Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Late Post For Week of 3/17- Captured In the CAVE

I found the visit to the CAVE this week very interesting in light of our readings on the two modes of technologies of control: Foucault's surveillance model in "Panopticism," and Agre's response with the theorization and model of "Capture."
The CAVE seems to align to Agre's 6th example of technologies of tracking. As a virtual reality environment the CAVE not only allows for user interaction, but functions pricessly through tracking. This tracking occurs as John Cayley explained by the large device that hangs over the cave and that monitors the magnet contained within the "pilot" glasses. It is interesting to consider how the CAVE pilot glasses enable user interactivity through what Agre identifies as an essential development of "capture" technology, a "grammar of action." Here movements of the human body, especially that of the head in relation to sight are first "analzyed" in order to properly impose a "grammar of action" on this movement. In doing so the CAVE can interpret the abstraction of movement of the pilot (which is translated to the grammar) and therefore allow for the interactivity to function. I find it interesting though that the other LCD shutter glasses do not see the "program" as it should look and therefore both resist the CAVE as a capture technology by functioning as a part of the system that is not captured. This provides an example of the resistance possible in systems of capture. I am also interested in the notions of how the cave as a space corresponds to the notion of the "representation" that capture seeks to digitize and calculate through a mathematics of tracking and the "reality" or the actual space. How is this division further complicated by the CAVE providing a third space, a representational space that both corresponds to the computers capture(d)-representation and the reality space of the CAVE's dimensions.

Sorry that this post is going up so late!

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