What is Immediacy?

When dealing with the concept of immediacy, questions are raised about virtual reality. Immediacy is also defined as a “disappearing act”. (315) The purpose of virtual reality and immediacy is to put the computer-generated image in the viewer’s face. The graphic puts the person in a stationary point to view the graphic generated world that appears to be around them. The experience of virtual reality is also called into question. In what ways is virtual reality necessary? What does it add or create in reality of life. Perpetual immediacy is experience without mediation. What this means is that the virtual reality will diminish “the mediating presence of the computer and its interface.” (316) The actual devices that are used to create the virtual reality are taken away, disregarded, or unapparent.

According to Bolter and Grusin, this work of immediacy can also be seen in digital graphics that are two and three-dimensional viewed on a screen. (316) Digital graphics are changing as technology changes. Any photograph, video, or image can be manipulated with computer graphics to create other meaning.  There is a desire for immediacy in film created by the audience. (316) This means that as an audience, we really want to feel like we are there and that everything happening in the film is real. There is more of a need to make the interface of computer programs and virtual reality to be “natural”. (316) Scientists and researchers are attempting to create “interfaceless” interfaces in which no outside electronics, or other use items will be used. (317) There is also a need for transparency that erases the mediums used to create the virtual reality. Virtual reality is a new creation that takes us out of history and into the future of film and graphics altogether. Computer graphics are the latest expression of the desire for immediacy, even though it is influenced by earlier traditions. Images are able to be recreated easier, and audiences are less likely to know whether or not the image is reality or not reality. Bolter and Grusin say that “even if we cannot always tell synthesized images from photographs, we can distinguish the somewhat different strategies that painting and photography have adopted in striving for immediacy…” (321) This means that as an audience, we are able to distinguish the effects of immediacy, in some ways this can be described as the opposite of immediacy of the immediacy if I were to put a name to it. As an audience, we can tell that there is some sense of the photograph, image, or other kind of virtual reality that makes it virtual and not an actual reality. 

Bolter and Grusin say that computer graphics are expressed in mathematical terms to create the perfect sense. (322) I agree that this is correct and that computer-generated graphics often use a lot of mathematics in programs and the creation of the virtual realities. (322) I also disagree in some ways because I think that computer graphics are expressed in terms of ethos, pathos, and logos. The computer-generated graphics look for a reaction of one or more of these three to what is created in the virtual reality. How an image, film, or something else affects the viewer defines how the reality will be created or what it will become. The experts on computer graphics that say “they are striving to achieve ‘photorealism’… to make their synthetic images indistinguishable from photographs”, are also in some ways striving to affect the ethos, logos, and pathos of the audience.  The more realistic the photograph looks to the viewer’s eye, the more they will believe the realistic qualities of the photographs.  Bolter and Grusin bring up the idea that the synthetic image is another medium, rather than the computer imitating an external reality. The other medium is a manipulated photograph presenting its own contents, rather than comparing it to another literal photograph of the same thing and picking apart the differences between the two. Each piece of equipment involved in the manipulation and creation of the photograph is another added mediation taking away the actual “realness” of the reality to re-create the reality in a digitally manipulated form. The virtual realities that involve helmets that the viewer wears to experience it use many different technological devices to make the experience seem more “real”. There is a tracker that tracks the perspective of the viewer’s head as that person tilts and turns their head. (325) The person can look down, see the floor, look up, see the sky, turn right, see the glance over and the new view that they encounter. Bolter and Grusin quote Rheingold’s claim, “[Virtual Reality] technology is taking people beyond and through the display screen into virtual worlds.” (325) In a lot of ways, I agree with this, but in a literal sense, these words are still untrue. No one is actually taken anywhere into a virtual reality. The virtual realities and systems that help them work are just breaking down the barriers between real and fake-real. No person is ever taken through the display screen, they are still physically there viewing the screen as the world around them. 

Rheingold and Bolter and Grusin talk a lot about video games and interactive interfaces but this also reminds me of the movie Spy Kids. I’m not sure which number movie this was, but in one of the newer Spy Kids movies, the kids are asked to go into the video game to save someone. I’m not sure of the actual plotline as I haven’t seen this movie in quite some time, but the whole point is that they are physically in a lab or large office space, but their mind and physical appearance is transported into the game with other players. They move freely through the world as if it were a reality, even though the world is designed as a fake, futuristic, dark world with obstacles and things to do as you move through the levels of the game. The movie creates this immediacy for the characters that is unrealistic to the technology that we have access to now in the world, to the extent of my knowledge. The movie itself adds another layer of remediation with the film. The scenes in which the characters are in the video game make the viewer, usually children, feel as if they are a part of the game with them. The movie takes you with the on the journey as they fight off little minion things and play in battles in giant robot costumes with other players. Even this scene itself adds another layer. While in the virtual reality, characters must go to the battle arena and choose a transformer size robot to be their battle robot. To control the robot, they must get onto a platform that replaces the head of the robot. The robot will copy every move that the character makes with their body. For example, if she were to kick, the robot would kick. If she were to punch, the robot would punch. If that character’s robot were to take a punch, the character would fall down on the platform and have to work to stand back up. These two layers take the characters of the movie out of their actual reality. The computer graphics that were needed to create a film like this were probably very intricate. The whole video game world along with many of the stunts would have to have been digitally created with computer graphics.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358. Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/toc/con4.3.html.