A New Mode of Being
By Mark Pesce

What do you think we might be able to learn about ourselves by learning more about, and using immersive reality technologies?

Immersive technologies provide ways to explore regions of the self that aren't always visible, in fact aren't maybe ever visible. A human being is like an iceberg - there's a portion of it that's accessible, that's explicit and then there's a lot of it that's implicit. We know it's there because we can feel it within ourselves. We make guesses that it's there in other people because we ascribe the same content to other people as we do to ourselves, but it's not often possible to actually invoke the same thing in two people. This is the function of art. Art, when it's working well, if you can say art works; it has a capacity to evoke emotional response.

At the beginning of the era of immersive technologies, only a few people were really talking about its capacity to evoke emotional response and really very few people did anything to demonstrate it. So, when you take a look at, for instance, Char Davies' work Osmos, you see a work who's entire intent centers around an evocation of an emotional response. This makes it unique.

Art, when it's working well, if you can say art works; it has a capacity to evoke emotional response.

In the book that I've just written, I make an analogy between Osmos and the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris because in both cases, the artists use space to transform being. If you're on the Ile de la Cite in Paris and you come up to Notre Dame, it's loud, there are tourists, there are venders, and there are all sorts of things. As soon as you cross the transom into the cathedral, there is an entire change. It becomes hushed, it becomes broad, and it becomes an experience of quality. Immediately your own internal state changes. It becomes reflective, it becomes spiritualized, and this is because the ancient architects of the cathedral understood that if you change space, you change yourself.

Now Char did this by creating a "space," but we want to use that word in quotes because this is no longer a real space, per se. It's a virtual space, but because it's immersive, you can imagine yourself into believing it. So, when you enter that space, the transformations of space that she's applied, then become real for you and so when you change space, you change being. So, to enter Osmos is to enter a new mode of being.

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