Bad Faith Intersubjectivity: The phantom-subjective image in virtual reality contemporary art
Access Status
Date
2018Type
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Source Conference
Faculty
School
Collection
Abstract
In 1996, the early days of Virtual Reality, Lev Manovich contemplated the aesthetics of virtual worlds, saying ‘If you want to experience cyberspace of the future today, visit… Los Angeles. The city offers a precise model for the virtual world. There is no center, no hint of any kind of centralized organization, no traces of the hierarchy essential to traditional cities.’ 1 Twenty years later, Shaun Gladwell, contemporary artist and member of the Bad Faith VR collective created AR15 Field Strip, a 360-degree video set in a suburban garage in Los Angeles, depicting a blindfolded man, kneeling on the concrete floor as if in prayer, as he field strips an AR15 assault rifle – the type of firearm used in the 2016 Orlando nightclub massacre. Fixed to a point in front of him, we are given vision of confinement, dislocation and threat. In the context of gun violence in America, Gladwell gives a sinister twist to Manovich’s vision of VR in LA. AR15 Field Strip places the viewer in a point of view without subjectivity, in what Haran Farocki terms a ‘phantom-subjective image’, ‘taken from a position that a human cannot normally occupy’.2 Through Gladwell’s AR15 Field Strip, this paper explores some fundamental questions around VR in contemporary art today and its radical phenomenology of narratology and intersubjectivity.
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Heckley, Philip Scott (2002)Approximately 70% of the western world's known nickel reserves are contained in laterite ores, but only 30% of the world's nickel production comes from these ores. This is due to the lack of economically viable technology ...
-
Li, Zhan; Chen, L.; Fang, Q.; Chen, Wensu; Hao, Hong; Zhang, Y. (2017)© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Ten full-scale field tests were conducted to study the performance of basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP) strip strengthened autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) masonry walls subjected to vented gas ...
-
Stefanova, Katia; Brown, Jordan; Grose, Andrew; Cao, Zhanglong; Chen, Kefei; Gibberd, Mark; Rakshit, Suman (2023)Statistical methods used for small plot analyses are unsuitable for large-scale on-farm experiments because they fail to take into account the spatial variability in treatment effects within paddocks. Several new methods ...