Abstract: This article interrogates the role of the witness spectator in 360-degree virtual reality nonfiction. As the postmedia age promises the softening of discreet media forms and the rise of a singular mode of mediated experience, the new virtual reality – one that operates in the twin shadows of VR’s past endeavors to mimic reality and early forms of social documentary – imagines an im-mediate encounter with the real whose product is an urgent political mandate to act on behalf of distant others. Using the New York Times’ 2015 news documentary The Displaced as a case study, I examine what is left of this mandate after the multiple paradoxes of the new virtual reality’s claim to the real are exposed, materially and metaphorically drawn out to their logical conclusion. While the New Virtual Reality formally communicates the immediacy of primarily distant human suffering in order to transform its users into conscientious witnesses, it simultaneously relies on a series of normative moralizations and cathartic responses to constitute its own viewing public. And yet, the formal and ideological limitations specific to this mode of address open unique opportunities for under-theorized counter-reads that provide a radical rebuttal to both utopian claims of a virtual reality “consciousness” and dystopian dismissals of VR’s political potential. Built on the back of a historied documentary tradition of making complicit otherwise “passive” viewers in the material they are shown, prerendered, or live-action, virtual reality raises numerous questions over the current role of the witness within a screen culture dedicated to the ubiquity of technological interpolators and challenges the postmedia paradigm even as it creates the conditions of its possibility.
The recent rebranding of Los Angeles-based virtual reality company Vrse, now known as Within, signals a teleological shift akin to what might be termed the “postmedia turn” in critical film and digital studies. As the postmedia idiom indicates the obsolescence of the media, virtual reality promises to become, as Chris Milk, a director and the founder of Within, famously stated, the last medium — a singularity whose task it is to neutralize the idiosyncratic effects of mediation itself. In a move that signaled toward the origins of cinema and the new media, Milk (2016) defended this statement by insisting that VR was a receptacle for all other media, or, like the mind, that VR represented the last medium through which all others enter: “Your consciousness is the medium,” he says. In futurist technological discourses as well as speculative fictions, the recurring topic of a fully articulated virtual reality apparatus has promised, at key moments, not only a new experience, but experience itself. Whether representative of a technologically constituted post-Cold War global citizen in the early 1990s, or a reaction to its own previous failures in the current state of perpetual crisis today, virtual reality privileges the viewing subject as an acting subject, someone whose own act of witnessing the world shapes it anew. Where the witness once received and processed encoded data alongside the media with which they engaged, their position now exists within the medium as a point of origin that attempts a familiar Cartesian conflation between knowing and being.
Figure 1: Chuol, from New York Times’ The Displaced (2015)
Figure 3: Figure 1: Oleg, from New York Times’ The Displaced (2015)
For users asked to go within a prerendered virtual reality – a new virtual reality – such as the New York Times’ The Displaced (2015) (https://www.with.in/watch/the-displaced/), whose creative director was no other than Chris Milk, they are confronted by a consciousness that curiously contains the ghostly images of a war-torn world that still exists somewhere out there. The primary subjects of The Displaced are three children: Chuol, 9 (fig.2), a South Sudanese boy who fled to a nearby swamp with his mother and grandmother when civil war spread to their village; Oleg, 11 (fig.3), whose rural coal mining town of Nikishino, Ukraine, came under heavy separatist fire in the months following a pro-Russian insurgency; and Hana, 12 (fig.4), a Syrian refugee who works with her family as a farm laborer in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The film is narrated by the three as they express their feelings over the state of grief and precarity they navigate on a day-to-day basis, and their hope for a future that feels impossibly distant. An introduction to these displaced minors doubles as an introduction to the technology of the new virtual reality. The children introduce themselves directly to the camera rig and glance in its direction frequently, their words surrounding the viewer in the form of English subtitles free-floating in the middleground: they are on display, and often the technology, the camera rig, a disembodied eye, becomes the focus of attention as well. Shooting with a cutting-edge camera rig consisting of eight GoPros with modified wide angle lenses, directors Imraan Ismail of Within and Ben Solomon, a videographer for the Times, place viewers literally at the center of the action, or inaction, encouraging them to direct their own vision and look where they please (Welsh, 2015). To simulate the virtual surrounds of the three locations featured in the film, The Displaced should be viewed through a head-mounted display (HMD), of which Google Cardboard, a foldable cardboard case with two lenses at its center, is one. The tensions at play between the metaphoric pursuits of an inconspicuous “last medium” and the current material limitations of its mode of viewership provides fertile ground for an analysis of the new virtual reality’s political mandate: to act in the face of direct experience. Built on the back of a historied documentary tradition of making complicit otherwise “passive” viewers in the material they are shown, prerendered, or cinematic, virtual reality raises numerous questions over the current role of the witness within a screen culture dedicated to the ubiquity of technological interpolators and challenges the postmedia paradigm even as it creates the conditions of its possibility.
Figure 4: Hana, from New York Times’ The Displaced (2015)
To understand what effect the rhetorical turn of the postmedia has on the actual politics of a new medium hailed as the last requires delineating between the various forms of what is commonly termed virtual reality, and between those that only exist in theory and those that operate in the real world. The Displaced, which was released alongside the U.S.-wide launch of the New York Time’s virtual reality application for smartphones, is particularly emblematic of the new virtual reality, a term that contemporizes an idiom that has outlived a number of referents throughout the decades. As an expression that attempts to differentiate between virtual reality’s conceptual articulation and its recent materialization in the form of 360-degree video, the New Virtual Reality is a radicalized nonfiction that mimics the mode of cinematic documentary in order to communicate its true-to-life urgency. In her recent work, Pooja Rangan (2017) has reframed this form of urgent witnessing as a capitalization of contemporary emergency, one whose “implication is that lives hang in the balance: since the casualties of emergencies are often subjects who have been deprived of their civil rights and protections, emergency calls for a humanitarian, not political, response…” (p. 10) Rangan proposes “reading emergency against its humanitarian justifications” in order to politically redirect the energies of human crisis-based documentary away from their self-perpetuating tendencies and toward a nonhumanist, discursive ethic, where distant suffering (akin to what Luc Boltanski addresses in his 1999 book of the same name) is not in service of a normative moralization for its witnesses but a point of complicit contention (p. 10, her emphasis). The Displaced, for one, uses its panoramic vistas and direct testimonials to transform distant spaces and forgotten conflicts into the here and now of its viewers. The New Virtual Reality is utilized to reveal our own world, not one that has yet to be realized: towards self-justification, the new virtual reality is used to make the emergency it depicts real, so that what is real is what it depicts and what it depicts is what is real. It foreswears its technological origins within the military-industrial-academic complex in order to embrace its implicit humanistic function within visual culture.
Paralleling the ways documentary is juxtaposed against fictional narrative, virtual reality represents the movement between the actual events and structures that create an observable universe and their virtual shadows. The kind of witnessing required of the VR viewer is informed in part, for example, by its own representation in science fiction films like Brainstorm (Trumbull, 1983), Brainscan (Flynn, 1994), Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995), and even The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999), where VR becomes the vehicle for experiences of the abject real: graphic violence, raw sexuality, and death itself. These films imagine a VR spectator whose very motivation for accessing the real through virtualizing technologies is prompted by the death drive. Death, an unrepeatable and ultimately inaccessible experience, is representative of the allure of virtual reality, that one could become witness to something so impossibly real as their own demise. Ironically, for these films, porting one’s consciousness into a technological apparatus doesn’t entail one’s immortalization but rather a more complete embrace of mortality itself. The opportunity to witness and thus experience the real outweighs both the primary suffering endured by those it depicts and the dangers implicit in making external to oneself their own fragile consciousness. As one memorable line from The Matrix states, “The body cannot live without the mind,” explaining how death marks the overlap between virtual world and real world, between the fictional construct of the matrix and the objective existence of the real. As the postmedium of virtual reality ventures to integrate these two paradigms – fiction and nonfiction – into a singular, knowing consciousness, the ethical imperative and political realities once embodied by the complicit, witnessing subject have in turn become threatened by obsoletion.
The theoretical basis for my close reading of The Displaced is a mélange of documentary studies approaches to the witness, realism, and the ethics of the image. Adopting the voice of the VR industry and its popular rhetoric, as I will oftentimes do, reveals its unique fallacies, especially when repurposed alongside the sobering critiques of certain theoretical interlocutors. Following the logic of the “last medium” paradigm towards its ultimate conclusion is meant as a radical reading against its original aims. What is experienced and identified with in the new virtual reality is not what the medium depicts so much as the medium itself, not the representational role assumed by the medium but its very apparatus; herein lies the progressive potential as well as the pitfalls of virtual reality nonfiction, for its primitive articulation provides an outlet for critical distanciation yet portends of a far more integrated system designed for cathartic moralization. The history that heavily informs The Displaced – especially as it’s a VR experience still beholden to the photographic image – simultaneously invokes the witness, realism, and the act of mediation in order to frame these terms oft-debated in documentary studies as coterminous, folded in on one another within its own cinema of space. On the opening page of their edited collection entitled Media Witnessing, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (2009) recognize the chiasmatic exchange between witnessing and the medium: “…every act of witnessing implies some kind of mediation…” and “…every act of mediation entails a kind of witnessing…” (p. 1) The truth claim of the new virtual reality collapses mediation and witnessing into a single, subjective “consciousness” that in turn promises a new ethical relationship with the media. Instead of witnessing in, by and through the media as Frosh and Pinchevski suggest of more traditional viewing experiences, the new virtual reality takes us within, within its space as well as, in a particularly Cartesian gesture, within its knowledge as being as such.
The contentious role that the witness and the medium have played within the porous parameters of media studies reflects the existential friction between direct experience and perceptual distanciation produced, in large part, in the wake of WWII. With the advent of the death of meaning following a global spread of mass human tragedy, the act of witnessing was demarcated by a political reality: what was witnessed was transformed at once into an unassimilable, affective truth experienced by the individual, and an ethical imperative to collectively respond. The act of cinematic viewership was theorized as an attempt to recreate this paradoxical relationship, to communicate the aporia of reality while preserving its material, political significance. The kind of meaning-making produced by this form of witnessing and the dangers it entails is described in more detail by Leshu Torchin.
While recognizing how contemporary discourses on the witness are inevitably shaped by the events of WWII, with the Shoah being the most significant referent, Torchin (2012) explains that the repeated use of Christian moralizations designating “innocent victim and redemptive suffering” leads to the symbolic displacement of genocide outside the realm of “world” as it is constituted socially and politically (pp. 10-11). “The symbolic frame risks overtaking the represented subject and reduces political urgency, sustained interest, and awareness of new geopolitical scenarios” (Torchin, 2012, p. 11). She calls this, appropriately, the risk of meaning-making, a challenge embedded in the “production of virtual witnesses through media” (Torchin, 2012, p. 11). Genocide, what in this case represents the very limits of representability, becomes trapped by its mediation, itself rendered virtual for its distant witnesses; the virtual witness can’t politically act in the face of the atrocious real for it has been symbolically displaced. The frameless views of a 360-degree documentary wants to avoid the “symbolic framing” of reality in order to resist displacing its viewers outside the material confines of a shared world.
In her canonical work Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes issue with the kind of “shared world” that photography in particular claims to engender. She problematizes the ways in which a viewing subject, removed from the “pain” of those represented, reaches empathetic climax through the photographs of a war-torn world that seems to exist apart from their own. “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain,” she writes (Sontag, 2003, p. 7). In the photographic hyperrealism of new virtual reality, the borders that divide and dissect space, that render the pain of others distant and unfelt, are targeted as a specific limitation of mediation itself. This act of challenging and crossing borders – whether in the case of the intra- and international borders that define life for the child subjects of The Displaced or the socio-cultural borders that divide subject viewed and subject viewing in the VR apparatus in general – becomes the topic of a vast number of 360-degree documentaries, “making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’),” as Sontag (2003) puts it, “matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore” (p. 7). The safety we feel is thus spatially defined, inasmuch as the audiences who are removed from these conflicted spaces can, counterintuitively, “ignore” them by way of “sharing” in them. We “share” in the spaces of pain and thus can put them out of our mind and into our body, through the borrowed experience of an-other. For Sontag (2003), this is the very failure of the photograph, a failure of empathy through empathy: “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind” (p. 8). To clarify her point, Sontag addresses the images that Serbs and Croats used during the Balkan War to galvanize their respective efforts; oftentimes, she points out, they used the exact same images of dead children, only with altered captions to suit their individual needs. “Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused” (Sontag, 2003, p. 10). The Displaced is a curious exercise of photography’s capacity to make its viewing subject empathize with the act of mediation as opposed to what it mediates. Ironically, in the name of a shared world, the world is removed from itself as its mediation overcomes the referent.
As the new virtual reality gains credence from its frameless viewport, it moves beyond the visual register implicit in the act of witnessing and instead attempts to communicate by feeling, a feeling akin to its own particular phenomenology of presence. Michael Renov (1986) notes that documentary as a unique cinematic idiom “foreswears ‘realism’” in favor of the im-mediate, “a direct, ontological claim to the ‘real’” (p. 71.). The mindfulness that the new virtual reality espouses carries on this tradition, yet where it continues to rely on the photographic medium to reproduce the real, its particular affective qualities straddle the divide between the presence of the real and the presence afforded by realism.
In an interview he gave on the NPR program All Things Considered, Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of the NYT magazine, emphasizes the stakes of a documentary project like The Displaced: “A lot of what – particularly in the realm of foreign reporting, what we do and what other journalistic institutions do is bear witness. And this is a way in which we can help put our readers in a position in which they can kind of bear witness too. They can have that experience” (Shapiro, 2015). Unlike the uni-perspectival vantage point offered by traditional film or photography, full 360-degree virtual reality purports to heighten one’s sense of agency and thus accountability for what they see. No longer is the relationship between image and witness only a figure of subjective understanding, it is now fully realized, as two viewers can report not only figuratively “seeing different events” but literally having sensed completely different sets of information. Where one viewer may have kept focus primarily on the center of the video, another may have constantly been turning and twisting in an attempt to absorb as much of the events depicted as possible. Another may provide a limit case for this kind witnessing and simply stare at the image’s zenith, the blank sky. To not look, as it were, would then be an act of forgoing one’s job as a witness, forgoing the agency that transforms into accountability, and also, in doing so, to forgo one’s role in conscripting the pain of others in the service of a virtual experience.
With the emergence of its own subfield of inquiry, documentary film has long been accredited for holding viewers accountable for the images that they see in a way that delineates it from its fictional counterpart. Although fiction and nonfiction film alike share in the indexical relationship to its recorded referent, thus instantiating its own unique relationship with their viewing subjects, documentary has long been theorized as a mass exercise in ethical confrontation. The shared responsibility for what kind of world documentary represents is born of the reciprocity between two spaces: the space of the film and our own space of experience. As cinematic virtual reality becomes more widely accepted as a form of “spatial cinema,” its complete collapse of these two spaces signals the rhetorical immediacy of its ethical mandate. In her ninth proposal featured in the essay “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Vivian Sobchack (2004) defines documentary in terms of its particular mode of spatialization: “Documentary space is constituted and inscribed as ethical space: it stands as the objectively visible evidence of subjective visual responsiveness and responsibility toward a world shared with other human subjects” (p. 248). Ethical space, as she describes it, is the exemplification of a “world shared,” or rather the sentimentalization of the space of mediation as a shared space of experience. Feeling that we share in the world represented, that we co-produce that reality, yields a sense of responsibility for those who occupy its boundaries.
Although, to understand how “ethical space” is created within the new virtual reality requires an important separation between the kind of indexical images Renov and Sobchack define as an “ontological claim to the real” and the virtual reality 360-degree video. Sobchack, for one, describes the vital difference between the filmed and digital image, a difference that defines the paradoxical claims of the new virtual reality. Sobchack (2004) explains ethical space as purely a product of the actual, and is careful to ascribe it to film and film alone: “It is a space that takes on the contours of the actual events that occur within it and the actions that make it cinematically visible. It is a space of immediate encounter and mediated action” (p. 255). In a different essay from the same volume, she describes the kind of virtual presence produced by the digital as something wholly at odds with the ethical space of the indexical medium. As opposed to the closed world of the indexical film, where the act of mediation itself transforms viewers into witnesses, the “intertextual metaworld” of the digital recording “has significant tendency to liberate the engaged spectator/user from the pull of what might be termed moral and physical gravity—and, at least in the euphoria of the moment, the weight of its real-world consequences” (Sobchack, 2004, p. 154, her emphasis). In the case of digital 360-degree documentary, the liberating effect of this “electronic presence” takes on a slightly altered meaning in that what liberates the viewer from this real-world weight is precisely the fact that we are able to “share,” in an increasingly corporeal way, the pain of others.
These spaces, with an added level of spherical veracity, are “so real” that we must watch in order to relieve ourselves of this weight; the “euphoria” gained is the ironic combination of becoming witness to a shared world and, as a result, feeling relieved of its “real-world consequences.” In this way the new virtual reality is a step toward a fully integrated system of postmedia in which we engage primarily to experience all the ills of the world and register them as our own experience, doing our part, sharing the load, as it were. Although affectively potent, so much so that we are told that the reality we experience in a head-mounted display (HMD) is our reality, that we in fact “become” the images we see, virtual reality recreates presence only in a kind of boundless absence.
Removing the frame from its testimony, nonfiction virtual reality strips from its images their “urgency,” the word Georges Didi-Huberman (2008) uses to describe what is lost in the Sonderkommando photos taken from inside Auschwitz when the condition of their taking is literally cropped out. The primacy of the witness in relation to the photographic “evidence” captured, “snatched” in Didi-Huberman’s language, is “cropped out” as it were, removing from its discourse the “urgency” which “is a part of history” equal to what the photos themselves display (Didi-Huberman, 2008, p. 38). The primacy of the witness in The Displaced is often superseded by its interactive elements, its testimonials and the history of their recording “cropped out” according to the viewer’s own “framing,” their urgency replaced by Rangan’s humanitarian emergency. Paradoxically, giving more freedom to the witness of this testimony downplays the complicity of the witness in the events she has been privy to, replacing it with a hand-picked experience of cathartic moralization and release.
Figure 5: Image from New York Times’ The Displaced (2015)
The ironic task of The Displaced is to place its viewing subject in a place of displacement, a process of displacement via the paradox of virtual realism. This is also the irony of an a priori subject position of presence, of Dasein, the elusive sense of Being-there that virtual reality, on the one hand, strives to recreate and, on the other, displaces entirely into the virtual. This dualism determines the self-defeatism of the new virtual reality: as it wars against mediation itself, against that which denies us the sense of culpability we truly desire, it strips us of our responsibility for what appears around us. Appearances, what Slavoj Žižek (1998) describe as being “lost in today’s digital ‘plague of simulations’,” are surprisingly all-too abundant in The Displaced, which relies on the symbolic interpolation of photographic realism to lend the appropriate level of truth-effect to the story of its three children (pp. 484-485). The play between epiphaneia — appearance, as in, the suprasensible, what Žižek (1998) calls the “transcendental dimension” that peaks out from (appears) behind the image — and parousia — presence, as in, a complete being-there, where imaginary and real lose their distinction — establishes the internal dispute of The Displaced, a limit case that proves symptomatic of photographic reproduction’s lasting influence on our sense of place, the virtual, and the real (p. 484).
With a few lines of expositional text at the start, The Displaced historicizes its narrative while also laying further groundwork for its truth claim. It reads: “Nearly 60 million people around the world have been driven from their homes by war and persecution – more than at any time since World War II.” Its gesture toward the Second World War defines the stakes of the contemporary moment as sharing in the unprecedented nature of a global conflict that to this day determines the limits of humanity’s self-destructive power as well as the limits of representability itself. Both ground zero for humanism’s failure and its resurrection, WWII is not only a latent determinate of the film’s subject matter, framing the grave realities it reproduces and making an appearance in the form of a Ukrainian memorial in one critical scene, but it inflects the aim of the film’s hyperrealism, reminiscent of what André Bazin (2005) calls “a form of self-effacement before reality” pioneered by Italian neorealists immediately following WWII (p. 29). The only way to capture human crisis is to let the space of the film unfold, its open-framed mise-en-scène creating a continuity between its space of experience and our own. Indeed, the faces of the three children portrayed in The Displaced often resemble the faces – Edmund in Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948), Bruno in Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), both children – that Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica capture in their own effort “to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality” (Bazin, 2005, 29, his emphasis).
What is less recognizable than the similarities The Displaced shares with film form and the historical precedent of the kind of mediation it espouses, are its 360-degree views and HMD interface that produce a set of unique discoveries. Holding the Google Cardboard, for example, up to one’s face for an extended period of time takes a certain amount of discipline, and the stereoscopy can cause a good deal of eye strain when the two images diverge, especially when attempting to read text subtitles. More advanced HMDs like Samsung’s Gear, the Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive, are commonly known to produce less discomfort, yet there is still a certain amount of visual training one needs to undergo in order to reproduce the effect of being present in these spaces. One must look past the screen despite its nearness, to defy the screen surface that at once invites the critical “nose-against-the-glass enthusiasm” that Laura Marks (2012) celebrates, or rather, eyes-against-the-glass enthusiasm (p. xv). Yet the nearness of the images also defies the haptic glass surface and Marks’ haptic viewing as such, inviting one to “plunge into depth” in such a way that the surface melts into delimited space (p. 8). Witnesses are determined by their experience of presence in the Baroque geography of virtual space. In creating one continuous spherical image by combining multiple views, The Displaced and cinematic VR become a matter of infinite folds, a mise-en-abyme of fold upon fold upon fold, border upon border upon border, where presence is manufactured by a stitched visage of reality.
The assemblage that results from numerous overlapping images creates a sense of continuity despite its divided viewpoint. In Leibniz’s theorem, the “division of the continuous” is expressed not through “dismemberment” or severance, but as folds, “each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 6). Bazin’s continuum of reality is transformed into the continuity of mirror images. As an external space of internal spaces, the virtual reality apparatus folds the witness in on themselves, what Gilles Deleuze (1993), following Leibniz, also names a “death.” This is the death of becoming external to one’s own internal space; it’s the point of conflation with the mode of mediation, the folding in on oneself experienced within the HMD. This mimics the “death” that Sobchack (2004) correlates to the act of indexical documentary, where the possibility of capturing the moment of death is likened to the moment where the space of the medium – an “external space” – enters our own “internal space,” thus establishing an ethical relationship with its abject representation. Witnessing death, as made possible by the indexical image, in turn produces the witness. The new virtual reality, on the other hand, ingratiates the viewer not to the reality of external space but to its internalization: witnessing death approximates the death of the witness themselves.
Mounted to a boom pole, the complex camera rig is hoisted in the air by an anonymous boy who runs alongside Hana and their friends, producing, converse to the sole visual register, a sense of embodiment in space through the movement of the camera, the skin of the film enveloping its field of vision, its limbs faintly perceptible as edges of the sphere. As masterfully as the 360-degree view is recreated by the GoPro rig, the seams between images reveal themselves on occasion, when a human face or limb is occluded, sheared, by the stitch. It is a “glitch” unique to this new virtual reality, whereby the imperfect reconstruction of the hemispheric picture results in an uncanny dematerialization of what it depicts, breaking Bazin’s continuum in favor of Dziga Vertov’s constructionism. In a frameless vista, this imperfection lends the image its limbs, from the Latin limbus, meaning “hem” or “border,” a particularly constructionist dynamic reminiscent of Vertov’s intersecting frames. Two modes of dismemberment belie the seamless folds of its Leibnizian world: the fracturing of the spherical image and the war-torn landscapes the new virtual reality depicts. As virtual reality news documentaries such as The Displaced transport viewers to the most dangerous corners of the globe, “…sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street. …War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins” (Sontag, 2003, p. 8, her emphasis). War dismembers the space of the children as the 360-degree image dismembers the children themselves, separating limb, membre, from body. War creates and relies on its borders, on creating them and then breaking them, on tearing them open as if on the human body; seeing the sheared edges and partiality of buildings (in Oleg’s Ukraine, for example) is “almost as eloquent” as seeing death itself, for they mark the violent rupture of part from whole. These dismemberments, and other reflexive “mistakes,” such as when the shadow of the camera rig becomes visible, ironically lend the film a potent veracity that aids in maintaining the witness viewer’s virtual presence, an acknowledgement of one’s own displacement within a real that remains safely surreal.
If one has the mind to pause the film, a startling effect of human tableau takes form, its temporal fixity neutralizing the impact of one’s interactive vision, returning it to what Deleuze (1989) terms the “time-image,” the image firmly anchored to a single perspective of the past, of the history it shows. Like a natural history museum, bodies pose as if stuck in their own present, a museum of the present, of empty presence. The virtual potential of the depth of space realized by the moving film is reduced to a “still life,” as Deleuze (1989) puts it, “defined by the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own container…” (p. 16). The self-contained universality of VR mediation traps its viewers in a cycle of statically defined images of human and economic crisis. While the totality of 360 degrees attempts to combat the further segmentation of an already infinitely divided late-capitalist ethos, “they suffocate its inner potentiality [death of imagination], at the cost of the dysfunctions that constitute an integral part of the functioning of their system” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983,152). In other words, it virtualizes the witness’s sense of response-ability, safely deferring this ethical mandate only to embrace the very crises that make possible the act of witnessing.
As the stories of the three displaced children unfold – their separate corners of the globe illuminated by 360-degree visual and aural presence – one may choose to stop paying attention entirely; one may turn away from the images of the children in their quadrant of the environment and turn toward new vistas, effectively turning one’s back on the displaced children to see what there is to see, to renounce one’s own responsibility as witness. Their story is subsumed by my story, my own consciousness, the story of virtual reality itself. In that story, the degree to which Oleg, Hana, and Chuol experience a sense of belonging in a world that has seemingly cast them aside becomes inconsequential as my gaze turns to the virtual skies. Is that not the most emblematic portrait of VR: a viewer laid on their back, contentedly glaring up at the sky amidst the horrors of a distant conflict? …now so terribly close?
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AUTHOR BIO: Jake Bohrod is a PhD candidate and Annenberg Fellow in the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. His dissertation examines the theoretical implications of virtual reality documentary and the politics of interactivity within discourses of the real. His areas of interest include interactive and new media, media praxis, and documentary rhetoric.