Virtual Reality as an Emerging Art Medium and Its Immersive Affordances

Abstract

Today's virtual reality (VR) technology is more immersive, reachable and widespread than ever before. It is increasingly adopted by diverse artists and attains growing recognition at film festivals. However, with past unfulfilled promises of VR in memory, skeptics doubt whether the current VR surge is more than a passing trend. I argue here that VR is endowed with immersive affordances, which qualitatively differ from those of any other art media, and describe the unique properties that allow it to induce transformative body-ownership illusions. Based on neuroscientific evidence I hypothesize that these affordances are mediated by peripersonal neurons, which encode stimuli surrounding our body. Finally, I review evidence showing that virtual-body-remapping implicates conceptual transformations, which potentially provide VR art with unprecedented powerful ideological devices.  History has rarely witnessed the emergence of a novel art medium with a distinctive set of stylistic conventions and technological affordances and constraints. Apparently, virtual reality (VR) is currently maturing as such an art medium. The VR field, which was established in several technological waves starting from the 1960s, is attracting a growing interest among artists who look for new forms of