Schedule

Media to be experienced are labeled as follows:

• 👩🏻‍🔬try in lab.
• 🏡try at home (usually Google Cardboard).
• 🔁can be played again outside of lab time (free on Steam, WebVR, Cardboard).

Week 1, 8/29 | Introductions

• Optional reading (~30 pp)
  • Milgram, Paul, and Herman Colquhoun Jr. "A Taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration." 1999.

Week 2, 9/5 | Scale

• Readings due (~66 pp)
  • Laurel, Brenda. "What Is Virtual Reality?" Medium, 2016.
  • Grau, Oliver. "Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality." Leonardo, vol. 32, no. 5, 1999, pp. 365–371.
  • Clarke, Michael Tavel, and David Wittenberg. "Introduction." Scale in Literature and Culture, 2017, pp. 1–32.
  • Horton, Zach. "Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene." Scale in Literature and Culture, 2017, pp. 35–60.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Leigh et al.’s CALVIN (1996). Brief documentation video.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Polyarc’s Moss (2017). Trailer.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Etter Studio’s Mr. Nom Nom (2016). Trailer. About page. Project’s GitHub repo.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Google’s Google Earth VR (2016). Trailer.
• Assignments due
  • Study on scale in virtual reality.
  • Send a few two-line proposals for Final Project ideas.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - Add/drop ends.

Week 3, 9/12 | Distance & Depth

Warning: read Merleau-Ponty's "Space" over a couple of days, take your time, and get through as much as you can. This is a dense piece of text, and, if you don't pace yourself, you may end up having migraines.

• Readings due
  • Steyerl, Hito. "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective." The Wretched of the Screen, 2012, pp. 12–30.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Space." Phenomology of Perception, 1945 (2005 edition), pp. 283–347.
  • Optional:
    • Shannon, Sonya. "The Chrome Age: Dawn of Virtual Reality." Leonardo, vol. 28, no. 5, 1995, pp. 369–380.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • ‍👩🏻‍🔬🔁Roel van Beek, Jurgen Hoogeboom, Joppe de Graaf, and Jesper van den Ende’s The Cubicle (2016). Trailer.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Electric Hat Games’s To The Top (2017). Trailer.
  • 🏡🔁Gibson/Martelli’s MAN A VR (2015) app 2. (Optional: if you have an Android device, give app 3 a look.) Trailer.
• Assignments due
  • Study on distance & depth in virtual reality.
  • Short response to readings and media.

Week 4, 9/19 | Immersion

• Readings due
  • Nechvatal, Joseph. "Towards an Immersive Intelligence." Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 5, 2001, pp. 417–422.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁daniwell & Momoko Fujimoto’s Whisper Momoko VR (2016).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Valve Corporation’s The Lab (2016). Trailer.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Wolf & Wood’s A Chair in a Room : Greenwater (2016). Trailer.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Zhong Ren's Cyber Panopticon (2018).
• Assignments due
  • Study on immersion in virtual reality.
  • Short response to readings and media.

Week 5, 9/26 | Physicality

• Readings due (~30 pp)
  • Lin, Wei-Cheng. "Building the Monastery, Locating the Sacred Presence." Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China's Mount Wutai, 2014, pp. 19-59.
  • Keigo Matsumoto's tweet (2018).
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Gibson/Martelli’s In Search of Abandoned (2013).
  • Documentation of Art404’s Echo Chamber.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Nintendo Virtual Boy games: T&E Virtual Golf (1995); Teleroboxer (1995); Virtual League Baseball (1995); Red Alarm (1995); Mario's Tennis (1995); Galactic Pinball (1995); FlashBoy+ (homebrew). You get to choose what you play. :)
  • 🚌 Observe and try Jon Rafman’s Transdimensional Serpent (2016) and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2014), part of I Was Raised On The Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
• Assignments due
  • Study on physicality for virtual reality.

Week 6, 10/3 | Agency

• Read two
  • Dove, Toni. "Theater without Actors: Immersion and Response in Installation." Leonardo, vol. 27, no. 4, 1994, pp. 281–287.
  • King, Sarah. "In/consequential Relationships: Refusing Colonial Ethics of Engagement in Yuxweluptun's Inherent Rights, Vision Rights." BC Studies, no. 193, 2017, pp. 187–192.
  • Yuxweluptun, Lawrence Paul. "Inherent Rights, Vision Rights." Immersed in Technology, 1996, pp. 314–318. MIT Press.
  • Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. "Cyberdämmerung at Wellspring Systems." Immersed in Technology, 1996, pp. 100–117. MIT Press.
  • Smethurst, Toby, and Stef Craps. "Playing with Trauma." Games and Culture, 2014, pp. 1–22.
  • Morie, Jacki. "Why yes, Virginia, there have always been women in VR." VR Scout, 2015.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992), available at the Archive of Digital Art and Yuxweluptun's website. (Optional: interview with Yuxweluptun, 2003.)
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Jörg Piringer's tractatus infinitus (2016) for iOS devices.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Google Creative Lab & NASA JPL’s Access Mars (2017). Trailer. Project’s GitHub repo.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Aldin Dynamics’s Waltz of the Wizard (2016). Trailer.

Monday, October 8, 2018, 6:00 pm - Attend lecture by Sumakshi Singh.

Week 7, 10/10 | Gallery space

• Read two
  • O’Doherty, Brian. “Notes on the Gallery Space”, “The Eye and the Spectator.” Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, pp. 13–64. The Lapis Press, 1986.
  • Parry, Ross, and John Hopwood. “Virtual Reality and the ‘Soft’ Museum: a Call for Further Research.” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 16, 2004, pp. 69–78.
  • Hayhoe, Simon. “Expanding Our Vision of Museum Education and Perception.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2013, pp. 67–86.
  • Miller, Gavin et al. “The Virtual Museum: Interactive 3D Navigation of a Multimedia Database.” Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation, vol. 3, 1992, pp. 183–197.
  • Huhtamo, Erkki. “On the Origins of the Virtual Museum.” Nobel Symposium, 2002. (14 pages.)
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Sketchfab's Instamuseum.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Finn Sinclair's The VR Museum of Fine Art (2016). Trailer.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁cybertwee's the cybertwee HQ *~ (2016) for iOS devices or Android devices. Kickstarter.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Rhizome's First Look: Artists’ VR (2017) for iOS devices or Android devices.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Float Gallery (2017).
  • 🚌Visit I Was Raised On The Internet again (pay attention to lay out and integration of VR) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
• Assignments due
  • Agency project and presentation.

Sunday, October 14, 2018 - Last day to visit I Was Raised On The Internet.

Week 8, 10/17 | Individual meetings

As Jas will be out of town Wednesday, October 17, there will be individual meetings to discuss progress in the course, final proposals, and any concerns. Additionally, the entirety of Wednesday, October 17, will be for studio time with Zhong and a guest.

• Guests: Li Yao (SAIC, MFA 18) and Snow Xu (SAIC, BFA 19).
• Assignments due
  • Send Jas & Zhong your Final Project proposal.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018, 6:00 pm - Attend lecture by Eyal Weizman.

Week 9, 10/24 | Performance

• Read two
  • Beller, Jonathan. “The Political Economy of the Postmodern.” The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, 2006, pp. 1–37.
  • Steyerl, Hito. “Is a Museum a Factory?” The Wretched of the Screen, 2012, pp. 60–76.
  • Heim, Caroline. “Audience as Co-Creator.” Audience as Performer: The changing role of theatre audiences in the twenty-first century, 2017, pp. 145–171.
  • deLahunta, Scott. “Virtual Reality and Performance.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 24, issue 1, 2002, pp. 105–114. doi:10.1162/152028101753401839
  • Striner, Alina, et al. “A Common Framework for Audience Interactivity.” arXiv, 2017 pp. 2115–2122.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Art404’s Google Tilt Brush Performance (2018).
  • Documentation of Tom Galle, Moises Sanabria, and John Yuyi’s Tinder VR (2017). (This is a performance piece and not a VR project.)
  • Documentation of Naotaka Fujii, GRINDER-MAN, and evala’s Neighbor (2016).
  • Documentation of Matsumoto et al.’s Unlimited Corridor (2016).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Innerspace VR’s Firebird - La Peri (2016) and Firebird - The Unfinished (2018).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Charades.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - Last day to withdraw from a Fall course.

🚌 Week 10, 10/31 | Revisiting the senses

Happy Halloween! We'll be meeting at the University of Chicago!

• Read two
  • Ablart, Damien, et al. “The how and why behind multisensory art display.” Interactions, vol. 24, no. 6, 2017, pp. 38–43.
  • Arnold, Peter, et al. “‘You Better Eat to Survive’: Exploring Cooperative Eating in Virtual Reality Games.” Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2018, pp. 398–408. Video.
  • Lopes, Pedro, et al. “Providing Haptics to Walls and Other Heavy Objects in Virtual Reality by Means of Electrical Muscle Stimulation.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2017, pp. 1471–1482. Video.
  • Keller, Hellen. "Sense and Sensibility: Smell is a Fallen Angel." The Smell Culture Reader, 2006, pp. 181–185.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Wolfgang Georgsdorf’s Osmodrama (2015).
  • Documentation of Maki Ueda’s Olfactory Labyrinth (2013) and Olfactoscape (2012).
  • Documentation of Marie Ehrndal’s Nosewise (2017).
  • 🏡🔁Plan8’s Sonic Umbrella (2017). Make sure to have your thumbs on the touchpads!
  • 👩🏻‍🔬(In-class) Haptics walls demonstration with Professor Pedro Lopes.
• Assignments due
  • Bi-weekly update on Final Project progress.

Week 11, 11/7 | Embodiment

• Read two
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. “Toward Embodied Virtuality.” How We Became Posthuman, 1999, pp. 1–24.
  • Yee, Nick and Jeremy Bailenson. “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior.” Human Communication Research, vol. 33, issue 3, 2007, pp. 271–290.
  • Kamau, W. Sebastian. “Rooms Full of Mirrors: Even if VR can produce empathy, that doesn’t mean it should.” Real Life, 2017.
  • Todd, Loreta. “Aboriginal Narratives in Cyberspace.” Immersed in Technology, 1996, pp. 179–194. MIT Press.
  • Zhang, Cynthia. “There, Yet Not: Motion Capture Technologies and the Promise of (Dis)Embodiment.” Graphics powder, 2018.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland's PLACEHOLDER: Landscape and Narrative in a Virtual Environment (1993).
  • Documentation of Hyphen Labs’ NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (2017).
  • Documentation of Milica Zec & Winslow Porter’s Tree (2017).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory’s 1000 Cut Journey (2018). Trailer.
• Assignments due
  • Short response to readings and media.

Week 12, 11/14 | Non-fiction

• Readings due
  • Future of Storytelling’s Journalism in the Age of Virtual Reality: Nonny de la Peña (2014).
  • de la Peña, Nonny, et al. “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News.” Presence, vol. 19, no. 4, 2010, pp. 291–300.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • Documentation of Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close (2017). Trailer. Steve Rosenbaum’s Video.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬🔁Shirin Anlen's Tzina: Symphony of Longing (2016).
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand’s Beyond Manzanar (2001). Brief video documentation. There will be working demos at sessions.
  • 👩🏻‍🔬Jas Brooks’s Everyone knows now (2016).
• Assignments due
  • Short response to readings and media.
  • Bi-weekly update on Final Project progress.

Week 13, 11/21 | Thanksgiving Break

No class!

Week 14, 11/28 | Substitute reality

• Read two
  • Suzuki, Keisuke, et al. “Substitutional Reality System: A Novel Experimental Platform for Experiencing Alternative Reality.” Scientific Reports, vol. 2, issue 459, 2012, pp. 1–9.
  • Macknik, Stephen, et al. “Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research.” Nature Reviews, vol. 9, 2008, pp. 871–879.
  • From On the Plurality of Worlds:
    • Lewis, David. “The Thesis of Plurality of Worlds.” On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 1–5, 1986.
    • Lewis, David. “Modal Realism at Work: Modality.” On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 5–20, 1986.
    • Lewis, David. “Modal Realism at Work: Closeness.” On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 20–27, 1986.
    • Lewis, David. “Modal Realism at Work: Content.” On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 27–50, 1986.
• Artwork & media to experience
  • RIKEN’s video on the Substitutional Reality system (2013).
  • Video documentation of Keisuke Suzuki’s Doppelganger experiment.
  • Documentation of Etsuko Ichihara’s SRxSI system that substitutes reality with delusion (2013) and The best courting experience for you: SRxSIxMS (2014).
  • Documentation of GRINDER-MAN’s MIRAGE (2012). Video (2012). Ars Electronica (2014).
  • Documentation of Tenga’s TENGA x SR (2015).
• Assignments due
  • Short response to readings and media.
  • Bi-weekly update on Final Project progress.

Week 15, 12/5 | Critique Week

• Assignments due
  • Completed Final Project installed on the VR desktops.

🎊 Week 16, 12/12 | Reflection

Final day of class! We'll be relaxing, discussing the semester, and eating pizza.

• Assignments due
  • Final presentations.
  • Return Google Cardboard!