Bibliographic record
Abstract
As immersive media develops, creative technologies and the creative practices that they enable are introducing forms of multisensory experience which displace the visuality that has dominated media to date, reflecting a cultural emphasis on sight that, as Brian Winston has shown (1996) can be traced right back to the invention of perspective in the Renaissance. Immersive media experiences can be multi-modal and multi-sensory, with content reaching us not just through our eyes and ears but through forms of embodied experience including smell, touch and proprioception. These mediated forms of sensory engagement now intersect with documentary themes within Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality experiences, prompting a discourse concerned with the expanded fields and rhetorical and political affordances of immersive nonfiction (Kim, 2022; Rose, 2018). This paper will offer an initial mapping of projects that harness the opportunities represented by these multisensory registers. Through reference to case studies by The Feelies (Munduruku 2017), Anagram (Messages to a Post Human Earth 2021) and Marshmallow Laser Feast (We Live in An Ocean of Air 2018) we will explore how the entanglement with media allowed by novel sensory affordances is being deployed. Expanding on the entanglement of the immersant and the multi-modal media interface we will investigate what multisensory forms of storytelling might bring to the documentary project of illuminating, critiquing and reshaping our shared world. With media criticism dominated by visual and textual interpretation, we will turn to phenomenological film criticism as a starting point for an analysis of the forms of knowledge that emerge when documentary engages senses beyond the visual and aural modalities of the 20th century. We will draw on Laura Marks’ (2000) phenomenological conceptualisation of the body and embodied knowledge within cinematic experience. Marks calls the forms of knowledge derived from embodiment ‘tactile epistemologies’. These, she writes, ‘conceive of knowledge as something gained not on the model of vision, with its connotations of dominance, but through physical contact’. The paper will propose tactile epistemology as a rich conceptual framework through which to consider the forms of knowledge production at play within the multisensory engagements emerging within VR and MR nonfiction. With reference to content that engages environmental themes, we will explore the hypothesis that this generation of multisensory immersive experiences holds potential for an epistemological shift from a nonfiction media that relies on the ‘god-trick’ (Haraway 1988) of seeing everything from nowhere towards a paradigm based in situated knowledge. In this model, meaning emerges as the immersant explores their media surround and pays attention to the effects that their multisensory interaction produces. Knowledge isn’t gained through mastery but through openness, even vulnerability, in what Marks has called ‘a compassionate involvement with the world’ or Michael Taussig has termed a ‘yielding-knowing’. Within this framework, entanglement is not only a characteristic of the multisensory interface and its way of producing meaning, but a documentary methodology that encourages a relational perspective on the human position vis a vis the environment and the more-than-human world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".