Week 2 - Midcentury VR? And the limits of such enclosures - Core Post 1 (Hyejoo)

What first caught my attention this week was Halpern’s description of the Eames-designed IBM display at the 1964 World Fair—the display’s virtual reality-esque qualities. “Viewers were lifted from the ground into a closed oval and entered a space of multiple screens that filled the field of vision” (Halpern, 342); “Inside this machine, the spectator was exposed not to any singular piece of content but to a perceptual field” (343). These are all processes of immersion central to VR, on which VR scholar Paul Roquet has recently said that immersion is “often just another word for enclosure. Once you strip away the claims to immediacy and presence that are made for VR, what’s left is a device that blocks perceptual access to the proximate world” (Roquet, The Immersive Enclosure, 2). Indeed, both Kepes and Eames’ vision for what is essentially a new episteme vis-à-vis a new concept of visual perception as landscape or environment at times sounds like an enclosure—perhaps because, for a start, it assumes an archive of data which, despite the seemingly infinite associations to be made from them, is still a fixed set of information, a “pre-recorded world” (Halpern, 337)? Ironically, the expansive vision of perception ends up feeling enclosed, limited.
 
Immersion or enclosure can evoke a certain disengagement or walling off from what is exterior. If this was in fact a corollary to midcentury understandings of digital media, McLuhan sees it. In the BBC interview, McLuhan is asked (around 13:00) about his predictions (in Understanding Media) on “the kind of life, the quality of feeling we’re going to have with the new alternation of our senses”—to which he mentions the (re-)rise of regional dialects in England and concludes that “this driving depth toward regional depth of culture is a normal feature of electronic forms because of circuitry that involves us deeper and deeper within ourselves…” While Kepes or the Eameses would purport that their visions of new media are expansive, McLuhan reminds us, true to his McLuhan self, that electronic media itself accounts for what is an increasing move towards the interior, the depths of ourselves—an enclosure? However, the renewed pride for regional dialects also meant the decline in standard English, which is potentially a positive fragmentation of (harmful) homogeneous notions of nation, identity, being.
 
Despite Vannebar Bush’s exhortations to use science and tech for the greater good, his grand drive towards a final stage of human knowledge via electronic media could also read as an enclosure in the sense of the Memex’s potential to offer that similar environment of the 1964 IBM display, where trails of saved data immerse the user. But while users enjoy the Memex space, we can ask, especially in light of Nakamura’s article, who is in actuality left out of this immersive usage, and what kinds of human work and labor go in to making such a perceptual technology possible.