Catharsis In the Age of the Metaverse. A Workshop at Brown University, April 17-18, 2023

Technology is the mythology of our time and simulation is the pervasive cognitive mode of contemporary techno-culture. Like such mythological places as Xanadu or Guixu (the location in Chinese mythology where all water, including the milky way, flows into a bottomless void) technological constructs such as the Metaverse or Open AI often describe what does not (yet) exist but might one day be reached – what the technology might one day do, not what it can do at this very moment (for a pre-history of Virtual Reality, see my digital monograph, https://shadow-plays.supdigital.org/). This is what the “meta” in the Metaverse conveys: usually translated as “beyond,” as in metaphysics, or “about,” as in metadata (data about data), “meta” also serves as a prefix meaning self-referential, as in meta-theory, a theory about a theory, and other interesting conceptual constructs such as meta-cognition (cognition about cognition) and meta-emotion (emotion about emotion). Two recent workshops held at Brown University and the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute, last April, have focused on the transformation of the classical concepts of “mimesis” and “catharsis” in the age of the metaverse: “Rethinking Katharsis: VR Narratives and the Empathy Machine,” as the Brown workshop was entitled. The emergence of powerful “neuro-mimetic” technologies that increasingly infiltrate, regulate and saturate both our emotions and our cognitions provides the backdrop for this reconsideration of the category of catharsis, from its early formulations in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works to its transformations as an aesthetic and psychological or psychoanalytical concept. At the Brown workshop, artists-scholars presented different perspectives on “catharsis” as a neuro-mimetic concept, a meta-emotion for the digital age which also implies, and requires, a new kind of cybernetic meta-cognition. Here is a quick review (the reader can follow the links and get a better sense of the individual works).

1. Freely based on the Futurist Cookbook of 1932, Mattìa Casalegno’s Aerobanquets RMX – A Multisensory Journey presents a unique culinary experience, “VR as you never tasted before.” Diners wear visors and instead of seeing the actual food they taste, prepared by real chefs, see virtual shapes and colors: a synesthetic experience and a kind of “Blind Man’s Bluff game” (with food) designed to rewire our sense of taste and produce a virtual catharsis involving our taste buds and our imagination.
2. Virtual Virtual Reality 2 by Samantha Gorman and Tender Claws studio, is an example of game-driven storytelling – a witty meta-take about the dangerous allure of the Metaverse: “When a metaverse shuts down, what happens to the avatars left behind?” In this darkly funny action-adventure game, you can pilot your “mech body” through the chaos of a dying metaverse, rescuing abandoned avatars along the way. The escape from the Metaverse, back to the safety of “meatspace,” is the cathartic outcome wittily promised by VVR2.
3. Rod Coover’s “Altering Shores Cycle” makes the user “drift” on uncharted waters in a virtual kayak, in between the visible and the invisible, on to the “beyond-environment” that we must all learn to navigate because of climate change and algorithmic inscrutability. Catharsis here is a meta-cognition: to fathom the unfathomable, the scale, the complexity, and confront the rising fears of the all-too-real “metaverse” we already inhabit.
4. Finally, Elisa Giardina Papa’s Cleaning Emotional Data and Technologies of Care​ show the ways in which service and affective labor are outsourced via Internet platforms, exploring such topics as empathy and immaterial labor – “human-in-the-loop” companies that provide “clean” datasets to train AI algorithms to detect emotions. ​Worker 7 – Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend​ documents the artist’s three-month-long “affair” with an interactive chatbot, posing the question of catharsis as a “human-machinic” combination. (Another example of AI penetration into the affective sphere are the Chinese artist Chouwa Liang’s films, which explore Chinese contemporary intimate relationships with AI lovers from a female perspective).

Taste, Play, Fear, Love. From these diverse projects, a clear understanding begins to emerge that “catharsis” can indeed be reconsidered as a meta-emotion for the digital age: a neuro-mimetic experience that we increasingly share with our machinic Other. Do we have any choice but to embrace our hybrid futures? Our avatars? Our AI Shadow?

Mattia Casalegno, Aerobanquet RMX (https://www.mattiacasalegno.net/aerobanquet-rmx/#11)