"Testing the Limits": What Happens When Digital Humanities Meets Alternative Worldviews

Abstract

"Testing the Limits" reflects upon the implications of a conceptual paradigm shift in theoretical approaches to the use of immersive technologies in a postcolonial, post-positivistic world. This reflection means bringing into proximity alternative explanatory models of "reality"—such as the indigenous philosophy of Leroy Little Bear where it relates to Western science, David Peat's thoughts on quantum theory and his collaboration with Leroy Little Bear, and the theory of synchronicity as developed by Carl G. Jung in collaboration with physicist Wolfgang Pauli—where these models open into alternative worldviews which offer a hypothetical rapprochement in the history of consciousness between science and art. This study, therefore, focuses less on the use of immersive technology in the Humanities than on the instrumentality of theory itself in constructing perceptual models of reality (including scientific and artistic worldviews), especially where it is "virtual" and where it needs to consider diverse philosophies, scientific theories and representations of space/time in relation to subjectivities. To illustrate this claim, the media work by Canadian artist Char Davies will be offered as a case study; Davies has gone on record seeking to subvert the visual aesthetic in VR and 3D computer graphics, which, in striving for "ever great photo realism," serves only to reinforce "the Cartesian divide between dominating subject and passive object." It is relevant in the context of this essay that Char Davies is a software developer and artist whose work is informed not only by her understanding of the history of consciousness in Western metaphysics, but also by her understanding of the relation of such history to quantum theory.