VISION CULTURE

Information Management and the Cultural Assimilation of VR

Julian Bleecker Afterimage, October 1992

There is no doubt that the process of visualization has been going through radical changes in the last decade. Where once technologies such as photography and cinema determined what it meant to “see” an image, now imaging technologies such as computer-generated and -enhanced animation, virtual reality (VR), infra-red sensing, satellite imaging, telepresence etc., are significantly altering the nature of imaging, of “seeing,” and of observing. These technologies are more than just chapters in the continuing development of high-tech research and production structures. They represent an important process of organizing knowledge across political and cultural sites in society, including the military, industry, the media apparatus, and consumer culture.

If we are to understand VR and other significant imaging technologies as involving the application and organization of new bodies of knowledge, it is necessary to examine historically relevant paradigms of vision and representation; that is, it is important to note the similarities and differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of physiological vision and emerging late twentieth-century forms of visual representation. My purpose in this paper is to develop a fuller sense of where VR finds its cultural, aesthetic, and representational antecedents.

In his study of the camera obscura in La dioptrique (1637), Rene Descartes makes a significant break with previous studies of this optical apparatus. While an analogy between the processes of the human eye and the camera obscura was often made by earlier observers, Descartes demonstrates a more pragmatic connection by “taking the dead eye of a newly dead person (or failing that, the eye of an ox or some other large animal)” and using it as a lens for the camera obscura.¹ As Jonathan Crary indicates, the significance of this hypothetical experiment cannot be underestimated:

By this radical disjunction of eye from observer and its installation in this formal apparatus of objective representation, the dead, perhaps even bovine eye undergoes a kind of apotheosis and rises to an incorporeal status.²

By this “radical” act, a distinctly organic and mortal object—the human eye—is decisively abstracted from the physical body and associated solely with vision and the process of seeing. This conceptual abstraction provides the foundation for a set of assumptions and a body of knowledge that make possible an entirely new model of seeing, representation, and illusion, whether mechanical, computer-generated, or neural-physiological. The experiments of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the physiological nature of color and Jan Evangelista Purkinje’s experiments with afterimages are two examples of the paradigm shift from vision understood as an objective act to vision that is understood as a process reliant on a physiological base of knowledge.

The science of physiological vision resulted, among other things, in the identification of “persistence of vision,” an effect first identified in the experiments of Purkinje and Goethe, among others, and suggested directly by the English-Swiss physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824.³ The principle established by these experiments is that vision physiology is temporal. That is, the exposure of the retina to images results in certain after effects, which are more or less pronounced depending upon specific conditions. This principle allowed for the development of such entertainment devices as the phenakistiscope, zootrope, thaumatrope, and stereoscope.

Considering the initial similarities between VR and the stereoscope—for example, their production of illusory 3-D effects, and their marketing as entertainment devices—the stereoscope is a particularly useful technology to analyze and contrast with VR in order to develop a historically specific description of the latter. I do not wish to suggest that the stereoscope is the technical precursor of VR. On the contrary; I wish to present an alternative to a deterministic view of technology that holds that one technology directly leads to another without being influenced by existing conditions of cultural production and political requirements.

The original development of the stereoscope was a result of scientific research. The phenomenon of binocular disparity—the problem that we see one coherent visual field composed somehow by two disparate points of view, one for each eye—was identified during the period of increasing scientific study of human physiology in general and vision physiology in particular around 1820–1840.

The British scientist Charles Wheatstone decided to explore the binocular phenomenon by devising an apparatus that could present two disparate images in a controlled manner. His apparatus allowed for the presentation of separate images to each eye and for the control of angles of presentation and focus distance. In this way the device reproduces the anatomical positioning of the eyes and the way they reference an image in space. By mimicking the physiological effect of ocular convergence Wheatstone’s stereoscope was designed to facilitate further study of the nature of binocular disparity. However, the mechanical reproduction of the physiological account of binocular disparity also suggests a desire to control the phenomenon. The Wheatstone stereoscope thus raises the problem of the relationship between humans (the vision system) and machines (the stereoscope).

In the late twentieth century other technoscientific concerns have come to the fore. Unlike the stereoscope, VR technology only peripherally raises issues of the workings of vision physiology. Instead, it is caught up with questions of how information is accessed, managed, and represented in the computer age. VR is being developed as a tool to re-present and manage data in a world where levels of information have increased exponentially. Tools such as VR are designed to increase productivity in the processing of this vast quantity of data.

Thus, the issues that VR raises have more to do with vision culture than with vision physiology. What made the introduction of the stereoscope during the nineteenth century significant was, as Crary says, that “no other form of representation in the nineteenth century has so conflated the real with the optical.”⁴ In the twentieth century, however, it is understood, even assumed, that the visual reality of the image is the product of optical manipulation via high speed imaging and graphics computer workstations. Our culture is centered on the production, distribution, and control of images. Thus, the military, corporate, and consumer-level proliferation of electronic imagemaking technologies (film and digital cameras, suitcase-sized satellite television broadcast systems, bomb-cams, desktop image construction and alteration, camcorders, fax machines, on-site television studio trucks, video telephones) has created a cultural environment into which VR is easily assimilable.

Although VR makes use of binocular vision the visual effect it produces is most dependent on creating the illusion of movement and the ability to interact with objects. For example, the ability to “fly” in VR requires the smooth transition of one’s point of view from one place to another. By relying on our common learned experience of what it looks and sounds like to move from place to place illusions of depth and space are evoked.

These illusions are further enhanced by using large scuba mask-style goggles (sometimes called by the VPL tradename, “EyePhones”) that block off the outside world. In this way the subject’s attention is focused solely on the world displayed on tiny television screens inside the goggles. Electronic tracking of the subject’s head movements—up, down, left, and right—allows the VR system to adjust the scene projected inside the goggles. When the subject looks up or moves their body to a new position, the scene inside the goggles adjusts to show the new point of view. All of these effects are designed to evoke a sense of movements that are performed in the real world.

At the same time the effects of movement, effacement, and scene adjustment allow for more than natural interactions. For example, movement can be made extreme and rapid, effacement can be used to block out spurious distractions or to control the presentation of information, points of view can be made omniscient or subatomic. These manipulations can endow the VR user with superhuman abilities.

Thus VR’s role in developing technoscientific studies in human-computer interaction and communication, video and war game simulation techniques, advanced visualization technologies, and human-factors studies suggest that its social, cultural, and political implications are fundamentally different from those of vision physiology in the nineteenth century. VR is not being used by researchers to discover or explore fundamental physiological processes, but rather to enhance previously known psychological and physiological limits. Consider that the military, the innovators of viable VR, define it specifically as an advanced human-machine interface technology and not as a device to study a new physiological paradigm. In this respect, the only similarity between the stereoscope and VR is that they both rely upon the popularization of technoscientific bodies of knowledge, one being vision physiology and the other computer-based real-time interaction.

The new paradigm of human-machine interface design is best described by the catch phrase, “user friendly.” Relying on the discourse of user-friendliness, researchers want to divorce VR from the tradition of clunky, obscure, and cumbersome computer systems. By tapping into the cognitive processes of the subject—creating a “high bandwidth to the brain”—the VR mechanism becomes “natural” and “intuitive.”⁵

It has been important to create a streamlined, unrestrictive appearance for the VR hardware. The physical apparatus of the VR system must be functional, easy to use, fashionable, lightweight, and as uncumbersome and unmechanical as possible. Even the trade names for VR components ring familiar bells, as convoluted as the associations may be: EyePhones, DataGlove, CyberFace, BodyElectric, DataSuit include everyday imagery—phones, gloves, data, faces, bodies, eyes, suits. In contrast, the names of nineteenth-century devices like the thaumotrope, stereoscope, phenakistiscope, or zootrope are decidedly technoscientific without incorporating any familiar imagery.

It is important to consider VR in relation to the larger social, cultural, political and economic framework of corporate sponsorship of visualization technologies. Multinational corporations such as Kodak, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Apple Computer are currently responsible for the development of some of the most advanced imaging technologies. It is this technoscience apparatus that is endowed with the power to manufacture and control the “space” of VR, and to build the technologies that will transport us there. But the corporate world, like the military, is primarily concerned with advanced information handling technologies not as a liberatory media, but as a means to increase productivity.

The relations between new imagemaking technologies and the structures of power and influence in the technoscience industry are clearly manifest in the ways that the industry markets itself and its products to the public. Consider the rhetoric that presents VR as a socially redeeming technology. For example, on its display posters seen almost exclusively by military and industry representatives, the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Lab in Seattle, Washington prominently asserted its intent to apply VR to “Recover Lost Americans.” The fact that the slogan changed from “Lost Americans” to “Lost World Citizens” at the same time as the Persian Gulf War attests to the very political nature of an industry seeking industrial and governmental support. I do not mean to imply that the Persian Gulf War “New World Order” rhetoric was the only reason the slogan changed—indeed the notion of “world unity” may be operating here. Either way the rhetorical intent is to promote a sense of liberation from some ambiguous mortal and agonizing drudgery.

The possibility of inhabiting an electronic space with human consciousness marks an important shift in the sorts of power we endow our bodies with and in the kinds of machines we construct. It has now become a cultural necessity to understand our bodies, our egocentricism, as able to exist within machines. Indeed it seems as though the only way VR or any other imaging technologies can exist is if, culturally, we are comfortable with the notion of occupying artificially-derived image spaces.

Thus, the “race to inhabit cyberspace,” that nether-world of computer processes and data, while made possible by technological advances like VR also involves a process of popularization and cultural assimilation.⁶ We can see the cultural assimilation of VR principles at work in fiction, video games, and cinema. The “VR movie” The Lawnmower Man (1992) by Brett Leonard, is instructive in this regard.

Although the movie was not much of a critical success, the story it tells about people (and, it is interesting to note, primates) inhabiting a VR-manufactured cyberspace is suggestive and compelling. While the narrative addresses the misuse of cyberspace by corporate interests the more important content of the film lies in its elaboration of the distinction between “real” space and cyberspace. The boundary is blurry and porous, but the movie makes it clear which space offers the most power to those who struggle to control it.

Jobe, the “lawnmower man,” seems content with his small, uncomplicated place in society as the neighborhood gardener. He is taken from the natural world to the technological world of cyberspace in an interesting reversal of the literary tradition in which the protagonist seeks fulfillment and psychic power by retreating to the natural, pastoral world. In cyberspace, Jobe reflects only briefly on his previous simple yet earnest commitment to the natural ecology of his lawn work. Having gained seemingly god-like powers in cyberspace, his interest in the natural world is, at best, peripheral and, at worst, destructive.

Whereas originally digital imaging was a tool for image analysis, what has come to the fore in our vision culture is a new form of visual representation crafted by image designers from Madison Avenue to Soho to the Pentagon.⁷ Examples of these designed image spaces abound. Most applications of visualization and imaging technologies “see things” that are otherwise undetectable—for example, satellite imaging, CAT scans and X-Rays, infrared images, and molecular modelling. The images produced by these technologies represent a dissected and recontextualized space, cutting through otherwise opaque surfaces to render what lies beneath. Whether via Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) technology, where fog and night are obliterated, or CAT scans, where image “slices” are cut through the human brain in precise succession, image dissection is used more and more frequently to control what and how we see.

Perception with these technologies becomes truly extra-sensory. VR and other imaging technologies are representative of a vision culture and a vision paradigm that involves effortless and endless mutability—as in the Macintosh paradigm of cut and paste information control. The proliferation of “direct to digital” imaging systems further enforces this paradigm of effortless imagemaking. No more proofs from negatives or darkroom chemical processes are necessary. Kodak’s Professional Digital Camera System (DCS) provides:

Portable, fully digital, full color, high resolution imaging at the touch of a button… No more environmentally hazardous chemical processes. Once an image has been captured it is available for immediate upload to your computer system, or worldwide transmission through the use of an optional modem.⁸

The purpose for creating new technological forms of imagemaking goes beyond the objective and benign analysis technoscience claims as its right. The privilege to obtain or create a particular point of view is tightly bound to political necessity. In this regard media critics have expressed concern for a paradigm of representation that VR researcher Jaron Lanier has called “post-symbolism.” According to Lanier, post-symbolism is an attribute of “a good shared virtual reality system.” Lanier continues:

In the long run what’s important about [virtual reality] is that it provides a new channel of communication between people, a post-symbolic world. It’s really not the physical world it’s serving as an alternate to, but the symbolic world… I coined the term “post-symbolic communication”… Post-symbolic communication is really simple… You can think about it as removing the middleman in the process of communication. You directly make up stuff that other people play with.⁹

[With post-symbolism] you can just directly make up the objective world instead of using symbols to refer to it. Then what you have is this possibility for a new adventure that’s as big as language. It would be a kind of alternate form of communication, which would not in any way replace language, but just exist side by side with it.¹⁰

However, the idea that one can simply invent a “new channel of communication” is directly contradicted by the culturally-derived nature of language. The suggestion that VR technology may provide a new language paradigm—a “post-symbolic world”—is indicative of the grandiose influence technologists suppose they have over our technoculture.

For example, we may infer from the sentence, “You directly make up stuff that other people play with,” that the metaphorical middleman in the communication process—the shared cultural references that make symbolic language possible—constitutes a hindrance to the process of communication itself.

Lanier’s VR-supported post-symbolism promises to enhance and control the creative process. However, it is unclear who or what this unnecessary middleman may be. The possibility of making up “the objective world instead of using symbols to refer to it” seems blithely oblivious of the extent to which the media are subject to manipulation in pursuit of consensus. David Levi-Strauss addresses Lanier’s proposal for a post-symbolic language in a commentary on the media during the Persian Gulf War:

Could it be that the increase in available information (and the speed of its transmission and storage) has caused a concomitant decline in our ability to deal with symbolic systems, making us vulnerable to the kind of pure propaganda we saw during Desert Storm? Is this the “post-symbolic” world that virtual reality producers say we have to look onward to?¹¹

Virtual Reality has thus become a metonym for the influential and hegemonic state of the information distribution apparatus.

VR provides the possibility of a vision that includes the ability to construct and interact in places previously unseen with the physiological, mortal eye, a “vision” beyond physicality not unlike the mystic’s crystal ball or the mind reader’s gaze.

Wim Wenders suggests in his film, Until the End of the World (1991) that the possibility of a project that penetrates the conscience with emerging imaging technologies may not be so far off. His cautionary tale reflects uneasily upon such possibilities, cautioning against technological exploits such as imaging intimate and primal states as dreams and the subconscious—although even the suggestion of these technologies is enticing. But the potential abuse by the military and intelligence communities is not the focus of Wenders’s caution, although the scientist in Wenders’s film constructing a “device” is in hiding from his previous employers and the government for this very reason. What we see are characters in a state of psychic bewilderment, nearly to the point of awe, from having their dreams imaged, recorded, and played back on demand in an eerily pixelated and impressionistic rendering. The cultural disparity Wenders portrays between the Western world, which is obsessed with constructing an imaging technology that will “see” the conscience, and the Australian Mombatu people, who leave when they understand that the technology will invade the place they hold as intimate, is a most profound suggestion of where such technologies will take us.

Notes

1. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 1, p. 166.
2. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 48.
3. Peter Mark Roget, “Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel When seen Through Vertical Apertures,” Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions, MDCCCXXV, pt. I (London: Nicol, 1825), pp. 131–40. Excerpted in Joseph and Barbara Anderson, “Motion Perception in Motion Pictures,” The Cinematic Apparatus, Stephen Heath and Teresa De Lauretis, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 76–95.
4. Crary, p. 124.
5. Meredith Bricken, “Virtual Worlds: No Interface to Design,” Cyberspace: First Steps, Michael Benedikt, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 366–67.
6. “Fun City MegaMedia,” Mondo 2000, no. 2.
7. Andy Darley, “Big Screen, Little Screen: the Archaeology of Technology,” Ten-8, vol. 2, no. 2 (Autumn, 1991), p. 86.
8. [Advertisement,] Computer Graphics World, May 1992, p. 81.
9. Timothy Druckrey, “Revenge of the Nerds,” Afterimage, 18, no. 10 (May 1991), pp. 5–9.
10. Stephen Porter, “Interview: Jaron Lanier,” Computer Graphics World, April 1992, p. 69.
11. David Levi-Strauss, “War After War,” (Re)Thinking Resistance, Nancy J. Peters, ed. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992), pp. 37–41.

There is no doubt that the process of visualization has been going through radical changes in the last decasde. WHere once technologies such as photography and cinema determiend what it meant to “see” an image, no imagine technologies such as computer-generated and -enhanced animation, firtual reality (VR), infra-red sensing, satellige imagine, telepresence etc., are significantly altering the nature of imaging, of “seeing,” and of observing. These technologies are more than just chapters in the continuing development of high-tech research and production structures. They represent an important process of organizing knowledge across political and cultural sites in society, including the military, industry, the media apparatus, and consumer culture.

It we are to understand VR and other significant imaging technologies as involving lhe application and organization of new bodies of knowledge, it is necessary to examine historically relevant paradigms of vision and representation; that is, It is important to note the similarities and differences between nineteenth· and twentieth-century understandings ol physiological vision and emerging late twentieth-century forms of visual representation. My purpose in this paper is to develop a fuller sense of where VR finds ils cultural, aesthetic, and reptesentational antecedents.

In his study of lhe camera obscura in La dioptrique (1637). Rene Descartes makes a significant break with previous studies of this optical apparatus. While an analogy between the pr000$ses of the human eye and the camera ot,scura was often made by ear[‘er observers. Descartes demonstrates a more pragmatic connection by ”taking the dead eye of a newly dead person (or faifing 1hat, the eye of an ox or some other large animal)” and u:sing it as a lens for the camera obsrura.1 As Jooalhan Crary indicates, the significance of this hypolhetical experiment cannot bo underestimated: By thisr adk;;ad!i sjunctiono f ey&f romo b$e-r,ear nd its instat1a1iionn t11i$ lorrnala pparatuso f Obfeetlvree, :i,esontatiotnhe, dead. pemaps evenb Ovlnee ye undergoesa klnd or apo1he0Saisn d ftses to an inoorporeaSl1 a1us,2 Sy this ‘“radical” act, a distinctfy organic and mortal object-lhe human eye-is decisively abstracted trom lhe physical body and associated solely wllh vision and the prooess ot seeing,. This conceptual abstraction provides the foundation lor a set of assumptions and a body of knowledge that make possible an entirely new model or seeing, tepresen1atlon, and Illusion, whethe( mechanical, computer-gonorated. or neural•physiological. The experiments ol Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the physiological nalu(e of color and Jan Evangeli$ta PuOOnje’s experiments with afterimages a(e two examples of the paradigm shift from vision understood as an objective act to vision that is understood as a process relian1 on a physiological base of knowledge. The science of physiological vision resulted, among other things, in lhe identification of persistence of vision, an effect first identified in tho experiments of Purkinje and Goethe, among others, and suggesled directly by the English·Swiss physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824.3 The principle established by these experiments is that vision physiology is temporal. That is, the exposure of the retina to images results in certain after effects. which are more or less pronounced depending upon specific conditions. This principle allowed for the development of such entertainment devices as the phenakistiscope. zootrope. thaumatrope. and stereoscope.

Considering the initial similarities between VR and the stereoscope-for ex.ample,t heir p,od1.1etioonf Illusory 3-0 effects, and their marketing as entertainment devices-1he stereoscope is a particularty useful technology to analyze and contrast with VR in O(der to develop a historically specific description of Jhe tatter. I do not wish to suggest that the stereoscope is the technical precursor of YR. On the contrary: I wish to present an alternative to a delermlnislic view of 1echno1ogy thal holds that one technology dlreclly leads to another without being influenoed by existing conditions of cultural production and polttloal requirements.

The original development of the stereoscope was a resutt of scientific research. The phenomenon of binocular disparity-the problem that we see ono coherent visual field composed somehow by twO disparate points of view, one for each eye-was identified during the period of increasing scientific study of human physiology in general and vision physiology in particular around 1820-1840. The British scientist Charles Wheatstone decided to explore the binocular phenomenon by devising an apparatus that could present two disparate images in a controlled manner. His apparatus allowed for the presentation of separate images to each eye and for the control of angles of presentation and focus distance. In this way the device reproduces the anatomical positioning of the eyes and the way they reference an image in space. By mimicking the physiological effect or ocular convergence Wheatstone’s stereoscope was designed to facilitate further study of the nature of binocular disparity. However, the mechanical reproduction of the physiological account of binocular disparity also suggests a desire to control the phenomenon. The Wheatstone stereosoope thus raises the problem of the relationship between humans (the vision system) and machines (Ille stereoscope). In the late twentieth c,entury other technosc-ientific concerns have come to the fore. Unlike the stereoscope. VR technology only peripherally raises issues of t.he workings of vision physiology. Instead, it is caught up with questions of how info(mation is accessed, managed, and represented in the compuler age. VR is being developed as