Engagement in Fulldome

It struck me that I have never met an educator wanting to make boring things, or an entertainer wanting to convey nothing beyond a feeling. My immediate response was to ask as to whether a common denominator is perhaps engagement. That is, considering engagement as the state that opens our senses and thoughts – and everything in between– to new experiences, while at the same time making memories that are worth recalling and savoring afterwards to in turn build new ideas in our minds. The more I thought about this, the more I wondered if there is really a division somewhere, and whether perhaps the dichotomy is just a marketing ploy that undermines either aspect, depending on the target function. It’s a move sometimes used much to the detriment of the work that navigates between disciplines devoted in various proportions to senses and thoughts, and the necessary cross disciplinary work that can make shows remarkable.

Today, immersive media challenges us to question the usefulness of old dichotomies for the development of new concepts. This becomes critical as experts from a wider scope of disciplines are needed and called upon to collaborate on a well-rounded project. The aesthetic, scholarly, and/ or scientific complexity that the public may expect today is also pushing experiences to new levels that no one single discipline can achieve in a single outcome. This is where the dichotomy of education/entertainment has perhaps become a roadblock of sorts.

Let’s consider what different disciplines want when using media at some level, namely engagement. Then let’s look at some of the kinds of mediated experiences that have resulted in the development of concepts; we may reflect on how these concepts may support or constrain the creation of immersive experiences in fulldome. Finally, let’s venture on imagining ways to advance fulldome shows and experiences that articulate sensory and intellectual premises among the disciplines involved in their creative process.

Engagement
The sensory appeal to support immersion is a particularly strong fulldome quality. Various kinds of experiences take advantage of this in order to engage the public. Many fulldome materials -- both live and recorded -- are produced, not with the aim to bore people or to merely produce a transient feeling. The fulldome immersive environment has a strong perceptual impact, which affords perhaps more complex means of guided perception than other media. In such an immersive context, engagement can be broadly considered a movement from disengaged to engaged and then hand-held. It then maintains a connection, sometimes led via a story narrative, and sometimes led through visual interest in a journey that meanders through various degrees of focus and un-focus. In that regard, an engaged state can connect the new with the familiar and the known with the unknown. We can think of said unfocused and focused states as beats and the silence in between. Can there be sound without silence, and vice-versa? It is common knowledge that perception roughly works like this: once we become accustomed to something, the something disappears from our attention. So, it would be reasonable to say that engagement is not a continuous focus or a continuous lack of focus, but the back and forth flow between those states, like silence and sound are for hearing, or like light and darkness are for vision. Through this choreography of attention, memory works because there are emotions attached to it, as Antonio Damasio states:
“The perception of any of (these) items generates emotions and feelings, and, in turn, the feelings accomplish the separation between the contents that belong to the self and those that do not. From my perspective, such feelings operate as markers. They are the emotion-based signals I designate as somatic markers” (Self Comes to Mind, 2010, Chapter 1).

Old Dichotomies
Perceiving and thinking happens alongside switching focus, losing focus, and refocusing. Focus may start in the act of sensory perception (aesthetic) but then this perception may weave in reflection. Thus, thoughts build up from what is perceived, sometimes going further into the elaboration of concepts.
Understanding this basic continuum of perception/aesthetics and thoughts/ concepts means that one can see that there is no division between them, but rather that it is one process. An aspect can be dominant, but that does not mean other aspects have disappeared. The reason I emphasize this is because a fulldome environment is intrinsically aesthetically powerful. Think of the many experiences that we’ve had as Planetarians, from story-driven shows to performances, as well as various hybrids of them.

In this regard, drawing a line between education and entertainment, one may unconsciously stifle aspects of this continuum and end up with a stereotype. I would argue that is an issue that we may want to reconsider in our community because the mental states that go from aesthetics to conceptualization are important. They are important in the building of a meaningful approach to experience development in fulldome as well as other creative and research endeavors. In summary, aiming to create works with a predominantly aesthetic or conceptual focus does not mean the works are exclusive to one or the other. Is a person supposed to be in the same mental state throughout a planetarium experience? Or through any kind of mediated experience? The aesthetic pleasure of focusing and defocusing is present in all immersive works. The rewarding achievement of conceptualizing is always present to some degree.

Let’s take a look at where the terms “education” and “entertainment” come from in western languages to see if we can reconsider them in the context of immersive experiences.

Education comes from the Latin “educat” which means ‘led out.’ That is –if I may interpret it in terms of physical and mental space–, a movement into the open.

Entertainment also comes from Latin “inter” for ‘among’ and “tenir” for ‘hold” which was commonly used as hospitality in the past: to maintain, which we could roughly understand in today’s media context as attention.

Revisiting these terms of the creative processes in immersive media may help us better connect work among various disciplines because work designed for fulldome both maintain (entertain) and move (know) in very fluid physical and conceptual ways simultaneously. In a way, different disciplines themselves exist in a continuum around the human experience.


Words and experiences
When considering where language comes from, it is readily apparent that it originates from experiences. As Lakoff and Johnson explain:
“... for example, HAPPY IS UP. The fact that the concept HAPPY is oriented UP leads to English expressions like “I’m feeling up today.” Such metaphorical orientations are not arbitrary. They have a basis in our physical and cultural experience” (Metaphors We Live By, 1980, Chapter 4).


It is only natural then to reflect on how the experiences we create in fulldome open up the capacity to build concepts for those experiencing those immersive works.

If, on the other hand, we consider stories that are told in fulldome, we must keep in mind that the words in the stories themselves come with the baggage of captured experiences that resulted in the coining of each of the words. In turn, when words are assigned to describe something new, that ideally means that we understand our experiences. Learning a new concept therefore entails a word or set of words that capture the concept built through accumulated experiences. In doing so, conceptualizing requires experiencing, reaching the continuum that goes from perception through the processing of what is perceived, being engaged in a story, or even experiencing a sequence that moves and maintains attention.

But words need silence to form sentences and lead a story.
Years ago, I was designing a signage set for a public research site. The lead of the project saw the spaces between images and text and told me that we could add more information there -not understanding that the space was intentional to focus viewer attention. In visual design, the “empty” areas are called -- for lack of a better term -­“negative space” and it is this “negative space” that pushes the attention of the viewer along the content.

To explain it in another way: in musical terms, if everything is saturated with sound, there is only noise, and the music disappears. If we consider distraction and attention, either can also become noise when reaching a level of saturation. Whether a fulldome experience relies on an aesthetic topic or a
particular story, the negative space of attention (or unfocused as opposed to focused attention) in all its sensory and conceptual forms, is necessary to engage in fulldome. Japanese anime films are very good at this: between scenes there may simply be a sequence of a rain drop falling in a water puddle, or tree leaves ruffling in the wind. In daily routines such as eating or dressing, the experience of life provides attentional negative space.


Further and deeper
The interplay of maintaining attention, switching focus, and leaving “negative space” between the parts of an immersive experience requires us to rethink how prompts to entertain (to maintain) and educate (to move) may overlap.
While in the past we may have considered just one or the other, perhaps even as competing priorities, today we are called to look at the whole of engagement in the immersive spaces that we build. This is because, in their very origin, our concepts do not exclude feelings or thoughts, aesthetics or concepts, as we explore fulldome works of various natures.

To this end, there is a necessary exchange among disciplines to achieve new levels of excellence. Whereas there is an old saying that goes as “divide and conquer,” an update to the continuing work in the planetarium industry may as well say “unite and grow” where the added discipline expertise accounts for more than the sum of the parts.

Emotions need to be involved for experiences to work, which means that engagement is more active than just simply watching. How we think and accrue new concepts is more physical than ever because of immersive spaces like fulldome.


Conclusion
In my experience, when there is something lacking in a planetarium project, it is all too often because someone in the work team did not understand the continuum of perception and thought. It may be a good idea to reexamine categorizations that are more fluid today, as useful as they were in the past.
Narrative, a stronghold of storytelling in dome experiences, relies on the ability to shift focus for a story to evolve. The focus on one aspect of a project does not exclude other aspects, and moreover, requires other aspects to stand together.

There is no exclusive territory between learning and being interested within immersive environments. Ideally, there is engagement across a continuum no matter the aim. A sensory focused fulldome event may even have the merit of “leading us to” (educat) observe our own perception. This kind of work may be entering the human experience differently –but perhaps not that differently– from that of a scientific visualization fulldome event that “maintains” (inter+tenir) the connection of various realms to the reach of direct human existence.

We live inside many extended realities today. We are, perhaps, not engaged with the data that informs those realities. Extended realities require aesthetic navigation abilities in moving across scales and knowledge domains. To this end, the collaboration among disciplines, free of dichotomies, that partition the continuum of the human experience, is paramount.
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Thanks to Carolyn Collins Petersen, Michael Daut, and Dan Neafus for their help on this column.