Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’

Abstract

In 2016, I participated in a performative virtual body-swapping transaction staged by anti-disciplinary international art collective BeAnotherLab using Creative Commons technology called The Machine to be Another. During this performance, I inhabited a volunteer refugee’s virtual body while hearing their story. This illusion is conceptualized by the artists as a means of ‘increasing empathy’ by visually and proprioceptively occupying the position of the other. But an eccentric perceptual illusion of othering the self through virtual means is just one manifestation of a more pervasive trend. From smartphone apps that offer downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical pathological phenomena to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables that enable new visual perspectives beyond anthropocentric human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art engineering. Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing scientific understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood. Correspondingly, the notion of an ‘immersed’ body is accompanied by the seductive promise of its porousness to a range of remote experiences and phenomena as this chapter will seek to evidence.