Between Being and Becoming: How Might Surprise Create New Meaning Co-ontologically in the Design Production and Reception of Immersive-Media?

Surprise is an inherent affect in immersive media design, production and reception. It enables what is implicit in experience to be made explicit through an immediacy in design practices, extending capability at the site of production. The development of new capability realised from a surprise enables a visibility of the inapparent by going beyond existing interpretative practices, revealing greater self-understanding in reflection after an event or encounter. Surprise makes apparent the spatial orientation to an object or entity by recalling a proprioceptive relation in movement from the already-there. This spatial orientation overwhelms any existing temporal, cultural relation in memory to the triggering object or entity, enabling a remembering of a previously forgotten capability. This recollection happens in the moment of the pause, halting or break in conscious registration, when the unqualified intensity in approach negates the qualified affect of temporal orientation relative to the object or entity. By spatially orientating action through proprioception, a surprise reveals an epiphylogenesis. The self-recognising of potential capability arising from a surprise illuminates the individually acquired phylogenetic and epigenetic memory apparent in the physiologically motivated somatic movement.

Using an ontological design approach to media production to illuminate surprise through a reconstruction of the Apollo 11 lunar landing – an example of the exploration of a new world - this practice-based thesis illuminates surprise as an anamnesis; a remembering of something forgotten from a past that may not have been lived in the present lifetime. By making the Earth explicit to a worldwide audience and visible through new media practices of live televised transmission, Apollo made the familiar object of the Earth visible from another planetary body. In doing so, Apollo foregrounded a new visible encounter with the sovereign home from the familiar home against a cosmos highlighting a new anthropological shift in perspective.

Media enables empathic engagement with both familiar and unfamiliar objects and entities through a liminal atmosphere between screen and spectator. The liminal relation enables an emotional involvement in previously qualified and unqualified intensities being revealed in cinematic space, affecting how objects may be experienced in their mediated reality, but also subsequently in everyday actuality. A surprise arises from an affective complicity with an ambiguous object emerging in the proximal space, making explicit an incongruence between its spatial approach and temporal orientation concerning that triggering object or entity. This ambiguity may emerge relative to an object or entity in how the practices associated are revealed in the immediacy of the everyday or through mediation to engender complicity.

The thesis contributes to new knowledge by proposing how deep-play, flow and hyper-focus arise in media practices affectively valorising objects and entities in the imagination. Media makes visible familiar and unfamiliar objects and entities through a perspectival frame-of-reference, entailing potentialities for surprise where ambiguity is made implicit with practices in relation to the valorised objects and entities in the imagination.

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