10.54103/ai/15161



As with films previously, claims are being made today about the capacity of immersive environments, including virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers effective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the passage from one state of consciousness to another, darkness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immersive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest technologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions, we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states. 



application/pdf
2785-7433
15161
I
en
Lily Hibberd
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Consciousness
Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
1
Thematic Section
2022-05-16
2021-02-13
2022-05-16
2022-11-28
AN-ICON
Lily Hibberd
2022/05/16
10.54103/ai/15161
UNSW Sydney 
2785-7433
I
Consciousness
en
Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and immersive digital media
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/15161/15712
1
             Cinematic
             darkness: dreaming
across film and immersive
digital media
by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd
                   Cinema
                                      Darkness
                                      Spectatorship
                                      Dream
                                      Consciousness




                                  Issue №1 Year 2022
                                  → Altered states
                                  Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                  and Andrea Pinotti
Cinematic darkness:
dreaming across film and
immersive digital media
by Martine Beugnet and Lily Hibberd

Abstract                       As with films previously, claims are being made
                 today about the capacity of immersive environments, in-
                 cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef-
                 fective simulations of altered states of consciousness. In
                 this article, we look anew at the enduring question of time-
                 based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s ability
                 not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves, but
                 to generate an imaginary realm of their own. Our analysis
                 centres on the use of darkness. Often associated with the
                 passage from one state of consciousness to another, dark-
                 ness has become a prevalent aesthetic in cinematic immer-
                 sive media. In some ways, as we will see, the latest tech-
                 nologies of audio-vision appear less apt than conventional
                 cinema to induce us to “cross the bridge” and venture into
                 the land of phantoms. In others, they emerge as privileged
                 entries into the dreamlike worlds of our contemporary, tech-
                 nologized era. In spite of differences in viewing conditions,
                 we find that between the older medium of 2D film and that
                 of cinematic virtual reality, darkness, combined with the
                 illusion of depth and visual replication of motion proves to
                 be a particularly potent harbinger of altered states.




Cinema           Darkness           Spectatorship             Dream          Consciousness
To quote this essay: M. Beugnet & L. Hibberd, “Cinematic darkness: dreaming across film and
immersive digital media”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 129-152

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD                129                                           AN-ICON
(...) spectators at the exit, brutally rejected by the black belly of the
theater into the glaring and mischievous light of the lobby, some-
times have the bewildered expression (happy and unhappy) of
people waking up. To leave the movies is a little like getting up: not
always easy.1
                                 Introduction: cine-obscurity

                            Darkness is dream’s natural associate. It is no
               wonder audiovisual works that seek to transport us beyond
               the here and now of awakened reality continue to rely on
               the power of darkness to enfold us and to unravel our sense
               of place and time. Though there are structural differences
               between the aesthetics and spectatorship of cinema and
               that of virtual reality, darkness functions across many me-
               dia forms as both a metaphor and as a corporeal device
               for immersion, encouraging spectators and participants to
               submit to imaginary realms.
                            The scope of this article is not to review the
               wider lineage of darkness across immersive forms of media,
               or indeed to revisit their origins going back to Plato’s cave.
               The media archaeology of moving images and obscurity has
               already been done by theorists such as Oliver Grau, and
               in groundwork of Siegfried Zielinski and Gloria Custance,
               who described the cinema as a dark “womb”.2 Other media
               theorists have delineated the parameters of interactive or
               immersive 3D viewing, most notably Maria Engberg and
               Jay Bolter on virtual reality aesthetics, as well as William




       1 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New
       Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105, 86.
       2 O. Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. G. Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT
       Press, 2003): 151-152. S. Zielinski, G. Custance, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as
       Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999): 92, 246.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD                130                                         AN-ICON
              Brown with the notion of “gaseous perception” in relation
              to stereoscopic cinema and darkness.3
                            In contrast with earlier theorizations, in what
              follows we focus on adaptations of cinematic immersive
              reality in the hands of artists and experimental filmmakers.
              To further account for the contemporary emergence of an
              aesthetic of darkness we firstly seek to establish a histori-
              cal backdrop. We then turn our attention to the works and,
              where available, the words of the creators’ themselves, as
              we consider four recent immersive media works imbibed
              in darkness: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing, Laurie Anderson
              and Hsin-Chien Huang’s La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom,
              Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness and Parragirls Past, Pres-
              ent: Unlocking Memories of Institutional “Care”. As immer-
              sion in darkness is closely related to dreamworlds and to
              dreams of outer space, these phenomena provide the un-
              derpinning rationale in the first half of this article and for
              our subsequent analysis of these four works.

                                 Enfolding darkness, from awakened
                                 dreaming to altered states

                            Amongst the most memorable scenes of F.W.
               Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) is the imaginary screening in which a
               seductress from the city appears to lure a naïve country man
               into a fantasized vision of urban life. One evening, as they sit
               together on the shore of a lake, the woman launches into an
               eloquent description of nightlife in the city. To demonstrate
               the impression made by her tale, Murnau materializes it in the
               form of a projection that magically appears in front of the two
               characters. Thanks to an astute system of transparencies,
               the dream show of the modern city superimposes itself
               onto the nocturnal sky, under the halo of a fake moon that
      3 M. Engberg, J.D. Bolter, “The aesthetics of reality media”, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no.
      1 (2020): 81-95. W. Brown, “Avatar: stereoscopic cinema, gaseous perception and darkness”,
      Animation 7, no. 3 (2012): 259-271.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               131                                          AN-ICON
              glows like the lamp of a projector.4 Stylized cityscapes al-
              ternate with kaleidoscopic, blurry visions of frenzied revelry:
              there is no attempt at harnessing this fantastic vision to a
              specific or stable point of view. The fantasy may originate
              in the female character’s mind, but it feeds on a collective
              imaginary, and the projection allows her to share it with her
              companion, as well as beyond the diegesis, with the audi-
              ence of Murnau’s film. The sequence is a celebration of the
              powers of the cinema not merely as a “factory of dreams”,
              but also as a sharing of the experience of dreaming itself.
                            Dreams and daydreams, hallucinations and
              memories, as the products of the human psyche, fascinate
              not only because they elude our self control (we can no
              more prevent or design our nightmares at will than we can
              consciously erase a memory), but also because they con-
              found our capacity to communicate and share experiences.
              In every medium, from literature to the theatre, painting and
              photography, techniques have been developed to evoke
              altered states of consciousness. The gap, however, be-
              tween the viewer or reader and the subjective creations of
              the psyche mediated by objective, external sources, is not
              easily bridged. Key to Sunrise’s mise en abyme of a screen-
              ing is the choice of a nocturnal setting: in a film theatre the
              night on screen blends with the darkness that surrounds
              the cinema spectator like a connecting tissue.
                            Because the visibility of the projected film im-
              age initially relied on a beam of light, darkness – also the
              companion of sleep and dreams – has been associated
              with the cinema from the start. With the shift from analogue
              to digital, the glow of the LCD monitor has increasingly
              complemented the light beam of the projector, alongside
              other self-illuminating screens found in the domestic en-
              vironment. Regardless of location, we still lower the lights
              while watching films whenever possible. More than a mere

      4 M. Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017): 33-34.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               132                          AN-ICON
               condition of visibility, obscurity facilitates the slipping in
               and out of total awakened awareness.
                            Film was the first medium to offer the promise
               of more than the mere representation of our imaginings – to
               engender a form of awakened dreaming through spectacle
               and apparatus. The increasingly photorealistic quality of
               cinematic images and sounds set in motion guaranteed
               the “credibility of its fabulations”.5 A spectator could hope
               to become immersed in a film in a manner similar to the
               dreamer, who experiences even the most absurd world of
               mental images equally as “real” as daily life occurrences,
               or of a daydreamer who indulges in memories or fanciful
               imaginings to the point of forgetting their actual surround-
               ings. The conditions of reception in the cinema auditorium
               came to reflect and strengthen the analogy: cut off from the
               outer world, plunged in darkness and silence, with limited
               physical activity, at the end of a screening the spectator
               often emerges as if they were awakening.
                            Yet in spite of the unequalled ability to blur the
               frontier between representation and perception,6 the fusion
               of image and reality never occurs fully.7 As Christian Metz
               reminds us, where in deep sleep the dreamer does not know
               that they are dreaming, film induces, at best, a semi-wakeful
               state: more than dream per se, the experience of watching
               a film (which can be emulated, though imperfectly, in indi-
               vidual situations of viewing) resembles that of reminiscing,




      5 C. Metz, A. Guzzetti, “The fiction film and its spectator: A metapsychological study”, New
      Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 75-105.
      6 S. Sharot, “Dreams in films and films as dreams: surrealism and popular American cinema”,
      Canadian Journal of Film Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 66-89. Also, on the myth of the credulous
      audience, see T. Gunning, “An aesthetic of astonishment. Early film and the (in)credulous
      spectator”, Art and Text, no. 34 (1989): 31-45.
      7 In contrast, “dreaming is subjectively indistinguishable from waking experience”. See T.K.
      Metzigner, “Why is virtual reality interesting for philosophers?”, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, no. 5
      (2018).

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD                  133                                             AN-ICON
              fantasizing or slipping into reverie. For Raymond Bellour, it
              is better compared with a form of hypnosis.8
                            Nonetheless, fascination for the medium’s
              oneiric qualities has driven some of the most radical and
              creative practices and theorizing of the medium. The rep-
              resentation of dreams themselves has had little to do with
              this evolution: from Antonin Artaud and the surrealists to
              Jean Epstein, the earliest avant-gardes nurtured the belief
              that the medium’s aesthetic potential laid not in the repre-
              sentation of dreams or reminiscences, but in the possibil-
              ity to dream or reminisce with images.9 In classic cinema
              however, as in avant-garde or experimental filmmaking,
              darkness and immobility remain the spectator-dreamer’s
              first allies.
                            In The Absent Body, Drew Leder observes that
              in normal situations of perception the awareness of our
              body diminishes: the reason we can focus on what we
              watch, or concentrate on what we touch, is that we do
              not pay attention to the actual process, nor to the eye or
              hand involved in it.10 A similar receding of bodily awareness
              occurs when we are absorbed in our own thoughts. Such
             “absenting” of the lived body is not however “equivalent to
              a mere void, a lack of being”.11 Rather, it testifies to the
              extent in which a sentient subject might be beside itself,
             “ecstatically caught-up in the world”:

the very nature of the body is to project outwards from its place
of standing. From the “here” arises a perceptual world of near and
far distances. From the “now” we inhabit a meaningful past and a
futural realm of projects and goals.12

      8 R. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: POL / Trafic, 2009).
      9 J. Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Paris: Cinéma Club/Seghers, 1975): 18-20. Also see,
      A. Artaud “Cinéma et réalité”, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris : Gallimard, 1978): 19; and M.
      Beugnet, L’attrait du flou (Crisnée: Yellow Now: 2017): 82-83.
      10 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 70-71.
      11 Ibid.: 22.
      12 Ibid.: 23.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               134                                          AN-ICON
                           Leder’s description of this phenomenon recalls
              James Gibson’s theory of “affordance”, according to which
              individuals are entwined with their surroundings, their pro-
              spective actions informed by the constant collecting of
              information from their environment.13 This capacity to feel
              or to picture our bodies outside or alongside themselves in
              time and space is an equally fundamental feature of dream-
              ing, hallucination and reverie, as well as the fabrication of
              their similitude in movies. Indeed, it is often the altered
              sense in which our body appears to relate to its perceived
              environment (feeling one’s bodily affordance hindered, dis-
              torted or augmented in turns) that marks the difference
              between awakened and dreamlike states.
                           In the cinema, the body’s capacity for ecstasis
              is simultaneously enhanced and directed away from the
              immediate environment, towards the virtual world that ap-
              pears on the screen. The film auditorium, as a space, has
              sometimes been compared to a womb.14 Darkness engulfs
              the barely moving spectators, allowing them to be together
              and alone at once, to ignore the borders of the screen as
              they recede in the obscurity. Within the secluded space of
              the theatre, the light originating from behind the audience
              trains spectators to project themselves on the screen, to sit-
              uate themselves within the perspectival view of the spaces
              offered to the eye, and the anthropomorphic quality of the
              camera’s gaze that explores them. From the 1950s onwards,
              anamorphic lenses widened the frame, and shortened the
              optical depth of field, with a corresponding increase in
              visual blur effects. Strengthening the sense of immersion
              and bringing the cinematic closer to the human field of
              vision, the blurring of the margins of the visual frame also
              subtly blended the projected image into the surrounding


      13 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
      14 T. Elsaesser, “Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment”, in M. de Valck, M. Hagener, eds.,
      Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005): 32.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               135                                         AN-ICON
              darkness, heightening the feeling of being suspended in a
              virtual dimension without physical limits.
                            In the cinema and at home, dimming the lights
              and turning up the volume amplifies the degree to which
              we forget about our own body so as to engage in watch-
              ing and listening to a movie, sometimes even touching or
              tasting through the synesthetic or haptic powers of certain
              images.15 Accordingly, in classic narrative cinema’s sub-
              jective point of view, a character’s body partly or wholly
              disappears from the frame. Such strategies allow us, as
              the spectator, not only to half-dream our way through a film,
              but also to engage with the expression of altered states of
              consciousness where images and sounds are supposedly
              the product of mental processes. Paradoxically, both of
              these experiences can involve audiovisual representations
              of extreme physicality (fighting, crying, flying…). Whether
              awake or dreaming,16 characters in films move, fall or take
              off in the air, as we ourselves sometimes do in our sleep.
              In all such cases, however, it is the incapacity to act on
              the film’s progression that grants the experience its onei-
              ric quality: as the dreamer with dreams, the film spectator
              does not control the flow of images: once triggered, they
              cannot be easily altered or fully erased at will.17 Nor can we
              always choose to retain a memory, or the trace of a dream,




      15 L.U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
      (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory
      Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). M. Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation
      (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
      16 Whereas a dream or a memory is a subjective reality emanating from the psyche, a film
      is an external product constructed according to a common idiom. In conventional filmmaking,
      transitions mark out the passage from woken to altered states of consciousness (fades in and
      out, blurredness, distorted perspectives, spiralling images amongst others). Film dreaming is
      thus reclaimed and repurposed as the representation of dreaming in film.
      17 See T. Kuntzel, “Le defilement”, La revue d’esthétique (1972), reprinted in D. Noguez,
      ed., Cinéma: théorie, lectures (Paris, Klincksieck, 1978): 97-110. R. Bellour, L’entre-images:
      photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 2002): 86. M. Beugnet, Le Cinéma et ses doubles
      (Bordeaux: Bord de l’eau, 2021): 5-6.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               136                                         AN-ICON
              any more that we can keep a precise recollection of all the
              images of a film whose course we can hardly change.18
                           As with films previously, claims are being made
              today about the capacity of immersive environments, in-
              cluding virtual reality, to offer viewers or experiencers ef-
              fective simulations of altered states of consciousness.19
              In what follows, we look anew at the enduring question of
              time-based mechanical (lens based and digital) media’s
              ability not merely to take us outside of or besides ourselves,
              but also to generate an imaginary realm of their own. In
              doing so we consider the issue of aesthetics alongside
              the conditions of spectatorship and reception. In some
              ways, as we will see, the new technologies of audio-vision
              appear less apt than conventional cinema to induce us to
             “cross the bridge” and venture into the land of phantoms.
              In others, they emerge as privileged entries into dream-like
              worlds of our contemporary, technologized era. What inter-
              ests us most is not the lure of the “myth of total immersion”
              or the pursuit of the perfect conflation of perception and
              representation that would entail the erasure of the frontier
              between reality and fantasy.20 Rather, we concentrate on
              the way cinematic virtual reality (including built immersive
              environments and head-mounted displays) creates the illu-
              sion of presence while exploiting digital imaging to emulate




      18 Remote control usage destroys the experience of time as co-presence, or of time slipping
      away (also an essential dimension of memories and dreams). Accordingly, Laura Mulvey
      associates the remote control with the emergence of a possessive spectator in Death 24x a
      Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
      19 From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995)
      and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) amongst others, the association of immersive
      technology and altered states of consciousness is a favoured topic in mainstream cinema. For
      a VR example see Dream (2016) by Philippe Lambert, which is built on a custom audio-visual
      synthesizer coded by Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/dream/.
      20 See M. Beugnet, L. Hibberd, “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive
      media”, Screen 61, no. 4 (2020).

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD              137                                        AN-ICON
               the dreamlike state of cinematic reception and conjure up
               a specific, distinctive kind of imagining.21
                             In the cinema, the obscurity afforded by the
               auditorium creates the condition for a unique experience:
               that of a shared space where a collective dreamlike or light
               hypnotic state prevails. Contrastingly, when viewing a work
               in a head-mounted display, there is no “joint watching”. The
               solitude is inescapable, only faintly or temporarily relieved
               in encounters with others, as characters or actors in the
               shape of avatars. Darkness creates a connection nonethe-
               less, an evocation of an infinite space that, ultimately, we all
               have in common. Hence, in spite of differences in viewing
               conditions, we find that between the medium of 2D film and
               that of cinematic virtual reality, darkness combined with the
               visual replication of motion proves to be a potent harbinger
               of the dreamlike. It unsettles our grounded-ness in place
               and demands that we forge new connections with images,
               and with the world, ourselves and others. We further sug-
               gest that across VR and film, darkness inaugurates a shift
               from the collective experience of subjective states toward
               the individual experience of an unconscious shaped by
               the shared knowledge of our finitude. Though we are told
               we live in the age of the Anthropocene, we have an acute
               sense of the relativity of our existence, of being caught
               in perpetual movement, connected yet unanchored. Like
               the dot-size character who faces the starry vastness of
               the universe at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man
               (Jack Arnold, 1957), the viewer who slides into the seem-
               ingly limitless night of contemporary films and immersive
               environments may experience a dreamlike state of radical
               groundlessness – a contemporary sense of solitary, yet
               shared, unmooring.

       21 Virtual reality is assumed to be closely entwined with interactive gaming and simulated
       training. This article however focuses on the transmedial practices of narrative and immersion
      – across film, video art, and immersive installation art – where the spectator rarely drives the
       story or provokes events.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD                138                                          AN-ICON
                           In “Of other spaces”, Michel Foucault notes how,
              from Galileo onwards, things could now only exist in their
              relative placement and movement:

a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement,
just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely
slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo in the 17th cen-
tury, extension was substituted for localization.22
                            The site of an object, from then on came to be
              defined as “relations of proximity between points or ele-
              ments”, like “the dots in a constellation”.23 Foucault builds
              on the pre-modern analogy between body and universe,
              arguing that traditionally, space had been constructed as
             “a space of radiation. Man is surrounded by it on every
              side; but, inversely, he transmits these resemblances back
              into the world from which he receives them”.24 In other
              words, the body is conceived as the medium through which
              the world is organized as it is perceived. Perspectival art,
              with its stable construction of space and anchoring of the
              gaze to a specific position in space, emphasizes such a
              sense of place-ness and orientation. Though convention-
              al filmmaking adopted the continuity system in an effort
              to emulate this centralized condition, its mobile gaze and
              time-based structure always threatened to reveal the fra-
              gility of the model.25
                            Alternative uses of cinematography thus sought
              to explore the relativity of movement and place, showing
              the anthropomorphic gaze, with its safely located source,
              to be an artifice. This approach was not exclusive to ex-
              perimental cinema: in science fiction and documentary film


      22 M. Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias”, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 6,
      no.1 (1986): 22.
      23 Ibid.: 23.
      24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Random House, 1970): 23.
      25 J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972): 18.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               139                                         AN-ICON
              reconstitutions of outer space in particular have made us
              familiar with “impossible” viewpoints, where a virtual cam-
              era circles around planets and floats through constella-
              tions.26 Here again, darkness, like the sidereal night, is key
             – sucking the spectators into its awesome solitude even as
              they sit in a crowd.
                           As we will see, immersive technologies have
              in turn proven to be remarkably able to produce a radi-
              cal sense of dis-anchoring. A 360-degree omnidirectional
              scape that moves independently from the viewer’s own
              movement implies a constant and uncontrollable fluctuation
              of one’s place within the image. With the dissolution of a
              stable single-point perspective the body of the observer
              ceases to be the sole reference and singular source of the
              gaze as an ordering principle of visible space. The most
              potent aspect however of these novel immersive environ-
              ments is the means to enter into the boundlessness of 3D
              constructed worlds, endless spaces that find in darkness
              their most compelling expression. In the fathomless black-
              ness of virtual spaces, furthermore, the solidity of repre-
              sented things is prone to slip away. The liminal threshold
              of immersive worlds is arguably always teetering on the
              brink of dreams – an aspect that the fanfare of virtual reality
              and the clumsiness of head-mounted displays paradoxi-
              cally diminishes. Even in 2D iterations construed from 3D
              renderings however, as is the case in the floating world of
             Thing, such an evocation of the universe offers itself as
              powerfully oneiric experience.

                               Sidereal night: Anouk De Clercq’s Thing

                             The first minute of Anouk De Clercq’s film
              Thing27    is entirely black. The sound track is also initially

      26 Famously in the “Blue Danube” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
      27 Video, b/w, 16:9, stereo, BE/IT/FR, 2013, 18’.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD             140                                        AN-ICON
              completely silent, though after a few seconds the faint
              noise of a light wind or breathing is heard, followed by a
              voice. The sound of the voice is slightly echoey, as if heard
              in a large, empty space. Then a crashing noise, followed
              by the appearance of thin, veil-like formations white dots
              that move into view from the right of the frame. But whose
              view? For the voice remains disembodied throughout, and
              its musings do not refer to the images with any specificity.
              Nor can we safely establish its location, as its stereophonic
              transcription varies in spatial orientation, switching from
              our right to our left ear. Equally impossible to determine is
              the origin of the movement that alters what we are given
              to see. Suggested by the changing size of the shapes and
              their moving in and out of frame, such spatial proximity or
              distance could equally mirror the trajectory of an invisible
              observer floating in the dark space, or that of the cloud
              formations themselves as they enter the former’s field of
              vision. Occasionally, a fade or a cut to black or a glitch-
              like effect (with a crackling sound emitted as all vanishes)
              plunges the screen back into utter darkness.28
                           Thing appears to be a journey through a virtual
              world, born out of the imagination of a fictional dreamer
             – given the nature of the images and the model-like appa-
              ritions of cities and buildings this dreamer could be the
              engineer of this world. De Clercq describes Thing as a
              journey through an architect’s “virtual memory”, “a bound-
              less, imaginary space” where fictional buildings and urban
              patterns emerge and disperse in the darkness, a series of
              ephemeral nebulas that manifest as a kind of “paradoxi-
               cal materiality” precisely because they are “virtual”.29 The
               film was made using LiDAR imaging of urbanscapes (an
              acronym for Light Detection and Ranging) a remote sensor

      28 See R. Misek, “The black screen”, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron, A. Fetveit, eds., Indefinite
      Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
      2017): 38-52.
      29 See the video here: https://portapak.be/works/30/thing, accessed 18/12/2020.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD              141                                         AN-ICON
             technology that generates accurate 3D information about
             the shape of very large surfaces and their characteristics
             using pulsed laser emissions to measure ranges between
             the sensor and the surface. Developed for architectural,
             archaeological and engineering surveys, such visualiza-
             tions provide a way of seeing spatial information, which
             is augmented when viewed in a 3D stereoscopic environ-
             ment. Yet another digital program subsequently renders the
             LiDAR data as “point clouds”, the dots of light we see in
             Thing. Most of the shapes and forms conjured up in Thing
             are made of these unstable, constantly reshaping clouds
             of dots.
                           Although the initial light point formations re-
             semble natural phenomena – cirrostratus, cirrocumulus or
             constellations – they later produce artificial patterns. An
             elongated, geometrical form floats in the dark like a space-
             ship, and the monumental entrance to a city materializes
             and dissolves. We then travel through the diaphanous out-
             lines of a district with a mesh of buildings with terraces and
             hanging gardens. The cross-cutting of a workshop appears
             and slowly glides in and out of view, its furnishings (stairs,
             hanging lamps, an easel, the semi-circular shape of what
             looks like part of a bull’s eye window) sketched in brilliant
             white against the surrounding night.
                           Some of the point cloud renditions are reminis-
             cent of white charcoal drawings on black paper, while the
             buildings and the room resemble X-rays: ghostly, silvery
             shapes in a process of disintegration. While X-rays and 3D
             scanners are already used to document vestiges, as well
             as to augment the existing data of artefacts and archaeo-
             logical sites, film also holds a specific connection to ruins.
             Of the attraction exercised by ruins on the cinema, André
             Habib notes how they offer themselves as the poignant
             manifestation of the transience of all things human, includ-
             ing that of our own existence. The inexorability of the flow

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD    142                            AN-ICON
              of 24 images or frames per second – of the ephemerality
              of its linear course from beginning to end that may be re-
              peated or looped but not halted – explains the “melancholy,
              quasi-ontological” relation that connects the medium to
              the temporality and spatiality of ruins.30 Drawing on tech-
              niques and visualizations that fuse the astrological and the
              architectural, De Clercq collapses human time and space
              (its material, located traces, its memories and dreams) in
              the infinity of the sidereal night.
                            To craft its boundless post-Galilean dream of
              space as a universe where the individual body and the
              individual consciousness are free floating or diffuse, Thing
              uses the tools of 20th and 21st century imaging. This draw-
              ing together of film, architecture, and infinite space gives
              De Clercq’s film an affinity with so-called immersive envi-
              ronments: a 2D film with a 3D sensibility, best seen in the
              obscurity of a cinema, it makes full use of the darkened
              film-theatre as its immediate, continuous extension.

                               “Dark, weird and shadowy”: Laurie
                                Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s
                                La camera insabbiata/Chalkroom

                           Experimental multimedia artist Laurie Ander-
              son has produced a series of virtual reality works that elu-
              cidate some of the aesthetic traits of De Clercq’s Thing in
              a fully 3D format, also harnessing some of VR’s aptitude to
              create dreamlike and out-of-body experiences. Created in
              collaboration with media artist Hsin-Chien Huang in 2017,
              Chalkroom is an installation and an interactive VR experience,
              permanently installed at the MoCA in Massachusetts, USA.31
                           Seated viewers don a head-mounted display
              and take up two handheld controllers to enter into the VR

      30 A. Habib, L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011): 9.
      31 Virtual reality 360 degree3D interactive video and installation, EN, 2017.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               143                                    AN-ICON
              experience. In the first scene, a lone architectural structure
              sits on top of a mountain. Unlike the architecture in Thing,
              the building appears to be concrete. You are coaxed to
              fly over and enter it, navigating a series of narrow corridors
              toward a small portal at the end. The controller, which also
              acts as a torch, is the only source of light. The virtual walls
              are covered in chalk writing, like their physical counter-
              part outside the head-mounted display. Here, however, the
              torchlight illuminates a small orb, making the text all the
              more elusive – a curious and perverse effect given that the
              artists have designated us as “readers” instead of viewers.
              Words disintegrate into phenomes, and break apart again
              into letters, like swarms of flies. Yet, Laurie Anderson’s vel-
              vet intonations flow over this eerie place, making it homely.
                            Claustrophobic passages open out into an
              infinite black space that contains a constellation of text.
              You’re free to fly around and explore the space, hidden sto-
              ries narrated by Anderson, which emerge as you approach
              certain zones. Objects, such as an illuminated, leafy tree,
              dissolve on closer inspection, and you see this too is made
              up of letters, as Anderson whispers to us: “You realise that
              things are made of words”. In interview, she explains being
              initially unsure about VR because it was too game-like, but
              that if she could make something “very homemade, dark,
              weird and shadowy, a different kind of space, a different
              kind of mental space” then she would be interested.32 Her
              aim, she adds, was to create an experience where you
              could fly “like in your dreams”.
                            On the face of it, since immersive environments
              such as 3D films in 360 degree cinema projection and virtual
              reality experiences on head-mounted display or HMD, 33


      32 “Laurie Anderson interview: A virtual reality of stories”, 2017, Louisiana Channel. Accessed
      20/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHT016FbR30.
      33 It is important not to confuse VR with the HMD. In simplest terms, Virtual Reality is defined
      as being the coherence of technical means that enable a person to interact in real time with a
      virtual world.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               144                                          AN-ICON
              effectively “environmentalize”34 the image, one could ex-
              pect the “womb” effect to be perfected and even emulated,
              as with Anderson’s installation. However, in contrast with
              conventional spectatorship, absorbed viewing is under-
              mined by the degree of physical activity involved in the
              experience.35
                           In addition to the heaviness and discomfort
              of the hardware – the headset and headphones – and the
              optical strain of stereoscopic vision, the attention and effort
              involved in interacting with the virtual environment para-
              doxically induce a sense of heightened physical awareness.
              Rather than projecting itself, the sentient subject engages
              with the task of controlling the effects of its own motricity
              in the here and now: a “presenting”, rather than an absent-
              ing of the body. These effects might be the result of VR’s
              relative novelty. Nonetheless, it seems that in the narrative
              context of cinematic VR – beyond gaming and therapeutic
              applications – interaction and causative acts tend to un-
              dermine immersion, contradicting widespread theories of
             “presence” in VR.36 After all, it can be very unnerving to feel
              your body split in two: an HMD effectively separates our
              head from the rest of our body. Not only can we not see
              our (real) selves but unless we are offered some form of
              avatar we also lack a visible body in the virtual world. Once
              we get used to this literal mode of “absenting” however,
              new forms of ecstasis become possible. As we become
              familiar with the process of virtual seeing, touching and
              moving, our experiencer or avatar body may recede into
              the background of our awareness, just like our lived body



      34 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”, in dossier M. Beugnet,
      L. Hibberd, eds., “Absorbed in experience: new perspectives on immersive media”, Screen 61,
      no. 4 (2020): 594-603.
      35 Interestingly, in Sunrise the virtual screen vanishes when the woman starts dancing.
      36 See C. Heeter, “Being there: the subjective experience of presence”, Presence:
      Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 2 (1992): 262-271.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD             145                                        AN-ICON
              does in a reverie, leaving us to be “ecstatically caught-up
              in the virtual world”.37
                           Distinct from many other VR interactive ex-
              periences, Chalkroom’s freedom to roam inhabits this
              liminal zone for two reasons: one, choices don’t lead
              to deterministic or sequential narratives, and thus, similar
              to a dream or hallucination, we feel that we are driven by
              compulsions and desires. Two, and even more compelling,
              is the sense that you cannot put your feet on the ground,
              that you are floating free. Anderson describes this in terms
              of disembodiment, stating that “losing your body” is one
              of her chief interests in producing these works.38
                           The inherent disembodiment felt when navigat-
              ing a 3D world in VR immersion is all the more estranging
              when it is set in the dark. The chiaroscuro effect is theatrical
              and exaggerates the sense of volume and depth as in a Ba-
              roque painting. And lower levels of light are also less visually
              straining in VR. In Chalkroom the upshot of floating through
              the dark signals our descent into the night; a diurnal cycle
              that we are bound to as circadian creatures. Anderson aptly
              remarks: “What are nights for? To fall through time into an-
              other world”; a world where, as Huang points out, “the words
              become a nebula” – chalk dust, atomised, diffuse matter
              disintegrating upon touch, evading our grasp.
                           While not all HMD-supported VR relies on
              interactive interfaces, wearing a head-mounted display
              cuts us off from the surrounding reality more effectively
              than the dimness of our living room, or the darkness of
              the cinema auditorium (where exit signs, are by necessity
              always visible).39 Distinct from watching the audience at a
              film screening, to observe someone wearing an HMD feels

      37 A. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990): 22.
      38 “Laurie Anderson Interview: A Virtual Reality of Stories”. In performance studies, such
      a transit state is called “liminoid performance”. See Alexandra G. Murphy, “Organizational
      politics of place and space: the perpetual liminoid performance of commercial flight”, Text and
      Performance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (2002): 297-316.
      39 A. Pinotti, “Environmentalising the image. Towards an-iconology”.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               146                                          AN-ICON
               a bit like trespassing. As when we look at someone who is
               sleeping, the experiencer is not aware of our gaze. At the
               same time, we have no access to what they are seeing. The
               duality of mind and eye as well as inner and outer worlds is
               a consistent theme in narrative VR experiences, one that is
               explicitly realised in works that manifest otherwise invisible
               or intangible traces, senses or information – or as in Notes
               on Blindness a lack of access thereof.

                                  Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness.

                              The virtual reality film, Notes on Blindness: Into
               Darkness40 was created as a counterpart to the feature
               documentary Notes on Blindness produced by Peter Mid-
               dleton and James Spinney in 2016. Both works arise from
               the first-person audio narration of John Hull, who describes
               in visceral and philosophical terms the process of losing
               his sight.41 Mired in darkness, as its title indicates, the VR
               version of the feature film has a wraith-like quality; of thin
               veils of light suspended in twilight. Its narrative is structured
               around six parts, each one being a memory, a moment,
               and a specific location recorded on John Hull’s tapes; each
               scene requiring a different level and form of interaction
               from the viewer in order to follow or progress through the
               narrative. Sound is central to the work, augmented through
               binaural audio (that spatializes sound as if it were bouncing
               around your ears), while the 3D rendering of objects and
               moving figures create a highly immersive experience. Sim-
               ilar to Thing, its most evocative aspect is the use of point




      40 With narrator John Hull. Interactive virtual reality, 360-degree 3D video, colour, EN/FR, 7’, 2016.
      41 Based on John Hull’s memoir, On Sight and Insight: A Journey Into the World of Blindness
      (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD                  147                                            AN-ICON
               cloud to suspend firefly-like dots in a seemingly infinite
               deep indigo.42
                                The first two scenes in Notes on Blindness
               establish the parameters for acoustic seeing: in the obscure
               world evoked by John Hull we must learn anew how to look
               with our ears. Light signals how sound might feel and alerts us
               to the acoustic realm in three dimensions. It is, however, in the
               second and third scenes that we are subjected to something
               closer to liminal performance. As Hull begins to realise that
               he can no longer remember what things or loved ones look
               like, he descends into despair. His fear of being trapped alone
               in darkness culminates in a scene out in the snow, where he
               panics because he loses all sense of place. At the end of the
               narration however, the VR interaction invites us to dissolve
               his footprints in the snow by training our attention, with our
               head position tracked by the HMD, on their impression in the
               darkness. When the first set of footprints vanish another pair
               appear, leading us in Hull’s steps back to the safety of home.
                            In the episode that features rain, Hull’s house is
               an almost silent place except for his gentle voice and the
               reverberation of raindrops falling on ordinary objects in the
               room. We are again invited to interact with our gaze, this
               time to give shape to otherwise hidden forms that the rain
               defines acoustically: pots, pans, glasses, dishes. This is a
               pivotal moment in Hull’s own life and the VR film; we too
               understand what it is to create the virtual shape of things
               by listening to them. There is also a specific, oneiric qual-
               ity to the space that the VR work creates whereby Hull’s
               experience becomes a shared one, rather than a voyeuris-
               tic observation of someone losing their sight.43 Everything
               we hear is echoed in its visual equivalent; renderings that


       42 Point cloud started to appear in cinematic VR works at this time. See, for instance,
      “Coexistence” 2016, at the Venice Architecture Biennale: https://vimeo.com/183596023
       43 For ethical issues related to the work, see D. Leblond, “Landscape Shaped by Blindness.
       Touching the Rock (1990) and Notes on Blindness (2016): Towards an ec(h)ology of vision”,
       Études britanniques contemporaines no. 55 (2018).

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD              148                                        AN-ICON
              appear as point clouds: luminescent, 3D shapes of objects
              and moving bodies that create elusive, lace-like silhou-
              ettes in the darkened space. In the process of becoming
              fully recognizable, and as they unravel and disperse into
              thinning clouds of bright specks, these forms resemble
              constellations. Hence, in Notes on Blindness, as in Thing
              and Chalkroom, the darkness acts as a connecting mate-
              rial: boundless, it enfolds all of us (seeing and non-seeing
              individuals) in a cosmic infinity that is simultaneously inti-
              mate and terrifying.

                              “Cold space, a dark place”: Parragirls
                               Past, Present: unlocking memories of
                               institutional “care”

                           The immersive VR film Parragirls Past, Present44
              is set in the grounds and buildings of Parramatta Girls
              Home – a punitive welfare institution for teenage girls sit-
              uated in Western Sydney, Australia, closed in 1974 and
              abandoned since the late 1990s. Its creation pivots on the
              memories of five former occupants, among the hundreds
              who have returned after many decades to confront this
              terrible place. As a labour of remembrance mired in trauma,
              the project required more than a year of collaboration with
              the aim of finding a form of testimony that might convey
              the survivors’ experiences to a wider public. In Parramatta
              Girls Home, children were not only deprived of freedom, but
              also cruelly disciplined and abused. Later, both Australian
              government inquiries and media reporting sensationalized
              and underscored their stigma and victimhood. The last
              thing Parragirls could abide was to provide viewers with
              prurient pleasures. Hence, a number of counter-visual strat-
              egies were developed, ruling out interactivity as a means


      44 360-degree 3D stereoscopic video, ambisonic spatial sound, EN, 2017, 23’.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD             149                                     AN-ICON
              for viewers to progress through the virtual environment and
              its narratives.
                             As with Thing, Chalkroom and Notes on Blind-
              ness, the point cloud photographic technique, materializing
              against the surrounding darkness, proved key. Among the
              varied ways that images can be “environmentalized” in
              3D and 360 degrees, point cloud is distinct: it bears little
              resemblance to the synthetic imagery of game and CGI
              animation. Cartographic in origin, point cloud provides a
              means to project these as experienceable architectures –
              places we can fly through, as if in space. In addition to the
              sense of irrepressible movement, of being sucked into the
              institution’s spatio-temporal vortex, it is the transformation
              of photographs into points of light and colour that float in
              an abysmal 3D world that gives Parragirls Past, Present its
              wraithlike and enigmatic atmosphere.
                             Accompanying the journey is the sound of the
              Parragirls’ voices, captured in ambisonic recordings. Wo-
              ven together, they offer a deeply personal yet collective ac-
              count of their experience as inmates. There is one location
              in particular in the Girls Home that former occupants find
              difficult to revisit: a basement solitary confinement cell, col-
              loquially known as the dungeon. In the film, Gypsie Hayes
              describes it thus:

the only way you can survive in there is to curl up and go to sleep.
That’s all you could do to survive that. It was nothingness. It was
just a cold space, a dark place.
                            In contrast to the exterior point cloud scenes, the
              cell is represented as a stereoscopic spherical panorama in
              360 degrees. Moving between the differently rendered and
              spatially located spaces, presented yet another dilemma
              however, which was resolved using the point cloud aes-
              thetic as a form of transition in conjunction with moving

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD       150                             AN-ICON
             tracking shots, to dissolve the image across one space or
             dimension into another.
                           The most unusual impact of combining point
             cloud with mobile tracking shots in the 3D world of Parra-
             girls Past, Present is the feeling of being pulled through the
             experience, almost against our will. The data points seem
             to transcend and even pierce our body, so that we become
             part of the ghost-like substance of the Girls Home. Distinct
             from its head-mounted display viewing, in the 3D 360-de-
             gree film screenings of Parragirls Past, Present at UNSW
             EPICentre. Standing alongside 10 to 15 spectators wearing
             3D glasses, you can see the points appear to emerge in 3D
             from the circular screen and pass through the bodies of the
             viewers beside you. The imagery may appear spectral as it
             floats through space, but so are the audience, whose bod-
             ies are traversed as if they had no consistency or solidity.
                           Crucially, in conjunction with the nightmarish,
             endless darkness and the omnidirectional eye, point cloud
             effectively disassembles the centralized gaze of VR’s typi-
             cally first-person perspective: enfolded in swarms of float-
             ing pixels, we start to feel what it must have been like to be
             under constant disciplinary surveillance – to be watched
             at all times by invisible omniscient eyes.
                           In the concluding shot, however, we fly out
             backwards, as if pulled up and out into the sky, discovering
             the vast emptiness that extends beyond the perimeter of
             the institution. On the one hand, what we are literally seeing
             are the limits of the photogrammetric images that could be
             recorded – black holes in both data and historical memory.
             On the other hand, as the sound of the multiple voices van-
             ishes, we grasp a sense of the collective unconscious that
             Parragirls still share with the other former occupants of the
             Home: the internalisation of a state of incarceration, being
             severed from the rest of the world, unable to imagine what
             lays beyond the space of incarceration other than a void.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD    151                            AN-ICON
                                 Conclusion

                            In moving image media, as in real life, darkness
               has always been a privileged channel towards alternate
               states of self or alterity. Black spaces encourage us to re-
               linquish control of sensing bodies, simultaneously fostering
               a sense of placeless-ness: in the dark, we lose our sense
               of orientation and lack the necessary landmarks to eval-
               uate distance and depth, and order the space according
               to the familiar rules of perspective and proprioception. In
               immersive environments, the feeling of being unmoored is
               heightened by the “environmentalizing” of the space: night
               enfolds us on all sides. Within this dis-anchored realm, the
               voices that appear to address us but remain devoid of a
               visible source seem to take possession of us, strength-
               ening the sense of losing one’s grip. But darkness is not
               the only precondition to our slipping into an altered state
               of consciousness. The experience of the scene unfold-
               ing independently from our will is equally important, which
               also occurs when watching 2D films. While spectators can
               look around in every direction in both the HMD and in a
               360-degree 3D cinema, if you cannot control your propul-
               sion through a space or scene then the film acts on you.
                            Only at this price – in accepting that I cannot
               change the “order” of the images and sounds – can a form
               of “dreamwork” take place.45 In the works described here,
               the unravelling of the images is inseparable from the relent-
               less, gliding movement that sucks us in, and, in the case of
               360 degree 3D films, passes “through” us: to turn our head
               and look back is to experience the sense of memory disinte-
               grating, and history as ruins, that Walter Benjamin so vividly



      45 As Thierry Kuntzel points out, such is the specificity of time-based media and its special
      link to the dream-like and to the unconscious: “the film and the story unravel outside of me, I
      cannot possibly intervene”. T. Kuntzel, “Le travail du film”, Communications, no. 19 (1972): 27.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               152                                           AN-ICON
              evoked with the allegory of the angel of history.46 Lighting up
              in darkness, point clouds appear like the ultimate expression
              of transience. Though they are a mere effect of a particular
              imaging technology, they often look like constellations, or
              like particles that float in space, such as dust, petals or
              snowflakes; points that redefine deep space as a conduit
              to the dreamlike. A figuration of matter propagating, taking
              form and then dissolving, point clouds perfectly capture the
              melancholy awareness of the impermanence of the material
              world, and the all-too human, shared sense of finitude, loss,
              and awe experienced in reminiscing and day-dreaming.




      46 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, trans. H. Zohn, in H. Arendt, ed.,
      Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 249.

MARTINE BEUGNET AND LILY HIBBERD               153                                         AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



                                                                                           1 / I                                                                              AN-ICON
