Perceiving Virtual Reality: Visuality in the 21st Century

Abstract

This thesis is about the Virtual Reality-Head Mounted Display (VR-HMD) as a model for contemporary constructions of vision. Vision is in this case not simply the faculty or state of being able to see, but an historical effect of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. As an observer, our ways of looking have been structured by power forces that make us a disciplined subject with a specific mode of visuality and subjectivity. This thesis addresses what specific modes of visuality and subjectivity can be observed in contemporary Western society by studying the VR-HMD as a model or as, what Jonathan Crary calls, a technique of the observer. In using a VR-HMD, the observer becomes an active agent who deconstructs habitual patterns and forges new ones to interact with the virtual environment. In this interaction, the sensation that the observer gets from the VR-HMD is multisensorially integrated. Similar understandings regarding visuality and subjectivity can also be found in today’s scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse. Therefore, this thesis argues that the VR-HMD functions as a contemporary technique of the observer. Understanding the VR-HMD as such a model shows that the body of the observer has attained a more explicit role over the course of time in the act of looking and that the body of today’s observer is disciplined differently: the body of the observer in the VR-HMD self-disciplines through the triggering of performance. Our self-image today does therefore revolve around our use of the performing extension of our body. The VR-HMD therefore shows that our agent self is in our lived mixed reality not limited to the physical body, but it has been extended through our interaction with digital technology.