Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920909990
Brooke Belisle
Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If ‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today? What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once?
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920904642
Sean Anderson
Perhaps it is best to dispense with a few necessary admissions. Selfimplicating, yes; a desire for the reader to temper their expectations, maybe. ‘Why is he writing this?’, you might ask (see one response below) deploying a concatenation of language(s) that are both inside and outside at the same time. Indeed. So much has yet to be written on the enmeshment of interiorities to be formulated within architecture. Yet within this call and response to an elegant densification of meanings in and around a collection of essays, of perambulations among spaces close and proscriptive, virtual and haptic, we find one who started thinking about this volume from the back to the front, a kind of delinquent recto–verso that has since become one intriguing mode by which to regard Brian Massumi’s challenging collection of essays, Architectures of the Unforeseen.
也许最好省去一些必要的录取。自私，是的；也许是希望读者能缓和自己的期望他为什么要写这个，您可能会要求（参见下面的一个响应）同时部署内部和外部语言的串联。的确关于建筑内部的相互关系，还有很多东西要写。然而，在这一呼吁和回应中，我们发现有人开始从后面到前面思考这本书，这是对一本散文集及其周围意义的优雅密集，对封闭和禁止、虚拟和触觉空间之间的探索，从那以后，布莱恩·马苏米（Brian Massumi）富有挑战性的散文集《不可预见的建筑》（Architectures of the Unpreseen）就成了一种有趣的模式。
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906259
Lisa Nakamura
Virtual reality (VR)’s newly virtuous identity as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ arrives during an overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobic moment in the US and abroad. Its rise also overlaps with the digital industries’ attempts to defend themselves against increasingly vocal critique. VR’s new identity as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology that engineers the right kind of feeling has emerged to counter and manage the image of the digital industries as unfeeling and rapacious. In this article, the author engages with VR titles created by white and European producers that represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris. She argues that the invasion of personal and private space that documentary VR titles ‘for good’ create is a spurious or ‘toxic empathy’ that enables white viewers to feel that they have experienced authentic empathy for these others, and this digitally mediated compassion is problematically represented in multiple media texts as itself a form of political activism.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906258
Brooke Belisle, Paul Roquet
Many of us are ‘over’ virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation. To sustain itself, the enthusiasm that it sparks about what could be over the next technological horizon sometimes rebounds, instead, toward the past to rediscover historical precursors. Witness, for example, the unlikely resuscitation of the Viewmaster in 2015, using a smartphone as a very expensive, moving-image stereoscope.1 As popular interest waxes and wanes, VR seems to have always been around and to be always emerging, but never to have completely arrived.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906261
G. Bollmer, K. Guinness
Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) is a brief virtual reality (VR) piece that depicts the artist beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Wolfson uses the haptic possibilities of VR to rapidly induce nausea in the viewer, an act that both relies on empathetic aspects of VR simulation – ‘empathy’ here linked with its history in German aesthetic psychology as Einfühlung – and is a confrontational distancing that questions the politics of ‘empathetic’ immersion. Real Violence demonstrates how contemporary judgments of VR and empathy repeat debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reinventing and emptying particular political/aesthetic strategies that have long characterized a strain of modernist art that uses the formal possibilities (and limits) of media in order to critique the very same possibilities (and limits). This article, through its discussion of Wolfson’s work, seeks to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today. It examines the limitations of immersion and emotional projection, along with the limitations of interpreting this work (and VR in general) as a means for enacting ‘progressive’ social and ideological change through the immersive, empathetic capacities of media. The article concludes by arguing that judgments of Real Violence (and the politics of ‘transgressive’ art more broadly) require assuming the will or intent of an artist who uses confrontation and transgression to ‘correct’ the experience of the viewer, which is something that cannot be assumed for either Wolfson or Real Violence, and rather his work is exemplary of emptying out the possibilities represented by both VR and critical aesthetic intervention.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920904654
L. McBride
Self-released on cassette and distributed through underground punk DIY networks in 1991, Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now ignited the countercultural Riot Grrrl movement in the United States by giving voice to the anger and resentment felt by young, working-class, disenfranchised women in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The power of the movement was situated in the figure of the youthful girl positioned as the site of protest and revolution against patriarchal structures of oppression. It coalesced in the enunciation of ‘Girl Power’ – before its reductive appropriation by the Spice Girls – as a slogan and formulation of feminist identity. In the intervening decades, the figure of the girl and her accompanying ‘girlhood’ has become part of the symbolic order of feminist discourse. She operates at moments as a temporal disrupter of current states of being (Freeman, 2000), as a cynical figure through which to critique notions of empire, capitalism and gender (Tiqqun, 2012), or as a recapitulation toward heteronormative structures through the co-opting of ‘Girl Power’ in popular culture in the late 1990s (McRobbie, 2009). In the social sciences, the proliferation of ‘girlhood studies’ since the early 2000s emphasizes the psychological and social development of girls across varying cultural, religious and geographic backgrounds. The figure of the girl in these discourses becomes either a literalization of the lived experience of young women or an empty signifier to be used. Thus the ‘girl’ is never fully realized or theorized as more than a symbolic tool; or rather, as an empty vessel to be filled with meaning from the outside. She is always becoming something else, even within the social sciences, where the emphasis is on her growth or change. It is this notion of the girl as becoming-woman (via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) that opens Elisabeth von Samsonow’s discussions of the figure of the girl in Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl as a fully theorized being, whose symbolic capital is not predicated on her ability to stand in as a signifier, but rather as a figure whose full realization is crystallized through the formulation of ‘Anti-Electra’ as an ‘outline of a future world’ through her relationship with the pre-Oedipal, the animal, and the technological (p. xvi).
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906260
Paul Roquet
This article rethinks the notion of virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy machine’ by examining how VR directs emotional identification not toward the subjects of particular VR titles, but toward VR developers themselves. Tracing how both positive and negative empathy circulates around characters in one of the most influential VR fictions of the 2010s, the light novel series-turned-anime series Sword Art Online (2009–), as well as the real-life figure of Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset that launched the most recent VR revival, the author shows how empathetic identification ultimately tends to target the VR game master, the head architect of the VR world. These figures often already inhabit a socially privileged position. A better understanding of how VR channels empathy towards VR creators points to the need to ensure a broader range of people have opportunities to take up the role of VR game master for themselves.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906264
M. Engberg, J. Bolter
In this article, the authors examine the aesthetics of immersion in two emerging media forms: 360° video and 3D VR. Their goal is to move beyond addressing technical affordances, to consider the techniques and choices that producers of 360° video and 3D VR are making to exploit these affordances, and what resulting effects those viewing experiences have. They discuss the tension between transparency and reflectivity in two contrasting examples, in particular: the Danish company Makropol’s Anthropia (2017) and Arora and Unseld’s The Day the World Changed (2018). The authors argue that technical affordances are part of a complex process of mediation that includes both experimentation with the technology at hand and a reliance on earlier media forms. It is critical, they argue, to understand the creative tension between established forms and new ones that underscore new aesthetic and narrative experiences in VR and 360° formats.
在本文中，作者研究了两种新兴媒体形式的沉浸美学:360°视频和3D VR。他们的目标是超越解决技术启示，考虑360°视频和3D VR制作者正在利用这些启示的技术和选择，以及这些观看体验所产生的影响。他们在两个对比鲜明的例子中讨论了透明度和反射率之间的紧张关系，特别是丹麦公司Makropol的Anthropia(2017)和Arora和Unseld的the Day the World Changed(2018)。作者认为，技术支持是一个复杂的中介过程的一部分，这个过程既包括对手头技术的实验，也包括对早期媒体形式的依赖。他们认为，理解现有形式和新形式之间的创造性张力是至关重要的，这些形式强调了VR和360°格式中的新美学和叙事体验。
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1470412920906255
M. Larocco
In this article, the author analyzes the ways in which the practices of virtual reality design are being standardized, focusing specifically on the Oculus Best Practices Guide (OBPG). Instructional writings like the OBPG are fruitful documents from which theories of practice can be extracted and, for companies like Oculus, they serve as alternative mission statements, articulating what Oculus wants and needs the standards and practices of its nascent product-medium to be. The author argues that the OBPG serves to create standards and practices that emphasize and maintain virtual reality (VR) user immersion in order to mitigate the weaknesses in the technology and better conform with VR’s idealized, hypothetical presentation in fiction and marketing rhetoric. The Guide plays a key role in Oculus’s larger attempts to mitigate market risk through the standardization of content across its distribution platforms in order to shape an inchoate technological object into a stable and lucrative entertainment medium. More broadly, the OBPG serves as an example of the specific ways in which market forces act on the development of new media practices, turning ‘standards’ into ‘industry standards’.
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