The eXtended Uni/Meta/Verse (XV) and the Liminal Spaces of Body, Ownership, and Control

Abstract

The “vironment” is the liminal space and boundary between the environment (our surroundings) and the invironment (ourselves). Examples of vironments include clothing, “wearables” (wearable computing technologies), and veyances (conveyances versus deconveyances), such as wheelchairs, rollerblades, bicycles, e-bikes, cars, paddleboards, and boats. Manfred Clynes, who coined the word “cyborg,” held that his favorite example of “cyborg” was a person riding a bicycle. A person navigating a vessel is also a cyborg. The word “cyborg” is short for “cybernetic organism,” and the word “cybernetic” originates from the Greek word κυβερνήτης (“kybernētēs” = “helmsman” or “rudder,” the same root word as in “governor” and “government”). In this way, we define “cyborg” as a closed-loop feedback (cybernetic) symbiosis between human and machine in which the machine is a vironment. The world’s first cyborgs existed more than a million years ago, long before the invention of the wheel and clothing, predating the emergence of homo sapiens. Being the first vironments, vessels hold a special place in cyborg history, at the nexus of water, humans, and technology. Humans and technology form a liminal cyborg space, and humans and water also form a liminal space. The beach is, in a sociopolitical sense, where we are at the liminal state of undress between clothed and naked, at the social boundary between lacking and demonstrating proper decorum, and at the territorial boundary between public property and private property, where security guards or private property owners often clash with beachgoers over rules, rights, and responsibilities of land ownership versus the navigable waters of maritime law. More generally, the bath, whether it be the beach or the bathtub, or public pool, or spa, is the liminal space between cyborg and non-cyborg, where we shed our vironments and vestments and become one with the waters. Taking to the waters, which most often requires the shedding of our clothes and other technologies, brings us back to a primordial state, akin to the way we were in the womb. The new field of Water-Human–Computer Interaction (WaterHCI) began 54 years ago (1968) as an exploration of this liminal space where technology meets cyborg/non-cyborg liminality. Some of the technologies we have developed over the last 54 years extend the human mind and body in the liminal space between reality, the metaverse, and society, thus defining a new entity we call the eXtendiVerse, (XV) and it is no coincidence that its last seven letters spell “diverse.”

This beach was of course built in the form that nature would take it… you can throw stones into the lake which is what the children particularly love doing, and of course, the lake always brings them back.

Michael Hough, landscape architect of Ontario Place