Presence and ‘Presence’

July 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Boundary, Fiction, Performance, Presence, Telepresence, Theatre |

Presence (in the sense of ‘telepresence’) is the cognitive immersion by a human operator in an environment which is not the ‘actual’ environment occupied by their physical body. A prototypical example is the virtual presence one can experience within a VR setup, although partial immersion is common in a range of new and traditional media; the novel, the play, the movie etc. More generally, presence is the immersion of oneself in the reality of lived experience. Immersion, or even absorption or dissolution, can be seen as the unproblematic lowering of the boundaries between the individual and the environment, such that the person and the environment are seamlessly connected. For virtual immersion, and correspondingly a feeling of ‘being present’ to occur in non-actual environments, the experience should be as veridical as possible, which means it should produce an integrated embodied experience. Non-immersion, in novels, VR, or in lived experience, gives one the disorienting (or just plain boring) experience that life is elsewhere.

The experience of ‘presence’ within the context of theatre is also a function of a boundary, but in this case it is a boundary produced by the fact that performance is almost always ontologically separate from lived experience, and the performer themselves are almost always ontologically (and physically) also separate. This separation conveys the very strong message that the entities and events are beyond a boundary corresponding to the boundary separating the non-immersed individual audience member and their environment. In this sense, the logic of theatrical performance automatically mitigates against the audience having an immersive experience, or of seeing the ‘presence’ of the performer. Not only is the stage activity fictional, it is also ‘unreal’. The various compositional and scenographic conventions which theatre history represents can be seen as solutions to the first problem, that of the anti-immersive nature of theatre. The extent to which a performer may be said to ‘have presence’ is a function of how well they are able to also cross this ontological barrier between the unreal and the real.