Whereas traditional artistic theories often emphasized beauty and order, I treat cognitive disorientation as a core aesthetic principle and a productive design element. This approach contrasts sharply with the philosophy of many interactive designers, who actively anticipate potential “failures” in their systems only in order to correct them in advance.

In my work, user experience becomes a systematic confrontation with the unfamiliar. The interactive experience thus revolves around the user's efforts either to make sense of the experience and thus make it familiar, or to find pleasure in exploring the unfamiliar for its own sake.

My work often engages with the idea of “playing” or “gaming”, understood as the technological articulation of new ways of seeing that extend our natural perceptual capacities. An awareness of new possibilities always arises from an unforeseen fissure in the tissue of our ordinary perceptual habits and expectations. The word “meta” means “beyond” or “changed” (as in “metamorphosis”), while “aesthesis” refers to “perception”.

One of the most artistically fruitful uses of computer technology, then, lies in the systematic production of new forms of visual experience. This is achieved by creating artificial optical systems isolated from ordinary contexts of embodied perception.

My underlying assumption is that actuality (physical “optics” or natural perception) is only a particular case among many other possible ones. For instance, ordinary monocular perspective is only one possibility. Other, “virtual” possibilities include divergent perspective and multiple viewpoint perspective. This active search for new possibilities of experience may be described as a “possibilitizing” of natural perception or as a “virtualizing of the actual”.

This method has a close kinship to the technique of “free variation” employed in the field of experimental phenomenology (see for instance Don Ihde's book Experimental Phenomenology ). Artistic creation becomes a way of experimenting systematically with the limits of human consciousness.

My interest in this aesthetics of virtualization initially arose from my interest in divergent perspective. It is concerned with emphasizing the co-evolution of technology and perception. Vision is alienated and technology is subverted.

Most existing animation packages are biased towards “convergent” perspective. Developed during the European Renaissance (around the 15 th century) by architects and painter, convergent perspective is based on the principle that all receding parallel lines appear to meet (“converge”) at a vanishing point. The apparent sizes of objects diminish in proportion to their distance. This method is highly Western-centred.

Other traditions of world art do not rely on convergence. Another method, orthographic perspective, depicts parallel lines as parallel. The apparent sizes of objects do not change in proportion with their distance.

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An alternative technique, known as divergent (or inverted ) perspective , was used by artists working within the Russian Orthodox tradition, as well as by Chinese and Japanese artists. In divergent perspective, receding parallel line appear to move away (“diverge”) from one another. This technique “inverts” ordinary perspective. For instance, objects appear smaller as they approach the viewer and larger as they recede into the distance.

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Cubist and post-cubist painters like Picasso and Hockney have also used divergent perspective in order to bring the object closer to the viewer, and to embrace simultaneously more views of the object than was possible in classical convergent perspective.

By emphasizing convergent perspective to the exclusion of other methods, most entertainment software seriously limits the possibilities of visual expression. Computer artists become unable to explore the rich traditions of non-Western art, as well as modern Western painting, which do not rely on convergence. It is important for artists seeking creative freedom to question the fundamental biases in the technologies that they use, so as to open up new venues for exploration.

I experimented with creating works that transition from convergent to divergent perspective. The results were my animation Res Extensa and the interactive installation Projectile . I also collaborated with my friend Mike Wong in the interactive installation Fruztum: Nomadic vision (2003).

Findings

Two interesting facts about perception became immediately apparent after these experiments:

1. When the visual content is a closed environment, such as a small room, a transition from convergent to divergent perspective often destabilizes our perception of corners and edges. The same edge shifts from concave to convex.
2. When the visual content is a pair of objects, such as for instance two cubes rotating around one another, a strong perceptual disorientation occurs involving the relationship between distance and apparent size. In divergent perspective, size actually increases with distance. This disorientation becomes more visible when one object rotates around the other. The occlusion of one thing by another increases the disorientation.

One additional consequence of divergent perspective is the systematic alienation of vision.

My work is profoundly influenced by philosophical and psychological studies in the phenomenology of perception. The standard experience of a “realistic” work, such as a convergent picture, a documentary photograph, an ordinary movie, is twofold. First of all, viewers do not occupy the same space as the virtual objects. We cannot walk into the image and interact with its contents. The institutions of visual representation largely rest on this basic alienation: The viewer's body is literally and radically outside of the fictional space.

Secondly, however, fictional objects do have some visual relation to audiences. They grow large when they are close and smaller when far away. Many visual effects depend on the viewer having some perceptual connection to the object. In action films, for instance, point of view shots of roller coasters and speeding cars make us feel as if we are moving within the fictional world. The famous Mona Lisa smile, which seems to follow us as we move, is another instance. The paradox of visual fiction is this: we are radically outside the fictional world, and yet we stand in some perceptual relation to it.

In divergent perspective, this paradoxical status of the user's body is systematically defamiliarized and foregrounded. Objects diminish as they approach the viewer and expand as they move away. Every object appears inaccessible, perpetually out of reach, and essentially paradoxical. The result is an experience of alienation from the world, intensified by our frustrated desire to make cognitive sense of it, to establish some sort of perceptual bond with it. The user is forced to formulate conscious hypothesis about the information presented. Instead of directly apprehending the visual content, she must make an active cognitive effort of interpretation. Unable to reconcile incompatible visual cues, our gaze is rendered homeless.

This “nomadic vision” goes hand in hand with our interest in subverting dominant technologies .

I am adapting the expression “minor technology” from a discussion of Kafka's literature by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychologist Felix Guattari. This strategy borrows a “major” technology (one which has been officially endorsed or heavily marketed) and, instead of rejecting it outright, finds a radically novel use for it. I am interested in discovering new possibilities buried within, but suppressed by, the dominant uses of existing technologies.

One important inspiration was the silent cinema of Buster Keaton. In films like The General or The Navigator , Keaton shows lone individuals or couples struggling to reappropriate gigantic technologies (a railway, a ship) that were not meant for small people to use single-handedly. This effort to subvert large-scale technology for outsider purposes is at the heart of some of my work.

I was really influenced in this respect by the pioneering work of my friend and colleague Mike Wong. Here is a link to his web site.

Our joint work Fruztum: Nomadic Vision implemented a radical hacker philosophy. As a platform for this project, Mike chose an ordinary SEGA Dreamcast, an underrated machine that has been institutionally "categorized" as a game console although it actually is a powerful computer. The machine was thus reappropriated to subvert ordinary perception. Mike also preferred the Dreamcast because it is cheaper than most personal computers and thus more widely accessible to artists. In this context, Mike and I remain grateful to Dan Potter for developing KOS , which facilitated programming on the Dreamcast.