Modifications of R: how the virtual comes to matter in VR, XR and MR art and performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT The work of 1930s writers Antonin Artaud, Stanley Weinbaum, and Max Herrmann, reveals an early history of Virtual Reality and a burgeoning interest in how the virtual can be concretized through experiences requiring the complicity of willing participants within a live performance setting. This sheds light on techniques underlying, and potentially overlooked, in contemporary illusory practices modifying perceptions of reality through the related terms that developed over the century, including ‘self-hypnosis,’ ‘creative work,’ ‘consensual hallucination,’ and ‘metaxis’. The paper speculates that the prerequisite for immersive technologies to function is the concretization of the virtual in the participant’s body achieved through complicity, suspension of disbelief, and absorption. This line of inquiry begins to connect with Karen Barad’s agential realism through mattering, specifically with the computational and virtual, which seem not to matter and are too often overlooked as immaterial. It proceeds through three sections exploring the purported modifiers of reality (especially X-Reality, Extended Reality, and Mixed Reality), how performance brings the virtual to matter, and testing these ideas through a case study, the immersive VR/MR/XR artwork Child of Now staged in Melbourne in 2022.