Towards a Techno-Hauntological Aesthetic: Immiscible Time and the Spiritual Imagination in Bodyless (Shishenji, 2019) by Huang Hsin-Chien

Abstract

This article discusses and explores acclaimed new media artist Huang Hsin-Chien’s virtual reality (VR) experience Bodyless (Shishenji, 2019). In this film, through the process of the body illusion or the body replacement program, a component specific to VR, viewers embody the soul of a political prisoner deceased during Taiwan’s martial law era. Bodyless juxtaposes Taiwan’s traditional spiritual traditions with references to the Ghost Festival (中元節) and includes a dystopic vision of the future that appears towards the end of the film. This article establishes, through a close reading of several key sequences of the film, the emergence of a techno-hauntological aesthetic. It creates a dialogue between Huang’s dream-like imagery and various interpretation of Bliss Cua Lim’s concepts of immiscible time and heterogeneous space. How does Bodyless visually enact, perform, and develop a techno-hauntological aesthetic? How does the artist explore philosophical concepts related to memory, time, and space by using VR?

1. Introduction

Huang Hsin-Chien (黄心健) (1966–) is a pioneer of new media art and a key player in Taiwan’s fast-developing virtual reality (VR) art scene. He has worked with well-known artists, such as Laurie Anderson, and has won multiple international honours, including, to name a few: the Honorary Mention of Prix Ars Electronica; the SXSW Award; and the Cannes XR Best Story VR Award. At the age of four, the artist lost his vision in one of his eyes, and it was later recovered thanks to an anonymous donor from Sri Lanka: “This also led to his obsession with stories, as he now reads stories through the eyes and the gift of an unknown deceased” (Tornatzky and Kelley 2023, 159). Although Huang’s career began well before VR art became popular in Taiwan and around the globe, there are not many in-depth analyses of his remarkable body of work. More recently, a thorough summary of Huang’s works was provided by Cyane Tornatzky and Brendan Kelley in their book An Artistic Approach to Virtual Reality (2023). In addition, the artist’s films explore several important topics such as the impact of digital technologies on our bodies and our minds, and the ethical consequences and risks associated with the rise of digital surveillance. Huang is an artist who uses VR to address several contemporary issues while engaging a critical discourse on the impact these technologies have on humans and society.

Bodyless (Shishenji, 2019; Huang 2019) is a 28-minute film inspired both by the artist’s own childhood memory and his family history. The artist decided to create this film due to his mother developing dementia, and wanting to tell her, via VR, the stories she had told him. Huang’s childhood experiences, and the actual occurrences connected to Taiwan’s martial law era, served as inspiration for this interactive VR experience. The martial law era refers to a period following World War II, and the civil war in China that lasted between May 20, 1949, and July 14, 1987 in Taiwan. During that time, the Republic of China government led by the Kuomintang instituted a repressive regime where anyone suspected of being a political dissident, a communist, or an independence activist was either arrested or executed. This period of history is commonly referred to as the White Terror.

To summarise the film, viewers accompany an elderly political prisoner as he passes away and he enters the afterlife. His soul then wanders in the underworld, and the artist references here several traditions and rituals associated with the Lunar Ghost Month; a time when deceased souls have the possibility to visit their families in the real world. The film heavily references Taiwan’s political past, and its spiritual traditions combined with a dystopic vision of the future. Towards the end of the movie, a dystopian future is shown in which data has totally dissolved humankind, and computation has taken over every aspect of life. The artist makes a connection between Taiwan’s oppressive regime under martial law era, and the current rise of digital technologies today and their use for control and manipulation. Bodyless is mostly an enigmatic and mysterious narrative that lacks a logical or even realist progression. The artist takes viewers on a journey through a series of heterogeneous spaces: first, a prison cell; then Huang’s own vision of the underworld; an underwater city; an apartment; and, finally a dystopic mega-city made entirely of data and numbers.

This article develops its study based on the following premises. First, the film’s visual and narrative elements are a combination of the artist’s personal reproduction of stories recounted to him by his mother, as well as his own childhood memories, and how they are reappropriated and eventually destroyed by technology. These memories are composed of historical, political, and spiritual elements that are interconnected and become interactive through the medium of VR. Second, the film manifests a surrealist and dream-like aesthetic that subverts standard ideas of linearity, and homogeneous conceptions of time and space. Third, the medium of VR has the capacity to immerse viewers in radically different worlds and give them an opportunity to embody a different form of corporeality, for example, a ghostly presence that can move freely between different spaces and temporalities, and through diverse planes of consciousness. Huang’s VR experience builds and enacts a techno-hauntological aesthetic by examining the relationship between technology and spirituality.

This essay first offers a succinct overview of virtual reality, highlighting its ability to allow users to assume the role of a deceased prisoner, and its exploration of the realm of ghosts. Second, other conceptual aspects are provided to discuss the development of a techno-hauntological aesthetic and its relationship to memories and technology by introducing Mark Fisher’s What is Hauntology? (2012) and Guo’s 2021 essay on hauntological aesthetics in Taiwanese animation feature Grandma and her Ghosts. One of the main components of the techno-hauntological aesthetic is established through its heterogeneous conception of time and space. Lim 2015 essay offers a reinterpretation of Henri Bergson’s concepts of time in relation to the fantastic and the figure of the ghost. Lastly, the ideas presented by Gilles Deleuze’s in his Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990) are compared to the unsettling visuals proposed by the artist in the last sequence of the film. Deleuze’s understanding of the society of control can also be linked to the techno-hauntological aesthetic. How does Bodyless visually enact, perform, and develop a techno-hauntological aesthetic? How does the artist elaborate and explore philosophical questions related to time, and space through VR? How do the Bodyless narrative and visuals propose a critical reading of our current technological era?

2. Virtual Reality and the Conceptualisation of an Embodiment Illusion

In this part, several VR-related aspects are introduced to emphasise their capacity to make viewers embody the soul of a deceased prisoner and explore the underworld imagined by the artist. On the technical level, VR is composed of a head-mounted display along with auditory and video feedback. In Digital Art (2023), Christiane Paul defines VR as “a reality that fully immersed its users in a three-dimensional world generated by a computer and allowed them an interaction with the virtual objects that comprise that world” (Paul 2023, 114). Chalmers (2022) defines VR as composed of three distinctive components: immersion; interactivity; and a computer-generated space. Immersion represents the involvement of the viewers in the virtual world and an emotional attachment with what is shown. The idea of interactivity, on the other hand, stipulates that there is a relationship between users and their environment, and that they affect each other. A computer-generated space signifies that the sound and images transmitted to the viewers’ senses come mostly from a computer and is distinctively different from non-computer-generated environments such as TV, film, or theatre.

VR calls into question the relationship between our actual and virtual bodies: “this is the illusion that a certain virtual body, or avatar, is my body. I feel as if I’m embodied in the avatar. I seem to own the body in roughly the way that I own my own physical body” (Chalmers 2022, 204). This process described by Chalmers represents the “embodiment illusion”. Put another way, embodiment illusion consists of “experiencing a virtual body as your physical body” (Chalmers 2022, 222). This constitutes one of VR’s most accomplished features and is central to the VR experience proposed by Huang. Viewers in Bodyless experience this embodiment illusion as their corporeality and perception of the world is made possible through the soul of a deceased prisoner and its subsequent wandering into the underworld that is imagined by the artist. The embodiment illusion also appears through the tracking of the user’s movements in real life. This allows the VR experience to feel more tangible as the interaction with the virtual world and its objects become more real. To better comprehend the techno-hauntological aesthetic developed in the film, further conceptual explanations and definitions are needed.

3. Defining Hauntological Aesthetics

The terminology used in this essay to discuss the emergence of a techno-hauntological aesthetic refers to the concept of “hauntology”. Hauntology is a term first coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1993). The term is a portmanteau between “haunted” and “ontology”. Derrida summarised this concept in the following terms: “to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” (Derrida 1993, 161). In this context, the ghost “has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet” (Fisher 2012, 19). In his article What is Hauntology?, Fisher offers new insight to this concept and defines two different directions associated with hauntology: “the first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)” (Fisher 2012, 19). These two elements defined here by Fisher allow for new consideration on the visualisation of a techno-hauntological aesthetic in Bodyless as the reading of the film shows. Building on scholarships of Fisher, Harper, and others, Li Guo’s discussion of Taiwanese animation feature Grandma and Her Ghosts (1998) offers a critical reading of hauntological aesthetics in relationship to Taiwanese animation, particularly by exploring the role played by music and sound. Lastly, another important aspect related to hauntology concerns its relationship with space and time: “haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenisation of time and space” (Fisher 2012, 19). This aspect of resistance to homogenisation is particularly at work in Bodyless. Bliss Cua Lim also links haunting with temporality: “the temporality of haunting – the return of the dead, the recurrence of events – refuses the linear progression of modern time consciousness, flouting the limits of mortality and historical time” (Lim 2015, 149). In other words, ghosts can be interpreted as liminal beings that conflate spatiotemporal categories.

4. The Prison Cell and the Reconfiguring of Time and Space

The film’s initial segment sets the tone for the VR experience and introduces viewers to Huang’s dream-like, surrealist aesthetic while also echoing Lim’s concept of immiscible time. Before the video begins, viewers are given instructions on the screen that allow them to navigate and even soar around the many spaces offered by Huang using the motion controllers provided. Although viewers are free to explore the artist’s different universes, they are nonetheless guided and must follow the various sequences presented as if they were watching a film. Viewers begin in a prison cell with the unconscious body of a political prisoner. Figure 1 Here, Huang in this first sequence directly references Taiwan’s troubled past during the martial law era.

Figure 1:

Still from Bodyless. Prison cell.

When the audience is immersed in the virtual world and looks at the scene around them, they notice a prisoner lying on his bed. They can also notice that his hand is holding a picture. The images presented to viewers are coloured in black and white, signifying that they are evolving into a bygone era. The body of the deceased prisoner is likewise covered in newspapers, a repeating image throughout the film. Here, the phenomena of the body-ownership illusion, as described earlier by Chalmers, is already effective in these first few minutes. Huang gives the impression that the audience is a soul floating outside of the political prisoner corpse. The artist emphasises a feeling of weightlessness that will be amplified later in other parts of the film where users can fly and defy gravity, especially in the last sequence of the film.

As viewers navigate around the prisoner’s lifeless body, his face and body are gradually “glitching” and being replaced by geometrical-looking figures. Here, the artist has already incorporated certain characteristics of the dystopian future that he will eventually reveal to the audience in the film’s closing scenes. In the first few minutes, he establishes a link between the prison, which symbolises Taiwan’s past during the martial law era, and the geometric forms, which indicate a future where technology has taken over every aspect of human life. Huang illustrates a blurring of temporalities here, with Taiwan’s authoritarian history serving as a premonition of an oppressive technological future. Already in the first few minutes of the film, Huang illustrates how viewers’ understanding of time cannot be linear, but rather it is continuous. This aspect can be read and interpreted through Lim’s concept of immiscible time. Building on Bergson’s philosophical perspective, Lim eloquently summarises his conception of time: “Bergson insists that the past is: it has not elapsed; it is not over and done with. Rather, it co-exists alongside the present as the latter absolute condition for existing” (Lim 2015, 15). One of the important distinctions offered by Bergson related to time is that it is not linear and that the past doesn’t stop to exist but is rather co-existing with the present.

Lim then introduce her own concept of immiscible time as it designates the incapacity “of mixing or attaining homogeneity. The immiscible pertains to the commingling of oil and water, for instance, which can never yield a true solution” (Lim 2015, 32). In that perspective, Lim’s follows Bergson’s idea that the past and the future are not separate from each other, but are involved in a continuous, simultaneous process that never becomes homogenous. She defines immiscible time as the following: “multiple times that never quite dissolve into the code of modern time consciousness, discrete temporalities incapable of attaining homogeneity with or full incorporation into a uniform chronological time” (Lim 2015, 32).

Another instance of this blurring of temporalities happens when viewers exit the prison cell to see an unnamed character seated in front of a television screen. This enigmatic character sitting outside of the prison also wears an item that look like a gas mask, concealing his identity. With the introduction of this first anonymous character, who is located outside of the prison space, the artist immediately immerses the viewer into an irrational and absurd universe. In fact, this first sequence of the film allows the artist to superpose different spaces and temporalities into the same frame thus creating an enigmatic and ambiguous atmosphere.

The profusion of natural components inside the prison is another noteworthy aspect of this opening sequence. Throughout the movie, recurring elements such as plants, branches, trees, and insects make several appearances and illustrate a connection with the natural world. The presence of branches breaking off the walls, and several bugs flying around the spectators in the virtual world give the impression that nature is gradually reclaiming the cell’s space. The artist draws to attention that there is a connection between humans and the natural world. The existence of these natural components stems from the artist’s childhood memories, when houses were not very well-constructed, and diverse plants and animals were living with him within the house. However, in the following sequences, Huang’s figuration of the future demonstrates a world where all the natural elements have completely disappeared. According to him, it is a critical reflection on how modern living has caused a disconnect with nature, and digital technology serves as an example of this. As the natural elements gradually disappear throughout the film, Huang makes conjecture about the destructive potential of technology.

Afterwards, the image switches back in full colour. After this initial exploration of the cell, bodies of viewers immersed in the virtual world are slowly attracted to move towards the bottom of the prison where Huang recreates the exterior façade of buildings from his native Taiwan. This shift between the worlds of the underground and the jail is also suggestive of the surrealistic viewpoint that the artist has developed as there is no formal coherence between the two distinctive spaces presented to viewers. Throughout the end of this sequence, audiences are slowly entering the underworld of the ghosts. Huang manipulates the users’ sensations in the virtual world, making them feel as if they are floating and flying through this strange universe, embodying the corporeality of the soul of the prisoner. This first sequence of the film already develops multiple elements that are associated with the techno-hauntological aesthetic developed by Huang: it appears mostly through the blurring and the reconfiguring of temporalities between the past of the prison and the appearance of the geometrical forms that are prescient of a strange future. The artist also emphasises the presence of natural elements inside the prison cell and its gradual disappearance throughout the film.

5. Travels in the Underworld: Visualising Taiwan’s Folk Traditions

This section continues to explore the potential of Bodyless to enact a techno-hauntological aesthetic through its spiritual imagination. The figure of the ghost (鬼) holds a central place in Chinese culture and is constantly referenced in the film: “the idea of ghosts is a living part of the modern Chinese parlance and culture, and accounts about ghosts have a long tradition in Chinese society” (Poo 2022, 3). Judith Zeitlin observes that “in Chinese literature the soul may split from the body not only upon death but also in coma or dream when the body is similarly immobilised” (Zeitlin 2007, 5). In Bodyless, the splitting of the body and the soul is rendered possible through VR’s capacity for immersion and interactivity in the first sequence. In that perspective, the soul is conceived as “a shadow or reflection of an absent form, a disembodied soul is closely associated with dream, image, and illusion, and comes close to the English word phantom” (Zeitlin 2007, 5).

After setting the scene and placing audiences into the perspective of a deceased political prisoner, Huang takes viewers on a journey through several of Taiwan’s spiritual traditions. This is the part of the film where connections to Taiwanese traditional culture are most obvious. Huang, on the other hand, reverses the pattern by placing these ritualistic elements directly in the underworld, therefore contributing to the formation of a dream-like realm. These rites and figures are often conducted in the living world, but Huang believes they are now part of his re-imagining of the underworld. Huang’s own visualisation of the underworld is completely surrealist and is constituted of a juxtaposition of multiple spiritual traditions. The screen indicates in white letters: “In the seventh month of the Taiwanese lunar calendar, the hell gate opens for ghosts.” The appearance of these white letters indicates that the viewers are progressively entering a world that is composed of ghosts. These different rituals are associated with the Lunar Ghost Month. The ghost festival is a celebration associated with Taoist and Buddhist beliefs in which the spirits of the dead visit the living. During this time, many ritualistic elements are performed, including food offering, the burning of incense, or even the burning of joss paper.

Another ghostly red figure that resembles a child appears and serves as a guide into this unusual world. Huang invites spectators to explore a fantastical universe filled with animated figures that include giant statues, and, in the background, there is the presence of a huge boat that is burning. In an interview, Huang has stated that it is greatly inspired by several folk traditions found in Taiwan including the Wang Yeh Boat Burning, Qi Ye and Ba Ye, Eight Generals, Parade Array, and other folk elements (Huang 2020).

By looking more closely at the different spiritual figures introduced to us during this part of the experience, it is possible to trace their origin into the diverse religious traditions of Taiwan. Folk religion in Taiwan was first brought from the Fujian province in the seventeenth century. John Bowker defines folk religion as “religion which occurs in small, local communities which does not adhere to the norms of large systems. In a wider sense, folk religion is the appropriation of religious beliefs and practices at a popular level” (Bowker 2003). Folk religion is conceived as the practice of common people in opposition to the elites. In the Sinophone context, Chinese folk religion includes “elements traceable to prehistoric times (ancestor worship, shamanism, divination, a belief in ghosts, and sacrificial rituals to the spirits of sacred objects and places) as well as aspects of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism” (Tamney 1988).

In Figure 2, the burning boat in the background is an important reference to Taiwanese traditional culture. It alludes to the Wang Yeh Boat Burning Festival (燒王船), an event held every three years in the southern coastal town of Donggang (東港鎭). This ritual involves completely burning a large wooden ship in order to invite gods, and to ward off sickness and evil spirits. The apparition of numerous masks flying around us in some sequences of the film is another aspect taken from Taiwan’s spiritual traditions. These masks feature the extensive makeup worn by both Qi Ye (七爺), also known as General Xie (謝將軍), and Ba Ye (八爺), popularly known as General Fan (范將軍). Qi Ye and Ba Ye are two divinities from the Fujian province. After they died, the God of Hell dispatched them to capture bad spirits and ghosts. The masks also allude to the Ba Jia Jiang (八家將), also known as the Eight Generals. These spiritual figures are noteworthy in Taiwanese folklore. Ba Jia Jiang, or the Eight Generals, on the other hand, identify a military troop that is part of a temple ritual in Taiwan’s Bai Long An, a temple located in the southern city of Tainan (Spiller 2017). Incorporating Taiwanese spiritual traditions is one of Huang’s two-pronged strategies. Firstly, he wants to highlight the island’s diverse and rich traditions to its audience and VR allows the possibility to experience them. Secondly, he uses them to emphasise and speculate on the possibility that technologies operate as a means of eradicating these spiritual elements in the future, a process shown towards the end of the film, where all the spiritual elements gradually start to vanish.

Figure 2:

Wang Yeh burning boat. Still from Bodyless.

The following sequence continues the exploration of the underworld but this time by immersing the audience into an abandoned environment made up of various ruined temples and shrines. This cinematic sequence possesses a meditative feel to it because the temples appear to be floating and submerged in water. Time seems to be suspended. The previously audible percussion music has completely stopped. This sequence is also interesting to put in relationship with sound and music in the VR experience as it contributes to add to the eerie atmosphere. Viewers can observe a wooden shrine with a gold light in amongst these temples. A female opera performer is dancing at its centre, but her face is obscured by the presence of butterflies. In fact, this character has her face hidden; a process like the anonymous figure sitting outside of the prison. The virtual body is moving and flying through this barren and ominous environment, where time appears to have stood still; the VR experience shows the weightlessness of the virtual body, thus accentuating the feeling of possessing an ethereal corporeality that can float, and fly in the presented world. The body ownership illusion remains in effect here, as viewers’ virtual bodies have the ability to look at the architecture of these ruined temples from numerous angles. This colourless world is prefiguring the visions of the future that appear later on in the last sequence. It is visualised through the artist’s use of the black and white colour scheme to illustrate a world where life has dissipated.

The world made up of temple and shrine ruins demonstrates how spiritual traditions, which were once vibrant and dynamic, have faded and died. They have vanished, like a recollection of the past, but their presence remains palpable, as evidenced by these abandoned ruins. This sequence of the film can also be interpreted in relationship with another aspect related to the concept of immiscible time, proposed by Lim, regarding the presence of haunted and abandoned locations: “haunted forest ruins and eerie city streets are not just static settings in which human’s actions unfold. Instead, homogeneous space dissolves into a spectral palimpsest of permanence and change, a kaleidoscopic space haunted by immiscible times” (Lim 2015, 155). Here, these abandoned and uncanny temples and shrines visualised by Huang can also be interpreted as direct manifestations of immiscible time.

6. The Destruction of Memories

The following sequence serves as a transition between the exploration of the world of ghosts and the dystopic, apocalyptic vision of the future. This sequence explores how Huang gradually envisions the disappearance and destruction of memories by technology. After travelling in the underworld and discovering several abandoned shrines and temples, Huang transports us to the interior of a living room that is reminiscent of Taiwan during the 1970s and the 1980s (Figure 3). The artist is experimenting with the discontinuity between time and space once more by placing us in this living room, demonstrating that there is not always a temporal or spatial coherence between each of the sequences. This can also be linked to the idea of heterogeneous space as described by Lim: “space lacks solidity, and everything moves: Bergsonism conductive, vibrational universe evokes with uncanny precision the elusiveness of place in ghost film” (Lim 2015, 155). There are also massive re-emergences of elements from the natural world, such as the enormous grasshopper that is seen on the refrigerator. The sequence is now located in the past, during the martial law era, and the television is playing and displaying a military parade. An unidentified man appears to be reading a newspaper at the table, and this could be the prisoner before his death. On the table in front of him is a miniature replica of a metropolis and the presence of multiple insects. Another aspect of the artist’s surrealist, dream-like aesthetic in this sequence is the reversal of the objects and animal size: the viewer’s perspective and body appear very small in relation to the other elements in the room. This reversal, or rather reconfiguration of the scales, is also important in Huang’s VR experience and relates to the artist’s childhood memories. According to Huang, he grew up in a small, cramped location, and he wants viewers to experience the same sense of confinement in VR. This surreal environment is composed of inverted perspectives, strange assemblages, and the abundance and juxtaposition of incoherent materials contributing to the surreal experience as if recalling a dream.

Figure 3:

A man sitting and reading the journal. Still from Bodyless.

The elements indicate the interaction with another memory from Huang’s past. In a procedure similar to the first sequence in the prison cell, viewers are drawn below the space of the room to uncover a desk covered with documents as well as childhood photos of the artist on a wall (Figure 4). The presence of the roots and branches in the prison is replicated in this enigmatic and strange place. These images are also real photos provided by the artist and incorporated into the film, adding an autobiographical touch. They represent and signify the past: a past that no longer exists, yet still influences the current perception of the present. As viewers move closer to the pictures on the wall, the faces on the photos begin to slowly dissolve and fade. Huang’s childhood memories, as depicted by these photographs, are fading and being gradually obliterated. Their identities are likewise rendered unidentifiable, and they are becoming entirely anonymous. The central image on the wall depicts a father and his son, but the reappearance of geometrical figure blur and conceal the identities of the protagonists, making them faceless. The artist repeats here the same process that was in operation at the beginning of the film inside the prison cell. This passage is crucial in the development of Huang’s techno-hauntological aesthetic in Bodyless: the appearance of these geometrical figures represents the capacity of technologies to gradually delete and suppress memories, rending them immaterial, like ghosts. After this passage, Huang immerse spectators into a technologically-advanced and mysterious futuristic world.

Figure 4:

Wall of pictures. Still from Bodyless.

7. Future is Data: The Society of Control

In the final sequence of the film, Huang takes spectators to a new realm. Technology has taken over every element of human life in this lifeless and colourless universe, and the audience is now completely absorbed in a world constituted entirely of data. Spectators are currently travelling through a massive metropolis where enormous, human-like creatures dressed in medical suits are dispersing an incredible amount of data into the atmosphere. With the controllers, viewers are able to fly and move freely in this space, thus contributing to this surrealist dimension. The natural features previously observed, such as branches, roots, and insects, have all disappeared. Huang imagines here a completely artificial world that is composed only of buildings and roads, and the air only contains numerical data.

This strange and desolate environment echoes Deleuze’s famous text Postscript on the Society of Control (1990) where he defines the transition of the “disciplinary society”, originally described by Foucault (1977), to a new form of control exemplified by what he calls the “society of control”. In the first sequence of the film, the space of the prison represents the disciplinary society. For Deleuze, the main characteristic of disciplinary society is that “they initiate the organisation of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws” (Deleuze 1990, 177). Huang insisted on this aspect in the first sequence of the film as the viewer wanders through the prison cell and experiences a feeling of imprisonment. While the virtual bodies were freely able to move and explore the space of the cell, they were unable to exit. Deleuze then introduces the idea of the society of control that will eventually replace the model of disciplinary society. While the mechanism associated with disciplinary society was the enclosure of space and of time, the society of control works through “modulation”, “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (Deleuze 1990, 179). Individuals subsequently become what Deleuze terms as “dividual”: “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze 1990, 180). In fact, Deleuze here describes a process where the numerical has supplanted the analogical and individuals are transformed into sets of data that are exchangeable and replaceable. The final scene of Huang’s film is consistent with this characterisation of the societies of control that Deleuze foreshadows in his text. According to Huang’s futuristic vision, technology has totally replaced all facets of civilization and reduced humanity to basic geometric forms. Put another way, the human body has totally dissolved and becomes – as the movie’s title suggests – bodyless. It resonates also with the figure of the ghost that has been embodied the whole time during the VR experience, that digital technologies have modified and transformed the body through a dematerialisation process, and it has become something intangible, like the corporeal form of a ghost: something that is transparent and that become incorporeal and invisible. Huang creates and conceptualises through its visual aesthetic a strong parallel between technology’s capacity and ability for abstraction and dematerialisation, and the legendary and mythological figure of the ghost.

At the end of the film, the following text appears on the screen in white letters:

“50 years ago, they destroyed my body; I thought this is the crudest thing that they could have done to me. But 50 years later, with new technologies they stole my face, reduced and distorted my kinsmen’s and countrymen’s memory about me. I am no longer a full man. I have become a symbol to deceive people, a commodity in the digital world to be traded. At last, I find myself being erased completely from the world.” In this passage, the opening sentence refers to the destruction of the body during the prisoner incarceration and echoes the function of disciplinary society where the focus is on the coercion and discipline of the body. In addition, the text stipulates that many years later the development of technologies can transform and modify memories from the past. Here, Huang’s dystopian vision of the future refers to what Victor Fan defines as the potential for digital technology to alter and change human consciousness: “digital technology has transformed human consciousness, and it mirrors, facilitates, and exacerbates the extension and proliferation of corporate and state surveillances by controlling and propelling individual affects” (Fan 2022, 4). Fan insists here on the potential of digital technologies to operate a radical reconfiguration of human consciousness. This dismantling of human consciousness is referenced at multiple reprises in the VR experience, particularly in the last sequence where pictures are destroyed.

In light of these key sequences of Bodyless, how does its techno-hauntological aesthetic operate throughout the film and what constitutes its principal characteristics? First, Bodyless’ techno-hauntological aesthetic manifests itself by drawing and positing a strong parallel between the spiritual, historical, and mythological figure of the ghost and the potential of emerging technologies to reduce, distort, annihilate, and transform memories into spectral figures. It is also reminiscent of the two directions of hauntology evoked by Fisher: Taiwan’s past conceived as a virtuality that is re-actualised in the artist’s pessimistic and repressive vision of the future; and the vision of the future shown by Huang that has not yet happened, is not fully actualised, but is at work virtually. The techno-hauntological aesthetic possesses the characteristic of being speculative: it seeks to offer a radical re-imagination of the potential of technologies to destroy not only memories but also the natural and spiritual elements that are essential to the world. The futuristic world visualised towards the end of the film is not completely detached or irrelevant to the current real world contemporary preoccupations with environmental catastrophe and ecological crisis: Huang is visualising a world where nature as well as cultural and spiritual traditions are extinguished, and this constitutes a haunting preoccupation for the world’s current times. While Huang constantly reflects on technology’s destructive potentialities in Bodyless, his vision can nonetheless be interpreted as being sometimes limited to one specific aspect and overtly dystopian.

8. Conclusion

Huang resorts to VR to allow audiences embody the soul of a deceased prisoner who wanders into the underworld while exploring his family memories and their upcoming disappearance through a dream-like and surrealistic aesthetic. This essay maps Huang’s VR art into a broader media ecology of Taiwan’s contemporary cultural productions. In recent years, Taiwan has emerged as a global pioneer in the creation of VR art. Many such artworks have been shown at numerous international film and art festivals. Jonas Schildermans writes that “artists in Taiwan, whether filmmakers, choreographers, theatre directors, or photographers, find themselves on exceptionally fertile ground to engage in this new form of artistry” (Schildermans 2022). Many governmental organisations that support and assist in promoting them have made it possible for VR art to develop and expand both locally and internationally: “Not only has the island developed a leading position in the global information and communications technology (ICT) industry over the last decades, there are also a number of government-supported organisations that actively boost the rise of VR art” (Schildermans 2022). By having this institutional and economic support from the government and from various cultural institutions, the Taiwan VR art ecosystem is at the forefront of innovative and cutting-edge technology and has the ability to develop further the potential for immersive storytelling. This is reflected in the artist’s preoccupation with technologies and their ethical consequences which are not exclusive to this VR film, but it is at work in other VR experiences he creates. More recently, his recent collaboration with French electronic music producer Jean-Michel Jarre entitled The Eye and I (2023) pursues the artist’s fascination with questions related to surveillance capitalism and control (Huang and Jarre 2023).

Other VR films in Taiwan have explored Taiwan’s traumatic past linked to the White Terror or its spiritual imagination. Singing Chen’s VR film, The Man Who Couldn’t Leave (Wu fa likai de ren, 2022), a VR film that uses a completely different aesthetic addresses similar themes by using live actors and a more realistic narrative frame (Chen 2022). Emerging VR artist Yen-Wee Hsieh and his two films Limbotopia (Bi an, 2021) and Limbophobia (An mian, 2023) also explore visions of the future where humans have completely disappeared (Hsieh 2023a, 2023b). Like Huang, Hsieh incorporates his interest of architecture and spirituality in his visual and narrative thus creating an unusual experience. In an opposite direction, new media art collectives, such as NAXS Future, are employing cutting-edge technological tools such as VR, motion capture, and gaming engine, as well as performances, and electronic music to explore Taiwan’s spiritual and traditional culture in conjunction with post-humanist and futuristic preoccupations. While Bodyless proposes an interactive experience where a techno-hautological aesthetic is featured, it also allows viewers to interact with intersecting temporalities from the past and the future.

Biography

Gabriel Remy-Handfield holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University Of Montreal, Canada, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on new media artist Lu Yang. He is now currently an SSHRC Post-Doctoral fellow at the Australian China Centre in the World, Australian National University, Canberra. His research interests encompass Sinophone contemporary art and digital media, cultural studies, post-humanism, and, the philosophy of technology. He has edited a special issue on Lu Yang in the journal Screen Bodies with Livia Monnet and Ari Heinrich. Forthcoming publications includes an edited book on Lu Yang’s art with Bloomsbury Press.