I was referred to, and recently began to review, the writings of Lauren Rabinovitz. I am particularly interested in encountering her thoughts on creating compelling interactive narratives. However, the article that I have read most recently is titled "More Than the Movies". I'm very interested in considering somatic visual culture, spectacle and embodiment. There were a lot of connections to make between this article and Oliver Grau's Virtual Art. That is perhaps a project for another time.
Through this text I was able to reflect on several "future" cinema trends that I had witnessed in the 90s and wonder if my experiences with them as a child inspired my eight year work in CAVE and VR tech. as well as a deep engagement with trying to embark on an exegesis of the term "immersive". I tend to look on "immersion" with a little bit of a skeptic's eye as a term that is more useful in marketing blurbs than as a descriptor for any specific tangible state. It would take a lot of persuading for me to believe that any contemporary cinema/vr apparatus is the naive ideal of "immersive". There are arguments I've made in the past to this effect, mostly having to do with the haptic sense of the interface and corporeal embodiment.
I am all for some of the arguments Rabinovitz is making about the relationships of the body, spectatorship, spectacle and viewing. I agree with the notion that many "futures" of cinema, like the CAVE, depend to some extent on "the reflexivity of embodied spectatorship" (100). New insight from Rabinovitz comes from thinking about embodiment as a requirement for 3D. One can argue that the apparatus does not impede immersion, but it is harder to deny that the illusion of 3D requires the body to activate it. I share Rabinovitz's subtle appreciation for Hale's Tours as a spectacle that derives effectiveness from considering both physical and cognitive sensations. I am not sure what she is referring to as the "standard Hollywood approach", but my guess would be the objective of "immersion" or absorption into the story or event: the attempt to divorce the spectator from the body. One of Rabinovitz's points led me to think about what is more "true" in the socially motivated VR projects that have been attempted by artists like Maurice Benayoun (World Skin). If the common modern adage that we can't trust our eyes is true, than perhaps we can trust our bodies (haptic/embodied) to collaborate with our eyes in order to encounter a "true" experience? I am talking about true in terms of both stirring and authentic (body knowledge grounded in vision and vs. versa). To do a transgressive work both these elements should be considered.
