Title: The Real and Unreal Locality of Exhibition in Tech Trends （《技术泛化下展览位置性的虚与实》）
Date of publication: March, 2018; Author: Ruixuan Li; Media: ARTCO China（《典藏·今艺术》）
Selected and Translated Text:
Unlike earlier media, such as photography or video, today’s new media breaks the barriers of time with the prowess of its interactive features and undoubtedly brings people closer together at the network level. In the interactive VR animation, VVVR, when a user speaks in different tones to his / her meditation partner, the avatar will spit out a string of geometric figures that fly at the partner. This work creates a very intimate space for the pair of participants, and the interaction between the two is real-time and exclusive. At the same time, the audience has become a co-creator to a certain extent, creating new personalized contents in a scene constructed by the artist.
However, the users’ increasing closeness is likely gained at the expense of their communication in the physical world. The most recent change in human-machine relationship in our society may have occurred in the past decade: with the rise of social networks, people are giving up face-to-face communication and becoming isolated. “The longest distance in the world is that we sit together, but you are playing with your phone.” This 2014 Chinese buzzphrase has become a classic mockery of smartphone society. Thus, would the future popularity of VR and AR affect our daily life Although this is still a difficult question, in July 2016, there were news reports of Pokémon Go players climbing walls and breaking into private property, or accidentally falling into the river, while trying to capture rare Pokémons. In those incidents, non-regulated technology was released in the market and became a sudden, contagious “cult.” The users’ spiritual world has been stripped off from reality: they open their hearts to the fictional community, but ignore their own corporeal safety. The hidden dangers of
Pokémon Go seem to confirm a major concern in the Human-Computer Interaction discipline: VR and AR devices are likely to bring us into a state of “disembodiment.” It is worth noting that the “rift” in the name “Oculus Rift” means to “split” and “break.” We need to split ourselves from reality before being immersed into the programmed experience. Perhaps communication and miscommunication have always been symbiotic, and the new technology only makes this contrast clearer.
This sense of disembodiment is also evident in the interaction between audience and artwork. Wearing a VR helmet, in the work Phantom (2015), the audience sees the surrounding nature through an interface, but when they are about to step out of a ring drawn around them on the ground, the “leaves” in their field of vision immediately become a visual obstacle, a program setting creating a “barrier set by the devil.” Although there are no actual structures around them, most viewers do not leave the ring. The artist embeds a strong subjective mindset in his work, manipulating the audience to appreciate a small landscape from a preset angle. In fact, this visual presentation is very similar to the first-person perspective in sandbox games. Even though players have great freedom of exploration in the game, they cannot jump out of the creator’s programming. Producers leverage coding “tricks” to dominate users’ choices and always occupy an absolute God’s perspective.
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