Humanities

This extended abstract proposes a means of classifying the " residual affect " of vertigo, startles, and similar forms of innate, autonomic response easily triggered in and by immersive Virtual Reality (VR). Employing a formal–functionalist approach, I first summarise relevant work on cognition and game emotion, then discuss how acute, involuntary responses to VR stimuli (1) necessarily feed into player experience and (2) correspond with existing categories for game emotion.

(N.B.: This is a draft version of an extended abstract + poster presentation invited to the IEEE VR 2017 conference in Los Angeles, CA.)

This preliminary study surveys whether/which avatar body parts are visible in first-wave consumer virtual reality (VR) applications for the HTC Vive (n = 200). A simple coding schema for assessing avatar bodily coherence (ABC) is piloted and evaluated. Results provide a snapshot of ABC in popular high-end VR applications in Q3 2016. It is reported (Table 1) that 86.5% of sampled items feature fully invisible avatars, 9% depict hands only, and 4.5% feature a head, torso, or legs, but still with some degree of bodily incoherence. Findings suggest that users may experience a sense of ownership and/or agency over their virtual actions even in the absence of visible avatar body parts. This informs research questions and hypotheses for future experimental enquiry into how bodily representation may interplay with user cognition, perceived virtual embodiment (body ownership illusion and sense of agency), and spatial telepresence (hereafter spatial presence).

It is already a truism that consumer virtual reality (VR) systems offer sensorially immersive first-person experiences that differ markedly from those begat by traditional screen displays. But what are the implications of this for player experience? It is well-documented that VR can induce illusions of non-mediation; of spatial presence; of embodiment in avatars. This paper asks—and reports on—what common features of digital games are liable to be experienced as stressors (that is, as beyond optimally affective or intense) when the player perceives her avatar–self egocentrically as a 'life-sized', spatially present, and potentially vulnerable entity within the gameworld. The present paper describes and discusses findings from a qualitative content analysis of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) experienced via head-mounted display-based VR systems akin to those now commercially available. A purposive sample comprising video, photographic, and written documentation of IVEs (n = 124) from historical clinical VR and telepresence research is interrogated through the lens of cognitive media theory. Effecting a novel approach inspired by systematic review, the present study's observations and inferences regarding players' subjective experience of IVEs are presented alongside relevant findings from the research literature sampled. This produces a preliminary formal framework for discussing VR player experience as significantly structured by patiency (cf. agency), with VR experiences eliciting self-directed affect, and thereby somewhat unintentionally engaging the player's body as a site for feedback.

By conducting a structural analysis of sleep related instances in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu this paper argues that ‘sleep’ functions as a crucial transfer point that both stabilizes and develops Proust’s narrative.
Furthermore the paper shows how the intrinsic analysis of sleep in Proust’s work gains valuable momentum by engaging with sleep research as a more general, multidisciplinary and comparative field of study. By introducing medical sleep research, the cultural history of sleep practices and the philosophy of mind as aspects contained within Proust’s œuvre, the paper thus seeks to position literary sleep research as a necessary perspective in current debates on sleep in the human sciences.
In Proust the paper will concentrate on La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of the novel concerned almost entirely with the captivity of Albertine. In this volume the significance of the sleeping individual as both (spiritually) abandoned and (bodily) available informs the narrator’s intermittent reflexions on themes of love, jalousy and art. As opposed to the ethereality of dreams and visions in the novel the description of sleep displays an extremely developed concern with the physicality of different sleep practices as well as an astute awareness of shifting mental states. Throughout the novel, and particularly in La Prisonnière, the moments of sleep intensify the development of themes and draws the narrative into a maelstrom that momentarily puts it to a standstill but also opens the overall thematic layers to further scrutiny.

The Aesthetics of Sleep: A study of sleep in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.
This thesis examines the significance and structuring function of sleep and sleep related instances in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (la Recherche). From the very first sentence, Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure, toward the final vocation in Le Temps retrouvé the theme of sleep is pervasive throughout the novel. Descriptions of sleep occur on different levels in the narrative and suggest that the study itself should be conducted through various approaches. The thesis is thus organised around three main chapters, each seeking to examine how sleep engages with other crucial topics and adjacent phenomena in la Recherche.
The first chapter, on time and sleep, is concerned with the instability of narrative temporality and how the descriptions of sleep either destabilizes the narration or actually form a narrative pattern, to which the overall structure of the novel adheres. On another level the temporality of sleep, conceived as certain external or biological conditions for measuring time, affect the narration and particularly the narrator. The latter can be seen as a special narrating instance that, in a paradoxical way, manages to describe sleep while it happens, though still largely incapable of grasping the passing of time that occurs in sleep. Ultimately, the insomnia that inflicts the narrator is a disruption of temporality, since it breaks the habitual cycle of sleep.
The second chapter, concerning spatiality and sleep, focuses on various places where sleep occurs, most prominently the bedroom. From the very beginning of the novel, in the first five pages to be exact, the narrator’s bedroom appears as a privileged place where certain perceptual conditions are displayed and experimented with. Throughout the novel, places or settings that involve sleep or sleepers help shape the narrator’s social and artistic experiences. Sleep itself can also to some extent be seen as a necessary boundary or threshold that negotiates between inner and outer modes of perception. Furthermore sleep is often evoked through spatial imagery, for instance when sleep is depicted as a garden that the narrator enters. The reciprocal fashion in which sleep affects space as well as space affects sleep is finally summed up in the term soverum (sleep space).
The final chapter, concerning love and illness, takes its departure in various voyeuristic scenes where the narrator gains crucial insight into the world of love and illness by gazing at the sleeping other. The intermingling of the pathological and the erotic is intensified when the sleeping person is a loved one, such as the narrator’s girlfriend, Albertine. The jealousy that surmounts the narrator in the relationship with Albertine is put into perspective when he observes her sleeping body, and the significance of the sleeping individual as both (spiritually) abandoned and (bodily) available thus informs the narrator’s intermittent reflections on themes of love, jalousy and art. The chapter finally shows how the pathological and erotic share a mutual impulse, namely the interpretation of symptoms or signs that reveals the origin of suffering.
The thesis concludes by addressing, in more general terms, the potential problems involved when studying ‘sleep and literature’.

As part of a wider project to consider the manner in which philosophical aesthetics can effectively inhabit the world of art practice as a teaching, this essay works both with and against Hegel to identify a fundamental aporia at the heart of the theory/practice matrix. Rooted in the anti- ...