Disalienation in the round

Biosphere 2, a research facility/tourist attraction outside Tucson, Arizona, is more a glass pyramid than a sphere, but it once served as a metaphor for a certain kind of totality, a particular anticipated future, a fully imagined microcosm that could be enclosed in a ball. In its premillennial hubris, Biosphere 2 aspired to simulate a minimally viable version of Earth on Earth itself, as if fast-forwarding through the slow environmental catastrophes humankind have already set in inexorable motion on the planet. Moreover, it staged this re-creation of an Earth purged of everything extraneous to human survival as a gratuitous spectacle, a way for humanity to contemplate itself in a purified, purely artificial condition, supposedly free from the random exigencies of the natural world.

“The finest example of what the human species is capable of inflicting upon itself is Biosphere 2,” Jean Baudrillard writes in The Illusion of the End (1992). It’s where “human beings come to watch themselves survive, as once they went to watch apes copulate.” At Biosphere 2, humans recast themselves as “extraterrestrials trained to survive in the very place where they destroyed another, far better adapted race.” The giant transparent bubble represents a fantasy of “artificial immunity,” in which ecology is recast as perfect administration of a rigorously reduced set of controlled variables.

This micro-universe seeks to exorcize catastrophe by making an artificial synthesis of all the elements of catastrophe. From the perspective of survival, of recycling and feedback, of stabilization and metastabilization, the elements of life are sacrificed to those of survival (elimination of germs, of evil, of sex). Real life, which surely, after all, has the right to disappear (or might there be a paradoxical limit to human rights?), is sacrificed to artificial survival. The real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, air-conditioned clone (have no fear, all the earth's climates are air-conditioned here) which is designed to vanquish death by total simulation … Having lost our metaphysical utopias, do we have to build this prophylactic one?

A different sort of sphere that has recently been built in the desert — the LED-paneled Sphere arena in Las Vegas — suggests an alternative. The “real world” is not sacrificed for an ascetic microcosm but for a maximalist spectacle of its remediation. (Among the first attractions exhibited at the Sphere was a Darren Aronofsky movie called Postcard From Earth that depicts the last two humans remembering the homeworld they lost.)

Unlike with Biosphere 2, what makes for full protective immersion in a controlled environment is no longer a matter of elimination and deprivation but sensory overload. The simulation operates not on the level of living conditions or atmospheres but on surfaces, of two-dimensional representations that come across as more intensely vivid and vibrant than their three-dimensional counterparts. The escape from Earth isn’t to a diminished and artificially sustained frontier version of it; it is to an entertainment screen. (Not the “desert of the real” but the Matrix.)

Las Vegas has long suggested a kind of blank-slate, existentialist logic to visitors — a barren environment in which humans can built the sort of world they want to live in unimpeded by any temptation to respect or preserve the “nothingness” that is there. The apparent absence of natural limits seems to suggest there are no moral limits either. Just drag and drop in the apartment complexes, the gated communities and the swimming pools, the shopping centers and parking lots, the freeway exits and spaghetti-bowl connectors, the “air-conditioned clones” of famous tourist attractions placed side by side for convenience. While it feels entirely artificial, it doesn’t evoke the austerity of a nascent space colony; instead it feels like living inside a television set.

The Sphere literalizes that idea, turning the subtext into text in the most obvious way possible, as befits the city’s lowest-common-denominator ethos. It takes postmodernist architecture to its logical conclusion, a total space that is also nothing but a sign. Drew Austin likened the Sphere to a “a building-sized consumer electronic device.” You can glimpse in it the hugest of the city’s many huge screens from afar, and then walk right through it so that it surrounds you, trading one simulation for another, seemingly bigger one that is actually more compact and concentrated, the city condensed to a dome. If the climate-controlled and screen-saturated casino floor weren’t enough of a fully immersive environment, the Sphere offers the next degree, a way to feel re-immersed after too much time spent already being immersed. And then, when one adjusts to that mode of immersion, one can step out from under the dome and find ordinary reality enchanting again.

In a piece about the Sphere for The Paris Review, Elena Saavedra Buckley recounts talking to a local who tells her that “the great thing about leaving the Sphere was being like, this is much better … There are smells here, I can talk to that guy over there. Here’s this shitty area with traffic cones, a parking lot. It’s all very immersive.” How overwhelming must the Sphere be to make one enjoy parking lots anew? It reminds me of how the best experience a VR helmet can give you is the joy of taking it off.

“Immersion” isn’t triggered by crossing some threshold of stimuli or reaching some level of high-definition but rather a matter of contrasts, of recalibrating the different kinds of mediation and sensory deprivation available. Wrapping someone in a screen is only one way — perhaps the most cumbersome way — of restricting their focus. Writing about the Sphere for The New Yorker, Jackson Arn argues:

In immersive art, sustaining attention isn’t the means; it’s the point, the work’s way of justifying itself. As such, the pitch is almost always the hard sell—intense, elemental sensation, immediately delivered. Sometimes the method of immersion is scale; often, it’s eye-wrecking color, or some all-out assault on the visual field. This sounds vaguely tyrannical, but immersion, as an ethos, is sweetly democratic. It treats all of us the same and requires the same thing from each of us—usually, nothing.

That makes immersive experiences seem like a kind of enforced passivity, but they are all designed to get you to get your phone out and engage with them. Arn describes this as immersion “falling short of its ideals” but it seems more like the essence of what immersion promises, a transcendent vantage point from within immanence. It doesn’t “dull your palate for the natural,” as Arn claims, but works as a palate cleanser. It makes all of what can be sensorily experienced seem like it was made for consumption rather than inhabitation.

Part of what must be fascinating about the Sphere is that it is a massive screen you can’t touch and which seems to command your submission, until you reassert a kind of control over it by taking out your own screen. When people take pictures of or in the Sphere, they are oscillating between modes of immersion and connection, moving between simulations and merging them ad hoc, adjusting the vertical and horizontal hold of the real.

A spherical screen by its nature seems to promise an automatic elimination of the frame. The mediation will have no seams, no edges, and will somehow thereby be total, no longer a perspective on the world but the world itself. “Immersive experience” is how we respond to that pretense of framelessness, by re-establishing our own frames. Immersion isn’t a surrender to sublime technological forces; it offers instead an escape from contingency, an escape from a reality that hasn’t been fully rationalized. Immersive spaces put up no resistance to our reappropiation of them.

In a famous passage in his Postmodernism book, Fredric Jameson argued that the Bonaventure complex in Los Angeles exemplified a “postmodern hyperspace” that

succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment — which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile — can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.

Now we live in a world where most people carry around a near complete map of the world in their pockets, on which their precise position is marked, But it is also a world where people increasingly lack any independent sense of direction and rely on their phones to orient them at the center of the universe. One can’t get lost because one is, in a different sense, always lost. Navigating the “mappable external world” has become superfluous, which suggests how the world no longer feels external. The phone allows us to take a kind of immersion in it for granted, so that our “immediate surroundings” don’t ever require further organization for us to be comfortable passively taking in our perceptions of them. We don’t need independent reference points. We know the phone has already synthesized the manifold for us.

The Sphere perhaps exemplifies this new condition, what’s become of the “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” that Jameson hoped for, in which “the great global multinational and decentered communicational network” seems to find its center in each of us as individual subjects. Its massive screens are analogues of our personal screens, which guarantee our place amid that network and appear to place it under our command. Yet at the same time, the giant screens envelop us within a seamless mediation that posits our stationary paralysis. The Robinson Crusoe fantasy of Biosphere 2 has given way to something more pharaonic, in which the central node of the network we seem to occupy is also the heart of the pyramid in which we’ve been entombed.