By Priscila Gonsales
One of the challenges for those who research education based on the perspective of post-humanism is to disseminate the idea that digital technology, increasingly embedded in social life, cannot be deemed a mere tool-object to be appropriated by the human being-subject. Katherine Hayles’ post-humanist perspective focuses on the interactions between human beings and technologies (between body and information). These make it possible to understand tangled networks in constant construction and reconstruction in the sociodigital context.
By participating in the virtual reality (VR) experience SOMA, with the Centre for Sociodigital Futures learning domain team, I was able to experience how the human consciousness cannot be isolated from its social and technological environment.
SOMA, a participatory experience, associates interactive, social and location-based virtual reality. In contrast to what is traditionally considered VR, or rather, a complete entry into an additional dimension, prioritizing vision and hearing, SOMA allows participants to consciously articulate their different senses and biological bodies, accessing different information belonging to both physical and virtual worlds.
For Katherine Hayles our subjectivities are constituted by the technologies with which we interact, generating cultural and adaptive quests. These subjectivities, simultaneously drive the development of technologies in today’s world, not only VR, but also AI, which, by no means neutral, are strongly addressed by political ideologies and concepts.
My own research focuses on the emergence of a collective citizen that cuts across culture, nature and technology and confronts the conceptions of traditional humanism, as well as current ideological and political conceptions. Post-humanism highlights the importance of human subjectivity. That is, the subject (person) is intrinsically involved in the system in which it is inserted.
How does SOMA work?
In an hour of cooperative and immersive participatory experience, SOMA proposes a sensory journey of exploration and dialogue between three instances: bodies, physical spaces and virtual spaces. Shoes left aside, the activity starts with a facilitated moment by the SOMA team that invites our bodies to interact with stretchy material that connects those in the experience, with a clear reference to dance and other somatic practices. This allowed us to engage with the activity in a multisensory way, going beyond the traditional VR experience which relies heavily on the visual.
In the sequence, some people start with the VR headsets and others act as ‘testimonials’ of the physical world, and then, together users share the journey of physical, emotional and sound perceptions to support multi-sensory consciousness.
Inclusion is an intrinsic aspect of SOMA, which contemplates a participatory design process, each experience of multiplicity of senses will be unique, according to the cognitive assembly (again, Hayles!) to be formed by each group of people and their respective interactions that will arise between them. There is no prerequisite or standard to follow in order to participate. This experience allows us to reflect on the implications of VR for our bodies and accessibility issues, something practically ignored by VR ideals, such as the marketable metaverse model.
Insights
Connection, empathy and caring are embedded in the SOMA experience. It embodies some aspects that are not always claimed, but which are essential to thinking about sociodigital life in a society that is increasingly permeated by the impersonality of digital. SOMA presents and suggests modes of human-non-human interaction and invites us to reflect on how bodies and sensations connect with VR and other technologies. The machine does not have a biological body, the machine does not have feelings, it does not perceive or think. The machine only performs from statistical combinations.
Participating in SOMA will certainly support my further empirical investigations to better understand the culture inserted in the model of “machine”, seeking to analyze how human and non-human recursiveness occurs or doesn’t occur in educational practices. For example: is pedagogical work reduced to the teaching and appropriation of AI technologies or is there something else? What relationships are established between student and AI, teacher and AI and how they connect with the concepts of subjectivity, of body-mind consciousness in constant connection. If the purpose of education were only to transmit knowledge, perhaps the computer or any other digital device by itself would be enough. However, as the SOMA experience brings forward, and the pandemic also revealed, we know that the personal contact, personal relationships, times and temporalities, caring and also the intelligence will never be artificial.
Priscila Gonsales is a PhD Student at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Languages and Technologies and a recent visitor to the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.
Her research explores complexity in critical studies on digital technology and education, based on post-humanism under the eyes of Katherine Hayles (1999), who investigates the interactions between humans and AI, that is, between body and information, that together form an entity in constant construction and reconstruction.
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Image credit: Alice Hendy