Hypermapping Conflict: War, Art and Immersive Aesthetics

Abstract

Immersive environments—broadly defined as multisensory installations designed to elicit embodied and sensory responses from their inhabitants—are commonly employed in the industries of war. Their taxonomy covers a diverse range of physical and digital spatialities, from the construction of 1:1 scale ‘Potemkin villages’ on the home front for urban combat training, to the design of elaborate schemas of camouflage and deception in conflict zones, to systemic mixed reality simulators that blend vehicular hardware, tactical scenarios modelled in digital engines, and real-time, command-level data. Since the advent in the 1990s of supercomputers, bodily control interfaces and graphics processing units (GPUs) capable of a threshold level of representational reality, Western militaries in particular have made extensive use of immersive, full-body simulators and head-mounted displays in both the training of military personnel and the development of human – machine interfaces. These have traditionally been seen as low-risk and inexpensive supplements to field exercises, with which learnt knowledge can be applied to real-world scenarios in controlled environments designed to mimic operational conditions. These immersive training programs result in the development of habituated and embodied memory in participants—forms of memory that are not only encoded through physical engagement but can be replicated in subsequent behaviour. As Seimeng Lai and Scott Sharpe argue in their study of tank combat simulators, ‘the military is not only able to bring about bodily or perceptual habits, but to produce the very disposition and tendencies of the soldier. Soldiers not only change what they do but change what they become’. In this example, the transformational ‘becoming’ experienced by the soldiers is contingent on their sense-making within an alternate reality. It showcases precisely the form in which immersive aesthetics were originally conceived through the paradigm of computer science engineering, which defined their mechanics through two co-dependent parameters: immersion and presence. Immersion can be gauged by the technological capability of hardware and software platforms to produce compelling visual, aural and biomechanical stimuli that mimic human