Ármeán Otília, university lecturer

Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Târgu Mureș

Faculty of Technical and Human Sciences
Department of Applied Social Sciences

What body to wear in a digital reality? Identity issues and possible crises related to questions
of presence, perception and body in Simon Senn’s Be Arielle F

Seen as a new medium, as a new tool for entertainment but also education, Virtual Reality gains
more and more attention. It is a new territory to create, to discover, to contribute to. Some are doing
3D scans of their own bodies, others are buying digital replicas, and then invest time, money,
connections to be able to get into them. The possibility to wear a digital body in a digital
environment would resolve the problem of being in a ghost-like state when entering a VR-show, but
would also raise many questions regarding identity, perception of the self, connection of self and
body, bodily presence in somebody’s skin. The Be Arielle F show by Simon Senn reports on a
research, an experiment of inhabiting a digital replica, making the Zoom-meeting itself a transition
from the hidden mode to the being present mode: the audience members appear to themselves and
the others in form of their avatars, monograms, pictures and sounds showing different levels of
replication. But do we have tools to tell a digital replica apart from a real person, or from a real
person who stepped into the skin of a digital replica?
Keywords: VR, digital replica, identity, presence

Metahumans, digital humans, synthetic humanity

Siren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9owTAISsvwk
https://telex.hu/tech/2021/02/14/epic-games-unreal-engine-metahuman-digitalis-ember
https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/pic-games-new-metahuman-digital-creator/

An important question in this approach is what would make a program / algorithm "lovable" to
provoke a connection from people but so that they do not become dependent on it. The visual
appearance and movement of robots, their answers are all functions of this question: how to define
the frameworks in which they are independent, whether they exist or not or how they exist when
they are not in interaction with humans.

VR as a medium for learning empathy

The impact of the collision of real and digital – crisis-effects

1. Crisis of perception
Perceiving a digital body.
More broadly, giving the body is very interesting for me: a virtual world is emerging before our
eyes, the elements of which are not yet mature, and the question is: what bodies will be the ones
that receive us there.
It is also a question of how the transition to a VR environment affects the way we think about
ourselves.

2. Crisis of denotation
Signs, notions with new meanings
3. Crisis of identity
identity issues related to the perceptions of one’s own body.
s a play that questions the reality of virtual.
4. Crisis of objects – hyperobjects, hyperreality, digital reality
#3dscanstore
“All of us belong to a continuous spectrum, and for me, it’s the paradigm of human
language/rationality, being independent and discrete (black/white/asian/Spanish etc.), that separates
us apart.” Wei Wong, fb

My take on the model everyone is using and abusing ...and while I am at it , I'd like to thank
#3dscanstore and
James Busby
for giving us these amazing models for free so we can play with them. From Sahin Michael Derun
to Octane Render

The reason of the ravel and crises in the Ted Chiang novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects
(2010) is that the software beings can’t live any longer since their platform is not updated any more.

- a literary science fiction visions of the future

the reason of the crises is that the platform for the software beings is outdated

occasional writer.

‘one of the most influential science-fiction writers of his generation”1

regard his stories as research projects pursued for their own sake.

“My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the
consequences of certain ideas.”

1 Rothman, Joshua: Ted Chiang’s Soulful Science Fiction. The New Yorker, January 5, 2017.,
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/ted-chiangs-soulful-science-fiction
“The Lifecycle of Software Objects” isn’t a story about Chiang’s parents disguised as a thought experiment. It’s a
thought experiment so thorough that it tells us something about the feeling of parenthood. That kind of thoroughness is
unusual. It is, in itself, a labor of love.

5. Crisis of action
analyzing the experiences and possibilities of action of the side of the experiencer

The example of the Be Arielle F show by Simon Senn

Where am I?
Avatar pictures as bodies,

BE ARIELLE F
Compagnie Simon Senn - Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne - Le Grütli Centre de production et de diffusion
des Arts vivants - Théâtre du Loup (Lausanne, Switzerland)
November 26., Zoom

https://www.interferences-huntheater.ro/2020/en/pieces/be-arielle-f/

“Since the number of participants is limited to 50 people, participation is subject to pre-

registration. If you would like to watch the live performance, please register by November 22
for the performance broadcast on November 24, and by November 24 for the one broadcast
on November 26, by sending an email to office@huntheater.ro.”

What can this body do?

“I bought a digital replica of a female body on the website www.3dscanstore.com for $12. The file
contained a static, photorealistic representation in three dimensions of the naked body of a young
woman. I used a free online tool to give her digital bones; this enabled me to get her moving. With
the help of several Internet users around the world that I met online, I developed an immersive
motion capture system. I bought a set of virtual reality equipment, including sensors, designed for
playing video games. I positioned the sensors on my body, put on the virtual reality headset, and
‘became’ this young woman. I raise my hands, I look at them, and they’re her hands. I look
downwards and my mind is fooled into thinking that I have the body of a woman. All the details of
this body and skin are visible. I even catch myself thinking that it suits me. After this disturbing
experience, I looked up the woman on social media by using the hashtag #3dscanstore. I discovered
a selfie she had posted at the time the scan was done. I contacted her and suggested we meet. She
accepted. I went to her home in England and filmed our meeting. We decided to call her Arielle.
This encounter unsettled me, so I visited a psychologist and asked about the identity issues related
to the perceptions of one’s own body. Snapchat dysmorphia, the desire to surgically transform
oneself to resemble filtered selfies, is today recognised as a clinical condition. I also queried a
lawyer about the legal issues related to the use of this digital body. The discussion with Arielle
continued. We talked about what her body could do. She got me doing things I would never have
done without this new body-image, which in a way became mine. Alone onstage with this
commonplace virtual reality technology and the tools that I bought throughout the project – and
with Arielle joining in on Facetime and the third presence of her body that I move around – I’m
here to explain the story.”
Simon Senn May 2019

Bilibok Apollónia (2020): Be Arielle F: A virtuális testem kinek a teste? @Interferenciák 2020.
Echinox, 7 December 2020. https://revistaechinox.ro/2020/12/be-arielle-f-a-virtualis-testem-kinek-
a-teste-interferenciak-2020/
Rapotan, Nona: Be Arielle F – Deschidem cutia Pandorei? Bookhub.ro, 1 decembrie 2020,
https://bookhub.ro/be-arielle-f-deschidem-cutia-pandorei/

Your wish is my command, whatever you want. If you want me to fly, to swim, to jump into fire, to
ride the clouds in the sky, Ariel will get right to the task.
Your father lies five whole fathoms below,
His bones have turned to coral now.
His eyes have turned to pearls.
There’s nothing left of him,
He’s undergone a complete sea change
And become something rich and strange.
https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/tempest/page_48/

In this digital performance, videographer and visual artist Simon Senn demonstrates how the virtual
world and the physical world are not always in opposition. The performance shows the unexpected
entanglements between technology, representation, gender and law. Senn’s experience began when
he bought the digital replica of a female body online. He then went in search of the woman whose
body he was « virtually » inhabiting. Onstage he conveys this disturbing experience to the audience.
https://impossiblebodies.nl/en/program/performance-simon-senn/
24 October 2020

http://www.passe-avant.net/reviews/feels-good-being-you-again-simon-senn?
fbclid=IwAR00QYKqvV2MHXEHF9x7HNwQEA6tOoZp0boWXDmhzx9ouWFr4UTQDAGiCPg
http://www.mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/be-arielle-f
https://artfiction.ch/livre/be-arielle-f/

http://presentfutures.org/rejecting-the-species-binary

Varis, Essi – Koistinen, Aino-Kaisa – Karkulehto, Sanna (Eds.): Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman
and Posthuman in Literature and Culture. Taylor & Francis, Routledge, 2020.

http://xtrorealm.hu/project/extrodaesia/
https://thedistanceplanlexicon.org/HYPEROBJECTS