It should come as no surprise that within any ostensibly unified dream of utopia paradoxically lies the disillusioning realities of fragmentation, contradiction and conflict. After all, one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. This has long been the predicament plaguing the endeavor of the romantic notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk- the aesthetic aspiration toward borderlessness. From its very outset, the ‘total work of art’ has been marked by unreconciled dialectical tensions. Between its sharp-tongued condemnations of technology and simultaneous reliance on it, its yearning for decentralised mass transcendence and its slippage into totalitarianism, the multifarious incarnations of the Gesamtkunstwerk have not served as actualized visions so much as a recurring dream. That is not to say, however, that these contradictory impulses signal a hopelessly vague lineage, destined for “the trash heap of history” as Lebbeus Wood has proclaimed. Even while its specific taxonomy remains ambiguous, the Gesamtkunstwerk- precisely its dialectical struggles- have proven fruitful as a means to understand critical pedagogies in the new millennium, taking on forms far beyond the term’s geographical and disciplinary locus. When taken to be a loose assembly of aesthetic elements rather than a monolithic, centralised endeavor, the potency of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic ideal among interdisciplinary art forms since the nineteenth century becomes undeniable.
This essay envisages the Gesamtkunstwerk’s internal unity-fragment dialectic as a productive horizon for emergent considerations of cyberspace, notably in virtual reality and augmented reality art experiences. Perhaps more palpably so than any medium, digital art betrays the paradoxical motif all-too-familiar to the Gesamtkunstwerk- the Wagnerian conception as well as its ostensible antithesis, Brecht’s epic/dialectical theatre- of technology as poison and cure. In realising many of the dreams of the total work of art, the meta-medium of cyberspace simultaneously re-entrenches long-standing oppositions of its internal dialectic and poses new predicaments for the tradition as it materialises in the metaverse, bringing forth with it a new set of ideological implications. Jason Farago writes of virtual reality artworks: “Forget contemplative distance, say goodbye to Brechtian alienation. In these works, immersion is all.” Problematizing Farago’s claim, this essay contends that facets of Brecht’s dialectical theatre- more indebted to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk than historians have generally acknowledged- in fact offer a viable framework by which VR artworks may tackle the enduring paradox of technology as poison and cure from within the medium itself. To be precise, I will posit that Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt or ‘estrangement effect’, coupled with an exposure of the mechanics of production, constitute the beginning steps of a critically empathetic framework by which to mediate digital surrogation or role-playing in VR experiences. As its case study, this essay examines Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand’s VR installation, Beyond Manzanar (2000), which deploys digital surrogation to recreate experiences of Japanese-American internment following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Drawing on Matthew Wilson Smith’s The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, Beyond Manzanar will be scrutinized using a dialectical framework that understands the Gesamtkunstwerk to be a cluster of aesthetic elements of dispersed authorship, as opposed to a unified Wagnerian singularity.
Since the German composer Richard Wagner popularized the term in his programmatic treatise of 1849, The Artwork of the Future, the Gesamtkunstwerk and its associated aesthetics have demonstrated profound consequences on interdisciplinary art forms, manifesting in the realms of music, theatre, architecture, art, and most recently, in the metaverse. Yet, even as it emerges nearly two centuries onward in places far beyond its geographical and disciplinary matrix, the heterogenous manifestations of Gesamtkunstwerk continue to be riddled by dialectical struggles and neo-Romantic longings comparable to those from which the vision was initially born. This invokes the necessity of tracing the genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk within the wider contextual framing of Wagner’s socio-political aspirations, for his endeavor is “a social and not simply artistic dream, and the social dream is essentially a communitarian one” (Smith, 2007, p. 9). In examining the varied contexts in which elements of the Gesamtkunstwerk have arisen- from Dada performances to Andy Warhol and cyberspace- one is pointed emphatically to the futility of prescribing a stable, unified identity to the total work of art. Further foreclosing the feasibility of a cohesive identity is the fact that Bertolt Brecht- long cast as Wagner’s foil, his dialectical theatre the antithesis of the total work of art- advocated for a critical but segregated mixture of the arts that might still be considered a Gesamtkunstwerk (Smith, 2007).
Following on from Danielle Follett and Anke Finger, as an initial attempt toward a definition, the Gesamtkunstwerk may be understood as “an aesthetic ambition to borderlessness”, distinguished by, but not limited to, three forms of “organic” synthesis that often operate collectively (2011, p. 3). Firstly, from a formalist standpoint, this synthesis is enacted on the material level as the ‘arbitrary’ boundaries between different artistic genres are dissolved. In his landmark publication, The Artwork of the Future, Wagner asserts that dance, tone and poetry- the three ‘fundamental’ arts- are “so wondrous closely interlaced with one another… that each of the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inbreathed and borrowed life” (1895, p. 95). In the aesthetic aspiration toward synthetic, multimedia totalities, the Gesamtkunstwerk runs counter to the modernist impulse which seeks to segregate the arts into discipline-specific objects (Rasula, 2016, p. 15). This segregation, as per Wagner, is epitomised by the lyric opera, a degraded pseudo-synthesis “led by egoism” for which his disdain is laid bare in The Artwork of the Future: “The opera, as the seeming point of reunion of all the three related arts, has become the meeting place of these sisters’ most self-seeking efforts” (1895, p. 152). With this organic trinity dismantled, the “three primeval sisters” must now submit to “despotic rules for mechanical movement” (1895, p. 95). Beneath Wagner’s explicit disdain for the mechanized world, however, lay an utter reliance on it in the realisation of this organic whole, a confusing contradiction which naturally calls forth the second feature of the Gesamtkunstwerk- the political dimension. Inseparable from his broader political aspirations, Wagner underscores that the formal qualities of the Gesamtkunstwerk “cannot arise alone, but only in the fullest harmony with the conditions of our whole life” (1895, p. 155). The endeavor of reuniting the constituent parts of the total work of art indelibly mirrored Wagner’s yearning to restore unity to a fragmented society, to reconcile the self with society and humanity with nature in the face of a deeply felt alienation that plagued the modern condition. As such, this second plane of synthesis involves a transgression of the boundaries between art and life, mobilising techniques of sensory immersion such that its audience, in a suspension of disbelief, undergo a collective transformation that ultimately serves the broader revolutionary purpose. This transformation is not limited to the tangible, however, as a final synthesis is enacted on the metaphysical level: the transcendental synthesis, obliterating the demarcations between the “present, empirical reality with a nonpresent, or not-yet-present envisioned totality, unity, infinity or absolute” (Finger and Follett, 2011, p. 4). It is in this yearning to operate on the metaphysical plane, in this longing for infinity, that the Gesamtkunstwerk would simultaneously attain its ritualistic quality as well as its fear of usurpation and eclipse by the larger totalities of commodity and fascist spectacle. Such concerns were inextricably linked with the looming commodification and industrialization that culture was seemingly bound for in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution. Conceived as a negative correlation, Wagner saw the emergence of mass media as running concurrently to the decline of the bourgeois public sphere, surrendering its capacity for critical public debate to the state’s cause of imposing ideological coherence (Smith, 2007, p. 21). Inevitably, this bore grave implications for an aesthetic project which sought to mobilise the Volk in a collective pilgrimage to a destination that, in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, might as well be considered mass indoctrination.
Far from a deadlock, however, the troubled relationship between art and mass media would in fact serve as an immensely fruitful horizon for Wagner’s art. In a repudiation of the cheapened pseudo-synthesis that was the lyric opera, he would reconceive theatre as the very vehicle by which notions of spectatorship, of spectacle and of the relationship between nature and machine would be transformed. The theories conceived in The Artwork of the Future, born from his attempts to grapple with these polarising forces, would find their most emphatic materialisation a quarter of a century later in the opening of his festival theatre in 1876. The unveiling of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth witnessed the epitomisation of what Matthew Wilson Smith has termed the “iconic” Gesamtkunstwerk, described as a pseudo-organic form that attempts to bury all the “outward signs of mechanical production on which it relies, and and which particularly appeals ‘folk’, myth and intuition” (2007, p. 3). Its counterpart- the “crystalline” Gesamtkunstwerk- undertakes an ostensibly antithetical approach by exposing the mechanics which underlie its essential structure, only to achieve the same result of the “iconic” by simultaneously re-incorporating these signs into a “pseudo-organic totality” (Smith, 2007, p. 3). In their shared urges for organic unity, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk serves as a tangible continuation of the Kantian dichotomy of organism versus mechanism, upholding the teleological conception of the world. Conceiving the various arts as a means to a unified end, the Festspielhaus materialised Wagner’s dream of the “theatrical edifice of the future” (1895, p. 185), yielding a formal composition that served to synthesise all forms of media through theatrical, acoustical and optical innovations. To this end, the Festspielhaus employed immersive technical features including an egalitarian amphitheatrical seating arrangement, borrowed from the ancient Greeks; a deep orchestra pit concealing the musicians from the sight of the audience; a rectangular proscenium arch, which, when juxtaposed with the marble pillars encircling the auditorium, directed the audience’s lines of sight to the focal point of the invisible fourth wall (Packer, 2011, p.157). Its dissolution, engendered by a suspension of disbelief, was indispensable to Wagner’s aim of utterly absorbing the audience into the simulacral stage action, by which the boundaries between spectator and spectated, present reality and the not-yet-present, envisioned unity, would be obliterated.
In The Gesamtkunstwerk and Interactive Multimedia, Randall Packer traces the enduring pertinence of the multisensory, totalizing effects mobilised at Wagner’s Festspielhaus in the impulses that drive the creation of virtual environments in digital art today. The innovations Wagner conceived for the theatre, as it pertains to the transformation of the stage-audience interface, have undoubtedly informed the evolution of the relationship between human and machine, particularly its reciprocality. In the context of VR artworks, this relationship is embodied by the human-computer interface that, by the same token, aspires to produce a hyperreal experience such that the immersant’s perception of reality is reconfigured by the artist’s lifelike reconstruction of it (Packer, 2011, p. 159). VR artworks, the newest iteration in the long lineage of immersive aesthetics, mobilise unprecedented technologies ultimately to fulfill age-old dreams, often characterised by neo-Romantic longings to ‘return’ to nature. Drawn into an embodied relationship with a virtual architecture, one becomes a part of the mise-en-scène, transported to another realm on a perceptual, psychological and sensory level. Within this capacity to extend the body beyond its “habitual and biological modes of embodied perception” (Bartlem, 2005), lies a transcendental potential which hearkens to Wagner’s yearning to not merely recover, but surpass the heights of the Ancient Greeks. Similarly, the questionable technopianism of early cyberspace theorists, such as Roy Ascott, remains intact today in the transhumanist impulse that heralds not merely a restoration of the organic unity of pre-modern times but a transcension into a “post-biological future” (2000, p. 3). What this implies is that, as the technological infrastructure of VR grows ever more complex, so does its ideological implications, and these immersive technologies are by no means neutral. As ideologically-loaded devices, at stake in the discourse surrounding immersive technologies is whether this embodied transcendence facilitates anthropocentric, technofetishistic escapism or holds the potential for critical contemplation. And in the case of digital surrogation experiences, this dilemma is further muddled as the simulacral environment recreates a historically and racially localized experience, potentially birthing voyeurism, objectification and retraumatisation. Locating their ontological roots in the Cartesian philosophical tradition, immersive technologies possess the capacity to tangibly enact the entrenched dualisms of mind/matter, nature/culture and male/female. Then, how might VR artworks forge a sustained critique of the Cartesian philosophical tradition in which their very origins lie, from within the medium itself? Such is the paradox that continually challenges the synthetical project of VR, a paradox which, in the dialectical tension between its message and the technological mechanisms that deliver it, reverberates a story all-too-familiar to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
The indispensability of the ‘suspension of disbelief’ to the project of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk manifestly extends to the construction of immersive VR environments today, of which a core consideration is reciprocal interactivity. In attempting to effectively simulate the organic, VR artworks often epitomise the paradox of the Gesamtkunstwerk by their extensive reliance on cutting-edge technology- a reliance which is then either, in the fashion of the ‘iconic’, concealed by ever more sophisticated blinders, or exposed to be merely camouflaged by the larger organic whole like the ‘crystalline’. To be precise, this dialectical tension, in the context of VR technologies, is embodied by the dynamic between the superstructural synthetic reality and the substructural base code and apparatus (such as VR headsets), from which it is respectively generated and hosted. The quest to sophisticate simulacral environments then, often driven by the impetus to be indistinguishable from reality, necessitates a concurrent sophistication in techniques of concealment to hide from the immersant the very technological mechanisms that underlie their lifelikeness. In other words, as Smith puts it succinctly, “strategies of simulation…develop alongside strategies of occultation” (2007, p. 172).
On one hand, binary code- the fundamental substructure of all artworks in the metaverse- realises, to a degree, the Wagnerian dream of reuniting the “sister arts” by means of universalization, as opposed to totalization. The meta-medium of cyberspace, Smith contends, is fundamentally distinct from live performance in its capacity to translate all data into binary digits or “bits”, which are universally exchangeable with other “bits” (2007, p. 163). In this sense, the substructures of all digital art are identical and as such, universally replicable, rendering the digital landscape of VR an inherently multimedia medium in its eradication of inherited aesthetic distinctions. In light of this universal exchangeability, the “old sisters” of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk are not reunified in a totality so much as rendered clones- “parentless, replicable, universally-exchangeable, free-floating”- with no centripetal force to bound them toward any predetermined goal (Smith, 2007, p. 163). The apparatuses by which this substructural code is brought to life, however, may be even less sympathetic to the Wagnerian cause. For one, the stereoscopic head-mounted devices used in VR experiences- as a result of their high requirements for latency (the time it takes from the movement of a tracked object to have a corresponding visual effect)- can produce ‘cybersickness’ in immersants, rapidly breaking the simulacral spell (Stauffert et al., 2020, p. 3). The constraints of the technological apparatus manifested tangibly in the ‘stage action’, any dream of Wagnerian totality is shattered; not only is the capacity to suspend disbelief extinguished, but what is elicited in the immersant, far from transcendence, is a response characterised by literal nausea, disorientation and dizziness. In the face of such a reaction to an attempt at totality- one of disoriented revulsion- Wagner might just have settled for a response, or lack thereof, of “dumbfounded passivity” that critics have frequently claimed of the Gesamtkunstwerk’s effects (Koss, 2008). Indeed, Brecht’s dialectic theatre sought precisely to startle audiences out of this alleged state of mass hypnosis as the vehicle for political enlightenment.
Brecht has typically been cast as Wagner’s foil, and such a delegation is not completely unfounded- the differences between their dramaturgies are indeed legion. Whereas Wagner strove to synthesise all the arts in a pseudo-organic totality, Brecht called for a separation and conflict of elements that exposed the mechanics of production (Smith, 2007, p. 72). Whereas Wagner sought to engross his audience by eliciting an affective, interpellative response, Brecht mobilised estrangement techniques, Verfremdungseffekt, to create a theatre of flux and contradiction. Brecht’s dialectical theatre, in its call for a “radical separation of the elements,'' appears to stem from his antipathy towards the Wagnerian approach to unity (Brecht, 1964, p. 37). In his essay Notes to my Opera Mahoganny (1930), Brecht makes manifest that his exacerbation of contradictions on the stage is inextricably linked to a broader condemnation of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk: “So long as the expression ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (or ‘integrated work of art’) means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be ‘fused’ together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere ‘feed’ to the rest”. This degradative fusion is not limited to the arts, however, “extend[ing] to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the Gesamtkunstwerk” (1964, p. 37-38). Ridiculing the Gesamtkunstwerk as “witchcraft”, Brecht contended that the phantasmagoric “muddle” birthed by the totalized intermingling of the arts was reproduced in its audiences, the individual spectators now an immobilised body. Such is the recurrent nightmare troubling the Gesamtkunstwerk, echoing its fear of usurpation by the larger totality of fascist spectacle. Considering Wagner’s notorious anti-semitism, coupled with his messianic mission of the total work of art and its utopian evocation of a unified Volk, it is hardly surprising that his conception has been the subject of contentious suspicion.
These contradictory pulls rouse the broader debate about the nature of the integration that the Gesamtkunstwerk aspires to. Does the synthesis of the arts, in line with the Wagnerian dream, constitute a redemptive transformation by which the masses may be mobilised? Or does it compromise their individual integrity and agency, as well as that of the spectators, conjuring a sort of totalitarian Gleichschaltung, or forced homogenization and participation (Finger and Follett, 2008, p. 6)? Brecht’s claims in Notes to my Opera Mahoganny are largely predicated on an affirmative response to the latter, but his repeated use of the qualifier “so long”- “so long as the expression ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ means that the integration is a muddle”- reveals that the Brechtian dramaturgy constitutes not a simple attack on the Gesamtkunstwerk so much as a reconception of its notion of unity. Akin to Wagner, Brecht’s vision of unity was borne from a yearning to overcome the profound social fragmentation felt in the rise of industrialized capital (Smith, 2008, p. 78). The form it took on, by contrast, was that of a contrapuntal unity, a collective of juxtaposed disparate elements that mediate the spectacle. In the dialectical theatre, unity is not established through the illusive seamlessness of the organic whole but quite the opposite: the incoherence, interruptions and conflict of independent parts, whose mechanical foundations are exposed. For Brecht, the linear developmental structure of the Wagnerian theatre- wherein the events of the plot are dovetailed in a predetermined narrative arc- signalled a fatalistically deterministic understanding of human nature, a character bound to their destiny by their essential, given self. Such a structure bore grave implications for reception; its audiences, hungry for the instant gratification of catharsis, would be embroiled in “the protagonists’ suspense-laden passage to their pre-given end” (Mumford, 2018, p. 81). In light of this, Brecht would devise an episodic structure, in which “the unified whole consists of independent parts”, of relatively autonomous scenes, juxtaposed in opposition to one another (Brecht, 2018, p. 132). As Matthew Wilson Smith remarks, what Brecht is speaking of here is montage. As an aesthetic principle, montage dissolves the distinctions between “unity and fragmentation, continuity and interruption” such that the disparate elements act not as antitheses, but as mutual aids (Smith, 2007, p. 79). This episodic structure was necessarily coupled with an exhibition of its production mechanics, a Verfremdungseffekt by which to, in an unmistakably Marxist move, place the means of production back in the hands of the labourers, or artists in this case. The Brechtian theatre, as Walter Benjamin understood, sought to bring audiences “in contact with the production process”, placing “an improved apparatus at their disposal”, ultimately transforming spectators into collaborators (1998, p. 98). In so doing, Brecht’s theatre dismantles the Kantian dichotomy of organic versus mechanical; that is, when the unified organic end is achieved by fragmented, mechanic means in discordance with the notion of unity, the teleological claim that the organic whole is both the “cause and effect of itself” (Kant, 1914, p. 199) is put to the test and ultimately refuted.
Installation view of Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand, Beyond Manzanar (2000).
Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand’s VR installation, Beyond Manzanar, draws from the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but does so in a way that estranges its utopian dreams by deploying many of the Brechtian strategies outlined above. Created in 2000, Beyond Manzanar is an interactive VR installation that reconstructs the post-Pearl Harbor internment of Japanese-Americans at the historical Manzanar camp, alongside threats made to Iranian-Americans in the wake of the hostage crisis of 1979-80 (Thiel and Houshmand, 2017, p. 3). Erected in the high deserts of Eastern California, Manzanar was one of the ten internment camps in which Japanese-Americans were incarcerated under the premise of a national security measure during the Second World War. The commemoration of these experiences, as Ingrid Gessner notes, was marked by “a long period of silence”; public statements regarding the forced removal and internment were rare, and this representational silence grew even quieter with the spatial erasure of the camps after the war (2016, p. 158). In the face of these infrastructures’ ephemerality, Beyond Manzanar revitalises these experiences through what Marita Sturken refers to as “technologies of memory,” in a virtual recovery of the site (1997, p. 10). As the installation toured the US, Thiel and Houshmand’s life-size projection of their simulated reality allowed visitors to navigate Beyond Manzanar with a simple joystick mounted in the centre of the darkened room. With no other virtual paraphernalia such as headsets or hand-held controllers, Beyond Manzanar makes for a VR artwork of modest proportions but a nonetheless immersive one; as Thiel explains: “if you have a screen that’s big enough to present the material life-sized, then the image is already immersive. You see the image in your peripheral vision, and your body reacts to it not as a picture but as a space” (Thiel in Smith, 2007, p. 181). Encased by three walls, the interactive screen projection is effective in palpably conjuring the alternate environment in its life-size, 3D recreation and use of music and lifelike sounds. In her interview with Matthew Wilson Smith, Thiel notes that Beyond Manzanar was consciously informed by the Gesamtkunstwerk, envisaging VR as the medium by which to fulfill as well as reboot its dreams for the current era, moving “beyond theatre not only by exploiting the irreality of space with no physical laws, but also by use of a first-person viewpoint to bring the user’s own body and personal character into the piece” (2007, p.182).
Internment camp with newspaper headlines, Beyond Manzanar (2000).
At the outset of Beyond Manzanar, the visitor- or digital surrogate, to be precise- finds themselves in a reproduction of the internment camp, encircled by barbed wire and guard towers. Moving through the identical rows of barracks, the visitor is taken by surprise to come upon ephemeral fragments of text declaring war and anti-Japanese hostilities hovering in the sky above. Almost immediately, Beyond Manzanar estranges its audiences, breaking the spell of the simulation by establishing the historical and political context of what was indeed the reality for internees. Such estrangement effects serve more than to establish critical distance, however; the surprise of encountering the newspaper clippings, and eventually, poems entangled in a barbed wire fence, simultaneously confines the visitor in a sense of imprisonment, a “confinement [that] is not only physical,” but one of “media confinement, a public confinement” (Thiel in Smith, 2007, p. 182). After passing through Manzanar, the visitor eventually encounters a Japanese garden, a site which refers to an actual garden built by internees at the camp. Inspired by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s firsthand account of the garden as a place of refuge- a fleeting moment suspended between dream and reality- Thiel and Houshmand recreated the site virtually in a “realization that a garden is an ancient form of Gesamttheatre,… of virtual reality” (Thiel in Smith, 2007, p. 183). Here, Beyond Manzanar evokes the Edenic longings of the Gesamtkunstwerk, yearning to recover a bygone utopian condition- but this totality is necessarily understood to be illusory and transient, maintained only by constant effort. As the visitor is forcefully thrusted out of this paradise, one is reminded of the hubris involved in Wagner’s claim to a totality that does not merely match but surpasses that of the ancient Greeks. Brecht’s criticisms of Wagner’s illusory unity are conjured here, and extended further in the following scene. There is perhaps no clearer instance of the Brechtian influence in Beyond Manzanar than when the visitor, wandering around the Persian garden, is violently jerked out and finds themselves hovering above the camp in a bomber plane. The projection now a replication of a first-person shooter game, the visitor loses control of the joystick and the scene unfolds on its own accord. In this uneasy juxtaposition of oppositional perspectives, Beyond Manzanar culminates in a self-reflexive critique of the entanglements between the very medium through which it is hosted, and the violent Cartesian philosophical tradition in which its origins lie. With a visible participation of the technologies in reinforcing the message, the installation echoes Erika Fischer-Liste’s assertion that “intermediality can only be perceived when the medium does not entirely disappear behind the message it conveys” (2014, p. 156). Once again, Thiel and Houshmand align themselves with Brecht, who claimed that the development of communication technologies demands “a kind of resistance by the listener” (Brecht, 1964), such that a passive spectator is transformed into an active participant. While Beyond Manzanar indeed draws on some of the motifs of the Gesamtkunstwerk- when considering its episodic, morally incoherent structure, loaded with contradictions, and its exposure of the underlying technological mechanisms- it is more so Brecht, than Wagner, who comes to mind. Albeit less immersive than VR technologies today, what Beyond Manzanar demonstrates is that, if conventions are effectively subverted, such technologies can hold the potential to tackle the enduring paradox of the medium and the message. In a response to the Gesamtkunstwerk’s fear of absorption into the “public entertainment machine”, critically distant approaches to VR may in fact serve to unfetter the medium from its reputation as an immobilising, “consensual hallucination”.
Bomber plane perspective, Beyond Manzanar (2000).
What remains unclear, however, is whether Thiel and Houshmand take into account the implications of the disembodied role-playing in Beyond Manzanar. Eschewing “a character-centered narrative viewpoint”, the artists chose not to include Japanese-American internees as avatars, instead allowing for a first-person experience of the camp (Roxworthy, 2014, p. 95). In Revitalizing Japanese-American Internment, Emily Roxworthy problematizes disembodied surrogation in VR experiences, particularly in its assumption of autoempathy. Digital role-playing, Roxworthy argues, does not automatically incur empathy, but rather reifies the viewer’s self-serving biases- and likewise, many critics do take empathy to be the natural consequence of surrogation, and “that such empathy is directed toward the masculinized perpetrators rather than the feminized victim- the first-person shooter rather than the object shot” (2014, p. 95). What is at stake here, as it pertains to Japanese-American internment reproductions, is the capacity for these surrogative processes, which rely on the “spectacle of Japanese American trauma itself” to substitute the self for the Other, to re-objectify and retraumatise the othered subjects being role-played. This poses yet another troubling dilemma for VR experiences; in the place of critical thought, digital surrogation runs the risk of identity tourism in an uncritical eclipsing of historical understanding. In fact, such an assertion is not far from Brecht’s own rejection of empathy and identification as modes by which to produce critical contemplation, criticising the immobilising role they assumed in the Gesamtkunstwerk- a wariness undoubtedly exacerbated by Hitler’s hypnotic totalities in which “the German public were encouraged to see the world only through the Führer’s eyes” (Mumford, 2018, p. 63). This concern about the passive responses he saw to be a product of empathy prompted him to minimize the potential for identification in the theatre of the Verfremdung. In the place of the usurpative mimesis enacted in the Gesamtkunstwerk, Brecht’s epic theatre would “appeal less to the feelings than to the spectator’s reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things” (Willett, 1977, p. 168). These principles are apposite to the context of digital role-playing experiences that reproduce historically and socially localized events. In fact, Roxworthy’s critically empathetic framework for mediating digital surrogation is derived from Brecht’s ‘critical mimesis’, as she calls it. Critical empathy, Roxworthy explains, “makes the process of identification arduous though necessary (not easy or seamless) both by revealing empathy’s potential failure and by vitalizing objects that are not normally experienced as interlocutors” (2014, p. 99). What this advocates for, in the context of VR role playing experiences, on one hand, is a reciprocal interactivity between the visitor and the objects and more-than-human beings present in the scene, evincing the agency of the original subjects in their environments. And on the other hand, as it pertains to interface- the visitor neither assumes the first-person perspective, whereby the visitor usurps the original subject’s body and renders it invisible, nor the third-person perspective, which renders the virtual avatar a “theatrical prosthesis”; rather, the visitor experiences the simulated world through a mediated “semi-embodiment” of the subject, the back of their head obscuring the visitor’s vision at all times. This semi-immersive and therefore semi-subjective perspective, coupled with the vitalization of the more-than-human world, circumscribes simple identification with the subjects and as such forges, in Brechtian fashion, “an alienating mise-en-scène that is more ponderous than immersive” (Roxworthy, 2014, p. 106). As more-than-human beings enter the equation, a greater consideration of thing-power in VR interactivity would forge a more equitable, horizontal-temporal future for immersive technologies, one that loosens the anthropocentric grip on the ontological centre without forsaking the humans too often left out of the equation.
Throughout its varied iterations, the Gesamtkunstwerk has always concurrently embodied two sides of the same coin- it is always being buried, is always resurrecting; the poison is always technology, and its remedy is always technology’s fruits. It should come as no surprise that, nearly two centuries onward from Wagner’s landmark publication, this evocatively protean idea continues to entrench its original dialectical tensions and produce new predicaments as it manifests in previously unprecedented contexts. When the aspiration lies in borderlessness, this is a project whose manifestations, at best, will always fall short; that is not to say, however, that the total artwork’s endurance is predicated on its capacity to be ‘fulfilled’, as if it were some simple solution for fragmentation. Rather, it is quite the opposite, as this essay has aimed to illuminate: the total work of art is not a solution so much as a symptom- “a sublime, telling and troubling symptom” (Smith, 2007, p. 188). As it materialises in the metaverse, the age-old discourse of the total work of art collides with the equally contentious one surrounding cyberspace and its immersive technologies. What is forged at their intersection is not a deadlock, but rather a burgeoning proliferation of new meanings, both awe-inspiring and nightmarish. What is not merely preserved, but exacerbated by this cutting edge technology, however, is the Gesamtkunstwerk’s recurrent nightmare of its usurpation by the larger totalities of commodity and fascist spectacle. Digital surrogation in historically localized VR experiences serves to further complicate this debate, invoking postcolonial and ecological considerations. As these interrelated theories necessarily enter the equation, it is in fact Brecht’s dialectical theatre, which, in overcoming Kantian dualisms, serves as the more thoroughgoing response to these emergent totalities. As such, this essay contends that Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt constitutes the stepping stones for a viable framework by which to mediate critically empathetic experiences of spectatorship, toward a profound reconception of immersive technologies.
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