An essay I wrote about the violence of VR fantasies is about to appear in Isthisit Issue_03, and after telling you to consider pre-ordering a copy, if you’re into it, if you want, I thought I’d reconstitute it as a blog post, with a few notes at the bottom, see below. 

A Rupture of Self

text by me, Hannah Nussbaum

You’re caught somewhere between the corporeal world and a digital landscape that’s been coded up and rendered for you by a 3D animation studio called Masters of Pi. Your biometrics rely on your successes or failures in a set of immersive games, and the games are sponsored by brands that exist in limbo, somewhere between virtual entities, and non-virtual peddlers of terrestrial products that you actually eat and shit out in the non-virtual world. In this world, there are a cornucopia of ways to indulge your desires in hyperreal detail: you and your avatar are in a schizophrenic union, and the darkest bonne bouches of the internet are available to stream in the round. William Gibson probably already told us this story: the one where immersive digital experiences gamify life. Life becomes an imbricated video game with incredibly high stakes, and pleasure and leisure become the Purge, only harmless because its only a digital simulation. 

In Azeroth, the mythical setting in World of Warcraft, digital currency is currently worth more than Venezuela’s bolívar. Does that count as virtual reality? When digital trappings permeate real space, we’re rendered avatars even when we step outside of the network. A collision of wet and dry takes place – synthetic emulsifiers rub vegetal and digital together. When you’re virtually online, offline, are you still an avatar? Are you accountable? Does hiding-behind-your-avatar become the next tax loophole, honorable discharge, etcetera?  

Beth Coleman conducted extensive interviews with a virtual Cannibal, Gy. Gy is a French white male adult who participates in gynophagia sex play – that is, violent virtual sex-play that ends in (virtual) death and (virtual) cannibalism – in European Second Life. His tendencies and pleasures provoke speculative meta-ethics, ‘in terms of what may actually be done to another person (legally and morally).’ Cannibalism is allowed on the net, because what does it mean to virtually eat someone who is only a proxy of themselves? One can also assume that participation is consensual, although consent is literally never as simple as I brought myself here of my own volition. full stop. Regardless, a virtual representation of a taboo ritual becomes ethically irrelevant for existing legal infrastructure when its being simulated. This feels like a pure expression of the way in which virtual prosthesis still claims the status of a ghost limb, when it wants to. It’s just a game is sometimes true, sometimes just a violently convenient alibi, more and more literally a category error. When pores between the screen and ‘offline’ are more like portals, when do video games and interactions that were borne-digital slip into life? So GamerGate looms large in this conversation: on the net until it isn’t. The larger point here: as wet offline life rubs closer and closer to dry online life, at what point can you enact your cannibalistic fantasies on the net, and still continue to compartmentalize your wet and dry selves? We move towards a new sense of sensuous geography.That was my avatar, not me.   

Roy Ascott asks us to imagine three VRs: Virtual Reality, Vegetal Reality (biohacking and technological instruments that interface with DNA) and Validated Reality (‘common sense’). He asks us to beat our brains over what he calls a ‘Biophotonic Flux’ – to “imagine a technology of the mind that allows you to become immersed in a vast database of universal knowledge, one that reaches deep into the neuronal zones, cuts through the layers of inhibition laid down by centuries of cultural conditioning, religious prejudice, and political repression.” He’s fantasizing about a thick futurity – again that word imbrication: said of the scaly covering of reptiles and fishes, of leaf-buds, the involucre of Compositæ. Once ontologically disparate layers of digital, DNA, and ‘everyday sensory reality’ will fuse like scales on a fish in our hybrid horizon. What then will the avatar imply? A bio-hacked avatar in an immersive virtual setting practicing biophotonic cannibalism, for fun. When DNA enters the network, and neural technology interfaces with virtual reality, compartmentalizing our avatars from ourselves may be a rupture we can no longer afford – or one that leaves us indifferent, affectless, traumatized: ‘Whoever turns into a swan, or a thing, is left with their abject original being inside.’ 

1) read this article in Spike Magazine by Dean Kissick. He really nicely describes the space between avatar and self as “the horrendous clinch.” This got me thinking about the clinch narrowing as virtual technology becomes more salient. Like, at what point can you stop differentiating between yourself and your avatar, particularly when space between those two selves explodes when augmented reality enters and interacts with “real” life. Can your avatar act like an asshole, but you’re just, like, regular you? 

2) P. Brey asked questions about the ethics of Representation and Action in Virtual Reality in 1999 - interesting if you’re interested, obviously dated (but kind of cool for that reason) and topical to my writing. 

3) Why VR probably won’t be “the ultimate empathy machine” for woman - Excerpt from the Nation article which I think is very very good: 

There is a strong continuity between the physical and digital worlds. Nick Yee, a cyberpsychologist, refers to the bleeding-through of the physical into the digital—and vice versa—as the “Proteus effect.” An avatar’s appearance, he posits, influences how we behave when we don that digital body, just as a leather jacket may inspire a combative demeanor, or a polo shirt a prim one. According to Yee’s research, that affect in turn bleeds into our IRL personae.

Endnotes

Coleman, Beth. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, 2011. (Cambridge, MIT Press), pp. 82.

Roy Ascott, ‘Biophonic Flux,’ 2003, http://www.academia.edu/1081142/Biophotonic_Flux 

Ed Atkins, in an interview with Chisenhale Gallery, discussing his 2012 exhibition Us Dead Talk Love  -  http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/images/EAtkins_Interview.pdf