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A baptism in immersion
Scannable infrastructure, immersive content
E-portfolio is still under construction
Click to read Foreword
What is immersion?
Interesting quotes:
Immersion has become an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept. - A.McMahan
How do you know you are immersed in a game? There are lots of obvious signifiers: time passes unnoticed; you become unaware of events or people around you; your heart rate quickens in scary or exciting sections; you empathise with the characters - Keith Stuart
Commentry:
Do the changes in font in the adjacent paragraph bother you? If they do, it is breaking your immersion. Perhaps the opposite, it may seem more aesthetically pleasing and so draw your attention in. In either case, this form of change makes it harder to read the text without distraction, you may be constantly disrupted from the passivity of reading. The text may appear defamiliarising and in compaison to this grey body text more interesting. One view would suggest that the paragraph to the right is harder to traverse due to the distracting elements in its presentation. It may bear the semblance to the idea Espen Aarseth terms 'ergodic'. A word that draws its etymology to the Greek words for 'work' and 'way' (ergon, hodos) meaning that it takes 'nontrivial effort' to read the text. Hodos is the root of another word, hodological, used by Bollnow, Satre and Lewin to describe the psychology of our immersion within spaces.
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Immersion is the crux of the true addict. - A.S.N. Grantham
Immersion is a funny word, we know when we have been immersed in something but it is impossible to know you are immersed in something, at least if we are talking about mental immersion. Physical immersion is defined as "The action of immersing someone or something in a liquid." (OED). The meaning of immersed is to "Involve oneself deeply in a particular activity." (OED). It is also permittable to use the word in a variety of other situations; we can be immersed by cultures, media or technology. The ubiquity of things is what gives us the ability to suggest we are immersed because they surround and encapsulate us.
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Immersion is not something that makes us retract from the text back into our own minds, immersion is when our minds are in harmony with our perception allowing a free flow of information into the imagination. The mind forgets about the body that is receiving and creates a synthesis of processing and interpretation.
Why are we attracted to immersion?
Interesting quotes:
Often there is an aspiration to leave bodies behind. This part of leaving behind the supposedly fixed and situated identities of gender, race, ethnicity and sexualities to enter a free space of the imagination in which we can supposedly choose 'who to be' and 'how to be'. This is part of a postmodern dream that echoes, in significant ways, the Kantian shift from a realm of necessity to a realm of freedom - Victor Seidler
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Immersion is "the blocking out of the physical world" - M.L. Ryan citing F. Biocca
The book became fetishised as an icon of power and the Christian Church introduced a sense of bodily denial, or disavowal, of the (writer’s own) body. - John Wood
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Commentry:
The current climate of ambiguous identities, resistance to social constructs and increased notions of fluidity in 'being' has left large masses of the populace disenfranchised with their real, physical selves. Not only that, but this generation is struggling to come to terms with the very real, dirty and unloving existence that we must endure upon this rock floating in the cold abyss. So there is a new diaspora towards the imaginative worlds as an escape from the ignorant world that does not change because we ask it to. Virtual reality is one avenue of escape, but it is not the first. Every story, oration and play carried out over humanity's long history with narrative is an escape from the real. Immersion allows us to exist without being of existence, it is an incorporeality and a possession. At the same time, however, it is a subjugation of ourselves and giving up of consciousness to the control of another. Although not the greatest film ever, Click, featuring Adam Sandler, shows how a man may willingly skip over parts of life because they seem a hassle, or at the present moment undesirable.
Leaving behind bodies and forgetting ourselves is an important part of theatre. The audience must become immersed in the narrative and forget their own lives to fully appreciate the action taking place on the stage. Failing to do so denies the audience any form of catharsis as they have not become emotionally bonded with the struggles of the character. This conforms to the notion of ‘choosing who to be and how to be’ as we ourselves enter the place of a character and it is only with characters that we wish to identify with that we can attain some form of connectivity. For me, as despicable as he may be, Aaron from Titus Andronicus is a character whose unrepentant nature speaks to a part of me that wishes I could live so unbridled by ethics.
Where are we immersed?
It is a difficult paradox to describe our immersion in the physical world. We are both entirely immersed in it and can be entirely absent from it simultaneously. It is a common consensus, however, that our bodies exist in the authentic world made flesh. Yet, recently, reality seems under constant pressure to assert itself as where we live. Scientists are postulating that reality is just an illusion as we exist within a simulation. Leaving the existential debates behind, immersion is a product of what our senses are receiving and how they are being registered. Senses themselves have their limitations and preferential treatment. Our interactions with senses build the representation of the external world we inhabit and of which a part inhabits us. As the source of our existence, reality is playing an ever-smaller part in our daily lives. As Baudrillard worried, the simulacrum is replacing the real but there still exists bastions of creations which inexorably link us back to reality whenever we encounter them.
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"An individual is not situated in relation to locations by means of degrees of longitutde and latitude. He is situated in a human space" Jean-Paul satre
Our immersion in the physical world is one of concrete dimensions and movement. It follows what our senses may or may not perceive. Psychological immersion, in difference, is affected with abstract rules, semiotics, symbolism and a maelstrom of other factors of consciousness and the unconscious. The senses we use to detect the external world create an entirely different version of reality, and thus immersion, than how we perceive the information gained from those senses. It may even be the case, as with myself, that the informationscape in our minds overrides the world around us.
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Virtual worlds offer a new kind of duality to immersive experience. When we are reading a book or watching a film we can become very involved with the characters and world created. this is diegetic immersion, the medium is a staging ground for the imagination. Virtual environments, with an emphasis on video games offers a secondary type of immersion. Nondiegetic immersion would include analysing and strategising moves during a game. Alongside this kind of immersion the same principle is being applied to our reading habits. An important part of modern day scholarship is not just remaining and reading a singular volume but knowing how to search and analyse a vast array of sources for the best and most relevant content.
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