Touching with a Virtualized Hand: Analogue’s Transports

Abstract

In this chapter, I investigate the complex proposition of becoming ‘immersed’ in virtualized identities in third sector and educational contexts, focusing on the research, development and reception of my company Analogue’s Wellcome Trust funded pilot project Transports —an interactive installation that invites individual immersants to participate in a first-person simulation of a fictionalized subject living with Young-Onset Parkinson’s disease (YOPD). The installation used low-budget components in combination with multisensory stimulation as a methodology to engender in participants a feeling of bodily ownership over a virtual hand. The aim was to cultivate an embodied understanding and a personal sense of living with a symptom associated with YOPD. I will explore the genealogy of the project, the iterative stages of its R&D process and evaluate the outcomes from the qualitative data gathered from participant questionnaires during the user-testing phase and testimonials from scientific/third sector collaborators on the project to assess its real-world impacts. I argue that the technology in use in Transports acts as both an intermediary between the virtual and actual hands, and an intervention designed to deliberately disrupt the co-ordination of the immersant’s limbs involved in the performance of a motor-skill. The destabilizing of important integrations of sensory information in the audience’s body is a strategy to make accessible the remote physical and psychical experiences of another body.