Abstract: Virtual reality (VR), with its huge diversity of cultural conceptions and definitions, is a wholly paradoxical technological phenomenon: it is at once futuristic yet retrograde, exciting yet unsettling, a simulation and yet reality. The potentials for VR lie in its capacity to unsettle binary discourses; we are forced to consider and engage our cognitive and perceptual systems to analyse ‘inbetween’ experiences, where I embody myself as being-in-the-world, whilst simultaneously traversing virtual space as an embodied ‘other’. Within contemporary experiences of media and embodiment, the horror genre becomes particularly relevant for further understanding subjectivity and affective response. This article calls for a reconceptualising of framelessness, or that which cannot be fully articulated within the borders of frames and fixity. Combining philosophical, phenomenological enquiry and genre theory, the paper will explore the compatibility of VR and horror as they draw attention to a phenomenology that can necessarily “attend to a realm outside of humanity” (Trigg 2013). Exploring contemporary media experiences of the horror genre, in particular, the Anglo-American J-Horror remake The Ring (2002) and the VR horror experience A Chair in a Room (2016), it will consider the ways cognition and embodiment in VR can be more truthfully captured through an approach that leaves the frame behind.
Figure 1: The Ring (Verbinksi, 2002).
The affective response of horror – far from an aestheticizing of alien existence – is the necessary symptom of experiencing oneself as other … Horror concerns as much the structure of the human becoming unhuman as it does the thematic experience of this transformation.
— Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (2014, pp.8-9).
Experiences of horror are particularly felt, that is to say that horror and the horrific manifest themselves as embodied and physiological experiences that take advantage of some of the most deeply rooted and primitive aspects of human Being. Horror, as a philosophical, political and cultural form, goes beyond the analysis of subjective experience and, instead, encourages us to embrace the ineffable contradictions of an ultimately “unthinkable world” (Trigg, 2014, pp.8-9). Horror’s affective potential lies in its capacity to unleash the presence of the unknown; the limitations of conceptualising the world as enframed within the horizons of human understanding are brought to light. In many ways, our relationships with ever more immersive technologies do something similar: they encourage active participation in systems, infrastructures and virtual worlds which are wholly new and unknown. Virtual Reality (VR), in particular, requires our cognitive and perceptual systems to negotiate “in-between” experiences, moments where we embody ourselves as being-in-the-world, whilst simultaneously traversing virtual space as an embodied “other”.
This paper argues that VR experiences offer the capacity to mediate horror as both an affective representational genre, what Noel Carroll terms “art-horror” , and a phenomenon of Being, what Levinas might term the il y a, or sheer horror of empty, shapeless and eternal being-in-the-world, through posing new affective and critical challenges for embodied subjectivity. I draw these conceptualisations of horror together through the claim that they are both concerned with the resistance of categorisation – whether that be ontological, conceptual or affectual. Horror “haunts the edges of culture” (Santilli, 2011, p.175), threatening the agency of the human subject and revealing itself through “weird” affection. Affect has been central to conversations around embodiment and spectatorship; Steven Shaviro (2010), for instance, considers affect as irreducible to representation, rather manifesting as an aesthetic bodily experience which eludes capture and definition, whilst Vivian Sobchack’s work re-evaluates spectatorship in cinema as “carnal”, or as “vision in the flesh” (2004). Carol Clover’s 1987 work on horror spectatorship, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, more specifically argues for the formulation of the ‘body genre’, exploring the specific kinds of affective work tied into spectatorship, particularly the enacting of specific gendered experiences. A critical account of the “weird”, as informed by Dylan Trigg’s Phenomenology of Horror, allows for an “evaluation of existing norms, in which the gaze of human subjectivity loses its privileged place” (2014, p.3). This paper, by engaging with an affective reformulation of the “weird”, will argue that the blurring ontological distinctions between the real and the virtual echo existing conceptualisations of that which goes beyond standard perception, cognition and experience .
As ontological divisions between the virtual and the real become increasingly blurred, the phenomenological conception of enframing (Heidegger, 1954; Hansen, 2004) seems unable to truthfully capture the relationship between immersive technologies and embodiment that might resist categorisation. Combining philosophical, phenomenological enquiry and works of art-horror, the paper calls for a conception of framelessness, or that which cannot be fully articulated within the borders of frames and fixity. Using the Anglo-American J-Horror remake The Ring (2002) (fig.1), as a representation of the “frameless” as a distinctly horrific trope, and the 2016 VR horror experience A Chair in a Room (fig.2) (Wolf and Wood Interactive) to consider framelessness as a certain affective experience in VR specifically, I will consider the ways cognition and embodiment in VR can be more truthfully captured through an approach which leaves the frame behind.
Figure 2: A Chair in a Room: Greenwater [Virtual Reality Game] Gateshead, England: Wolf & Wood Interactive Ltd.(2016)
Kjetil Rodje (2017) explicitly confronts the stylistic framing of horror in the found-footage film as a mode of perceptual viewing which links media objects and bodies together through dynamic actor networks. Enframing, in both philosophical discourse and media encounters, then, is the act of understanding, experiencing and seeing the world from a specific (and inherently reductive) perspective. In the same way that, as humans, we reduce things to a specific ordering for use (Heidegger, 1954), media also constitute a framing of the world as representation. Horror disrupts this capacity to frame by complicating ontological stability and exposing the limits of the world as enframed. Horror presents various iterations of the world as it exists beyond framing.
Breaking the Frame in Horror Cinema: Gore Verbinksi’s The Ring
The American remake of the J-Horror film, The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) is perhaps the most well recognised representation of ontological disparity and the “breaking out of the frame” trope in twenty-first century horror cinema. Based on the collection of novels by Koji Suzuki and the earlier Japanese film adaptation Ringu (Nakata, 2000), the film follows protagonist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) as she attempts to find the source of a “killer video tape” which, upon being watched, will kill the viewer, following a telephoned warning that they will die in seven days. In an attempt to halt the circulation of the tape, Rachel seeks to discover more about its supernatural inner workings. Upon tracing its origins, Rachel discovers the backstory of Samara Morgan, the unhuman supernatural entity whose spirit possesses the tape. Rather than a lingering human figure, Samara is represented as a weird glitching-static entity embodied in a physical human-like form whose movement and supernatural capacities exceed human comprehension. Her emergence through the television screen does not see her transformation from a mediated virtual entity to a fully realised human, rather, the representation of Samara is unsettling because she is mediated and exists in the real world as an uncanny not-quite-human; Samara breaks the boundaries between real and virtual embodiment/s. Not dissimilarly, as Lacefield notes, such a breaking of boundaries explores the intrusion of the technological into the realm of the subject (2010). The incapacity of the frame to inform a boundary between fiction and reality, and thus also the supernatural and the natural in The Ring sees the human body threatened by the unknowable unhuman whose existence goes beyond the rules and experiential capacity of the human world.
The transgression of the frame is initially signified by the movement of a still image of a fly on the television from inside to outside and beyond the screen. As Rachel attempts to analyse the VCR tape’s underlying workings by persistently fast-forwarding and rewinding it, the fly continues to crawl seemingly ‘within’ the screen, but actually appears to exist independent of it (fig.3).
Figure 3: Images from The Ring (Verbinksi, 2002). DVD Video.
This oscillation defies all sense of human control; the presence of the supernatural here not only appeals to our innate fears of unexplainable loss of control, but also marks an inversion of the natural urge to assign things to specific ontological categories.
When mediation occurs as unruly, such as the tape playing without consent, the mediation of the supernatural is brought to light, whereby the supernatural apparition is correlated with the disruption of seamless flow of information. This idea reflects the ontological disparities of the frameless, whereby a strange or haunted form of communication between two sites causes any distinct ontological divisions to dissolve. The sense of non-definition depicted in The Ring’s horrific visual representation is what provokes fear in the non-diegetic viewer; the haunting seems to defy all forms of human control in an attempt to communicate its unruly presence. Indeed, the representation of unhuman virtual bodies provokes a distinct and weird affective response by the non-diegetic viewer, as attention is drawn to the discomfort of physically feeling the presence of frameless bodies. An interruption, such as Samara’s emergence from the screen implicates the unhuman act of becoming as mediation itself.
In these ways, The Ring provides an introduction to the disruption of the enframing orientation, or any sense of stable ontology, as represented in horror cinema. Samara, as frameless apparition, marks the inversion of human agency; such horrific encounters mark an unfixed phenomenology of that which exists beyond us in the realm of the human subject. With these features identified, the paper will now turn to philosophical accounts which consider technological enframing and its impact on real-world experience. In the same way that strange encounters with media objects reveal their existence without us, phenomenological accounts of enframing (despite focusing on human experience) also narrate the world as it always exists beyond human subjectivity.
Phenomenology and Technological Enframing
Philosophical accounts of human/technology relationships discuss the ways that technology enables us to understand further the ways human’s enframe the world by analysing immediate experiences of it. Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954) explores the use of technology as a means of interacting with the world as it exists as standing reserve, or waiting to be accessed through and by human use of tools. Heidegger’s works continue to inform a trajectory of re-readings; the ‘enframing’ concept is of particular interest to new media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen, who aligns Heideggerian phenomenology with experiences of new media and VR most explicitly. Where Heidegger’s approach towards technology more broadly considers objects of use that are “by no means anything technological” (Heidegger, 1954, p.4), Hansen rewrites bodily enframing into the cultural and technological milieu of immersive digital events and objects. Heidegger’s emphasis on enframing is primarily concerned with the realisation of Being and its relationship to the world; Hansen, rather, sees enframing as a performative role undertaken by the experiencing body. Though Hansen’s approach aligns Heidegger’s philosophy with a more contemporary discussion of digital media, it would seem that much of Heidegger’s discussion of enframing as both revealing and concealing is mitigated so that the body is put in the “empowered” position of giving form to digital data. Such an analysis only accounts for the ways the body might enable a seamless conversion of formless information into fully realised affect, and not those elements which remain concealed, arduous or beyond immediate cognitive comprehension. An account which might see the body as disempowered, as responding to the affective potential of immersive digital innovations in weird and unexpected ways, will enable a critical understanding of VR which goes beyond familiar encounters, and legitimises the consideration of instances where technological use might affectively deviate.
Heidegger’s conceptualisation of enframing sees human dependence on tools as bringing nature to a state where it can be accessed, so that both humans and the world of appearances are enframed to be configured into an ordering for use. This relationship to technology, Heidegger asserts, gives way to the essence of technology itself as “Gestell”, or “enframing”. Technology, then, is both a material entity and an instrumental one; the essence of technology (enframing) foregrounds the idea that technology is “a means to an end” and “a human activity” (Heidegger, 1954, p.18). This foregrounding highlights the use of technology as being framed for and by its human use. The action of enframing never captures things as they truly are outside human understanding. Though Heidegger hints that human use of technology conceals the things themselves, he also suggests that such enframing reveals a truth. He continues:
Modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing. Therefore we must take that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-reserve in accordance with the way in which it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing reserve (Heidegger, 1954, p.19).
Here, Heidegger proposes that seemingly both humans and technology are recruited into the enframing event in order to reveal an ultimate truth that cannot expose itself purely through human action. Humans rely on technology, but there are always elements which escape our (human) comprehension. The act of enframing is not perceivable to the physical eye, and is articulated by Heidegger via its strangeness and ambiguity as humans and their being-in-the-world are revealed to one another. In this way, human embodiment – and its technological extensions– sees human Being (our always being in and of the world) come into realisation. Heidegger’s essay emphasises the role of enframing to reveal the real, and the real as always seemingly outside man and technology, an ontological event which escapes the ordering that it necessitates. Through enframing, then, Heidegger asserts that humans and Being, as the “Being of whatever Is” (1977, p.xv), come into estrangement and realisation of one another.
Rearticulating the enframing concept in his work, New Philosophy for New Media, Mark B. N. Hansen correlates an approach to the use of technology with the “advent of digitisation” (Hansen, 2004, p.10). This movement sees enframing take on new technicalities, where the focus shifts towards the process in which information is converted into concrete bodily affect. As Hansen puts it:
Correlated with the advent of digitisation, then, the body undergoes a certain empowerment, since it deploys its own constitutive singularity (affection and memory) not to filter a universe of preconstituted images, but actually to enframe something (digital information) that is originally formless. This originary act of enframing information must be seen as the source of all technical frames (even if these appear to be primary), to the extent that these are designed to make information perceivable by the body, that is, to transform it into the form of the image (Hansen, 2004, p.10).
Hansen’s approach differs to Heidegger’s in the way it marks digital information’s seeming dependence on the body in order to be fully realised through its conversion into affective bodily response. For Hansen, the frame and framing are necessary to “institute a difference between the actual and the virtual and thus to catalyse the actualisation of the virtual” (Hansen, p.74). He states that framing “always originates in the transpatial meaning-constituting and actualizing capacity of (human) embodiment. The technical frame, or interface of digital media is constituted as its ‘objective support’” (Hansen, p.102), an ontological separator – keeping data permanent instead of the impermanent “mental or instrumental” form of visual memory. By framing virtual space and/or digital data, Hansen argues that the body converts data into a “contingent actualised image” (Hansen, p.120) — the body becomes the “source of all technical frames” (Hansen, p.120). However, Hansen’s approach to enframing does not account for instances where the body may be unable to interpret given information in a recognisable way. When media does something unexpected, such as temporaneous glitching, the body does not become a framing source—rather, the realm of subjectivity is confronted by the digital as it exists beyond the embodied interaction with it. In immersive VR experiences in particular, the body does not necessarily convert data into an actualised image, but is rather confronted by strange affective sensations as the actual and virtual collide.
Framelessness as Immersion
In the early stages of virtual reality’s development as a consumer device, developers are attempting to tackle cognitive, epistemological and embodied limitations in order to most successfully interact with users’ bodies; by perceptually placing the body in unique mediated virtual environments, developers must first of all forge a literacy for understanding how the body adapts to immersive virtual experiences, and how to make these experiences as natural and seamlessly encountered as possible. In order to achieve a certain kind of immersion in the virtual world presented, the interfacial frame of the medium seeks to become completely transparent. This is the primary focus of a recent TED presentation given by Chris Milk, CEO of VR company Within, who remarks:
I started thinking about frames, and what do they represent? And a frame is just a window. I mean, all media that we watch—television, cinema—they’re these windows into these other worlds. And I thought, well, great. I got you in a frame. But I don’t want you in the frame, I don’t want you in the window, I want you through the window, I want you on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world (TED, 2015, no page).
Though Milk’s understanding of the frame focuses on the visual interface, the movement through and beyond framing implicates the removal of ontological distinctions between the user and digital information. But where does this leave the body? Discourses of technological transparency and transcendence divert away from the potential experiencing of affective displacement in this ontological mashup of the real and virtual.
It is clear, then, that the body’s capacity to make sense of digital information is expected. I return to the idea that an account of the unexpected interactions between the body and digital information is an important mode of enquiry. Heidegger’s analysis of enframing focuses specifically on an event where human usage of technology frames the world of appearances; Hansen places enframing closer to the experiencing human body, where it comes to be an affective interpretation of virtual information. In a similar technical vein, the permeating discourses of technological transparency focus on the frame-as-interface and ultimately seek to do away with the frame as its presence sees it become a perceptual obstruction. However, framelessness-as-transparency purely reflects the invisibility of enframing in all human perception: everything is always enframed, but we never encounter it as such. Enframing can only be recognised when being-in-the-world is disrupted by that which cannot be framed. Horror has the capacity to expose that which exists beyond, and the capacity to frame the world is brought into question.
With these ideas in mind, it will be possible to consider a new approach which considers VR experiences as frameless. Framelessness might be conceptualised as an experience where a very “new” simulated world is perceived as a fully present space, but the body’s place outside it causes a strange oscillation between technological enframing (relationship to technology) and the bodily enframing of virtual space (bodily spacing). Rather than regard the removal of the frame as signifying the removal of the interface, the removal of framing has more to do here with a consideration of instances where human embodiment affectively encounters that which exists beyond our comprehension—we could say that the body’s incapacity to frame virtual information in a given way makes it an uncanny site where fleeting sensations of otherness produced by VR can in fact highlight the body’s own “alien materiality” (Trigg, p.77). Such sensations might occur when, for example, the user is presented with the opportunity to fulfil the role of becoming another body within a virtual simulation. Alternatively, in an instantaneous simulation glitch, the sensation might be that of space breaking away from the body – an incapacity to grasp a space which I perceive myself to be inhabiting.
Such instances could generally be seen as a hindrance to VR’s “taking off” in the consumer market. However, a willingness by users to embrace these weird affects as part of gaming narrative experiences in VR is highlighted by the popularity of horror games developed specifically for the medium. VR is still in its early stages; horror in particular is able to provide a platform where its current technological limitations actually become part of the gameplay itself. In his essay on ‘Silent Hill and the Aesthetic Economies of Fear’ (2015), William Cheng notes that, in the development of survival-horror video games in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s, fear was elicited “by teasing the player with an illusion of control, only to snatch it away at the worst moment” (Cheng, 2013, p.175). Indeed, his analysis of the player’s control of Harry Mason, the protagonist in the first Silent Hill game (fig.4), considers the unruly movement of the virtual character through the game space as only serving to elucidate the player’s lack of agency due to “awkward controls” and “clumsy combat” (Cheng, 2013, p.175).
FIgure 4: Harry Mason, protagonist in the original Silent Hill game (1999) Available at: https://krysofalltrades.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/ae41f-harrymasonsh1.jpg
In the ongoing gamification of the horror genre, the embodied action of the player is particularly incorporated into the wider affective potential of the game itself. In the early development of video games, the limitations posed by deficient technological controls seemingly became part of the horrific experience inherent in games such as the early Silent Hill franchise; questions of player agency, unruly technology and system malfunctions all emerge as part of the game-play, bridging horror from the virtual into the real through arduous and frustrating control of the character by the player. Horror games emerging on VR platforms are also able to incorporate the same technological limitations into the experience as a whole. Diverging away from third person control of two dimensional characters, however, users now face the challenge of embodying the character directly in the first person . Such an experience sees new affective sensations emerge.
Dylan Trigg’s A Phenomenology of Horror offers a unique approach to such a doubling of embodied experience. Though focusing primarily on representational accounts of horror, Trigg inaugurates a new philosophical approach which unites the tropes of horror with the weird affection of Being through his analysis of the “unhuman body”. Locating his work within a range of philosophical enquiries on error and embodiment, Trigg considers the body as simultaneously being the most familiar and unfamiliar site of experience by presenting an “unhuman” phenomenology which sees the body as a “collision of the human and non-humanity inhabiting the same body, with each aspect folding over into the other…The subject…is depersonalised through an exposure to the alienness of matter. What remains is materialised abjection” (Trigg, 2014, p.55). Trigg links this unhuman embodiment to the “abject”, as most notably explored in the work of Julia Kristeva (Kristeva, 1982). Abjection concerns itself with the notion of the unknowable, something that escapes understanding (Kristeva, 1982, p.2). Though Kristeva’s theory of abjection alludes to experiences of the horrific and the uncanny nature of being, Trigg’s approach arguably reaches beyond the horrors of human being and instead considers the ways in which the feelings associated with “unhumanity” are manifest.
Trigg’s nuanced approach to an unhuman philosophy appeals to the body as a site for experiencing otherness. A voice is given over to the “weird” bodily sensations that are mostly overlooked in philosophy and the materiality of the body comes to the surface as “an existence that both enables and exceeds all subjectivity” (Trigg, p.11). By closely analysing and exploring the horrific representations of non-ontological beings, necessarily anthropomorphised by the not-quite-human figure of the undead, Trigg asserts that horrific experiences implicate the otherness of the human body itself, describing this as a “body horror” (Trigg, p.8). Though he emphasises the existence of “another” phenomenology, this is precisely enabled through a newly informed focus on the human body; such a focus sees the body in its messy materiality and provides an alternative to the conceptualisation of subjectivity as an “empowered” and all-knowing source of understanding. Dylan Trigg’s conception of the “body horror” provides a useful account of the body as a potentially uncanny site when experiencing VR, and whether such experiences are better accounted for if a phenomenological analysis considers the limitations of human bodily interpretation. Phenomenology ultimately seeks to analyse subjective experience in order to discern and more fully understand the world and our being in it; similarly, Trigg’s phenomenological approach to horror and Being formulates an alternative to the central concept of enframing which seems inherently tied to the empowerment of human subjectivity. “Body horror” becomes representative not as a means of experience as a unified and felt experience, but an acknowledgement of the human becoming, to a certain extent, “unhuman”.
Horror Beyond the Interface?
The VR horror game, Chair in a Room (2016) (fig.5) bridges the gap between body-horror, those weird sensations of uncanny re-embodiment in virtual space, and an already well-informed trajectory of genre tropes which inevitably immerse the player via physiological, cognitive and emotional responses. The game follows the memories of an anonymous protagonist, patient no. 6079 (the players’ character) as they come to terms with the past events which led them find themselves held captive in a room (with a chair) in the “Greenwater Institute”. The plot forms a wider investigation into addiction, religious immorality and murder, as the collection of plot lines enable you to figure out the institutional corruption which, it turns out, is actually controlling your recollected memories and everything that you are seeing. The accessing of the patient’s memories sees you grappling with the implication that you have committed murder, and are in the institute in order to have your memories of the events leading up to the murder regained; the player finds themselves repenting in a confession room, escaping to a run-down hotel and confronted with the continual sighting of the dead body of a young boy who you may (or may not) have killed.
Figure 5: GTLive (2016) ‘Horror in VR! Chair in a Room (Part 1)’. Available on video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1Vbb7ShMI
The game utilises room-scale simulation, which calibrates movement through the actual space in which the player moves around in with the scale of the simulated environment. It begins in a clinical, whitewashed room – with posters filling the walls and a number of objects to interact with, including bottles, a chair and a radio. This introductory space precedes the main storyline gameplay, providing an introduction which allows the player to familiarise themselves with the game mechanics and movement through the simulation. The player is able to use handset triggers to move their character’s photorealistic hands, interact with objects, and look and move around the environment. Chair in a Room, however, ties the experience of weird affection when operating a virtual body in the gameplay itself. At the beginning of the first chapter of the game, the player finds themselves in a similar room where one of the institute’s nurses appears as a blurred figure behind a glass pane. She instructs the player to “please take your medication”, and a small green pill in a cup is dispensed through a slot in the cell door. One of the posters displayed on the wall of the cell appears to be an advertisement for the said drug (pictured above), depicting an image of the drug as a bitten apple (capturing the recurring imagery of sin and repentance which is central throughout the game) stating “one a day, to keep the visions away”. In the bottom corner of the poster, a warning in small print can be seen describing the side effects of the prescription, which include “seizures, blackouts or convulsions and twitching or uncontrollable movement of the hands”.
This fine-tuned detail in the game makes it particularly successful in not only tying together the horrific components of the gameplay with the horrific components of your strange and glitching movement through the virtual space, but also the emerging weird affect this has on the player’s physical body: general feelings of displacement, motion sickness and fear of the unknown mediation taking place. Such affective responses incur slippages between subjectivity and technology (Lacefield, p.8) where the perceptions generated by virtual information has immediate cognitive and physiological impact on the player’s own body. One user review of the game remarks that “the physics and glitches are relentlessly terrifying” , not reminiscent of the ways others have described the terror of the gameplay and jump scares, but in the relentless frustration and discomfort of the glitching movement of a virtual body moving joltingly through the simulated space. This links technical glitches and strange movements in the game world with the suggestion that the diegetic drug usage is affecting the character’s movement; the inferred hallucinatory effect of the drug is aligned with the similar nausea and displacement tied to the medium itself. By explicitly linking together the failure of the game’s technological system mechanics to calibrate the player’s movement with the virtual body to the plot mechanics of a mysterious prescription drug, the game links the horrific feelings of being in a virtual body to genre specific horrific tropes particularly tied to loss of control. Upon completion of the game, it is revealed that the drug has actually manipulated your memories throughout the narrative, and is part of a larger an experimental scheme coordinated by the institute to recruit unknowing subjects into the testing of a perception-altering drug.
The game cleverly aligns the perceptual manipulation of both the player and the patient they embody, drawing attention to the fact that VR as a medium is still at a point where seamless and transparent experiences are, perhaps, impossible at this developmental stage; when things go wrong in the game, i.e. when the body I am in the game-world does not correspond with my movement through it, the game incorporates the unhuman body (in this instance the simulated body whose movement makes it feel unhuman) as having a mind of its own.
Drawing on the horrific elements made familiar by films like The Ring (2002), the movement of the medium as having a mind of its own ultimately conveys some kind of unhuman presence, an anxiety towards technology’s intrusion of subjectivity. By replicating abject sensations between diegetic and non-diegetic movement in the game, sensations that are triggered by the medium appear to happen outside the control of subjective embodiment, and instead implicates the presence of emergent unhuman forces (namely behind the medium and its underlying systems) that manifest as weird affection in the body itself. This jarring sensation correlates with Trigg’s unhuman phenomenology, as horror presents the opportunity of “the human becoming unhuman” (Trigg, p.9). The uncomfortable jolts of a virtual body moving of its own accord makes the user feel their body as a limiting “alien material” (Trigg, p.7) as it follows this unsettling movement as though it was perceptually real.
Would these sensations be accounted for within the phenomenological model of enframing? If enframing always requires the world to be framed for human use and the body as a site of converting information into fully realised affect, then such experiences of weird and unconsented action by a virtual body does not seem to align itself with the established criteria of enframing. Rather than actualising the virtual, it appears that unnatural movement rather disempowers the body, causing it to respond uncomfortably to the un-consenting movement of the virtual image. Chair in a Room (2016) uses visual cues to incorporate the presence of the unruly technological system into the horror experience at large. Not dissimilarly to the ephemeral fleeting encounters with the killer VCR in The Ring, the medium highlights the impropriety of the frame, as a distinctly human ontological category, as the boundaries dividing the real and the virtual, the human and the unhuman become increasingly porous. Horror is already representative of framelessness as a genre trope, and a phenomenology which captures this as the experiences of broken ontological distinctions enables a new approach to VR experiences which highlights the limitations posed by the cognitive and physiological reactions of the human body.
A new critical understanding of VR seems necessary in the evolution of both the technology and content produced for the medium which considers instances where hardware does not work seamlessly with the body, and the ways this can mimic the “weird” sensations most commonly associated with horror. Though VR ultimately seeks to replicate human embodiment and interaction in alternative virtual worlds, the feeling of ontological in-betweenness inscribed into the experiencing of it doesn’t see this happen, and this can be arduous, frustrating and uncomfortable. The compatibility of horror (as both a genre and philosophical approach) and VR is accentuated through questions of agency and potential discomfort during movement through virtual spaces. Experiences of unruly movement in immersive simulated spaces not only highlight technological limitations, but also highlight the limitations deeply rooted in human embodiment itself. Yet, this bodily and affective disjunction can, in fact, be reconsidered as a new aesthetic of VR experiences, bridging discourses of embodiment, horror and technology – and revealing how specific kinds of affect are elicited to provoke genre-specific sensation. As a technology whose purpose is to mediate natural human perception, VR’s is able to affectively produce the sensation of coming into contact with the limits of human perception. Such aesthetic encounters with the frameless encourage us to acknowledge the existence of that which can, and always already does, exist beyond human enframing.
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Notes
1 Carrol, Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990). London: Routledge. “Like works of suspense, works of horror are designed to elicit a certain kind of affect. I shall presume this is an emotional state, which emotion I call art-horror”, p. 16.
2 Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016) suggests that the “weird” and “eerie” are both in themselves affects, but also modes of film/fiction, perception and being.
3 Paraphrased from Mark N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass MIT Press, 2004) p.10
4 It is important to note that this is a specific example of VR horror experiences – not all simulations necessarily adopt the first person perspective, though such experiences are the focus of this paper.
5 ‘A Chair in a Room is by far the most underrated and terrifying VR-experience on Steam. A new horror classic. Please, give it a shot!’, posted by TiSoBr on Reddit (July 2016) <https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4vgsqh/a_chair_in_a_room_is_by_far_the_most_underrated/> [accessed 29 March 2017].