Embodiment, AI and the Perception of the Real
- Publisher:
- MIT Open Documentary Lab
- Publication Type:
- Report
- Citation:
- 2024
- Issue Date:
- 2024-09-10
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As creative media technologies continue to evolve, we are seeing expansion in the ways in which participants’ bodies are drawn into the produced experiences. Embodiment, on the one hand, is a persistent state of being human, and so any media experience is to some extent embodied. However, the affordances of immersive and interactive media technologies enable more explicit forms of embodiment, where movement and multi-sensory approaches can be incorporated into the progress of a work.
These technological developments that enable embodiment are being increasingly used by documentarians to experiment with representations of the real. The nonfiction project is expanding forwards, as makers and audiences not only examine reality but constitute it, at times through physical interaction. While there might be a tension between documenting the real and creating the real through an interactive experience, tensions can offer creative avenues for exploration.
At IDFA DocLab in November 2023, MIT researchers explored how the different forms of possible embodiment were being used by artists, and how they had impact on audience experience and understanding. We wanted to understand what strategies and tools artists are using, how these projects are being received by audiences, and whether the knowledge communicated or experience delivered is distinct from that shared by more traditional forms of flat screen media.
We also wanted to find out whether and how discomfort was being used in creative ways by the projects. Discomfort is a challenging notion in media – on the one hand we’re getting better at spotting and preparing for it, for instance we now know the importance of trigger warnings. On the other hand, many of us are retreating into filter bubbles so we are less likely to be presented with uncomfortable truths, or ideas that unsettle us. We can avoid discomfort of the conceptual variety with some ease. So are artists finding ways to reinsert some discomfort, to trouble us with unease?
Early immersive media experimentation often purported to offer a fully virtual reality, distinct from the physical world. Now, we see increasingly creative approaches that ask critical questions of our perception of reality and toy with slippages, many of which use embodied practices to do so. Also, given the explosion of tools using Artificial Intelligence in the last year or two, we aimed to examine how these were being used in the expanded documentary field, and how they might connect with this questioning of realities.
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