(Salle F106)
Spagnolli, Anna
Gamberini, Luciano
University of Padova, Padova
Action Repair in Mediated Environments : Presence
Displayed through Bodily Orientation
A human place is shaped by action (Johnston, Gregory , Pratt, Watts,
2000) so when a course of action changes, the actor’s local place
undergoes a redefi nition as well. To explore this phenomenon, we
relied on a corpus of video-recorded sessions in immersive virtual
reality (Gamberini, Spagnolli, 2003) and collected 84 episodes in
which the actor stopped her course of action after a spontaneous
technical anomaly. We adopted the approach of conversation analysis
and examined these episodes with special attention to non-verbal
actions to see whether interruptions produced a shift from the
virtual to the real place. It emerged that interruptions were often
followed by new actions performed on physical objects external to
the digital environment. However, like verbal repairs, they set the
conditions for the interrupted action to be resumed and were then
pragmatically subordinated to the main action in the virtual environment
(Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974) ; in addition, participants’
bodies were oriented to both virtual and physical objects. We
argue that depending on the relationship between interrupted and
new courses of action, interruptions do not necessarily generate the
dissolution of the previous presence in a place, but rather its recon-
fi guration via the opening of a secondary course of action sharing
resources with the former.
