May 19, 2:00 – 2:50 pm
Alison Griffiths, Baruch College, City University of New York and CUNY Graduate Center
Proxy Bodies:
A Radical Genealogy of VR
The intericonic space enveloping colored figurative religious sculpture in Medieval cathedrals has always been overdetermined and risqué, evidence of a transhistorical anxiety around historical technologies of sensory mediation. Life-size simulacra of saints, Christ, and the Virgin Mary tricked out with fake blood, tears, eyelashes, fingernails, and veins remind us that forms of mediated illusionism have remained remarkably durable across centuries of artworks and now find expression in VR as well as cinematic and digital works. My paper traces the lineaments of VR’s embodied, immersive, and sensorially discombobulating modes of spectatorship to mimetic polychrome religious statuary from the Middle Ages. I use the concept of the hyperreal to interrogate not only naturalistic visual effects found in both VR and sculpture but also how space itself might be experienced in similar ways in VR and the multimedia medieval cathedral. I’m interested in how the liminal, transitional, and sensing space of the cathedral along with its sculptures shares affordances with VR; mediated yet uncannily lifelike; detaching yet entrapping; grounded yet other worldly, and shaping sensory awareness in remarkably similar ways. Lastly, I explore how realism is negotiated across these seemingly opposed artworks, using the concept of the revered gaze, a heightened, rapturous encounter with mediated images, to consider how the real and the artificial are in productive tension in proxy bodies that move us via different yet strangely interconnected indices of belief, both sacred and profane.
Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches film history, visual studies, and media theory. Griffiths is an internationally recognized scholar whose monographs, scholarly articles, and book chapters have had a major impact on the fields of anthropology, cultural history, cinema studies, nineteenth century visual culture, and new media studies