“I have this vision that a thousand years after there is a nuclear explosion, some Martians will come down to earth…and discover this huge icon… standing there like some Easter Island head that they’ve discovered of some lost civilization… and if they’re lucky enough to have a quarter […] they take their quarter and they sit on this thing and… Lo and Behold – Sensorama.”
Morton Heilig, unpacking his Sensorama prototype from storage in his garden during an interview, interviewer unknown. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idx83Gp2LHs)
A Morton Heilig Centenary
On the 100th anniversary of Morton Heilig’s birth we are inviting artists, immersive media practitioners, media scholars and historians to contribute brief reflections on Morton Heilig: as an inventor, a writer, a key character within media history, as a symbol of 20th century immersive imaginaries, as a cypher for 21st century techno-futurism. This portfolio of reflections will use the anniversary of his birth as a starting point to situate contemporary immersive and multisensory media practices in a wider historical frame.
In the above quote Heilig fantasizes about his invention being used by Martians a thousand years after a nuclear explosion. What is the legacy of the Sensorama 60 years on? How does Heilig’s work fit within a wider chronology of multisensory media?
Overview
This project is interested in understanding what insights long durée media history can offer to the ever-changing space of Multisensory Storytelling. Multisensory Storytelling, as we conceive of it, is a set of creative practices responding to the increasing prominence of multisensory and immersive media technologies across cultural production and everyday life. As such, multisensory storytelling is in constant evolution: as tech shifts, new forms and possibilities emerge, old orthodoxies are pulled down. Grounded in MyWorld, a creative technology R&D programme, our research to date has grappled with the changing landscapes of XR development platforms and delivery hardware. We have tracked the production of multisensory artworks, situated multisensory media within wider frames of cultural practice (including documentary, biography, and spatial media) and explored the relationship between multisensory artworks and questions of accessibility, sustainability and entanglement. However, this focus on what is immanent within the diverse field of multisensory storytelling, and latterly, although more vaguely “immersive” media, has drawn attention away from the ways multisensory storytelling sits within media history more broadly.
How do contemporary practices of multisensory storytelling relate to past efforts to mediate embodiment? What media-futures are being articulated in today’s multisensory media environment? Which media histories are being recruited into contemporary multisensory practice? And which are being forgotten within multisensory’s turbulent innovation cycle?
Addressing this set of questions, we are taking the opportunity, this autumn, to mark the centenary of Morton Heilig’s birth.
Why Heilig?
Heilig was a prolific inventor, who patented a sequence of immersive contraptions, commonly thought of as precedents in the development of VR. He published an essay called “The Cinema of the Future,” which articulated several ideas now held as preconditions for immersive media design: the importance of interaction over simulation, the impact of certain sense registers on attention, the significance of the social context and embeddedness of the work. At the same time, Heilig is a contested figure. As Nic Guittierez argues “the symbolic value of Heilig’s ambitions has too often been confused with his inventions themselves.” His popular rendering as “a man ahead of his time” is a keystone of a particular ideology of immersive media development – tech-driven, market-oriented and vaguely transcendental. In a word: Californian.
Morton Heilig’s relationship to Multisensory Storytelling is simultaneously obvious and obscure: he stands as both an exemplification of the aspirations for multisensory media, in which immersion is a progressive step beyond the limitations of monosensory or audio-visual media, but is also a case-study in the hubris associated with this vision of media-historical progression. As such the more legible the connection between Heilig’s project and today’s multisensory storytelling activity, the more complicated the relationship between the immersive imaginaries of the 1960s and today reveal themselves to be. The Sensorama is a quintessential multisensory device, but only three were ever built. It was, in theory, a decisive intervention in a media landscape attempting to appeal to more and more senses, but was also, in practice, an object lesson in the limitations of technologically mediated sensory immersion. It manifested both emancipatory and conservative impulses: using the perceived failures of popular cinema to envision the future of mediated embodiment, whilst imagining a transcendent media experience within the generic confines of an arcade peep-show (one of the films produced for the Sensorama prototype included a scenario in which a man watches his secretary perform a perfume-addled bellydance). The so-called “Movies of Tomorrow” whilst technically and conceptually prescient are burdened with markers of their historical moment.
What light can these tensions – so apparent in retrospect – shine on the contemporary ecosystem and its overlapping network of platform control, technical possibility and critical and creative aspirations? What might Morton Heilig be working on if he were alive today? How might his aspirations for multisensory media and critiques of popular entertainment translate to our own media environment?
This sequence of reflections will position Morton Heilig as a lighting rod for thinking about the state of Multisensory Storytelling and its relationship to media genealogies (both narrative and technical). They will serve as conversation starters that couch contemporary practice in media history. Even the simplest question – is Morton Heilig really the grandfather of VR? – will offer value to the project of conceptualising multisensory storytelling in a media historical context.
Form & Timeline
We are seeking to commission short pieces of writing (1000 words, more if you want) landing somewhere on the spectrum between informal and academic.
The pieces are being commissioned by invitation to the following timeline:
September 11th: Confirm a focus/one-sentence summary.
October 16th: First Draft
October 30th: Notes
November 13th: Final Draft
December: Final document design and sign off.