Virtual Reality's Differential Perception: On the Significance of Deleuze (and Lacan) For the Future of Visual Art Education in a Machinic Age

Abstract

In this paper I argue that, generally speaking, field of art education and artsbased research has misunderstood and misinterpreted virtual reality (VR), applying it to field of representation through usual venues of cyberspace narratives, plots, objects, and characters, where meaning making and usual framing through interpretive (hermeneutic) criticism sutures viewer into ideology of a fantasy space. Drawing on theories of Giles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, radical critique is made that VR, as a machinic assemblage that disrupts representation, opens up a self-reflexive abyss as already explored by video artists in 1970s. With VR, modulation and serialization of object become new problems, as do and vibration. However, greatest challenge for art education is to come to terms with VR's fourth dimension?the nonlinearity of time, its paradox of interpassivity, and, lastly, its critical potential for identity as doubled-reflection. Misrecognitions of VR Like a sleeping giant who wakes up to find that someone or something has stuck a sharp implement into one of its vital or gans?an eye would be most appro priate one here?it screams in pain, blinded, trying to find a way to ease sting and remove irritant. Currently, art education is in a state something like that. In some sectors awareness of such a penetration hasn't even begun to register. But it will. In others, irritant has already been removed and ignored. In yet others, a film has formed over implement to make it part of eye itself. Throughout its history in North America, field of art education has been slow to recognize changes to perception that young people are already experiencing. Just when field thought it had late modernity right, with its centering DBAE (Discipline-based Art Education) initiatives, along came un folding predicaments of postmodernity, and it was once again plummeted into disar ray. Disarray, decenter ment, dis-solution, and deconstruction have become perma nent signposts of visual art, which always sits uncomfortably in conservative re cesses of public schooling where stability, tradition, and daily repetitiveness are wel comed values. One of problems with visual art edu cation is that it has not caught up to changes of perception enabled by new technologies; nor has its established main stream journals remotely begun to explore theoretical ground so as to understand virtual world that is unfolding. This sounds like a harsh claim. After all, haven't there been obvious inroads in past 10 years into computerization of visual art? Haven't art educators become more and more computer literate? Aren't there many research studies to show just how children are technologically savvy? Buckingham and Stefton-Green (2003) have a long list of articles and books to show that this is case (Buckingham, Graham, & Sefton Green, 1999; Sefton-Green & Buckingham, 1996)?to prove that kids are interactive and creative with media. There are also research studies that show just how el ementary children are able to create their own Web pages, and gender biases of VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH ? 2005 by Board of Trustees of University of Illinois 129 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.102 on Thu, 23 Jun 2016 05:58:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms creating their own cyber-narratives in hypertexts, and so on (Kafai, 1996,1999). But, I would maintain, art education (and by implication media education) has yet to come to terms with changes in percep tion that have been enabled by advent of virtual reality (VR).1 The majority of this research is caught up in available vi sual technologies (computers, digital camcorders, laser discs, and computer software)?so-called apparatus theory as initially theorized by Jean-Louis Baudry (1970,1976), and sidetracked by questions of cognition?as if VR databases provide us with superior epistemologies. As is cus tomary with every new technological inno vation, dystopias of VR are presented, fore most by proponents like Jean Baudrillard (1996) and Paul Virillio (1994) who dwell on anxieties of technological surveil lance and manipulation.2 At same time, these new technologies are praised for their Utopian breakthroughs by proponents like Howard Rheingold (1991) and Stelarc (1997) . Here techies have a field day claiming why a huge portion of school budget should be directed toward buying latest software upgrades and computer hardware. As a field, art education has a similar bifurcation. What is missing from this picture are shifting changes in con cepts, affect and precepts that have re sulted in a specific complexity brought on by virtual age. It seems that les sons from failure of both Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists to construct a new social order?one capital ist, communist?through a nar rative mystique of technological efficiency have not been learned (see Foster, 1990). Art (and media) education today appears to be repeating their symptoms. The philosophers of virtual were late Giles Deleuze and his theoretical part ner Felix Guattari?two names that seldom, if ever, find their way into mainstream art education journals. Their writings are diffi cult and this is perhaps one of main reasons that they, like many French phi losophers who have plenty to say concern ing postmodern condition, often sim ply receive cursory symbolic mention. Hopefully, Deleuze and Lacan's importance for art education will be demonstrated in this article. Visual art education has been fixated on representation?both on its cri tique (as first begun by members of Social Theory Caucus in 1980), and on its aestheticization. Aesthetics receives high praise in art education circles. No matter which theory of aesthetics is drawn upon, aesthetics remains a high priority. In con trast to this modernist orientation, I would argue that VR has nothing to do with rep resentation as it is envisioned in cur rent paradigm of art education?in all its facets. Aesthetics, likewise, receives a drastic reconceptualization by Deleuze.3 Visual art education has yet to come to terms with two aspects of visual world that VR forces it to recognize: and time?as both a movement image and time image.These two aspects of visual world destroy traditional modern ist notion of framed perception that tends to still dominate art education, introducing what I shall call phenomenon of interpassivity?after Pfaller (2000)?which presents us with other side of intersubjectivity that VR environments solicit. VR forces art educators to rethink perception as a dialectical process of ar tistic reception and creation between intersubjectivity and interpassivity; as an interactive reality between self and an animate world that gazes back (see Elkins, 1997), a concept already developed in its nascent form by Lacan (1979, pp. 67 78), who drew on photographic theory for his formulations. The day-glo fluorescent colors at height of modernism are slowly being replaced by inner glow of pixel-screen colors of televised computer screens?the flat screen becoming sym bolic of a floating portal to another fictional world of cyberspace. If electric age at fin de si?cle produced of new, in Robert Hughes's (1980) terms, when grand magasin ottered vitrine to lure consumer desire, virtual elec tronic age au d?but de millennium has in troduced what might be called the shock

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