Brief Overview of the Amplified Reality Headset

Inigo Wilkins
Brief Overview of the Amplified Reality Headset

Installation

• audio-visual recording and playback device
• virtual reality headset (vrh)
• amplified reality headset (arh).
– experimental praxis
– sound and sight
– perception and memory
– space and time

Composition of Headset

• a digital video camera
• an external microphone
• a liquid crystal display (lcd) module
• a Fresnel lens
• a pair of headphones

Function

• time lag of externally relayed sonic information
• rhythmic interaction
• controlled sonic feedback loop
• relays a point of audition
• deterritorializes the audio-visual technology and the soundscape itself

Design and Operation

• amplified voice
• totemic mask
• collective memory
• interactive process

Theoretical Background

• Bergsonian conception of the virtual
• Pierre Levy, Brian Massumi, and Gilles Deleuze.
• virtual exists as a dimension of real potential distinct from possibility
• memory as embodied tendencies in varying states of contraction and diffusion – a crucially virtual realm

Philosophy

• an anti-representative tool for producing and recording affect
• indebted to the philosophy of Spinoza
• opposes Platonic, Cartesian, Hegelian and Freudian models of thought
• rejects the hylomorphic approach that posits a duality of form and substance and subjugates the copy to the original
Methodology

• uses a metallurgical methodology concerned with properties and degrees
• events or singularities
• thresholds of transformation
• rejects the alienating modernist obsession with subjectivity and familial atomisation
• the reduction to text of all media
• the contraction of all meaning to the presence or absence of the phallus


Interactive art

• Myron Krueger’s computer controlled responsive environments
• Ivan Sutherland father of computer graphics and virtual reality
• pioneered the ancestor of the arh
• first head mounted display (HMD)
• called the ‘sword of Damocles’
• non-linear narrative polyphony, strategies of seduction,
• explorations of power and play, proximity, manipulation, and memory.
Key Interactive Artists

• Jeffrey Shaw
• Camille Utterback
• David Rokeby
• Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
• Supreme Particles Group
• Ponton Media Art Lab

Inspiration

• Cave Automatic Virtual Environment
• Ray Hannissian’s stereoscopic video explorations
• tape-recorder experiments of William Burroughs;
• the notion of playback
• Dianetics, Ron Hubbard, the engram.
• cut-up method

Applications:
recording and playback

Recording dominated by sensory-motor schema

• the movement-image
• disabilitatingly technological reality headset(dtrh)
• MacLuhan: media as prosthetic extensions
• to record a slice of time where instinctual meta-sensory mechanisms of body (such as proprioception) activated before awareness

Playback dominated by the irrational cut

• the time image
• subjugation of time to space
• to render time and thought perceptible
• two functions parallel the double nature of time
• present bifurcates in two streams
• projects into the future (actualising)
• records as past (virtualising)


Illimitable Applications

• multiple arhs in different locations
• the relay of audio-visual information to interactive nodes
• adding extra technology
• using computer programs to alter the sound and images.

Practical Research

• investigating video and microphone technology
• experimenting with different methods of recording, transmission, and playback
• trawling the net for similar projects
• Locating required technical components within a non-corporate budget.

Immersive Media

• viewing lcd screens directly using fresnel lens
• structural concerns: weight and shape (length, height, balance)
• synchronisation of the recording/playback devices


Media

• ‘the medium is the message’
• society is driven by sight
• acoustic space - immersive, inclusive, overlapping, mutable and indiscrete
• visual space - cold, detached, exclusive, discrete, industrial
• anti-occularcentric critique
• anthropocentric premises
• body as medium for other bodies, media and technology

Transversal Evolution of the Machinic Phylum

• bodies evolve through processes of contagion in a transforming network of relations
• machinic phylum is flow of matter
• following irreducible constellation of relations in flow is metallurgical praxis of artisan
• genealogy of media
• the arh plugs amplified audio and digital video into the human body
• memory and dreams, or virtual bodies, also evolve transversally


Conclusion
The arh is:

a metallurgical probe
an instrument for recording and producing affect
a transversally evolving contagious mutation engaged in a positive feedback loop with its environment