Martin Peter Pleiss

Towards a phenomenology of novelty:
perceiving and engaging with Virtual Reality

In my PhD project, I investigate the perception of novel situations presented in virtual reality artworks. In these extraordinary environments, one engages with a foreign and unexpected world which offers new opportunities for relationship-building. This thesis explores the constitution of such relations – that is, of the mesh between the experiencer’s perception and the virtual world, where subjective attention and intentions encounter materialised rules and (afforded) interactions.

The greater goal is to initiate a phenomenology of the perceptual engagement with novel situations. In order to study such environments, I use ‘experiential art’: artworks which either implicitly or directly offer the opportunity to engage with the unexpected or strange. At its core, this is a phenomenological project embedded in a 4E cognition research context: I analyse participants’ first-hand accounts of their initial moments within these artworks and explore ways to relate these descriptions of experiential content to third-person measurements such as eye tracking and pupillometry. Drawing upon methodologies from the phenomenology of perception, aesthetics and game studies and upholding an exploratory approach, a provisional focus lies on interrogating relational temporal structures and emerging patterns of presence, attention and interaction.

Tags: Phenomenology, Aesthetics, perception, virtual reality, novelty, orientation, meaning-making, 4E cognition, artwork, pupillometry

Publications

  • Pleiss, Martin (2012). Warum man mit Flow alleine nicht die Welt rettet. Gamification und Problemr?ume. In Mertens, Mathias & Langner, Anne-Kristin (Ed.), flow aus spielen: Optimale Erfahrungen durch Computerspiele. blumenkamp Verlag. ISSN 978-3942958073.

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  • Pleiss, Martin Peter (2023). Action cycles before ‘affordances’ in unfamiliar contexts within a playful Virtual Reality environment.
  • Pleiss, Martin Peter (2023). The affective cycle of orientation in unfamiliar contexts within an aesthetic Virtual Reality environment.
  • Patricia, Detmering & Pleiss, Martin (2021). Aporia.
  • Lepczynski, Tanja & Pleiss, Martin (2021). Virtually virtuoso. #10 Artificial Intelligence in VR Art . [Internet]. Spotify (Podcast).

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Published Sep. 11, 2019 9:16 AM - Last modified Dec. 7, 2022 2:53 PM