Abstract
This chapter looks at the role of Virtual Reality (VR) in testimonies which are co-created by survivors and witnesses, by artists, programmers, designers and audiences, by humans and non-humans. It shows what VR can contribute to testimonial, witnessing and memory practices by exploring the wide spectrum in which VR testimony is currently employed, from realistic reconstructions and 3D immersive virtual environment (IVE) simulating first-hand experience of survivors, to tools for forensic analysis. VR testimony can be found in educational, archaeological, commemorative and judicial contexts and serves a range of functions. This chapter explores the notion of VR as an “empathy machine”, the role of AI in VR testimonies and collective processes of remembering which are increasingly distributed across a network of human and computational agents.
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Notes
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Antonin Artaud coined the term in 1938 when he spoke of the theatre as “la réalite virtuelle”, a reality that is both illusory and purely fictitious. Ivan Sutherland (MIT) was the first to create a VR headset in 1960 that attaches the eyepiece to the head and allows for the movement of the head to guide movements within computer simulations.
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We will follow Mandy Rose (2018) in our preference for the term ‘participant’ over ‘user’.
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For example, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team who ensures that the former torture centre turned memorial museum ESMA in Buenos Aires safeguards potential forensic evidence which the site can still provide.
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“Central to our contemporary framework for interpreting traces and evidence is the fact that the initial interpreters or mediators of evidence are no longer necessarily human, but often automated or semi-automated technologies of detection and imaging” (Bøndergaard, 2017: 27; see also Weizman, 2014: 10).
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See, for instance, the controlled, small-scale study by Peck et al. (2013) in which participants experienced their virtual body as dark-skinned, which, according to the authors of the study, has led to a subsequent (if only temporary) reduction of implicit racial bias and negative interpersonal attitudes.
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“The phrase ‘empathy machine’ was first used by the film critic Roger Ebert to describe the power of cinema to allow the viewer to ‘understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears” (Farmer, 2019).
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The VR experience is a collaboration between the UN SDG Action Campaign, UNICEF Jordan and Hollywood Production studio Vrse and was co-created by Chris Milk and Gabo Arora. It was released on the VRSE application and iTunessay and screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image and countless UN forums and conferences. It received the Interactive Award at the Sheffield International DocFest.
- 16.
In all their hypermediacy most VR experiences aim for lifelike immediacy, for psychological realism and co-presence, which has the potential to trigger various forms of misappropriation in audiences, ranging in degree from vicarious/secondary trauma to what Kate Nash calls “improper distance”, responses which potentially overshadow VR’s therapeutic and humanitarian prospects (Nash, 2018).
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Note that consumer AI-based assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Contact Center AI are able to sustain multi-turn conversations that involve natural sentences as opposed to discrete ‘yes’ or ‘no’ instructions.
- 20.
See the first manifesto on VR ethics by Madary and Metzinger (2016).
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Simine, S.Ad., Ch’ng, E. (2023). Distributed Remembering: Virtual Reality Testimonies and Immersive Witnessing. In: Jones, S., Woods, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13794-5_14
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