Embodiment and the Perception of Nonhuman Sentience in Virtual Reality Interactive Art

The exploration of our understanding of a human experience is a key function behind art and performance, offering modes of thought that intend to express alternative perspectives on the human situation. As human experience is underpinned by our embodiment, artistic expression is in its form privileged to contribute an insight, as it creates an experience that is inherently visceral and by its very nature deals in direct sensorial engagement with the body. To be embodied is the fundamental condition of human experience. For each of us our individual embodiment is characterised experientially through direct sensorimotor perceptual feedback and kinaesthetically from a set of movement possibilities, all provided moment-by-moment through our body. We cannot move or act in the world without understanding ourselves as embodied beings. Further, our experience of embodiment extends beyond inhabiting a body to the experience of that body within its environment, but also as a body interacting with other embodied beings. Immersive and interactive technologies, such as virtual reality, offer a medium for artists to mediate the interconnection between the sense perceptions of our body, the physical environment and other embodied beings with computational processes. Creating a mediated reality in this way lends the potential for artists firstly to envision and imagine alternative ways of perceiving a shared external world but secondly to interrogate our existing processes and approaches of perception.