Towards a Phenomenology of Novelty: Perceiving and Engaging with Virtual Reality

In 4E cognition, - which holds that the mind is embodied, embedded, enacted and extended - the role of contexts is highly relevant, as an agent is understood as a system reciprocally connected and dependent on its environment. A way to evaluate contexts is to look at the familiarity or novelty of phenomena and relationships within that system. However, these observations are challenging because they aim at the subjective perspective within an experience.

In this thesis, I explore the notions of unfamiliarity and novelty through a phenomenological lens while mapping the structure of subjective capabilities and relationships in a specific version of unfamiliarity. I present an iterative experiment where participants face the unfamiliar and experience the process whereby what is novel becomes, to a degree, familiar and meaningful to them. Hence, the participants experience a virtual reality artwork characterised by its abstract presentation and a difficult-to-recognise context.

Afterwards, they participate in extensive phenomenological interviews to produce qualitative descriptions of their perceptions, intentions, affect, and reflections. I hermeneutically evaluate and phenomenologically treat these descriptions. Across participants, clusters of descriptions form intersubjectively relevant consensus categories used for structural analysis of the experience.

I describe an observed ‘self’-enabling drive to act, characterised by the participants’ focus on their potential actions. They anticipate, actuate, and realise their relevance within the new environment. I also observe what I call ‘mediating action potentials’ that differ from classical habituated actions in the specificity of involved expectations and intersubjective openness. These observations fit the assumptions that action perception strives for optimisation with the help of experiential ‘types’ and supports the notion of a minimal self sedimenting in and through a lived body.