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I’ve been thinking about what’s the relationship between the exercises and the subject of ‘computational art & witnessing’. And here’s some thoughts.

Keywords: Contact, Border, Distance

If you contacted the object/target by yourself, if you were being inside, being part of the environment - does it mean that what you perceived was absolutely real, what you witnessed was absolutely objective, what you said you’ve witness was the fact? Is there any possibility that as you were at the border of self and the other, your physiological perception affected your subjective interpretation of what happened in the environment? On the contrary, if you were at a distance from the event, you didn’t contact it through yourself, instead you contacted it through a medium (like see it from a camera, without any bodily perception, there’s only visual awareness) - would it be a bit more objective, or saying more close to the fact?

So the controversy point lies on the medium media. Through what media can we see infinitely close to the fact, the reality? - Can Virtual reality technology do this job?


+ Rationality of VR - Realism and Realness

In Instrumental Vision (2013), Rose Woodcock discussed the realness of VR, “Virtual imaging technology is thus well fashioned as a fine tool for the creation, not of pictorial illusionistic space, but three-dimensional, corporeal "actual" space.” While two-dimensional images (paintings or photographs) depict the mimetic realism by elaborately representing the pictorial perception of light and texture (the optical relationship), the three-dimensional VR world has its ‘actual’ space and lighting, so there’s the realness of the corporeal relationship between objects in that world.

Rose also mentioned that in the VR world, there’s no real time and space (factors outside and beyond immediate, temporal perception), and as an artificial, constructed reality, it has no immanent “history” and on “future”, which means it can be turned off at any time. However, it also means that it can be turned on at any time, for any times - which shows its advantage in projects like Forensic Architecture’s Killing in Umm al-Hiran. (Like their other investigate-oriented projects, they reconstructed the history - the specific space and time where and when the incident happened. By observing the artificial history from different angles, via multiple approaches, for many times, it became possible to reveal the hidden truth of the immediate “real” history.)

+ Controversy of VR - Trust of Artefact

“The line between testimony and representation is blurring. Although on the one hand we see everything almost live and unedited, on the other the narratives that emerge are heavily mediated. There’s a distinction (and impasse) between what we see and what we can say about what we’ve seen.“

As Nishat Awan argued in “Digital Narrative and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance”, even between what we directly see and what we say, there’s a distinction. Not to mention the reconstructed virtual reality. I reckon there’s always some doubt to the paradox between its mediation and its realness. Also as we discussed in the lecture, it seems like there’s always a destiny for VR technologies that people can’t help to associate it with game, which against the reliability of digital witnessing. However, as points raised in the discussion, this issue might be caused by the difference of the attitude, and how many power and responsibility the viewer has - if one see it with a negative attitude, believing that she/he couldn’t do much to affect the specific event/history/future, she/he might not take the witnessing seriously.

# Term1_9

Responding to Computational Art and Digital Witnessing

Awan, N., 2016. Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance. GeoHumanities 2, 311–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1234940

Woodcock, R., 2013. Instrumental vision. Carnal knowledge : towards a new materialism through the arts 171–184.

Forensic Architecture | Goldsmiths [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://www.forensic-architecture.org/ (accessed 4.4.19).

Reference

Killing in Umm al-Hiran Exhibited in Tate Britain

Click to watch the video in Vimeo

Another VR witnessing project "Clouds over Sidra" we discussed in the lecture