“As the melodies suffused her mind they intermingled”
— Marc Stiegler, “The Gentle Seduction”

Sitting alone on the riverside, my neighbor is immersed in viewing our familiar corner of Taipei through the perspective of the drone he’s piloting. Looking down through virtual reality (VR) glasses, he’s unaware of his physical body, disappointing my dog, who has loped over to greet him. My neighbor is in his own virtual world, isolated from our shared world or other individuals. This image of immersion as isolating is prevalent in popular culture (like the frenzy over internet addiction) as well as in science fiction (SF), from as early as E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” which presciently envisions a future of humanity partitioned into honey-comb cells, constantly communicating with and surveilled by the titular entity. The story opens, “Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee…There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds.” Though connected through the unassailable Machine’s network of what resembles a social media world, they distain personal contact, not even raising their own children. Their interactions are short and distanced, physically and emotionally, for “the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people.” Aside from the one rebellious character, humans in Forster’s future seem content to stay isolated in their cells, without access to nature nor one another, absorbed in the Machine’s world. But could technological immersion also bring us together? As historian Michael Bellesiles puts it, since Forster, “science fiction has been giving shape to competing visions of human-technology interface” now dominating social discourse, debating whether social media like Twitter is just a bully’s soapbox or has potential to facilitate social movements like the ongoing protests in Iran and China.

[Spoiler alert for some texts discussed below.]

Science fiction series like Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood or Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989) and Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan series (2019–2021) imagine radical togetherness. Butler’s future humans enjoy tentacular collective consciousness through the bioengineering of the alien Oankali with whom they interbreed. Non-verbal, physiological communication allows individuals to understand one another at a neurological level Butler depicts as transcendently sexual, a connection that communicates a “half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.” This tentacular communication resembles the tentacled feeling-based knowledge of Donna Haraway’s spider Pimoa chthulu representing speculative knowledge through a legacy of “science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism” (Haraway 2016, 31). Over Butler’s three books with shifting protagonists, the reader sees how easily successive generations accept dramatic changes to how our species interacts with others and defines itself, by the end of the series evolving into beings that are unrecognizably human. The protagonists of Butler’s first book and Martine’s series, Lilith and Mahit, are both accused of betraying their species through their openness to the other, signaling the transgressive potential of radical togetherness.

Martine’s future humans have developed various technologies to bring minds together. The first book, A Memory Called Empire, foregrounds “imago line” neuro-technology described as a “mindclone language,” to implant a line of professional predecessors’ minds—including memories, abilities, mannerisms, and endocrine responses—into their successor’s brain. The community deploys this technology to give individuals the knowledge and skills of generations, so that a small population can protect its knowledge. However, the process alters how the recipient thinks and acts, giving them the experience of having multiple human minds inside their own. The second Teixcalaan book, A Desolation Called Peace, imagines two forms of collective consciousnesses, one from an alien species, and another developed through human technology for fighter pilots. “The Shard trick” allows pilots to simultaneously share “proprioception and pain…instinct—reaction time—and in moments of extremity or beauty, thought,” and in transcendent experiences of the technology, some even “recited poetry to one another without ever opening their mouths” (italics in the original, 391). Yet the cost of immersive radical togetherness is physical and mental anguish: Martine describes one character’s first experience of the collective consciousness as “tumbling, thrown from himself as far as he had ever been. Into the void, and into how it was screaming” (444).

Collective consciousness in both series changes how the future humans experience their bodies and process knowledge, most importantly as their perceptions are multiplied by the knowledge and sensory input of many bodies. This fictional portrayal of collective consciousness across bodies hyperbolizes a dynamic that Stacy Alaimo theorizes regarding our current human embodiment: “trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” with the trans- “emphasizing the movement across bodies” and sites (Alaimo, 2). Those bodies and sites can be non-human and human, natural and constructed. Quoting Ursula Heise’s “eco-cosmopolitanism,” Alaimo includes the “political, economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological” amongst the global networks in which bodies are entangled (15–16). We are immersed in these systems, which like other bodies, are constantly acting upon us; we are exchanging mutual influence and information, and are shaped by the interactions with, for instance, our neighbors and global capitalism.

Trans-corporeality trivializes physical and conceptual boundaries, inviting us to recognize how science fiction imaginings of collective consciousness or human-machine hybridity might already be appearing. Forster, Butler, and Martine all hint at how immersive futures will change our bodies and our thinking, while trans-corporeality suggests that the future may be closer than we think: we are already more immersed in inputs from other bodies and networks than we realize. Similarly to Alaimo’s trans-corporality, describing how human bodies are all already entangled with other bodies and enmeshed in global networks, Donna Haraway famously argues that we are all already hybrids of humans and machines. Haraway goes so far as to label contemporary humans cyborgs: “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…The cyborg is our ontology…a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (Haraway 1991, 150).

紀大偉 Chi Ta-Wei’s cyberpunk novella《膜》The Membranes presents the ultimate trans-corporeal cyborg, immersed in economic and technological networks challenging the boundaries of the body and with a consciousness composed “of both imagination and material reality.” Ari Larissa Heinrich describes Chi as “channeling” the Haraway essay quoted above, making the reader confront how “People were anyway ‘already cyborgs’” (Heinrich, 142). Chi’s protagonist Momo is a brain-in-a-vat for a military contractor, whose perception of her life is mostly scripted. Momo does not know that she is disembodied, nor what her brain is actually doing. Shards of what may be her reality seep through, but seem like hallucinations or dreams, as when “Momo began to hear fragments of melodies too discordant to reproduce and see flashes of complex images she couldn’t describe” (Heinrich’s translation of Chi, 84). To overlay the work her brain is conducting for the military weapons company ISM Enterprises—to which she is indentured for funding her life-saving “megaoperation”—her mother has been scripting Momo’s life experiences, including interactions with and attraction to imaginary cosmetology clients.

The truly meaningful connection Momo has is not with the android clone or imaginary clients, but rather with her mother, even while the mother writes herself out of her own script to justify being physically distant for the twenty years of Momo’s indenture. This basic human connection between mother and child contrasts poignantly with the capitalist and militaristic power shaping Momo’s existence. That Momo is mired in military capitalism, with these systems working on her body (even before funding the operation to remove her brain from her body and sustaining the brain in service of a military contractor), reinforces the allusion to Haraway’s theorization of cyborgs, as “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (Haraway 1991, 151). Momo’s position also highlights significant cyberpunk themes: namely, delineating fluctuating dynamics and boundaries of power, identity, embodiment, memory, and the real (Cavallaro, xi–xvi).

The fluid boundaries of identity, embodiment, and memory in the context of technological immersion is particularly prominent in Marc Stiegler’s short story “The Gentle Seduction.” In a dizzying escalation of bio-technical and mechanical developments, the unnamed protagonist becomes dispersed, with parts of her reconnecting in new combinations. As in Chi, technology gives her better ways to connect across generations (finally understanding her grandchildren), and then across species boundaries. When humans begin exploring the possibility of communicating with aliens, she is asked “to expand her communication channels, open them so wide that what she thought, they would also think; there would be no filter protecting her internal thoughts.” In this open communication with the other, she is not undone. Rather, at the story’s end she finds “communion” with the aliens, and loses the need to identify herself as a solitary being.

The radical openness of her sense of self at the end is an extension of her almost mystical opening of herself to communication with aliens, a theme reminiscent of the series from Butler and Martine. Steigler’s protagonist experiences transcendent connection with humans through music, as in the quotation from which I draw the epigraph: “As the melodies suffused her mind they intermingled.” The intermingling of music echoes the intermingling of individuals, and the immersive and almost euphoric musical unity, “the cadence of a grander euphony…filling her mind with a symphony of symphonies.” This connection through music foreshadows the immersive communion: “on a thousand planets, with a thousand bodies and a thousand voices, she leapt in the air and filled the sky with lilting laughter, a chorus of joy that spanned the arm of a galaxy.”

Music gives technological immersion a particularly engaging potential to create interpersonal connections. In her 2019 pandemic novel A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker describes an immersive metaverse music platform, StageHoloLive, that provides one of the few legal spaces—albeit virtual—for people to gather and connect. In a near-future US wracked by plagues of violence and virus making people fear human contact, with public health and environmental laws banning assembly and forcing live music underground, 24-year-old protagonist Rosemary finds a way to connect with people beyond her family and with herself through StageHoloLive’s digitally-enhanced and -distorted music. From her first concert, we can see the immersive quality, technological potential, and transformative effect. From the opening notes, she is immersed: “music hit Rosemary like a wave…filling every corner of her. One chord, and she was full,” perhaps even exhaustively, so that she cannot take in anything beyond the digital music. Even in that maxed out state, she recognizes the technological offerings to augment it further, scrolling the “menu of optional enhancements and accessibility options.” Though aware of the technological manipulations that give her and other users the unique subject position of someone else for whom the wink was intended, she is nevertheless overcome when the bassist “looked straight at Rosemary and winked…the sexiest wink Rosemary had ever seen.” Further, the experience has a transcendently transformative effect: “Nothing had ever satisfied her the way writing code did, but now she was the code, and she was being overwritten” (Pinsker 40–42). 

Pinsker juxtaposes the immersive technological potential of metaverse musical performances with the even more captivating thrill of being in a real music venue experiencing a live show. Rosemary’s first live show is so immersive, that she is filled with more than just general music: “cello and the voice came up through the trembling floor, up through Rosemary’s bones. It was a physical sensation, a resonance taking place between her body and the instruments and the room. However long they played, it didn’t feel long enough” (164). Though StageHoloLive developed quickly to compensate for a newly isolated society, as a means for otherwise isolated individuals to use technological immersion to experience community and inter-human bonds, it comes at the profit-motivated cost of the live music: they shut down venues to squash competition. This unnecessary, greedy cruelty is a reminder that, whether through the police or the market, technologies will replace our live experiences with something more profitable for the companies, even if it is less meaningful for us.

Texts like Stiegler’s short story “The Gentle Seduction” and Pinsker’s novel show how easily individuals and societies slip into technological immersion. In fact, our immersive future is already enveloping us in a technologically-mediated experience of life. Corporeally and epistemically, we are entering posthumanism, when technology begins to dissolve “demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation,” in the words of N. Katherine Hayles. Corporeally, body modifications like cochlear implants or artist Neil Harbisson’s antenna through which he hears color, are permanently technologically altering bodies’ ways of being in the world. Epistemically, our use of technology is already shifting how we understand, communicate, process, and produce knowledge, even offline. Our near constant engagement with smart phones, Nicholas Carr observes, is accelerating how technology is physically changing our brains. We may not yet have technology allowing us to exist as brains-in-vats, communicate with alien species or through collective human consciousness, or to live dispersed in a thousand embodiments, however the world of music is approaching science fiction visions for mutually-generative changes in technology and humans.

During the pandemic, influential South Korean pop culture company SM Entertainment pivoted towards the digital, with the goal of eventually weaving all of their productions into a unified narrative about a metaverse, starting with the K-pop music group Aespa. Building upon the model of British virtual cyberpunk band Gorillaz, which is composed of four fictional musicians who perform through animated music videos (and was purportedly intended “as commentary on the vapidity of popular music at the turn of the millennium”), Aespa added further dimensions. Audiences can experience Aespa (whose name is meant to invoke avatar, experience, and aspect in the sense of an alternate reality) through their physical bodies or digital avatars, through concerts and ‘fan meetings’ in physical, digital, or hybrid realms. The group introduced the concept of “kwangya” (literally “wilderness”) in their songs, which became their virtual universe, where each singer has an avatar. Then SM Entertainment introduced the Kwangya mobile app for metaverse musical engagement with Aespa and other bands, a development that received mixed fan reception.

While identifying cyberpunk features and aesthetics in Aespa’s performance, critic
張容禎 Chang Jungchen argues that Aespa is not addressing cyberpunk themes around power, identity, embodiment, and the real that Chi (and arguably also Forster, Martine, and Butler) consider. Rather, Aespa’s cyberpunk expression is drawing the audience into the metaverse world, training viewers to recognize symbols and construct narratives like that of kwangya across performances and performers in the SM Entertainment world. Chang notes that the company’s profit motives frame the purpose: “not to speculate about a technological future, but to seduce fans to follow a whole pack of idols.” Semiotic training is central to the seduction, luring “the audience to immerse epistemically in the metaverse as the audience invest intellectually (and financially) to grasp and perceive the digital scenarios” and to collaboratively participate with the artists and other audience members in the hybridization of that digital world and the audience’s reality, which is itself becoming partly virtual as they create fan communities in the metaverse.

Collective audience construction of music idols with attendant symbols and meaning around the idols is central to the K-pop model, commodifying a space where fans can experience a speculative world in which they explore their fantasies through the idols. So what is new about Aespa? Echoing the fictional post-pandemic parallel StageHoloLive in Pinsker’s novel, SM Entertainment is experimenting with replacing live performance with digital technological immersion. Where traditional K-pop thrills live concert audiences with proximity to the idols and a whole “army” of like-hearted fans in a physical space, Aespa offers hybrid audiences a different collective immersion in a trans-corporeal whole. Digital technology and interaction with many users multiplies an individual fan’s possible perspectives in ways that approach the collective consciousness immersive experiences in Butler and Martine’s series. Beyond the thrill of physical proximity to others in a collective experience of live music, the digitally immersive musical experience allows a user to assume the perspectives of others and join a mutually-constitutive collective world-making. Reflecting on the audience’s enthusiastic reception, Chang speculates that this model of immersive hybrid world-building and meaning-making has “the power to cultivate a sense of technological collectivity as the fans actively collaborate with each other and the company to make the sf setting more concrete, valid, and rich with each song.” Alternatively, Bellesiles comments, “it could go the way of 3D glasses, which promised to change viewers’ relationship to film, but mostly gave people headaches.”

Considering Haraway’s cyborg and Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, we should ask how our interactions with technology are pulling us into new realities, training and changing us according to the profit-motivated design of companies like the fictional ISM Enterprises and StageHoloLive or the real SM Entertainment. Science fiction imaginings demonstrate how close we are to immersive futures, and how easily humans can be seduced to slip into such futures. “Will we fall for the corporate marketing of immersive musical technology pop idol fandom,” asks Nobody Beats drummer Boots Wang, then alluding to Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, “or will we seek out the basement shows with acts we’ve never heard before, to make new communities for a human future?” Emerging technology comes with both peril and possibility: as we look ahead to ever more immersive technology, let’s be critical of profit-motivated tech that threatens to destroy spaces where humans can connect, yet let’s also encourage innovations with the potential to bring us together.

For a PDF list of works referenced, please click here.

Image of person using VR technology by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash, with filter added.

Lilith Acadia is a literature professor at National Taiwan University, and PI of a lit lab funded by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology researching AI in SciFi. Lilith has a PhD from Berkeley, and creative work published or forthcoming in The Dodge (Best of the Net nominated), Gordon Square Review, New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, and Sycamore Review.

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