Presença em realidades mediadas por tecnologias interativas digitais

Abstract

The popularization of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality systems places this modality of experience of interactive content within the list of conventional digital media devices of high commercial insertion and popular acceptance, along with smartphones, computers and video games, among others, especially after the mid 2010s. It is notable that this type of interactive experience, initially focused on mass entertainment, especially videogames, spreads to other areas, following the path of traditional media (such as photography, cinema and video), reaching our area of ​​interest: the Arts. We observed artists as one of their early adopters, exploring the potential of artificial reality devices and extending its technical, aesthetic and poetic limits, outlining the possibilities of using them within a context of autonomous artistic language, with distinct potential, practices and results from other audiovisual languages, interactive or not. We are interested in investigating the particular power of this technology in producing the experience of reality that, although different from the immediate natural reality, is experienced as real in a greater or lesser degree of effectiveness. In this statement, one of our basic ideas is implicit: that the realities mediated by interactive technologies are "real" realities - in line with what the philosopher David Chalmers (2022) proposes - and this characteristic is at the heart of the poetic and aesthetic force that these systems lend to the Arts. We approach how the configuration of the subjective conscious experience of the reality of objects mediated by interactive electronic systems takes place, which falls within the scope of Presence phenomena, a concept that is developed especially in the area of ​​philosophy from the texts of Martin Heidegger, who unfold the phenomenological method inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, as do the texts of Maurice Merleau Ponty, the latter dedicated to embodied perception. The study of Presence is also manifested in the works of Jacques Derrida, and, more recently, in the area of ​​philosophy of mind, in the texts of Alva Noë and David Chalmers. Another central area for the current study is that of psychology, which provides us with the important concept of Enaction - coined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varella - or active perception, which is complementary to the field of Ecological Psychology initiated by James Gibson, dedicated to the perception of affordances. By highlighting the ways in which an electronically mediated object becomes perceived and investigated through embodied action in a similar way to how an immediate real object is perceived and investigated, we seek to emphasize the power of this technology as a tool of artistic production, revealing possible creative practices that explore the authorial creation of reality events, experienced both subjectively and collectively, whose effects can be perennial and materially effective.