Digital Embodiment and the Arts: Exploring Hybrid Spaces Through Emerging Technologies

A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades.

This book explores the notion of embodied experience from the first wave of virtual reality through the current use of mixed, augmented, and extended realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. Access to new technological tools has given way to an explosion of digital culture and experience, allowing artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridization of creative practices. While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books, few place digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does.

This unique synthesis first analyzes embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality, imagination, and technology. It next lays the groundwork for a more explicit understanding of the role of the body in our engagement with digital technologies, focusing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body, the virtual body, and the hybrid body. The final section is a chronological exploration of the technological developments of virtual reality, virtual worlds, and augmented, mixed, and extended realities.

Denise Doyle is the principal editor of the Journal of Virtual Creativity, also published by Intellect, and visiting professor at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Canada.