What is Reality?
EXCERPT FROM A DISCUSSION IN CLASS ON OCTOBER 21, 2020
For this class we brought up the Chalmers article and the students shared their thoughts…
DK (Dana Karwas): I would like to hear from some of the people that watched the Sarah Oppenheimer video and would like to know if it had any significant impact on how you’re thinking, either about your work or your practice in terms of what what that talk was about and even her delivery. Would anyone like to share?
MK (Morgan Kerber): Know I’m trying to bring up my medium post for that. Just so I can remember what I it’s been a week.
DK: For example, Morgan watched the video more than once. I remember you mentioned watching it three times…
MK: Three times, and just because I was trying to understand, I guess I’m really fascinated with the way that artists look at space versus the way architects have been trained to look at space. So the things that artists latch on to are kind of overlooked a lot of the time I find in architecture, and particularly the color temperature of light, for instance, which she talked about a lot in her articles or like the corner as being a transition point between space and because light is often an afterthought, like we love to fetishize a skylight bringing in daylight consistently through the day. But when it comes to fluorescence or types of light bulbs, the effect that those can have between spaces. It’s often like an afterthought, or almost like its been value engineered out of our discussion in a way and so that’s something that I just really love to listen to her talk about and how by changing those things, with just simply changing the light bulb within the room — he transition becomes either accentuated or flattened and i don’t know if there’s something there that is quite magical that I think is it completely architectural — and something that we don’t learn about.
DK: Thank you. Yeah, when I first watched her talk I had a few breakthroughs in how I was thinking about architecture. But I was really taken by the talk she gave at the GSD, and the types of questions that she received afterwards, were coming from an architectural crowd. I like how she is working at a very granular level and taking something quite mundane, like a museum space, and transforms it through light and motion. Especially with her use of mechanical engineering and motion and how the motion of a door swing works across dimension both in plan and in the actual space. I like how she’s breaking down our relationship to the space — and I also think it is magical, and I think that all architects should be exposed to this kind of thinking sometime in their career. Does anyone else have anything to say about the readings? Did they love it? Hate it?
Chris, you wrote something about that was thoughtful
CP (Christopher Pin): Yeah, if I can remember correctly, I just appreciated that you paired it directly with the Alistair Turner reading. I read that right before I watch the video and I’m sure everyone else here are also very visual learners. So I find myself often Googling things as I’m reading and I thought it was really great end to that reading. And I thought the prospect of the isovist was a cool one. Not a new one for me, I think architecture students and architects have seen that kind of diagram, but the spatial implications of it drawn out in a project like that was super exciting. I just thought the direct relationship between the idea of Isovist and that installation was really cool.
DK: I think you wrote something at the end, I guess you’re talking more about that. Some of the other works but you did have a comment at the end of our post about the Chalmers article.
CP: I think I just railed on like the Chalmers article
DK: Yes, which we can move into. Does anyone want to start? Why don’t we start with the Chalmers reading.
CP: Do I talk about it?
DK: Yeah. Throw something out to this zoom grid of people
CP: I dont have any notes infront of be but what I had written about it was that, if I can remember correctly, I didn’t enjoy it at all. Well, there were parts of it that I enjoyed but I found it to be a little bit nauseating and his presentation of information, I was pretty skeptical that it was like a lot of strong meaning so I had to read it a couple times. I was a little disappointed that was more of an appeal to rationale when it comes to the comparison of digital and virtual object versus what I was hoping it to be, a more phenomenological discussion surrounding what we perceive as real and the entire time I was waiting to hear why he has a flat ontology between virtual space and real space and he kept harping on all these reasons behind why virtual objects are real and he kind of goes back to the fact that there are digital processes behind the virtual objects that are real but in my opinion, I’m not interested in the literal digital mechanism. I’m more interested in the temporal aspects and he gets to it at the end.
The thing I found super interesting was the rearview mirror non-illusion, which I wrote a bit in my medium post. I’m trying to remember all this on the spot, but he highlights four aspects of the rearview mirror non-illusion that I finally found to be super fascinating as to why I personally find real space to obviously be more valuable and more meaningful than virtual space and they all connect to time and about learned experience in the real world versus the virtual world. I think that elements of knowledge precedented input and output. The uncanny and I think I’m missing one more, but it’s basically the idea that you don’t perceive the rearview mirror as objects that are actually in front of you because of your learned experience in the world and your precedented experience of assessing that stimulus and driving according to what you’re seeing. I found it kind of brought up the interesting idea of, maybe in a world, if I could start to wrap my head around, meaning in a world or like a flat ontology, where the only thing I know in the world is like 50% real and 50% virtual or even more of a percentage or higher percentage for the virtual which is not a prospect I’m super excited about that was kind of freaky.
I also found on the last comment was, I think the guy’s name is Nozick and that idea that you can experience any sense you want in the experience machine or something like that. I found it to be pretty creepy and I was pretty off put by it definitely wouldn’t plug into that experience. I’m interested to hear from anyone that would plug into that experience actually, because that’s fundamentally against how I approach life so anyway that’s my 2 cents or my five cents, I guess.
DK: Thank you. Joey has something to say.
JR (Joey Reich): Yeah, I actually would plug in, I like the idea of it. It likens it’s a theater at some point. I think in a way you’re saying all life is virtual and it is all real at the same time, whether that be digital or physical. In a way that everything you see you take for granted and maybe this goes back to what I’ve looked in psycho analytics, but everything is taken in, transformed and re-appropriated as a representation of what’s going on. For me I think everything we view is just a cognitive intake and especially playing with the Oculus a little bit, it does feel very real. I think reading the article, helped me jump into that experience a little bit without just being like, “Oh yeah, digital!” But I thought it was really cool that it was virtual and so then you’re taking it in as virtual and because it’s virtual it is real. So there’s not a delineation between the two other than you accept the fact that it might be digital
As this tech progresses, if you found yourself in something completely immersive, you have no clue. You’re in it because everything you do is virtual and I think ultimately that’s what he’s getting at. I think with the the plugin Experience Machine, he was saying strictly that that’s not VR because it’s more cinematic in a way as you pick it and you don’t choose what happens after it begins. There’s no change or VR. There’s always choices and so I think that active doing is what makes it feel like it’s real, in a way. So as long as you can do and take it in as if it was real it is real in a way. In the same way, you have no way to know today is real or not. We have no way to know if this is one big simulation in a game in a Dyson Sphere world for some reason we happen to be in. We don’t know that we like a lot of things we can’t prove beyond the phenomenon itself. So I think, in a way, by saying reality is virtual he’s saying it’s phenomenal logical. Then he does liken it to a city in the end but I don’t think it has to be disrupting or disturbing necessarily. Total opposite for me.
GJ (Gordon Jiang): Yeah, I would add some parts. I read the article a couple days ago and I agree that in the last chapter of Chalmer’s reading he mentioned that VR is not the second class reality where there is a second level, we can call it a second level. I think that definition is important. Also, I think as artists we live in a reality and we keep rendering this invisible visible. So we say, then this invisible was not a reality actually before we created it, but because we create these dialogues between us and the reality, this invisible thing keeps coming out. In other words, I think VR has the potential to create that dialogue between us, the creator and we say the second level realities. Eventually these two things will keep finding that balance and they kind of interact with each other and that’s why I’m so passionate about my project, the Pantheon. I want to keep digging out things from the reality and use the VR tools to explore it. I’m fascinated by that division.
BC (Bobby Chun): Yeah, I’m also not too upset about the kind of virtual realism here because I feel like a lot of Chalmers argument based on the kind of functionalism, casual relationship between the virtual objects and the physical objects. I feel like because my project is a lot about this kind of consciousness, dreams, which if you actually think about it, dreams are not actually real in the sense that it’s physical, but it’s real in the sense that maybe within this the kind of dreamscape or even the dreams the things within the dream can have this kind of functional relationship. Kind of a casual relationship with one another. So if you do something, if you have a lucid dream or let’s say you do something in your dream and it feels real. It’s real in the sense that it has a certain effect to your dream whenever you’re doing things but it might not be affecting the kind of physical world. It doesn’t really have that kind of cross dimensional relationship. But the kind of relationship within the dimension is true and valid as it affects you in a kind of way that’s just subconsciously also going back to your mind.
Maybe something you experienced in a dream is equally as valid as something that you experience. Let’s say in the real world. Also a question of what is actually real because I think what Joey said, you’re not sure, like we’re not sure at this moment. Are we actually living in this real world. We can be living in this ‘matrix world’ no one ever knows. So as long as it feels real and we’re interacting with the stuff around, it’s valid and real.
CP: I was interested in, specifically the meaningfulness or the comparison between how meaningful what we perceive as real and virtual is. The factors that provide us meaning and what I kind of understood as what provides meaning. I sort of understood it as two really strong factors that provide meaning. One is that, just like a mass amount of time spent doing something and the other is interaction. The longer I spend doing something, the more I believe that it is my reality. I think a way of speeding that up and reducing the actual power of time is through interaction and an input and output precedented, like knowing something’s going to happen when I do it. That cuts down the amount of time you spend doing something to believe in the meaningfulness of the reality. That’s something I find super interesting about with Bobby said with dreams because dreams don’t necessarily have that interaction and on the other hand, it’s almost like a complete reversal of what I’m saying. Dreams are super ephemeral they’re just very fleeting and don’t really have any sort of interaction in anyway, yet we’ve all experienced times where we wake up and we’re super relieved that what we dreamed is not actually happening. So there’s a crazy sense of reality that happens in dreams that actually has nothing to do with time spent in the dream versus interaction with a stimulus. So that’s the complete. That’s what I find fascinating with dreams it’s a complete inversion of the two factors that I believe that have the most impact on me.
JR: Do you think that maybe the relationship there is that dreams happen in a fraction of a second right before you wake up. But in dream space you feel like you’ve spent days, weeks, however long in the dream, physically interacting in a very short time scale. So something like VR, doing that same mechanism could change a timescale and even generate…
CP: But VR doesnt do that same thing though, I don’t think VR makes you feel…
JR: I’m saying that it works like a dream does. If a dream has what you would call ‘realness,’ you would attribute realness to the dream. So let’s say VR captures dreamness is it then more real?
Ma.K (Mari Kroin): I just want to try because it’s making me think, and maybe this is less related to the article and more of what you guys are saying, but I think the facet of time is really interesting because to me, I understand what you guys are saying about dreams but it’s also to me like a sub product of having to sleep anyway. You’re not having the same time commitment, I guess, as it takes to maybe code something, put something or create a world into VR or experience that, that is your time. I’m just thinking about moments where I’ve had to unplug from the digital world and that’s when things feel really real to me. It’s when,I don't know if you’ve lost all your data or had to reset a video game that you’ve been playing for a long time, is that experience real? That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now is I don’t think that’s time wasted, but it’s something different from the life that you live when you don’t have power. When there was a blackout a few months ago, it really made me think again about like my surroundings and the things that I touch every day And the things that I spend time on. I think that, for example, drawing something with your hand is actually different from drawing something digitally. If so, maybe I side a little bit with Chris here.
MK: I think that, to be honest, in my own world, which is a weird world, you can have virtual moments within the materialized world and you can have real moments within the virtual world. This comes from just thinking about, I wrote about it in my medium post later this this week, but James Turrell for instance, the suspension of reality that you go into within his immersive pieces of artwork, they are a virtual environment. They are completely curated, they disconnect you from motion, they disconnect you from people, they are of themselves a virtual space.But they are completely made up everything in the real, they’re made of light, they’re made of drywall, they’re made of all of these things, yet you could go into. Let’s say, for instance, I worked on a project that used HoloLens that projected the movements of where we were going to be building before we could do them. So we never drew anything we just had this projection off a model and we built it off of the model.
That to me is a completely real experience in real life. That also is completely augmented by the virtual. I think we’re Chalmers kind of gets me is that his definition is a little bit singular in the sense of only you can have virtual experiences in virtual reality and you only can have real experiences in real reality and they are still equal but I guess I would argue that you can have both types of experiences within both types of realities in a way
BC: I feel like even for Chalmers, maybe he’s a bit much more like clearly delineated into like dimensions but also just coming back to the idea of dreams. I feel like there’s the relationship between the virtual and physical as a much more ambiguous way of working here but if you think about dreaming, where you can have an epiphany and a dream, then you will wake up. The dream will have certain effects to your real life and in reverse the kind of experience you have during the daily life will have subconscious effects through your dreams.
But maybe the kind of relationship there is not as apparent or as obvious as the one within each dimension. So the kind of relationship here, I wouldn’t say as completely separate. There’s definitely real and I’m not sure about putting real like reality and virtual but the kind of virtualism at the two opposite ends. I also feel what you just said, they’re like reality within the kind of virtual space and also the kind of virtual experience within reality. So personally, I think maybe it’s more appropriate to use the words, physical space and virtual space rather than real space and virtual space. Also not thinking about the kind of reality or authenticity in the virtual space.
IL (Ingrid Liu): I feel like the realness, whether it’s physical or virtual doesn’t really matter. It’s more of the value that experience the embodiment brings. So there are some limits of virtual worlds. One is simply using it only as a consumption tool and then there’s a lack of a bodily consequence. It does not allow things to naturally grow. So in order to synthesize, we sort of need to step outside of reality into the real space or I should say physical space to reflect. There is a motion of stepping out of the virtual embodiment or digital embodiments but then you enter into that space so the interaction happens when you have to interchange a platform.
BC: I’m also interested just speaking about the kind of virtual space. I’m just wondering what everyone’s thinking about this kind of Facebook and Twitter as like virtual space. It’s so real, the interactions that you have with people, your friends, but at the same time you’re in this kind of virtual embodiment of social media space. It’s never real in the sense that it is not physical. Let’s say you’re having a Facebook video chat with your friend across the country. You’re not within the same space. Even right now we’re using Zoom. We’re partially in this virtual space but the kind of experience is also real and legitimate that we are having a conversation that might not be happening in the physical space, but it has this kind of effect.
GJ: I’m just fascinated about the dream. When we talk about dream, we’re talking about the metaphysics right? It’s different than the physical world and I mean Heidegger once said, we are all metaphysically homeless and if architecture ever solved problems the first problem itself is the metaphysical homelessness. I’m just thinking there’s a lot of examples, I’m looking when I’m looking at the Mies Tugendhat House, I would think that it’s like a dream journey when you walk into the house you are in a different mood. The space expresses another environment for you to imagine, to dream in a space. I’m just wondering, then we talked about virtual reality, is that also can create what Heider said about homelessness. I think that’s always my problem and question.
DK: Amina, you had something to share
AR (Amina Ross (they/them)): Yeah, kind of pulling on the comment before what was just said, I was thinking about and also drawing from what Morgan was saying. I was thinking about the troubling or agreeing with this idea of troubling, a sort of binary opposition being created between the virtual and the real. Thinking that some of the issues that I take with immersive experiences are pre-constructed or what makes me want to question the reality or legitimacy of it. For example, Twitter and Facebook ,just mentioned, is because of how mediated those experiences are by technologies that the users oftentimes don’t have a role in sort of shaping. I think that questioning the reality of these constructs is really helpful but similarly I think questioning the reality of the constructs within which we socialize in the physical world is also useful. I think that there’s in both spaces, there’s a usefulness to questioning and sort of troubling what reality is being posited. I think that’s kind of speaking to some of Christopher and some of his skepticism around that experience machine like my skepticism at that machine would be if the user of that machine wasn’t also able to be a sort of co-author in what that looked like. Where agency factors in so that that’s just sort of what I was thinking about what’s been said so far.
CP: To touch on the machine part of it, the Experience Machine. What I liked about it is, it’s a very concise way of provoking a debate that he right off the top of the article outlines that he’s going to touch on, which is the meaning behind the virtual versus the meaning behind the real. There is two conversations to have here, one is like is virtual real versus our learned experience and the “real world.” Which one’s real which ones not real? What actually makes real? What actually defines realness? Then the second debate is because when it comes to realness, I can buy into all these arguments about virtual objects being real objects, like libraries and Facebook as well as the idea that virtual experience and virtual time happens. For me, it’s more just the discussion of the meaning behind it. I feel there’s two discussions happening and I think the one about meaning is the one that I’m sort of interested in and the one that makes me consider my life a little bit more…Sort of like what Mari was saying.
DK: This makes me think of something that has been coming up in a lot of conversations I’ve been having with the folks running the Yale Cabaret this year as as they have taken, I think all 16 performances online and I don’t know if you all have ever been to the Yale Cabaret, but it’s, this kind of underground very intimate theater experience and you’re basically sitting on the stage with the performers and there’s food and their are drinks and it’s a very festive. It is an extremely close situation with storytelling performance set design, all the people involved, and then it creates this really unique ecosystem. When I’m considering what everyone’s saying here and kind of the arguments that Chalmers has around meaning and reality remind me of the Cabaret group, as they have the challenge of getting all these performances online, and are porting the space over into possible VR environments or online environments and trying to come up with what that is and what that even means, and how it is valuable to the theatrical universe. And one of the things that we like to talk about with this group is the idea of intimacy. What we’re all having now or hearing a performance just kind of piped right into your ears in a way that we might now have have experienced otherwise.
Something about the Chalmers article that stuck with me was that my eyes are creating the reality, like the dreams (Bobby) and so I’m somewhere in between all of these arguments and negotiating them kind of digital evaluation every time I have a unique experience in VR and I bring this awareness as an observer. But there was something about the digital object. The reality of of having a real object in the space and how those objects can be shared with different texts. For instance, you could be holding a vase in both spaces, but that vase could start to take on different meanings. So I’m going to leave us today with this conversation. And this is great. I like when all of you talk to each other through the grid — -through our system, and thanks Chris, Morgan, and Joey for kicking it off. Not to put you on the spot, but that was great.
I think that this week, we’re going to get into a great offset for Chalmers with the which is the kind of anti thesis of the Chalmers reading, which is the Karen Barad reading on New Materialism and Karen is a quantum physicists feminist theorists who wrote this book called Meeting the Universe Halfway, which you will all read an excerpt from and I always like to follow up.
The Chalmers reading with the Barad reading because she talks about this idea of intra-action so she doesn’t believe in interaction, it’s with an a interaction and — It’s basically a term she uses to replace interaction. And this idea of kind of interaction and these like reality questioning reality spaces. I thought resonates and it’s essentially, the interaction understands an agency that is NOT an inherent property of an individual or or human to be exercise, but as a dynamic system of forces. So going into our invisible fields tutorial, it would be I think helpful to kind of at least look at this Karen Barad reading that I’m going to post because it’s more than just what we’re seeing in these interactions that we’re experiencing. It’s all of these forces moving and communicating together and there. Then what is that in the context of these kind of alternate spaces are these ways that our eyes are seeing things that are creating some type of reality, whether it’s known or removed from the physical reality as you know — is up for debate….
