Frictionless : A virtual reality documentary
- Submitting institution
-
University of Ulster
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 86159832
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- Special European Union Programmes Body
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
https://ulster.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/REF2021/Ee8gu-R8kJZDmCOIVrpS_zsBLFWydbeQ6BR9D0z47izEpw?e=coYWpn
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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C - Creative industries and technologies
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Context:
As a virtual reality documentary, this work gives voice to the experiences of those who lived near a hard border in Ireland/Northern Ireland (during the Troubles) in a distinct form of mediated practice. The film is an output from an artist-in-residence project at the Playhouse Theatre.
Aims:
Frictionless invokes what Bazin (1967) calls total cinema a ‘total and complete representation of reality’ here using VR to both simulate an experience and link this to the lived experience of ‘other’. The work explores presence (Steuer, 1992), spatiality (Qvortrup, 2002) and their impact on the emotional resonance of testimony, whilst guarding against what Nash (2018) calls ‘improper distancing’.
Methodology/Findings:
The ethical implications for this nascent medium are not well understood, there is a risk of empathy being the viewer’s only appropriate emotional response (Hassan, 2020). The effect that VR’s spatiality has in the context of re-traumatisation needs consideration, particularly its effect on the emotional reading of the work, given the context imbued on each location through the dialogue. Through design, materiality, the positionality of the user, interactivity and narrative agency, we can guard against the notion of VR as an ‘empathy machine’ (Schutte, 2017). The film juxtaposes victims’ and survivors’ testimony in the form of audio recordings, with locations filmed in 360 degrees from present day. Participants, appear only at the end of each story, placing the viewer and participant together in a symbiotic relationship at their site of past trauma. Exploring presence (McRoberts, 2018) in this way adds an emotional punctuation giving agency to the past through its juxtaposition with present though the viewer’s ‘embodied transportation’ may form part of any new contextualised understanding. (Nash, 2018).
Dissemination: The project was premiered at the Art in Place of Conflict conference (funded by EU PEACE IV), Playhouse Theatre, 17th of September 2020.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -