This paper describes an ongoing art project exploring the generalization of classical montage theory to the emerging technology of “room scale VR”. We take the emblematic “crop duster” scene in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and invite the spectator to experience it “from the inside”. This raises interesting research issues. How to inhabit this cinematic story world? How can the traditional tools of cinematography and montage be used to direct the audience in this new kind of experience? How can the rhythm of the spectator's body be matched to the rhythm of George Tomasini’s (Hitchcock’s editor) fast pace editing? And what form can this montage take and for what aesthetic and dramaturgical effects? To answer these questions, we propose the experiment of a montage that adapts in real time to the displacements of the body and the gaze of the spectator, engaging a dialectic between narrative rhythm and bodily rhythm. We propose new algorithmic tools to transport the audience into the story as originally planned by Hitchcock while at the same time respecting the behaviors of the audience to guide the experience. In doing so, we seek to create a new form of relationship between the author of a narrative experience in virtual reality and the spectator who explores and activates the experience with his own body.
This article aims to present the collective research that has been made in the framework of the research seminar "Vocabulary of the Virtual" organized by IRCAV (Institute of Research on Cinema and Audiovisual Studies), Sorbonne Nouvelle and the “Spatial Media” group, EnsadLab. The main topic is to clarify the notions that refer to the concept of the "Virtual" in order to define it through an interdisciplinary approach according to different fields of science (aesthetics, philosophy, film theory, sound theory, ergonomics, design, engineering, cognitive sciences, etc.). This article presents many different conceptual tools such as cartography, mental maps, notional diagrams with several dimensions, etc., that have been conceived over the last three years, to show how the reflection on the concept of the Virtual was first established and constructed, and how it has been developed. The notion of symbiosis seems to be defined as a structuring notion of the concept of the Virtual across the process of anchoring the levels of virtuality inside technological devices and concrete sites, as well as inside the physical body of the VR users. The user’s body serves as a catalyst for the concept of the Virtual which then becomes organic.
