Virtual Reality in the Age of Digital Re-reproduction

Virtual reality presents the future. Filmmakers extol its ability to evoke audience empathy. Journalists champion its potential to mobilize audiences distracted into sensory malaise. Joe-Shmo praises the potential for an alien-esque hat and increased possibilities for video games and porn. Time and space disappears as viewers respond to events and experience beyond their geographic and temporal limits. 

Although VR is positioned as an unprecedented development, it may not be so radical. Virtual reality ushers the viewer into a constructed three-dimensional universe that uncannily resembles a material landscape. This landscape prompts a visceral response like the Lumière brother’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat allegedly “caused fear, terror, even panic”. Though they were accustomed to photographic realism, film shocked viewers. Now, despite being accustomed to dramatic moving images, VR shocks users.

That Virtual Reality is needed to jolt audiences the way films once did suggests the medium is more polemical than newspapers and tech-mavens realize. Technology’s development of social forms extends beyond the digital age. Walter Benjamin explored similar matters in his 1936 work ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. At the time, society faced similar cultural and political stressors that were eroding previous modes of representation. Amidst internal threats, European society was fracturing as neighbouring countries became enemies with opposing ideologies. New forms of art — Futurism, Hollywood films, radio — responded by promoting a form of expression that matched the frenetic atmosphere. This, Benjamin argued, shifted how citizens interact with their environment. Art’s ‘aura’ —the unique attributes a product communicated to its audience — was no longer its defining attribute. Whereas art was once limited to irreproducible objects — a play can never be identically re-performed, painting required physical presence — film, photography and audio reduced the importance of being there. Mechanical reproduction collapsed time and space for artistic expression. When the viewer doesn’t need to be in the company of creation to experience art, art switches from a repeated ritual to a singular act. Benjamin contends that reproduced art becomes politicized as ‘exhibition value’ displaces ‘cultural value’. 

This displacement provided the preconditions for celebrity culture, which commodifies the human image. The actor — aware they are offerings themselves to a camera which camera that endlessly copies their image — conducts himself for consumption. The emotions, the unique experience of their character and the audience’s ability to empathise, collapse together as the subject’s image is manipulated through filming, reproduction and editing. Mass marketing emphasizes the divide between man and his image. Representations of the body are sold and consumed, divided and reassembled, to create a beguiling reality for viewers. 

Virtual Reality updates celebrity consumer culture for Millennial culture that prefer to commoditize experiences. If the masses have grown immune to film and photography’s absorption/alienation, VR re-engages audiences by renewing their belief in art’s potential for political expression. Filmmakers and journalists quoted in the New York Times cite VR as having ‘unique potential … to summon emotion in the viewer’, ‘ability to generate intense empathy on the part of the viewer’ and ‘command of presence’. Although these statements seem to promise revolution, read through Benjamin’s history of mechanical reproduction, VR resituates mechanical reproduction for the 21st century. If the economy has shifted from producing commodities to producing experiences, art has responded by moving from producing celebrities to producing immersive digital environments. While capitalism continues to structure Western society, technological changes during the past eighty years have reorganized production and class, conditioning the development of new ideologies and ways to express them. Not only can the viewer enjoy art from any temporal and spatial location, they can experience an event regardless of social viability. 

Whereas Benjamin discussed ‘pure art’ — that is, art made to be art, to represent reality with the implicit admission that does not accurately reflect reality — VR tends to presents itself as a factual depiction, complicating the implications of reproduction. When used as a journalistic tool, VR echoes the Benjamin’s concluding omen, ‘[Experiencing humanity’s destruction as pleasure] is the situation of politics which Fascism is rending aesthetic’. Although VR may use real people and real stories, the editing techniques used to relate these stories are ignored to validate the generated experiences and emotions. While the audience is supposed to understand their response as authentic, the stories presented to them have been choreographed like a movie. VR negates its intended aim and inverts the question it appears to answer: what happens to representation when reality becomes virtual as opposed to lived?

In an ideal world, the multiplication of experiences — whether virtual or lived — would increase society’s empathy, building peace and understanding for conflict-ridden areas. As utopian experiments tend to demonstrate, even societies operating under ideal conditions are subject to strife due to individual interpretations of events. Since VR prizes the individual audience member’s experience as opposed to the collective response, it seems possible that the individualization of technology will intensify film’s alienation. The potential for VR to be a constructive force depends on how society unites the phenomenon with its response. If VR only provides entertainment, it will become another tool for capitalism to monetize Experience. If the separation is presented solely to build empathy, it threatens to commoditize human nature. VR needs to find a midpoint that allows viewers to share emotion, while understanding that an individual’s experience of this emotion remains unique. VR needs to find a storytelling voice that allows for the communication of stories outside of pleasure/information binaries. VR needs an ideology to harness its potential for social change.

Featured image via Flickr: Maurizio Pesce

Perfume ads exemplify printed media's communicative authority

Although digital advertising is diverting money away from print ads, research demonstrates that forming a bond between consumer/brand/product happens quicker when the message not mediated through a touch screen. If Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was correct when he claimed that ‘the medium is the message’, digital media sends a message of distraction. Print, on the other hand, grounds meaning in a concrete, multivalent sensory world that connects the reader to material life. 

Online readers sense that the screen’s buzz compromises their attention. From the abundance of information to the strain on the eyes, screens homogenise the details they present. Breaking news and cat videos are reduced to pixels. Information is either visual or aural, though spoken messages are easily avoided with mute. Touch screen phones may claim tactile satisfaction, but it’s a monotonous tap that condenses diverse message to a single experience. Tap and read is the modern scratch and sniff; multivalent pathways of information collapse into a producing/consuming unit. Screens replace involvement with more, more, more information, increasing distraction while mitigating investment in presented messages.

Print media retains potential for communicating and disseminating meaning by appealing to the senses beyond the visual. While an artistic front-page can hardly compete with the availability, reproducibility and mutability of digital photos, print media has touch, smell, sound and taste. The feel of the pages, the aroma of the paper, the sonorous thud of a weighty issue, the metallic twang of fresh ink: print products supply readers with a dynamic sensory environment.

The perfume ad exemplifies print’s ability to stimulate the senses. Once integral to fashion and celebrity magazines, bland digital adverts have largely replaced them. Printed on weighty cardstock, the perfume ad announced its presence in the magazine. Browsing the newsstand, the reader could choose Vogue rather than Elle or Vanity Fair based on the number of inserts, visible at a simple flick of the spine as they were printed on narrow pages. The decreased width accommodated that all-important flap, under which might hide perfume ambrosia or the stench of decay. It was never clear which, though a vaguely floral odour permeated every magazine with the inserts. 

The roster rotated: an Estee Lauder scent appeared around Christmas (when they promoted their seasonal gift boxes available at Macy’s), Clinque Happy defined Seventeen and DKNY seemingly loved Lucky. Each season ushered in a new aroma, varying in one or two drops of synthetic compound from last year’s scent. But the promise for renewal remained. Peeling open the flap, the reader altered the width of the page, changed the scent of the magazine and integrated themselves into the message. Rubbing their wrist against four inches of condensed perfume, the magazine and advertisement imprinted themselves onto the reader’s body. The temptation was to sniff it straight away, but the smell developed while reading about Karl Lagerfeld’s latest creative endeavour. When the smell had settled itself properly into the pores, it remained a facsimile of the true scent. A trip to the perfume counter and chat with the salesperson was required to determine whether the aroma nestled in the pages of Marie Claire matched what sprayed from the bottle.

Touch, transformation, smell, visuals, conversation: perfume ads represent the immersive sensorial experience print advertising and media offers readers. This immersion is compelling in an age when every brand manipulates similar visual cues for communicating their brand. Successful digital ads naturalize themselves into the environment, hiding between real posts to produce no more emotion in the viewer than a non-sponsored image. Digital media produces alienation, not immersion.

Print immerses with more than perfume and beauty product samples. Nike’s inserts city-specific running maps, including recommendations for refuelling stops and tips for form. Immersive print ads aren’t limited to inserts. Play-doh’s self-mocking ads re-situate the viewer’s perception of their physical alienation and the company’s ability to bridge the gap between image and material. Apple’s multi-page watch ads translates their seamless aesthetic for the magazine’s form, incorporating the spine into their design. Sharpie juxtaposes a rumpled page with color and known cultural icons to create a visual joke that implies the product’s role in the material creative process . Whereas a digital ad needs to be crafted to invisibility and naturalization, the print’s physical presence retains communicative strength.

If print media is dead, then sensory stimulation seems doomed to becoming ever more homogenized and alienating. Digital media provides simple, visual images that are momentarily arresting before the viewer becomes distracted by a more shocking message. These messages might be impressive, but they fade away as quickly as they came. Print might require more time to produce, but it has a longer life cycle in readers’ lives and minds. What advertisers need is a way to present their message that takes into account the inherent diversity and characteristics of media consumption. Long live the perfume ad.  

What the Anna G Anniversary Corkscrew Teaches us about Good Design

Alessi’s Anna G Anniversary Corkscrew (or AGAC) is ostentatious. That’s the point. You must stop and think before grabbing its oversized head, hidden behind a mask that slides on top but doesn’t stay in place. Stop, think. Good design asks us to revise our interactions with everyday objects by liberating us from mindless routines and offering space for reflection.

Founded in 1921, Alessi is an Italian company that combines smart design with industrial production. Until the 1950s, Alessi produced mainly small wood and metal objects for the home. As the economy industrialized and consumerism too hold, design became an essential tool to stimulate consumer desire. Form may have followed function, but form was an increasingly integral to function. In 1955 when Ettore Alessi decided to introduce product collaborations with external designers, he asserted the industrial object’s potential to be an artistic product. Italians mitigated society’s transition to consumerism by uniting an object’s aesthetic value with its use value.

It’s not immediately clear how AGAC manifests this union or if it does at all. The corkscrew jars with Alessi’s sleek spoons and clever kettles. The garish plastic body and oversized magnet mask seems to combine a day of the dead mask with a vintage doily. You turn away. And then you turn back. Because Alessi’s AGAC isn’t a bottle opener but an invitation to celebrate daily life.

I discovered the AGAC as a sales associate at Eataly. They were released to commemorate the twenty years of the corkscrew’s manufacture. AGAC cost $150. We received four and sold them all, including the sample. This surprises people who don’t believe in spending more than $20 on a single kitchen tool. But when you buy an AGAC you don’t purchase just a kitchen tool. You buy an invitation to the party, a conversation piece, a moment of reflection.

I was carrying the floor sample while searching for a colleague. You have to hold the AGAC upright so the head doesn’t fall off. I circled the store once, twice, three times. My face pinched into a mask of annoyance. I’m trying to do something important, I fumed, where are they! I walked by a mirror, caught a glimpse of myself and laughed. In my hand was a $150 corkscrew with an expression that suspiciously resembled my own strained scowl. How could I be angry? For a moment, I saw from afar. I’d become so invested in my invented drama, I forgot myself and my surroundings. AGAC brought me back.

Good design forces us to step outside of ourselves and re-examine our situation. Good design doesn’t make acts thoughtless. Absentmindedness is a flaw of bad design. Think about the duvet you toss over your bed or the shoelaces you notice only when they turn black. Whereas bad design reminds us of its presence through its flaws, good design directs us to reconsider our routine. Think about your buttery smooth leather wallet or the magazine whose pages feel pleasantly weighty in your hands. These moments invite us to reconnect with our actions and thereby cultivate a more mindful attitude. Good design finds reason to celebrate the ordinary.

The Enchanting Universe of the Experimental Cocktail Club

The exteriors are unmarked. Except for the line. It may just be two or three people, perhaps a few more on Friday evening, but savvy drinkers know to arrive early to secure their seat at the Experimental Cocktail Club. Started in Paris in 2007, this mini-chain — it has locations in New York and London — presents itself as an exclusive speakeasy. But this isn’t a Gatsby gaudy stage set. The Experimental Cocktail Club exudes an effortless style that allows both mixed drink aficionados and novices to assimilate subdued modern glamour for the duration of their drink.

Regardless of the specific city, ECC — as christened by their loyal customers — locates their bars in similar neighborhoods. They sit on the border of an ethnic enclave and hip area: the Marais in Paris; Chinatown/Lower East Side in New York; and Chinatown/Soho in London. The central location lets visitors feign exploration while lingering in their stomping ground.

This combination of the novel and familiar permeates the ECC universe. That seemingly unmarked entrance? Look closer; it’s a sign. In Pairs light glimmers behind blacks velvet curtains; in New York there’s a not-quite hidden restaurant hygiene grade; in London the door is worn down. Although these markings could appear incidental — people do knock on the door in London, the bar must display a hygiene rating in New York — the ECC atmosphere use these markings as tools that build a community in opposition to standard bars. Since their facades don’t resemble a regular restaurant, the visitor experiments when approaching the door. They ring an anonymous doorbell; they clank an unidentified knocker. Through experimentation cocktail lovers enter into a club of people that share an attitude toward drinking.

Once inside, the discomfort of experimentation disappears and the club enchants its members. From the tables and lighting to the drinks and the music, the Experimental Cocktail Club reproduces their bars like a global corporation, while maintaining an exclusive ambiance. Each location retains the same bar, the same low seats, the same glassware and the same beats. Low lighting hides the particulars, leaving a spectral glow of oriental opulence. Trendy tea lights on private tables and at the bar cast an orange-y glow over the space. Subtle variations keep the cookie cutter structure novel. Reorganizations of the proportions position New York’s as a cool American bar, London’s as an updated British gentleman’s club, and Paris’ as an artist’s haunt. The frame is streamlined, but the content is altered.

 Thus, it won’t shock visitors to multiple locations that each outpost’s menu riffs on a limited group of basics. There’s the drink with bourbon and an egg white; the one with rum, a spice and lemon or lime; there’s the sweet one with cognac. These aren’t Starbucks’ globalized offerings. The drinks mix the local accent into the set cocktails. New Yorkers get tropical, tiki inspired drinks, while Londoners sip updated classics. These variations serve the visitor an interpretation of the city in a glass. Entering an ECC incorporates the drinker into a club where cultural differences are experienced as novel twists on a familiar structure, emphasizing experimentation’s potential to bridge differences.

This hybrid of familiar and novel naturalizes the speakeasy gimmick. Although the hidden door satisfies an imagined prohibition nostalgia, drinking at ECC doesn’t feel contrived. Once inside, the speakeasy script finishes. Apart from a reservation, there’s no code word required to order a drink. There’s no insider knowledge needed to decipher the menu. It’s experimental. The bartenders don’t invent, but present riffs the familiar. ECC experiments with new accents in their different locations and invites their customers to do the same. It’s a club. And the drink’s just happen to be well-made. It’s a cocktail.