Hyperrhiz 28

Experience of Indeterminacy in Virtual Reality

Desiree Foerster
University of Chicago

Citation: Foerster, Desiree. “Experience of Indeterminacy in Virtual Reality.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 28, 2025. doi:10.20415/hyp/028.e02

Abstract: This essay analyzes a multidisciplinary study that uses virtual reality (VR) as a platform to explore experiences of indeterminacy. As part of the study, three virtual environments were created that disrupt the anticipation of common relationships between the participants and their surroundings, such that common behavioral strategies lose their meaning. I use the interview technique of micro-phenomenology to explore the unfolding experience of navigating both these virtual environments and the loss of a meaningful relationship with the surroundings. Through an analysis of the structure of the participants’ experiences, I develop the following arguments: First, I contend that immersive experiences in VR can reveal the indeterminacy that is fundamental to our perceptual experience. I explain this role of indeterminacy through Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s writings. Second, and through the lens of Simondon’s work on invention, I argue that VR environments can offer a platform to develop new structures of experience that impact how we encounter and handle indeterminate situations in daily life. This argument is central to the debate about the value of awareness-generating art and the question of how awareness can lead to lasting behavioral change.

Keywords: Virtual reality, indeterminacy, micro-phenomenology, queer phenomenology, aesthetics, anticipation, invention, relational ontology, speculative research.

Introduction

I was very lost. At first, it was a very strange-looking space. So, it took a little while for my brain to comprehend what I was looking at…for maybe a few seconds, I assumed that there was like some, I guess, like a really big puzzle considering everything was so flipped. I assumed that I would need to somehow un-flip everything if that makes any sense. That’s like the first thought that came into my brain. (P1, 2022)

The above quote is a description by one of our study participants (each of whom is hereafter referred to as P and a corresponding number) of their first encounter with the virtual space that I developed together with students of design and computer science to explore the experience of indeterminacy. My interest in indeterminacy was sparked in part by the traction the concept has gained, not least due to the increasingly complex problems human societies around the world are facing. Studies on climate change and other “wicked” problems (Churchman 1967; Tonkinwise 2015) that do not come with easy solutions often call upon indeterminacy as a major factor impacting individual and collective responses. The climate change discourse has intensified and gained urgency in recent years and is therefore ideal for better understanding the role indeterminacy plays in the way such complex problems are discussed. Some authors (Hale 2022; Dieveney 2023; Mann 2023) claim that the complexity of climate systems creates an indeterminacy that not only raises questions of personal and political responsibility but also calls into question the status and function of scientific studies and modeling of climate change.

The language we use to describe the unfolding and impact of climate change matters, and, as Geoff Mann states, “the words we use to calibrate our reality seem less and less like accurate descriptions of the conditions they are supposed to name” (Mann 2023). While communication about climate change is fraught with indeterminacy, the impacts of climate change threaten to make indeterminacy an increasingly common part of our everyday experience. And climate change is not the only way that indeterminacy creeps into our daily lives. The seeming stability of our lifeworld—at least in the Global North—becomes increasingly porous under the mounting threats of ongoing humanitarian crises, worsening global inequality, and growing anti-democratic tendencies. What use are our existing concepts in the face of such events?

Bruno Latour is among the scholars questioning the adequacy of terms such as crisis to address the climate emergency, deeming them misleading. He argues that “talking about a crisis [is] just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that ‘this too will pass,’ the crisis ‘will soon be behind us’” (Latour 2017, 7). Or, as Mann states, “If ‘crisis’ is so continuous a state as to be ‘normal’, what help is either term?” (Mann 2023); he concludes, “[w]hat we need is a much more honest assessment of what we do not or cannot know, which is, among other important things, where the edge is” (Mann 2023). The edge Mann refers to here is that of our knowledge, of our experience, and certainty, which also marks what is at stake in addressing indeterminacy.

I aim to explore these edges through experimental methods and a novel foray into phenomenology to make experiential accounts fruitful for new thinking for a future, which calls for speculative research practices. The question posed by Martin Savransky (Savransky 2017, 25), “[w]hat might be at stake in thinking and imagining for a future that may be more than a mere extension of the present?”, accentuates the urgency to reevaluate speculative thought in the face of increasingly diminished lifeworlds, threatened by harmful colonial frameworks (Reibold 2023). At the heart of this question lies the demand for us to familiarize ourselves with the paradox that thinking of the new, of a future that is more than what is now, cannot utilize principles and reason in the same way we are currently accustomed to (Savransky 2017). Thinking and imagining for a future beyond the present and past invites a different kind of work, one that, I propose, acknowledges the structures of our experience and how they change alongside our environments. Because, however vague and subjective, our embodied experience is always present and involved in socio-politically shaped events. Engaging with our experience of indeterminacy allows us to explore what lies behind these edges of our knowledge. And this has far-reaching ethical implications as well. As Margrit Shildrick points out in her rethinking of relational economies of self and other through monstrous corporeality and how it makes space for difference,

[t]o relinquish the determinacy of the bounded body is to open up the possibility of reconfiguring relational economies that privilege neither the one nor the two. Instead of an ‘anaesthetic’ ethic that works by separation and division, there is licence for Irigaray’s vision: ‘The internal and external horizon of my skin interpenetrating with yours wears away their edges, their limits, their solidity. Creating another space outside my framework. An opening of openness’ (1992: 59). (Shildrick  2001, 171)

Leaning on Luce Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference (Irigaray 1992) Shildrick highlights how an awareness of the interrelatedness of our bodies with the world and other bodies allows us—and demands us—to reevaluate the systems that structure our life world. The opening towards the indeterminacy that lies beyond the edges of the known stresses the role experience plays in sense-making and gives new weight to aesthetic experiences, both as a method and an object of study.

The potential of aesthetic experiences to enhance our ability to learn (Starr 2023) has been the subject of numerous studies and has inspired the design of our technologies and media landscapes. In this article, I am especially interested in the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to explore human experience of indeterminacy. Virtual and augmented reality are increasingly used in various settings to change our behavior. Students of STEM learn to handle sensitive lab equipment in virtual environments (e.g., Exam 4.0 2022); people suffering from phobias learn to confront their feared object in VR and to regulate their affective response (Horváthová et al. 2015), and VR is used to teach us to become more empathetic toward others (Martingano et al. 2021). While the success of these attempts might vary and be questionable at times, what these examples have in common is that they are intended to regulate the reaction to and handling of external objects or other people. One reason for the prominence of VR in educational contexts is its media specificity of immersion. In VR, the frame of the image disappears; it offers something that “goes beyond the mere contemplation of the image, as users are actually inside it, at least with their gaze. […] VR images are a set of images created in synchrony with the movements of the user’s head and body” (Bandi 2023, 296). VR can be used to explore those edges of experience that Mann calls upon and offer ways to familiarize ourselves with them. The experimental study on which this article is based aims to gain a better understanding of the processes that accompany the modulation of affect and behavior in VR. More concretely, I explore whether immersive VR environments offer, in Raymond Williams’ sense, new structures for feeling our way into indeterminacy.

After the lengthy introduction to indeterminacy as it becomes part of our day to day I ought to clarify that this article does not engage with concrete crises such as climate change but with the sense of indeterminacy that complex problems like climate change elicit. Following the assumption that phenomenological experience not only influences the language we use to conceptualize and communicate our reality (Lakoff and Johnson 2003) but also changes our habitual patterns of engaging with it (Dewey [1925] 1994), I propose that aesthetic experiences such as those provided in immersive media environments can, in fact, enhance our level of familiarity with indeterminacy. Familiarizing ourselves with indeterminacy as part of our experience and not something out there has the potential to change the very structures of experience and the habits we use to make sense of the world (Dirksen et al. 2019; Wienrich et al. 2021). It also means to accept that we cannot avoid indeterminacy. Experiences of indeterminacy call our attention to the edges of what is known and might open up spaces beyond established frameworks, for better or for worse—and challenging the question of the subject implied in this “better or “worse”: better for whom? Worse for whom?

In what follows, I first describe an interdisciplinary VR study that we developed to explore the experience of indeterminacy. This study uses VR to expose participants to an indeterminate situation and applies the micro-phenomenological interview technique to understand the participants’ experience of dealing with indeterminacy. After a brief description of the project, I will expand on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl to outline how indeterminacy can be understood as being fundamental to experience. Then, I turn to Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and her conceptualization of orientation, which she develops in the context of sexual orientation, to explore the productive force of the experience of indeterminacy (Ahmed, 2006). In the context of this article, I build upon Ahmed’s starting point of thinking about orientation: how being oriented means to know where we are and where we are going, to recognize the objects we encounter along the way. Instead of abating instances of disorientation as minor disorders to be overcome (Merleau-Ponty, 2022, 296), Ahmed’s account brings into focus moments of disorientation as a way to reorder our relationships with the world. This perspective serves me to highlight the potential of VR platforms to impact our thinking, feeling, and acting beyond the virtual experience. In our VR application, basic characteristics of orientation were dismantled and participants, so I argue, developed new techniques to orient themselves within alien environments. The development of new techniques will be studied through the lens of Gilbert Simondon’s work on invention. Simondon’s theory allows me to explicate more closely, how the reordering of the relationship between subject and world at a pre-reflective level impacts perception, which serves me to expand the phenomenological analysis of the VR experiences. Weaving together these different perspectives from phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), queer and feminist theory (Ahmed), and relational ontology (Simondon) to analyze experiences in VR, I highlight the potential of aesthetic experience in immersive media environments to contribute to structural change beyond awareness creation, which makes it relevant to the speculative project of future thinking.

Exploring Indeterminacy in VR through an Experimental Study Design

In this section, I describe the study design of the project. We constructed three virtual environments that were meant to disorient participants, thereby making them feel as if the meaningful relationship between their bodily presence and their surroundings was disrupted. We used the software Unity to design the rooms, which were then presented to the participants on an HTC VIVE head-mounted display. The participants were seated during the experiment to minimize nausea. The rooms were similar to puzzles that participants had to solve, and each puzzle had a set target: Participants were required to find and touch a star that was present in each room (Figure 1). 

The first room was modeled after a hyperbolic space (Figure 2) in which two rooms were connected by an invisible hallway (Figure 3) that could only be reached by taking on an uncommon perspective: Participants had to lean into a part of the space that appeared to be walled off in order to look around a corner that only then would appear.

The second room illustrated a cave scenario, containing three platforms (Figure 4). The platforms were connected by invisible bridges that would only materialize once the participant stepped on them (Figures 4 and 5).

The third room was modeled after a mirrored room (Figure 6): The floor was a mirror, and participants had to locate a button that was only visible in the mirrored image on the floor (Figure 7). They consequently had to reverse this image in their head and touch the button that was invisible in front of them.

Afterward, I interviewed the participants using micro-phenomenology, an interview technique developed by psychologist and neuroscientist Claire Petitmengin (2006) that is used to access pre-reflective phases of one’s experience. I detail this technique in the following section.

Micro-phenomenology as an Interview Technique

The goal of the micro-phenomenology interview is to access the pre-reflective dimension of subjective experience and thus to make the interviewee aware of how they experience a particular moment. A micro-phenomenological interview follows a strict structure: First, the subjective experience is evoked; that is, it is revealed to the experiencing subject. The interview is usually about a past experience—it might have occurred a few days or a few seconds ago. To evoke the experience, the interviewer asks the interviewee to provide a detailed description of the experience: When did it take place and where? When remembered, how is it remembered? Are colors present? The interviews of the participants in our project started with an evocation of the experience after donning the headsets and seeing the first room. The room was generally described as white and abstract. Once the evocation of the past experience is stabilized, the interviewer asks further questions to shift the interviewee’s attention away from the content of the experience (the what) toward the way the experience unfolds (the how). To this end, the questions focus on two dimensions of experience: its diachronic and synchronic dimensions (Petitmengin 2006, 248). Questions regarding the diachronic dimension of the experience—how the experience unfolds in time—direct attention toward particular moments of the experience. A typical question for this line of investigation would be, “What happened when you did x?”. In the interviews this article is based upon, the diachronic questioning aims at displaying the different steps the participant is experiencing from entering the VR room until solving the puzzle. The synchronic dimension can be described as the descriptive categories that comprise the experience. A classical question in this category would be, “Are you experiencing the event from a first-person perspective or are you looking at it as if it were a screen or picture?”, or “does ‘x’ have a color?”. When guided in this way through a specific subjective experience, the interviewee becomes aware of how the experience itself unfolds, independently from the content of the experience. Respectively, the interviews this article is based upon focused on the emotions, thoughts, and kinesthetics that accompanied the experience of solving the spatial puzzle.

After this brief introduction to micro-phenomenology, I now present the findings of the interviews which I conducted after participants experienced the three virtual environments, followed by philosophical and speculative reflections on those reports.

Understanding the Experience of Indeterminacy Through VR

The three virtual rooms that our participants navigated were designed with the goal to spatially disorient them and thereby intensify the sense of indeterminacy. Habitual ways of orienting in space were experienced as ineffective, such that the interviews would reveal (a) the cognitive and bodily micro-acts involved in navigating the unfamiliar spaces and (b) if and how the participants experienced a loss and re-establishment of a meaningful relationship with their surroundings.

A common answer to the question, how the participants managed to successfully navigate the rooms and reach the star, was, “I figured it out.” This figuring it out meant in the first instance finding a hidden hallway into a part of the room that held the star. In the second room, participants had to understand how to materialize the bridges between the first two platforms by moving close to the platform’s edge. In the third room, they had to mentally reverse the image of the star mirrored in the floor and touch the invisible star in front of them. Using micro-phenomenological questions, I invited the participants to elaborate on how this experience of figuring it out unfolded over time. For example, I asked, “What do you do to figure it out” or “What kind of sensual experiences go along with this ‘figuring it out’?” The answers revealed that figuring out how to navigate the alien VR spaces involved mental acts, such as memory and recognition; affective states, such as feelings of frustration; and bodily processes, such as activation of muscles in the upper body. All interviews exposed a similar pattern of the unfolding, diachronic experience that comprised three main phases: surprise (associated with recollection and anticipation), coping (associated with symbolization and invention), and relief (reestablishment of meaningful relationship). In recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s phenomenology, I will analyze in the following these three phases and the associated mental, affective, and physical processes. I will propose that these phases foreground experience as indeterminate.

Phenomenologically speaking, experience is indeterminate by nature because our perception is anticipatory. This assumption dates back to the founder of the phenomenological method, Edmund Husserl, who understood experience as a constant flow rather than a series of events. He defined three interconnected phases of perception that allow for its description: retention, the immediate present, and protention (Husserl [1939] 1973). In retention, past experiences are preserved in consciousness. They serve as a reference to reality based on what happened before and they are available to our consciousness and memory. These experiences impact the way we perceive our immediate present—this is the second phase, the immediate present—and what we expect to happen in the (near) future, which is protention, the third phase. According to this model, our experience is structured according to an anticipatory directedness toward the world. We consequently do not experience the past as separate from the present. Our present seems to be a logical continuation of the past, and we anticipate a certain experiential route to follow. However, because our experience is structured in an anticipatory way, it is inherently indeterminate since anticipation always runs the risk of not being met.

Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty formulated the productive quality of indeterminacy ([1945] 2012), using the concepts of horizon and gestalt to explain it:

In vision […] I apply my gaze to a fragment of the landscape, which becomes animated and displayed, while the other objects recede into the margins and become dormant, but they do not cease to be there. Now, along with these other objects, I also have their horizons at my disposal, and the object I am currently focusing on – seen peripherally – is implied in these other horizons. The horizon, then, is what assures the identity of the object throughout the exploration […]. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 70)

We always see a figure (a gestalt) in front of a horizon, a background. In any perceptive experience, a background is present, but this background is indeterminant; it does not have a fully resolved form. The same is true for peripheral vision, which comes with different degrees of presence and absence. The background—the things shifting in and out of our peripheral vision—is indeterminate. Indeterminacy in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding is thus positive; it is integral to our perception, and it is in part why we can perceive something clearly in the first place (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 7).

To highlight how participants experienced the confrontation with and the navigation through indeterminacy, I analyze the interviews in terms of the following: the three main phases (the diachronic dimension of experience) and their associated qualitative processes of feeling, sensing, and mental activity (the synchronic dimension of experience). Furthermore, I characterize these phases and qualitative processes through phenomenological vocabulary, which then helps me to demonstrate that the virtual experiment makes indeterminacy apparent as part of our experience.

Table 1 lists the different phases of experiences and their associated mental and physical processes:

Phase 0 marks the onset of the experience associated with the desire to accomplish the task of finding the star in each room. Shortly after putting on the headset and finding themselves inside the first room, participants felt surprised because the virtual environment deviated from what they expected. This marks the first phase in the unfolding of the diachronic experience, dominated by anticipation and recollection of previous experiences. One interviewee reported,

Well, I definitely got put into a different space. That was nearly completely white. And also, I guess my first thought was, this is quite small. And then as I continued, it was a bit more frustrating, because it wasn’t exactly as small as I thought it was, just different. (P1 2022)

This sense of surprise was accompanied by anxiety and the feeling of being lost. Anxiety was felt as a physical sensation in the upper body, a tension of almost “unbearable intensity” (P2). The participants quickly realized that these virtual rooms were different from other VR environments or games they knew, in which one must operate a tool or interact with the environment in a given way. This realization gave way to the second phase, which was marked by a more systematic activation of previous knowledge about how to navigate new and/or virtual environments. As one participant described it,

I think I just tried to press every button but not in any like, considered combination, just kind of randomly to see if that would like yeah, enable for some like fly mode or something. (P3 2022)

Here, the participants began to pay attention to repeating patterns in their surroundings as well as differences. As P1 explained,

I have to think differently for a moment. I looked at everything around me again and try to reframe it. […] I’ve sort of tried to see the world a little differently. So, what was the pattern in this world compared to what I’m used to? So I can drop what I’m used to and get adapted to it and now looking at. (P1 2022)

The resulting incompatibility experienced between the anticipated environment and the actual environment led to the search for new meaning in the form of patterns in the environment, which would symbolize some meaningful relationship. In this phase, all participants described a sensual connection between head, mind, and upper body: the feeling of flow, warmth, energy, and tickling that started in the head and moved down the arms, commonly looping back to the head. This triggered a stronger activation of the upper body, a sense of “pushing forward” (P2), of trying to interact with the surroundings, which led to different attempts to do so. Some of these attempts ultimately helped participants find their way to the star. The third phase, completion, was felt as a “weight being lifted” (P1), “relief” (P1, P2, P3, and P4), and “a jolt of joy” (P4).

If we map Husserl’s three parts of perception—retention, immediate present, and protention—onto the experiences as they were described by the participants, we can explain how anticipatory perception unfolds in time and how indeterminacy materializes when anticipation is not fulfilled. After participants noticed that the VR spaces did not offer common affordances and that forms of interaction common to virtual environments failed to lead to successful interactions, feelings of anxiety and frustration became stronger. This was, I propose, because the fundamental indeterminacy of our being in the world, which is part of anticipatory perception, emerged momentarily. This fundamental indeterminacy, once felt, put participants’ sense of agency at stake. It disrupted the meaningful relationship with their world that is needed to act intentionally. The participants felt utterly disoriented in Ahmed’s sense: “Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel liveable” (Ahmed 2006, 157).

For Merleau-Ponty, the “I can”, the sense that I can act intentionally in the world, proceeds from overcoming disorientation. By changing our mode of attention, by reorienting the body according to the horizontal and vertical axes (Ahmed 2006, 159), Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subject regains its agency in the world. The concept of gestalt shift is useful to understand how participants tried to reorient themselves virtual environments:

To pay attention is not merely to further clarify some preexisting givens; rather, it is to realize in them a new articulation by taking them as figures. They are only pre-formed as horizons, they truly constitute new regions in the total world. The original structure that they introduce is precisely what makes the identity of the object before and after the act of attention appear. (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 32)

When previous experiences in VR did not provide solutions for navigating the alien environments, participants began to pay attention to repeating patterns in their surroundings. If something draws our attention, then something that was previously inconceivable, or indeterminate, becomes recognizable and meaningful. In Merleau-Ponty’s understanding, this process of a gestalt shift, of something becoming meaningful to us, is not a one-way street. That which draws our attention is active in this process; it speaks to us and poses a problem for us. According to Merleau-Ponty, when something comes to our attention and becomes recognizable and meaningful, we experience our involvement with the world (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 453). When the virtual rooms presented a problem to the participants by not adhering to infrastructures known from previous experiences, newly perceived aspects of the surroundings came to the fore, drew their attention, and invited different actions, some of which ultimately led to the solving of the puzzles.

While moments of disorientation serve Merleau-Ponty merely to explain how our body works to constantly regain and maintain a stable relationship with the world, Ahmed is interested in the productivity of the experience of disorientation itself. This is in part because sometimes, and for some bodies more than for others, disorientation becomes an unmovable obstacle, a status quo:

“But what if the orientation of the body is not restored? What if disorientation itself becomes worldy?” (Ahmed 2006, 159) such the question Ahmed poses in response to Merleau-Ponty’s grounding of phenomenology in a “straight and upright body“ (Ahmed 2006, 159), a body that is not objectified because it is black or disabled, but a generic idea of the body that roots the intentional subjects in a homogenic world.

The vocabulary Husserl and Merleau-Ponty developed is helpful in analyzing the experiences of the participants in our experimental study and, in particular, for understanding how indeterminacy is experienced on different levels. But Ahmed’s notion of disorientation helps me to articulate how the experience of indeterminacy as such has the potential for finding ways to orient ourselves in an increasingly indeterminate world. Thus, the potential of VR applications that enable the experience of indeterminacy might not only lie in the experience of overcoming indeterminacy but in being with indeterminacy. While most of our participants found ways to solve the spatial puzzles and thereby overcame the sense of indeterminacy and disorientation provoked by the alien environments, they also experienced what it means to be disoriented. Feelings like anxiety, sensations of warmth, and searching for familiar patterns all marked a gap that opened up between being oriented and disoriented. As Ahmed notes, it is in moments of disorientation, when we find ourselves lost, that new spaces might open up to us (Ahmed 2006, 170). Spaces that we were unaware of before.

Ahmed is particularly interested in this world-making capacity of indeterminacy, or, as she puts it, of the negotiation of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar:

being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar: being lost can in its turn become a familiar feeling. Familiarity is shaped by the ‘feel’ of space or by how spaces ‘impress’ upon bodies. This familiarity is not, then, ‘in’ the world as that which is already given. The familiar is an effect of inhabitance; we are not simply n the familiar, but rather the familiar is shaped by actions that reach out toward objects that are already within reach. […] The work of inhabiting space involves a dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, such that it is possible for the world to create new impressions, depending on which way we turn, which affects what is within reach. (Ahmed 2006, 7f)

The thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that accompanied the experience of navigating our indeterminate virtual spaces will in the following be regarded in this context of inhabiting space as a co-shaping of space and bodies. The experience of disorientation in VR, so my argument, potentially allows the development of new forms of extending into space, and thereby to change the subjectivity of our participants in turn. One way in which we are shaped by the spaces we inhabit is through what Ahmed calls homing devices:

“If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how ‘finding our way’ involves what we could call ‘homing devices’. In a way, we learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home.”  (Ahmed 2006, 9)

Homing devices are not simply objects but  “ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we could call livable or inhabitable space“ (Ahmed 2006, 11). Ahmed is not only saying that we are shaped by our environments as much as we shape them; she is also arguing that we can develop techniques to familiarize ourselves with unfamiliar environments, to learn to inhabit them, to shape them.

Before moving on to the final part of my analysis, let me provide a summary of the argument so far. While the analysis of the described experiences in VR through Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives helps explicate how participants encountered and experienced indeterminacy in the virtual rooms, Ahmed’s sense of queering phenomenology allows considering the possibility that the unfolding experience of “figuring it out” changed not only how participants would perceive and move through the virtual spaces but also changed their very subjectivity, their way of being oriented in the world. Ahmed's theory therefore provides here an opportunity to bridge the gap between a phenomenological view on our experiment and the subsequent exploration through Simonson's theory of individuation.

Invention of New Behavioral and Perceptual Habits in VR

As explicated before, if we become aware of indeterminacy in immersive environments and find ways to navigate through it, however accidentally it might appear to us, we will turn to previous experiences and strategies that helped us deal with similar circumstances. In our experiment, these previous circumstances were largely derived from previous video or VR gameplay. These memories did not arise as visual images. Instead, participants described this remembering as physical impulses that lead to the spontaneous motor activity of pushing forward to interact with the environment in different ways. When their habituated ways of interacting with the virtual environments did not lead to the desired outcome (solving the puzzle), participants had to develop new strategies. I understand these strategies as anything ranging from physical sensations to feelings, thoughts, and motor behavior. Simondon’s image cycle offers a schema that explicates these different processes as part of one activity, namely individuation.

Simondon ([2008] 2022) developed his concept of the image cycle to explore how human perception and experience are shaped by interactions between the mind, the environment, and the processes of individuation. This theory suggests that the way we perceive and understand the world is not solely determined by the external stimuli (objects and events) we encounter but is also influenced by our internal mental processes, emotions, and the cultural context in which we exist. Thus, what we usually understand as external and internal factors contributing to our understanding of reality are described here as being in constant and dynamic interplay. In this sense, Simondon’s theory does not oppose phenomenological accounts of perception such as those developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I propose that Simondon’s image cycle helps to conceptualize the unfolding experience of the participants in our experiment and highlights how the design of the virtual rooms emphasizes the need to invent new habits of perception and action to solve the puzzles presented in the study. I thus interpret the different phases that the interviewees described through the lens of Simondon’s image cycle and emphasize invention as one aspect of the experience that could not have been described in pure phenomenological terms. Virtual environments such as those created for this study can then be said to enable the invention of new anticipations, images, and ultimately experiences that impact the individual in the long term.

As mentioned before, the image cycle portrays the genetic process of the image in which the preindividual, sensory experience of the external world and creative action play a central role. Simondon describes this by way of marking different phases of the image cycle, which should not be viewed as separate but rather as interrelated. The preindividual phase of the image cycle is that of experiences generated through basic motor activity, infused with anticipation:

[…] they are motor, linked to the most simple behaviors through which the living take possession of the milieu and proceed to the first identification of the (living or non-living) objects they encounter. […] [T]he primitive motor images have no other content than the movements themselves (autokinetic, non-finalized image), such that they are organized in a way that conforms to the specific programs of the individual and as a function of the chance encounters which occur within the frame of the milieu in which it finds itself. (Simondon [2008] 2022, xxvi)

Primitive motor images thus drive simple behaviors before any conscious thought, seeking a relationship with the environment. While at the beginning of the image cycle, basic motor activity coordinates the orientation of experiences, “anticipation already appears as a creative proposal to interact with changing and not fully determined environmental conditions. It accumulates vital and unconscious knowledge that unexpectedness is to be taken into the dialectics exercised by imagination” (Sabolius 2019, 42). Such primitive motor images were described by all participants in the first phase of the VR experience. The fact that they all had some experience with virtual environments intensified their anticipatory actions. As the participants explained,

…like an urge to just move my body in certain ways that would, I would think… would interact with the environment. (P2 2022)

So it was just my…my sense of like forward locomotion was like activated. (P3 2022)

These movements, infused with anticipation, set off the image cycle, through which the participants were urged to create a meaningful relationship with their environment. When common ways of interacting with the virtual environment did not lead to expected outcomes, the participants exhibited continuous changes in motor behavior, such as using their hands to push or touch something or moving their heads. They also started to recognize bodily sensations, such as feeling warmth and tingling in their bodies. Moreover, participants felt a sense of “forward locomotion” (P3) and an “[…] urge to move my body […] to interact with the environment” (P2).

In this first phase of the image cycle, an individual continues to generate potential ideas and interpretations of incoming sensory data. In this sense, our experiences of motor activity, such as exploring spaces, manipulating objects, and interacting with others, provide the raw material for perception and imagination, which continues as this original intimate and unfolding relationship between the organism and its milieu:

Perception is not the grasping of a form but the resolution of a conflict, the discovery of a compatibility, the invention of a form. This form that perception is modifies not only the relation between the object and the subject, but also the structure of the object and the structure of the subject. (Simondon [1964] 2020, 259)

While imagination is thus partly based on previous experiences generated through motor activity, it influences how one perceives their environment going forward. Perception is indeed the second phase of the image cycle. However, it is “dependent on the intra-perceptual images—the subsets that are formed by imagination” (Sabolius 2019, 42). This second phase provides the organism with a particular means of receiving signals and information as well as a manner of responding to them. Modes of sensing form and culminate in actual perception. Anticipation also plays a role here, as it is integral to the organism’s way of gathering sensory information. In the third phase, images are organized and systematized in the form of a mental possession that is analogous to (but not representative of) the exterior world, similar to memory. This part of the image cycle is strengthened by affective and emotional experiences (Sabolius 2019, 42). In this phase, the image cycle transitions into a mental space, marking a “break from motoric and responsive interaction with the surrounding environment” (Sabolius 2019, 42).

At this point of the image cycle, the influx of information from the environment reaches saturation; the organism is thus “no longer able to welcome new experience” and “must modify its own structure in order to find larger, more powerful organizational dimensions capable of overcoming the experienced incompatibilities” (Simondon [2008] 2022, 21). Previously incompatible qualities are brought together in a new, metastable state:

This coupling of incompatible yet linked qualities expresses the state of supersaturation of the memory-image—a metastable state that is the necessary condition for invention, that is, for a structural change restoring compatibility within a new system. The image having become a symbol condenses a contradictory experience. (Simondon [2008] 2022, 124)

I observed this saturation and symbolism in our experiment when participants were unable to use previous experience and anticipation that structured the incoming information from the environment to orient themselves. They faced an “interruption by an obstacle, a discontinuity” (Simondon [2008] 2022, 139), that provoked the final phase of the image cycle, namely invention. In the invention phase, organisms establish new structures of experience and new anticipations to create the “appearance of the extrinsic compatibility between the milieu and the organism and the intrinsic compatibility between the subsets of the action” (Simondon [2008] 2022, 139).

A new image is hence invented, for example by creating a new spatial relationship between an individual and its environment. One participant (P1) described this experience when they realized that they could not navigate the virtual spaces using familiar habits. After feeling anxious and lost, they changed what they paid attention to in their surroundings, searching for repeating patterns or something familiar:

I mean, it’s taking information I already know so that I don’t have to think more creatively about what’s going on around me … rather like maybe puzzles and patterns. That in some way they… like inspire some level of creativity finding stuff, but it’s going to be more like what is familiar and easily accessible to me that I can change my motor plan easily with something too complex. (P1, 2022)

Then, they tried to shift their perspective, in fact defamiliarizing themselves with the environment to perceive what could not be aligned with previous experience:

Basically, drop all the meanings. Don’t put so much importance on what you previously have known in order to make space for what will come. (P1 2022)

This opening up to something new is intrinsic to the invention phase of the image cycle, as it allows for the formation of new anticipations and new images. Imagination thus not only informs the interpretation and organization of sensory information gathered from the environment and our perceptions but also is the foundation for invention, the creative act of producing something new, whether it is an idea, a concept, an object, or a solution. Invention is thus a way of creating a meaningful relationship with the world. This phase of the image cycle is also intensified here due to the characteristics of the VR image, as “the VR image‑object is constituted by the interaction with the experiencer […]. The relationship between users and image is much more essential than in physical images tout court” (Bandi 2023, 304). In the interviews, participants described this as “changing their motor plan,” an “urge to move and interact” and to “drop all meanings,” and thus creating a relationship with their surroundings that would elicit a perceivable and meaningful effect.

Simondon’s theory emphasizes that even though imagination comes before sensory perception, it already expresses a fundamental relationship between the individual and their environment. Furthermore, for Simondon, the invention of new images is part of the process of individuation. The image cycle offers a new concept to explain how we change alongside our milieu and how imagination informs the subject in its becoming. Through Simondon’s perspective, it can be assumed that when the participants in our study had to create new techniques for processing information and new patterns of experience in order for new responses to the environment to arise, these new patterns of experience ultimately became part of their individuation.  This underlines the potential for de-habituation of perceptual sensibilities through VR, which was already part of the first artistic experiments with this medium conducted by artist Char Davies in the early 1990s. Referring to Gaston Bachelar’s writing about the psychologically transformative potential of vast, open spaces such as the desert, Davies emphasized the qualities of virtual spaces to offer new forms of “communication with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature” (Bachelard 1966, 206, cited in Davies 1998). Davies’s groundbreaking VR pieces were inspired by this potential “of immersive virtual space as a medium for ‘bringing forth’ or ‘manifesting’ abstract ideas into the realm of virtual ‘place’ so that they can be kinesthetically explored and bodily lived” (Davies 1998). Through the lens of Simondon’s image cycle, the bringing forth of abstract ideas into the virtual place where they can be kinesthetically explored and bodily lived appears not only as part of the basic structure of the becoming of subjects; the invention of new habits of perception and action in the VR experience can also be said to become part of participants’ larger habitual pattern, even beyond the virtual environment. Therein lies the political and ethical potential of this new aesthetic; and phenomenology can help foreground it. Phenomenology, as Ahmed states, is full of moments of disorientation (Ahmed 2006, 159). If we understand these moments as more than mere opportunities to investigate their overcoming, we can understand how the dynamic alignment of bodies and space is structured unequally: large parts of the world are created so that certain bodies can orient themselves in it and not others. The images that rotate through Simondon's image cycle are largely predetermined by culturally dominant forces. But what both Ahmed's queer phenomenology and Simondon's relational ontology reveal is that the images and ideas that inform notions of subjectivity and collectivity are not fixed. While the spaces through which we orient ourselves influence these images and ideas, we can also develop new images and ideas, opening up new spaces or reshaping existing ones. Queer phenomenological investigations of indeterminacy combined with an ontogenetic understanding of the subject as developed by Simondon can thus point the way to dealing with increasing indeterminacy in a more just manner. And they can be helpful in investigating the potential of VR applications to contribute to this endeavor.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that virtual environments can serve as platforms for the development of new structures of experience, particularly by disrupting conventional ways of perceiving and acting. These environments allow the underlying processes of meaning-making to become more tangible. In doing so, the habitual subject/object relationship momentarily opens up, the intentional subject recedes, and an indeterminate, evolving process of individuation takes center stage. The novel strategies of responding to this indeterminacy are not merely automatic reflexes but involve imaginative and inventive processes. These, over time, could lead to the development of a heightened sensitivity to potential relationships, as well as new ways of acting and perceiving.

New forms of imagination and sensitivity—especially in the face of growing indeterminacy—are essential for responding to concrete threats, such as climate change. This article therefore complements and extends current discussions about the significance of speculative theories, methods, and new imaginaries for envisioning multiple futures. This is particularly relevant in an era marked by increasing threats to democracy, further marginalization of minorities, and widening inequalities. Thinking for the future, then, requires inviting indeterminacy into the conversation: to attend to what cannot yet be determined by the established means we use to make sense of the world; to loosen the grip on the concepts and frameworks we use to classify things and beings; and to re-structure our patterns of experience in ways that allow us to think, imagine, and feel differently.

The study on which this article is based seeks to understand whether and under what conditions immersive VR might provide a space for practicing attention and developing new patterns of experience in the face of evolving, yet-to-be-determined constellations.

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank various people for their contribution to this project; Desiree Valdez and Tallon Hodge for their help with the VR application and interviews. Prof. Pedro Lopes and Yudai Tanaka from the Human Computer Integration Lab for their assistance. The staff at the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center at the University of Chicago for providing access to their facilities.

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Notes

1. Since the project was not located in an empirical or STEM-science field but developed as a collaboration between the humanities and computer science, the goal was not to produce verifiable and replicable results but to add experiential values to theoretical thinking about phenomenological experience, whereby existing concepts can be challenged and reconsidered.