Swinging Back and Forth Beyond Physics

Walter Benjamin sketches out a concept that has now been revived and is frequently applied today in two passages in his works – Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (A Short History of Photography) and Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) –, namely the concept of the optical unconscious.¹ Benjamin deploys this term to characterise an experience of images that allows us to recognize a “different nature” in photographs and films than the one we perceive in everyday life; in the images, “something [...] remains that cannot be silenced”, a space “unconsciously permeated” by the people photographed, a “magical” sign of their lives.
Rosalind Krauss rejected Benjamin’s formulation concerning the optical unconscious as she could not find an “analogue to the ‘unconscious’ [in] the visual field”. In Krauss’ view, only art is capable of constructing an unconscious in the image.² While accepting this assertion, the argument does not take into account that Benjamin does not substantiate the visual field, but rather connects it to the tangible mode of existence of specific people and individual objects. There is no “per se” of the optical unconscious, but rather, taking the object that is recorded, the unconscious is formed through an exchange with the apparatus and henceforth is revealed to the viewer as this other image. Film, in turn, for all its technical contingency, is able to establish a creative “healthy alienation between environment and man” (Benjamin), so that the cinematic imagination offers us images that are visual concretions of our unconscious life, our desires, the “omnipotence of thought” (Freud). The question that needs to be addressed is whether this optical unconscious can also be transposed, over and above the media of photography and film, to our understanding of digital-immersive techniques – now as the numerical unconscious?³

Swing
A suitable test case in this context is the VR installation Swing by Christin Marczinzik and Thi Binh Minh Nguyen that has been shown and used very successfully (not only) in art spaces: users swing “away” on a real swing equipped with VR goggles. Do we experience a numerical unconscious in this swinging – I am swinging and the interactive image is swinging?
You (still?) need a special, “augmented” pair of glasses to glean experience of what is known as virtual reality (VR) – or is it just about having an experience? These glasses do not correct shortcomings of vision, but instead create a completely new field of vision, which does not correspond to our environment, but is generated from pure data. Computational operations produce stereoscopic images, which we see on the inside of the “lenses”. The glasses in the spectacles are monitors, so that the extremely short distance between the eyes and the monitor and the device circling and enclosing the head leaves the eyes no choice; they are disciplined to look towards the otherworldly world conjured up from digital storage. In the process, something overwhelming happens, ultimately to our cognitive process architecture, to our brains. What I incontrovertibly see is what exists. Esse est percipi. At least in my recoded perception. A complete alignment of digital data logic with our binary vision, our cognition, occurs and the artificial spatial perception produced in this way provides ideal conditions to recognise what we perceive as formally identical to our natural physical perception. In other words, it is tantamount to handling VR as if it were not VR. Handling it, not only perceiving or acknowledging it.
But what do we see in VR environments? Replicas of reality, elaborately rendered simulations of architecture or nature that mimic a real 3D world, or computer-generated images that relish playing with references of an external reality. The movement of objects in this second world is likewise artificial; it is an animation. The difference between normal/physical swinging lies precisely in this progressive and enormous change in the “outside world” that is perceived. While the field of vision changes only minimally when swinging, here the shift is radical.
When trying out this Swing piece, the overwhelming impact is initially put into perspective, for the environment is peculiarly colourful and sterile, creating an imitation that is not “real”. You find yourself surrounded by a “handcrafted watercoloured world”. This is initially a cute stylization of landscape, but as the swing flies higher, a panoramic overview of the world and subsequently of space unfolds that left me agog, despite its scenic children’s-book aesthetics. It is, in a sense, the “transcendent” movement of the swing, the habitual yet unusual pendulum movement, over and above all physical circumstances, that provokes a challenge of perception or coordination that redefines boundaries – and subjects the image to movement. It is all about swinging above a steadily increasing, picturesque abyss. Complex synchronization between our sense of sight, our sense of balance and our physical movement becomes necessary. In this schizo-movement, effected by the body in its reality, but with visual coordinates from a completely different world, the impossibility of experiencing a vertically configured geography in your own physical movements emerges; the exception however, being the psycho-physiological parameter or zone in my plastic brain that – programmed by others – enables me to swing in that sense, although all sensory data would argue against such a surreal geography being habitable. And perhaps as we swing, we laughingly repeat Baudelaire’s question, “Avalanche, veux tu m’emporter dans ta chute?” [Avalanche, will you sweep me along in your fall?]⁴

The Numerical Unconscious
The numerical unconscious is a machine-based expression of the peculiar association between our logical and physical acts. While older image-creation techniques are grounded in differential logic, i.e. maintain the distinction between image and reality despite all the attempts at immersion on the part of the cinema, games and online industry, and the viewer or user can always find their way back to the point where a distinction exists between their location and that of the image, VR techniques first and foremost establish a quasi non-differential image/viewer/user environment. My perception in VR receives data exclusively from the inner life of the programmes, i.e. from architectures, object and movement formations that have been computed. The immersive experience succeeds when my body reacts to them in its behaviour, i.e. my movement corresponds with the simulation. When that happens, rather than merely seeing something, I become part of it and can also alter it to a certain extent. Becoming part of the image, reacting to the image, however, means questioning the image per se. If a completely artificially generated environment includes me, if what I see contains me without any distinction being drawn, if I act as a protagonist in a simulation, then I am a co-protagonist, co-creator, co-player and no longer a viewer set at a distance from an image. To put this in other terms, the difference has shifted inwards, as a distinction between contradictory motor, physiological and cognitive data. Equipped with Oculus Rift glasses, I become a player, play “the thing” with my body.
And yet: I get stuck in the virtual environment, haphazardly. External reality has been completely replaced by its media-based counterpart. In VR simulations, optical-physiological data correspond to wishes translated by programming technology. A simulation means renouncing the need to obey all the laws of science and randomly creating new living conditions in this other reality with its other nature. Game simulations, game animations, game animisms often look like hyperreal dream worlds, conveying a conviction to me that all the laws of nature are suspended here and that I can re-establish my life or test it out differently than within the constraints of rule-bound reality. We are plugged into the fantasies of programmers, software developers and VR designers, in a sense into the collective fantasies of a society. Fantasies, derivatives of the collective unconscious, now articulated in programming and design as a numerical unconscious grounded in VR. The figures, gestalts of the collective dream, are mirrored in a highly distorted form as hyperbolic constructs in the creatures produced by animation studios that populate today’s cinematic universe. In VR constructions, however, we are co-generating part of a fantastic world that enjoys playing with extreme effects, at any rate relativising the role of the optical, the visual, and in many cases short-circuiting bodily sensations with the numerical artifacts. The “replacement of external by psychical reality”, which Freud noted as a characteristic of the unconscious, succeeds in the present with an extra-psychical apparatus.
Drawing on Freud, two interpretations of our Being-with in VR situations are conceivable. First, there is the experience of a schizophrenic movement. As part of the simulation, we are only concerned with ourselves and perceive everything we encounter as hallucinatory processes generated by us, so that the “as-if” strangely lacking in resistance; we no longer encounter and cathect objects, but only immaterial phenomena, appearances that emerge from us and no longer have any external reality, “that is to say, that here the object-cathexes are given up and a primitive objectless condition of narcissism is re-established”.⁵ In VR environments, this reading celebrates the narcissistic self-exaltation and overestimation of subjects who are little by little deprived of their reality (currently: through pandemic isolation techniques).
The second interpretation takes the inverse approach. In perceiving and acting in VR worlds, we treat all the abstract things surrounding us – all images and objects of the data world are formal/linguistic, mathematically generated artifacts – as if they existed in concrete terms. In any event, cathexis of VR objects, of object-imaginings, occurs without any “verbal images”, in other words we do not absorb the objects into a linguistic-reflexive context or engaging our “Ego” into play.⁶ This happens without resistance or repression. It is only semi-conscious; it occurs without reflexive distance. An unconscious takes shape and we are willing to go along with its representations, displacements and condensations. Within the context of virtual images, we encounter familiar fantasies, desires, fears. For example, concerning the heights and depths of falling.
In many VR applications, phenomena occur that could not previously be experienced, such as swinging beyond the bounds of physics. However, there is a desire to swing endlessly beyond the limits, higher and higher, to overcome gravity, to rise up higher and higher, to see the world from above. Thus, in using the Swing game, we find ourselves confronted with affects that we appear to cathect effortlessly. The “external perceptions” that assure us that the impossible is being realised are, after all, system-generated and thus controlled. They can be tied to memory traces, recollections of flying, of lightness, of Petrarchan high-altitude fantasies of a world below us. We thus learn from the numerical unconscious about the mathematically sublime dimension of VR applications.