Embodied/Virtual Environments

Abstract

This article by no means serves to account for theories on virtual technologies or virtual design but, rather, offers a distinct exploration on the role of the body in virtual experiences and spaces. Selected works account for embodiment literature and emergent considerations of the body in what may be considered a post-body, or post-human, era of technology, connectivity, and communications. This list includes work that researches, discusses, or questions notions of virtual with regard to landscapes of experience and that looks to discourses on the role of the body in human perception. With implications for larger questions regarding the human mind, and apart from dualistic conversations on mind-body connections, embodiment theories view the body as a tool for participation in lifeworlds. Embodiment is inherently a social concept, and one that rests on foundational understandings of human evolution and adaptation as well as human sociability and socialization, sometimes explored as ecosocial phenomena. Conjuring many inquiries in biology, cognition, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion, and ecology, this collection is composed mostly of work in the humanities and social sciences and is skewed by traditions in anthropology. It is generally well accepted that cultural perspectives inform human knowledge, but theories in embodiment ask how social and cultural conditions inform not only perspectives, but also experiences or felt senses (or both). Questions of materiality give way to attention on the physical, earthly environment to which humans have evolved and with which humans have coadapted. Scholars have referred to this era as the Anthropocene, which ultimately points to human dilemma, since human behavior is defined by progressively more destructive behavior that yields an earth on which humans cannot rely for resources. Simultaneously, media, entertainment, and design technology have moved into virtual reality and augmented experiences that either transcend, mimic, or escape earthly realms or physical limitations. Simulated or virtual experiences make use of what we know about human perception to create new forms of reality. Theories of being and knowing, inherent to the anthropological canon, pose examination of bodily knowledge and bring about inquiry in medicine, disability studies, cognition, and health, to name a few. Mediated and augmented experiences have all manner of applications and implications, including overriding biology and genetics, posing questions for the future of the human condition. This article includes new work from science journals and popular media to illustrate how new human adaptations, ecologies, and virtual perceptions interface with embodiment.