of experience I derive from it. I knew this person was not an intense reader, but I was still surprised to hear that he had never had such experience reading, not even with non-fiction, not even with, say, a compelling journalistic account of an interesting socio-technological issue or project.
I read academic articles on “embodied comprehension” of fiction [1] and implementation of haptics in augmented reality [4] to explore what I might use to simulate a physical experience of text, but it became clear from this research that I would need to shape my project around constraints of time and knowledge. Still, I wanted to combine my interest in VR with a physical, haptic or perceived-haptic (faked) experience of text in a story, somehow.
To do this, I chose to use an excerpt from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” which I thought would provide dense text, and dense potential meanings. (This text has been interpreted in numerous artworks, with some writers claiming that it describes the Internet itself, although I think that this claim greatly over-simplifies Borges’ work.)
