The proliferation of screen cultures has transformed spectatorship. One can now imagine the spectator as someone watching a film on their mobile phone. What is less ubiquitous, but bound to change soon, is the spectator as someone immersed in a private world delivered by virtual reality (VR) headsets. The Internet is filled with videos of people’s first VR experience and these images of early encounters are reminiscent of spectators once terrified by the screen image of a train arriving at a platform. With one significant difference: Earlier, the audience was a collective but here it is an individual. We have access to their reaction but not to what they are watching.
No thresholds
The term ‘watching’ doesn’t quite capture the sensual experience of a VR film. Designed as an immersive experience that literally places you in the scene, most VR content is currently driven by a touristy aesthetic (walkthroughs of the Museum of Modern Art, point-of-view perspectives of adventure sports etc.), all of which are immediately gratifying but without the ability to forge lasting memories.
But some experiences etch themselves on your mind. One recent work, an experimental documentary film by Francesca Panetta called 6×9 , is a VR exploration of solitary confinement. The film positions the viewer inside a tiny 6’ x 9’ cell, with just a bed, a toilet, and a few books, and opens with a chilling greeting that says you will spend 23 hours a day here.
The film is just a little over nine minutes, but those nine minutes feel stretched as time is disintegrated by the claustrophobic space. The film draws on voices of prisoners who have spent years in solitary confinement, and uses techniques such as blurred vision, hallucinations and spatial dislocation to simulate what happens to them after long-term sensory deprivation. The experience is disturbing and one which you’re glad is over even after just nine minutes.
The filmmakers claim that “this is not like watching a documentary, you are in it”. One of the motivations behind the project was to build empathy by getting people to emotionally connect to an experience that is otherwise removed from most people’s lives.
The operative word, though, is empathy — and in recent years VR has come to be described as an empathy machine. Prominent VR filmmaker Chris Milk used the term in a Ted Talk and numerous filmmakers have rushed to adopt VR for similar reasons. VR’s claims to being an empathy machine is based on its ability to put you in another space not as a disinterested observer but as a participant.
Underlying these claims are a set of assumptions not just about VR and technology but about empathy itself. The word empathy is relatively new, coined as late as 1909, and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has called it “an exercise of the muscles of the imagination, making people capable of inhabiting for a time the world of a different person….” If for Nussbaum it is imagination that fuels empathy it seems to be at variance with VR’s insistence that only by wholly recreating a physical or spatial context can we be assured of generating an empathetic response.
How does 6x9 compare, for instance, with other mediums such as literature (prison memoirs, etc.)? In Hell is a Very Small Place , prisoner William Blake writes, “Life in the box is about an austere sameness that makes it difficult to tell one day from a thousand others. Nothing much and nothing new ever happens to tell you if it’s a Monday or a Friday, March or September, 1987 or 2012”. Solitary confinement, he concludes, is essentially a timeless place.
6x9 works on the strengths of VR, namely spatial translocation, but is unfortunately not supported temporally.
If solitary confinement is a timeless place where you measure time from screaming and beating up the walls to debilitating hallucinations in a matter of weeks, months or years, 6x9 collapses the entirety of solitary confinement into nine minutes.
Unpacking vocabulary
It would be difficult to deny that the experience is a disturbing one, but if it creates empathy, it does so in moderate, bite-sized morsels. What if the film had not been nine but 90 minutes long, what if it had gone one step further to become a nine-hour experience?
If sympathy works at a distance and empathy is about overcoming distance, then the real challenge of art is how the journey between viewer and work may be seen as a collaboration where the two meet halfway.
How may we unpack this vocabulary of a travelling sentiment in which the visually immersive experience produces a realistic space but with no consequences? Finally, can hyperrealistic immersiveness itself run into the danger of no longer producing empathy, but only an intense experience that feeds into an economy of attention already preoccupied by oneself and one’s feelings?
The author started watching films in theatres. Then video came and shocked him. Now, he tries to figure out even smaller screens and the future of image cultures.
