Seeing is Sensing: Three Strategies for Multisensory Experience in Mixed Reality Art
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Machinic Sense & Sensibility: Immediations
Presentation Title:
- Seeing is Sensing: Three Strategies for Multisensory Experience in Mixed Reality Art
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
In this paper we outline three strategies used by Mixed Reality (MR) artists to produce experiences that challenge vision as a single sense modality. The interactions enabled in the works that we discuss emphasize how virtual technologies produce embodied experiences and a mixed sense of reality, thereby reconceptualizing both MR and virtual technologies as multisensorial embodied practices. Exploring three different installations, we show how this mode of multi-sensory experience is also a multi-media phenomenon. Seeking to reconsider both the ‘self-world’ and the ‘self-other’ relationships, these installations further demonstrate how such induced embodied experiences can be utilized to initiate what we understand as a sense of critical empathy. In seeking to both virtually and physically place the viewer in an/other body, an/other space, or in granting them access to an/other history or cultural knowledge, these works fundamentally aim to shift viewers’ perspectives of their environment, while at the same time exposing the constraints of their own embodied position.
