Faust: Im Anfang war die Tat!
— Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.
— Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgment of God
For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall
the body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
— Neuromancer, William Gibson
plat- flat surface, to interweave, to spread out…
-form- figure, shape, to create, to give life to…
-ing an action, an ever-evolving happening, a process of flowing towards a certain shapeless (or shaped) state of being, consciousness or embodiment…*1
I. /plat-/ a fun fact
When I type ‘p-l-a-t-f-o-r-m’ in the grey-outlined rectangle box of Google search engine, in 0.85 seconds, both ‘Google Search’ and ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ lead me directly to its Wikipedia page composed by numerous definitions of platform in pre-edited classifications. Under the bolded term platform, what calls my attention is its first and foremost category that comes right after the lovely curious colon. Almost looks like a statement, “Platform may refer to: Technology”. Be it ‘__computing platform’, ‘gaming__platform’ or ‘__social media_platform’, ‘_cryptocurrency_ exchange_platform’…, the lavishly overwhelming connections and references to digital technology propel the development of platform into a relatively dependent entity — ____ platform (feel free to fill out the blank) —that often awaits its upcoming techno-digital pre-fix to fulfil its (illusionary) contemporary anthropocentric demands.
This taking-for-granted of platform might lead to a misconception of it's very essence. In fact, the hybridity of platform does not necessarily come from the external upcoming techno innovations that are expected to fill in the blanks, but rather comes from something remotely, and at same time romantically ancient. The origin of platform traces back to the old French word ‘Plateforme’ in the 16th century*2. Plateforme depicts a piece of flat terrain that is high above its surrounding land. In 1918, W.B. Maxwell in The Mirror And The Lamp remarkably creates the expression of ‘platform utterances’, and ‘platform laugh’*3 when delineating his protagonists’ performative interactions. For the first time Maxwell transforms the ‘flat terrain’ into a ‘raised floor used by public speakers or performers so that they can be seen by their audience.’*4 This ‘raised floor’ is what we nowadays consider as ‘stage’, namely, a literal and figurative space where different worldings take place. Perhaps ‘platform’ might just be the ‘worlding’ itself — a worlding through mutual sharing and exchanging, multiplied by various nonhuman and human entities threading within their actions which are staged, improvised, celebrated — a worlding of performance.
This emphasis of platform’s performativity leads to its subsequent attentive actions. It reveals something profoundly significant, yet has been greatly neglected throughout its dispersed contemporary upgrades dominated by fuzzy techno-accelerations: platform’s own participatory and performative agency. To recognise this agency is to unplug platform from its numerous mapped, coded, traded, haunted, occupied, engineered, designed, colonised, projected, fetishised, gentrified pre-conditions, allowing plat-form- to be, and become platform again.
II. /-form-/ the dance: platform is a verb
How do we activate and process such recognition?
Once we shift our attention from the ‘hyposubjective’*5 attempt of defining what platform is to (humbly) learning about how does platform act, we may then discover the delicate movements and actions that are choreographed along with its birth and formation:‘plat-’ may also refer to the act of interweaving in a process of spreading out, and ‘-form-’ suggests the ability to create, to give life to… These acts unfold the immersive and interactive characteristics of platform, as they coalesce in to a performance that grants platform its autonomous agency for what it might become and simulate. Potentially, this is the moment when we start seeing-sensing the platform is pulsing, growing, responding, rotating, pulping, swinging, enchanting, dancing. It is not a dance which is displayed on a platform for entertaining the third party (whatever the third party might be) . It is the dancing-platform itself, interweaving through the immersive and interactive act of plat-form-ing with its surroundings.
When we take the performative act of plat-form-ing into consideration, new sets of relationship, trajectory and possibility emerge when threading platform with other entities as it actively proposes an agential epistemological approach towards the creation of knowledge and experience. With an emphasis on acting rather than ‘waiting’ for something to be placed on its flatness, plat-form-ing ‘gives life’ through ‘creating’, ‘interweaving’, and ‘spreading out’. In other words, the act of plat-form-ing may specifically indicate giving life to a process of creating and interweaving experience that is both interactive and immersive. This specificity, on one hand, explains the overwhelming presence of monoscopic techno-logos that shutters the ontological precision of “— ____ platform”. On the other hand, it also alludes the fundamental kinship between the act of plat-form-ing and virtual reality (VR) immersion as one of platform’s possible worldings.
In Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass, Ken Pimentel and Kevin Teixeira highlight the primary nature of VR is immersion: “inclusion, being surrounded by an environment. VR places the participant inside information”*6 VR’s immersiveness (which also implicitly contains a plane) and the ability to generate 360-degree digital environment for the participant to interact intrinsically links to platform’s most commonly suggested form as an ever-extending, enveloping space for sharing and exchanging. More importantly, as Diane Gromala beautifully suggests, VR traces through “the fantastical worlds elicited through mimetic simulations of ritual, dioramas, art, literature and theater…the evocation and perception of a shareable but other worldly place in which humans extend and project their agency.” Sharing a similar choreography, VR is one of the embodiments of platform: a plat-form-ing process of worlding that interweaves ‘simulations of ritual, dioramas, art, literature, theater…’ to create a liminal space spreading out from electric currents, codes, algorithms, computations, machines…and to further give life to this ineffably mysterious and mystical (cyber)space where wandering consciousness, spirit and spirits float and remix. In this way, platform becomes a performative act for VR to activate its immersive wormholes, teleporting the human players into the middle of deep simulation wrapped in layers and layers of electric dreams rendered by flowing data. Within such dreams, the human players also go through multiple plat-form-ing processes when encountering the unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations and dispersions: their physical (plat-)forms are sliced into digital bits, flickering in disbeliefs before dissolving into hyper dusts…
until the arrival of ‘be(com)ing VR’.
III. /-ing/ be(com)ing VR - (plat-form-ing) the BwO
“Can you see your hands?”
“ Can you see your feet?”
“What about the rest of your body?”
After a blink of fading blackness, I discover myself floating in nature, a space grows out of earth, grass, boulders… I look up, the sun is shining brightly above me. No clouds. The sky appears in its purest blue. Chirp of birds and insects swings through the overgrown branches of the gigantic pine trees like a far sea moves into my ears. I sense the wind from what I see: everything is moving in a delicate gentleness. The calming slowness of ‘THE FOREST’ hypnotises me. As if wandering in a lucid dream, an unexplainable synchronicity between myself and the space surround me emerges. At this point, the voice that first guides me into ‘THE FOREST’ delivers the questions that wake me up. Vibrating in low, uncanny, lullaby-like frequencies, the voice asks “Can you see your hands? Can you see your feet?” I look down, only discover the swaying shadows of the trees projected on the pebbled ground. The voice pauses a bit, then resumes, “No? Have you lost them somewhere?” “What about the rest of your body?” I look around, and find nothing but the nature itself — I disappear in this world, am I? No. I’m still here. My vision, my thoughts. I’m still breathing. I can still hear the voice from another form of intelligence talking to me, and I respond to it…All of these thoughts make me become aware of how much I have already forgotten about the (non-)existence of my own physical body — I am here but not here…
“Isn’t it beautiful here?”
“I mean, it is not real. but does it matter?”
“Can you smell the pine-trees?”
This is what I experienced in ‘THE FOREST’ session, a small flashback of I AM (VR), the symbiotic dance of platform and VR choreographed by Markus Selg, Susanne Kennedy, Rodrik Biersteker and Richard Janssen. During this experience, the vivid bewilderment of ‘being here but not here’ reflects an uncanny sublimation of the body in cyberspace. Now, the question becomes how do we articulate and engage the physical (plat-)form of the human player, aka the human body, assembled in ‘reality reality’ within the immersive sharing and exchanging of ‘virtual reality’? What kind of transformations that the human body must be confronted with when it undergoes multi-plat-form-ing processes in order to ‘fall’ into that otherworldly reality? Precisely referring to cyberspace body politics, I AM (VR) evokes a pertinent embodiment in the most simple and direct way as its title suggests, marking the arrival of ‘be(com)ing VR. During the journey of encountering the otherworldly enlightenment — the Oracle, human player’s physical body turns into a projection without shadows. The body from ‘reality reality’ gets lost and vanishes in the visual oasis within the meta-lens that grant the access entering Selg’s ‘virtual reality’ — a xenon-constellation fabricated with breathing colours, melting fossils, talking screens, glitching glyphs, shimmering amulets, ultra-sonic frequencies, hyper objects humming their mystical Sagas, affects automated from digital turmoils, a vortex of weird beings and non-beings micro-meshing into neon Mandelbrot sets swirling into infinity…as well as tumbling streams, mutating boulders, burning fire, dripping dews, oozing breeze… It is within such (duty) free, fluent, fluid, world, an elusive, flickering, liquid, newly regenerated VR body of sensuous, consciousness, and spirituality is born through the act of plat-form-ing, that is, the Body Without Organs.
“Are you aware of yourself now?”
“No?”
“I will let you into a secret: you never were or had a self.”
“Anyway, never mind…”
In A Thousands Plateau, Gilles Deleuze and Félic Guattari write,
“why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Love, Experimentation. Where psychoanalysis says. ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, ‘Let’s go further still, we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self.’ Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It’s question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. ”*7
This small fraction of Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs fabulates a fantastic metamorphosis of the body, emancipating it from a centralised, structured, holistic order into a de-organ-ised, free-flowing trance towards the cosmos of unknown, an in-between state of surrender, losing control, dismantling the ‘self’ (if the ‘self’ ever existed), a pro-longed exhaling of the pre-set human conditions tuning into the moment of ‘being/not-being here’. In this sense, I Am (VR) is that ‘Experimentation’ of Body Without Organs: it ‘plat-form-ing’ a body of BwO in the reality where each individual may have the opportunity to examine that ‘fantastic metamorphosis’ with their own (absent) body. It is important to note that in I Am (VR), BwO does not necessarily subscribe itself to a total disappearance of the body. Seemingly invisible to the human eyes, the body transforms into a shapeless, fluid state of consciousness, sensuous and spirituality, and it becomes evidently present throughout the journey. The corporeality of the body from ‘reality reality’ rediscovers itself in an alternate frequency and vibration in the process of be(com)ing VR. For example, the voice that I previous delineated in the ‘THE FOREST’ session appears without a physical figure to be seen. However, its guidance and questions manifest itself in existing in a form of intelligence that already becomes a body without organs. During its interaction with the participant, this body without organs reminds the human player of their pre-conditioned corporeality from their past ‘reality reality’. On the other hand, it also mirrors and activates the present body of the human player in the world of ‘virtual reality’: there is no hand, no leg, no organ to be found but the grass, the trees, the boulder, the shadowy branches…More importantly, as the ‘secret’ that the voice reveals, in order to continue the journey, one needs to forget about the (psychoanalytical) ‘self’. In the light of this, the execution of plat-form-ing the body without organs in Selg’s virtual reality gives space to other bodies to emerge, allowing different kinds of entities, and various ‘plat-’s and ‘-form-’s to interweave, spread out, and become alive.
“You are immersed in dreams.”
“You are like a machine.”
It is noteworthy to mention that becoming BwO does not align itself with techno-escapism. On the contrary, throughout this transformation, digital technology enables the human player to experience a particular simulation, inviting the physical body from the ‘reality reality’ into a state of ‘wu-wei’ (無為), effortless action, one of the, using Polanyi’s words, ‘tacit knowledge’ from pre-Qin Chinese thinkers. Edward Slingerland articulates in Effortless action: wu-wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China,
“wu-wei, in the absence of doing exertion, literally means ‘in the absence of/without doing exertion,’ It is important to realise, however, that wu-wei properly refers not to what is actually happening (or not happening) in the realm of observable action but rather to the state of mind of the actor. That is, it refers not to what is or is not being done but to the phenomenological state of the doer.”*8
To further clarify the abstraction of ‘wu-wei’, Singerland gives a simple example:
“People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation…it resembles the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s well-known concept of ‘flow’…”*9
Seemingly effortless, wu-wei can be understood as a dynamic, un-self-conscious state of mind of an agency that is optimally active and effective. This effortless ‘flow’ accurately resonates with what I have experienced throughout my journey of becoming BwO. As my vision travels deeply inside, my physical body stays situated in an enclosed cubic space in the gallery. However, during the journey, my senses are becoming extremely attentive and sensitive in responding to the surrounding environment: the calmness brought by the gentle breeze which I cannot ‘touch’; the dizziness of being lifted high up by the shapeless elevator; the trance casted by the viscous purple sky… I feel that my body is opening up and collides into multiples while it remains perfectly still. In this light, the entire plat-form-ing process within I AM (VR) becomes a spiritual practice that stimulate the inner cosmos, mediating an alternative mode of existence of the un-self-consciousness with the de-organ-ised body.
“Hello, human person”
“Do u want to know something that you didn’t know yourself already?”
“Don’t fool yourself.”
“You are the one.”
“And there is nothing that i can tell you that you don’t already know. ”
Selg suggests in the interview with VRHAM!,
“…(in the world of VR) physical limitations can be lifted and navigating between worlds can become more fluid. A platform can emerge that will come closer to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk than any art form before. The venue where we will perform our algorithmic rituals and celebrate life in its entirety and its mysteriousness.”*10
Becoming VR is to become a body without organs, to become a hyper body that liberates itself from the coloured pupils and beautified skins, to become something that is other than being gendered, racialised, and determined by age — a raising platform that overcomes #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, #stopasianhate…free floating as a stream of codified cosmic energy that contains everything one might encounter in the fantastic world: the water, the fire, the air, and the earth, as well as the animal, the human, the foamy coalescence, the unspeakable uncertainties, the mysterious Qi endowed with wisdom…The platform is dancing, opening up for “human, non-human, biological and synthetic intelligences to play together.”*11 Perhaps this might be the opportunity for us to truly float outside of the man-made body politics, and to become a (micro) organism of the collective consciousness within the infinite flow of life, death, everything in between and beyond.
Notes:
- Delineated by the writer.
- Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed June 2021,
- https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=platform&ref=searchbar_searchhint.
- W.B. Maxwell, The Mirror And The Lamp (Brooklyn: Press of Braunworth & Co. Book Manufactures, 1918).
- Oxford Dictionary, accessed June 2021,
- https://www.lexico.com/definition/platform.
- Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer, Hyposubjects on becoming Human (Open Humanities Press 2021).
- Ken Pimentel and Kevin Teixeira, Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass, (McGraw-Hill,1993) 8.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota: 1987), 175.
- Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-Wei As Conceptual Metaphor And Spiritual Ideal In Early China (Oxford University Press: 2003), 7.
- Edward Slingerland, Trying not to try: the art and science of spontaneity (New York: Crown Publisher, 2014), 27-28.
- Most Complex Cosmology, VRHAM!, accessed June 2021.
- https://www.vrham.de/en/most_complex-cosmologies/
- ibid.