Virtuality and the Mouse

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    1/8

    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 neural

    network cultured from the cortical cells of a long-deceased cat, genetically predisposed

    and behaviourally conditioned to recognise images of death and pain. The only human

    intervention required, when the images reached Beijing, was to select those most

    appropriate to upload to other parasitic programs () which generated the phantom

    presence in near-Earth orbit of a so-called virtual satellite, whose principal output was the

    Execution Channel.' (MacLeod, 2007: 191)

    '[R]odents seem uncannily out of place in the sterile abstractions of computing.' (Harpold

    and Philip, 2000: 7)

    Mouse in Virtual Reality

    Video footage: a mouse perched atop a styrofoam sphere, its head restrained by a harness. Above

    the 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 vertices

    picked out in stripes of blue and white. Reacting to the VE, the mouse scrambles forward, moving the

    trackball. As the projected scene adjusts to the mouse's movements, the camera shakes slightly, drawing

    1

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    2/8

    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 rodent

    relatively 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 their

    attempts 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 to

    appreciate the Princeton assemblage as something approaching a totality. It seems plausible for the

    simulated corridor to be brought to the subject, which remains resolutely embodiedin the heart of the

    apparatus. 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 the

    Princeton 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 are

    interpenetrated 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 assemblage

    than, 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 private

    universe, 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

    2

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    3/8

    attempt to woo older gamers, this focus on the immersive properties of the system is also

    part of the larger association made between the Virtual Boy and virtual reality in order to

    push 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's

    promotional material diverts attention from the material configurations of the console; with 'the

    perceived primacy of information over materiality obscur[ing] the importance of the very infrastructures

    that make information valuable' (Hayles, 2001: 72). Approaching from the other direction, the Princeton

    assemblage's foregrounding of a five-inch long, non-human subject destabilises many of our core

    assumptions about the virtual introducing novel modes of scale and subjectivity, which monopolise our

    attention - 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 be

    to approach the Princeton assemblage as 'housing', rather than machine. Here, we can begin to sense an

    interesting between two distinct approaches to the apparatus of virtual reality. Embedded within a far

    larger 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 which

    foregrounds the primacy of the individual. Mimicking the form of personal electronic gadgetry and

    clothing, the Virtual Boy is a portable, wearable interface.

    As a mode of being, Hayles' conception of virtuality entails a fundamental refocusing of attention

    on the material objects which co-constitute the virtual. As she argues, information 'must always be

    instantiated 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 golden

    haze when the Star Trek transporter locks onto it' (Hayles, 2001: 71) The abstraction of information

    from a material base can only ever be a rhetorical act. So while immersive virtual technologies promised

    users the experience of their 'subjectivity () flowing into the space of the screen' (Hayles 2001: 92), the

    reality was far less impressive.

    3

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    4/8

    Boyer (2009: 30) comments on Nintendo's neglect of the subject's body in their design of the

    Virtual Boy; questioning the efficacy of their decision to mimic the form of virtual reality's electronic

    prosthesis, but not its ability to achieve what Hayles (2001: 91) would have described as a 'reconfiguring

    [of] perceived body boundaries.' Playing games on the Virtual Boy, the console user in a peculiar

    parallel with the scientifically-mediated existence of the Princeton mouse would have to keep their

    head entirely still, 'eliminating those expected body movements () when the user becomes engrossed in

    the experience, such as leaning into curves during a racing game' (Boyer, 2009: 30).

    Both the Princeton assemblage and Nintendo's Virtual Boy represent technologies of immersion

    the former pursues it as a means of replicating scientific data that would otherwise be unobtainable,

    while the latter appears to regard it as a desirable end in its own right.

    Gibson (1984: 51) defined cyberspace as a 'consensualhallucination () a graphic representation

    of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.' Reading the interpenetrations of

    Haylesian virtuality as broadly contiguous with the original notions of cyberspace, we have to ask: is the

    mouse capable of consent? For virtuality to 'work', there must be a deliberate suspension of disbelief on

    the part of the subject. In order to participate, they must be consciousness of the artificiality of that in

    which they are participating. If these conditions are not fulfilled, the relationship between subject and

    environment cannot be considered 'virtual', and may as well be that of an engagement with top-level

    reality. This applies as much to humans as it does to rodents. Consider the the eponymous simulated

    world ofThe Matrix(1999): for the individual human subjects embedded within the simulation, their life

    is real - and to suggest otherwise would be laughable. Without any grasp of an outside context, they

    would be totally incapable of parsing their day-to-day experiences as a product of virtual reality.

    So it may be for the mouse less an autonomous, self-determining subject than an embodied

    symbol of scientific endeavour, which 'stands alongside the ubiquitous double helix as [an] icon (...) of

    the laboratory in modern Western culture' (Birke, 2003: 211). The point of the Princeton mouse is that

    the act of navigating the virtual corridor triggers the same neurological reaction as that of a physical

    4

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    5/8

    environment. If this is the assemblage's totality of meaning, then the actual mouse-as-animal can only be

    deprotagonised, stripped of agency, and recast as an purely instrumental 'part of the equipment of

    science () [moving] into the realm of data' (Birke, 2003: 217).

    For Lister et. al. (2009: 115), the allure of virtual reality is rooted in a cultural desire for the ability

    to pass 'through the surface of an image or picture [and] to enter the very space () depicted on the

    surface.' Built on a conception of human subjectivity that emerged in a specific cultural and historical

    context (namely, the European Enlightenment), this is hardly something we would be able to extend to

    the laboratory rodent constrained equally by the harness and its animal reactions to the visual stimuli

    of the image.

    The delineation between human desire and animal response may, however, be less clear-cut than

    initially assumed. In a recent study of long-tailed macaques (Steckenfinger & Ghanazfar, 2009), the

    monkeys' reactions to near-lifelike forms replicated the model of a comparable human aversion. Hailed

    as the manifestation of a phenomenon first defined by Japanese roboticist Mori (1970) as the 'uncanny

    valley' an interruption in the otherwise linear relationship between lifelike appearance and familiarity

    this study found that, given a choice, the monkeys preferred 'to look at unrealistic synthetic [macaque]

    faces and real faces more than () realistic synthetic faces.' Even lower-order primates, it seems, have a

    relatively well-developed ability to distinguish between different levels of visual fidelity when it comes

    down to identifying things that look like them. Regardless of whether or not this research could be

    applied to a mouse's perception of its 'virtual' environment, a door has been opened, complicating future

    attempts to separate human culture from the supposedly instinctive reactions of mice and primates.

    * * *

    5

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    6/8

    At this point, I'm rapidly running out of (a) time, and (b) mental coherence. So a brief summary of the

    kind of things that would otherwise have followed:

    If the mouse is incapable of distinguishing between actual and virtual in its experience of the Princeton

    experiment's simulated corridor, the 'virtuality' of the experience is displaced, to the subject of the

    biologists' prodding and probing, i.e. the mouse's neurology, where the corridor has some kind of

    peculiar, gestalt existence as a virtual entity. It's still founded on a (biological/neurological) material

    base, as the point of the experiment is that this is physically measurable - so there's no real need to fall

    back into the gravitational pull of the Cartesian dichotomies demolished by Hayles. Maybe include

    something about the renaissance concepts of memory gardens/memory palaces as a curiously spatial

    mnemonic.

    Then segue into the conclusion, returning to Hayles' definition of virtuality, and breaking down the

    two examples in terms of material objects (screen, projector, trackball, headset, control pad) and

    information patterns (Nintendo games/virtual corridor/rodent qualia). Although everything conspires

    to foreground the differences between the two examples, they are in fact very similar the Virtual Boy

    is the Princeton assemblage with the sense of scale shifted down, toward the horizon of the body.

    Finally, we snap back to the MacLeod quote from the beginning. Science fiction as a literature of

    virtuality. There's something quite sinister/uncanny about the initial video clip, with the preferred

    subtitle: Mouse in Virtual Reality. Permeable membranes, entanglement, interaction. Fears of

    mutation, of emergence. Intelligent media from another route altogether.

    For Hayles (2001: 92), while the precise form of this final synthesis of material objects and

    information patterns remains unfixed, 'it seems clear that the virtual subject will in some sense be a

    cyborg.'

    * * *

    6

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    7/8

    Bibliography

    Birke, L., 2003. Whoor Whatare the Rats (and Mice) in the Laboratory? Society and Animals, 11 (3),

    207-224.

    Boyer, S., 2009. A Virtual Failure: Evaluating the Success of Nintendo's Virtual Boy. The Velvet Light

    Trap, 64, 23-33.

    Doel, M.A. and Clarke, D.B., 1999. Virtual worlds: simulation, suppletion, s(ed)uction and simulacra. In:

    Crang, M., Crang, P., and May, J., eds. Virtual Geographies: Bodies, space and relations. London:

    Routledge, 261-283.

    Gibson, W., 1984.Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.

    Harpold, T. and Philip, K., 2000. Of Bugs and Rats: Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor, and the Fantasy-

    Spaces of Informational Globalization. Postmodern Culture, 11 (1). Available from:

    http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v011/11.1harpold.html [Accessed 7 November 2009].

    Harvey, C., Collman, F., Dombeck D., and Tank, D., 2009. Intracellular dynamics of hippocampal place

    cells during virtual navigation.Nature, 461, 941-946.

    Hayles, K., 2001. The Condition of Virtuality. In: Lunenfeld, P., ed. The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge,

    MA: MIT Press, 68-94.

    Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I. and Kelly, K., 2009. New Media: A Critical Introduction.

    2nd ed. Oxford: Routlege.

    MacLeod, K., 2007. The Execution Channel. London: Orbit.

    7

  • 8/14/2019 Virtuality and the Mouse

    8/8

    Mori, M., 1970. Bukimi no tani [The uncanny valley].Energy, 7 (4), 33-35.

    Princeton University, 2009. Mouse in Virtual Reality. New Jersey, USA: New Scientist. Available from:

    www.newscientist.com/articlevideo/mg20427304.900/44892629001 [Accessed 5 November 2009]

    Steckenfinger, S. and Ghazanfar, A., 2009. Monkey visual behaviour falls into the uncanny valley.

    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (43), 18362-18366.

    The Matrix, 1999. Film. Directed by Larry & Andy Wachowski. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.

    8