Abstract 

Keywords: Augmented Virtuality, Augmented Reality, Software Assemblage, New Materialism.

An analysis of the material-discursive practices surrounding Augmented Virtuality and Augmented Reality reveals the sometimes digressional, sometimes convergent positions taken by computer science and media art on the issue of embodiment. Mapping out some of those positions, this paper considers Mixed Reality as a topology that has an entangled and material relationship with the body, that goes beyond an analysis of Mixed Reality as a technology of augmentation: rather, a topological understanding of Mixed Reality explores the patterns of diffraction ( Barad 2007: 29) that ripple and disrupt the material thresholds between physical and virtual, troubling the over simplified real/virtual dichotomy that permeates much Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Tendering an argument for Mixed Reality as a continuous topology operating between physical and virtual spaces, I will address the contrived duality of embodiment/virtuality embedded in much of the literature surrounding Mixed Reality. Then, I will offer a contrasting view of Mixed Reality as a contiguous topology where virtual and physical are interwoven by contingent and conditional ‘meshworks’ (De Landa, 1998) of augmentation, involving technicity, devices, bodies, and objects.

• Rewa Wrightis fascinated by augmented emergences in organiccomputational-material systems, which she calls software assem-blages. She works across the territories of generative art, net-worked abstraction, experimental documentary, audio-visual performance, and mixed reality. She has presented her work at ISEA2013 (Sydney), the Post Screen Festival 2014 (Lisbon), and ISEA2015 (Vancouver), ISEA2016 (Hong Kong) and Vivid 2016 (Sydney). She is finishing her Ph.D in realtime, in the afterglow of a future not yet born.

Full text (PDF) p. 112-120