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Virtual documentary: the virtual real and its rhetorical legitimations

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Virtual documentary: the virtual real and its rhetorical legitimations

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VIRTUAL DOCUMENTARY:
THE VIRTUAL REAL AND ITS RHETORICAL LEGITIMATIONS

by

Jacob Bushnell Bohrod

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

May 2021

Copyright 2021 Jacob Bushnell Bohrod

ii

for my parents,
who taught me to dream vigorously at the world
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Acknowledgements

I have to start by acknowledging the immeasurable role the city of Los Angeles has
played in both the virtual and actual becoming of this project. For those who say the city of
angels is shallow, I would agree wholeheartedly but not before offering an addendum: it is as
shallow as the screen. At once a mirror and a void, its translucency is artificial, that may be, but
it is translucent nonetheless. It means exactly what it intends. There is no use attempting to
pierce the surface; all there is to know is skin deep. And that is both a comfort and deeply
unnerving. The good thing about a place where what you see is what you get, as soon as the view
gets ugly you can change perspective. I have never experienced a place brimming with such
virtuality, a setting so charmed with parallax. Above all, I will cherish the city’s spirit of
generosity. I have learned that it is not just a Hollywood banality, Los Angeles truly does
discover people.
Many people were there from the earliest stages of this journey, who witnessed its
turbulent incipience and shaped its ideas in all their grotesquery. I want to thank my friends and
associates Mike, Isaac, Maria, and George whose intelligence and humor lent me strength and
this project its diversity of thought, and who numbered among myriad other graduate
interlocutors paramount to my growth as a scholar and a person. To Bill and Tom, and all the
graduate workers who fought for and continue to fight for unionization and an equitable future
for higher education, thank you for your passion, care, and solidarity. Someone who exerts an
inextricable influence on my way of thinking is my colleague, comrade, and fellow member of
the highly exclusive Cohort of Two, the good homie Trace. I have enjoyed being your disciple
all these years.
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Better writers and greater minds provided much needed encouragement and even more
needed humility along the way. Thank you to Donna Casella from my time at Minnesota State
Mankato, the second film scholar I ever knew but the first to tell me to pursue my ideas to their
very end and without hesitation. My deepest gratitude goes to my dissertation committee – Tara
McPherson, Michael Renov, and Virginia Kuhn – for their inspiration, generosity, and patience;
they were the critics in my head who kept me company and kept me honest. And I can’t express
enough my indebtedness to my advisor, Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose first lesson was also the last,
that brilliance means nothing without kindness. I have treasured the opportunity to learn from
and work alongside you.
No words can properly characterize my feeling of thanks for Paul and Bree, respectively,
my own guardian angels, gracious souls, the animating ideals of this project and the will to
continue were forged in our lengthy and joyful conversations.
Thank you to my dear friends Conor and Stefania, who made Los Angeles feel like home.
And to the love lost and found throughout these many years, none of this would be
possible without you.
With a heavy heart I pay tribute to my Baba, who passed before she could see this
finished. And to Poppie who, despite his longevity and determination, was robbed the chance to
see me walk. They share this with me.
I have to thank my brother, Nate, my soulmate and the first film scholar I ever knew,
from whom this project derives its critical resiliency. And finally to my parents, Nancy and
Bruce, my shelter no matter the storm. If only I could do as good by others as you did by me.

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Table of Contents

Dedication........................................................................................................................................ii

Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................iii

List of Figures................................................................................................................................vii

Abstract..........................................................................................................................................xii

Introduction......................................................................................................................................1

Immersion: 360º of Separation in the New Virtual Reality ..........................................................21
Within................................................................................................................................21
The (Fictional) Origins of Immersion ...............................................................................29
Spatial Continuity .............................................................................................................37
The Tradition of the Victim from Housing Problems to The Displaced...........................51
“Ethical space”: The Displaced.........................................................................................66
Without..............................................................................................................................78

Presence: Photogrammatology and the Making of Virtual Histories ...........................................81
What are you now? ...........................................................................................................81
A Note On Presence Terminology.....................................................................................89
Photogrammatology...........................................................................................................99
Visual history, virtual history..........................................................................................109
Virtualizing Palmyra, Syria.............................................................................................118
What is Palmyra?.................................................................................................122
The Case of the Two Louis..................................................................................127
Spread what has been destroyed..........................................................................131
Coda.................................................................................................................................138

Interaction: Theorizing Documentary Impotentials.....................................................................141
Just Gaming.....................................................................................................................141
“Interactive Documentary” and the Agential Document.................................................148
The “I” of the Index.........................................................................................................163
Reparative Virtual Realities.............................................................................................171
Degrees of Freedom in Plato’s Cave...............................................................................177
Perceptual Latency, Political Latency..............................................................................181
Playing with Potential......................................................................................................191
Case Analysis: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice...................................................................194
vi

Conclusion, or, Embodiment: Become Your Own Documentary ..............................................204
A Dire Fantasy.................................................................................................................204
Prosthesis > Mimesis.......................................................................................................212
The Documentary that Never-Have-Been.......................................................................222

Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................227
vii
List of Figures
1. Immersion
1.1. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). .........................................................................27
1.2. Rainforest Cafe. .....................................................................................................................32
1.3. The Battle of Gettysburg (cyclorama) (Paul Philippoteaux, 1883). .......................................39
1.4. Matterport’s digital “dollhouses”. ..........................................................................................44
1.5. The oculus of Camera degli Sposi, painted by Andrea Mantegna (completed 1474) in the
Palazzo Ducale at Mantua. ............................................................................................................47
1.6. Panorama of Flatiron Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903). .....48
1.7. Panorama of Flatiron Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903). .....48
1.8. Panorama of Flatiron Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903). .....48
1.9. The Ledge (Dewar, 2017). .....................................................................................................49
1.10. Clouds Over Sidra (Arora and Milk, 2015). ........................................................................59
1.11. Growing Up Girl (RYOT, 2015). ........................................................................................62
1.12. Growing Up Girl (RYOT, 2015). ........................................................................................62
1.13. Project Syria (Emblematic, 2015), before the blast. ............................................................64
1.14. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Oleg stands in the rubble of his school. ........71
1.15. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Oleg and his friends sit at a WWII
monument. .....................................................................................................................................73
1.16. Bruno in Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948). ..........................................................................72
1.17. Edmund in Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948). ............................................................72
1.18. Chuol in The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). ........................................................72
viii
1.19. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Hana and her friends, in the hems of the
image. ............................................................................................................................................76
1.20. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). A 360-degree tableau. ...................................78
2. Presence
2.1. “Notre-Dame: Indoor+Outdoor (crowdsourced)”. ................................................................82
2.2. A participant tries Richie’s Plank Experience (Toast VR, 2016) at Mobile World Congress,
Barcelona. .....................................................................................................................................96
2.3. The Enemy (Khelifa, 2016). .................................................................................................101
2.4. #100Humans (Schechter, Gasking, and Gombos, 2016). ....................................................101
2.5. “Photogrammetric image of northwest facade looking southeast at fire damage,” Washburn-
Crosby Milling Complex, Washburn "A" Mill, 710-714 South Second Street, Minneapolis,
Hennepin County, MN. ...............................................................................................................104
2.6. “ELEVATION OF BRIDGE”, Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, Wissahickon Creek Viaduct,
Spanning Wissahickon Creek, north of Ridge Avenue Bridge, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County,
PA. ............................................................................................................104
2.7. “Photocopy of right-hand plate of photogrammetric stereopair”, Perry E. Borchers,
photographer, 1974. St. Mary's Seminary, 600 North Paca Street, Baltimore, Independent City,
MD. .............................................................................................................................................105
2.8. Untitled (László Moholy-Nagy, c. 1940). ............................................................................106
2.9. A LiDAR visualization from the perspective of a self-driving car. .....................................107
2.10. “Sin título by Alejandro Otero, 1954” (Arc/k Project, 2018). ...........................................112
2.11. “The Fortress of Buhen” (Bill Riseman, 1994). ................................................................114
2.12. “Temple of Bel” (Arc/k Project, 2016). .............................................................................119
ix
2.13. Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (Tiepolo, 1725/1730). ......................................126
2.14. Views of the Ruins of Palmyra (van Essen, 1693). ............................................................128
2.15. “Temple of Bel”, Lepagelet and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault after Louis-François Cassas.
Etching. .......................................................................................................................................129
2.16. “Three-part panorama from the Temple of the Standards” (Louis Vignes, 1864). Albumen
print. ............................................................................................................................................130
2.17. “Temple of Bel” (Louis Vignes, 1864). Albumen print. ...................................................130
2.18. “Temple of Bel, view of the cella” (Louis Vignes, 1864). Albumen print. .......................130
2.19. “Temple of Baal, Palmyra, Syria”, sanantharam, from Microsoft Photosynth, the
discontinued crowdsourced photogrammetry modeling application. .........................................136
2.20. Campanile Movie (Debevec, 1997). A digital, three-dimensional Campanile created from
only a few photographs. ..............................................................................................................138
3. Interaction
3.1. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). ...........................................................146
3.2. The Unexplained (FlagTower, 1996). The first i-doc? ........................................................152
3.3. FlagTower advertisement. ....................................................................................................153
3.4. Stevie (James, 2003). ............................................................................................................158
3.5. Stevie (James, 2003). ............................................................................................................158
3.6. JFK: Reloaded (Traffic Games, 2004). ...............................................................................166
3.7. The Cyber Banana by Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi. ...........................................................167
3.8. Darfur is Dying (Ruiz, 2006). ..............................................................................................170
3.9. Darfur is Dying (Ruiz, 2006). ..............................................................................................170
x
3.10. An example of “roomscale” VR and the HTC Vive “lighthouses”, from VR developer Stress
Level Zero. .......................................................................................................................180
3.11. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014). A photogrammetric model used for
the setting of the game. ...............................................................................................................192
3.12. Star Wars: Battlefront (EA, 2015). ....................................................................................193
3.13. Primary (Robert Drew, 1960). An over-the-shoulder view of John F. Kennedy campaigning
for the Democratic presidential nomination. .........................................................195
3.14. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). An over-the-shoulder view of Senua and
her personal hell. ..................................................................................................................195
3.15. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). Using “focus”. .................................197
3.16. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). In order to signal its accuracy, the game
opens by crediting a mental health advisor as well as a historical advisor. ......................200
3.17. “Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis.” The top image represents a characterization of psychosis
offered by one of the game’s advisors. .......................................................................................201
3.18. “Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis.” The bottom image is the next still in the featurette, depicting
an instance in the game where the visuals match the advisor’s description.” ............201
4. Conclusion, or, Embodiment
4.1. STRIVR at Stanford. ............................................................................................................206
4.2. STRIVR virtual training for Walmart employees. ...............................................................208
4.3. Talespin’s “Barry demo”, a virtual trainer for firing employees. ........................................211
4.4. “Chronophotograph” (Étienne-Jules Marey and Charles Fremont, 1894). ..........................214
4.5. The Machine to be Another (BeAnotherLab, 2014). ...........................................................216
xi
4.6. Image from Peck et. al., “Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit
Racial Bias”. ...............................................................................................................................219
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Abstract

This dissertation’s primary objective is to interrogate the intersection of virtual reality
and nonfiction media, expanding and troubling the rhetorical limits of “documentary” in order to
better understand what role the concept of “reality” plays in contemporary political and cultural
discourses. At the basis of my argument is the contention that documentary shares with virtual
reality a truth claim, a legitimizing rhetorical position employed to specific, political and ethical
ends. I make this connection along two parallel lines: first, I examine VR’s legitimizing
rhetorical structures evidenced by academic, industrial, and cultural interlocutors; these
rhetorical legitimations are embedded in the fabric of photographic and cinematic documentary
practice, as well as the larger legitimizing ecosystem of cinema’s scientism. Second, I conceive
of documentary and its new media expressions as their own productive force of the “virtual real”,
a political reality that privileges the virtual as a conditioning element. Situating the objects of
virtual documentary under the banners of its most repeated truth claims (immersion, presence,
interaction, and embodiment), this project uses case studies to illuminate and illustrate the ways
in which virtualizing technologies have rhetorically constituted the shape of the real in the late
20th and early 21st centuries. It enacts an intervening epistemological framework that critiques
and locates in virtual reality nonfictions the expressions of a liberal humanist technocratic
worldview, delineating between which (political) realities are made possible and which must be
forged through the failures of virtual documentary.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

In 2015, a new wave of popular virtual reality content was triggered by the launch of The
New York Times’ virtual reality mobile application alongside the free distribution of a
rudimentary head-mounted display – the “Google Cardboard” – to thousands of NYT subscribers.
Concurrently, the Oculus Rift – a high-quality, consumer-ready virtual reality headset that had
once only been a Silicon Valley pipe dream – had become a reality in the wake of a $2 billion
company buy-out. Soon, following the NY Times’ lead and encouraged by the buzz around the
Rift, every major news outlet in the English-speaking West began producing their own
immersive content. Hundreds of tech companies, most freshly created but also some of the most
influential in contemporary history, pivoted to face the new, virtual wave heading their way.
Speculative capital gorged on the prospects of a virtual reality system in every American
household, where a single technology would determine how the average person communicates
with others, goes to work, receives healthcare, searches for information, watches movies, plays

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games, and ultimately conceptualizes and interacts with the world. As if dormant, waiting for the
right time to come back to life, virtual reality began a new public relations campaign, reflecting
and insisting on an established consensus of “reality” as it went.
Virtual reality once more became a useful idiom to describe the moment, a long moment
of crisis whose climax seems ever nearer yet that much farther away; a highly ideological
moment, where status quo systems of belief are upset and the nature of “reality” revisited. Just as
the first phase of virtual reality popularization corresponded with a global reorganization
following the fall of the Soviet Union, the most recent incarnation has been met with political
crisis, this time epitomized by a devastating Syrian civil war that, to the time of this writing,
continues to entangle almost every major power on the globe, rendering the future a precarious
prospect. The economic uncertainty wrought by more than thirty years of globalization has been
amplified by increasingly common environmental disasters, and populist ideologues rise to
power by beckoning to the imagined past in order to lay claim to the present. In this historical
milieu, the very act of representing the real is a weapon. Indeed it seems the virtual has come to
the rescue of the actual, where the stakes involve nothing less but the redemption of reality, and
the only way out of the rabbit hole remains a descent deeper into the maze of the virtual.
Recent developments in the field of nonfiction film and video have prioritized immersive
and interactive design as a means to better engage audiences with their own lived realities, if not
access that lived reality directly. The rise of virtual documentary marks an important departure
for documentary studies and visual culture on the whole. As the first generation raised on
computers and the Internet grows up, media artists and activists as well as established
commercial communications conglomerates have recognized the potential for a new form of
nonfiction that seeks to implicate its users in a real-world state of crisis, whether in the aim to

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remain dominate over a highly mercurial attention economy or to fulfill documentary’s political
and ethical mandate. Furthermore, with the introduction of a refashioned virtual reality apparatus
that intends to bypass the limits of perception itself, the terms of what constitutes the real-world
and our function therein are being renegotiated. Virtual documentary in the form of 360-degree
video, photogrammetric models, and digitally interactive nonfiction spaces embodies diverse
modes through which new media attempts to access the real following the advent of ubiquitous
digitization, what has often been labeled by film studies as an affront to the indexical relationship
to a shared reality.
This dissertation interrogates the intersection of virtual reality and nonfiction, expanding
and troubling the rhetorical limits of “documentary” in order to better understand what role
digital mediating nonfictions play in contemporary political and cultural discourses. To this end,
rather, it tries to understand reality as a discursive property itself, determined by the political and
cultural ideologies common to many forms of VR nonfiction. At the basis of my argument is the
contention that documentary shares with virtual reality a truth claim, or claims, a legitimizing
rhetorical position employed to specific, political and ethical ends. These truth claims are shared
in part by all “discourses of sobriety”, but in the case of virtual reality, as with the documentary
film, it benefits from both its technical mastery of recreating the observable world and its self-
reflexive structuring as a mediated experience.
1
Therefore documentary cinema becomes an
accurate heuristic with which to understand virtual reality, and, following, the interconnected
interests of immersive, interactive, and new media generally conceived. Comparing the kind of
actualities virtual nonfictions produce to their discursive and theoretical bases, I intend the

1. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 36.

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heuristic of documentary (and its rhetoric) to be a productive tool for new theoretical and
political formations.
The meta-discursive question guiding this project asks, “How should virtual reality
nonfictions be understood?” This encapsulates the quest for a suitable method – an
epistemological starting point – with which to track the movements of the virtual real, the
implication being that answering this question would also entail the adequate interpretation of
virtual reality and documentary in their own right. The subsequent question is: “What’s the
relationship between VR as a technical object and VR as a theoretical concept, as a method or
practice?” This question assumes that, as Mark Pesce asserts, “virtual reality is a methodology”
and that its theoretical purchase should be understood in concert with its technical being.
2
For the
sake of this dissertation, I will conceive of “virtual reality” in two ways. The first and primary
problematic addresses virtual reality as a theoretical concept. Virtual reality has long been a
thought experiment that engages the possibilities and limitations of subjectivity, as well as how
latent temporal and physical states condition what we think of as reality. The second approach
conceives of virtual reality as a technology with its own historical iterations, including its origins
in simulative computer science, its moment in the 1980s and 1990s as a techno-cultural
ambassador of the (near) future, and its most recent expression in the 2010s as an entertainment
medium as well as a tool whose modus operandi is to interface with the real. The latter instance
will be the most pertinent to this inquiry.
Furthermore, I will use the term “documentary” in a number of ways in relation to its
rhetorical function. It is first imagined through the lens of cinema’s scientism – its virtual
correlation to the sciences – and its contributions to the notion of visual documentation,

2. Mark Pesce, VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace (Indianapolis: New Riders
Publishing, 1995), 25-26.

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including cinema’s history of measuring objective reality, its photorealism, and, in turn, its use
for political influence. It is then conceived, relatedly, with regard to the documentary film’s
particular truth claim, which is invested in its indexical ontology, its historical connection to the
notion of socio-political truth, and, in turn, its use for political influence. What happens to
“documentary” and its contingent truth claims when they are subsumed by the virtual? How has
documentary been interpreted by the virtual reality technologies of world capture and display?
The chiasmatic rejoinder suggests of documentary a discursive agency, one resistant of
technological determinism and active in its libidinal pursuit: How have the virtual reality
technologies of world capture and display been interpreted by documentary?
As an attempted theoretical intervention, “virtual documentary” indicates a kind of
misrecognition of virtual reality for documentary and vice versa. The term indicates that digital
nonfictions, in a strict sense, borrow from the structures of documentary, but I also argue that
people already engage with documentary virtually; that is, spectators know it's not real, but they
treat it as such anyways. This produces a dissonance and disavowal common to experiences of
supposedly realistic representations of the world. The map, for example, is real inasmuch as it
represents reality. The same is true of the photograph; the likeness is real, and this threshold,
between reality and realism, is maintained by social codes upheld by certain rhetorical scaffolds.
Thus the rhetorical positions being referenced here are documentary “truth claims” but also the
supplementary discourse of documentary’s virtual “potential”.
Loosely organized around the rhetorical categories and claims most associated with
contemporary virtual reality – presence, immersion, interaction, and embodiment – this
dissertation bridges the scholarship of documentary cinema studies and new media along their
overlapping political axes. Largely absent in the literature is a formalized exploration and

6
theorization of “reality” (as an artifact, as a set of shared ideas, as a political formation) in virtual
spaces, as well as a formalized critique of new media documentary that focuses on the
ideological structures that animate its existence. This project reframes many of the key debates in
cinema and media studies using virtual reality. If not quite polemical in my aim, I take a
decidedly critical view of new media documentary and the ontological arguments that surround
it, offering instead an epistemological framing that considers the political and ethical
assumptions at its core.
Virtual documentary’s truth claims are represented by four intersecting, often
overlapping, idioms that lend the form its unique credibility, each of which head my chapters:
immersion, presence, interaction, and, as part of my concluding remarks, embodiment.
Investigating the intellectual history of these terms, I figure them as essentially claims of
(post)mediation. The first is the immersion claim. A technical imperative, immersion requires a
mediating fidelity robust enough to mimic human consciousness, to erase the imposition of the
apparatus in order to seamlessly take the place of one’s own thinking, dreaming mind. It
describes a degree of visual similitude with what we know to be real and the recreation of “real”
spaces. Virtual documentary repeatedly declares itself a liberator of contained, contested, or out-
of-reach spaces that demand external exposure if not “outside” intervention. Through 360-degree
exposés of the Global Refugee Crisis, physical and ideological borderlands, and topographies of
human trauma past and present, the New Virtual Reality expresses a reconstitution of the
documentary witness through the spatialization of its subjects and thus its particular mode of
viewership.
The next claim is that of presence. Presence, in VR researcher Mel Slater’s words, is the
“human reaction to immersion,” or, (if successful) the product of immersion that makes a virtual

7
experience, a virtual-real space, “believable.”
3
For a virtual document, the substance of its reality
– its material now-ness and contextual credibility – determines the user-viewer’s experience of
really-being-there, of the “presents” it makes possible. This chapter analyzes the 3D
photogrammetric models of cultural heritage sites in order to understand how reality is figured
by virtualizing technologies in historical terms. The topophilic techniques of virtual presencing
privilege the historical “persistence” of an internet- and data-driven archival practice hellbent on
conserving what has already been marked for destruction. Indeed, in the case of the Arc/k Project
and other similar attempts to digitally preserve Syrian material histories, photogrammetric
models and laser-scanned objects live out “[...]a certain fantasy of photography[...]” by assuming
the structures of documentary evidence, and in relieving these histories of their material weight
they help absolve a political project whose fatalistic approach to modern warfare triggered the
obliteration.
4

The third claim is interaction: the promise of a causal relationship between user-viewer
and the virtual worlds to which they relate. In relief of an indexical connection, the interactive
gesture forms the bond of response-ability between the subject and the virtual document, making
possible the very conditions of its documentary cache. The interactive ontology of the virtual
documentary substantiates its assertion to return whatever agency and opportunity for self-
determination was stripped of its participants, not simply within its digital spaces but in the
totality of real life. This claim is the most overt in its political implication, where shared action
between and among virtual others constitutes a virtual polis. This chapter displaces the
“interactive documentary” outside of its institutional epistemological determinations and

3. Mel Slater, “A Note on Presence Terminology” (Presence connect [3], 2003), 2.
4. Akira Lippit, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 52.

8
relocates it in the fictional confines of blockbuster video games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
(Ninja Theory, 2017). Evacuating the virtual documentary of its content in this way will reveal
the manner in which the virtual real and its gestural index help determine, delineate, and often
dissolve political participation and their “latent” manifestations.
The fourth and final claim is that of embodiment. Unique in that each of the previous
idioms frequently evokes it, but then less distinct as a result, the embodiment claim depicts
virtual documentary as a socially, economically, and politically productive force at the site of
user-viewers’ corporeal experience. By grafting the virtual apparatus to the body (i.e. head-
mounted displays, body-tracked retro-reflective second skins, etc.), the user-viewer is rendered a
product of virtual documentary herself, her gestural activity quantified and re-presented to her in
the name of performance enhancement. For this claim, not only is the truth of one’s embodied
existence “objectified” by the apparatus, but it’s mobilized as a source of labor, a means of
warfare, a tool of ideological reification. With companies like STRIVR or Debias VR, the
quantification of unconscious behavior is packaged and (re)presented to individuals as its own
kind of documentary meant to depict one’s mean error relative to certain institutional standards.
Virtual training platforms in enterprise and sports or educational portals meant to recognize
individual “bias” utilize the apparatus of VR to render the human body a documentary
infographic, primed to help build the new embodied realities of late-capital.
What the products of virtual documentary often uphold as the basis of reality, as well as
their political mandate, are conditioned by a cinematic imagination particular to the documentary
and its tradition of social commentary. This tradition is rooted, for one, in the scientism of the
cinema. As the driving force of cinematic evolution, the scientistic pursuit of measuring the
physical world, and therefore taming it as a quantifiable object, legitimized the practice of

9
cinema as one that could help make real often divergent interpretations of reality. In many ways,
starting in the 1980s, virtual reality came to be thought of as a similar tool, one that not only
provides new epistemological insights into the state of reality but also allows for a more direct
channel between human action and the world acted upon. In a kind of Hegelian undertaking,
virtual reality wishes to finally transform the cinema into a pure science, to invent it anew by
fulfilling its original promise. As they have in the case of the cinema, industrial promoters,
governmental bodies, the news media as well as academic interlocutors work to define the
technological ontology of virtual reality as an achievement in gaining unmediated access to
objective reality. Indeed, much of what fuels the return of virtual reality in the tech industry and
throughout popular culture is its upgraded computing power, allowing for previously unavailable
levels of verisimilitude between human sensory capacity and the virtual prosthesis. Its ability to
process real-world data input such as depth maps from infrared scans and 360-degree, photoreal
video couches VR’s truth claim in the observable world. The accuracy of its measurements, often
communicated in visual terms, to that end, becomes a determining factor for notions of objective
truth in virtual spaces. In accordance with this cinematic precedent, such a degree of access to
reality is touted as a force not only for entertainment but worthy of a liberal political order that
seeks to maintain power through a properly informed and moralized subject-citizen. The very act
of looking – or, rather, of experiencing – for user-viewers of virtual reality nonfiction is
conceived as a political act whose impact extends outward, with static individuals at the center of
a rapidly expanding sphere of influence.
Virtual reality, despite its long history as technical object and philosophical speculation,
seemingly resists sustained critique. In academia and as a technical object, it represents a
totalizing system where critique is labeled an external interloper and must be eradicated in favor

10
of recuperative analyses that highlight its “potential”. VR has become a kind of stand-in for not
only the tech-solutionism of a certain liberal political thinking but the academic obsession with
potentialities and thus a staunch resistance to critique for its own, political sake; potential is
embraced at the expense of critique, for critique without potential is deemed hollow,
unactionable. While VR’s elusiveness and false-starts make it a difficult object to pin down, it
remains, I contend, one the most visible articulations of the material and libidinal connections
between academia, the arts, and the government-industrial complex since cinema. Therefore it
requires a critical language that attempts to describe and inscribe VR within this economy of
power. To this end, I'm not only responding to the academy and the disciplinary segregation with
which it understands virtual expressions of reality, but to these expressions’ intersecting
institutions of legitimization, including the news media, the documentary and VR industries, and
popular culture at large. In this way, the critique itself becomes the “potential” of the object, a
discursively generative act with its own political intimations.
In response to the slipperiness of “virtual reality”, a current of counter-terminology flows
against its more institutionally recognized definitional phrasing. The term “virtual reality” on its
own is an empty signifier, traveling through the decades and from application to application
meaning different things dependent on its historical-political milieu. To give it the form of
documentary is to ground it, at least temporarily, in a metastable position from which a critique
is made possible. A discursive analysis of such a fickle idiom – virtual documentary – demands
several entry points, an analytic strategy that can match in flexibility. I draw in large part from
continental thought, especially in relation to the concept of the “virtual”. Jacques Derrida’s
deconstructive “grammatics” figures heavily in my mode of discursive analysis, as associated
thinkers like Martin Heidegger are virtually present, relegated primarily to the margins. Critical

11
theory similarly performs a latent function in this project, as Marx’s “reification”, Adorno’s
“interpellation” and “late capital” are often utilized yet go unremarked on. Additionally, I
employ film and media theory to address the implicit mediations between the virtual and the
actual as well as the mechanical and technical manifestations of “virtuality”. This
interdisciplinary approach means that, while retaining a kind of poetic license in my descriptions
and tone, I treat the object of virtual documentary as a cultural expression conditioned by power
in both direct and indirect ways.
All the material I draw from is self-reflexive, primarily because virtual reality is the
ultimate meta-concept for representational forms; to evoke it discursively is to bring it into
being, so to speak. It is an oxy-moron, a self-creating and self-negating dyad that characterizes
experiences of post-mediation. In this way I intend the dissertation as a meta-discourse, for it
seems, despite my epistemological goals, no articulation of VR can avoid its own productive
definition. I follow the rhetorical legitimations of documentary and virtual reality broadly
exercised by virtual reality engineers, VR and documentary practitioners, popular news outlets,
industrial promotional material, and academic theory in order to investigate how their
epistemologies – often at odds – share in a political project. This approach details the knowledge
production of virtual media to investigate at what points the twin epistemes of documentary and
VR are activated to prove or address a political argument based on real-world material effects. It
follows the scientism of earlier forms of mediated reality, the truth claims of cinematic
innovation, but also the various claims of those institutional discourses mentioned above. I draw
from the history of virtual reality and documentary practice, their philosophical articulations, as
well as online news sites (i.e. Road to VR), corporate homepages, and podcasts (i.e. Voices of
VR) to analyze the rhetorical legitimations of VR nonfiction as an industrial and cultural

12
phenomenon. These are the official and non-official, virtually official iterations of the culture
speaking to itself. They are also the virtual material platform from which believability and thus
an undeniable “reality” springs.
As a more detailed description of my chapters will soon show, I study expressions of
virtual reality documentary. And while these case studies illustrate several intersecting practices
of constructing the virtual real, they are not exhaustive in that virtual reality remains an evolving
and contested medium that contains, in the context of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, more
fantasy than reality. VR as its own media paradigm is expressed culturally and technologically in
a way that both reflects and instantiates its “real” existence, as in, the effects of the idea of VR.
In this way, the objects I analyze – despite their virtual fabrication – are equally expressions of
the real, of a documentary quality. They are common to one another in that they draw directly
from “reality”, translating visual, aural and spatial data captured by sensing machines into
computer simulations. Sometimes they are the very means of translation, but they share in their
effort to communicate reality in terms previously established by the documentary. Virtual reality
and documentary are coterminous systems of discursive practice whose ideological projects
insist on the political realities of the contemporary moment. These realities are marked by their
virtual doppelgangers, and a state of emergency that continually justifies the modern imperial
project. What has been dubbed reality becomes a co-producer of its virtual counterpart and vice
versa, through the technical process of reality capture and representation as well as the
ideological ecosystem that maintains its status as believably and then actionably real. So while
this project might not be described as archeological in the strict sense, it nonetheless traces the
expressions of virtual reality through an iterative lens, unearthing, as it were, the rhetorical and
technical evolution of virtual reality and its documentary objects.

13
The first chapter links virtual documentary practice to the spatial and ethical rhetoric of
“immersion” as its own source of legitimation. While the immersion claim coincides with the
fundamental conceit of mediation itself, it can be more specifically traced back throughout the
history of the plastic arts, the novel, and the cinema to define its unique spatial access to reality.
The technical fidelity with which VR attempts to immerse its user-viewers – especially its low-
latency 360-degree images – specularly translates the real world and simulates the totalizing
experience of perception. For user-viewers of VR documentary, to be phenomenally, digitally
“immersed” in the spatial order of the document is also to experience its content “first-hand”, to
become both witness and victim to experiences otherwise distant, dangerous, or deterritorialized.
For the products of 360-degree video documentary, the spaces depicted match in physiological
but also cognitive distance. That is, the immersive borderlands, warzones, and refugee camps of
the Global South obsessed over by VR documentary are a priori distant for their intended
audiences of the Global North. This chapter interrogates the role of witness-spectators in 360-
degree virtual reality nonfiction in order to establish the ethical stakes of the dissertation.
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 recent past 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

14
simultaneously relies on a series of normative moralizations and cathartic responses to constitute
its own viewing public. And yet, the formal limitations specific to this mode of address aid
under-theorized counter-reads that provide a radical rebuttal to both utopian claims of a virtual
reality “consciousness” and cynical dismissals of VR’s political potency. Built on the back of a
historied documentary tradition of making complicit otherwise “passive” viewers in the material
they are shown, prerendered virtual reality raises numerous questions over the current role of the
witness within a screen culture dedicated to the ubiquity of technological interpolators.
In the work of Gabo Arora, news outlets like The New York Times, and other key
proponents of 360-degree nonfiction’s humanitarian intervention, victims ranging from the
historical referent of the Holocaust (The Last Goodbye, 2017) to those of civil war and the global
refugee crisis (Clouds Over Sidra, 2015) are repurposed in a way that reiterates the Griersonian
“documentary idea” for contemporary audiences. These films and interactive experiences utilize
the documentary rhetoric of generating an empathetic and thus actionable response from its
viewers, evidencing what Pooja Rangan calls “new formal innovations” that help justify the
tradition of documentary’s “urgent ethical imperative of representing lives at risk.”
5
Through a
historical analysis of the documentary victim as originating with the ideas and practices of John
Grierson and a close textual analysis of virtual reality documentary, this chapter argues that the
liberal humanist interpretation of documentary representation was always already an expression
of “virtual” politics whose consequences in the age of new media are as potent as they are
diffuse. The mutually beneficial relationship between distant, “voiceless” global victims and the
immersive claims of virtual reality documentary not only perpetuates the tradition identified by
documentary scholars like Brian Winston but also helps define the virtual role such

5. Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2017), 2.

15
documentaries play in manifesting the technocratic model of liberal humanist political
engagement.
In the second chapter, virtual reality takes the form of the photogrammetric models that
make “present” distant peoples and the distant past. Where “immersion” lays claim to a
verisimilar spatial re-creation of reality and utilizes the history of filmic social documentary to
legitimize its ethical imperative, “presence” describes the virtual document’s capacity to
materially and experientially contextualize its spaces, to discursively engage user-viewers in a
present experience of something now past. As the effects of global conflict and environmental
ruin lay waste to the material record of the past, photorealistic texture- and object-mapping
technologies (i.e. photogrammetry) promise to not only preserve what is left of these precarious
archives, but to re-create what has already been lost in the virtual. In this way photogrammetry’s
objective mapping of the real world is used to justify an ethical shift away from a commitment to
objective reality and material immediacy toward the immaterial presence of virtual preservation.
Established by Brian Pope – a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and the founder of virtual reality
research and development group Cognition – the Arc/k Project is an initiative to preserve cultural
heritage and the material histories of past civilizations by way of crowd-sourced
photogrammetry. With early experiments focused on the heritage sites of devastated Syria such
as the Temple of Bel and Roman Amphitheater in Palmyra (sites that have since been destroyed
at least in part by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), the Project promotes the digital capture of
especially vulnerable architectural and monumental objects of historical or cultural significance,
“[...]even artifacts that have already been damaged or destroyed.”
6
This chapter seeks to exhaust
the functioning logic of the Arc/k Project, Iconem, CyArk, and other VR cultural heritage

6. Arc/k Project promotion.

16
preservation initiatives – those that must imagine and perhaps celebrate new ruins even as they
attempt to live out their mandate to conserve the old – in order to ask how self-preservation via
virtual documentation relates to self-ruin in the digital age. This logic extends to the larger
framework of photogrammetric virtual documents being developed by museums and other
conservation groups, as well as the artistic renderings of photo-real depth maps in documentaries
like #100Humans (Daniel Schechter, Linc Gasking, Rainer Gombos, 2016).
This chapter undergoes a visual historicization of Palmyrene ruins in order to understand
how photogrammetric documents write their own virtual histories, making “present” the past in a
way particular unto itself. The 18th century etchings of French explorer Louis Cassas, for one,
even as they add evidentiary value to the Voyage pittoresque, romanticize the Palmyrene past in
the effort to make it present, inviting the viewer to imagine its once-glorious monuments of
imperial achievement in order to preserve their ruination for a continent keen to extend its own
global foothold. Now that the monuments are gone, history themselves, a similar process of
making evident their past existence manifests itself in the digital reconstructions of the Arc/k
Project and others – claiming, with the same romance that Cassas inflected in his depictions,
“these things were here”. And yet the eternal referent has importantly become the ruins
themselves, not the buildings as they existed before their modern visualization. What was once
product of a romantic imaginary of the past, in the work of Cassas for example, becomes
(im)materialized in the 21
st
century; the digital replicate, a virtual catalogue of forgotten
experience, itself living between what is present and what is impossible, helps to maintain the
distance of the past while simultaneously affording us its “presence.” The “presence effect”,
even if just an effect, describes a desire to repurpose the past while at the same time recognizing
the impossibility of history’s true presence, or that history could ever truly be “present”. I ask

17
how a comparative practice of looking can reveal the ways that increasingly accurate
technologies of visualization paradoxically invoke their truth-claim to support a virtualized
experience of history for certain global populations.
Chapter three interrogates the interaction claim by way of the nonfiction practices that
translate “procedural reality” into simulative forms. Privileging the user-viewer’s subject-
position and gestural relationship with the virtual text, “[i]nteractive non-fiction works create a
new logic for the representation of reality.”
7
This logic, however, is guided and prefigured by a
status quo political imaginary that promotes the enlightenment of individualized actors –
primarily centered in the post-industrialized West – as the source of incremental progressive
political change. By gaining the agency to affect change in the way the documentary orders
information, narrativizes its documentary materials, and thus makes reality “knowable” through
something newly experienced as such, the user-viewer is implicated – the argument follows – in
that reality. In newsgames (i.e. Darfur is Dying [Ruiz, 2006]), serious games (Papers, Please
[Pope, 2013]), “historically accurate” simulations (1979 Revolution: Black Friday [Khonsari,
2015)], and virtual reality testimonial re-creations (6x9 [Panetta and Poulton, 2016]), the agency
of the user-viewer is conceived of as making agential the document itself, such that by way of
interacting with its content a politics of progressive action is achieved. The interaction claim
instantiates the gestural index by way of socially or politically “important” subject-matter, where
“importance” is defined by the level of humanistic agency afforded the user-viewer and the
humanist identification with the subjects she encounters. Interactive nonfiction challenges the
primacy of the index as documentary’s ethical ontology, replacing it with a gestural index that

7. Arnau Gifreu-Castells, “Mapping Trends in Interactive Non-fiction through the Lenses of
Interactive Documentary,” in Interactive Storytelling: 7th International Conference on Digital
Storytelling, ed. Alex Mitchell, Clara Fernandez-Vara, and David Thue (New York: Springer,
2014), 156.

18
effectively recuperates the liberal humanist approach to global political upheaval and explicitly
engenders a “humanistic approach to agency.”
8

And while the category of “interactive documentary” seeks legitimization by excluding
what otherwise could be termed a “video game” generally speaking, this chapter also conceives
of the virtual documentary as those nonfiction elements that insist upon the fictional interactive
spaces of video games like the Uncharted series (Naughty Dog, 2007-2017), Hellblade: Senua’s
Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), and Star Wars: Battlefront (EA DICE and Criterion Software,
2015). These interactive products “gamify” the documentary content that helps build their
playable spaces and characters: photogrammetric environments and props, real-time rendered
actor-characters, and digital historical artifacts. Such applications of documentary material in
popular virtual realities and AAA video game titles provide a limit case that de-centers academic
and industrial notions of interactive documentary based purely on subject matter. Indeed, by
existing outside or adjacent to interactive documentary as it’s commonly defined, these
nonfiction products are less easily incorporated into the humanist agential project that currently
legitimizes interactive virtual documentary. They mark a point of failure for the interaction
claim, or rather, they help re-imagine the failures of interactive documentary as their raison
d'être. I offer a series of counter-terminology – disavowal, latency, impotentiality – that draws
from theories of virtuality in order to conceptualize what kind of politics are made possible by
these inadequacies. I think there is potential where documentary fails miserably. Therefore its
failures receive extended critical attention.
My conclusion focuses on embodiment as a legitimizing claim that is born of and extends
from the three previous assertions. As a simulating dispositif, virtual reality makes direct use of

8. Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of
Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower Press, 2017), 2.

19
the embodied experiences of its users to register and respond to the gestural index as a mode of
reality production. The VR researcher Richard Skarbez finds that, in controlled studies of virtual
reality presence, participants overwhelmingly name “full embodiment” as the primary factor
determining their sense of symbiosis with the virtual real.
9
Indeed, our desire for embodiment
corresponds to an increased experience of tactility in the mediated apparatus, through the
ubiquity of mobile phones, for example, as they transform our palms into smartscreens. To this
end, head-mounted displays prioritize both the intentional and unintentional gaze of their user-
viewers, handheld wands and force-resistant gloves provide digital fingers and virtual tactile
feedback, and wearable haptics transform one’s skin into a virtual interface.
Echoing the cinematic engagement with embodied perceptions, the user-viewer of virtual
reality similarly undergoes a process of identification within the contours of its apparatus, its hall
of mirrors reflecting my vision back as the look of the other and refracting my embodied
experience into an infinitely distant horizon. It achieves – or attempts to achieve – its own
affective collapse by grafting the apparatus onto the body of its user-viewers. The “mimetic
knowledge of cinema” is bastardized by the VR apparatus.
10
In other words, its eyes become my
eyes, its ears my ears, its limbs my limbs. This is no longer a procedure of mimesis but of
prosthesis.
By quantifying and measuring the collective movement of bodily action within the VR
experience, the user-viewer is framed as a documentary subject herself. She, as the experimental
human subject, is the primary source of documentary data that drives embodied training

9. Richard Skarbez and Kent Bye, “#555: VR Presence Researcher Finds Full Embodiment to by
Key Component in Plausibility”, produced by Kent Bye, Voices of VR, July 11, 2017, podcast,
MP3 audio, 44:04. https://voicesofvr.com/555-vr-researcher-finds-full-embodiment-to-be-key-
component-in-presence-plausibility/.
10. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 151.

20
simulations that encourage the repetition of highly precise gestural feedback. In the sports
training simulations and learning modules of the VR company STRIVR, for example, what
remains excess to the productivity of one’s embodied experience is minimized in favor of
enhanced performativity. The gestural index of the virtual document is registered as its own
mode of labor production and the apparatus serves the ultimate goal of training the body to be
productive on behalf of the demands of late-capital. Where the embodiment claim asserts that the
VR apparatus will return control over one’s embodied experience to the user-viewer by
transforming her into her own virtual documentary – and by doing so it will be able to highlight
and correct for one’s suprasensible “bias” – in fact VR prosthesis grafts the ideological structure
of late-capital onto the body of the user-viewer.

21

I m m e r s i o n
360º of Separation in the New Virtual Reality

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.
-Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts

Within

The rebranding of Los Angeles-based virtual reality production company Vrse, thereafter
known as Within, signals a 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 gestured toward the origins of cinema and the new media, Milk 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

22
medium,” he says.
1
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 state of perpetual crisis of the late 2010s, virtual reality imagines its viewing
subjects as acting subjects, someone whose own act of witnessing the world shapes it anew.
Where the viewer once negotiated their role as witness 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.
For users asked to go within a prerendered virtual reality – a New Virtual Reality – such
as The New York Times’ The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben Solomon, 2015), whose creative
director is 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. Through
The Displaced, other 360-degree newsdocs and similar products of “immersive journalism”, the
last medium of virtual reality becomes the vehicle for a familiar documentary reality. Likewise,
in claiming to reconstitute the witness through an immersive viewership unique to nonfiction
mediations, the New Virtual Reality gains the cache and legitimation of the documentary and its
“ethical spaces”. 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

1. Chris Milk, “The birth of virtual reality as an artform”, February 2016, MPEG-4, 17:34,
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_the_birth_of_virtual_reality_as_an_art_form?language=e
n.

23
“passive” viewers in the material they are shown, prerendered, or cinematic, nonfiction virtual
reality raises numerous questions over the 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.
As a moniker for post-mediation, “immersive” media not only has a certain flexibility in
its address but it adds a layer of intentionality, of affect that guides its use. As an idiom it
connotes both specific instances of digital integration such as the computerized wristwatch as
well as a general set of design principles that in some heightened sense transport audiences into a
space apart from their own. For those crafting fictional worlds in which they intend to engross
their audiences, practices such as fully integrated visual effects, added dimensionality, and world
building have become the doctrines of immersive media. For nonfiction and documentary, the
implications of immersion go beyond the capacity to engage its viewers by way of a coordinated
set of designs. If documentary were to achieve immersion, it would successfully connect the
space occupied by “reality” with the simulative and immersive technology that makes such an
exchange possible. As Vivian Sobchack notes, to be implicated within the documentary space is
to enter an “ethical space,” to be immersed in such a way that renders its audiences responsible
for what they are witness to, or, given their newfound immersion, what they themselves
participate in. Where immersive media and the documentary mode of viewership coincide is
their promise of a delivery from the distanciation of the act of mediation itself. Yet where the
idealized viewer or spectator of documentary film must overcome the barrier that divides them
from and then returns them to a “world shared”, the audiences of immersive nonfiction
experience the space of documentary as their own virtual reality.

24
Insofar as immersion indicates a mode of being whereby the space of objective reality is
subsumed by the space of subjective experience, it acts as both a documentary precept as well as
a key legitimator of virtual reality. It is a spatial claim above all else, suggesting primarily a
continuity between otherwise separate or divergent spaces, something borderless, boundaryless,
and often invasive. The point of immersion also doubles as the point where documentary content
– containing a certain “ethical” quality, as Sobchack describes, and marked by its insistence on a
witnessing participant – meets the totalizing apparatus of virtual reality, specifically its 360-
degree images and what can be said of their “immersive” properties. Important to note, however,
is that immersion has been employed – by different thinkers and at different times – as an
umbrella term containing the spectrum of VR rhetorical legitimation, and is often supplemented
by the terms explored in more depth throughout this dissertation: “presence”, “interaction” and
“embodiment”. While this slippage remains revealing in itself, what differentiates immersion is
its specific claim to spatial transgression and cohesion, the promise to be fully integrated into
“reality” and the “shared world” of documentary spaces. Through documentary, it connotes
travel and transportation; an ethnographic, anthropologic cultural immersion in the tradition of
Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, and Jean Rouch; reportage, a journalistic tenet, to share in the
reality of the “embedded” reporter. When documentary functions as virtual reality, and vice
versa, the spatial doctrine of immersion is rhetorically transformed into an empowering state of
being. As Janet Murray indicates, “[...]immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that
the new environment makes possible.”
2
It may also be assumed, if one is to be plunged into a
new environment, that immersion also implies, for some or for most, a form of drowning.

2. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York:
Free Press, 1997), 99.

25
The idea of immersive viewership can be sourced at least in part by advances in
increasingly totalizing visual displays devised to conjoin disparate spaces and times. Often
journalistic in their intentions (yet equally designed to entertain), these immersive media of the
past provided the sense of a physical extension beyond the traditional frame and otherwise
impossible spatial access: aerial hot-ballooning painting, traveling and photographic panoramas,
ride-movie attractions and documentary réalités.
3
A deeper genealogy reveals that the notion of
being “immersed” in other spaces is not exclusive to the plastic arts, which, like the cinema,
were said to provide more an objective impression of reality than subjective immersion. For New
Romance novels and an emerging genre of fantasy fiction, scientific rationality, in the form of
documentary textuality, added the weight of reality to their stories, creating immersive worlds
where readers could quickly lose – or find – themselves.
4
With the advent of the cinema, as
documentary and early film history scholars note, the visual purchase of the photographic
medium becomes inextricably tied to the act of witnessing. The new media becomes
synonymous with a physical but also political collapse of previously differentiated spaces.
Drawing on imperialist theories of the continuity of a global political topography, the impossible
spatial access achieved through cinematic and especially documentary witnessing is conflated
with a capacity to connect with, empathize with, and therefore act on behalf of distant others.
Part panoramic painting, part cinematic revelation, the New Virtual Reality continues the
traditions of impossible viewership inaugurated by previous forms of documentary and advanced

3. See: Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and, Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in
Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
4. See: Michael T. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual
Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

26
by the science fiction imaginaries that shape conceptions of virtual reality’s immersive
capabilities (and limitations).
Central to the conceit of the New Virtual Reality is the contention that the liberal
humanist documentary was always already an expression of “virtual” politics whose
consequences in the age of new media are as potent as they are diffuse.
5
These VR
documentaries play a virtual role – an immanent ideological function – in manifesting the
contemporary technocratic model of liberal humanist political engagement. The result of this
attitude is further exploitation and commodification of victimhood, where victims “compete” for
documentary representation and thus humanitarian relief, in the specific lack of sustained
political change. The libidinal pursuit of their mediations oscillate between a desire to be
immersed within the space of mediation as its own “true” reality, and to be delivered from the
distance of the act of mediation through emersion.
6
The result is an “improper” distance, and
“ironic morality”, which often coincide with technologically determined mediations of reality
labeled “new”, reminiscent of the aforementioned New Romance as well as the new cinema.
7

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,

5. For a similar critique of the “liberal documentary”, see: Jill Godmilow, “What’s wrong with
the liberal documentary?”, Peace Review (Palo Alto, Calif.) 11, no. 1 (2007), 91–98.
6. Adriano D’Aloia, “Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Virtual Reality Immersion and
Emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema, no. 87 (June
2018).
7. Kate Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence,” Studies in
Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2017), 119–131, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796.
Nash draws on Lilie Chouliaraki’s notion of irony and “improper distance” to relate how
witnessing operates in VR documentary. Writing on the release of Jean Rouch’s 1959 Moi, un
noir and its combination of reportage and narrative, Jean-Luc Godard exclaims, “New cinema,
says the poster for the film. And it is right. [...]Jean Rouch, moreover, is constantly moving
forward. He now sees that reportage derives its nobility from being a sort of quest for a Holy
Grail called mise-en-scène.” Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings (New
York: Viking Press, 1972), 129.

27
a term that contemporizes an idiom that has outlived a number of referents throughout the later
part of the twentieth century (figure 1.1). As an expression that attempts to differentiate between
virtual reality’s conceptual articulation and its third-wave materialization in the form of 360-
degree video, the New Virtual Reality is immersive nonfiction that mimics the mode of
cinematic documentary in order to communicate its true-to-life urgency.
8

In her recent work, Pooja Rangan 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[...]”
9

Rangan proposes “reading emergency against its humanitarian justifications” in order to

8. I credit Mandy Rose for parsing the iterations of VR technology into “waves”, the first being
the rise of HCI in the 1960s and the second coming in the late 1980s alongside a more fully
articulated VR HMD. The 2010s marks the third-wave of VR technology.
9. Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2017), 10.
Figure 1.1. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015).

28
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.
10
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-legitimation, 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 an implicit humanistic function within visual culture.
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 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[...]”
11
Immersion
within the last medium – a frameless, 360-degree image – injects an increased level of agency
and therefore response-ability into this equation. 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

10. Rangan, 10 (her emphasis). See: Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and
Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass
Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.

29
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. What is experienced within the New Virtual Reality is not what the
medium depicts so much as the medium itself, not the representational or simulative 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
distancing yet portends of a far more integrated system designed for cathartic moralization.

The (Fictional) Origins of Immersion

As a media and mediating concept, immersion’s rhetorical origins lie in the modern
Western conceptualization of space and its social organization. Feeling alienated by a
modernizing world and instilled with a vague feeling of subjective and political division, a
burgeoning bourgeois society developed the scientific and cultural means to make sense of the
world, to bring nearer to truth the distant fantasies of empire. Making sense of modernity meant
smoothing over its inconsistencies and unintelligibility with evidentiary veracity. Even
imaginary spaces – especially imaginary spaces – were lent documentary description and detail
to approximate a harmonious, shared reality. The prerequisite for an immersive mediated
experience is that its world first must be real to itself, that is, it must engender a “consistency of
imagination” equal parts artistry and reportage.
12
The prolific detail of writers like Joyce,
Tolkien, and Faulkner fills the space of their narratives with boundaryless articulation and
engenders a borderless engagement, their consistency extending out to the reader herself. The

12. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 111.

30
descriptive and multi-modal properties of literature provide readers with a totalizing experience
of a different order than that of the illusionism of the plastic arts. Scientific rationality infuses the
novel with modern significance and aided its popularity in the nineteenth century. As Michael
Saler argues, for New Romance authors in particular, engaging in the discourses of sobriety
provided their fictional worlds a virtual reality that readers could place themselves in. He writes,
“[...]the worlds of the New Romance were usually receptive to the rational, scientific, and
consumerist trends of modernity”, and they textually reproduced the documentary aesthetics –
especially images of spatial organization – common to the modern project.
13
Through authors
like H. Rider Haggard and J.R.R. Tolkien, New Romance was “[...]distinguished by the indexical
idioms of scientific objectivity. Maps in particular were important for establishing the imaginary
world as a virtual space consistent in all its details.”
14
On top of making use of newly developed
technologies of printing images (i.e. half-tone lithography), the New Romance employed
footnotes, appendices, and other “paratextual elements” to aid its “illusion of objectivity”.
15
The
imaginary worlds of New Romance carried the evidentiary weight of reality, their abundance of
“concrete details”, as Roland Barthes puts it, establishing entry points for readers to participate in
the narratives to an extent that they couldn’t in their own modern lives.
16

Depending on the medium, for the subject immersion implies both a concentrated mental
effort (even if it’s often unexpected) and no effort at all, a letting go, surrendering to the currents
of a new reality. (Like Murray’s water analogy, immersion is not particular, and when subsumed,
one does not notice the water, that is, until you can’t breathe.) Through documentary aesthetics

13. Michael T. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66.
14. Saler, 67.
15. Saler, 69.
16. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989):
141-48.

31
and abundant textual detail, New Romance readers become absorbed into fictional worlds to the
extent that they feel themselves to be participating in the events of the story. A spatial relocation
coincides with participatory subject formation. Readers simultaneously transport themselves into
the worlds of the text and take on their own performative role; immersion requires “[...]moving
away from the immediate physical environment and losing oneself in a story.”
17
Through an act
of subjective transportation, they actively “generate fictional truths” in order to achieve
participation.
For visual media like the cinema and the New Virtual Reality, however, audience
participation takes a decidedly more passive position in relation to immersion. Where readers are
often said to “immerse themselves”, viewers are “immersed by” cinematic media. While they too
are cast as participants, viewers act through the ironic distancing of bearing witness. The
cinematic media always already generate fictional truths on behalf of its viewers. The
transportive capacity of the cinema is then hindered by how closely it conforms to reality. This
effect is compounded in nonfictional cinema, which resists the “fictional truths” of immersive
participation. “Paradoxically,” Marie-Laure Ryan posits, “the reality of which we are native is
the least amenable to immersive narration, and reports of real events are the least likely to
produce a feeling of being on the scene.”
18
She names the “docu-drama” as one attempt “to enjoy
fiction-like participation, not only in imaginary worlds, but also in historical events.”
19
When
confronted by the immediacy of its emergencies, viewers become all-too-aware of reality; this
results in an unpleasant, even paralyzing experience. Thus immersive participation ironically
involves a degree of familiarity and evidentiary anchoring – a kind of spatial coordination within

17. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,”
SubStance 28, no. 2 (1999), 116.
18. Ryan, 119.
19. Ryan, 120.

32
the mind of the subject – as well as a perceived detachment and deliverance from one’s current
reality.
Immersion is reserved for improbable experiences, distant yet recognizable, exemplified
most tangibly by amusement parks, theme restaurants, nightclubs, and other material spaces
designed to “transport” their audiences. Space itself becomes the ideal medium of immersion.
Amusement parks provide near-dangerous scenarios for thrillseekers and a consistency of
imagination enough to transport its visitors within its storyworld. American chain restaurants like
Medieval Times, Buca di Beppo, Casa Bonita, and Rainforest Cafe provide other-worldly,
“foreign” or untimely cultural experiences for their diners (figure 1.2). These experiences benefit
from spatial and thematic cohesion, replete with in-character staff and design details meant to
counteract any self-reflexive impulses.
Immersive audiences of this kind attempt
to remain as close to unaware of the
construction of the experience as
possible without ever truly succumbing
to its artifice. The “virtual reality effect”
that results is less replicable in the
cinema, which prioritizes the
“impression of reality” over the
totalizing suspension of disbelief.
20
Indeed, what virtual reality as a technological apparatus
guarantees is to synthesize the reflexivity of cinematic witnessing and the immersive properties
of real spaces.

20. Ryan, 113.
Figure 1.2. Rainforest Cafe.

33
Combining the viscerality of the amusement park with cinema’s impressionism, virtual
reality mobilizes improbable or impossible experiences of witnessing to bolster its claim to
immerse its audiences in the real. 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 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 to
making external to oneself their own fragile consciousness. As fans of The Matrix may recall,
while VR affords its users superhuman powers, those who die in the matrix equally die in the
real world. Death marks the overlap between virtual world and real world, between the fictional
construct of the matrix and the objective existence of reality. 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.

34
For the entertainment industry, VR marks both its inevitable death and the anxious
beginnings of something new. In reaction to the incremental manifestation of virtual reality
technologies, literary and filmic representations often picture VR as the harbinger of chaos, even
if they are at odds about whether or not this chaos would result in a revolutionary ontology or a
dystopic violation of progressivism’s most emblematic tenets. Frequently these texts use virtual
reality as a symbol of the loss of control, and in doing so, paradoxically, they anticipate a return
to control. VR then becomes, despite its chaotic potentiality, the herald of this will to control.
On the introductory page of his treatise on the cinema of simulation, Randy Laist
contextualizes the second wave of VR in the late 1980s by codifying the effect the Cold War had
on the American psyche. “If an emerging climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and feminism
had threatened the white male’s cultural supremacy, the Cold War provided a metanarrative that
consolidated power in the hands of a national father figure while simultaneously anchoring
reality itself to a stable set of familiar coordinates.”
21
With reality untethered after the fall of the
Soviet Union, a return to the laboratory was required, where the results of controlled
experimentation might yield something stable that could stand in the place of a Cold War ethos.
For films like Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992), often named as the quintessential
virtual reality referent despite its critical failure, VR both epitomized the contentious ground of
reality leading up to and immediately following the end of the Cold War and its reinstatement.
The Cold War laboratory would simultaneously invent and contain the threat of VR in much the
same way the Cold War seemed to be simultaneously self-invented and self-prevented.
Leonard’s films are concerned not just with VR but with VR research, the idea of virtual
reality and the applied experimentation of its idea as such. As Oliver Grau writes, some 10 years

21. Randy Laist, Cinema of Simulation: Hyperreal Hollywood in the Long 1990s (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 1.

35
after the release of these films and the second wave VR craze, “Virtual reality may not be in the
headlines any longer, but it has become a worldwide research project.”
22
Those ten years saw
little widespread mobility for VR as it remained – and largely still remains – in the laboratory.
Leonard’s films don’t imagine worlds like Strange Days, in which VR has already entered the
popular culture, wreaking havoc and complicating the already complicated politics of the
pseudo-dystopic future. Instead, his films are stuck in R&D. Transparently cautionary, they
depict the dark origins of VR, his characters often discovering the true power of VR within a lab
environment. He imperils the researchers, or, better yet, casts them as villains, opportunists like
so many other science fiction characters who are willing to risk the safety of others for the sake
of experimentation, for ushering in the future prematurely. His films take place in laboratories of
VR because that’s where VR lives: sites of control, meaning sites that purport to control, or
ensure, the future they imagine. They are built like bunkers. Characters must be secure, in sterile
surroundings, for virtual reality, we are reminded, is a weapon, a “concentration of power,” what
Brian Massumi names “a mode of reality that counts-as-one”.
23
The singularity is threatening in
the case of The Lawnmower Man because it places at the center of that “mode of reality” a
traumatized simpleton, a victim of fate. Leonard prioritizes the guinea pig, the put-upon, a
symbol of the utterly powerless. After the VR researcher Dr. Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) loses
unmitigated access to his own lab, he begins to experiment on the man who mows his lawn, Jobe
Smith (Jeff Fahey) (the biblical allusion is clear). As the result of Dr. Angelo’s experiments, the
lawnmower man’s consciousness is eventually uploaded to the internet where he becomes the
singularity, gaining access to every aspect of the electronic infrastructure and realizing his

22. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003),
15.
23. Brian Massumi, “Envisioning the Virtual”, in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. Mark
Grimshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59 (his emphasis).

36
ultimate ambition: to ring every phone on Earth all at the same time. A benign act, yet it is the
eerie marker of his loss of humanity, lost to infinite being, distributed throughout the globe so as
to be nowhere and everywhere at once.
Imaginaries of VR like this exemplify the “semantic struggle that grows out of fictional
entertainment[...]to emanate nonfictional projects.”
24
This is also the struggle for technologists
and engineers, the struggle to convert some of those fictional elements into a lived experience of
VR. For media scholars this struggle highlights the discursive powers of fictionalization,
especially in the cinema. What people expect of VR is what the movies have already shown
them, even movies like The Lawnmower Man that hint of virtual reality’s chaotic consequences
when it moves from the lab to something more “applied”. So engineers struggle to get that movie
experience right, or to prove it wrong. Where it transitions from a “semantic” struggle to one
with a dire material component is in its industrial application, most easily recognizable in the
military, for example. Even in peacetime, simulation is a survival technique, and a coping
mechanism to preserve the status quo of Cold War dualism, instantiating a perpetual state of
emergency, what Paul Virilio terms “pure war”.
25
In the anticipation of emergency, VR
conditions its state of possibility, often imperceptibly shifting from fiction to nonfiction, virtual
to actual. As Norbert Wiener, one of the fathers of cybernetics, puts it, “Emergencies are
provided for in times of peace. I also mean by that, emergencies like the falling of an atomic
bomb[...]”
26
This power is too great to share, according to Leonard, thus the future, the
inevitable, must be contained to its site of control, its laboratory, where it nonetheless “leaks

24. Michael Heim, “The Paradox of Virtual Reality”, in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed.
Mark Grimshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114.
25. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989).
26. Norbert Wiener, “Men, Machines, and the World About”, in The New Media Reader, ed.
Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 70.

37
out”, as it were, not in the form of a power-hungry singularity, but subtly, as immersive
technologies, as iPhones.

Spatial Continuity

Itself a product of an idealized mediation of modern spaces, virtual reality operates as a
fictional truth imagined by and inserted into the evolution of the cinematic apparatus. Tracing the
impulse to achieve mediated spatial continuity from panorama painting to skyscraper films and
the virtualization of real estate in the contemporary era, a topography emerges showcasing to
what end immersion is rhetorically and technologically employed. In the debate over cinema’s
directional proclivity, virtual reality intervenes to extend spectatorship along horizontal and
vertical lines, interior and exterior coordinates, and into three-dimensional space. Immersive
media casts the spectator as zero-point from whom the virtual world stretches out in 360 degrees.
Abundantly exemplified by 19th century optical toys and machines such as kinetoscopes,
stereoscopes, and kaiserpanorama, the technical apparatus enacts the “[...]broader psychic,
perceptual, and social insularity of the viewer[...]” that produces and begins to privilege “[...]an
enclosed and privatized subject.”
27
The horizontal, borderless panorama in particular codifies a
pre-history of VR that places modern spectators at the center of historical and nonfictional
events. For Raqi Syed, the rotational and eye tracking technologies of 21st century VR
“[...]introduce a kind of new horizontality to the cinema.”
28
Obversely, Kristen Whissel identifies
cinema’s “New Verticality” brought about by advancing CGI that interrogates the zenith and

27. Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth
Century”, Grey Room, no. 9 (2002), 7.
28. Raqi Syed, “Total Cinema: Or, ‘What Is VR?’”, Senses of Cinema (blog), March 28, 2019.
http://sensesofcinema.com/2019/feature-articles/total-cinema-or-what-is-vr/.

38
nadir of spectatorship, perhaps reinstating through VR, as Jonathan Crary writes, “[...]the
vanishing point and its residual theological implications.”
29
Finally, in 3D cinema and its
documentary offshoot, the metaphoric “depth” of immersion is realized through the z-axis as
stereoscopy places its audiences at an ironic distance from the ethical spaces of the mediated
real.
Alison Griffiths finds in past forms of immersive entertainment the fully formed
iterations of not only the cinematic apparatus but also that of virtual reality itself. The cinematic
apparatus is a material and psychological construct that extends out from traditional sites of
spectatorship like the theater to include the museum, independent gallery, festival, university
screening room, community center, and each of their overlapping ideological functions.
30
A
prefiguring of the apparatus, a near-tautology of the embodied apparatus as seen in a history of
immersion, Griffith’s work historicizes the “immersive view” that would help instill in the
cinema its sense of encompassing its viewer. The remediation of immersive experiences such as
the panorama ensures that the cinematic apparatus “[...]privilege[s] an immersive mode of
spectatorship[...]”
31
The panorama is an example of this prefiguring, a pre-history that helps
correlate embodiment and immersion for the cinema in its period of dominance. She writes, “It is
this heightened sense of embodiment that makes the panorama a particularly compelling example
of immersive spectatorship[...]”
32
The panorama’s frameless, 360-degree vantage point
“attempted to create the sensation of the spectator’s physical relocation into the center of such a

29. Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality”, 20.
30. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 18.
31. Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 41.
32. Griffiths, 39.

39
space.”
33
Often depicting recent and historical battle scenes or magisterial and distant locations,
large panoramas were designed to completely envelop spectators’ field of view, effectively
giving the impression that the space of the painting entered the space of the audience. Most
optical devices of this time period promised a relocative experience “[b]ut the panorama is
unique: unlike these other forms, it presents an unbounded image, an image that is to the viewer
endless.”
34
Panorama spectators were “on the scene”, their whole body transported to famous
locations they couldn’t otherwise visit and points in history that could be dynamically
transformed into spectacle (figure 1.3). As the popularity of panoramas increased in the 19th
century, audiences were literally placed at the center of traveling cycloramic displays, which
were often paired with a kind of live lecture that described and informed what they were seeing.
Dioramas additionally provided a physical extension of the painting into the space of the
viewers. In the effort to more immersively and therefore realistically engage its audiences, the
borderless panorama – aided by dioramic depth – ironically proved a reminder of the limits of
human vision and its capacity to interpret space as a consistent whole. The omnipresent and
panoptic centering of the spectator is betrayed by the very limits of visual perception, where
occlusion and a limited field of view adds a realistic layer of perceptual doubt. Crary

33. Griffiths, 39.
34. Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality”, 20.
Figure 1.3. The Battle of Gettysburg (cyclorama) (Paul Philippoteaux, 1883).

40
acknowledges the innate virtuality of such an immersive spectatorship: “A structure that seems
magically to overcome the fragmentation of experience in fact introduces partiality and
incompleteness as constitutive elements of visual experience”
35

For Griffiths, the idea that bridges the gap between the panorama and the cinema, the
genealogical throughline and remediating effect, is that of “reenactment”, a revisitation of or
relocating to an event that has already happened. In the cinema as in the panorama, an experience
after-the-fact is performed. While the panorama offers an index by way of its topographical
reconstruction, the cinema transports a previously lived moment - without degrading its
“pastness” - into the present for its audiences to experience anew. For the panorama as for the
cinema, one is invited to revisit an event already concluded and relegated to “pure ontology”, in
Bergsonian terms, as if for the first time. This revisitation defines the immersive experience of its
combined apparatus. Virtual reality, on the other hand, eschews this model of revisitation, and
through its interactive apparatus instead promises that the user-viewer’s experience is unique to
its moment of utilization. Although it benefits from the same immersion that “enveloped”
viewers of the panorama (and cinema, for that matter) within “[...]an artificial reality in which all
boundaries delimiting the real from the synthetic ha[ve] been putatively eliminated”, its unique
form of immersive “place illusion” provides an original, indexical experience - or imprinting -
no matter its “content.”
36

This innovation, and the effects of its rhetorical weaponization, is exemplified in the
enormous amount of travel and news experiences available for virtual reality platforms. It’s a
replaying of the panoramic moment, which also saw an abundance of travel and “news”

35. Crary, 21-22.
36. Griffiths, 39. Mel Slater’s concept of the “place illusion” produced by virtual reality will be
addressed in more detail later in this dissertation.

41
recreations, only with a renewed promise. In repeatedly turning to distant spaces and distant
others (distant as they are from an imagined Western focal point), as well as borderspaces and
contingent geographies, 360-degree news experiences define the VR apparatus in terms of how
its operators can both “share” in and, in turn, influence the people who occupy such spaces. In
this way, VR reinterprets the imperial project of the Global North while extending the cinematic
metaphor of visuality to support its claim to trigger empathetic responses in its user-viewers. In
Geography and Vision, Denis Cosgrove gives a detailed account of how, as early as the 16th
century but predominantly in the 18th and 19th centuries, Western national powers, and the
United States in particular, made visible the rest of the globe through cartography, topography,
and illustrations. One result was the instantiation of the belief in the homogeneity of space and a
shared globe. The New Virtual Reality has resurrected this effort through films like The
Displaced as it bounces back and forth between three different regions of the Global South but
frames them as “shared experiences” of displacement; or as in RYOT News’ insistence on
shooting on borders and at crossings, in order to evoke a kind of global borderspace that
determines a fixed Western or American point of view, an attempt at an experiential and thus
ethical collapse of this space. Cosgrove’s analysis shows that much of the early American
mapping of the world collapsed space too, but to an imperial end, where “that space over there”
starts to look like something that could be incorporated into “this space over here”; empathy was
their goal as well, in a kind of twisted paternal logic. Importantly, Cosgrove historicizes and
contextualizes “empathy” as a reaction to the representations of other space. Empathy, here,
correlates to the creation of a “geopolitical space” for the imperial imagination.
Cosgrove makes an example of how the northern hemisphere viewed and made viewable
the southern hemisphere via another “border,” the equator. “So long as recorded knowledge of

42
the globe remained the preserve of the northern hemisphere alone, its southern equivalent[...]was
imagined to resemble the northern in geography as well as in geometry.”
37
That is to say the
north envisioned the south as a mirror image, a specular counterpart; thus there is made possible
a trickle-down empathy, where the affects we embody in the north will be proportionally
(symmetrically) registered in the south. The immersive hapticity and 360-degree capabilities of
the VR apparatus recreate the “sphericity” of the globe, where north - as a directional concept
and the ideological focus of VR spectatorship - provides a point from which “the world radiate[s]
out not merely around me but from me.”
38
The “immersive view” of the virtual reality apparatus
is such that it does engender an empathetic response, only that it’s in relation to the apparatus
itself, essentially a privileging of myself as the ultimate referent and my embodied gesture as
indexical input, not with the distant spaces and distant others it simulates.
For its stakeholders, virtual reality’s 360-degree recreation of global sphericity is
suggestive of an equally distributed economy of empathy that counteracts the disproportionate
damages wreaked by global capital. The speculative intentions of virtual reality as future
windfall for its venture capital investors can be mutually understood alongside its specular
ambitions, to provide immersive mirror images of the Global South on behalf of user-viewers of
the Global North. Recreating historical events and distant places in order to codify them as my
own personal experience, virtual reality privatizes external spaces and landscapes as well as
otherwise public sets of knowledge. Likewise, as VR technology seeks to specularly digitize the
entire world of built space, it makes “public” the private interiors of speculative real estate. The
derelict and war-torn borderspaces of the New Virtual Reality are offset by a specular and

37. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 204.
38. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 13-14.

43
speculative continuity of high-end interior spaces normally accessible to only the benefactors of
global capital’s vertical arrangement. Providing experiential access to the luxuries of high-end
interior spaces, VR equally provides user-viewers the opportunity to empathize with the ultra-
wealthy.
Perhaps in response to the failing trust in real estate and its future guarantees that resulted
after the 2008 financial meltdown, the economy of space has witnessed a digital migration, a
shift from the primacy of live experiences of future homes and commercial spaces to the virtual
domain of the internet and smartphone apps: Zillow, Padmapper, Craigslist, and Matterport.
Since 2011, Matterport, a multivariate 3D and immersive photography start-up, has made its
goal, as its brief vision statement indicates, to “[g]ive people the freedom to experience any place
at any time.”
39
Originally a high-end camera company, Matterport now purports to be a “data
company” first and foremost, according to their CEO.
40
They now specialize in converting 2D
images, 360-degree stills and video into 3D images and digital models. Increasingly these pre-
conversation images are crowd-sourced and photogrammetrically stitched together. With more
than 1.6 million 3D images in its database, Matterport aims to steward more than 100 million 3D
images and scans in the near future, becoming “the Getty” of virtual interiors. Using LiDar,
photogrammetry and its own proprietary stitching software, Matterport creates perfectly rational
models of human vision while virtually codifying an aesthetic of future spaces. Its boostering
claim is both reminiscent of the cinema’s specular intention and overdetermined by virtual

39. Matterport, “Matterport’s Innovative 3D Reality Capture Technology Helps Protect Valuable
Property Investments,” Matterport News, December 13, 2017, https://matterport.com/news/
matterports-innovative-3d-reality-capture-technology-helps-protect-valuable-
property#:~:text=Founded%20in%202011%2C%20Matterport%20gives,any%20time%20and%2
0from%20anywhere.&text=Matterport's%20easy%2Dto%2Duse%20platform,plans%2C%20gui
ded%20tours%20and%20more.
40. Ingrid Lunden, “Matterport raises $48M to ramp up its 3D imaging platform,” TechCrunch,
March 12, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/05/matterport-2/.

44
reality’s unique pattern of stasis. As their user-viewers are interpellated by global capital’s
speculative valuation of real spaces, these photogrammetric models propel consumers into an
increasingly irrational future.
Driven by Matterport, real estate giants like Sotheby’s International or newer, expanding
real estate ventures like Purplebricks invite you to virtually inhabit the exclusive settings – the
“dollhouses” – of the rich. Their virtual real models are optimized for web shopping, and
Matterport’s business-to-business portability guarantee their central position in the digitization
and virtual commodification of interior spaces. Purplebricks, the UK-based realtor group, is the
Uber of real estate companies. Along with an app-based interface and automated house listing,
one of its consumer “features” is a partnership with Matterport to provide “virtual viewings” to
prospective buyers.
Their so-called virtual “dollhouses” signify a totalizing perspective of the interiors of
such expensive realty (figure 1.4). Matterport’s irrational models – mimicking capital’s “excess
of coherence” as Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle write – provide impossible specular access;
Figure 1.4. Matterport’s digital “dollhouses”.

45
their scale is malleable, their dimension and proportionality coordinated to objective points in
space and relationally affirmed by the vastness of the scan. Their “representational accuracy” -
mirror imaging - specularly translates capital and guarantees its speculative ambitions, its virtual
reification. Their accuracy is less comparable to the abstracted plastic dollhouses of the late
twentieth century than 18
th
century English “Baby Houses.” Exact replicas of existing private
properties, the Baby House was meant to signal one’s elite class status, and satisfied a desire to
experience this status in the third person, to experience capital inside-out. The Baby House is a
public display of a privacy reserved for the few.
41
By augmenting them with staging software
and photogrammetric assets, Matterport’s models, like the Baby House, can be customized and
made even more accurate by its virtual set dressings. Owners and purchasers alike can project
their preferred objects into the models, using reproductions of their own furniture or potential
furniture and furniture layouts. Simply stated, the staging of the real is conditioned by the virtual.
In this way, VR embraces the public view of private spaces; these “images” are “public” facing,
meant to be experienced by insiders on the outside; they are admired as a movement between in
and out, encephalization, to quote Lyotard, “a cycle of flows, the circle of a market and its
central balance.”
42

Beyond their evocations of past projects of spectrality, virtual real estate models are most
essentially a practice of mapping, of mapping the “interiors” of capital and transforming them
into experiences of speculation. The surveying technology of photogrammetry and laser scanning
used to literally map the landscape of the State, to survey for development, to make smooth the

41. In this way the Baby House shares much in common with 17
th
century “peep-show” boxes,
antiquated HMDs that directed “one’s gaze through a peephole toward something that is
inaccessible to others.” Grau, 50.
42. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Libidinal Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993), 123.

46
development of capital and its spatial claim, has been turned inward. Of landscape and real estate
development, Lewis Baltz writes,
One of the most common views capitalist society takes of nature is among the most
rigorous and most appalling: “Landscape as Real Estate.” [...]To know that an apparently
unbroken expanse of land is overlaid with invisible lines demarcating the pattern of
future development is to perceive it in a very different way than one would otherwise.
43

These methods of visualization condition our relationship to real space, yet Matterport’s turning
outside-in of photogrammetry and LiDar technologies, its mapped specularization and immersive
aestheticization of interiors, chiastically reorganize Baltz’s observation: Matterport turns real
estate into landscape. Capital is “naturalized” by its specular arrangement.
These virtualizing technologies of mapping and “making experiential” are expressions of
a late-imperial imaginary, still dedicated to land and conquest, to expansion and retention, but
this time more liquid in its pursuits, “trickling down” vertical temporal lines. The poison and the
promise with these models is they invite us in as “separate” spaces of wealth, the modern, the
abundant, altogether having no relation to the desire to be “immersed” in capital, or the very
technologies of visualization that promise and prove – over and over again – this state of
immersion; yet they also urge us to experience capital as it “really is”: streamlined, bodyless,
image of images, mise-en-abyme, speculum.
Defying the horizontal continuity of the panorama and the landscapes of virtual real
estate, the virtual mapping of out-of-reach spaces is also arranged in specular relation to
cinema’s computer-aided New Verticality. According to Kristen Whissel, ever-improving digital
realisms “[...]have given rise to a new film aesthetic based on height, depth, immersion, and the

43. Lewis Baltz, Lewis Baltz Texts (Göttingen: Steidl, 2012), 45, as quoted by Alberto Toscano
and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 231.

47
exploitation of the screen’s y and z axes.”
44
Digital effects enable a renewed vertical and z-axis
orientation that eschews horizontalism’s “secularization of sight” in favor of the naturalization of
vertically organized social strata and its correspondent emphasis on transcendence and the fall.
45

The zenith and nadir gain additional symbolic meaning in the arrangement of di sotto in su
(figure 1.5). Digital vertical
illusionism mimics that of the
Baroque oculus, where “[...]‘the
physical body’ of the observer
achieves ‘lightness’ and is
drawn up into heaven[...]”, an
essentially moralizing
experience brought about by
vertical immersion.
46
In
blockbusters and superhero flicks like Titanic (Cameron, 1997), Avatar (Cameron, 2009), X-Men
(Singer, 2000), and The Matrix, Whissel identifies the exploitation of the screen’s vertical axis as
a test for developing digital effects as well as a commentary on the prevailing order of their
cinematic worlds. Through wire-removal software, motion control, photorealistic digital
animation and virtual performance capture, these films are able to more seamlessly immerse
audiences in spaces of great height and depth, great moral clarity or its bottoming-out.
47
Creating
spectacular scenes of ascension and descension that correlate to the rise and fall of their

44. Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2014), 13-14. Quoted as well by Syed, “Total Cinema: Or, ‘What Is
VR?’”.
45. Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality”, 20.
46. Grau, 48-49.
47. Whissel, 25.
Figure 1.5. The oculus of Camera degli Sposi, painted by
Andrea Mantegna (completed 1474) in the Palazzo Ducale at
Mantua.

48
protagonists, the new vertical cinema utilizes digital effects to quite literally remove the “vertical
seams” that once proved, for expanded cinema like the Cinerama, “a disappointment”.
48

Before the dawn of cinematic narrative, actualités captured magisterial views of ever-
more-impressive feats of modern real estate’s vertical engineering. A rapidly modernizing
American urban landscape exemplified upward progression. Skyscraper films pictured capital’s
vertical organization with the sky being its speculative limit. A precursor actualité shot by
cameraman Robert Bonine in 1902, Panorama of Flatiron Building, or as it was otherwise titled,
Eighth Wonder, slowly tilts upward to capture the entirety of the Flatiron Building in NYC, a
construction that initiated what is now considered New York’s first skyscraper era (figures 1.6,
1.7, 1.8). The film is an exterior view, a “public” view from street level, from the outside,
leaving viewers to speculate on the space inside and the views from the top.
Similarly in the service of the specular gaze and speculative vertical organization, VR
actualités as well as fully rendered experiences use the skyscraper and simulated heights as
plausible experiences of physical displacement in order to prove the “real” effects of its virtual
product. For decades VR labs worldwide have used “pit sims” to exemplify the real effects of

48. André Bazin, “Cinerama, a Disappointment”, in André Bazin and Dudley Andrew, Andre
Bazin’s New Media (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2014), sourced from
Syed, “Total Cinema: Or, ‘What Is VR?’”. “[...]the fundamental flaw in Cinerama was the
imperfection of the vertical seams where the three projected images met.”
Figures 1.6, 1.7, 1.8. Panorama of Flatiron Building (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903).

49
virtual simulations. The “artificial” experience of immense height that the skyscraper provides,
in this case, is made “real” by the apparatus of VR. Moreover, the spatial organization of 360-
degree VR encourages user-viewers to interrogate the evaporating points of the zenith and nadir.
The most complex vertices in the recreation of a perfectly spherical image, these vanishing
points double as reality effect as they are the hardest stitch points. Digitally erasing the camera
itself and recreating the space directly above it, the y-axis stitches prove the mastery of the image
and its realistic verticality.
What might be
termed a virtualité, The
Ledge, developed by
John Starr Dewar and the
Los Angeles VRcade
Two Bit Circus, sends
user-viewers up 50
stories in a graphically
rendered downtown center. While the relative realism of the visuals and the slow scaffolding
climb is enough to make your palms sweaty, The Ledge requires you to stand on a simulated
scaffold just like the one you see in the head-mounted display (figure 1.9). The platform gently
shakes and sways as you gradually reach the top of the building, allowing one to bodily
“interact” with verticality, to feel one’s verticalness and its uncanny. At the end of the
experience, the scaffolding gate simultaneously swings open in both the real and virtual worlds,
such that there is no divide between user-viewer and “the ledge”. An in-world character then
instructs the user-viewer to jump, to succumb to the gravity they once defied. The act of virtual
Figure 1.9. The Ledge (Dewar, 2017).

50
suicide is a virtual experience of “free fall”, as Hito Steyerl puts it, an embodied communique
from the front of the “class warfare from above”.
49
The Ledge does not beckon to the sky in an
irrational pursuit of the infinite future; instead it grounds speculation through a virtual act of
suicide.
Taking a leap of faith from a virtual skyscraper tests the limits of immersion’s capacity to
enable its participants (its victims) to “share” in an experience of other spaces and other people.
Paradoxically, plunging into perceived depth, one may actually disconnect themselves from the
object of immersion. Where a widened z-axis invites audiences inside the screen, in stereoscopic
cinema for example, it equally increases the distance between the space of the viewer and the
deep space of the image. The mise-en-scène of positive parallax “[...]encourages a detached
viewer who is disconnected from the people and objects in deep space within the frame.”
50
For
3D documentary, Miriam Ross argues a proportionate mix of positive and negative parallax can
create “[...]the potential for audiences to recognise that their immersive experience operates in a
shared auditorium/screen space during which they never fully enter the latter or leave the
former.”
51
This creates a kind of “ethical space”, returning to Sobchack, where viewers are likely
to incorporate their space of viewing with the space of the movie; the viewer is then asked to
“opt-in” to the world of the cinema, to virtually occupy its space all the while cognizant one is
not really there. This spatial blending is nullified by the VR headset, where one ceases to
incorporate their immediate surroundings with the space inside the HMD. Unlike the 3D
documentaries discussed by Ross, the New Virtual Reality in particular attempts to entirely

49. Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective”, e-Flux, no. 24,
April 2011, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-
vertical-perspective/.
50. Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences (Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 84.
51. Ross, 91.

51
displace its user-viewers, avoiding the use of archival footage or otherwise non-conforming
media that would suggest disjointedness or discontinuance.
52
Without the proscenium, virtual
reality can additionally avoid the “frame violations” of 3D cinema, when “[...]stereoscopic
protrusion seems to ‘violate’ the boundary of the frame on either side of the traditional screen.”
53

This leads to the shearing of 3D objects at the edge of the screen, a flattening that “can produce a
disruptive effect as the eyes try to rectify the seemingly incongruous information that an object is
both whole and split across different depth planes.”
54
As the 360-degree image itself violates the
frame its only incongruities remain the creases and the borders of its stitched visage.

The Tradition of the Victim from Housing Problems to The Displaced

Virtual reality achieves legitimation by codifying real spaces and spaces of the real,
immersing its audiences in improbable scenarios of spatial access. Whether the elevated
dollhouses of the rich or war-torn borderlands, the spaces documented by 360-degree virtual
reality implicate a compromised user-viewership and produce a sense of trespass. Virtual reality
brings distant or otherwise inaccessible spaces intimately close, such that its audiences become
participatory witnesses and share in the poverty (or prosperity) of its subjects. For definitional
New Virtual Reality experiences such as Clouds Over Sidra (Arora and Pousman, 2015) and The
Displaced, spatial immersion is tantamount to sharing in the plight and victimhood of others.
These 360-degree documentaries exemplify how the immersive claim draws from the history of
documentary cinema and the act of bearing witness that sharing space with distant others

52. Ross, 87-88.
53. Ross, 67.
54. Ross, 67.

52
implies. This reciprocal process of legitimation displaces the documentary idea into virtual
reality. The spatial cinema of the New Virtual Reality desires to deterritorialize the documentary
subject and involve the witnessing onlooker in increasingly intimate ways; immersion, in this
sense, implies a renewed ethical bond between documentary subject and documentary viewer
brought about by a shared virtual space. The result privileges an engagement with virtual victims
as its truth claim participates in the reproduction of a political subject whose engagement with
documentary doubles as an act of moral clarity, providing personalized, cathartic interaction in
the absence of a collective political agency.
Virtual reality seeks legitimation as a new form of witnessing that nonetheless derives
from long-established notions of the “purpose” of documentary and its socio-technical and then
political function. In particular, the New Virtual Reality engages and reifies John Grierson’s
“documentary idea”, the urgency it drew from WWII now displaced to the Syrian Conflict and
other sites of neo-imperial crisis. One of the “fathers” of documentary, Grierson was a Scottish
film critic turned filmmaker and producer who is widely credited with coining the term
“documentary” in reference to nonfiction filmmaking. His most lasting legacy is the belief in
harnessing the “use” of film to shape the real, to directly address political issues and help support
national, democratic ideals. To do this he emphasized social problems like housing or
government programs like the postal service, and turned his camera on the working class and
other victims of unequal social development in interwar Britain. He believed in harnessing the
representational power of cinema to document the underprivileged, to redirect state power
toward addressing the pressing social issues of the time. It is Grierson’s “outcome-oriented”
view that helps define his ethos and extends to the contemporary formations of VR documentary.

53
The information age has ushered in an evolved obsession with media effects and the
“direct” impact especially documentary can have on the real. Contemporarily, the “success” of a
given social justice documentary can be measured statistically, mostly through the charitable
donations and other funding it generates. As a tool for the liberal management of crisis – a
rhetorical cudgel in an appeal to authority on behalf of immediate, moral “action” – social
documentary privileges the representation of perpetual crisis as well as its victims as subjects of
nonfiction cinema.
Grierson’s own conception of documentary impact was solidified by the onset of WWII
and the shared, global crisis that it represented. For Grierson, WWII triggered a reassessment of
cinematic representation and propaganda, especially for nonfiction film. The Nazis in particular
understood the suggestive power of cinema and the symbolic weight it carried; writing on the
“documentary idea” at the height of the War, Grierson seems almost envious of the German
propaganda machine and its capacity to unite and mobilize significant swaths of its targeted
audience.
55
Even 70 years after its conclusion, the global emergency that WWII symbolized
provides reference and justification for VR’s documentary intervention. For Clouds Over Sidra
and The Displaced, the comparison to WWII is vital in expressing the “urgency” of their content.
If the New Virtual Reality is to “wak[e] the heart and the will” of their viewing publics, as
Grierson puts it, they must “create a sense of urgency in the public mind”.
56
The neo-realist
cinematic tradition as well, a result of WWII’s aesthetic rupture, with its own origins in
documentary realism, serves as an implicit referent for 360-degree documentary. Children are
central to their narratives, symbols of the most vulnerable to global crisis and suggestive of the

55. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966), 248-58.
56. Grierson, 250, 257.

54
actions that need to be taken to ensure their future. They are the most innocent, and immediate,
of victims, and as children they are more readily decontextualized from their individual milieu in
order to represent global humanity and its shared destiny.
Grierson’s conception of the documentary is both realized and perverted by the New
Virtual Reality. In “The Documentary Idea: 1942”, Grierson first makes clear the documentary
idea is a multitude of ideas, that documentary’s goal should be the offering of many options,
many futures. He imagined a kind of “piling up” of documentary content, produced with
machine-like proficiency by state and local actors across the globe, amounting to an otherwise
“impossible freedom”; his Third Way centrist approach has indeed produced a “Grierson effect”,
in the words of Zoë Druick and Deane Williams, one that helped legitimize documentary across
the world.
57
This Third Way politics takes a “neutral” free-market position that is representative
of liberal and conservative ideologies across the spectrum. Contrary to what I argue is a
“cathartic” relationship at the center of VR documentary spectatorship, Grierson specifically
warned against the production of catharsis: “If there is one thing that good propaganda must not
do these days it is to give people catharsis. This again, not just because ‘the war has to be won’,
but because as far as the eye can see, we are entering an era of action, in which only the givers of
order and the doers generally will be permitted to survive.”
58
In this way I contend VR
documentary and, in general, the history of social documentary is at once a perversion of
Grierson’s documentary idea and its complete realization. To indulge in Third Way fantasies is,
today, a cathartic act: it reinforces the idea that my emotional and humanitarian involvement
with the mediation of distant or not-so-distant victims is a direct action, one that provides relief

57. Grierson, 167. See: Deane Williams and Zoë Druick, The Grierson Effect: Tracing
Documentary’s International Movement (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
58. Grierson, 257-58.

55
to said victims. The irony is that the “era of action” has transformed over time but its ideal
remains the same, in such a way that the “doers” have become the “viewers”, directly complicit
in the victimization they once were supposed to act against.
In “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary”, Brian Winston asks, :
“[...]if it is the case that [social justice] problems are unaffected by fifty years of documentary
effort, what justification can there be for continuing to make such films and tapes?”
59
In the age
of immersive media, this question bears repeating: Do more than eighty years of social justice
documentary indicate that privileging the victim has failed to inspire meaningful change?
Framing this kind of documentary practice as productive of a historical reality where social
injustices propagate and crisis ensures the maintenance of the status quo, we can discern how
bringing global victims into closer contact with supposedly participatory documentary witnesses
ensures the sustainability and futurity of documentary media itself. This framework is in
opposition to the assumption that documentary media and the representation of the real generally
speaking act as a corrective, the last bastions against the forces of exploitation and inequality.
Developing what Pooja Rangan calls “new formal innovations” not only justify the tradition of
documentary’s “urgent ethical imperative of representing lives at risk”, but legitimize the
theorization of documentary viewers as participatory witnesses to the suffering of distant
others.
60
Immersion, in other words, is heralded as a renewed commitment to people and places
made vulnerable or victimized by ongoing crisis in the form of global proxy wars, unprecedented
economic inequality, and climate devastation. I contend, as Winston also does in part, that the
political failures of documentary film, video, and now VR, has resulted in their complete

59. Brian Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in New
Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 270.
60. Rangan, Immediations, 2.

56
success. Afterall, it was Grierson’s vision that in dealing with “public information”, the
documentary could sustain itself indefinitely. Sadly, to sustain itself, it makes victims of its
subjects, victims, to a degree, of space itself.
The contentious role that the witness plays within the porous parameters of media studies
reflects the existential friction between direct experience and perceptual distancing 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 conflated with 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
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 the
“world” as it is constituted socially and politically.
61
“The symbolic frame risks overtaking the
represented subject and reduces political urgency, sustained interest, and awareness of new
geopolitical scenarios.”
62
She calls this, appropriately, the risk of meaning-making, a challenge
embedded in the “production of virtual witnesses through media”.
63
Genocide, what in this case
represents the very limits of representability, becomes trapped by its mediation, itself rendered

61. Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the
Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 10-11.
62. Torchin, 11.
63. Torchin, 11.

57
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
want 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 photographic media in particular claim to engender. She
problematizes the ways in which a viewing subject, removed from the “pain” of those
represented, reaches empathetic enlightenment 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.
64
In the photographic hyperrealism of the 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 puts it, “matters that the
privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.”
65
The safety we feel as witnesses 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-

64. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 7.
Tellingly, her framework is the Spanish civil war and the rise of Franco’s regime: an intra-
national war effort, a splitting apart, at the borders, equally politically as they are geographic,
ideological as they are material.
65. Sontag, 7.

58
other. For Sontag, 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.”
66
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.”
67
The Displaced is a curious
exercise of photography’s capacity to make its viewing subject empathize with the act of
mediation and its rhetorical positioning 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.
In the work of Gabo Arora, news outlets like The New York Times, and other key
proponents of 360-degree nonfiction’s humanitarian intervention, victims ranging from the
historical referent of the Holocaust (The Last Goodbye, 2017) to those of civil war and the global
refugee crisis (Clouds Over Sidra, 2015) are repurposed in a way that reiterates the Griersonian
“documentary idea” for contemporary audiences. These experiences utilize the documentary
rhetoric of generating an empathetic and thus actionable response from its viewers. Individuals
such as Chris Milk have been particularly influential in championing 360-degree VR video as the
next “empathy machine”.
68
One of the most critically discussed 360-degree documentaries used
to make evident the affective powers of the emerging technology is Clouds Over Sidra, a
collaborative effort between Milk and Gabo Arora. The documentary, which follows 12-year-old
Sidra as she navigates life on the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, exemplifies the Griersonian
method not only in centering victims for its narrative but in the wider discourse of “usefulness”

66. Sontag, 8.
67. Sontag, 10.
68. Milk, “The birth of virtual reality as an artform”.

59
that legitimates it. A refugee forced to flee her native Syria, Sidra “narrates” (through a
translator) a typical day in the camp and her feelings as a youth displaced by forces entirely out
of her control. Produced as the first 360-degree project for the United Nations, Clouds Over
Sidra highlights how a sense of normal is approximated in the refugee camp; to this end, it often
resembles a not-so-subtle extended advertisement for UNICEF and the UNHCR. One shot, for
example, depicts Sidra’s family huddled together in a tent emblazoned with UNHCR lettering as
Sidra tells us her mother “makes sure we are all together for dinner” (figure 1.10). As the Syrian
War itself remains a distant and obscured entity – its complex of geopolitical actors and
antagonists ironically flattened, as it were, through the child’s perspective – the family is still
able to simulate domestic bliss thanks to the UNHCR.
The director of
Clouds Over Sidra, Gabo
Arora, shares with
Grierson a belief in
utilizing the most
advanced representational
technologies to advocate
for liberal reform and
humanitarian intervention.
The founder of United Nations VR and the “storytelling” studio LightShed, Arora documents the
suffering of “ordinary” people, as well as the victims of historical geopolitical conflict and social
unrest, in order to target specific stakeholders and political operatives. In an interview he gave
with the Voices of VR podcast, Arora explains how he wishes to democratize VR on a global
Figure 1.10. Clouds Over Sidra (Arora and Milk, 2015).

60
scale, supporting the UN’s humanitarian goals.
69
He claims that viewers of Clouds Over Sidra
were, on average, doubling their donations to UNICEF in comparison to viewers of traditional
documentary. He credits VR’s capacity to incite empathy in its user-viewers for its exceptional,
measurable “usefulness.”
Arora studied film and philosophy at NYU, and he speaks often of his admiration for
Susan Sontag and what he interprets as Sontag’s commitment to the mediated production of
empathy. He is well known for his lecture, “Representing the Pain of Others”.
70
The argument
follows that VR’s “empathy machine”, much like Grierson’s documentary machine, will be able
to capitalize on “the next conflict” in order to render it empathetically proximate, and therefore
“real”, to the user-viewer. “What we need most is critical thinking,” says Arora.
Susan Sontag said, “It’s passivity that dulls feeling.” In immersive media we can create
work that is anything but passive. Without imagination there is no empathy. What can we
build with art and storytelling? The First World War was brought home through
photography, the Vietnam War through TV, Syria through YouTube and Black Lives
Matter through Facebook Live. Will the next conflict be covered in VR?
71

Through its immersive properties, VR purports to help us "share" in the pain of others,
something Sontag specifically warns against; it perpetuates the idea of the "agency" of individual
citizen-actors, obfuscating the power of structural and ideological forces as well the legitimations
of sociotechnical systems like VR that such thinking produces. I don’t think this is so much an
act of critical thinking but one of the commodification of empathy, the eager anticipation of the

69. Gabo Arora and Kent Bye, “#499: VR as the ultimate empathy machine with Gabo Arora,”
produced by Kent Bye, Voices of VR, January 31, 2017, podcast, MP3 audio, 48:07.
https://voicesofvr.com/vr-as-the-ultimate-empathy-machine-with-the-uns-gabo-arora/.
70. Gabo Arora, “Representing the Pain of Others” (lecture presented at the MFA Interaction
Design Lecture Series, School of Visual Arts, New York City, NY, November 8, 2017).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0ka2J_KDpw
71. Mark Atkin, “Human Assets: The promise and dread of digitising humans”, Immerse, Feb.
15, 2018. https://immerse.news/human-assets-624f3066c2ce.

61
next conflict that will in turn justify its documentary mediation. Once again, Grierson’s
documentary idea is perverted by its full realization.
Following The New York Times’ entry into VR and the advocacy of influencers like
Arora and Milk, other established news organizations began to produce and publish 360-degree
news documentaries. Between 2015 and 2016, at the height of a global refugee crisis and leading
into a historic election year in the U.S., 360-degree video became the journalism de jour, a new
news promising unparalleled access and connection to the events of the day. Mobile VR had
arrived and soon dedicated VR news applications like Guardian VR and TIME Immersive
transformed smartphones into conveyors of 360-degree “ethical space”. The Los Angeles-based
immersive media company RYOT and other small, specialized production houses aided outlets
like NPR, the AP, and Huffington Post in creating their own 360-degree content, exemplifying
the confluence of news gathering organizations with technologist-driven production companies.
RYOT, which was eventually purchased by HuffPost, developed their own 360-degree news
catalogue and in-house style that not only reflected its mission to link every news story to a
particular action its audiences can take but followed in the proven example of Arora and Milk.
With stories like I Struggle Where You Vacation (2016), The Crossing (2015), and The
Margins: Border Crossing (2015), RYOT News’ VR newsdocs center on borders, contested
land, and the liminality that persists in highly regulated social and national settings. They make a
point to juxtapose an assumed stability on behalf of their user-viewers with the precarity of
subaltern populations, seemingly beholden to the whims of distant stakeholders. Through
didactic narrational testimonies and subtitles, RYOT’s 360-degree documentaries prime its user-
viewers to share in these sometimes life-and-death stakes.

62
Growing Up Girl (2015), for example, is a short 360-degree documentary produced by
RYOT News that, as its subtitle indicates, depicts “a day in the life of a young girl on the border
to Tanzania and Kenya in VR”. Each scene announces its “purpose” either through its 10-year-
old protagonist’s direct address or in subtitles that partially overlay the image. After Monica
fetches water from a small stream, she tells us, “I get ready to go to school”. She walks across
the horizon of a barren desert landscape as a subtitle informs us, “In sub-Saharan Africa 30
Figures 1.11 (top) and 1.12 (bottom). Growing Up Girl (RYOT, 2015).

63
million children are not enrolled in school.” “I love school,” she says, now standing at the
chalkboard of her small but colorful classroom. “I want to be a teacher when I grow up.”
Another subtitle follows on the heels of her words: “Every year a girl spends in school can boost
her future income 10-20%” (figure 1.11). Finally, Monica is back home and cooking beside her
mother as smoke billows and pirouettes from the fire. A subtitle reads: “Every year, smoke
inhalation kills 3 million people” (figure 1.12). While the direct address of Monica’s voice-over
narration provides Griersonian testimonial linking her lived experience to that of her audiences,
subtitles become an overriding force in the staging of action in 360-degrees. The immersive,
frameless images deterritorialize Monica in spite of the locative context the documentary
supplies in the form of statistics and factoids. In this way the subtitles work against the pleasures
and revelations of the 360-degree image, which promises its own site of discovery and limitless,
boundless identification with a way of life that is removed from my own. Monica’s experience as
a child in her part of the world is supplanted by abstracted information targeting the user-viewer
to produce an empathetic response; the former is only a pretense for the latter. While the space of
Growing Up Girl communicates our shared world, the subtitles signal a renewed separation: we
as audiences of the Global North are now implicated in reaching a type of individualized
“conclusion” or solution to the problems we share with Monica. The subtitles counterintuitively
tell us not to pay attention to the imagery, the 360-degree detail of the experience and its
emptiness, but to a prefigured and overdetermining ethical “purpose” aimed at a perceived
Western audience.
The expansion of immersive media into the domain of current affairs suffices to link the
journalistic tenet of being physically proximate to a deeper revelation of truth, bolstering the idea
of VR’s capacity to more effectively produce knowing witnesses on behalf of distant suffering.

64
The first-hand connotations of reportage fit well with immersion’s rhetoric of shared spaces. For
experiences of immersive journalism, the duties of reportage – and its response-abilities – are
transferred onto the spectating witness. Nonny de la Peña, innovator of immersive journalism as
its own news practice and the “godmother of VR”, describes her work as “[...]the production of
news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situation
described in news stories.”
72
She extrapolates on the journalistic “embed”, the “view from the
ground” that results when a reporter is exposed first-hand to the news event.
73
In experiences
such as her break-out
Hunger In Los Angeles
(de la Peña, 2012) and
Project Syria
(Emblematic, 2015), de
la Peña eschews 360-
degree video, instead
opting to recreate news
events using real-time 3D
animation. User-viewers are cast as bystanders, experiencing through a first-person perspective,
in the former example, the moment when a man collapses in a diabetic seizure while waiting in
line at a food bank, or, in the latter example, the moment a bomb hits a populated street corner in

72. Nonny de la Peña, Peggy Weil, Joan Llobera, Elias Giannopoulos, Ausiàs Pomés, Bernhard
Spanlang, Doron Friedman, Maria V Sanchez-Vives, and Mel Slater, “Immersive Journalism:
Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News”, Presence: Teleoperators
and Virtual Environments 19, no. 4 (August 1, 2010), 291.
73. de la Peña, 291. Here de la Peña et. al. borrow from WWII reporter Martha Gellhorn to
describe the embed.
Figure 1.13. Project Syria (Emblematic, 2015), before the blast.

65
Aleppo (figure 1.13). These specific events are sourced in reality, reconstructing the physical
space and often integrating live-recorded audio.
While certain conventions of interactive documentary normally accessed on a computer,
game console or mobile phone are repeated by immersive journalism, the goal of “deep
immersive journalism”, a product of virtual reality, is to produce the conditions where “the
participant can feel that his or her actual location has been transformed to the location of the
news story, and more importantly that the participant’s actual body has transformed, becoming a
central part of the news story itself.”
74
The participant’s body, while lacking in corporeality,
registers the affective significance of the news story; it is in their own emotional response that
user-viewers share in the event and therefore constitute a witnessing subject. The “important
role” immersive journalism plays is “to reinstitute the audience’s emotional involvement in
current events,” a problem of affect that has a technical, as opposed to political, solution.
75
This
claim results not in the designation of newly agential witnesses, but in a “surveillance logic”, as
Mandy Rose puts it, where participants “[...]invisibly [look] on at people from the social
world.”
76
That witness-participants do not experience the immediate dangers and corporeal
precarity of an embedded, on-the-scene individual, is reason enough to discount the ethical
charge of immersive journalism. Such rhetoric of VR’s unmediated, immersive access to the real
“[...]has encouraged a liberal agenda expressed in modes of filming that privilege affect over
thought, observation over analysis.”
77
The news story is reduced to a personalized emotional
response, reportage to a display of cathartic release.

74. de la Peña, 293.
75. de la Peña, 298.
76. Mandy Rose, “The Immersive Turn: Hype and Hope in the Emergence of Virtual Reality as a
Nonfiction Platform”, Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (May 4, 2018), 140.
77. Rose, 147.

66

“Ethical space”: The Displaced

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 notes
that documentary as a unique cinematic idiom “foreswears ‘realism’” in favor of the im-mediate,
“a direct, ontological claim to the ‘real’”.
78
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.”
79
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

78. Michael Renov, “Re-thinking Documentary: Toward a Taxonomy of Mediation”, Wide Angle
8, no. 3-4 (1986), 71.
79. Ari Shapiro, “In Virtual Reality, ‘The New York Times’ Will Help Viewers ‘Bear Witness’
to Stories”, National Public Radio, Oct. 20, 2015.
https://www.npr.org/2015/10/20/450321184/in-virtual-reality-the-new-york-times-will-help-
viewers-bear-witness-to-stories.

67
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 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 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.”
80
Ethical space, as she
describes it, is the exemplification of a “world shared,” or rather the sentimentalization of the

80. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 248.

68
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 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.”
81
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.”
82
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.

81. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 255.
82. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 154.

69
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 is our
reality, that we in fact “become” the images we see, virtual reality recreates presence only in a
kind of boundless absence. Sobchack writes: “[...]this new electronic sense of presence is
intimately bound up in the centerless, network-like structure of the present”, perfectly echoing
the centerless vistas of 360-degree video, and evoking the infinitely engrossing and interpellating
processes of late capitalism, where the virtual comes in constant relief of the actual.
83

Removing the frame from its testimony, nonfiction virtual reality strips from its images
their “urgency,” the word Georges Didi-Huberman 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.
84
The primacy of the witness in The Displaced, for example, 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.

83. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 153.
84. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans.
Shane Lillis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 38.

70
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.
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 describe as
being “lost in today’s digital ‘plague of simulations’,” are surprisingly all-too abundant in The
Displaced, which relies on photographic realism to lend the appropriate level of truth-effect to
the story of its three children.
85
The play between epiphaneia – appearance, as in, the
suprasensible, what Žižek 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 and
its relative “reality”.
86

The primary subjects of The Displaced are three children: Chuol, 9, a South Sudanese
boy who fled to a nearby swamp with his mother and grandmother when civil war spread to their
village; Oleg, 11, whose rural coal mining town of Nikishino, Ukraine, came under heavy

85. Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, Or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the
Big Other”, Public Culture, 10 (3) (1998), 484-85.
86. Žižek, 484.

71
separatist fire in the months following a pro-Russian insurgency; and Hana, 12, 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 (figure 1.14). 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. The children are on display, and often the technology, the camera
rig, a disembodied eye, becomes the focus of attention as well. Shooting with a 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.
87
To

87. Madeline Welsh, “The New York Times hopes its first virtual reality film, ‘The Displaced,’
kicks off mass adoption of VR”, NiemanLab, November 10, 2015,
https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/the-new-york-times-hopes-its-first-virtual-reality-film-the-
displaced-kicks-off-mass-adoption-of-vr/.
Figure 1.14. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Oleg stands in the rubble of his school.

72
simulate the virtual surrounds of the three locations featured in the film, The Displaced should be
viewed through a head-mounted display, of which Google Cardboard, a foldable cardboard case
with two lenses at its center, is one.
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.
88
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

88. Clouds Over Sidra similarly gestures to WWII as historical referent, declaring: “The world is
facing the most devastating refugee crisis since WWII.”
Figures 1.16 (top), 1.17 (middle), and 1.18 (bottom).
Bruno in Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), Edmund in
Germany Year Zero (Rossellini, 1948), and Chuol in
The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015).

73
and making an appearance in the form of a Ukrainian memorial in one critical scene, but it
exemplifies the aim of the film’s hyperrealism, reminiscent of what André Bazin calls “a form of
self-effacement before reality” pioneered by Italian neorealists immediately following WWII
(figure 1.15).
89
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” (figures 1.16, 1.17, and 1.18).
90

89. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 29.
90. Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1, 29 (his emphasis).
Figure 1.15. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Oleg and his friends sit at a WWII monument.

74
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
makeshift 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
(now defunct), 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 immersed in these spaces. One must look past the screen despite its nearness,
to defy the screen surface that invites the critical “nose-against-the-glass enthusiasm” that Laura
Marks celebrates, or rather, eyes-against-the-glass enthusiasm.
91
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.
92
Witnesses are determined
by their experience of immersion in the Baroque geography of virtual space, a “style”, Jorge Luis
Borges notes, “that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that
borders on self-caricature.”
93

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 immersion 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

91. Marks, Touch, xv.
92. Marks, 8.
93. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 4.

75
expressed not through “dismemberment” or severance, but as folds, “each one determined by the
consistent or conspiring surroundings.”
94
Bazin’s immersive 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, 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 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 audio-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
(figure 1.19). 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

94. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 6.

76
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.”
95

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

95. Sontag, 8.
Figure 1.19. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). Hana and her friends, in the hems of the image.

77
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
terms the “time-image,” the image firmly anchored to a single perspective of the past, of the
history it shows (figure 1.20). 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 puts it, “defined by the
presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own
container[...]”
96
The self-contained universality of VR mediation traps its viewers in a cycle of
statically defined images of human and economic crisis. Its virtual space “[...]is a self-contained,
total system[...]continuous in all its possible directions, and infinitely plastic.”
97
While the
totality of 360 degrees attempts to combat the segmentation of an already infinitely divided late-
capitalist milieu, 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.

96. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 16.
97. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1953), 75.

78

Without

Regarding the privileging of the victim and therefore the prioritization of the act of
witnessing in documentary viewership, Brain Winston declares, “[...]we have confused media
responsibilities to the audience with the ethical duties owed participants as if the outcomes of
taking part were the same as spectating.”
98
His point is exemplified in the ways that the rhetoric
of virtual documentary uses this “confusion” to conflate media witnessing with unmediated
experience; that is to say, VR documentary agrees with Winston and attempts to be a corrective
by allowing the immersed spectator herself to “take part”. Here also lies a basic rhetorical
legitimation of immersive nonfiction; in an effort to self-correct, documentaries like The

98. Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim”, 181.
Figure 1.20. The Displaced (Ismail and Solomon, 2015). A 360-degree tableau.

79
Displaced perpetuate such a “confusion”. They proclaim, we have to accurately and respectfully
communicate the subject positions of our participants so we will attempt to put our viewers right
there with them so they might share in each other’s worlds.
While the images of documentary were always “virtual” to a point, VR documentary
virtualizes its victims of distant crises, places them at “the plane of immanence”, the site of
within-ness that sustains documentary’s own existence, that defines its politics.
99
If “[t]he actual
falls from the plane like a fruit”, as Deleuze puts it, the tradition of the victim in documentary
rots the fruit on the branch; it makes of documentary a tree full of fruit that never drops.
100
Its
object returns to subject but the process is contained within the individual spectator, an “inner
circuit” so tight that it transforms images to memory, preserving the present as past.
101
That is, it
preserves the “emergency” of the moment in its image as our own memory.
As the stories of the three displaced children unfold - their separate corners of the globe
illuminated in 360 degrees - 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 toward new
vistas, effectively turning one’s back on the displaced children to see what there is to see, to
disavow 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

99. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 149
100. Deleuze and Parnet, 150.
101. Deleuze and Parnet, 150.

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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?

81

P r e s e n c e
Photogrammatology and the Making of Virtual Histories

Palmyra’s streets and you/
Forests of columns in the level desert/
What are you now?
-Frederich Hölderlin, Lebensalter

What are you now?

On April 15, 2019, a fire broke out at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, quickly and
efficiently destroying much of the roof and the iconic flèche of the UNESCO World Heritage
Site and arguably the most famous heritage site in France. The public outcry was massive, and in
less than a week, more than $1 billion was raised to support the reconstruction. This response
wasn’t without its critics, but the global event became an important legitimizing cause for
practices of virtual preservation and reconstruction. Before the fire was even out, 3D-scan artists
and digital heritage initiatives began to share their photogrammetric and laser-scanned models of
Notre-Dame on social media, indicating that their point-clouds and texture maps would aid
efforts to reconstruct the gothic site.
1
One of the most thorough digital reconstructions of Notre-

1. This is ironic because reportedly it was the reconstruction effort that in fact led to the fire in
the first place. Sean Captain, “Notre-Dame fire: Why historic restorations keep going up in

82
Dame came from 3D modeling artist Raiz, who posted a crowdsourced digital replication of the
cathedral on the online 3D model publishing platform Sketchfab about two weeks after the
incident. The model, “Notre Dame: Indoor+Outdoor (crowdsourced)”, combines image data
culled from myriad photographs and videos freely available online, creating a composite,
navigable 3D graphic with photoreal textures and accurate scaling (figure 2.1). An archive of
images photogrammetrically stitched with, albeit, imperfect accuracy, the recreated Notre-Dame
can be viewed through an HMD or loaded into a real-time program like Unity for use in 3D
environments. A series of numbered notations can be clicked through when viewing the model in
the Sketchfab portal, including reference points for which parts of the structure were destroyed
and which parts remain intact. For digital heritage companies like CyArk and the Arc/k Project,

flames”, Fast Company, April 15, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90335390/notre-dame-
fire-why-historic-restorations-keep-going-up-in-flames. The totalizing erasure of fire, a
particular annihilation, repeatedly rears its head as photogrammetry’s dialectic counterpart.
Figure 2.1. “Notre-Dame: Indoor+Outdoor (crowdsourced)”.

83
the burning of the 12th-century Gothic Cathedral provided the opportunity to put a public face on
what is mostly a discreet mission to virtually preserve architectural and material sites of
historical importance worldwide, proving the usefulness of virtual technologies of capture and
display to make present again what in this case has been lost to history.
The virtual reconstitution of Notre-Dame illustrates one way spatially coordinated
recreations of real places enter the documentary discourse as tools of presencing. Even as Notre-
Dame’s digital models reluctantly earned their “documentary” status, what the cathedral’s partial
destruction reveals is that the potential of such documents lies in their instantaneous mobilization
on behalf of verifying the objective status of the referent. Through the visual and then virtual
historiography in which they partake, such models attempt to rescue a precarious monumentality
that contains a collective historical reality. For photogrammetric archaeographies, their referent
is doubly an objective, material historical reality and the visual archive that gives it shape. What
virtual reality is able to make present, here, by way of its documentary veracity, is a historical
subject refracted through the image of the archive. Yet in making visible these particular
examples the virtual documentary is awarded a new presence by the epistemological project
“examples” take part in. Documentary “presence” in this regard then would also include the
ecosystem – an economy of visibility – that grows around it in the effort to fill those
“epistemological gaps” that lend logocentrism its discursive texture.
2
The meta-virtual-reality of
these documents is their function as examples, as epistemes, images attesting to a shared
historical reality.
Insofar as I’ve demonstrated that virtual reality has come to be defined by what it claims
or merely imagines to achieve, establishing a consensus on its ontological status, or, equally

2. Michael Renov, “Re-thinking Documentary: Toward a Taxonomy of Mediation”, Wide Angle
8, no. 3-4 (1986), 71

84
important, its historical significance, remains a challenge. With successive iterations of varying
technical operability, virtual reality has, at critical moments, defined its own presence by either
reinforcing the “reality” of its historical moment or retreating to a reality yet to be, yet to know
its effects. VR’s limited exposure as a mass medium, strictly speaking, only amplifies the degree
to which a discursive ecosystem dominated by techno-authoritarians and popular speculative
imaginaries determines how VR makes itself known, how it legitimizes its own historical
presence. To the point: When you can claim VR does not exist yet, you can deny its diffuse
effect on society, its politics. Equally true, when announcing its presence, you can assign a
particular politics to its mode of use. Furthermore, when interfacing with the sober disciplines of
engineering, science, economics, and archaeology, for example, virtual reality becomes
rhetorically aligned with hard or practical epistemological methods of representing reality. In
much the same way the cinematic medium became synonymous with a function to shape reality
by reflecting it, VR gains credence, viability, and its own kind of presence through an alignment
with the discourses of sobriety.
Virtual reality’s own lacking presence – its frequent lapses into science fiction, utopian
ideation, and general technological “hype” – is rescued by the liminal identity of the
documentary. Documentary has a presencing effect on VR, participating in its legitimations as a
credible source of mediated knowledge while elevating its capacity to reflect and transform the
subjective human experience. The boundaries of mediated nonfiction, upheld by what Bill
Nichols calls the “discourses of sobriety,” are what contain virtual reality and imbue it with its
presence, with its own story with its own beginning. Like documentary, VR engages with the
discourses of sobriety in ontological terms, eliding the ideological assumption at the heart of its
truth claim. VR shares with documentary a base assumption: the “recognition of historical

85
reality” and its presence.
3
By entering the discourses of sobriety, virtual reality and documentary
share an originary mediating formation, one that fundamentally addresses “real events” and “real
consequences”.
4
In this way, the documentary is able to reify its own legitimizing rhetoric
through VR. By grafting itself onto documentary’s own discourse of sobriety, VR in turn gains a
previously unachieved “presence” in the social realm.
The reciprocity between VR and documentary results in the mutual elevation of their
truth claims. Long held in dubious regard by the scientific disciplines, the image-based practices
of documentary cinema are supplemented by the metered precision of photogrammetric
recreations. Likewise, virtual reality is imbued with documentary veracity, specifically its
potential “[...]to address the historical world and to possess the capacity to intervene by shaping
how we regard it.”
5
They share a recourse to a “historical reality”, which not only describes
history itself and the political reality it helps inscribe, but their own history as technical objects.
As a cinematic paradigm, the documentary and its truth claim are positively correlated with the
technologies of recording. Documentary’s own discourse of sobriety owes itself in large part to
the sobriety of photography and the pro-filmic, to the rhetoric of the indexical relationship
between film viewer and filmed event. VR, in turn, makes rhetorical use of its systems of
tracking and simulation – its ability to digitally map and display the real world – in order to
render its historical reality truly “present.” This presence is both technically defined and
experientially determined. The historical truths it chooses to re-present are indexically present,
but so too is the user-viewer, whose own experience of history re-created becomes integral to
that history itself. For VR, this achievement is widely labeled as, simply, “presence”.

3. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 36
4. Nichols, 36-37.
5. Nichols, 38.

86
This chapter locates virtual reality within the discourses of sobriety and engages with the
formal practices that help lend virtual documentary its reappropriated, as Jacques Derrida puts it,
sense of presence.
6
This signified presence is written by the documentary’s photogrammatics, its
“formal essence” benefiting from “the privilege of its proximity to the logos”.
7
The application
of photogrammetry is figured as the privileging technique of virtual documentary. It is a
technological and rhetorical inscription of presence within the very act of virtual documentation.
And that is also to say that photogrammetry is the method by which the virtual real becomes
documented, documentable, an object of discursive enunciation and rhetorical legitimation.
Using photography to measure and translate the visible world, photogrammetry becomes the
common denominator for virtual reality’s various claims on historical reality, a formal practice
that not only affords virtual reality its own presence but achieves for its user-viewers the kind of
presence akin to that which determines the historical texture of Being itself. The discursive
function of VR, I argue, extends beyond the confines of its content, into the formal conventions
that make up its (photo)grammatics; therefore I am primarily addressing a form, which is also,
for VR, a desire for presence.
Long a tool of surveyors, excavators, archivists, and similar photo-scientists,
photogrammetry is reborn in virtual reality as the bridge between material reality and rendered
digital worlds. The comparative looking it employs with algorithmic aid translates real-life
objects, built environments, and natural formations into digital artifacts, creating archaeological

6. Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 10. Here I introduce Derrida to meet reconstruction with
deconstruction, to critique the privileging of presence in VR discourses. The full quote is:
“History and knowledge, istoria and episteme have always been determined (and not only
etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence”
(his emphasis).
7. Derrida and Spivak, 18.

87
data-sets, digital archives of the present. Archaeology, the disciplinary discourse of sobriety most
associated with the science of the present, likewise gains new authority over the present via
virtual (re)construction. As Derrida articulates a critical grammatical supplantation of logic and
its insistence on presence, photogrammatics describes the process by which archaeology is
transformed into a photographic history, one that contains its own possibility of a history written
by light.
8

While the immersion claim makes use of virtual reality’s spatial reorganization, so too
does VR’s production of presence hinge on the accurate exhibition of precarious, spatially and
visually defined objecthood. Once again, the Syrian Conflict provides the backdrop against
which virtual reality documentary is expressed. The digitization of the ruins of Palmyra, Syria,
represents how photogrammetry is used to document the presence of the past through a cultural
heritage threatened by modern global conflict. As the preservation of its visual history gives way
to its virtual material reconstruction, Palmyra becomes the justification for neo-imperial
immortalizations of the (Near) East. Presencing Palmyra as virtual documentary – and in
particular, the now destroyed remnants of its Temple of Bel – seizes upon the precarity of
material history to make a case for digitally archiving and structurally re-presenting material
culture deemed threatened by modern political and environmental turmoil. The visual history of
Palmyra doubles as a history of visualization through which this “forest of columns in the level
desert” was made present for primarily Western consumers. I argue that as photo-writing is
subordinated by “the problematic master of the ‘gram’”, as Louis Kaplan notes, a new
ontological status of the photovisual document issues an epistemological challenge, a political

8. Derrida and Spivak, 27-28. Derrida describes “grammatics” as: “A history of the possibility of
history which would no longer be an archaeology[...]”

88
imperative, to understand the operating “language” – photogrammatics – of the experience of an
increasingly virtual reality in the contemporary era.
9

The object of concern that the virtualization of both Notre-Dame and the Temple of Bel
highlights is the disappearance of the material past and the new discursive and material histories
that emerge in response, to document what was and to transform it into a living present. Where
the digitization and re-presentation of three-dimensional space lives out a fantasy long held by
the science of display, the material objects exemplified by Notre-Dame and the Temple of Bel
indicate the importance of preserving particular archeological, cultural, and geologic symbols
that, officially speaking, narrate World Heritage. By making visible both “natural” and inorganic
material referents to a shared world, these objects are rendered as malleable as a text, equally
designed to spectacularly engage onlookers and audiences as they are to counter moments of
crisis that witness the degradation of civil commitments to shared historical narratives. What do
these digital recreations “document” and in doing so what do they attempt to “make present”?
In the case of the near-destruction of Notre-Dame, crisis becomes a legitimizing cause, a
rallying cry for a system of virtual reality that can remember for us, that overcomes the assumed
lack of traditional documentary. In order to mobilize the material past on behalf of a virtual
future, these models claim to reach something beyond interpretation, performing an ideological
obfuscation common to the documentary and its own legitimizing structures. Do
photogrammetric, laser-scanned, and similar digitally reconstructed real-world objects – virtual
reality’s res extensa – make the impossible present, bringing the virtual real closer to a present
experienced? Do they constitute the traces of “subterranean” histories ready to be unearthed, to
be actualized in the present? Are they ghostly coordinates of a buried presence? Or are they

9. Louis Kaplan, László Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 37.

89
simply a rehash of documentary epistemology, a gesture that marshals “presence” in the interests
of an established political order? What happens when these documents are displaced,
deconstructed, decontextualized, demusealized, depresenced, delegitimated?

A Note on Presence Terminology

In conditioning the scientistic inquiries of the discourses of sobriety, Western
metaphysics privileges presence as the experiential effect of “reality”.
10
Presence is not only a
legitimizing rhetorical characteristic of virtual reality and the documentary, but represents the –
philosophical, cultural – project of legitimization itself. Virtual reality both revels in and rebels
against its own history of presence, at times embracing its perpetual state of near-completion, a
promise of the future to come that the popular presses and Silicon Valley ethnographers find
irresistible.
11
Or, when the historical present is threatened, VR is mobilized to reinforce the
borders of reality through its own interpretation of the presence of history. Where “immersion”
lays claim to a verisimilar spatial re-creation of reality and utilizes the history of filmic social
documentary to legitimize its ethical imperative, “presence” describes the virtual document’s
capacity to materially and experientially contextualize its spaces, to define its own structures of
legitimation by discursively engaging user-viewers in a present experience of something now
past.

10. It is worth noting here the abundance of “mindfulness” VR applications, and the concomitant
wave of Eastern/Buddhist pseudo-religious practice stemming from Silicon Valley, that promise
their own therapeutic return to presence and the moment of now.
11. See: Peter Rubin, Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection,
Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018), and
Blake Harris, The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept
Virtual Reality (New York, NY: Dey Street Books, 2019).

90
The discursive weight carried by the term “presence” hangs heavy on the virtual
documentary’s medium specificity. It is a term equally employed to signal VR’s unique
contribution to representational media and its master-signifying claim as an ideal form of
mediation. The philosophical charge of the presence paradigm aligns documentary’s forays into
the virtual with theories of the mind, the self, and questions of human Being. Necessary to my
inquiry into virtual reality’s structures of legitimation, a note on presence terminology parses the
technical understanding and implementation of presence from its larger discursive register, if
only to recombine them anew at the point of documentary. For many theorists of the virtual, the
oxymoronic moniker “virtual reality” is an apt descriptor of how the mind perceives the
objective world; reality is the irreducible product of the dialectic play between the “potential” of
the virtual and the actual’s causal materiality. This dialectic “between the virtual and the actual
corresponds to the most fundamental split in time, that is to say, the differentiation of its passage
into two great jets: the passing of the present, and the preservation of the past.”
12
“Presence”
terminology corresponds to the human response to this temporal reality. To assert the medium
specificity of virtual reality is to assert “presence” as its formal effect, as its language of
mediation.
For a medium in the throes of making itself real, the first order of business is to locate
and instantiate the correct language of presence as it describes the formal expressivity of virtual
reality. In this way the discourse surrounding “presence” terminology becomes its own self-
fulfilling activity. The affirmative defining of presence as the determination of being follows a
long history of logocentrism in Western philosophy, coincident with Enlightenment values that
go on to provide the discourses of sobriety with their scientific purchase. Jacques Derrida’s

12. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 151.

91
deconstructive project recognizes in the grammatical, phonocentric, and that is to say, discursive
shaping of “presence” a “historical determination of the meaning of being”.
13
Logocentrism, as
expressed in grammatical thought and practice, adheres to a linear temporal order that dominates
its historicity. Moreover, in the “subdeterminations” of presence, he identifies a definitional
fluidity that nonetheless establishes presence as the absolute determinate of being:
[...](presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence
[ousia], temporal presence as point [stigmè] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-
presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the
self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth).
14

Presence is a determinate feature of Being, inscribed or written by its “grammatics” as Derrida
calls it. “Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as
presence.”
15
Derrida’s revelation is that presence is not a “natural” or necessarily ontological
feature of Being, but a product of the grammatics of language that prefigures Being as an
expression of presence. The positivist definition of presence sets the discursive parameters of the
phenomenon it describes, namely as a Being that is both individuated and co-created, dependent
on sight, and temporally situated in the moment of now. Any “being” ascribed to the technical
object of virtual reality implicates presence: presence incorporates its essential individuating
feature, its historical determination, and its particular visual register. It is a seemingly
inescapable originary assumption, ideology masquerading as ontology. Yet the contested terrain
of virtual reality’s discourse of presence – especially when its technical achievements fall short
– preserves it as a site ripe for the “misunderstanding and nonrecognition” necessary to a
deconstructive practice.
16
The misunderstanding or even misrecognition of virtual reality, as it

13. Derrida and Spivak, 12.
14. Derrida and Spivak, 12.
15. Ibid.
16. Derrida and Spivak, 14.

92
encounters the discourses of sobriety and becomes its own tool of documentation, facilitates an
analytic model that renders VR and its effects newly visible.
17

While “presence” is widely evoked by marketers and techno-evangelists to label VR as
the latest revolutionary human-computer interface (that therefore serves as a sound investment
for venture capital), academic contributions to the defining features of VR’s presence effect lend
an air of institutional legitimation to the hype. In particular, HCI engineers moonlighting as
cognitive scientists use presence to describe the unique form of VR mediation, and philosopher-
cognitivists seize upon the VR metaphor to spar over the ontology of the self. For one, the
computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Mel Slater has pioneered presence research using
virtual environments, inspiring a generation of researchers following in his footsteps. Founder of
the Virtual Environment and Computer Graphics group at University College London in the mid-
1990s, Slater’s quantitative research addresses how presence of the self (the feeling of “really
being there”) is achieved in virtual environments and has helped refine the language of presence
used by virtual reality and HCI engineers. In differentiating between what he terms “place
illusion” and “plausibility illusion”, Slater’s work establishes the technical factors necessary to
produce a sense of presence. Dependent on the immersive system’s fidelity to real-world sensory
experiences, including its display and tracking abilities, “Presence is the form.”
18
“Presence is
about form, the extent to which the unification of simulated sensory data and perceptual
processing produces a coherent ‘place’ that you are ‘in’ and in which there may be the potential

17. Here I am considering what Martin Heidegger writes of discourse and the metaphor of
visuality: “Discourse ‘lets something be seen’[...]: that is, it lets us see something from the very
thing which the discourse is about.” Martin Heidegger, John Macquarrie, Edward Robinson, and
Taylor Carman, Being and Time, Harper Perennial Modern Thought ed. (New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 56.
18. Mel Slater, “A Note on Presence Terminology”, Presence Connect 3 (2003), 4.

93
for you to act.”
19
For Slater, presence corresponds to a kind of historical coherence – the
plausibility illusion – where one asks, is this really happening and am I currently present to this
reality as a historical actor.
As a cognitive psychologist, Slater represents an institutional desire to quantify the self
and therefore legitimize virtual reality as a useful tool for measuring the unconscious of human
behavior. Attempting to epistemically rein in a phenomenal experience of being, cognitive
scientists using VR are largely reliant on the self-reporting of behavioral phenomena using post-
experiment surveying. Participants are asked to consider their own thoughts and attitudes while
inside a virtual environment and how it mimics real-world behavior, “[...e]ven though
cognitively you know that you are not in the real life situation.”
20
Counter-intuitively,
participants are asked to quantify their level of presence despite its classification as a product of
the unconscious mind. In this way, the cognitive perspective desires to reduce presence to a trick
of the brain, a stimulated “response” that incorporates but largely exists outside the socio-cultural
determinations of historical reality. Virtual reality creates and documents presence in the only
way it knows how, as an epistemic effect, as something that can be documented as such. To
document an experience of presence is to return presence to the cognitive, to the logos, despite
what we believe of its existential im-mediacy.
Supplementing the perspective of the cognitive sciences, philosopher Thomas Metzinger
equally describes VR as a foregone conclusion of human subjectivity, and a useful metaphor for
that reason. After co-authoring an oft-cited ethical guide for both VR researchers and users,
“Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct,” the German philosopher and fellow cognitivist has

19. Slater, “A Note on Presence Terminology”, 2.
20. Slater, “A Note on Presence Terminology”, 2.

94
become a reigning authority of VR.
21
Like Slater, Metzinger pays strict attention to the language
used to describe and anticipate virtual reality technology. The ethical framework established in
“Real Virtuality”, for example, includes recommendations to researchers and users centered on
combating and curbing the (dangerous) rhetorical hype surrounding VR technology.
22
On the
user end, the authors call for more longitudinal studies and recommends that users remain aware
of the largely untested and therefore unknown effects of virtual reality. This doesn’t prevent
Metzinger, however, from developing his own language of presence that, similar to the epistemic
project of Slater, hinges on what he dubs a phenomenal fiction. In his 2003 opus, Being No One,
Metzinger details what he calls the phenomenal self-model to claim that no such thing as the self
exists. The self, he argues, is a cognitive projection used to situate and process phenomenal
human experience. The virtual self codifies History as a personal experience, so even if “the
[Platonic] cave is empty,”
What does exist for conscious systems of a certain complexity, however, is a certain need
– the necessity for the system as a whole to explain its own inner and outer actions to
itself. It has to possess a representational and functional tool that helps to predict its own
future behavior, to continuously monitor critical system properties with the help of an
ongoing internal simulation, and which can depict the history of its own actions as its
own history.
23

Metzinger uses a visual and spatial metaphor in characterizing presence as a “window” whose
purpose is to uphold a causal and temporal linearity; the window of presence “frames” an

21. Michael Madary and Thomas K. Metzinger, “Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct.
Recommendations for Good Scientific Practice and the Consumers of VR-Technology”,
Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3 (2016). https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00003.
22. Madary and Metzinger, “Real Virtuality”. For example: being “clear and honest” with the
public about the scientific process and its uncertainties, questioning the notion of “informed
consent” on the internet and in other digital HCI research, informing users of the unknown
effects of VR, etc.
23. Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 2003), 557 (his emphasis).

95
experience of being in the world as my experience.
24
All presence, in that way, is “self-reported”,
as it is an extension of self-consciousness. Presence is a form of phenomenal “temporal
internality”: “It is this form of internality that is a simulational fiction[...]”
25
As “the temporal
immediacy of existence as such”, presence simulates an internal, perpetual moment of now.
26

The homonymy of Metzinger’s historical self-modeling and the 3D modeling that constitutes and
contextualizes virtual environments buttresses a rhetoric that equates VR with a self-reflective
experience of history.
For both Slater and Metzinger, virtual reality represents a unique opportunity as both
thought exercise and engineering problem for representationally recreating a sense of presence.
They both ponder over the barest setting or experience necessary to evoke the feeling of being
within a causal, consequential historical reality. Metzinger asks, “What is the minimal degree of
constraint satisfaction necessary to get a firm grip on the phenomenon?”
27
Slater is equally
interested in achieving presence by meeting its minimum constraints. “This is the real scientific
question for presence,” he writes.
28
The issue arises in how one reconciles presence as an
affective response to being-in-the-world and presence as a quantitatively knowable feature of
mediation. This requires one to frame reality and the subjective experience that defines it as
objectively sensable, as a brain-based phenomenon that can be, to a certain extent, documented.
Virtual reality documents the experience of presence, that is, re-presents presence as direct
knowledge. This autoepistemic closure, as Metzinger puts it, represents an act of falling from a
world into my world, into a higher order reality, my own affective reality.
29

24. Metzinger, Being No One, 53.
25. Metzinger, Being No One, 128 (his emphasis).
26. Ibid., 126.
27. Metzinger, Being No One, 135 (his emphasis).
28. Slater, “A Note on Presence Terminology”, 3.
29. Metzinger, Being No One, 131.

96
To attempt to answer the question of presence, virtual reality labs across the country have
used what are called “pit simulations” or “pit demonstrations” (figure 2.2). These simulations are
often used as documentaries of presence for current or potential investors and other VR
stakeholders. As VR researchers Jim Blascovich and Jeremey Bailenson attest, “At just about
every virtual-reality laboratory we’ve ever visited, scientists proudly and sometimes deviously
roll out their version of a ‘pit’ demonstration[...] This demonstration is particularly effective for
people initially skeptical about how ‘realistic’ the experience can be.”
30
Although these
simulations consist of varying degrees of realism in various settings, the basic premise is to
induce the affect of presence by harnessing the feeling of falling, of vertigo. What becomes
“documented in the phenomenon of falling,” to quote Martin Heidegger, is “[...an] existential
mode of Being-in-the-
world.”
31
Within a virtual
environment, which range
from low-polygonal
skyscraper settings to
recreations of the VR lab with
a cavernous abyss at its
center, user-viewers are
confronted with a plank they
must walk on to avoid taking

30. Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds,
and the Dawn of the Virtual (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 38.
31. Heidegger et. al., Being and Time, 221 (his emphasis). As Heidegger says, “Falling has its
temporal roots primarily in the Present (whether in making-present or in the moment of vision)”
(401).
Figure 2.2. A participant tries Richie’s Plank Experience (Toast VR,
2016) at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona.

97
a virtual plunge. Some researchers outfit their labs with an actual plank (sans pit) to increase the
tactile sense of suspension. In addition to testing the fidelity of the motion tracking, system
latency, and proprioception effect, pit simulations demonstrate how VR can induce presence
even in low-immersion environments, or where a feeling of presence is otherwise difficult to
induce. Slater concludes that, as one experiment proved, “Even some individuals who reported a
relatively low sense of presence [in VR] said that their presence increased when faced with the
plank room[...]”
32
What these simulations attempt to prove is that the cognitive status of the real
has a lesser determining factor than one’s reflexive response to the world; these results equate a
“realistic experience” with the near-autonomous response triggered by a sudden drop. Watching
people lose their balance and flail over an imaginary abyss, sometimes resulting in daring and
often painful leaps of self-preservation, researchers conclude that VR is most effective when
facilitating direct knowledge, when its act of mediation disappears, when it fulfills the fantasy of
the medium and begins to function as episteme.
The goal of the virtual documentary is to enact a regime of relation between the “direct
knowledge” provided by VR and the shared historical reality it insists upon. As “the cinematic
idiom that most actively promotes the illusion of immediacy”, documentary’s own mode of
mediation is similarly determined by this relationality.
33
Like the photographic or cinematic
document, the virtual documentary phenomenally recreates “direct knowledge” in order to codify
and therefore lay claim to what Roland Barthes calls “‘objective’ history.”
34
Documentary’s
photogrammatics, its visual “scientific language”, stages presence and addresses objective

32. Mel Slater and Martin Usoh, “Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments”, in Proceedings
of the IEEE Conference - Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, Seattle, WA, 1993,
93. doi: 10.1109/VRAIS.1993.380793.
33. Renov, “Re-thinking Documentary”, 71.
34. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
146-147.

98
history by way of the photographic process. As the experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and
Étienne-Jules Marey indicate, photography’s contribution to direct knowledge hinges on its
command of the temporal field. The photograph’s “imageness” is conditioned by “[...]the
attestation of presence and the testimony of history[...]”
35
. Additional formal documentary and
news strategies such as the use of narrative voice, archival imagery, and self-reflexivity reinforce
the presence of the photographic image. Televisual images have the compounded benefit of the
presentist paradigms of liveness and flow. As Leshu Torchin notes, for television news, for
example, “presence can be established through a set of verbal cues.”
36
These “cues provide the
immediacy that confers transparency to the mediation[...]”
37
Archival imagery delineates
historical periods in order to demarcate the present of the documentary itself, in the time of its
viewing, where the viewing of it calls it into the present. And often self-reflexivity affords a
renewed claim on the real; to acknowledge the act of mediation is a disclosure judged “true” or
“real”. “For such a brand of documentary practice, mediating processes are the vehicles rather
than the encumbrances to its claim to veracity.”
38

Plank simulations are a testament to the powerful effects mediation can have to induce a
sense of presence. They indicate that, while one may be able to reasonably testify to the degree
to which they felt present during a mediated experience, a true sense of presence is best
determined by how that medium engages the autonomic nervous system (the unknowing mind).
Plank and pit sims are so effective at documenting presence because they work to shock the user-

35. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007), 26.
36. Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the
Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 8.
37. Torchin, 8.
38. Renov, “Re-thinking Documentary”, 76.

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viewer out of the reality that is the mediating apparatus so as to “fall” into the present.
39
In this
way, they successfully simulate the falling away from consciousness toward an “unmediated”
presence, a feeling that exists despite one’s “knowledge” of (it) being there. This is not only the
nominal goal of virtual reality – to replace consciousness as its own mediating filter–but
ostensibly the goal of any act of mediation. The extent to which a given medium can be said to
induce a feeling of presence is normally determined by how readily that medium can disappear.
Ironically, the less present the medium and its act of mediation, the more present the user-viewer.
VR plank sims return one to their senses as they are returned to “[...]temporal immediacy: a
sense of being in touch with myself in an absolutely direct and nonmediated way, which cannot
be bracketed.”
40
A quantifiable VR presence, then, goes a long way to legitimize virtual reality’s
recourse to a shared historical reality, to objective history. This recourse is ideologically framed
as unmitigated, a nonideological project itself. It opposes a view of historical reality as being
shaped by the act of mediation, where the formal features of that mediation condition the
“reality” it communicates.

Photogrammatology

Photogrammatology. Where to begin? Or as Derrida puts it, “Where and how does it
begin...? A question of origin.”
41
It seems a natural turn that virtual reality has gained wider
credence in documentary discourses by way of its visual scienticity, that is, its photogrammatics.

39. In Roger Caillois’ taxonomy of game types, ilinx describes “[...]the pursuit of vertigo[...]”
that “[...]destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.” Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games,
reprint ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23.
40. Metzinger, Being No One, 310.
41. Derrida and Spivak, Of Grammatology, 74 (his emphasis).

100
As far as the question of photogrammatology concerns itself with origins, with ontology, it
interfaces most commonly with the “sober” discourses of engineering, topography, archaeology,
and, as they have come to be associated with the real in at least general terms, history, and of
documentary. As virtual reality is provided an origin in documentary, photogrammetry gives
form to the virtual documentary. Within the category of photogrammetry I am generally
addressing the process by which 3D information is extracted from 2D measurements, including
especially the latest forms of digital Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry. SfM
photogrammetry is a visual effects technique, whereby 3D digital models are algorithmically
stitched together using photographic data. But implied is a larger set of similar capture and
display technologies including volumetric video, LiDAR scans, and the overlapping concerns of
videogrammetry, stereogrammetry, iconometry, diagrammetry, Instagrammetry, and all of their
respective “-ologies”. The photogrammetric content that helps define virtual nonfictions in
institutional terms – documentaries like Karim Ben Khelifa’s The Enemy (2016), or Daniel
Schechter, Linc Gasking, and Rainer Gombos’s #100Humans (2016) – equally provides an
epistemological framework, a visual grammar, to a virtual reality hellbent on making itself real,
giving it a “presence” on the level of the photograph or the film (figures 2.3 and 2.4). These
virtual documentaries are notable in how they use photogrammetry in the staging of their human
testimonies, but they represent only a fraction of the use of photogrammetry in virtual
nonfictions.
However, photogrammatology would have to forego origins in order to grapple with the
desire for a visual order of presence. It would need to interrogate the quest for origins, to
question the “scientificity” of the photo-image, for, to quote Derrida again, “[that question’s]
repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case

101
and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.”
42

Indeed we see in the thorough and highly useful archives of The VR Nonfiction Mediography
produced by Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters, or MIT’s Docubase, a
desire to declare virtual reality documentaries as such, to index them as their own points of
reference, to give them their own writing.
43

42. Derrida and Spivak, Of Grammatology, 28.
43. The VR Nonfiction Mediography, http://vrdocumentaryencounters.co.uk/vrmediography/;
MIT Docubase, https://docubase.mit.edu/.
Figures 2.3 (top) and 2.4 (bottom). The Enemy (Khelifa, 2016) and #100Humans
(Schechter, Gasking, and Gombos, 2016).

102
The question of photogrammatology, then, a science of the science of writing with light,
would need to, for an instant, put origins under erasure, to embrace what Charles Musser calls
the long durée of documentary, its idea only seized upon by the technologies of photography and
the cinema.
44
“It is very possible that there was never any first invention of cinema,” writes Jean-
Louis Baudry.
45
One of the virtual realities, the possibilities, of cinema is that it never was.
Everything unfinished within photography and the cinema – never was, not yet began, not yet
present and without origin – resides in virtual reality. Baudry’s rejoinder is helpful in that it
describes how one apparatus can desire for another, that it is desire that gives them form,
delaying any true beginning despite a shared technical mandate, an adherence to the referent.
This may be why Laszlo Moholy-Nagy prefers the term “re-invention”, or, “invention-re-
invention” when it comes to writing with light.
46
Louis Kaplan describes Maholy-Nagy’s own
photogrammatology as the undoing of origins: “[...]the unusual logic of the photogrammatical
signature makes the question of an original invention and inventor (whether singular or multiple)
inapplicable or even gratuitous. This is not a history of invention in search of a copyright, but the
construction of the photo-grammar of invention that ends by issuing a general right to copy.”
47

Photogrammetry’s own history runs parallel to that of photography, its key iterations
punctuated by familiar faces who helped advance the development of photogrammatics –
Albrecht Dürer, Johann Zahn, Louis Daguerre, François Arago, and Albrecht Meydenbauer. At
first an experimental and cumbersome method for map-making and structural drawing,
photogrammetry gained wider institutionalization and large-scale adoption over a long period,

44. Charles Musser and Joshua Glick, “Documentary’s Long Durée: Reimagining the
Documentary Tradition”, World Records Journal 2 (fall 2018),
https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/02/04.
45. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus”, Camera Obscura 1 (October 1, 1976), 113.
46. Kaplan, László Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings, 46.
47. Kaplan, László Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings, 43-44.

103
naturalized in scientific discourses by Empire’s expansion and the onset of global warfare. The
inception of the airplane and the subsequent upgrades in aerial photography, the improvement of
stereoscopy, shrinking instruments and larger Fields of View, gained photogrammetry a seat at
the table of presence by marrying it to the interests of the military. Ironically, photogrammetry
became synonymous with the documentation of the ruins of another time, the soon-to-be-
ruinous, the derelict, out-of-date, the monuments and environments marked for erasure. Albrecht
Meydenbauer’s German Cultural Heritage Archive, one of the first photogrammetric collections
of historical buildings, as media theorist and archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst points out, “already
anticipated the potential war losses, the past future of the originals.”
48
Photogrammetry records
for the sake of what will be destroyed, transforming what it sees into visual history.
Photogrammatologists – namely surveyors, structural illustrators, architects, visual
effects artists and archaeologists – identify common co-ordinates on a set of photographs in order
to spatially measure an object or area. These control points or reference points were traditionally
physically marked on the glass plate of the print. In order to achieve the most accurate
measurement, a photograph must comply to a certain standard that helps provide a complete
view of the object: it should be a sharp, wide-angle, high resolution image with low shadow and
even lighting.
49
Because it operates by way of the mathematics of comparative looking,
photogrammetry always implies multiple images, an archive, all depicting the same thing with
relative uniformity.

48. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), 93.
49. “Even lighting” implies the photographs were taken on the same day at around the same
time, or at least a similar time of day on different days; we will see how this rule is bent by
crowdsourced SfM photogrammetry.

104
Looking at photogrammetric plates, it is difficult to discern the difference between them
and a standard photograph (figures 2.5 and 2.6).
50
The plates seem to operate on much the same
level Roland Barthes describes in Camera
Lucida, their studium being a partially
destroyed building or a bridge overpass,
only their punctum is predestined, as
series indicators stamped onto their
surface, or survey control points
indicating what exactly this photograph
references (figure 2.7). The punctum
here, the affective reality of the
photograph, is transformed into a
visually coded annotation, or a point of
reference for the calculations of an
algorithm. Adhering to its referent in
mathematical terms, photogrammetry
seems to exist outside the confines and

50. Let’s for a moment do away with the ontological double bind, or triple bind, that these
images put us in, like those archived on the Library of Congress website, which are photographs
of photogrammetric plates now digitized.
Figures 2.5 (top) and 2.6 (bottom). “Photogrammetric
image of northwest facade looking southeast at fire
damage,” Washburn-Crosby Milling Complex,
Washburn "A" Mill, 710-714 South Second Street,
Minneapolis, Hennepin County, MN.
“ELEVATION OF BRIDGE”, Philadelphia & Reading
Railroad, Wissahickon Creek Viaduct, Spanning
Wissahickon Creek, north of Ridge Avenue Bridge,
Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA.

105
privileges of affective discourse (in this way its referent need not be “stipulated” as W.J.T.
Mitchell notes of standard photographs).
51
Photogrammetry, like the photogram, elides the
referent in order to create pure reference. The “shared points of reference” between
photogrammetric stills enable the structural reproductions we see in illustrated diagrams and
digital three-dimensional models alike. Despite what Barthes says of the grammatics of the
photograph – that it cannot be read as such – photogrammetry encodes its images, annotates
them so they speak, at the very least, to one another. The “floating mark”, indicating a reference
point that appears to “float” in a stereogram, ties its images together, literally gives them

51. W.J.T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 61.
Figure 2.7. “Photocopy of right-hand plate of photogrammetric stereopair”, Perry E.
Borchers, photographer, 1974. St. Mary's Seminary, 600 North Paca Street, Baltimore,
Independent City, MD.

106
meaning, gives them reference and creates of them references; that is, their mathematic punctum
lends them evidentiary veracity thoroughly embedded in their own shared present.
The photogram, the cameraless
imprint of images via the open exposure
of film, provides precedent for this form
of literal reference (figure 2.8). Of the
photogram, Mitchell writes, “One can
make a photograph that ‘adheres to the
referent’ in a quite literal way[...b]ut this
guarantees nothing about its realism.”
52

And “realism” seems to be the primary
differentiator between photograph and
photogram, yet each are present
simultaneously within photogrammetry.
Three-dimensional photogrammetric
models are the photograms that retain their realism, fulfilling “a certain fantasy of photography,”
says Akira Lippit, that drifts into the hyperreal.
53
Models like that of Notre-Dame declare
themselves real in relief of what is now Notre-Dame. The model is the real thing, not what it
depicts. They exscribe the real within the present, what Lippit calls a “moment too late”: “A
virtual reality that approximates the real through a gesture, large or small, of deferral.”
54

52. Mitchell, Image Science, 62.
53. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 52.
54. Lippit, Ex-Cinema, 39, 40.
Figure 2.8. Untitled (László Moholy-Nagy, c. 1940).

107
In the digital era, photogrammetry relies on computer vision to determine the status of the
document. It is employed to virtually document areas marked for forensic study. The partnership
between photogrammetric imagery and newly portable LiDAR technologies represents growing
interest in photo-real spatial re-creations to aid forensic analysis, to capture but more importantly
interpret the raw data of the real. Indeed photogrammetry’s tried-and-true scientific methodology
is given new life by improvements in camera and display technology, providing data sets like the
surface-level windspeeds of potentially devastating tornadoes, and, where crime scenes are re-
presented for investigators, a new visual logos detailing criminal intent.
To this end, LiDAR (a recombined portmanteau of “light” and “radar”) produces its own
cameraless photographs, digital photograms consisting solely of light measurements. Using time
of flight measurements, LiDAR’s invisible light sees the external world as points of reference,
actively producing its own inscription through an extramissive eyebeam (figure 2.9). If
photogrammetry is the technological materialization of intromissive vision, LiDAR is the de-
Figure 2.9. A LiDAR visualization from the perspective of a self-driving car.

108
corporealization of extramission. The laser beam produces a perfect eye-line match, to borrow
from film studies, a “geography of visual order” conjuring ancient theories of vision where the
eyes were the source of light and not its mere interpreters.
55
LiDAR images are not exposures so
much as they impose their vision on the world, exposure under erasure, still providing for the
presence of the viewer if not the external referent beyond the presence of its measurements, the
placing of the viewer. Its measurement is not imprinted by the exposure, but it imprints the real,
each point its own punctum, pin prick, whose compilation creates a studium, a socially embedded
and understandable visual object with its own realism. The eye-line, like the punctum, defies
temporality, establishing “[...]a point of contact between beings in space—a point of
convergence even if the bodies themselves are no longer present.”
56
For Derrida, the “force” of
the punctum is its “potentiality, virtuality[...]its latency.”
57
The punctum is virtual in that at its
point of contact converge the past and present, outside and inside, exploding into pure presence.
In a kind of rebuke of the punctum, if only to call it bourgeois, Jacques Rancière describes it as
“senseless naked presence”, “brute presence”, “sheer presence”, “pure presence”, and “undiluted
presence”.
58
The temporal fixity of the photogrammetric punctum is also a mathematic reduction,
a foregone conclusion of reified photogrammatics. The “new punctum”, that of Time itself,
subsumes photogrammetric fatalism through its complex of abundance and pluricity. This
subterranean temporality is rescued only by the historical gesture: “This punctum,” Barthes says,
“more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is
vividly legible in historical photographs[...].”
59

55. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and
Narcissism Adrift (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2016), 11.
56. Lippit, Cinema without Reflection, 10.
57. Lippit, Cinema without Reflection, 13.
58. Rancière, The Future of the Image, 15-27, 22, 29.
59. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

109

Visual history, virtual history

Photogrammetric models are visual archives, a collection of “historical” photographs and
visual data, vast visual histories repurposing the past. Virtual documentaries in their own right,
3D photogrammetric simulations utilize their metered precision to pressure long-held
assumptions that the image – less than the word – belongs outside of historical discourse. An
institutional dialectic exists between the primacy of the letter and the rise of visual culture: the
former shores up its interests by attacking the latter, and visual culture gains credibility through a
tacit connection to technological progress and its “democratizing” influence. Where
documentary images are meant to provide an evidentiary link between visual culture and
historical reality, virtual documentary claims to neutrally re-presence the history it records. What
do these models make visible vis-a-vis history? What kind of continuum do they instantiate,
between what is visible, what is visual, and what is present?
Visual history, as a term gaining wider credence in certain academic circles, signifies a
shift in the discourse of history. It is a term that on one hand references the very substance of the
past – its material and representational remnants, in the form of objects and images ranging from
relics and monuments to lithographic prints and photographs – and on the other hand delineates
its own unique practice, one that extends beyond the traditional, partitioned borders of
humanistic studies of the past. Visual history is an abstraction of historical inquiry as it has
largely been adopted by professionals of the field, and it is specifically the abstraction of the
visual that triggers a crisis of identity for historical thinkers. In other words, it reminds us of
something we always knew but often forget: that history itself is determined by an economy of

110
visibility. What is the relationship between visual history and visible history? At what point can
we say a given history is made visual? Who makes it visual? Which histories can be said to be
visible and yet unvisual; given their unvisuality, can we say that they are visible histories at all?
The practice of visual history demands that these questions be answered simultaneously or not at
all, lest the visible – its objecthood and figuration as such – be consumed by a disciplinary drive
toward narrativization. For what makes history visual, as L.J. Jordanova points out in relation to
the material evidence of the past, is its particular mode of mediation.
60
Visual history is primarily
the study of a vast multiplicity of both conscious and unconscious mediations communicating
something of the past to the moment of the present. I find it no coincidence that as visual history
begins to solidify its epistemological intentions, and media archaeology excavates the living
history of media technologies, the meta-medium of the computer and its digital interface threaten
to collapse the mediated multiplicity of history into a singular experience of the present.
The power of the visual to im-mediatley conjure the past into the present is hitched to the
pictorial operations of human memory. That one may remember an image of the Egyptian
pyramids without knowing much more about its past nor present (nor without ever actually
having been there), exemplifies the visual relationship one develops between reality and oneself,
between the history of the world and my own history. In this way historical presence is visually
correlated to my own mnemonic capabilities, where history is reliant on the act of “preservation
in the sphere of the mind.”
61
The mental mapping and visual archiving performed by human
memory provides a model for historical preservation. For visual historical societies and academic
initiatives, photogrammetry and digital scanning companies, and virtual heritage non-profit

60. L.J. Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5.
61. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York:
WWNorton, 1961), 16.

111
groups and private start-up companies, historical preservation depends on the accurate
(re)interpretation of the spatial ontology of history. From The Institute for the Visualization of
History in the 1990s to the Arc/k Project, Iconem, and the Google Arts Open Heritage Project in
the 2010s, the effort to “represent historical sequence in spatial terms” becomes tantamount to a
re-presencing of historical memory.
62

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud tests the operability of a historical practice that
likens the monumental, material layering of a historical city to the functions of a remembering
mind. He imagines the limits of experiencing the full history of a place like Palmyra, where most
of the monuments of other times are “now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of
later restorations made after fires or destruction.”
63
He conceives of the four-dimensional Rome,
a persisting Roma Quadrata, where “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed
away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.”
64
He
describes engaging with this layered history, a three-dimensional reconstruction, through a kind
of HMD, a virtual reality where “[...]the observer would perhaps only have to change the
direction of his glance or his position in order to call up one view or the other.”
65
He finally
declares the spatial representation of a historical city as a clumsy analogy to historical memory,
as the destruction a city suffers over time – the kind of material erasures it undergoes – cannot
compare to the mental processes that repress, bury, and attempt to excise its past formations.
Virtual reconstructions desire the obverse comparison – juxtaposing not a mind to a city but a
city to a mind – in order to preserve an ancient material past evocative in their ruinous splendor
of the imperial project of Western Europe. They treat heritage sites as part of a healthy cerebral

62. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 17.
63. Ibid.
64. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 17.
65. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 17.

112
network, necessary for the body politic of techno-liberalism to properly operate. They attempt to
mine the unconscious in some effort to bring back to the fold the repressed memories and
experiences of a pre-colonial paradigm, returning the treasures and resources of the world to a
state of potential discovery and excavation. Instead, as Freud indicates, casting the city as a kind
of mental organism in order to equate its material historical evolution to the mental processes of
memory lost and found neglects the irreversible damages a city undergoes. In other words, such
an analogous model conceived by practices of virtual heritage disregards the political dimensions
of city space. In this way, by striking such a comparison, the movement from historical
preservation to virtual reconstruction reveals its own political project, by enacting a mental
model of the historical iterations of a lived space, its political context is erased, repressed even.
Indeed the growth of virtual heritage practices over the last thirty years seems to confirm
such cynical archiving. In many ways, a chronology of virtual heritage projects post-2001 is
analogous to the topography of U.S. interventionism and political upheaval; where crisis goes,
Figure 2.10. “Sin título by Alejandro Otero, 1954” (Arc/k Project, 2018).

113
virtual documentary follows. The Invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s coincided with The Institute
for the Visualization of History’s Baghdad Museum Project; the 2010s witnessed a wellspring of
mostly private-sector initiatives to document the crumbling heritage of Syria, including the Arc/k
Project, CyArk, and Iconem; and curiously the efforts of these groups have shifted focus to other
global destinations earmarked for American intervention, like, for the Arc/k Project, Venezuela
(figure 2.10). Three-dimensional reconstructions, SfM photogrammetric modeling, and LiDAR
archiving anticipate (potential) targets of material destruction and virtually catalog their histories
in the name of an eternal present.
In this way photogrammatics remains very much a project of the science of the historical
present, namely archaeology. “Archaeology, as opposed to history,” Ernst reminds us, “refers to
what is actually there: what has remained from the past in the present like archaeological
layers[...]”
66
Barthes claimed photogrammatics have undone a societal commitment to
monumentality, the immortal presence of archaeological knowledge, but SfM photogrammetry –
the creation of three-dimensional models from a series of photographs – testifies to the
technocratic commitment to the present of the past. Among the hybridized academic sub-fields
that coalesced around the digital revolution, Virtual Heritage began to utilize tools of computer
visualization in the early 1990s to communicate the historical present and aid archaeological
research. The development of Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi’s Virtual Reality Modeling Language
and Quicktime’s 360-degree VR plug-in made interactive displays of archaeological data
possible.
67
Virtual reality brought studies of the past up-to-date, so to speak, uncovering new
evidence of the past to weigh against established knowledge. Donald Sanders, a prominent

66. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, 57.
67. Jonathan Bateman, “Immediate Realities: An Anthropology of Computer Visualization in
Archaeology”, Internet Archaeology 8 (2000), https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.8.6.

114
archaeologist and progenitor of Virtual Heritage, describes virtual visualizations as an
opportunity to embody the past in ways previously unattainable: “Viewing the past as 3D
environments from the point of
view of the original inhabitants
allows researchers to ask new
questions, see data in new ways,
and open the door to new (and
more complex)
interpretations.”
68
Models like
that depicting the fortress of
Buhen in Egypt, what Sanders
claims as, “[...]the first detailed
and precise, interactive virtual ancient environment to also feature linked databases and a virtual
tour guide[...]”, hinge their truth claim not only on the annotations that accompany them but on
their epistemological collapse; the “precise” spatial reconstruction of the monument is enough to
span the distance between East and West, as well as the perceived distance of the past to the
present (figure 2.11).
69

Shortly after its conception, VRML was gradually adopted as the modeling language of
virtual heritage and for conducting virtual archaeological research. Discussed in the pages of the
niche VR magazine CyberEdge Journal and exemplifying “[...]the enormous potential inherent

68. Donald Sanders, “Virtual Heritage: Researching and Visualizing the Past in 3D”, Journal of
Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 2, no. 1 (2014), 38.
69. Donald Sanders, “A Brief History of Virtual Heritage”, in Picturing the Past: Imaging and
Imagining the Ancient Middle East, eds. Jack Green, Emily Teeter, John A. Larson, and Anna
Ressman, Oriental Institute Museum Publications 34 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago, 2012), 96.
Figure 2.11. “The Fortress of Buhen” (Bill Riseman, 1994).

115
in an intimate relationship between the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML),
developments of the World Wide Web (WWW) and GIS”, virtual heritage became a legitimizing
use-case for VRML and VR in general.
70
While working for HP in the early 1990s, David
Raggett envisioned a “walkable” internet, a space that was navigable in three dimensions, what
we are used to in real life, but behaved nonlinearly like hypertext, semantically connecting the
information of the world while transgressing its spatial-temporal fixity. In his short article
“Extending WWW to Support Platform Independent Virtual Reality,” which Raggett presented
at the first World Wide Web conference in May 1994 in Geneva alongside author of the Web,
Tim Berners-Lee, he conceptualizes a Virtual Reality Markup Language, a computer script that
could read and write information in three dimensions that could then be shared and accessed
through the Web. Enter Mark Pesce, a software designer who, alongside Tony Parisi, another
computer engineer, designed the first workable VRML interface for the Web at about the same
time Raggett was coining the term. With VRML, Pesce would design a world-building language
that borrowed from cinema, distributing its universe across the Web in snippets he called
“scenes”: “Central to the concept of VRML is the world, or VRML document. This world should
be thought of as a scene, rather than a large, monolithic environment, like Earth.”
71
He gave his
VRML document the extension .wrl, for world, and further mixes the metaphor in his
introductory text on VRML. “VRML is the language of cyberspace, and it seems fitting that the
first book we write in this language should be the Story of the World. It will be written by many

70. Eben Gay, “Better Than the Real Thing?” CyberEdge Journal 6, no. 3, issue 31 (May/June
1996). Mark Gillings and Glyn Thomas Goodrick, “Sensuous and reflexive GIS: exploring
visualisation and VRML”, Internet Archaeology 1 (1996).
71. Mark Pesce, VRML: Browsing and Building Cyberspace (Indianapolis: New Riders
Publishing, 1995), 45. He is referencing theater, but the takeaway is the idea of worlds built like
databases.

116
hands, sung by many tongues, and will stretch out—like a great canvas—to cover the whole
planet.”
72

Continuing the spatial allegory that Freud meaningfully warned against, Pesce
reinterprets the Western colonial project of bringing the world to heel through the language of
VRML. He envisions a universal language that might rewrite the entirety of the world within
cyberspace, that might model the world in three-dimensional movie “scenes” that behave like
scripture telling their etiological tale. This is the scripture with which we’ll colonize the New
World of cyberspace. His book adopts another structuring allegory around the mythical
interpretation of the European conquest of the Americas, its first chapter announcing,
“Cyberspace is the unexplored country.”
73
The first order of business must be – like European
missionaries bringing the Good Book to the Americas – subjugating cyberspace with a text-
based language of record, replacing the primitive, analog tradition of oral history with more
exacting depictions and measurements of the world. VRML will then go a step further, beyond
the limits of text and thus of history, expanding its world to recapitulate even the pre-historical
products of language, a visuality that envelops the “half a million years of human language” that
predated text.
74
Its architecture, like Jorge Louis Borges’ Library of Babel, will archive “every
memory or fragment of knowledge or wisdom or truth or scientific fact or creation or prayer or
great word spoken” within “a room—improbably long and impossibly high[...]”
75
Like the
Biblical text, the interactive language of cyberspace is of the world but it also contains the world,
its virtualized measurement of the actual its enaction as such. Its coding is “executable”, its equal

72. Pesce, xvi. The text “#end world” is what completes the code of any VRML document.
73. Pesce, 3. The VRML browser “Pioneer”, formerly known as Fountain, further indicates the
kind of colonial mythologizing VRML takes part in.
74. Pesce, 30.
75. Pesce, 326.

117
only God’s word, which “converts meaning into action,” phenomenological information into the
virtual in-formation.
76

Pesce’s virtual nostalgia for a colonial project of discovery and grammatic subjugation
extends through VRML to the latest photogrammetric three-dimensional reconstructions of
virtual heritage. Insofar as any attempt to re-presence the past participates in a project of
nostalgia, virtual heritage and environmental recreations are unique in that they waver between
the impulse to restore and the impulse to reflect. Svetlana Boym distinguishes between
restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia through chiasmus: the former spatializes time, the
latter temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia, as the name indicates, attempts to regain in the
present something lost in the past. “The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the
present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot[...]”, she writes.
77
The restorative
tendencies of virtual heritage and “historical” photogrammetric models is hinged on its omittance
of durée, its aortic temporality, as Barthes says; like the photograph, or archaeology itself, they
write the past out of history. Their grammatical tense is not the perfect tense of memory – as in
reflective nostalgia – but the “aorist” tense, where the action, perhaps a final ruination, is never
completed.
78
The Monumentality of the real is replaced by the libidinal expressions of primarily
a Western technocracy desperately attempting to preserve what it is about to massacre.
Photogrammetric reconstructions seize upon the memory by remembering for us, in the
language of photogrammatics. When specialists and amateurs alike interact with 3D scans, we
remember how these objects looked, literally how they have been pictured before, in order to
experience “how they were” in the here and now. Depictions of the Middle and Far East, the Old

76. Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 166.
77. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.
78. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.

118
World, even natural landscapes now facing utter erasure, are ironically re-presenced for
cosmopolitan Western sensibilities by maintaining their distance. This nostalgia is
“[...]‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself’[...]”, says Boym, where “[...]the home is in
ruins or, on the contrary, has been just renovated and gentrified beyond recognition.”
79
Virtual
memories of this kind aid the “reestablishment of stasis”, that is, the imperial nostalgia of the
Western imagination.
80

Virtualizing Palmyra, Syria

In the mid-2010s, the slow and devastating escalation of primarily a domestic conflict in
Syria reached a boiling point, ensnaring almost every world power and kickstarting both a global
refugee crisis and a rush to preserve the rich regional material histories threatened by war. The
hypermediated documentation of destruction in global-historical cities like Aleppo, Damascus,
and Palmyra transformed the Syrian Conflict into a global affair. The media storm became
reminiscent of a history of imperial fascination with Syria, from the first century Romans to the
British and French in more recent epochs. In particular, the ancient caravan city of Palmyra
became a focal point for peace advocates and preservationists alike. Palmyra’s symbolic value
was enough to quickly render it the most marketed, the most public, the most global facing – that
is to say, rhetorically weaponized – legitimizing cause for practices of digital scanning and
photogrammetric modeling. As corporate giants like Microsoft and Google used the case of
digitizing Palmyra to advertise their own technology, smaller initiatives and non-profits also

79. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 50.
80. Boym, 49.

119
seized the opportunity to promote the potential of virtual reality and photogrammetry to preserve
and even reconstruct the ruined city.
One of these NGOs, the Los Angeles-based Arc/k Project, launched the digital archiving
initiative “Perpetuity│Palmyra”, creating crowdsourced photogrammetric models of Palmyra’s
most famous and threatened monuments. Arc/k’s virtual model of the Temple of Bel, for
example, is featured in soft focus; posted to Sketchfab or available on Arc/k’s website, the
Temple’s imperfect stitching results in a plasticine model that only sometimes, given certain
views, results in the photoreal recreation it strives to be (figure 2.12). Like with Raiz’s
crowdsourced model of Notre-Dame, user-viewers are encouraged to navigate the space of the
Temple like it was a guided tour, exploring it in much the same way one would explore a text.
Clicking on a set of numbers placed around the model, the viewer can marvel at a variety of
perspectives of the monument while small windows display contextual and historical
descriptions of the structure. While these features lend the model a sense of narrative and
Figure 2.12. “Temple of Bel” (Arc/k Project, 2016).

120
documentary discovery, the crudeness and relative simplicity of the model is belied by the
discursive ecosystem that encircles it. Its documentary cache is primed by a history of
visualizing Palmyra that conditions the city’s contemporary significance.
The Temple of Bel, a Semitic temple dedicated to the Babylonian god of the sun, is one
of the most heavily photographed and, before its destruction, well-preserved monuments in
Palmyra. Its state of preservation had resulted in a thorough historicization relative to other, less
documented, or, in this case, less visually interpretable Palmyrene relics. This monument also
effectively “places” and enworlds Palmyra, whose landscape is largely desert and unremarkable
save for the city that once must have provided glimmering relief to weary traders. Starting in the
late 17
th
century, European artists, explorers, and antiquarians began depicting the much-
rumored Palmyra as a wonder not just lost to time but also to modern civilization. Their
visualizations of the monuments in particular made evident the present existence of the lost city
while thoroughly fixing Palmyra to its past as a Roman outpost. The celebrated work of Robert
Wood in England, for example, or the prints of Frenchman Louis Cassas’s 18
th
century etchings
published in a volume of the Voyage pittoresque series, installed an exotic imperial vision of
antiquity in Palmyra, memorializing Palmyrene ruin in contrast to a modernizing Europe.
81

Indeed, the images published in Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart
“would revolutionise architectural taste in England,” popularizing the look of Palmyra’s pastness
while simultaneously mythopoeticizing it for the most powerful imperial force of the time.
82
The
1864 photographs taken by Louis Vignes, on the other hand, mostly unseen until recent years,
belie the ruins’ mythic stature, instead representing a more sobering, lived reality. Yet in their

81. See: Robert Wood, Giovanni Battista Borra, and Paul Fourdrinier. The Ruins of Palmyra,
Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart. London: Robert Wood, 1753.
82. "Stones that Speak: the Multiple Symbolisms of Palmyra," The Economist 415, no. 8940,
May 30, 2015, 81-82. https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2015/05/30/stones-that-speak.

121
totalizing frames these photographs reproduce the same effect of making present the pastness of
Palmyra by way of its documentary aestheticization.
One of several forays into the digital conservation and reconstruction of Palmyrene
monuments now entirely lost to history, the Arc/k Project is an initiative to preserve cultural
heritage and the material histories of past civilizations by way of crowdsourced photogrammetry.
Arc/k was established in early 2015 by Brian Pope, a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and the founder
of virtual reality research and development group Cognition, who represents the marriage of
crisis-oriented historical opportunism and a technologist ethos. Arc/k’s website frames the act of
photographing the precarious materialities of our world as a heroic counter-balance to global and
social degradation. “We face a host of daunting, even demoralizing challenges,” it reads,
“through the compounded multiple tragedies of war, religious zealotry, poverty, neglect, climate
change and even vandalism as they conspire to rob humanity of its collective culture as well as
memory.”
83
In order to preserve the historical, material, even biological world with the same
integrity of reality (the initiative includes the digital preservation of dying ecosystems as one of
its goals), Arc/k suggests one-to-one reconstruction by way of photogrammetric models. As the
effects of global conflict and environmental ruin lay waste to the material record of the past,
photorealistic texture- and object-mapping technologies promise to not only preserve what is left
of these precarious archives, but to re-create what has already been lost within a wholly
democratic, if not always open-source, system. “You can get involved, simply by taking a
photo,” they write.
84
Arc/k’s ethical mandate is tempered by several factors, key among them is
the belief that a technologically saturated modern culture is both the root of our own ruination
and our salvation. “We see that for every challenge generated by our civilization’s uses of

83. “Who We Are,” Arc/k Project (2017). http://arck-project.org/who-we-are/.
84. “What We Do,” Arc/k Project (2016). http://arck-project.org/what-we-do/.

122
technology, we must also pursue solutions made possible by even more advanced technologies
and innovations in the sciences.”
85
Like with previous visualizations of Palmyra, the Arc/k
Project claims the city as a testing ground for its “even more advanced technologies” of
visualization and memorialization. And also like past visual records, Arc/k effectively
reinterprets an optics of imperialism: the cost of their experimentation is offset by the
commodification of a history that lies just out of reach for the Western world. Arc/k’s own
business model describes the opportunity to feature its visual assets in Hollywood cinema,
“monetizing cultural heritage preservation so that history is not only preserved, it’s made
profitable.”
86

What is Palmyra?

In order to understand what Palmyra was and how it has been envisioned throughout
history, it is necessary to contextualize what it has come to signify in the contemporary moment.
This is because Palmyra means several different things, its name and image often equally
evocative politically as it is culturally, historically, and geographically. It is a city, an
archaeologically rich “site” as much as a photographic citation, yet, first and foremost, Palmyra
is today a warzone.
87
Although the Syrian civil conflict had been raging for more than four years,
Palmyra remained widely untouched until June 2015, when the army of the Islamic State of Syria
and Iraq began to take aim at the cultural heritage of Syria in dramatic fashion. No longer a place
of great military strategic value, Palmyra was instead targeted for its cultural significance and

85. “What We Do,” Arc/k Project (2016). http://arck-project.org/what-we-do/.
86. Arc/k promotional material.
87. Palmyra has been on UNESCO’s list of world heritage sites in danger from 2013 to the time
of this writing.

123
symbolic value; its very historicity made it a target for demolition. In June 2015, ISIS began an
assault on both the civilian township and the ruins for which the city is world famous.
88
The
peripheral sites and burial grounds were singled out for their profitability as ISIS forces exported
the relief busts lining the ancient tombs in order to support their war efforts. A second phase
involved a different tactic: where the deconstruction and liquidation of Palmyra netted an
immediate profit, the demolition of specific archeological emblems would have the dual benefit
of provoking a global response and memorializing the ISIS cause. In early August 2015, a series
of expertly laid explosives razed the Temple of Baalshamin, importantly one of the most well-
preserved and pictured monuments in Palmyra. Finally, in late August, arguably the most iconic
structure of the region, the Temple of Bel, which, at one period, literally shaped the Palmyrene
landscape and represented the spiritual and economic wealth of its people, was destroyed save
for its outer gateway (the only portion of the structure containing reinforced concrete). The
destruction of the Temple of Bel carried with it a specific set of signifiers, namely that, when it
stood, it was the material consequence of the dialectic of history, where several religious and
cultural traditions became coterminous. By destroying the temple, ISIS attempted to lay claim to
the future by waging war on what it viewed as an insidious, primarily Western, corruption of
history by way of its layering. These acts of cultural destruction, despite the similarities they
might share with other efforts to demolish cultural heritage such as the Taliban’s destruction of
Bamiyan Buddhas in central Afghanistan, can be singled out for the ways in which they were
committed as a means of war as opposed to a result of war.
89
From March 2016 to March 2017
alone, the city traded hands between ruling forces three times.

88. Ross Burns, “Cultural Heritage Under Threat—Palmyra and Aleppo” (presentation,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, February 07, 2017).
89. Burns, “Cultural Heritage Under Threat”.

124
Palmyra devolved into a state of siege for the very fact that it is a site of ancient ruins.
Anachronistically speaking, Palmyra has very little material value to offer its conquerors: no
natural resources to exploit, no geographic advantage, no significant population to recruit or hold
hostage, no other economic benefit to reap nor current seat of power to seize.
90
Instead, the site,
littered as it is with the ruins of a once-great Roman outpost, represents how the past holds sway
over the present, how its preservation as ruination draws a virtualized line through antiquity and
up to the eternal present. The history of Palmyra as we know it today is primarily a history of its
ruins, a kind of default starting point as much of its pre-Roman past is undocumented and its
significance as a historical site derives from the monuments erected during its Roman rule.
As the Roman empire grew, its vast network of trade lines became a crucial source of its
continued strength, and strategic waypoints and outposts gained in importance and prowess. By
the first century A.D., Palmyra was a vital tradepost that provided a shortcut off the main route
from the Euphrates river to the Mediterranean Sea.
91
The city commemorated its expanding
wealth by building a series of monuments meant to rival those of Rome itself. When it was
finished, the Temple of Bel, for one, which was meant to promote trade in the region by
capitalizing on the piety of its wayfarers, provided a spectacular vision with its bronze and gold

90. It is worth noting that, at various times in history, Palmyra was viewed as a strategic military
position. In French mandate Syria for example, Palmyra became a central military position vis-a-
vis Damascus and Homs. Palmyra also became central to French efforts to pacify the Syrian
desert, “[...]to fill the empty space of the oasis with more disciplined objects, forms and
movements.” Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space and
State Formation (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 179, 148. At other times,
it was seen as a position impossible to hold or defend. As the British and French negotiated
control over Syria in the late 1910s, the British initially coveted Palmyra as a strategic location
bisecting Palestine and Mesopotamia. The idea was soon abandoned, though, due to
“[...]distances, bad or non-existent roads, shortage of transport, and that ‘a small force at Palmyra
would be indefensible’, and subject to attack by local Arab tribes.” John D. Grainger, The Battle
for Syria, 1918-1920 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), 228.
91. Burns, “Cultural Heritage Under Threat”.

125
detailing. Itself established on top of an already developed Bronze Age site, the Temple of Bel
catered to the diversity of the city by remaining thoroughly heterogeneous in its design and
codification. The Temple is both Hellenistic and Semitic in concept yet follows the Greek
architectural tradition passed on through the Romans, with a central place of worship enclosed
by a series of columns and conjoining spaces. Bel, the Sun God, is at once of Semitic origin yet
evocative of his Canaanite counterpart Baal-Shamin; furthermore, Bel is often depicted flanked
by the Palmyrene gods Yarhibol and Aglibol, who symbolize the sun and the moon
respectively.
92
Despite its references to local religious culture, the Temple of Bel remains forever
alien to itself, “outside itself” in the Bergsonian sense. As Malcolm Colledge explains: “From
every viewpoint, the temple seems an intruder. It is of a size, splendor and sophistication
inconceivable in the context of known earlier and contemporaneous Palmyrene work. This
implies that the main artistic direction, and doubtless many if not most of the masons and
artisans employed, came from outside.”
93

Although this kind of cultural alienation and spiritual conflation is not unique to Palmyra,
it effectively depicts the way in which Palmyra, even in antiquity, was in a constant state of
determination, where the demands of its present moment consistently reframed what once
determined its past. Later, as its great monuments slowly transformed into the ruins now
preserved in the modern imagination, Palmyra and its virtual past became an inspiration to the
West, although for a time it resisted any concrete “picturing” and instead became a source of
utopian myth and exoticization. The story of Zenobia, for example, is the subject of Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo’s Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (1725/1730) (figure 2.13). The wife
of Odaenathus, who Rome dispatched in the middle of the Third Century A.D. as the “corrector

92. Ross Burns, The Monuments of Syria: A Guide (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 210-212.
93. Malcolm A. R. Colledge, The Art of Palmyra (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976), 237.

126
of the East”, Zenobia assumed power after her husband’s assassination, eventually turning the
Palmyrene state against Rome; instead of “correcting” the East, she empowered it.
94
Tiepolo’s
painting depicts Zenobia gesturing to an encampment of her soldiers while standing atop a stone
platform, presumably a grave, resting one arm on a ruined pillar that juts out from its foundation.
Tiepolo therefore prefigures the ruins of the Palmyrene landscape alongside Zenobia, her
despondent soldiers turning their heads with some discomfort to better see the queen. Here the

94. The story of Zenobia received renewed attention in nineteenth century Europe, when a neo-
classical “romantic sentimentality” towards ancient ruins repopularized the mythic Palmyra, and
proto-feminist sculptors repeatedly figured Zenobia. Rex Winsbury, Zenobia of Palmyra:
History, Myth and the Neo-Classical Imagination (London: Duckworth, 2010), 21.
Figure 2.13. Queen Zenobia Addressing Her Soldiers (Tiepolo, 1725/1730).

127
living mythology of Zenobia is grafted onto the ruins of her civilization, her ambitions for a new
future and path forward stemming from – literally resting on – the grave of the past.
95

The Case of the Two Louis

The earliest visual record of the Palmyrene landscape and monuments dates back to the
late 17
th
century. As modern British explorers traversed the region, a tradition of memorializing
what they saw in panoramic paintings emerged. The first of these panoramas was reproduced by
Abednego Seller in The Antiquities of Palmyra, a 1696 publication that helped ignite the interest
of scholars and travelers in the West.
96
At the same time, the Dutch artist G. Hofstede van Essen
completed a 33.8x169-inch oil painting titled View of the Ruins of Palmyra, which “was used as
the source for all subsequent depictions of Palmyra in the West until Robert Wood’s 1753
publication” The Ruins of Palmyra (figure 2.14).
97
Van Essen’s painting depicted the Palmyrene
landscape as a marvel of ruination, a vast sea of marble that gave the impression of King
Solomon’s ancient fortified city of Tadmor, once lost to scripture; to match its mythic
imagination, the medium of the panorama indicates the ways in which the grandeur of Palmyra
resists the limitations of the frame. Some one hundred years later, the French explorer and
antiquarian Louis Cassas was commissioned to document the site of Palmyra as part of a larger

95. Zenobia’s eventual defeat and ouster, resulting in the near-annihilation of Palmyra at the
hands of Roman Emperor Aurelian, is replayed by the destruction of ISIS. Exacting Aurelian’s
final blow, the Mid-Eastern fundamentalists are ironically recast as Roman imperialists, where
the preservationists are Zenobia, the freedom fighters supported by Western armed forces.
“Where Zenobia is, final ruin cannot come.” William Ware, Letters From Palmyra By Lucius
Manlius Piso, to His Friend Marcus Curtius, At Rome (London: George Routledge and Co.,
1851), 189.
96. Frances Terpak and Peter Louis Bonfitto, The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra, exhibition.
www.getty.edu/palmyra.
97. Ibid.

128
expedition that would take him throughout Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and other locations around
the Near East. Cassas would spend a month sketching Palmyra, accurately rendering what he saw
in some instances but embellishing a great deal of others, increasing the volume of decaying
objects and reconstructing scenes of its magnificent Roman past.
Aspiring to surpass earlier publications on Palmyra, Cassas wanted to awe and inspire his
European audience by lavishly documenting this great Greco-Roman city lost in the
desert. His panoramic etching conforms to the voyage pittoresque tradition, inviting the
viewer to simultaneously marvel at the grandeur of antiquity and lament its inevitable
decay.
98

Released toward the end of the French Revolution, Voyage pittoresque de la Syrie represented
antiquity and the ruination of ancient civilizations for a country wrestling with a burgeoning
liberal order. For some, Cassas’s drawings would have provided a cautionary tale of the hubris of
global imperial rule (figure 2.15). The ruins not only portrayed the past as something that
remains incorporated into the present, they portended a future wherein “our present becomes
history.”
99
For others, though, it would only aid the distancing between modern Europe, whose
time was very much the present, and the ancient world of the East, which belonged entirely to
the past. Cassas’s quaint portraiture of Bedouin caravans and smiling camels provided stark

98. Frances Terpak and Peter Louis Bonfitto, The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra, exhibition.
www.getty.edu/palmyra.
99. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 79.
Figure 2.14. Views of the Ruins of Palmyra (van Essen, 1693)

129
contrast to the self-sustained imagination of progressive Western European civilization. Either
way, Cassas became famous for his images of Palmyra, his reproducible etchings permanently
embedded in a collective consciousness of the ancient city.
In 1864, the French naval officer Louis Vignes snapped 29 photographs of Palmyra. His
commander having returned home after the reconnaissance of Petra among other ancient sites of
interest, Vignes continued to Palmyra where he would capture in faded detail the first known
photographs of Palmyrene monuments. The collection includes two panoramic views – one
consisting of two frames and the other of three frames – that continue the tradition commenced
170 years before it (figure 2.16). Yet, despite mimicking its forebears in attitude of mind,
Vignes’s visual history is of a much different quality. While similarly providing an evidentiary
source for the city’s documentation, his photos were the first to transform Palmyra into “a source
of personal aesthetic and emotive experience,” what would later make up the individuated parts
Figure 2.15. “Temple of Bel”, Lepagelet and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault after Louis-François
Cassas. Etching.

130
of Arc/k’s 3D models.
100
Where the trope
of discovery helped elevate the work of
Cassas, no such enchantment greeted
Vignes. The mechanical eye of his early
camera captured the sober reality of
Palmyra at the time, with a mud-hut
village occupying the Temple of Bel and
much of the wonders associated with the
area still underground (figures 2.17 and
2.18). Less exploding with the potential
of the past, these images seem haunted by
it. The distorted sepia tone and feathered
edges transform each monument into the
cruel remainders of history, now made
accessible to the present through its

100. Claire L. Lyons and J. Paul Getty Museum, Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of
Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 24.
Figures 2.16 (bottom), 2.17 (top), and 2.18 (middle). “Three-part panorama from Temple of the
Standards”, “Temple of Bel”, “Temple of Bel, view of the cella” (Louis Vignes, 1864). Albumen print.

131
“uncomplicated documentation.”
101
And although the first photographic documentation of
Palmyra went widely unseen, perhaps because of their relatively reserved sense of magnitude,
“[...]Vignes’s trip marks the beginning of modern documentation of Palmyra, and a new era of
visual reportage” that continues through the Arc/k Project.
102

Spread what has been destroyed

The practice of visualizing history and analyzing history’s visualizations operate with a
different grammar than written histories; visual histories make “present” the past in a way
particular unto itself. Cassas’s etchings, for one, even as they add evidentiary value to the
Voyage pittoresque, romanticize the Palmyrene past in the effort to make it present, inviting the
viewer to imagine its once-glorious monuments of imperial achievement in order to preserve
their ruination for a continent keen, like the Roman Empire responsible for Palmyra’s grandeur,
to extend its own global foothold. Now that the monuments are gone, history themselves, a
similar process of making evident their past existence manifests itself in the digital
reconstructions of the Arc/k Project and others. They claim, with the same romance imbued in
Cassas’s depictions, “these things were here”, and yet the eternal referent has importantly
become the ruins themselves, not the buildings as they existed before their modern visualization.
What was once product of a romantic imaginary of the past, in the work of Cassas for example,
becomes far more “satirical” in the 21
st
century; the digital replicate, a virtual catalogue of

101. Ibid., 25.
102. Frances Terpak and Peter Louis Bonfitto, The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra, exhibition.
www.getty.edu/palmyra.

132
forgotten experience, itself living between what is present and what is impossible, helps to
maintain the distance of the past while simultaneously affording us its “presence.”
The three-dimensional reproductions of Palmyra take the form of what Hayden White
deems a Satirical Romance, in that they help to expose, in the words of Vivian Sobchack, “the
fatuity of a Romantic conception of ‘real’ presence still held, at least in part, yet also in part
disavowed.”
103
The “presence effect”, even if just an effect, equates to a desire to repurpose the
past while at the same time recognizing the impossibility of history’s true presence, that history
could ever truly be “present,” and, most importantly, that the present would ever truly desire to
be replaced by the image of the past. This would be the ironic or satirical positionality of the
Arc/k Project, the “virtual history” it constructs. The irony of re-presencing the Palmyrene ruins
is that in doing so we acknowledge how they resist the present.
I ask how a comparative practice of looking can expose how increasingly accurate
technologies of visualization paradoxically invoke their truth-claim to support a virtualized
experience of history for certain global populations.
104
Traversing the history of Palmyra through
increasingly sophisticated methods of visualization reveals the ways in which its visual history
evolved to maintain a view of Palmyrene monuments that would keep intact its particular virtual
presence while being in character with the contemporary moment. While the technologies of
visualization gained in their ability to make evident the meticulous detail of reality, so too did the
attitudes that met these images gain in scrutiny. Each epoch of visualization represented a new
turn in visual description that denoted its own effect of virtual presence, however shared over
time. As Vivian Sobchack explains, for philosopher of history Eelco Runia, the denotative

103. Vivian Sobchack, “Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past”, in Media
Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 328.
104. Jordanova, The Look of the Past, 217.

133
powers of the historical object – represented in “meticulous description” – are akin to the
denotation of presence vis-à-vis life.
105
In other words, the more accurately “described”, or in
this case, “pictured,” the monuments of Palmyra, the more present – both spatially and
historically – they become. The truth claim implicit in the visualizations of the Temple of Bel is
tied directly to how the past has been accessed throughout its history.
A theory of continuity becomes central to the conceit of these monuments as virtually
prefigured in regard to their own depiction throughout modern history. Louis Cassas’s etchings,
Louis Vignes’s photographs, and the Arc/k Project’s digital 3D models collectively provide a
sense of time divided by era yet historically assimilable unto themselves. The variations of
mediation expressed between them, then, can be defined as a qualitative multiplicity, where each
is individuated by its mode of representation but contained within each subsequent
manifestation. The visual description of Palmyra produces in turn not just its subsequent
depiction but how it is perceived generally. The image co-produces reality, putting “into
perception, in advance, something of the image itself.”
106
By way of its own visual history, the
perception of the Temple of Bel is imaged – literally “imaged”, but also, determined – in
advance. Each iteration produces “only a difference of degree,” each a cleavage between “strong
states and weak states”, the first built by the present, the second by the past.
107
However, by
achieving a photogrammetric 3D model of these recently demolished monuments, models that
have indeed transmuted the material to the immaterial and then back again, the Arc/k Project
attempts its own collapse of the perception of the present with the representation of the past.
108

105. Sobchack, “Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past,” 326 (her emphasis).
106. Henri Bergson’s use of the term “image” encompasses a psychical view or memory that is
here literalized. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 135.
107. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 135.
108. Lauren Turner, “Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph recreated in London,” BBC News, London,
April 19, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36070721.

134
Where Cassas and Vignes represent the kind of documentary imagization that memorialized
Palmyra for the West, Arc/k’s models become the monuments themselves, forming in their
multiplicity the durée of Palmyra as a past made present. “It is by virtue of their mutual
inextricability that virtual images [memories],” those created by early modern explorers like
Cassas and reinterpreted by Vignes, “are able to react upon actual objects.”
109
Photogrammetry
itself is the conjoining of several hundred “discrete elements” to form something continuous
(duration), which in this case manifests as an expression of the felt past; we experience this life
of duration as an image, one that is unassimilable and yet expresses its own psychological
plurality. The space of creation is continuous but multifold, expressing itself as something
“uniform, regular, and calculable for us.”
110

Palmyra’s visual history exemplifies the close relationship in modernizing Europe
between visual documentation and archaeology itself: the rise of antiquarianism which linked
history with its visual evidence, and then, for the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries, the close ties developed
between archaeology and imperialism. As its own visualized teleology of Palmyra’s monumental
history, the 3D figures of the Temple of Bel and Arch of Triumph symbolize the relationship
between visual technologies and modernity. These figures, like Cassas’s etchings and Vignes’s
photographs before them, are meant to “document” the Palmyrene monuments, to introduce them
into the modern hierarchy of knowledge as historical fact. While Cassas and Vignes made
evident the Palmyrene landscape in exploratory missions designed to, in part, emphasize the
historical present for distant audiences, however, the Arc/k Project reanimates the (only recent)
historical past in the name of historical “preservation.” It maintains that imaging technology and

109. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 149.
110. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time
of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 14.

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graphic reproductions of past objects now lost to time have become the histories themselves;
these technologies of visualization are accurate enough, or have always been accurate “enough”,
to render the experience of history “present” for a steadily increasing global audience. The
aesthetic determination of realism, then, as it correlates with the accessibility of visual
representations results in the co-production of the historical reality they intend to imitate or
reproduce. That is, the reality of Palmyra is produced in part by its imagization. The fact of it
being imagized has resulted in its own particular historical reality throughout the modern period
and up to the contemporary moment, evidenced quite viscerally by their current state of
obliteration. Put in clear terms, the only reason why these monuments no longer exist is because
of the popularity of their images over the course of the modern period. The technologies of
aesthetic reproduction and, following, democratization that Orientalized the monuments in the
name of European modernity produced a lacuna of historical visualization, conservation, and
consumption that resolves itself in the photogrammetric model: spread what has always already
been destroyed.
111

Indeed, one can locate in the Arc/k Project the same rhetoric of democratization
embedded in the discourse of modernity and its technologies of mechanical reproduction. Even
as the 3D Temple of Bel is sanctioned as a document of history, a document of historical gravitas
to be recognized apart from non-historical depictions, it owes whatever element of accuracy it
may have to its non-documentary images of crowdsourced photography (figure 2.19). Despite its

111. Not all three-dimensional reproductions of Palmyrene monuments share in the vision of a
future where the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage results in good business. Artists and
political activists such as Moreshin Allahyari and Bassel Khartabil (the latter imprisoned by the
Syrian government in 2012, and later executed) envision open-source access to virtualized
history, their Palmyrene models available for download at no cost online. Filippo Lorenzin,
“Spread what has been destroyed: Interview with Moreshin Allahyari,” Digicult.it, January 25,
2017. See also: Moreshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, The 3D Additivist Cookbook (Institute of
Network Cultures: Amsterdam, 2016).

136
conservationist purpose, the model is entirely composed of photographs not taken with the intent
to document the monument but rather to represent an individual presence at the site of the
monument (i.e. tourist photographs); lucky for the Arc/k Project, photographs have the unique
property of conserving history without intending it.
112

The Arc/k Project’s mode of photogrammetric, digital conservation and reconstruction,
however, introduces a new set of signifiers and pitfalls. Addressing the benefits that the age of
computerized systems of cataloguing and comparison lend to historical analysis, Martin Warnke
and Lisa Dieckmann explicate the kind of reconstructive possibilities that digital databases and
comparative visual media studies enact using the meta-image depository Prometheus as a case
study. They advocate for a heterogeneous, almost scattershot interrelation between similar
imagery across time, such that,

112. To be sure, the “crowdsourced” photographs that the Arc/k Project uses to build its three-
dimensional models may come from sources of scholarly intent, but my argument is that the
images that make up the building blocks of such models designed under a conservationist
mandate are not conservationist themselves. Thus, a visual, and in this case, experiential,
document of history is born of its own archive of images.
Figure 2.19. “Temple of Baal, Palmyra, Syria”, sanantharam, from Microsoft Photosynth, the
discontinued crowdsourced photogrammetry modeling application.

137
users are able to create and visualize relations and references between images and image
details in order to fill the significant space and to gain new insights and meaning out of it.
Through the network analysis of pictorial Meta-Image-reference elements maintained in
Prometheus, the manifold possible meanings of an image can become manifest, meanings
that through time may have shifted or displaced from person to person.
113

For a photogrammetric model like that of the Temple of Bel, the “shifting” and displaced
meanings are transmuted literally into parallax views for the stitching software to blend
seamlessly together to create a whole. The “significant space” that normally divides any given
set of interpretations is also subject to a literal collapse, as multiple photographs taken at
different times can conceivably be reworked into a singular, spatial, virtual representation.
Predictive modeling, then, following the mechanization of photography, has attempted to fill the
spaces once designated for imaginative reconstruction, perhaps, in the case of Palmyra, to the
point where its virtual visage remains but its history as a history of destruction is lost. This
signals the potential dangers of a model of history in which material culture is “saved” by way of
its photoreal spatial digitization, echoing, if taken to the extreme ends of its logic, the process of
Vernichtung – the “reduction to nothing, annihilation, but also annihilation of that annihilation”
– practiced by the National Socialists during the Holocaust.
114
Is creating a 3D Palmyra akin to
its erasure, the story of the disappearance of its monumental ruins only a kind of existentially
destructive revisionism?

113. Martin Warnke and Lisa Dieckmann, “Prometheus Meets Meta-Image: Implementations of
Aby Warburg’s Methodical Approach in the Digital Era,” Visual Studies 31, no. 2 (April 2,
2016), 113-114 (my emphasis).
114. Rancière, The Future of the Image, 45.

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Coda

For the cinema that never was, virtual heritage provides the opportunity for rebirth, to be
born digital 100 years after its consensus germination. My initial interest in photogrammetry was
actually spurred by promotional material for the Arc/k Project, where they express their aim to
digitize historical assets for use in Hollywood productions. It seems fit given that, as Donald
Sanders points out, advances in “digital rendering capabilities pushed by Hollywood
moviemakers and video game designers” in the early 1990s played a major role in producing the
conditions necessary for virtual heritage and other VR applications.
115
Photogrammetry’s use for
digital FX was first used to
generate realistic backgrounds for
the staging of action, focusing on
monumental environments like
the cityscape in Roland
Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla, but
soon gained wider
implementation, probably most
famously in The Matrix’s bullet-
time shots. John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for The Matrix, was reportedly inspired by
the SfM photogrammetry technique achieved by Paul Debevec at Berkeley. Debevec, who would
go on to become a Research Professor at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies where
mobile VR took off, demonstrated how structural information can be used to build 3D models of

115. Sanders, “A Brief History of Virtual Heritage”, 96.
Figure 2.20. Campanile Movie (Debevec, 1997). A digital,
three-dimensional Campanile created from only a few
photographs.

139
existing sites, and that photoreal skins can be grafted onto those models in turn. His Campanile
Movie (1997) pictures a Berkeley monument, The Campanile, to document the effect (figure
2.20).
Nowadays it might be easy to mistake an entirely digital Hollywood film for a virtual
heritage project or documentary content, which is perhaps what inspired Jon Favreau to liken his
photoreal animated remake of The Lion King (2019) to an architectural reconstruction.
116
Equally
tricky might be distinguishing between a nature documentary about the woods of Northern
California and a digital rendering of the forest moon of Endor. The counterfictions of high-end
video games increasingly source their alternate realities in actual reality, displacing these
photographic archives thoroughly outside the discourses of sobriety. Yet games of this kind
engage in photogrammatics to yield their own unique productive historical artefacts. As opposed
to counterfactual histories, which speculate on alternative historical outcomes and non-existent
timelines in real-world settings, the counterfictional history of these games proposes the obverse:
a fictional universe populated by photoreal archives, really sensed objects, environments, and
even people. When digital assets are sourced in reality, not inspired by reality but literally
referencing it, the product is a counterfiction that prompts a re-evaluation of photogrammetry’s
decades-long relationship with cinematic digital FX, and, then, a serious consideration of the
formal contours that shape the virtual real. Counterfactual storymaking is about taking the
variables of the real past and creating a fictional continuity; counterfictional storymaking is

116. Charles Barfield. “Jon Favreau Explains The ‘Freedom’ Of Using VR (And No Sets) To
‘Film’ His ‘Lion King’ Remake”, The Playlist, April 25, 2019. https://theplaylist.net/jon-
favreau-lion-king-vr-filming-20190425/. In another interview the director indicates that he wants
the movie to feel like a “BBC documentary”. Anthony Ha, “‘Lion King’ director Jon Favreau
explains why he’s remaking an animated classic”, TechCrunch, May 30, 2019.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/30/lion-king-director-jon-favreau-explains-why-hes-remaking-
an-animated-classic/.

140
about taking the entirely fictional worlds of Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and Star Wars, and
populating them with “nonfictional” objects of the present. The virtual materiality of the objects
create their own kind of continuity, a visual continuity that replicates a perceptual truth, the
history of a real object, environment, person who at one point existed, the proof being the virtual
objects themselves, cast repetitiously as fantastical, near-real objects that make their worlds
present, that can afford presence.
More disquieting is that the latest advances hardly involve any sourcing whatsoever;
photogrammetric content can be produced and tested using single photographs or YouTube
videos. These images will soon convince you that completely real-time rendered 3D worlds are
prerendered video. And all three-dimensional spaces will be replicable as virtual
photogrammetry transforms video games into sites of extraction.

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I n t e r a c t i o n
Theorizing Documentary Impotentials

Just Gaming

In their 2010 “Interactive Documentary Manifesto”, Andre Almeida and Heitor Alvelos
attempt to codify an emerging practice of mostly internet-based, digital interactive nonfiction.
Over the course of several prescriptions, this maker's manifesto explores the central question of
computerized, interactive forms of nonfiction media: to what degree does the agency of the user-
viewer affect the reality of the documentary experience? Put another way, how do fact-based
media invite their audiences to interact with – possibly altering or at the very least conditioning –
the truth of its product without compromising its very status as documentary? The authors adopt
a political posture in relation to interactivity and the documentary, their primary objective to
identify the confines and consequences of user agency within the “structural formalism” of
digital documentary.
1
Along with Dayna Galloway, Kenneth McAlpine, and Paul Harris’s “From

1. Andre Almeida and Heitor Alvelos, “An Interactive Documentary Manifesto”, Interactive
Storytelling 3, (2010), 127.

142
Michael Moore to JFK Reloaded: Towards a Working Model of Interactive Documentary”
published in 2007, the “manifesto” provides a rough guideline to the production practices of
interactive documentary in an effort to accelerate its standardization and industrial legitimacy.
2

More significantly, they typify an approach to virtual documentary that is at once explicitly
political in its intent and yet reliant on an ill-defined ideology to delineate the horizons and
limitations of documentary’s interactive potentials. Both are explicit roadmaps for the integration
of interactive design and documentary filmmaking. While imbricating the politics of
documentary and the formal dimensions of interaction, they exemplify the rhetorical positioning
of interactivity as an extension of a general documentary humanism. Relating the agency of the
user-viewer to the agency of the documentary itself, where even its possibility becomes
rhetorically agential, the political purchase of the manifesto is immediately relieved by the
foregone conclusions of an idealized humanistic subject of documentary. For a manifesto almost
entirely devoid of political content, interactivity itself is imbued with the innate humanism of the
documentary; interactivity is naturalized, therefore, as an extension of humanistic agency. In
laying claim to the very possibility of interactive documentary, to its potentials as yet unfulfilled,
these authors raise a pressing question: If interactive documentary only exists in possibility, what
latent ideological structures participate in the conditioning of its possibility?
Among the legitimating rhetoric of virtual documentary there is a divide, and a
movement, between the spatial claims of immersion and presence and what are often the more

2. Of course there are many like-minded investigations into interactive documentary that
predated the “Manifesto”, and the idea of an interactive documentary or documentary as an
interactive medium appears in correlation with the advancement of digital technologies. For a
detailed account, see: Dankert, H. and Wille, N. E. “Constructing the concept of the ‘interactive
3D documentary’ - film, drama, narrative or simulation?”, in Virtual interaction: interaction in
virtual inhabited 3D worlds, ed. Lars Qvortrup (London: Springer, 2001). Almeida and Alvelos’s
“Manifesto” provides a much-cited rhetorical anchor for studies of interactive documentary and
exemplifies the technical approach to its political potentials.

143
objectively identifiable actions of human bodies within these virtual real spaces. Where
immersion and presence can be considered the qualitative demarcation of the virtual
documentary’s medium specificity, interaction and embodiment provide both the quantifiable
variables needed to justify documentary’s continued use-value as well as the metrics that form
the products of virtual documentary itself. And while immersion and presence, as I’ve argued,
each include within their significance a quantitative evaluation of doc-media’s impact (and are
often used in tandem and with much definitional latitude to justify one another), interaction is
largely framed as the means by which one might achieve these spatial ideals. For authors like
Almeida and Alvelos, locating the medium specificity of new media documentary is needed to
separate it from its filmic antecedent and define its unique offering vis-a-vis the real. In the
teleology of “being there”, interaction is theorized as a point of departure as well as another
means of approaching verisimilitude with “actual experience”: “[...]interactive documentary
should always explore unique approaches to the subject that cinema can’t achieve – the so-called
‘being there’ feeling comes to mind.”
3
In relation to the documentary, interaction is not only
legitimated as supplement (despite its adjectival usage in “interactive documentary”), it provides
an experiential means, a post-indexical recombination of the subject of documentary within fully
rendered systems. Its inherent relationality signifies not only a reconstitution of the subject but a
gestural extension of the subject of documentary into the virtual real. As a reclamation of
documentary’s liberal-humanist political agenda in the era of digital technology, the interaction
claim is most exerted in defense of virtual documentary’s potential for social change.
Addressing the expanded political role interaction affords nonfiction media, Kate Nash
intimates both a shift in documentary production to “impact producing” – a quantitative

3. Almeida and Alvelos, 126.

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approach to measuring documentary media’s influence on policy or public opinion – and a turn
toward digital systems whose capacity to literally track its audiences becomes cause for
celebration. She writes, “[Interactive documentaries] frequently aspire to expand documentary’s
political role, particularly by providing new ways of engaging with social issues and
opportunities for forms of self-representation. In these aspirations is a continuation of
documentary’s political ambition, but also a response, shaped by the cultures and possibilities of
digital media, to the contemporary challenges of representing and attempting to impact on the
real.”
4
The “possibilities of digital media” Nash identifies are materialized in the technological
promise of virtual reality as well as the cultures and politics of possibility that supplement its
legitimacy. Nash characterizes the rise of interactive nonfiction as a response to the challenges
facing traditional forms of documentary, which, presumably, come up short when it comes to
engaging audiences in social issues and encouraging novel forms of self-reflection in the digital
era. In this, Nash recognizes where interaction may constitute a new politics of nonfiction in
response to traditional documentary’s implied failure. As a movement toward the integration of
digital systems built to interpret user-viewers’ reactionary input, the interactive turn in nonfiction
media – what Deniz Tortum recognizes as the “emergence of a new genre of nonfiction, one that
is in real time” – fosters a fundamentally reactionary relationship between the virtual
documentary and its user-viewer subjects, such that the mode of interaction becomes a means to
replicate the ideal humanist subject-citizen.
5
This interactive politics is hinged on the symbiotic

4. Kate Nash, “I-Docs and the Documentary Tradition: Exploring Questions of Engagement”, in
I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, ed. Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi,
and Mandy Rose (London: Wallflower Press, 2017), 9. The term “i-doc” has its own cache here,
a neologism that attempts to forget altogether the supplementary function of interaction and
instead desires to inaugurate a new form of nonfiction in spite of, or perhaps just the opposite, in
exaltation of the “documentary tradition”.
5. Deniz Tortum, “Breathing Archives: Immersive Nonfiction Storytelling through 3D Capture”,
March 2016, Watershed, Bristol, UK, MPEG-4, 19:05, https://vimeo.com/172493927.

145
connection formed between user-viewers and the digital interface; a disconnect between user
input and system calibration results in a latency that amounts to a political failure, a
delegitimation and disavowal that creators, as Almeda and Alvelos implore, must avoid at all
cost. The failure the authors evoke on nearly every page of their manifesto results when the
principle of interaction overtakes the documentary address, that is, when interactive agency is
either interrupted by technical limitations or exceeds the boundaries of the documentary content;
in other words, interaction fails when documentary is transformed into a video game.
In much the same way it does for documentary, the interaction claim is used to legitimate
virtual reality as an extension of human experience in the real world. The responsiveness of its
virtual worlds is touted as a means to not only achieve verisimilitude with “actual experience”
qua experience, but to curate those experiences, to actively constitute particular political subjects
and advance particular causes with real-world effect. In turn, virtual interaction actualizes the
documentary, its “potential” and “possibility” realized through the politicization of interactive
nonfiction content. To “play” an interactive documentary, then, or to enter into nonfictive spaces
through an HMD, is an enaction of its ideology, so much so that even if user-viewers aren’t
aware of it or don’t fully internalize the procedural reality presented to them, they can be said to
at the very least perform the politics of the documentary at hand. Interaction transforms the
documentary into its own agent, its own acting subject that determines the reactions of its users.
This is the legitimating feature common to all interactive documentary, and it provides a
wellspring for a subfield that has grown in leaps and bounds over the past ten years. In both
explicit and implicit terms, the i-docs community – scholars, practitioners, producers, corporate
and government sponsors – embraces the virtual humanism at the core of these products. The
characteristics of this humanism are expressed as reified documentary narrative conventions

146
within VR as well as an interactive indexicality that bridges documentary film and its originary
truth claim with digital media and its interface. The interaction claim instantiates the gestural
index by way of socially or politically “important” subject matter, where “importance” is defined
by the level of humanistic agency afforded the user-viewer and the humanist identification with
the others she encounters. Interaction favors continuity over the discontinuous, identification
over misidentification, avowal over disavowal.
However, for a technical system yet to make smooth this humanist transference, virtual
reality yields ample opportunity to re-theorize interaction and the emerging genre of real-time
documentary. The interactive components specific to VR coincide with the perceptual
affordances unique to video games and double as effective political metaphors. While interaction
calls digital objects, places, and people into three-dimensional reality, it also simulates the
absences and failures of perception: occlusion, parallax, and especially latency. The legitimations
of interaction are offset by what it precludes, its politics suffering from its own latent relationship
Figure 3.1. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017).

147
with reality, its own simulation sickness. In this way, VR as gaming headset troubles its claim on
the real. As the category of interactive documentary seeks legitimation by excluding what
otherwise could be termed a “video game” generally speaking (a rendered playable product
whose entertainment value outweighs its informational pursuit), this chapter conceives of
interactive documentary as those nonfiction elements that insist upon the fictional interactive
spaces of video games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017) and Star Wars:
Battlefront (EA DICE and Criterion Software, 2015) (figure 3.1). These interactive products
“gamify” the nonfictional content that helps build their playable spaces and characters:
photogrammetric environments and props, real-time rendered actor-characters, and digital
historical artifacts. Aiming to expand its audience’s understanding of severe mental illness,
Hellblade in particular invites players to experience the “fictional”, reparative realities of a
fractured psyche with vérité realism. The game asks audiences to experience it as a potential
documentary if not the actual thing, a virtual documentary that harnesses interaction to provide
previously impossible insight into the human experience. Such applications of nonfictional
material in popular VR and AAA console video game titles provide a limit case that de-centers
academic and industrial notions of interactive documentary based purely on subject matter.
Indeed, by existing outside or adjacent to interactive documentary as it’s commonly defined,
these nonfiction products are less easily incorporated into the humanist agential project that
currently legitimizes interactive virtual documentary. They mark a point of failure for the
interaction claim, or rather, they help re-imagine the failures of interactive documentary as their
raison d'être.

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“Interactive Documentary” and the Agential Document

Considered one of the most influential developments in 20th century computer sciences,
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad inaugurated a new era in which human actors would no longer be
“writing letters” to their computer counterparts but “conferring” with them.
6
Developing the
graphical user interface as the primary means most people would engage with computers,
Sutherland’s advances provided a roadmap for experiential design, one that, from the outset,
attempted to confirm the usefulness of interaction to cognition: “The decision actually to
implement a drawing system reflected our feeling that knowledge of the facilities which would
prove useful could only be obtained by actually trying them.”
7
This breakthrough in 1963
equally initiated a new set of naming conventions in computer science and digital media studies
that would span from human-computer interaction and computer-assisted design to emerging
media and the aforementioned immersive media. Going back well before Sutherland’s time, we
can locate in the rhetoric of the new media of photography and cinema an experiential
declaration, such that the new media would impact society and individual life beyond the letter.
As the boundaries between computational processing and the new media began to blur following
Sutherland’s advancements, the experiential character of their products and practices had become
fact, and the impact of digital experience was both reflected and critically examined in
developing discursive practices such as “technoculture” and “cyberculture”. Its ubiquitous and
diffuse cultural influence solidified the computer as more than an object to be acted upon; it was
viewed as its own acting agent.

6. Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” (Doctoral
Thesis, MIT, 1963), 8.
7. Sutherland, 8.

149
The importance of naming conventions on the computerization of audio-visual media
cannot be overstated. Its comparatively short history has produced an outsized vocabulary meant
to establish necessary distinctions between its multifarious forms. However, much like the
documentary and its originary truth claim, despite its numerous specializations, when
computational systems are integrated with already established social practices a distillation of
what is believed to be its essential characteristic takes place. What computerization signifies,
then, when it comes into contact with documentary, for example, is its experiential register, the
agent-to-agent “conferring” that is signified by interaction. In regard to media studies, interaction
gained legitimation through de facto consensus, as a kind of catch-all that signifies the shift from
viewer to user-viewer. Interaction is implied by a mediating system that asks audiences to
perform any act other than watching and listening; inasmuch as it normally connotes an
additional sensory register on behalf of the audience, it also implies, as Sutherland explains, an
auxiliary cognitive function, such that one might have learned something or discovered
something through the audio-visual experience. When it is wielded adjectivally, as in the term
“interactive documentary”, the breadth of what “interaction” might in fact correspond to in
practice is condensed to this central characteristic. This daunting expanse of significance may
explain the reluctance of most critics who take an interest in interactive documentary to fully
unpack the meaning behind its “interactive” component, while also justifying the shorthand term
in turn.
Before the coupling of interaction and documentary and their re-formation as “i-doc”,
there were several critical forays into the interactive arts – popularly referred to simply as video
games – and the realities that they inform and produce. Influential media and games theorist Ian
Bogost posited in Persuasive Games that video games contain their own rhetorical component,

150
one that would be widely circulated in game studies as “proceduralism.”
8
Depending on the
particular affordances of a given game, players are said to enact its ideological content,
instantiating their own procedural reality. To an extent, these procedural systems include a
didactic impetus, at the very least teaching players how to interact with the games themselves.
Serious games, as described in Clark Abt’s titular exploration from 1970, describes those games
that are designed to educate their players beyond the confines of their own ludic processes.
Meant to educate or train their players, serious games mark a departure from Johan Huizinga’s
formative conception of play in Homo Ludens, mainly that “[...]play is the direct opposite of
seriousness.”
9
Huizinga specifies that while play can be a very serious act indeed, it exists in a
kind of parallel register to other socializing activities, in a virtual relationship with the actuality
of human behavior. The world of game design ran away with Huizinga’s off-handed
conceptualization of the “magic circle”, a psychological but also physical space of play that
establishes its own guidelines of participation and exile.
10
Treating the magic circle as an ideal
shortcut for ideological production and reception, the serious games movement radically
transformed education, and its genealogy can be traced all the way up to the “gamification” trend
of more recent decades. Finally, when didactic or fact-based games attempt to edify their players
of contemporary realities and current events they may be termed “newsgames”.
11
These products
generate a social if not political correlation between players and the news through experiential
learning. For both serious games and newsgames, because of their claim to a direct procedural

8. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007).
9. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955), 5.
10. See also: Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
11. Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer, Newsgames: Journalism at Play
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

151
relationship with the real, “play” is regarded as too playful a categorization. The rise of “smart”
and touch-based technologies ubiquitously distributed throughout the 2010s rectified any
remaining contradictions between serious content and playful expression to the point that digital
tech has become synonymous with interaction. Interaction is not only assumed of any emerging
technology, it lends whatever it describes an air of seriousness, of legitimacy in its own right,
shared by the cultural status of the smartphone and, increasingly, of the totalizing virtual
interface. It refers to those extensions of human being that upon their consumption, their
enaction, fundamentally impact the real.
A combination of two terms that are already combinations in their own right, “interactive
documentary” has grown in popularity to reference any set of organized nonfiction materials that
is accessed through computerized technology. Its principal advocates include Judith Aston,
Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, three scholars and practitioners who are the primary
conveners of the I-Docs Symposium (started in 2011) and authors of the collected volume I-
Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. Addressed in more detail later, these
academics truncate “interactive documentary” to “i-doc” and often speculate what the “i” might
mean if not only “interactive.” The i-doc is a broad conception of interactive nonfiction,
encompassing newsgames (Darfur is Dying [Ruiz, 2006]), serious games (Papers, Please [Pope,
2013]), “historically accurate” simulations (1979 Revolution: Black Friday [Khonsari, 2015)],
and virtual reality testimonial re-creations (6x9 [Panetta and Poulton, 2016]). The interactive
documentary as a fully rendered, real-time production was anticipated by Hanne Dankert and
Niels Erik Wille who, writing in 2001, define the “interactive 3D documentary” as “[...]an
interrelated sequence of moving images projected on a screen and giving the user/spectator a

152
view of a world including agents, ‘props’ and scenery, organized in one or more locations.”
12

They describe their notion of the i-doc as a type of mix between animated film and historical re-
creations or drama documentary, where “[...]images[...]make true statements about the real
world, but without any of the normal ‘authenticity’
of a photographic documentation.”
13
Despite
numerous examples of virtual reconstructions in the
1990s that fit Dankert and Wille’s description, the
idiom of “interactive documentary” itself is rarely
implemented before the turn of the century. The
authors cite the edutainment CD-ROMs produced
by Britain’s self-proclaimed “premier documentary
and interactive studio” FlagTower Multimedia in
the mid-1990s as the first instances of so-called
“interactive documentary.” Having produced a series of pre-broadband era CD-ROM histories of
the 20th century including The Space Race (1995) and World War II (1995), FlagTower would
explicitly name their hypertextual investigation into paranormal and extraterrestrial activity, The
Unexplained (1996), an “interactive documentary” (figure 3.2).
14
“With FlagTower Multimedia,

12. Dankert and Wille, 347.
13. Dankert and Wille, 349.
14. To promote their line of WWII edutainment CD-ROMs, FlagTower reportedly “[...]drove a
fully-functional tank into exhibition spaces[…]” like the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Paul
Palumbo and John Kalb, Interactive Publishers Handbook (San Francisco: Carronade Group,
1996), 128.
Figure 3.2. The Unexplained (FlagTower,
1996). The first i-doc?

153
it’s not a game. It’s the real thing,” declares one company advertisement in 1995 (figure 3.3).
15

The Unexplained entices user-viewers with sub-sections such as “Strange Phenomena”, “Earth
Mysteries” and “Beyond Science,” each consisting of narration-driven accounts of various
“unexplained” events with a backdrop of corresponding photographs, illustrations, and
animations. The “Ghosts and Spirits” section, for example, lists various types of hauntings and
how they’ve been interpreted throughout history, including the delineation between ghosts who
“appear not to interact with the living” and those who do. For The Unexplained, it would seem,
the interactive documentary quite literally conjures the ghost in the machine.

15. “FlagTower Advertisement”, PC Magazine 14, no. 17 (Oct. 10, 1995), 633.
Figure 3.3. FlagTower advertisement.

154
While FlagTower labels their doc-drama CD-ROMs “interactive documentary”, their
hypertextual, choose-your-own-path style is only one example of the wildly differing forms of
interactivity that the term implies. Dankert and Wille, for one, are careful to draw the line
between single computer screen-based productions and VR, which the authors note includes its
own unique affordances despite similarities with “traditional” interactive documentary.
16
And as
much as interaction demarcates a shift to a user-centered, even user-produced analytic model for
nonfiction content, interaction also indicates the manner and mode in which the documentary
was created. For Web-docs such as Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes, 2012) and Highrise (Cizek,
2009), interactivity connotes the minimal gestures of clicking, typing, moving a cursor, and
generally navigating through hypertext-driven menus and options. These documentaries, much
like The Unexplained, use traditional forms of documentary address and representation, such as a
narration track, sourced audio clips, photographs, and historical illustrations, to lend themselves
an air of credibility and authority.
Serious games and newsgames, on the other hand, introduce users to fully rendered, pre-
designed computer environments built according to a corresponding procedural reality. In
Papers, Please, for example, players personify an immigration officer determining who can enter
the borders of a fictional country. A series of moral conundrums arise as the game pits the
players’ financial wellbeing against the fortunes of those seeking entrance, and players must
respond to changing border policy. The morally compromised position of the border officer
simulates the highly contextual yet ultimately banal calculus that excludes some people from the
country and welcomes others. Players of Papers, Please achieve a humanistic identification with

16. Dankert and Wille, 347.

155
the other but for the purpose of exposing the systemically embedded decision making that
upholds highly contingent and often detrimental immigration policy.
As its web and CD-ROM constituents have faded in popularity, interactive documentary
and interaction generally speaking has increasingly been associated with smart and haptic
technologies, where direct hand-to-screen touch has replaced the necessity of cursors, keyboards,
and other extended technological interfaces. Built-in gyroscopes transform portable devices and
smartphones into realistic 360-degree viewports, detecting the movement of the device within
real-space in order to extend the space of the medium into that occupied by user-viewers and
vice versa. The inclusion of GIS data or other location-specific identifiers give user-viewers the
ability to co-create digital documentary through their own bodily movement and experiences
within space. With each of these forms, “[...]reliability and credibility is substituted by notions of
immediacy, transparency and interactivity” that ironically fuels “the expansion of mediated
reality” to incorporate user-viewers such that their own (re)actions become co-constitutive.
17

Toward the end of the 2010s, as VR technology advanced enough to gain a foothold in
documentary film festivals and other institutional exhibition spaces, the i-docs paradigm turned
to virtual reality as its next “evolutionary” step. As nonfiction media increasingly implicates its
audiences, virtual reality as an interactive platform and paradigm claims to shift the relationship
between audiences and the real established by doc-media from correlative to causative. Whatever
remnants of viewer passivity leftover from the cinematic era are entirely shed in VR as the
narrative of nonfiction is shaped by user participation or the lack thereof. For virtual
documentary, the interactive, user-guided production of its narrative becomes the rhetorical
vehicle for such a claim.

17. Dankert and Wille, 364.

156
Despite the broadness of its connotations, interaction is mobilized as a functional
extension of the traditional truth claims of documentary as opposed to its own ideological force.
Galloway et. al. make the case for interactive documentary as a “logical extension” of the
documentary form, which may also be to say, it follows the formal and ideological “logic” of the
documentary and its claim to the real.
18
Interaction signifies the realization of the documentary
ideal, and more specifically indicates the manufacture of heretofore inaccessible or
unincorporated sets of knowledge.
19
Interaction is harnessed as a reorganization of power insofar
as it claims to directly alter the lives of its subjects. In Representing Reality, Bill Nichols
recognizes the interactive capacities of traditional documentary cinema.
Interactive documentary stresses images of testimony or verbal exchange and images of
demonstration (images that demonstrate the validity, or possibly, the doubtfulness, of
what witnesses state). [...]The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of situated
presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and
other.
20

What distinguishes the interactive mode is in part the spatial relationship it develops between the
documentarian and her subjects; the interactive mode intimates an “actual encounter” between
cameraperson and filmed subject. Spanning from Dziga Vertov’s kino-pravda to Rouchian
cinema vérité, the interactive mode introduces the camera and its operators as subjects
themselves, and its images are judged by their capacity to attain a higher degree of truth based on
the situational contingencies found at the site of mediated encounter.

18. Dayna Galloway, Kenneth B. McAlpine, and Paul Harris, “From Michael Moore to JFK
Reloaded: Towards a Working Model of Interactive Documentary,” Journal of Media Practice 8,
no. 3 (2007), 336.
19. In all, the reason one might want to become a co-creator or co-editor of the documentary
would be “in order to gain alternative kinds of knowledge and insights within the field of
interest”; this motivation supports the view of interaction as a kind of non-ideological force.
Dankert and Wille, 357.
20. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 44 (his emphasis).

157
The interactive mode stresses the mediating apparatus as a productive force and invites
documentarians to feature themselves as mediated subjects. As documentary moves from
observational to interactive, there is a phase change from virtual to actual that takes place. What
distinguishes them, according to Nichols, is “[...]the sense of the precariousness of the present
moment [i.e. its capacity to be influenced by interaction].”
21
When the documentarian centers
themselves in the act of documenting, it focuses “[...]the effect of the encounter between people
and filmmakers when that experience may directly alter the lives of all involved.”
22
The direct
effect used to describe interactive documentary as a mode of cinematic production carries over to
the i-doc. When the filmmaker is replaced by an interacting user-viewer, there is a perceived
transference whereby her actions, no matter how small, are said to directly alter the lives of the
subjects she interacts with and of herself. For a form like the 360-degree documentary, the
filmmakers, while having an outsized influence on the placement of their subjects (i.e. directing
participants to not get too close to the camera, to not leave the immediate area of the camera,
etc.), must displace themselves outside the totalizing view of the image; the imperative is to
avoid interacting with the subject, at least on camera. This has become standard practice all in
the effort to center the user-viewer as the point of interaction, such that they become
“metaparticipants”, someone who directly engages with the other participants and subjects of the
film but also plays a role in shaping the perspective of this participation.
23
The “narrative” of the
interactive documentary incorporates the participation of the documentarian and the arc of their
“moral growth”, such that “[...]the logic of the text leads less to an argument about the world

21. Nichols, Representing Reality, 49.
22. Nichols, Representing Reality, 49 (my emphasis).
23. Nichols, Representing Reality, 50.

158
than to a statement about the interaction themselves and what they disclose about filmmaker and
social actors alike.”
24

No more clearly is
this interactive privileging
highlighted than in Steve
James’ 2003 documentary
Stevie. The film features
James reuniting with
Stephen Fielding, an Illinois
man James used to spend
time with as part of the Big
Brother program when
Fielding was a boy. When
Fielding is convicted of
child molestation and is
awaiting his sentence, James
speaks with a group of
Fielding’s acquaintances
about what Fielding should expect in prison. They suspect Fielding may be killed, or at least
badly beaten and abused. Claiming to have connections to the Aryan Nation, the men could
intervene on Fielding’s behalf, but they say they will only step in to help if James personally
requests it (figure 3.4). James is visibly flustered and confused as he is singled out by the men,

24. Ibid., 53, 45.
Figures 3.4 (top) and 3.5 (bottom). Stevie (James, 2003).

159
revealed, so to speak, by the direct address of his documentary subjects (figure 3.5). The
opportunity to immediately and directly alter the life of the subject of his documentary catches
him off guard and conflicts with his perceived remove from Fielding’s fate. The fact that James
must personally appeal to the Aryan Nation for help in this regard creates an additional layer of
ethical imbrication. In this moment, James grapples with his own complicity as both filmmaker
and Fielding’s old friend; the moment James is able to intervene as documentarian in order to
save Fielding from irreparable harm becomes synecdoche for all the critical moments James as
Fielding’s friend wasn’t there to help or guide Fielding to a better life. The encounter is
culmination of all the instances that James abandoned Fielding to pursue his own ambitions as
documentarian, all the moments he was absent, and this realization proves critical to James’
moral arc as documentary inter-actor.
While Nichols identifies this process of moralization as perhaps atypical of the interactive
mode, for the i-doc, a role reversal between filmmaker and interactive user-viewer results in a
shift in the locus of morality and responsibility.
25
The encounter that encompasses the “ethics or
politics” of the interactive text is reoriented from filmmaker-to-scene to viewer-to-scene.
26

Viewers of the i-doc are no longer only “witness to the historical world” but a user-viewer who,
by way of their interaction, “[...]inhabits it and who makes that process of habitation a distinct
dimension of the text.”
27
Once again the “presence” of the user-viewer is evoked to suggest their
unique response-ability.
28
In making the case for a readjusted reading of interactive documentary
as instead a “living documentary,” one that's defined not by its user's control but by its user's

25. Ibid., 53.
26. Nichols, Representing Reality, 56.
27. Nichols, Representing Reality, 56.
28 “The equivalent form of interactive 3D documentary is one in which the user has some
presence in the depicted world, and is allowed to interact with agents present in the picture space
(and perhaps the avatars of the other users).” Dankert and Wille, 356.

160
“being a part of it,” Sandra Gaudenzi alludes to the medium's affective intentionality and the
type of subjectivity it is meant to produce: “The user is not 'observing' the digital artefact, not
'controlling' it, but 'being transformed' by it.”
29
Alongside Mandy Rose and Judith Aston,
Gaudenzi is co-director of the “i-Docs” conference and website hosted by the Digital Cultures
Research Center at the Pervasive Media Studio, University of West England Bristol. The vitalist
agency with which Gaudenzi describes the i-doc suffuses it with humanistic value, and, insofar
as interaction is considered the basic operation of life down to the cellular level, provides
renewed urgency to the directive interact or die.
30

The conception that interaction imbues the documentary with its own life force and
therefore its own agential powers overwhelms the i-docs discourse and explicitly engenders a
“humanistic approach to agency”.
31
The additive, positivist speculation over “what interactivity
brings” the documentary and the “potential” of co-creation it generates returns to the essentialist
position that human being is defined by operability.
32
That emerging technologies will reinstate
the causative humanity of its user-viewers substantiates the paradoxical “[…]appeal to
essentialist humanism of these new ‘post-human’ documentary forms.”
33
Their humanism
couples Heidegger’s presence-at-hand with the Levinasian “encounter” to describe human being
as both individuated agent of causation and product of social interaction, of relationality that

29. Sandra Gaudenzi. “The Living Documentary: From Representing Reality to Co-Creating
Reality in Digital Interactive Documentary” (Doctoral Thesis, University of London, 2013), 75.
30. For illuminations on the theory of interaction as a vitalist concept, in the sciences as well as
the philosophy of technology, see the edited collection: Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder,
Interact or Die! (Rotterdam [Netherlands]: V2 Pub./NAi Publishers, 2007).
31. Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of
Interactive Documentary (London: Wallflower Press, 2017), 2.
32. Aston, Gaudenzi, and Rose, 2.
33. Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose, “‘This Great Mapping of Ourselves’: New Documentary Forms
Online”, in The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2013), 368.

161
provides the barest conditions for political formation. For the interactive mode, the “human” is
aligned with the operator, the user-viewer, an empathic individual whose own moral awakening
provides its core experience. The combination of interactive affect and procedural realism
constitutes a political subject now “humanized”, properly human, willing to come to the defense
of an imagined polis that stands in for an imposing morality. Its politics favors moralism: the
good of the individual and the affective display of one’s goodness through the virtual interface.
And despite the fact that passivity is positioned as anathema to (inter)action, the virtual
documentary user-viewer takes a position of assumed ignorance, of vehicle for an imposed
humanistic agency.
The agency one feels playing a documentary, then, is quite paradoxical, not only in the
sense that it compels the user-viewer to exert her passivity but also in that her agency is pitted
against the humanistic appeal of narrative cohesion. In order to solve the riddle of a “post-
human” documentary form appealing to an essentializing humanism, the interactive documentary
is defined according to a preconceived result. Unstructured interaction destabilizes the narrative
elements that make it a “documentary”; therefore the moniker is saved to indicate only those
forms with humanizing intent. When its narrative organization is superseded by amorphous or
noncausal structuring, especially when these arrangements break the doctrine of story by
foregrounding its mediated artifice, documentary reverts back to nonfiction, to the “fact films”
and news content that are said to operate on a different rhetorical register. In their community-
based manifesto “Beyond Story”, Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow critique the supremacy of
story in the documentary field, where bourgeois narrative arcs primarily help documentary
appeal to neoliberal markets. They similarly note that “[...]the first decade of the interactive or
digital documentary doggedly follows the market driven logic that has only recently fastened to

162
the field of feature documentary.”
34
Careful attention must be paid to the story of interactive
documentary and how it manages user actions lest it stray from its intended ideological function
or, God forbid, lead to disavowal. Interaction therefore is implemented in service of story, in that
its “[...]expansion of the [documentary] form makes it possible to enrich the story in new
directions”,
35
or such that, “The notion of plot is expanded to comprise the skills, fascinations,
interests and personality of the user.”
36
It is the interactive documentary’s function, then, to
establish “an underlying coherence in the cognitive and/or affective experience of the user”, to
serve the assumption that “[...]the ultimate aim of any interactive documentary is to tell a story.
This conceptual approach toward interactive documentary seems to be embedded in most of the
tools built for interactive designers.”
37
As the formal standards and creation platforms of
interactive documentary and virtual reality overlap, their rendered realities become beholden to
certain standards of humanistic storytelling and narrativity. The virtual documentary that results
represents less an expansion of documentary marketability than a complete integration of
nonfiction media and the market economy, as well as the political ideology that legitimates it.
When interaction overcomes the factual pursuit of the narrative, or when nonfictional scanned
environments, historical set dressings, and real bodies permeate through fictional storyworlds,
this integrating process of meaning making is disrupted, challenging the truth claim of
interaction and retroubling its political manifestation.

34. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, “Beyond Story: an Online, Community-Based
Manifesto”, World Records Journal 2 (fall 2018), https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/02/03.
35. Arnau Gifreu-Castells, “Mapping Trends in Interactive Non-fiction through the Lenses of
Interactive Documentary,” in Interactive Storytelling: 7th International Conference on Digital
Storytelling, ed. Alex Mitchell, Clara Fernandez-Vara, and David Thue (New York: Springer,
2014), 162.
36. Dankert and Wille, 366.
37. Craig Hight, “Software as Co-Creator in Interactive Documentary”, in I-Docs: The Evolving
Practices of Interactive Documentary, ed. Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose
(London: Wallflower Press, 2017), 90.

163

The “I” of the Index

Digitality has proven problematic for documentary discourse and the mode’s basest truth
claim. Before the advent and industrial takeover of digital photography and computerization,
documentary theory employed the semiotic axioms of Charles Peirce to describe the unique
ethical relationship established between photography, cinema, and their viewers. According to
Peirce’s famous triad, as well as being an icon and often featuring various symbols, the
photograph is an index, a physical transmission of light onto a specially treated piece of film that
proves the co-existence, at one point in time, between itself and whatever the light reveals of that
moment. The photographic medium, from which documentary cinema evolved, is said to
establish a material relationship between its viewers and whatever it depicts. Compounded by
documentary’s humanistic subject matter, this indexical association is evoked to legitimate the
documentary as a socially important and even necessary mode of representation in an
increasingly alienating world. By reducing light to information, digital systems undo its physical
properties – the physical proof of an objective referent – and therefore undo the physical
connection between viewer and world viewed that made possible their ethical exchange. For
influential media scholars like Lev Manovich and WJT Mitchell, digital media have heralded the
death of the index and therefore foreclosed on the radical response-ability of documentary
audiences. As Joost Raessens notes, “The discourse of photography has traditionally been called
on to legitimatize the documentary film; hence, the reduction of the indexical status of the
photographic image causes the documentary to lose its legitimization.”
38
This identity crisis

38. Joost Raessens, “Reality Play: Documentary Computer Games Beyond Fact and Fiction,”
Popular Communication 4, no. 3 (2006), 218.

164
spurs on the race to recuperate documentary in the digital era as a legitimate method for relaying
and producing historical reality.
In lieu of photographic indexicality, the interactive gesture substantiates virtual
documentary. Interaction is rhetorically called on to reinstate the documentary index, to
challenge the primacy of the photographic index as documentary’s ethical ontology by replacing
it with a participatory gestural index. In Peirce’s theory of semiotics, the index is fundamentally
a causal sign, that is, the index establishes a physical connection between sign and its object –
even if indirect – beyond correlation. The index is an inscription of “presence”, indicating that
the sign and whatever produced it shared a physical space and coincided at a specific time now
past. Furthermore, the index, as opposed to being a description or qualification of its referent,
merely suggests the presence of its object. For example, smoke is an index of fire but often, if the
flames themselves are out of sight, smoke does not describe what kind of fire is taking or has
taken place. A pointing finger suggests the presence of something (being pointed at), and a
shadow suggests something is present that is blocking the light, but they do not necessarily
describe their object per se. The connection an index establishes therefore exceeds the
determinations of interpretation. Interacting with computerized systems designed for human
input similarly establishes a physical relationship between user-viewers and the objects with
which they interact. These inter-actions – may they be moving and clicking a mouse, operating a
controller with joysticks and buttons, or donning a headset that tracks body movements – are also
established without regard to interpretation. At their core, they are only the physical conditioning
of one’s experience, not the experience itself. The click of a mouse, for example, may indicate
the shooting of a gun or the selection of a hyperlink, but however the computer interprets it, it
remains an indexical cue that connects the physical actions of the user-viewer with a response in

165
the system; likewise, one’s movements within VR, all tracked and correspondent to the virtual
world, mean very little to the object of the documentary and the nature of its subject matter.
When coupled with the thematics and tropes of social documentary, or educational historical
narratives like FlagTower’s WWII lessons, however, the gesture recuperates what seemed lost in
the digital era. Together, they establish, at least rhetorically, an unimpeachable, physical, and,
most importantly, causal link between user-viewers and the objects of virtual documentary.
For some thinkers of interactive and traditional documentary, that the advent of digital
photography did not deter governments, news outlets, and the general population to lose faith in
the photograph as representative of reality is cause for a different approach to the index. Cindy
Poremba, for one, takes a cue from Phillip Rosen noting that, in the contemporary sense of the
term, “indexicality is not technically but socially defined.”
39
Joost Raessens similarly argues that
the historical, social function of documentary as it has come to be known by its “semio-
pragmatic” content overtakes the primacy of the index: “The semio-pragmatic dimension of
documentary film has become far more important, referring to the ways in which spectators or
users are part of the structure and meaning of films that they treat as documentaries.”
40
Poremba
makes the case for “simulation as index”, a type of “conceptual indexicality” that behaves
according to simulative proceduralism.
41
The simulated real-world physics of JFK: Reloaded
(Traffic Games, 2004), for example, allow players to test the conditions that were necessary for
Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate the president (figure 3.6). The sheer difficulty of reproducing
Oswald’s magic bullet is the point of the experience, meant to instill doubt in the official single-

39. Cynthia Katherine Poremba, “Real/Unreal: Crafting Actuality in the Documentary
Videogame” (Doctoral Thesis, Concordia University, 2011), 47.
40. Raessens, “Reality Play”, 220.
41. Cindy Poremba, “JFK Reloaded: Documentary Framing and the Simulated Document”,
Loading… 3, no.4 (2009), 4.

166
shooter account of JFK’s assassination. Simulation proves useful for such physical laws,
Poremba states, but are less valuable for detailing human behavior; inaugurating a simulative
index further leads to the trouble of interpreting such simulations in order to treat them as real.
The social consensus on the “real” and the “physical” determines how we link the document to
the documented, and it's in the folds of this evolving consensus that interaction furthers its case
for indexicality. The compelled gesture of the interactive documentary provides its own real-
world performative coupling to the workings of the documentary. It is not so much the
simulative conditions of the experience that establish a new index – these conditions are more
akin to the “pragmatic” content that completes the truth claim – but the individual, gestural
connections that user-viewers must establish with the documentary.
42
The gesture establishes a

42. See: Albert Atkin, “Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference,” Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society 41, no. 1 (2005). In the Peircean formula, the index represents
individual relationships whereas the symbol, for example, must be shared among a group.
Figure 3.6. JFK: Reloaded (Traffic Games, 2004).

167
physical relationship between subject and object, an “I” statement that, although conditioned by
the affordances of the system, connotes an individual relationship and response. The declarative
“I” of virtual documentary, the “I” of the index, is “interaction”.
Although Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad may have initiated the conditioning of the
interactive gesture as the index of virtual reality, programming experiments in the early 1990s
laid the groundwork for the cultural adoption of computers as a causative, and social, apparatus.
The desire to make the World Wide Web in particular not only popularly accessible but co-
creative inspired Mark Pesce
and Tony Parisi to develop
their Virtual Reality Markup
Language. A spatializing
code that harnesses user
interaction to build three-
dimensional virtual worlds,
VRML was meant to
empower a computer-illiterate populace to constitute their own virtual realities online. Often
lacking its own point of reference to the real world (most of the early examples of VRML are 3D
polygonal primitives), the VRML object demands user participation for its realization as such.
43

Pesce and Parisi’s first test object for VRML was a digital banana, the Cyber Banana, a crude
three-dimensional model of the bright yellow fruit presented at SIGGRAPH 1994. It was to
cyberspace what Muybridge’s horses were to photography, what the Lumiere actualités were to

43. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, early uses of VRML included the recreation of
archaeological and historical heritage sites, which utilized GIS and other locative data to more
accurately reproduce their objects.
Figure 3.7. The Cyber Banana by Mark Pesce and Tony Parisi.

168
cinema. The Cyber Banana exists on a 2D plane, only its profile visible at any given single
interval (figure 3.7). The user-subject’s index finger then provides the extra dimension as one
can use a mouse to grab it and rotate it around its invisible axis, viewing it from all sides and
directions. The Cyber Banana demonstrates in a very simplistic way how interacting with this
model is what calls it into “3D” space; it’s the interaction, virtually touching it and turning it
around, that changes our perception of it from 2D to 3D, creating a virtual real that inscribes
information on a 2D plane but our interaction with it transforms it into a 3D “actuality.”
Well before even the advent of the social Web, VRML prefigured what Virginia Kuhn
has called “Web 3 Point Oh”, a semantic internet that supplements its vast indices with their
contextual signifiers. For VRML, however, the contextual data of this imagined Semantic Web is
the user interactions that are registered and indexed themselves. In this way, the virtual
documentary shares with the Semantic Web a type of ontologic fantasy, “[...]an effort to squeeze
knowledge into data, which is organized according to a very particular (and monolithic) set of
values.”
44
The protocol anticipated by VRML “[...]material[izes] human perception via stimulus-
response”, requiring the interactivity of an index finger to point its object into reality.
45
The
Cyber Banana assumes its full meaning as virtual sign when it’s enacted by a human participant.
Of course it is not my intent to label the Cyber Banana a documentary simply by way of
its interactive register. The Cyber Banana demonstrates, instead, how user input can occupy the
position of making its object “real” in the sense that an index is undeniably “real” even if its
referent or meaning is unknown. For virtual documentary, the interaction claim is only legitimate
when paired with socially or politically “important” subject matter, where “importance” is

44. Virginia Kuhn, “Web Three Point Oh: The Virtual is the Real,” in Cybertext Yearbook 2013
– High Wired Redux, eds. Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik (Jyväskylä, Finland:
University of Jyväskylä, 2013), 3.
45. Kuhn, 2.

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signaled by the level of humanistic agency afforded the user-viewer and the humanist
identification with the subjects she encounters. These subjects are normally social problems,
often on the global scale, that solicit a sense of enlightened morality and shared humanity. They
promise to incorporate an implied other into one’s process of self-identification and intend to
condition user-viewer subjectivity within the binary of victim and perpetrator. Towards this end,
their appeals vary in style. They can be focused on embodied realities, like in 6x9, which locks
user-viewers into a virtual prison cell to experience solitary confinement firsthand. The 360-
degree doc uses testimony in the form of narration and text on the walls of the cell to enhance
user-viewer experience as well as keep their attention. 6x9 simulates the mental toll solitary
confinement takes on prisoners, who hallucinate and generally lose grasp of reality. Such a
“firsthand” experience is intended to shape user mindset when it comes to prison reform and the
abolition of solitary confinement by making an appeal on the individual level. This assumption
reverts back to the basic premise that individuals are empowered through the moral outrage and
refinement that virtual interactive experiences may elicit.
More urgent scenarios mobilize interactivity to engender a humanitarian, collective
response, even if they too rely on individual moral outrage. Leshu Torchin gives the example of
documentary game Darfur is Dying, which “merg[es] documentary epistemephilia with game
mastery.”
46
In this newsgame, the player chooses from a number of fictionalized refugees in the
Darfur region of Western Sudan (figure 3.8). As a refugee, one must help their community by
foraging for water (a virtual game of hide-and-seek with roaming death squads), growing and
harvesting food, and avoiding death by the hands of Janjaweed raiders. During intervals warning

46. Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the
Internet
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 193.

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of “imminent attack”, the user is
prompted to either continue this
pattern of in-game survival or help
stop the attack (figure 3.9). If the
player chooses to help stop the
attack, they are removed from the
narrative and asked to participate in
any number of real-world actions,
including writing a congressperson
or donating to relief groups. What
appears as active and attached
participation with not only the
documentary but the crisis itself is
complicated upon returning to the
game proper. Although players are
allowed to momentarily feel good
about themselves, the game continues as normal, the refugee camp still under threat of
starvation, dehydration, and Janjaweed incursions. The game only “ends,” theoretically, when
the real-world Darfur is secured and safe from its current horrors; it ends when the conditions
that produced the crisis are overthrown. In effect the documentary game can never be “won” as
players are forced to reconcile with the fact that by virtue of playing the game they are rendered
next to ineffectual, the implied solution being mass mobilization on the scale that an interactive
Figures 3.8 (top) and 3.9 (bottom). Darfur is Dying (Ruiz,
2006)

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documentary can only point to. The i-doc then becomes its own index, a pointing mechanism, for
solutions it cannot interpret nor describe.

Reparative Virtual Realities

Darfur is Dying asks its users to occupy a position where they simultaneously must
identify with the villager-victims they operate and the vague tech-solutionism it proffers.
Ignoring for a moment the idea that assuming interactive control of its villager-victims results in
one’s automatic identification with that subject-position, the game’s contradiction results when a
supposedly shared political position and historical reality is substantiated by one’s individual
interactions with doc-media as their own personal consumer choice. Consumer choice, here,
masquerades as political praxis. As opposed to embracing the view of interactive documentary as
a consumer choice that can “connect individuals to the events and situations surrounding them,
thus allowing them a deeper immersion in their everyday (offline) lives”, I argue the re-
politicization of interaction means welcoming its proclivity for disconnectedness, alterity and the
distancing of perceptual remove.
47
The power of the interactive documentary is not only that it
gestures to the user-viewer's current detached state but directs the user-viewer to perform this
very gesture, transforming psychic suggestion to embodied operation.
There is a kind of inherent documentary reflexivity, akin to the reflexive mode Bill
Nichols discerns, that virtual interactive constructs amplify. Dankert and Wille recognize: “It is
of course possible to design an interactive work that draws attention for instance to the
artificiality of the interaction of a present day user with a strange, past world, rather than trying

47. Paolo Favero. “Getting Our Hands Dirty (Again): Interactive Documentaries and the
Meaning of Images in the Digital Age,” Journal of Material Culture 18, no. 3 (2013), 272.

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to make the user forget it as a precondition for the ‘suspension of disbelief’ aimed at.”
48
We have
seen that i-docs like Darfur is Dying are not afraid of breaking narrative to call attention to their
own simulative status, or use their own digital fabrication reflexively as a proof of authenticity.
49

However, we might ask given the example of Darfur is Dying, can an interactive documentary
be unknowingly reflexive? Isn’t the very definition of reflexivity a knowing position vis-a-vis
oneself? Cindy Poremba notes that designer control over user experience extends only to
creating the conditions of experience, not the experience itself. While the prevailing tendency of
virtual documentary is to seek legitimation within an established political status quo, and
therefore its very conditioning conforms to the status quo, the gap that remains between its
experiential design and user experience provides opportunity – if slim – to take its manifestations
“out of context”. In fact it is its very conditioning as interactive that enables the misidentification
and disavowal of virtual documentary.
Both the promise and dangers of documentary hinge on its placement of viewers in a
contradictory position. “Documentaries are constructs, yet they seek to reveal the real without
mediation,” writes John Ellis. “Watching a documentary involves holding these two contrary
beliefs at once, a process of disavowal which is not terribly unusual in human behavior, but is
inherently unstable.”
50
The instability of documentary viewership has only been compounded by
digitality, which destabilizes some of the central truth claims of traditional documentary as
we’ve outlined thus far. That documentary and especially digital documentary lend themselves

48. Dankert and Wille, 357.
49. For VR, one must acknowledge the virtual condition of their experience in order to,
ironically, believe in the experience as real. Some of the best examples of VR fiction play with
multiple layers of reflexivity. Tender Claws’ Virtual Virtual Reality (2017) comes to mind.
50. John Ellis, “Documentary and Truth on Television: The Crisis of 1999”, in New Challenges
for Documentary, Second Edition, ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005), 342.

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toward disavowal – a retreat from the empirical, revelational claims of documentary discourse –
provides fertile ground for postmodernist interpretations of the historical arc of documentary.
Michael Renov, for one, in championing those digital documentaries that instill “radical doubt
born of contradiction”, argues that post-indexical interactivity, when effective, severs historical
ties between documentary and the modernist, Enlightenment values of grand narratives and
monolithic epistemology.
51
Diverging from the Freudian use of Verleugnung, often translated as
“disavowal”, Renov uses the term to signify how digital interactive documentary might reinstate
“individual moral responsibility” at the expense of perceptual and epistemological certainty.
52

“[...]I am interested in new media practices that, in their representation of the real, undercut
certainty of any sort[...]casting the viewer/participant adrift in an ocean of possibility.”
53

Returning to the Freudian concept, one recognizes the fraught formations doubt and disavowal
may take in the case of interacting with the real. It is worth asking which possibles are made
possible in this regard, when disavowal and postmodern uncertainty reify the virtual politics of
the liberal state and when they contradict them.
For Renov, the disavowal characteristic of new media documentary lends it renewed
purpose in pointing toward an indeterminate horizon of meaning. To a degree, the result of
disavowal is always the substitution of one reality for another, possible reality.
54
For Freud,

51. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004), 145. For a brief but thorough overview of how VR intersects with Enlightenment values,
see: Simon Penny, “Virtual Reality as the Completion of the Enlightenment”, in The Virtual
Reality Case Book, ed. Carl Eugene Loeffler and Tim Anderson (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1994), 199-213.
52. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 136, 147.
53. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, 139.
54. Sigmund Freud, “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis”, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1961), 183-87. Freud postulates that despite the distinction between neurotic and
psychotic responses to a damaged id, they both result in a “reparation” of reality.

174
disavowal results from improper integration, when an individual rejects one reality in favor of
one more amenable to the reparation of their damaged id. A neurosis responds with regression,
basically forgetting the inciting incident, while psychosis responds by erecting an entirely new
reality, “[...]the creation of a new reality which no longer raises the same objections as the old
one that has been given up.”
55
This (im)possible reality fits the terms of the individual. It is akin
to delusion. This may account for the instability Ellis describes of documentary viewership. The
contradiction and room for delusion that documentary elicits arise from one’s exposure to “the
real without mediation” despite one’s passivity; that is, in its capacity to “reveal the real” the
documentary constitutes its own event, so to speak, a moment of immanent action, yet its user-
viewers remain conspicuously unable to act in its reality. The disavowal that results may be a
complete rejection of the documentary as a historical reality. This contingency will be addressed
shortly. Another form disavowal may take is a kind of doubling down on the “possible” reality of
the documentary as a symbolic one. Instead of rectifying a contradicted subject-position in its
reality, the neurosis will play a game, of sorts, to find solution in a parallel substitute:
But whereas the new, imaginary external world of a psychosis attempts to put itself in the
place of external reality, that of a neurosis, on the contrary, is apt, like the play of
children, to attach itself to a piece of reality – a different piece from the one against
which it has to defend itself – and to lend that piece a special importance and a secret
meaning which we (not always quite appropriately) call a symbolic one. Thus we see that
both in neurosis and psychosis there comes into consideration the question not only of a
loss of reality but also of a substitute for reality.
56

To rectify the contradictions experienced during a documentary, its viewers must figure
themselves in a possible reality where their agency is returned to them as if in a game; this
amounts in some part to the catharsis of documentary viewership. It leaves us imbued, when

55. Freud, “The Loss of Reality”, 185.
56. Freud, “The Loss of Reality”, 187 (my bolding).

175
successful, with its “special importance” and “secret meaning”, that is, feeling like an agential
part of the reality it conveys. Interactive documentary betrays this symbolic transference by
declaring everything outside its dyad non-interactive, non-agential, impotent in its ability to
complicate its audiences in the real world. Its disavowal is of traditional documentary itself; that
disavowal, too, buttresses its own claim to “special importance” as ethically or politically
pertinent. Its symbolic phantasy survives through gamification, substantiating the possibility of
its interactions as the very latency that is special to documentary. Its latent formations are what
justify postmodern accounts of political becoming through the possibilities of increasingly
virtualized nonfictions.
However, it is necessary to further tease out the various forms disavowal takes in relation
to interactive documentary usership in order to understand what exactly audiences disavow in the
process. As Joost Raessens notes, “[...]playing serious games always incorporates a moment of
disavowal – of distancing – specific to games.”
57
There are at least two levels of disavowal that
I’ve identified. The first disavowal is on the level of the information provided by the
documentary and supposedly embodied in the user-viewer through the interactive gesture. For
example, one may simply be unconvinced by the reality recreated by Darfur is Dying and/or the
fact of the Darfurian genocide taking place. For i-docs, this disavowal is akin to the spell wearing
off at midnight, when the documentary turns back into a video game. Of course this is the worry

57. Joost Raessens, “Serious Games from an Apparatus Perspective,” in Digital Material:
Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille
Lammes, Ann-Sophi Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 26. His discussion of disavowal comes via the work of
games researcher and scholar Caroline Pelletier. See: Caroline Pelletier, “Reconfiguring
Interactivity, Agency and Pleasure in the Education and Computer Games Debate – Using
Žižek's Concept of Interpassivity to Analyse Educational Games,” E-Learning 2, no. 4 (2005),
317-26. Interpassivity here means to unload the impossible weight of one’s being onto an-other,
a mediated other and Other mediation, which preserves the ego when exposed to a reality that it
cannot accept.

176
of interactive documentary producers as well as their primary motivation for creating a
convincing enough experience. As audiences for these documentaries are mostly self-selecting,
and exhibition venues are also relegated to classrooms, museums, cultural festivals and private
homes where user-viewers are expected to be conducive to the information articulated by the
mediated experience, this form of disavowal is minimized by design.
The second form is the disavowal of the i-doc itself and its compelled gesture. In the case
of Darfur is Dying, one may leave the experience believing the genocide in Darfur is real, and
even that something needs to be done about it, but simultaneously disavow the reality of the
documentary itself, or rather, the reality of its agential conveyance. It is easy to think that such a
disavowal would result in a return to material reality, and therefore reinstate the possible politics
foreclosed on by the interactive interface. Perhaps the latent force of these documentaries is the
absent position it places its user-viewers in. If disavowal is always the disavowal of absence,
then the political subjectivity that results from such a documentary disavowal would be against
the empty gestures of virtual documentary; its possibility is actually the foreclosed possible,
intimating the creation of a new reality not personalized to my own neurosis or psychosis – my
own psychological reality – but one that forms out of a collective experience of disavowal on the
scale of virtual documentary. This disavowal is theoretically performed to some extent every
day, in one’s daily experience of interactive interfaces and the reality they make possible. It
incites the “reparative” politics necessary to combat the base tech-solutionism and appeals to
existent authority offered by such documentaries. Such a disavowal is necessary to counteract the
formation of a political subjectivity based in virtual (inter)action. Disavowing an interactive
documentary turns it back into a video game, turns one back to their own virtual passivity, their
own impotential.

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Degrees of Freedom in Plato’s Cave

By donning an HMD, operating the Oculus Touch controllers, walking around a room-
scale play space or stepping on a positionally tracked treadmill, users generate an enormous
amount of interactive data that make up the footprints of VR. “Analogously to the footprints
people leave in grounded reality, people leave traces in virtual reality. Every ‘step’ one takes in a
virtual world leaves ‘footprints’ that are as detailed and predictive as any forensic scientist could
hope.”
58
The partitioned, individual interactions that characterize the majority of interactive
documentary (like clicking the Cyber Banana into existence) are here accumulated into a
collective dataset; VR works not just based on the reactions of its user-viewers but through the
accumulation of these reactions. Even retinal movement and eye-blink rate have become key
instances of user input. In registering the minute gestures of its users, where each input is
considered a unit of reality (an event that physically takes place in the body as in the world),
virtual reality adopts an emergent, accumulative approach to its simulative nonfictions. Each
reaction is its own index, and an accumulation of these indices becomes iconic of an individual’s
physical patterns: blinking rate and pupil movement, scrolling rate and attention span, gait. For
researchers like Jim Blascovich, this data produces a causal and even predictable relationship
between user interaction (especially the unconscious varietal) and their (immutable) subjectivity.
He writes, “[...]digital footprints reveal much about physical and psychological identity. Actions
that seem trivial in a virtual world – whether one chooses to walk or run, how quickly one types,

58. Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds,
and the Dawn of the Virtual (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 155.

178
or how close one stands to other people – provide clues about the self.”
59
The triviality of the
interactions are offset by their sheer quantity. While users do not create physical imprints in their
environment, each interaction imprints on the virtual world such that a causal relationship is
established between virtual reality dataset and the user-viewer.
60
This indexical accumulation
provides ample ground to make definitive claims and even future predictions about individuals,
their embodied identity, and, most importantly, how their actions and reactions within virtual
reality constitute their true subjectivity.
Virtual reality is characterized by a multi-tiered system of human-computer interaction
necessary to its operations. The three principal elements of VR are tracking, rendering, and
display.
61
Tracking describes how the system is able to know where user-viewers are looking,
standing, as well as how they are moving and at what rate. In order for it to accurately account
for user interaction and input, virtual reality surveils, records, and compares every surface-level
(that is, visible) user motion. In quite a literal sense, it tracks even minute movements, strictly
affording for every displacement it can sense. This immense cache of tracking information
determines how the system “builds” the virtual world so users can experience it in real time. This
is called rendering. The system reads where users are looking or how they are moving, and then,
depending on these interactions, it will render the corresponding perspective, imperceptibly
accommodating to user input and, for a brief moment, relegating every other possible perspective
unrendered, undrawn, in a state of potential becoming. Finally, for virtual worlds to be made

59. Blascovich and Bailenson, 159.
60. Blascovich is keen to choose the example of digital footprints to describe VR tracking. Each
“footprint” produces an individuated and identificatory index. “What makes the footprint a sign
of its object is the brute existence of its object and the causal relationship that exists between
them. This makes the footprint an index.” Atkin, “Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference”,
166.
61. Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What
It Can Do (New York: WWNorton & Company, Inc., 2018), 21.

179
visible to their users, visual information is relayed to the head-mounted display. The resolution
and frame rate of the display should be enough to translate the details of the rendering lest the
system spend an inordinate amount of computing power rendering images that look blurry,
pixelated, or slowed down.
62
When successfully working in tandem, these components
substantiate the capacity for user interaction in a responsive virtual environment.
For user-viewers, tracking is the primary register of interaction in VR. Tracking is what
produces the conditions of possibility for interaction in virtual worlds and virtual nonfictions.
Although tracking has a direct impact on rendering and display, and it is the latter elements that
make one’s virtual interactions sensible, without tracking users would have no interactive
recourse to the virtual reality. Several forms of tracking are common to virtual reality.
Microelectromechanical gyroscopes measure relative orientation and angle. These gyroscopes
are ubiquitously present in mobile electronic devices, and their application in smartphones
engendered a wave of mobile VR in the 2010s. The type of VR known as “3 DoF”, or three
degrees of freedom, refers to the gyroscopic gauging of pitch, yaw, and roll. This rotational
interaction is most optimized for pre-rendered experiences like 360-degree videos and other non-
realtime media where only users’ head movements – looking side-to-side, looking up-and-down,
and tilting left-to-right – are registered. The addition of an accelerometer extends the conditions
of interaction beyond the head to include the translational movement of the body.
63

Accelerometers are used to calculate user position, including their lateral, vertical, and
forward/backward movements. Their application in multimedia was popularly introduced

62. Advancements in resolution and framerate between the early 1990s and the late 2010s made
possible VR’s mobilization and triumphant return to the scene.
63. Although most smartphones now have accelerometers in addition to electronic gyroscopes,
their limited computing power make rendering and display difficult, compromising the accuracy
of the tracking and therefore making current generation smart devices (at the time of this writing)
inefficient for 6 DoF VR.

180
through motion controllers for gaming, like the Nintendo Wii Remote or Playstation’s Sixaxis or
DualShock 3 gamepads. The combination of rotational and translational tracking produce 6 DoF
VR, what is also generally referred to as “room-scale” VR. Advanced systems may also
incorporate infrared time-of-flight data for more accurate tracking. The implementation of 6 DoF
tracking can be achieved either “inside-out”, where cameras (sensors) are built directly into the
headset and are aided by computer vision algorithms like with the Oculus Quest, or externally,
through a series of cameras mounted around the room like with HTC Vive’s “lighthouses”
(figure 3.10). With 6 DoF VR, user-viewers can move around a designated area and have a
lifelike visual-perceptual experience within the virtual environment. Freeing user-viewers from
the carcerality of traditional spectatorship, an accurate interactive tracking system ironically
ensures that the limitations of human perception are returned to them. Objects in the distance are
occluded by nearer ones; user movement reveals one reality while concealing another. Where
VR interaction is measured in degrees of freedom, unshackling its user-viewers from the fixed
Figure 3.10. An example of “roomscale” VR and the HTC Vive “lighthouses”, from VR
developer Stress Level Zero.

181
position of Plato’s Cave, its perceptual abolition includes the potential not to see, that is, the
impotential of perception.

Perceptual Latency, Political Latency

The base measure of success for a fully interactive 6 DoF virtual reality is how accurately
it re-presents – in this case visually – an experience of three-dimensional space. This includes
what three-dimensional, spatial perception necessarily must omit. In this way VR promises not
unbounded perceptual access to its worlds nor the mechanical eye of post-human cinematics but
rather the recombined viewership of the all-too-human. Its tracking system allows VR to extend
user-viewership behind objects, over them, under them, while occluding other objects on a
simulated Euclidean grid. The tandem effects of occlusion and parallax indicate successful
interactive perception as they return to perception its virtuality, the latency of three-dimensional
visuality. Parallax, which in optics refers to the difference in apparent position of an object
observed at more than one differing viewpoint, accounts for that which is not immediately
visible. A side profile view of a human face, for example, only depicts one eye and ear, whereas
a front-facing portrait shows both ears and eyes. Translational movement around this head image
produces many differing views of the same thing; as one moves around the image-object, one
view is actualized while the nearly infinite others are trapped in a state of latency. Occlusion is
an effect of parallax whereby differing viewpoints reveal and conceal differing visual objects.
The side profile view of a face occludes one ear and eye in favor of the others. Occlusion is
perceptual addition by way of subtraction. VR interaction simulates the perceptual remove that
returns one to reality.

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To be able to move one’s head or body as the visual environment moves accordingly –
revealing the totality of some objects as others are occluded – describes a perception much at
odds with the traditional spectatorship of cinema. Yet as audiences are beholden to the fixed
frames of cinema and its static geometries, the nonfictional elements that insist on the filmic
event imbue even fictional cinema with an anticipation of the real, its potentiality. Bill Nichols’
proclamation that all film is documentary might be re-interpreted to say all film is potentially
documentary, or rather, that film is always already a potential reality. Cinematic spectatorship is
infused with the latency of the real, with documentary latency: the ethical space of documentary
demarcates the latency of abject reality, making the documentary film a “pregnant invention”,
rendering the edges of the frame fraught with possibility.
64
Documentary film is often treated as
a parallax view, one that necessarily occludes infinite possible realities in order to unveil
something specific. In both the process of production and consumption, documentary
simultaneously actualizes one reality (in perception) at the expense of all others. In “The Parallax
Effect”, Faye Ginsburg uses the metaphor of parallax in another appeal to the “logical next step”
of the documentary field, one that moves beyond the monolithic observational mode historically
associated with documentary.
65
She describes documentary parallax in terms of Jean Rouch’s
regards compares, a model of comparative looking that encompasses participatory documentary
in anticipation of the interactive mode.
66
Looking at the same object through different
viewpoints, especially in the form of auto-ethnography, is meant to reveal the complexities of

64. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1953): 412. Here I also draw on Vivian Sobchack’s notion of “ethical space” as well as André
Bazin’s “continuum of reality” discussed in chapter 1.
65. Faye Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect: The Impact of Indigenous Media on Ethnographic
Film,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 173.
66. Ginsburg, “The Parallax Effect”, 158-59.

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that object, to actualize the filmic object in order to grant it new possibility. Again, what is
afforded by a comparative looking of parallax, or what is afforded by an interactive parallax, is
increased dimensionality, literally and in the figure of harnessing some possibility heretofore
occluded. However the question remains: what are the possibles made possible by documentary
as by interactive perception, by parallax and occlusion as functions of perceptual latency (virtual
visuality)? The interactive user-viewership of VR moves past the metaphor of parallax by
separating viewership from itself, that is to say, enacting the perceptual latency of the individual,
the latency of one’s own perceptual faculties, the possibles made possible by perception and the
virtual reality of all documentary.
The ludic visuality inherent to VR supplements its nonfictions through parallax and
occlusion. Unlike the cinema, what VR occludes is not relegated to a permanent state of
occlusion, but merely rendered latent to one’s perception, a virtual reality. Latency becomes
anticipatory of the possible, the gesture of its inter-actors a virtual finger that points, and yet
latency also signifies the failure of interaction. At once latency describes VR’s interactive modus
operandi, its potential, that is, to execute perception’s innate virtuality through user input, as well
as VR’s undoing, its impotential. In video game parlance, latency is known as “lag”, a
discontinued possibility to act. Mia Consalvo calls lag a type of video game “noise”, “a lack of
information being received” or “its untimely arrival”.
67
Lag may describe a slowing frame-rate,
otherwise known as local latency, where the system has trouble displaying in smooth succession
the information it is generating. In this way it could also mean not the lack of information but an
excess of information that cannot be decoded without skips and fractures. Lag may also mean

67. Mia Consalvo, “Lag, Language, and Lingo: Theorizing Noise in Online Game Spaces”, in
Video Game Theory Reader 2, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge,
2009), 303.

184
network latency, as in online gaming where one or more players’ internet speed slows, causing a
discrepancy with other players. This latency can have destabilizing and devastating effects for
multiplayer games that concentrate on timing, hand-eye speed, and accuracy, such as Fortnite
(Epic, 2017) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Activision, 2019). When measuring in
milliseconds, even the difference between CRT and LCD displays can be vast. Consalvo
continues by suggesting that lag normally works against the primary function of video games by
preventing the “flow state” so desired by gamers.
68
Like watching a movie that’s missing every
other frame, experiencing lag in video games constitutes a radically different mode of reception,
of interaction, than intended. Latency here becomes a startling realization of the impotential of
mediation.
For the user-viewers of VR, latency is not only an annoyance that interrupts gameplay
but results in a physical disavowal often immediate and sometimes long-lasting. Similar to video
games, VR may suffer from frame-rate issues, but this lag is compounded by motion-to-photon
latency, meaning the time it takes between user motion (tracking) and display change. If the
temporal discrepancy between user-viewer interactions and what they perceive is less than
300ms, they shouldn’t be able to sense any latency at all. General system latency may never
entirely be neutralized, and contemporary VR has developed adequate compensations like
foveated rendering, which means the system provides less visual material to peripheral images
and the “world” outside the view of the user, in order to accurately render in detail the areas they
are focused on. The problem instead arises when latency is sensible, when it is visible, that is,
also, when latency is actualized. The result is simulation or simulator sickness, “[...]an
unpleasant feeling that occurs when there is a lag between what your body tells you you should

68. Consalvo, “Lag, Language, and Lingo”, 304.

185
be experiencing, and what you actually see.”
69
More than just an unpleasant feeling, simulation
sickness can manifest as sudden violent nausea, loss of balance, eye strain and acute headaches,
as well as persistent nausea and dizziness well after the experience.
70
Virtual reality researcher
Jeremy Bailenson cites at least one instance of a woman who participated in one of his studies
and later that day became dizzy enough to fall and hit her head on a fencepost.
71
Simulation
sickness is a cause for worry not only because it can only be quelled by the most technically
advanced VR systems but that it has the potential “[...]to actually decelerate the entire VR
movement itself.”
72
It is ironic to think that latency, that which remains virtual, a moment of
delayed presence, is what threatens virtual reality with irrelevance or outright nonbeing.
Simulation sickness is the symptom of virtual reality’s impotential, that is, its potential to never
actualize as a “movement”, as a medium, as an epistemology, as a politics.
Through simulation sickness, virtual reality acts upon its user-viewers, bypassing
consciousness to override the autonomy of the body. Virtual reality’s resistance to being
produces an instability consistent with vertigo. For an instant its virtuality destabilizes even
autonomic security. Does latency have an agency, completing the vitalist metaphor? Latency is
preservative in this regard, as it returns the potentiality of agency to virtual reality; the
potentiality to not act in virtual reality then would constitute its disavowal. Giorgio Agamben is
quick to note that, for Aristotle, “potential” has two meanings that are often conflated by
theorists. The first meaning is used in the generic sense “[...]that a child has the potential to

69. Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 22. Simulation sickness is explained further on 67-69.
70. It is worth mentioning here that VR researchers find that women generally speaking are more
likely to experience simulation sickness, an effect to an extent of the varying inter-ocular
distances between different people that alters the fit of the HMD. In its pursuit of a universal VR
headset, the immersive media industry consistently privileges the “average male” for
standardization.
71. Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 254.
72. Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 253.

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know[…]” or to take on yet unseen attributes; this infantilized potential has a definitive object in
mind, one that is achieved through learning or gaining knowledge to some degree.
73
The
moralizations, privileging of victims, and techno-solutionism proffered by VR is bolstered by
rhetoric that supports VR as a means to gain knowledge of reality otherwise inaccessible. The
infantilized subjects of VR represent this generic sense of its potential. The potential that more so
interests both Aristotle and Agamben is the second type, the potential not to do something. This
form of potential is reserved for those people, otherwise understood to already possess some kind
of knowledge, who contain the capacity to actualize. “Thus the architect is potential insofar as he
has the potential to not-build, the poet the potential to not-write poems.”
74
“What Aristotle then
says is: if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly
potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully
into it as such.”
75
Here Agamben seems to identify a problem of latency, where the potential to
not-be lags behind actuality; potentiality only exists when impotentiality equally actualizes in the
moment of potentiality. When, in VR, reality lags behind, remains latent, to the actualizations of
user-viewers, as in, when there is a delay between user interaction and the perceived reality, its
potential to not-be is autonomically transmuted. Simulation sickness is VR’s impotential.
The latency characteristic of VR and its political subjectivity can be conceived as
extensions of documentary epistemology. The project of documentary and VR overlap in the
realities to which each lend their potentiality, and the latency that supposedly delays their
becoming. Literary and cultural theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht reiterates Consalvo’s
conception of latency as a matter of evidence or information, describing it as a sensible lack of

73. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000), 179.
74. Agamben, Potentialities, 179.
75. Agamben, Potentialities, 183 (his emphasis).

187
evidence that would otherwise afford the object its presence. This desire for presence, however,
results in “situations of latency” where “we do not find the right angle for being to unconceal
itself.”
76
Borrowing from the Heideggerian notion of the “unconcealment of being” and its
association with certain epochs or Stimmungen, Gumbrecht recognizes how a perceived lack of
actualization is compensated for by evidentiary structures designed to expose unseen opportunity
for agency. Despite evidentiary intervention, the positionality of latency as a kind of “exclusion
and non-fulfillment”, that is, impotential, cannot be located for it is that which is occluded, that
which occludes being, meaning that even when what is latent becomes present it is unrecognized
as that former latency.
77
For this reason Gumbrecht illustrates latency in the figure of the
stowaway, which represents a felt presence that is nonetheless, by definition, unknown. “In a
situation of latency, when a stowaway is present, we sense that something (or somebody) is there
that we cannot grasp or touch— and that this ‘something’ (or somebody) has a material
articulation, which means that it (or he, or she) occupies space. We are unable to say where,
exactly, our certainty of the presence comes from, nor do we know where, precisely, what is
latent is located now.”
78
Interacting with latent documentary realities, user-viewers are possessed
by the stowaway, the stranger who guides their hand toward unconcealment, an interactive
revelation. Discovering this latent actor, that is, bringing it into evidence, only aids its occlusion.
Making immanent one angle or line of sight occludes another, therefore what latency occludes
can never fully be “revealed” or epistemologically accounted for. We can only sense the

76. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “All That Matters Is Invisible: How Latency Dominates Our
Present”, April 8, 2014, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2:03:15,
https://whc.yale.edu/videos/all-matters-invisible-how-latency-dominates-our-present.
77. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2013), 37.
78. Gumbrecht, After 1945, 23.

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alienation of occlusion, the latency that violently alienates us in the form of existentialist nausea,
of simulation sickness.
The coalescence of latency as a dominant theme of Western politics and culture,
Gumbrecht argues, originates at the end of WWII. “Something like a disposition of violent
nervousness permeates the seemingly quiet postwar world, which points to a latent state of
affairs.”
79
A Stimmung of latency renders the past “sensible” but invisible. For Gumbrecht, the
German suppression of the events of the war was in part replicated by the rest of Europe if not
the world, as it waited for some latent force to reveal itself, some redemption that always is yet to
arrive. The result is a renewed quest for evidence, the exploration of so-called new angles for the
unconcealment of being. A desire for evidence coincides with the success of the natural sciences,
which shifted the focus of the human project to things that are latent and cannot be transformed
into visibility, into evidence, into presence (i.e. genes, atoms, viruses, computer processes, or
larger things, the planet, the universe, a multiverse) (Gumbrecht, “All That Matters Is
Invisible”).
80
Causality, too, lacks strict evidentiary form. After 1945, the historicist chronotope,
which interpreted the past as an obstacle that must be overcome in order to choose from the
possibilities of the future, dissolved into the chronotope of the “broad present”, a period of
latency where the present never fully actualizes.
81
Because the present is always delayed, so too
is the moment when a choice is made among the possibilities of the future, the moment of
political agency. Heidegger maintained the hope that the unconcealment of being would take
place through technology, and much of the modern political project so too asserts that electronic
technology has the potential to produce a type of evidence we have not yet seen, enough to

79. Gumbrecht, After 1945, 24.
80. Gumbrecht, “All That Matters Is Invisible”.
81. Gumbrecht, “All That Matters Is Invisible”.

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reinstate an age of evidence. Interactive technology in particular epitomizes the ready-to-hand
im-mediacy that lends it potentia. But that potential is trapped, Gumbrecht says, in that
electronic technology ultimately produces a different form of constructivism, one that has no
special access to outside evidence and in fact does not allow for it. Latency, then, itself is
processed through the mill of evidence, recycling itself to become its own evidentiary structure.
Virtual reality, too, the incestuous commingling of documentary and interactive technology,
participates in this evidentiary feedback loop.
The interactive documentary, in all its guises, suffers its own simulation sickness, a
political latency. In interactive documentary, each user-viewer is cast as potential agent of
actualized political change. This potential is co-opted however by the function of the technical
interactions themselves; the emancipatory political-interactive subject lags behind, therefore,
while facing increasingly encroaching global crisis. Each (human-computer) interaction in fact
forestalls action, instilling latency; their virtual indices are a presence in absence.
82
In previous
work I have called this the absent gesture of interactive documentary.
83
Although a condition that
seems to permeate contemporary epistemological practice, political latency does not refer to a
lack of information, but its untimely arrival, creating a latency between action and perception.
Change is deferred by lagging action. And into the gap rush zombified epistemological claims
and techno-moralizations to uphold latency as a fulfilled potentiality. Louise Amoore names
what governs these impulses “possibilistic logic”, “the algorithmic arraying of possibilities such
that they can be acted upon.”
84
Amoore’s work details how various “practices of authorization”

82. Gumbrecht, After 1945, 26.
83. Jake Bohrod, “The Absent Gesture: Interactive Documentary, Subjectivity, and Disavowal”
(presentation, Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference, Montreal, QC, March 2015).
84. Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2013), 12, 23 (my emphasis).

190
characteristic of liberal capitalism “flourish as expert knowledges, to act as though they were
sovereign, as proxy forms of sovereignty.”
85
These sovereign, computerized knowledges exhaust
all possibilities as actionable. In defiance of Agamben’s call to be one’s own lack, a call to
(in)action, for the politics of possibility, “All potential must be actualized and fulfilled.”
86

Political latency is not so easily abolished. Even Renov’s “radical doubt born of
contradiction” can privilege potentiality at the expense of the impotential. Amoore writes, on the
legitimations of risk expertise, that “[...]its authority is derived precisely from the capacity to
decide the exceptions that make it possible to act even in the face of radical uncertainty. [...]It
seeks not to forestall the future via calculation but to incorporate the very unknowability and
profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision.”
87
An effect of latency is that it
incorporates uncertainty as its raison d’être; this is expressed in how user-viewers of interactive
documentary are invited to perform their own acts of uncertainty or disavowal. Critique itself is
implicated, personified by those voices compelled to champion the potential of virtual
technologies as they interpret the real. Here Amoore begins to articulate what kind of potential
politics remain through such grim circumstances:
Arguably critique is made extraordinarily difficult when the very terrain of criticism—
that which escapes, the excess, the return, the mistake and error—becomes incorporated
within the security technique itself. [...]this is a form of governing that can only act on a
potentiality that is already actualized as a possibility—a plane that would have been
boarded, a border that would have been crossed, a future violence that would have been
fully realized. There are other forms of potentiality flourishing in the interstices of this
way of governing life itself, forms of potentiality that are incipient, never fully grasped or
realized.
88

85. Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 6.
86. Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 159. Agamben, Potentialities, 182.
87. Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 9 (my emphasis).
88. Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 26.

191
The potentiality she refers to is impotential, the potential not to act or the potential that is not
acted upon.
89
The future of documentary need not be interaction nor virtual reality. Perhaps its
future can be misrecognized in the present, misrecognition being one of those impotentials that
confuses one mode of being for another. The turn toward impotential is an embrace of the
stranger who acts, a welcome of the failures of interaction for they form the basis of political
potentiality. Therefore true potential politics, potential potentials (potentia potentiae), means
“leaving only the undecidability of the action.”
90

Playing with Potential

Displacing the notion of interactive documentary outside humanist-realist content and
into the hybrid commodities of AAA video games complicates traditional academic and
industrial notions of the fiction-nonfiction divide, and opens mainstream gaming to
politicizations that challenge the legitimating effects of interaction. The real-time and
virtualizing technologies used in the creation and consumption of games like Hellblade: Senua’s
Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017) and Star Wars: Battlefront (EA DICE and Criterion Software,
2015) transform them into potential documentaries, virtual documentaries that upset the didactic
and prescriptive impulse of documentary. Their counterfictional storyworlds mark a point of
failure for the interaction claim, enticing audiences to misrecognize the real objects,
environments, and people that populate their story worlds. To tell the fictional story of its
psychotic Celtic protagonist, Hellblade uses virtual reality to “achieve a more objective

89. Ibid., 158.
90. Amoore, The Politics of Possibility, 172.

192
narrative”, inviting players to approach the truth by way of artifice.
91
With vérité formalism and
a bounty of supplemental, extratextual development documentary, the game intends to inform
players of the reality of severe mental illness and through experiential means gain access to
otherwise impossible subjective states. Its status as potential documentary hinges on the accuracy
of its representation and how it implements virtual reality in order to directly alter the lives of its
players and participants.
Potential documentary video games are characterized by virtualizations at the level of
both game assets and game animations. For assets, photogrammetry has gained a decisive
foothold in the
development
pipeline. Although
photogrammetry had
been used in the past
mostly for game
props, according to
Nataska Statham,
“The first large-scale
use of photogrammetry in a video game is the September 2014 title The Vanishing of Ethan
Carter by independent Polish developer The Astronauts.”
92
The team behind Ethan Carter
utilized photogrammetry in the hopes that it would give a boost to their game’s immersive
qualities while streamlining their asset builds (figure 3.11). Following Ethan Carter, EA

91. Gifreu-Castells, “Mapping Trends in Interactive Non-fiction”, 157.
92. Nataska Statham, “Use of Photogrammetry in Video Games: A Historical Overview,” Games
and Culture 15, no. 3 (July 3, 2018), 3.
Figure 3.11. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014). A
photogrammetric model used for the setting of the game.

193
announced that large-scale photogrammetry would be used for the assets of its 2015 release Star
Wars: Battlefront. EA had previously used photogrammetry in the first-person-shooter
Battlefield series for military props, but for Battlefront the idea was that not only props and
outfits from the Star Wars films would be scanned but also locations. Playing the game, fans of
the series may recognize the Redwood forests of the Ewok-inhabited moon of Endor as the same
California locales where some of the original Star Wars trilogy was filmed in the 1980s. As
players replicate one memorable scene from Return of the Jedi (Lucas, 1983), gliding through
the forest on a speeder bike, the game’s photogrammetric assets are the content that goes
unnoticed, that is excess to the force of the game or excess to its procedural “meaning” (figure
3.12). In the case of photogrammetric models of natural environments, the natural world
becomes human artifact, yet still goes unnoticed as a natural outcropping or expression of the
world of the game. Photogrammetry may also be implemented to develop game animations. In
the case of Hellblade, a form of facial photogrammetry was used to create a “virtual human” that
players interactively bewitch. Performance capture technology then allowed the game’s creative
Figure 3.12. Star Wars: Battlefront (EA, 2015).

194
director Tameem Antoniades to direct scenes of the game in real time. Piecing together several
aspects of virtual production, Hellblade “[...]showcas[es] the potential of combining
photogrammetry, motion capture, and game engines to create real-time cinematography, where a
digital scene can be directed and rendered in real time with minimal postprocessing[...]”
93
Other
even more experimental real-time productions like The Under Presents (Tender Claws, 2019),
developed for Oculus, casts live actors to perform in-game, producing an experience that’s part
immersive theater, part digital animation.

Case Analysis: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was developed by the British independent game studio
Ninja Theory and released in August 2017. The game is set in 8th century Scotland, although
most of it also takes place inside the mind of its main character, Senua, as she believes herself to
be traversing Helheim in search of her slain partner. Senua is a Pict Celtic warrior haunted by
childhood trauma who undergoes a psychotic break after Vikings invade and decimate her
village. Players control Senua on a gruesome and often horrific journey through Helheim and her
fractured psyche. Built by a team of only about 16, the game achieved the production value and
realism of big developer AAA titles (Ninja Theory calls the game an “independent AAA”) by
collaborating with vanguard virtual technology companies. Its most distinctive feature is its real-
time performance capture and the creation of Senua, a “virtual human”. Although performance
capture has become industry standard for high-end realist game animation, and Ninja Theory had

93. Statham, “Use of Photogrammetry in Video Games”, 9. Interestingly, Statham points out the
regional proclivity of photogrammetry in games: “So far the push for photogrammetry in games
has been mainly European[…]” (14-15).

195
extensive experience working with the technology in their previous games like Heavenly Sword
(2007), for Senua they lacked the budget usually required for such an undertaking. So they
outsourced the process, creating an extensive co-creative collaboration between Ninja Theory,
Epic and Unreal Engine 4, facial technology company 3Lateral, the live facial technology of
Cubic Motion, Xsens’s motion capture system, and the real-time production companies Ikinema
and Technoprops. Originally Ninja Theory used their video editor Melina Juergens to prototype
Senua, but she impressed the team enough that she was cast for the full game; Juergens would
end up winning a BAFTA for her first-time performance.
The vérité formalism of the
game invites players to experience
Hellblade like they would a
documentary, as its psychological
theming equally disturbs the
“objective” status of its
interactions. An over-the-shoulder
third-person perspective
conditions its mode of play
while commenting on
Senua’s split personality and
the unknown location of our
internal “actors” (figures 3.13
and 3.14). Throughout the
game, Senua is plagued by
Figures 3.13 (top) and 3.14 (bottom). Primary (Robert Drew, 1960).
An over-the-shoulder view of John F. Kennedy campaigning for the
Democratic presidential nomination. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
(Ninja Theory, 2017). An over-the-shoulder view of Senua and her
personal hell.

196
multiple voices – separate identities – that provide narration to her journey. They discuss her in
the third person as well as address her directly, bidding her to perform certain acts or warning her
of potential danger ahead. Many times they address the player, who is likened to another one of
Senua’s personalities compelling her to act. The reparative reality that results from Senua’s
psychic break provides a meta-narrative device through which the game continually reflects on
its own artifice and the powers of perception to determine reality. At one point these internal
actors are referred to as “the strangers in your own body”, which equally nods at the player who
controls Senua’s actions and the process by which user-viewers are controlled by forces outside
themselves. Of course the game itself conditions player interactions, but the confused origins of
Senua’s internal motivations hints at the reciprocal giving over of one agency for another in the
practice of inter-action. Performing a kind of Cavellian “world viewed”, the game’s third-person
viewpoint is suggestive of the perceptual remove that divides us from reality. Controlling
Senua’s body, I am the stranger, and yet I also control “the camera”, which is my second
conduit, where my subjectivity is actually housed; they are formally linked, for when I move “my
camera”, Senua moves accordingly. Likewise the documentary subject is equally controlled by
“the camera”, an audience conduit.
The floating third-person perspective entrusts the player with complete reign over the
virtual environment: it favors looking past Senua in observation of her surroundings, peaking
around corners, at all angles, moving in and out of occlusion, anticipating danger or rather
otherness, a distinct difference that provides interactive cues in a sparsely designed scene. The
point of the moving camera is anticipation as much as framing. Unlike the stationary camera of
the single-stick era of gamepads, or fixed third-person cameras, which offer more directed
interactive visuality, an over-the-shoulder POV grants players more responsibility in

197
“documenting” or “framing” Senua’s actions in-game.
94
Like the vérité camera, whose imminent
presence conditions its mode of spectatorship, Hellblade’s perspective maintains a participatory
connection to the game world even if Senua bears all of the interactive consequences. For
creative director Antoniades, “The viewer is an observer, like a presence watching Senua.”
95
The
third-person remove not only determines the entire control system of the game, it instantiates a
mode of discovery
and co-creation that
permeates it.
Potentiality and the
element of
unpredictability
motivates players to
constantly be
swiveling the camera around Senua and the game environment. The game captures the
anticipation of vérité, the potentiality of the open frame that Bazin treasured.
The separateness of the player-controlled camera and Senua as a fully realized character
is skillfully featured as a self-reflexive component of gameplay. One of the main interactive
components of the game is “focus”, where pulling the R2 trigger will push the camera in right
next to Senua’s face, which now hovers in the peripheral, bottom-left edge of the frame (figure

94. Games like the first God of War (Santa Monica Studio, 2005), released on the Playstation 2,
broke with industry consensus at the time, wresting control of the camera from the player to
achieve a more “cinematic” framing.
95. Ninja Theory, “Hellblade Development Diary 18: The Shoot Set Up”, Dec. 4, 2015, MPEG-
4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACTByOjqyQ&list=PLbpkF8TRYizaT6GfMcKBG-
RoUOQ6BJRXp&index=18. Along with implementing the third-person camera system,
Antoniades achieved the effect of the floating spectator by shooting the game’s cinematics in
single shots with a handheld GoPro rig.
Figure 3.15. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). Using “focus”.

198
3.15). Through the focus feature, Senua can weaponize perception. Merging the viewpoints of
these conduits helps complete visual puzzles and “make sense” of what Senua is experiencing.
The oscillation between the divided third-person perspective and a nearly integrated first-person
view imitates the push and pull of subjectivity within Senua as well as between player and
character. Moreover, now a common feature in especially realist action video games like the
Uncharted series (Naughty Dog, 2007-2017) or God of War (Santa Monica Studio, 2018), a
robust photo mode complements the game. Photo mode asks players to interact with the game at
a further remove, to treat it as realist art exhibit or documentary space. Hellblade is unique in
that it includes a fully realized photo editor where you can even crop out your character and
document the landscape. Where focus helps piece together Senua’s traumatic history by lending
the environment a secret meaning only accessible to her, photo mode enables players to make
their own meaning and personal connection to the world of the game.
At first the game was not released for VR headsets nor did Ninja Theory consider
translating Hellblade to VR. Although they used VR headsets during production of the game, the
development team wondered if the movements of the camera in cutscenes, for example, would
make its users ill. About a year before the game’s launch, Ninja Theory introduced a real-time,
stereoscopic demonstration of Hellblade to be viewed in 360 degrees, through YouTube or the
Oculus Store. This preview caused enough excitement that they decided to convert the entire
game to VR. “VR is something we’ve been experimenting with and we’ve been using Hellblade
as a testing ground,” says Antoniades. “[...]VR is most certainly going to be the dominant form
of gaming. It’s just hard to see right now due to the bulky headsets, power and battery

199
requirements.”
96
Twelve months after the release of the game for consoles and PC, Hellblade
launched in VR for the Vive and Oculus.
For gameplay, the VR port utilizes a semi-fixed head steering system, where users can
turn their heads to direct Senua’s movements, but the viewpoint gradually adjusts to the
discrepancy of one’s head position and the position of Senua in-game. This keeps the user-
viewer and Senua tied together, so the two viewpoints don’t drift too far apart. This point-of-
view also allows for the game to be played sitting down and does not require full room-scale
utilization. Importantly players still must use a game controller to perform its interactions, and
the camera is still primarily directed through the right joystick. Beyond optimizing the console
version of Hellblade to run at 90 frames per second, a considerable task admittedly, Ninja
Theory didn’t need to entirely overhaul much of the game as its development lent it a
compatibility with VR. The game’s audio, for example, was already recorded binaurally, which
fit nicely with the 360-degree spaces of VR.
Overall, Hellblade is a game that demands to be taken seriously. For an action-adventure
title, its pacing is comparatively slow and contemplative. Much of the game consists of
navigating exceptionally detailed and visually dynamic environments, punctuated strategically
by moments of intense combat or puzzle solving. It invites players to get lost in the game as its
world rarely feels familiar or homely. Gameplay is limited to only a few combat controls and the
focus feature. Unlike similar titles like God of War (2018), whose combat, aesthetic, and setting
within Norse mythology make it an apt comparison, Senua’s gameplay embraces realism: there
are no RPG elements that allow players to “upgrade” Senua, nor a heads-up-display cluttering

96. Rebecca Hills-Duty. “Ninja Theory Co-Founder Confident in the Future of VR”, VRFocus,
August 3, 2017. https://www.vrfocus.com/2017/08/ninja-theory-co-founder-confident-in-the-
future-of-vr/.

200
the screen; Senua lacks super-human abilities, and all of the fantastic elements of the game are
explained by Senua’s failing mental state. Therefore the most unrealistic aspects of the game –
its compromised visuality – are couched in the internal realisms of the lead character. Senua’s
disavowal from reality is our means to access the reality of psychosis, and the game’s
extratextual content confirms the accuracy of its representation of mental illness.
Its minimalism extends to the game menu, which includes a documentary featurette on its
production. By including a making-of documentary, which buttresses multiple hours of video
development diaries, Ninja Theory solicit audiences to engage with Hellblade as an extended
documentary experience (figure 3.16). The featurette as well as the development diaries detail
the research put into the game, its reliance on mental health professionals and people
experiencing psychosis to shape the game, and its goal to elucidate as well as entertain its
audiences. For one, Antoniades explains that the real archaeological discovery of a Celtic woman
Figure 3.16. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). In order to signal its accuracy, the game
opens by crediting a mental health advisor as well as a historical advisor.

201
named Senua inspired him to create Hellblade. He based Senua’s characterization in Pict history,
as well as Celtic and Norse legend, culture, and documented attitudes on mental illness. The
landscapes of the game were
designed using satellite data of
Nordic fjords and the
topographies of the tiny Scottish
islands where the game is
nominally set. Furthermore, to
humanize Senua’s movements
and combat style, a stunt double
was tested, and the game
controls were adjusted for
human limitations in order to
feel more naturalistic. Finally,
the producers describe the game
as a new way to understand the
reality of mental illness. As one
of the game’s expert consultants
says, it’s “[a] game that provides a fresh perspective on the condition [of psychosis].”
97
The
documentary featurette contains a mash-up of intertitles with testimony from people
experiencing psychosis and examples of how they represented those experiences in the game
(figures 3.17 and 3.18). Many of the representations of psychosis (beyond the voices in Senua’s

97. Ninja Theory, “Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis”, documentary featurette in Hellblade: Senua’s
Sacrifice, Ninja Theory, Playstation 4, 2017.
Figures 3.17 (top) and 3.18 (bottom). “Hellblade: Senua’s
Psychosis”. The top image represents a characterization of
psychosis offered by one of the game’s advisors. The bottom image
is the next still in the featurette, depicting an instance in the game
where the visuals match the advisor’s description.

202
head) manifest as compromised (perceptual) materiality: liquid and melting material edges and
surfaces, fractured and recombined environments, impossible or exaggerated colorations. Other
scenes of the game call attention to the nightmarish qualities of psychosis, filling rooms with
dead bodies or isolating Senua in pitch black. Antoniades asks, “Have we gone too far with our
representations or not far enough?”
98

Following the advice of mental health experts, the game imagines delusion and psychosis
as an immersive world of one’s own, the productive imagination of a parallel world that speaks
only to the psychotic. The gameplay is designed to represent the incessant pattern-making of
delusional thought; one’s surroundings repeatedly provide clues and connections to elucidate the
“truth”. Looking closely, “focusing” or discovering another angle will reveal these new modes of
understanding. Another mental health advisor on the game describes it as “tough subjects being
tackled with honesty.”
99
Ultimately the game’s creators wish to destigmatize psychosis and
severe mental illness, claiming the game will help audiences to see differently in order to
progress toward a better world.
Returning to Almeida and Alvelos, the springboards with which this chapter began, one
can’t help but agree with the authors’ highly critical characterization of the majority of
interactive documentary. “These pieces recurrently end up poorly made with a serious deficit of
engagement when compared to traditional linear ones, failing to embrace the best features of
both worlds with an inclination towards interaction.”
100
Yet this failure of integration is met with
success of another kind. Hellblade succeeds because its virtual reality disrupts its very status as a
work of fiction. Its inclination towards interaction reveals the documentary stowaway, an

98. Ninja Theory, “Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis”.
99. Ninja Theory, “Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis”.
100. Almeida and Alvelos, 124.

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insistence on the real. If “[...]any attempt to force a subject into an interactivity is a recipe for
failure”, Hellblade again fails by compelling its players into interacting with a negotiated
reality.
101
In a way then, the heuristic of documentary, here, fails too, for it ceases to be
recognized. In its place I proposed a counter-terminology, a series of theorizing concepts, in
order to more accurately establish the forms and effects of an interactive virtual documentary.
Synonymous with the virtual and in opposition to doc-media integration, these concepts devise a
recipe for failure.
There is a connection to be made, finally, between the psychosis represented interactively
in the game and the "reality" constructed by i-docs in the traditional sense, the reparative reality
of meaning making. They make one feel empowered, restored. The game simulates a struggle for
meaning, but also something real. Is this virtual documentary an impotential? I have argued that
Hellblade uses cinematic and documentary veracity to legitimate the creative decisions it makes.
It is also more literally a documentary subject itself, in more than 20 video development diaries
as well the included doc-featurette. Many of its features are historically and physically sourced.
But like The Displaced, which ventures to paradoxically place its viewing subjects in a place of
displacement, the game simulates the real experience of unreality, implausible states of being
and impossible states of knowing. Hellblade players cannot know the reality of Senua nor the
real people and experiences she’s based on, nor do they necessarily expect to. Therefore, like the
traditional i-doc user, or the very psychosis the game simulates, they create a new reality. A
virtual reality all their own.

101. Almeida and Alvelos, 125.

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Conclusion, or, E m b o d i m e n t
Become Your Own Documentary

You could become your own documentary. You could wear your documentary, media-making
machines as fashion. I can see myself as a living, talking, walking, breathing documentary
machine. I am my own platform. I will become my camera and my distribution machine all
rolled up into one.
Peter Wintonick, “New Platforms for ‘Docmedia’: ‘Variant of a Manifesto’”

A Dire Fantasy

As if the relationship between compounding global crises and the legitimization of
emerging technologies were in doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 arrived just in time. The
virus and an unevenly distributed global lockdown almost instantly proved to be a tailor made,
calamitous reinforcement of virtual technology and its assurance to create new opportunities to
access the real. For an alienating technology like virtual reality, which has proven time and again
to be otherwise unpopular and in many cases seems to actively resist popular engagement itself,
the crisis provided the occasion to leapfrog willful adoption in favor of an imposed adaptation.
The isolation, “social distance” (in all of its various connotations), and overwhelming craving for
the “normal” that defined especially the American response proved perfectly amenable to VR
companies selling “virtual embodiment” as a remote work and education solution. The

205
codification of virtual documentary application during this period throws into stark relief how
virtual body tracking and recursive systems of re-presentation are applied in “real-world”
settings.
In a May 2020 webinar sponsored by the VR training company STRIVR titled “Recover
better: How to seize this moment to reimagine learning at work”, co-founder and CEO Derek
Belch addresses how his company is positioned to take advantage of the remote work demands
and corporate austerity brought about by pandemic. “We feel very fortunate to be leveraging a
technology like VR[...]at a time when remote work is happening, at a time when budget
contractions are very real[...]and companies are going to look to achieve similar training
outcomes in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the dollars.”
1
Although obligatory lip service is
paid to the economic and social devastation wrought by the crisis, the webinar prioritizes
speculating over how VR will help sustain but more so increase productivity as a result of
COVID-19. While the legitimations of VR must normally position it as an ideologically neutral
interfacing with objective reality, in introducing a new lifestyle based on distance, the pandemic
necessitates the use of VR as a training tool, no longer neutral but in fact openly ideologically
motivated. “We’re gonna need tools like VR to teach people all these new protocols,” says Josh
Bersin, a global industry analyst, referencing the regulations demanded by COVID. “With
STRIVR and immersive learning, this was already happening and now it’s just being
accelerated.”
2
A rush to touchlessness in the physical world – the minimization of person-to-
person contact, a kind of disembodiment – provides opportunity for virtual embodiment to gain

1. Derek Belch, Cat Ward and Josh Bersin, “Recover better: How to seize this moment to
reimagine learning at work”, May 29, 2020, Webinar, MP4, 49:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwOHP1UdNLU.
2. Belch, Ward and Bersin, “Recover better: How to seize this moment to reimagine learning at
work”.

206
credence as a matter of pragmatism. Crisis again provides rhetorical cover for virtual technology,
to eschew criticism of the kind of reality it enforces; it substantiates a media infrastructure that
manufactures its own users through the mandatory implementation of VR in the workplace and
educational settings. As VR advocates seek substantiation through the operations of labor and
education, the human body becomes setting for the reintroduction of the immersion, presence,
and interaction stripped from potential users by pandemic conditions. VR leads us to new
embodied realities through the compulsory self-creation of embodiment documentary.
STRIVR was co-
founded by Belch and
Jeremy Bailenson, a
renowned VR researcher
and author of Experience
on Demand, in which he
details the company’s
origins at Bailenson’s
Stanford University as a simulator designed for football practice (figure 4.1). In testing how VR,
with its millimeter-accurate tracking capabilities, can better prepare athletes and help them
understand their own bodily performance, the pair discovered the system’s efficacy for training
beyond sports. They found that by utilizing VR’s comprehensive recording and visualization
functions, VR could be an effective tool for individuals to pre-cognitively prepare for fast-paced
and stressful real-world scenarios. Echoing what the military has known for years, Belch and
company promote the use of VR for training people to make split-second decisions and execute
Figure 4.1. STRIVR at Stanford.

207
actions with precision and repeatability.
3
The goal is “embodied cognition”, to reflexively
distribute “knowledge” into the body, to bypass the delay – the latency, perhaps a kind of
autonomic skepticism – between bodily information receptors and cognitive impulse. STRIVR
had early success selling their training technology to professional and college football
organizations, and similar endeavors, like W.I.N. Reality’s batting and pitching simulators, soon
made progress. But in quickly realizing the finite reality of the sports world, they shifted their
business model to serve the training and educational needs of corporate America. STRIVR’s
mandate became more universal: to minimize what is excess to one’s embodied cognitions, or,
rather, to incorporate those excesses into an established model of productivity.
Bailenson’s relationship with STRIVR is particularly revealing of how VR researchers
leverage claims based in cognitive psychology to transition into business. In this case, Bailenson
utilizes empirical studies suggesting that VR’s immersive environments, sense of “presence”,
and recursive visualizations (where users are able to study their own embodied instant replays)
result in better retention among trainees. Bailenson extrapolates from these highly limited and
questionable studies to sell both the public and private corporations on VR’s “potential to
democratize learning and training”.
4
For one of STRIVR’s biggest clients, Walmart, virtual
embodiment training is less a “democratic” distribution of learning resources than the exact
opposite, its privatization, a means of private corporate control over the embodied sovereignty of
their employees (figure 4.2). Recording and measuring employee actions in virtual training

3. Here I am generally thinking of the military’s use of VR to train and rehabilitate soldiers, and
more specifically referencing the military’s use of embodied technologies like the Army
Research Lab’s Human Variability Project, which “aim[s] to outfit soldiers with wearable,
interactive sensors to produce a range of data that could be machine-read and analysed,
quantifying bodily processes and reactions in order to understand their operation.” William
Merrin, Digital War (London: Routledge, 2018), 255.
4. Jeremy Bailenson, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What
It Can Do (New York, N.Y: WWNorton & Company, Inc, 2018), 42.

208
modules – especially those actions that are cognitively “unintended” – aids the quantification of
learning outcomes, where all bodily functions not directly associated with the productivity of
one’s labor can and should be eliminated, or incorporated into the act of labor itself.
5
The
objective is to train one’s reflexes and subconscious associations to better align with employer
directives. Virtual
employee training and
its invasiveness is
framed, however, as
bolstering
“productivity”, or is
siphoned through the
language of human
resources to reflect a
more enlightened workspace, where mandatory “bias” training meant to inspire a more
harmonious workplace in fact virtually guarantees employee compliance while minimizing
employer liability. This rhetorical obscurantism demonstrates how VR’s empiricism – its
appearance of scientific rigor – is used to create a market environment conducive to VR, in this
case as a viable tool for embodied training and worker compliance.
Straining to identify the object of training for Walmart employees beyond compliance
and liability, Bailenson advocates for VR’s capacity to train employees to surveil and detect not
only unwanted behaviors in themselves, but, for example, the pre-criminal behaviors of
customers. “For floor managers, this means quickly walking down an aisle to see if the rolls of

5. It is in fact enough to simply record these discrepancies (and for employees to know that they
have been recorded) to have affirmative proof of employee non-compliance if/when needed.
Figure 4.2. STRIVR virtual training for Walmart employees.

209
plastic bags hanging over the aisles are fully stocked, or noticing that one of the customers is
lingering a bit too long in one place (is she shoplifting?).”
6
Moreover, it is really less the
perceived effectiveness of virtual reality to train its employees in work protocol than the cost-
effectiveness of virtual training modules that convinced Walmart to adopt Bailenson’s machines.
“The beauty from their perspective is that VR is magnitudes of order cheaper than setting up a
physical training store that is stocked with food and customers.”
7
And because virtual reality can
verify beyond reasonable doubt that “every trainee gets exactly the same experience”, the
company can hardly be liable when employees deviate from their training and have empirical
justification for when it needs to discipline or terminate staff.
8
When it does come time to fire an
employee, VR can even deliver the appropriate empathy and “soft skills” training so managers
can let them down easy.
For VR training and VR labor, what has been termed “enterprise VR”, the user’s body is
explicitly a site of techno-ideological inscription. That is, the demands of work are integrated
into one’s body autonomically. The body is equally a site of extraction, as well, where embodied
actions are quantified, data-mined, and preemptively evaluated in relation to their productivity. It
is this relationship to the productive capacities of the human body that re-stages the Taylorist
notion of laborer as automaton: relentlessly more productive at lower the cost. Whether they are
aware of it or not, the laborer’s body becomes the site of productivity. Training the body to more
automatically respond and act on behalf of the demands of work bypasses the messiness of mind-
body mediation. In pandemic, where the human body itself becomes a liability for productivity,
this also means even industries associated with human contact are rushing to manufacture a

6. Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 40.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Bailenson, Experience on Demand, 41.

210
technical solution. “[...T]he moment of truth forced by the virus has seen worker-replacing
automation even by companies that had not previously turned to robots.”
9
The fragility of the
worker as a human body, let alone the body’s propensity for non-compliance (which often goes
undetected), requires their disembodiment, replacing it instead with a fantasy of virtual
embodiment. For Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life and advocate for virtual
connectivity solutions, “The pandemic has approximated the conditions of his most dire
fantasies.”
10

Part of this fantasy of automatic production involves replacing thinking human bodies
with a virtual workforce whose embodiment “automatically” enacts the politics of their
employment. One of the public’s more infamous introductions to virtual reality employee
training was Talespin’s “Barry demo”, where users practice the uncomfortable scenario of firing
an employee (figure 4.3). A virtual character in his 60s with decades of experience, Barry sobs
and pleads for his job as users test out the right combination of platitudes to calm Barry and
incite him to give up his livelihood graciously. Other virtual training platforms more directly
typify the global expanse of neoliberal and extractionary economies. Librestream, for example,
offers an “onsight augmented worker platform” for oil rigs, manufacturing floors, and aircraft
hangers, and with new funding secured it plans to expand into Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and
Latin America.
11
These initiatives espouse the “real-world solutions” offered by virtual and

9. Steve LeVine, “Our Economy Was Just Blasted Years into the Future”, Marker, May 25,
2020,
https://marker.medium.com/our-economy-was-just-blasted-years-into-the-future-a591fbba2298.
10. Anna Russell, “Zoom Fatigue and New Ways to Party”, New Yorker, Sept 17, 2020,
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zoom-fatigue-and-the-new-ways-to-party.
11. Scott Hayden. “Librestream Secures $24M Series D Funding to Expand Its AR-Powered
Worker Platform”, Road to VR, June 24, 2020. https://www.roadtovr.com/librestream-24m-
series-d-funding-ar-worker/

211
augmented technologies. Transfr VR offers their training models to a variety of companies and
schools, including arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin; Acadicus, by Arch Virtual, is a VR
content aggregator for training in mostly the medical field; Engage focuses on VR for online and
remote education, and markets its own authoring services; and Vantage Point centers on
Emotional Intelligence Training and the burgeoning field of “soft skills” education.

The benefit of virtual training and automation to politically charged industrial
professions, aiding the fossil fuel economy or the manufacture of war machines, for example, is
in exposing and filtering out undesirable or “low-quality” workers. Training can then amount to
divining who would be a good worker based on virtually embodied, that is, unconscious
behaviors. Jim Blascovich exemplifies how face tracking in VR training simulations lends to the
preemptive detection and elimination of human error and, presumably, individuals predisposed
to adverse attitudes.
Facial movements predicted errors with high accuracy about five seconds before they
occurred. Moreover, by looking at a few minutes of data from any given person, we
Figure 4.3. Talespin’s “Barry demo”, a virtual trainer for firing employees.

212
predicted whether they were going to be a high- or low-quality worker, based on the
overall number of errors they committed. The face not only told us when an error would
occur, but also the type of person that was error-prone.
12

VR lends employers both the means to pre-emptively categorize potential employees and the
techno-empirical basis to justify their predictions. Quantifying the productive “potential” of their
trainees, these tautological systems define their human subjects as “error-prone” before a pattern
of error is even established. Mark Andrejevic demonstrates how the technologized ideology of
automation relies on pre-emption to self-define its accuracy and applicability, such that, in this
case, “errors” are reserved for only the “error-prone”.
13
The pre-emption that partly characterizes
the ideology of automation portends, then, of the operationalization of knowledge and images,
the adoption of computational logics, and their application on the level of global politics (i.e. any
male victim of a drone strike must be, by fact of their being killed in a drone strike, a combatant
or terrorist).
14
While VR training systems are championed for the supposed embodied realities
they afford their users, in practice they are wielded in advancement of the neo-Taylorist
optimization of labor on behalf of the ambitions of capital.

Prosthesis > Mimesis

The credibility that training and education applications lend the paradigm of virtual
reality is grounded in the claim of “embodiment”. This assertion reiterates the post-mediating

12. Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds,
and the Dawn of the Virtual (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 164.
13. Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media (New York: Routledge, 2019).
14. See also: Jussi Parikka’s “Operational Images and Visual Culture” project,
https://www.famu.cz/cs/veda-a-vyzkum/aktualne-resene-vyzkumne-projekty-na-
famu/operational-images/

213
effects of VR, specifically in the effort to redress instances of incorporeality brought about by the
demands of modern society. Toward engineering “embodied cognition” within its user-viewers,
the VR apparatus treats the human body as its own source of productive information that, when
fed back into the system, achieves new epistemic formations. Through techno-prosthesis, the
body of user-viewers are immersed within distant or impossible spaces, made present to past
temporalities, or relationally recombined by interacting with objective reality. Above all, the
embodiment claim asserts that the VR apparatus will return control over one’s embodied
experience to the user-viewer by transforming her into her own virtual documentary.
VR’s positional and orientational tracking ensures that participants are equally the
products of virtual reality experiences as they are the users. Virtual documentary viewers are
their own documentary subjects whose embodied actions constitute a “corpus” of prosthetic
knowledge. Deviating, then, from “the mimetic knowledge of cinema”, VR is nonetheless an
extension of documentary media’s reflexive representations of the “embodied realities” of its
subjects and audiences alike.
15
Grafted to shared truth claims as it is to the body of its users, VR
is documentary prosthesis. It exists in addition to; it then does not rest on mimesis, its
documentary imitation of reality, but openly participates in the productive creation of this reality.
Through prosthesis, VR fashions (fastens) reality, extending the body as it does the
documentary.
Documentary has often framed embodiment in terms of not only its capacities for
mimesis but for revealing those embodied actions that go unconsidered in daily life. The
application of this knowledge set to real-world settings is aimed at better operability, a
supposedly deeper understanding of how the body informs our reality and how to operationalize

15. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 151.

214
this understanding. Historically this often translates to empirical efforts to quantify the body.
Elizabeth Stephens demonstrates how early 20th century physiologists like Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth, or their previously referenced predecessor Étienne-Jules Marey, utilized photography
and film to measure human action in sport and at work (figure 4.4).
16
Their chronophotographs
and chronocyclographs visually represented patterns of movement and were employed to
discover false assumptions about physical
motion and the body or to uphold newly
establishing models of human
optimization. The visual evidence of their
“motion studies” played a major role in
the emerging field of “scientific
management”, which studied how factors
like whether one is sitting or standing,
using one arm or two, correlate to the possible speed and precision with which a work task is
completed. Microcomputers made quantifying physical activity beyond singular locations like
the workplace possible, giving rise to a self-tracking movement that has become ubiquitous
through products like the smartphone and Fitbit.
17
Anticipating the next wave of gig economy
self-tracking and quantification, Alison McDowell notices, “Everyone will have to become an
entrepreneur of their quantified self, curating a digital brand to sell over and over and over in a

16. Elizabeth Stephens, “Cultures of Hyper-Productivity and the Quantification of Work: A
Visual History of Time Management Studies” (lecture presented at the Deakin Science and
Society Network seminar series, streamed live November 16, 2020).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T89i5HBT0L0
17. Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016).
Figure 4.4. “Chronophotograph” (Étienne-Jules
Marey and Charles Fremont, 1894).

215
globalized marketplace.”
18
Becoming my own virtual documentary in the form of digital
recordings and biodata will not only be a fashion, it will literally determine my productive worth.
Embodiment in virtual reality is described as a type of transference not dissimilar to the
experiences of immersion and presence, nor to the agential charge of interaction. In another case
of a VR researcher translating his theoretical findings into real-world application, Mel Slater’s
Virtual Bodyworks promotes the use of VR for training and rehabilitation, ranging from chronic
pain patients to domestic abuse offenders. Slater believes VR is more effectively suited for
training because, “VR is excellent for measurement – since everything that the trainees do can, in
principle, be recorded and measured: Their overall behaviour, the bodily movements, their
physiological and brain responses. The trainee could also re-enter the environment and observe
their own recorded data being played out.”
19
Yet as much as one can learn from one’s own
embodiment, VR’s Body Ownership Illusion, the sense “that your co-located virtual body is your
body”, means that users can be manipulated into identifying some other body as their own.
20

This attempted literalization of walking in another’s shoes represents a form of training directed
not at acquisition (as in a skill or trade) but disavowal, to train away embodied bias. Slater uses
the Body Ownership Illusion to posit that virtually trading bodies can help eliminate embodied
biases like sexism or racism that require unconscious intervention. This phenomenon is
promoted by installation projects like The Machine to be Another, where half-naked co-

18. Alison McDowell, “The Mixed Reality Commute: Education for the Telepresence Gig
Economy”, Wrench in the Gears, Sept. 6, 2019, https://wrenchinthegears.com/2019/09/06/the-
mixed-realty-commute-education-for-the-telepresence-gig-economy/
19. Mel Slater, “Virtual Reality for Training”, Mel Slater’s Presence Blog, March 29, 2020,
http://presence-thoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/virtual-reality-for-training.html.
20. Mel Slater, “Virtual Reality for Training”.

216
participants each experience the other’s viewpoint through their respective HMDs, so that, for
example, a man can briefly “experience” the body of a woman and vice versa (figure 4.5).
21

Applications of virtual embodiment of this kind express the ideal operability against
which the body is measured. The purpose of training and education can be quantified as an
elimination of bias, to prevent bias from ever becoming. Once bias is eliminated, disavowed, VR
can therefore prove all remaining embodied actions as well as its own empirical methods are
unbiased, objective, real, and, consequently, Good. Unlike mimesis, which requires some
activation in the viewer, some mobilization, prosthesis bypasses mediation, the reasoning goes,
and is therefore more empirically demonstrative. Because the virtual prosthesis sets the terms of

21. http://beanotherlab.org/home/work/tmtba/. For the link between the Body Ownership Illusion
and “implicit bias”, see: Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakiris,
“Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition”, Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 19, no. 1 (January 1, 2015), 6–12.
Figure 4.5. The Machine to be Another (BeAnotherLab, 2014).

217
embodiment, of bias, of the implicit and the explicit, its own existence as dataset is self-evident
of its effectiveness. Here, the body indeed never lies.
The tech-solutionism of VR training is framed as reclaiming individual agency from
unconscious, anti-social and anti-productive bias. The push for VR embodied education solutions
coincides with the popularization of implicit bias training, especially in high impact,
“gatekeeping” positions, like policing or hiring committees. The framing of implicit bias
training, similarly addressed in many fields as a kind of general “ethics” education, highlights
assumptions about personal political agency and the effect that cultivating individual
responsibility has on large-scale social problems. The “implicit” nature of one’s biases render
racial prejudices, for example, “beyond our (direct) control”, therefore justifying an “indirect”,
that is, perhaps, unconscious intervention in the form of virtual embodiment training that would
make bias “explicit”. VR – imagined as a kind of implicit detection machine – is leveraged once
again to address the stranger in oneself, to call out the stowaway, the part of the individual that
exists and acts in secret. The implicit, the latent, and the virtual must be reined in to an
operationalized epistemology lest they continue to perpetuate the evils of bias.
22

To determine which behaviors can be considered “implicit”, the virtual training sector
relies on the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. During the IAT, subjects are asked to assign
positive or negative values to, for instance, photographs of people with varying skin shades. A
fast-paced tempo ensures that test subjects rely on their implicit associations as opposed to an

22. Empirical studies indicate that people are readily able to identify their own implicit biases or
rather the effect these biases have on their behavior. But this operational knowledge may not
preclude them from behaving with bias. Much like a condition of virtuality, where we know it is
not actual yet this very knowledge allows us to behave as if it were (therefore bringing the
experience into reality), in the case of the implicit, we can know full-well of our implicit
associations yet remain powerless to intervene in situations where these biases are deployed.
Jules Holroyd, “Implicit Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions”, Consciousness and
Cognition 33 (May 1, 2015), 519.

218
explicit rationality. Although debate continues over how this test replicates preconceived and
ideologically embedded notions of implicit thought and behavior, it is gaining ground as
scientific consensus through public-facing initiatives like Harvard University’s Project Implicit
and now virtual embodiment training platforms.
23
Debias VR, for example, focuses on anti-
implicit bias training for teachers and businesses, attempting to intervene at the highly localized
site of individual discriminatory behavior in the classroom and at work. Friends With Holograms
similarly advertises its “soft skills” training for a variety of industries and social spheres. Racial
prejudice in particular, and how it manifests in diverse workplace settings, is used to justify
virtual intervention.
As an anti-social behavior most subjects would openly deny participating in themselves,
racial prejudice has been singled out to exhibit how implicit bias can be addressed by VR
embodiment training. In revealing the biased behavior most people engage in without their
explicit knowledge, the body is viewed as not only revelatory of one’s “true” self but as the locus
for correcting unwanted attitudes. Tabitha Peck and Mel Slater et. al.’s published study, “Putting
Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias”, exemplifies the argument
that VR can train away racism by manipulating the Body Ownership Illusion (figure 4.6).
24
This
study uses (full) embodiment – positional and orientational tracking of not only the head but the
entire body by way of a retro-reflective velcro bodysuit – to contradict the only previous study of

23. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. See also: Jules Holroyd, Robin Scaife, and Tom
Stafford, “What Is Implicit Bias?”, Philosophy Compass 12, no. 10 (2017), 1-18.
24. Tabitha C. Peck, Sofia Seinfeld, Salvatore M. Aglioti, and Mel Slater, “Putting Yourself in
the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias”, Consciousness and Cognition 22, no.
3 (September 1, 2013), 779–87. The title of this study is almost too honest, clearly implying with
the use of “Yourself” that the reader is white, or at least not Black. This portends of an argument
based solely on embodying a Black avatar: I did the training, so I am scientifically not racist;
these police officers can’t be racist, they completed the embodiment training.

219
this nature that in fact correlates VR body swapping and increased racial bias.
25
Its aim is to
reclaim embodiment on behalf of its pro-social potential. To this end, unconscious, “embodied”
actions are treated as more real than conscious ones.
From the outset, the
study supports the view that
racism is a part of human nature
as opposed to an historical
phenomenon. The authors write,
“Hostility towards racial out-
groups in particular seems so
ingrained in human nature that
it is at play even when
interacting with virtual
characters.”
26
This leads the
authors to posit that “racism
might be overcome” by short
circuiting how people encode
race and “placing people into a different ‘coalition’[...]by changing the form of their body
representation.”
27
There is no mention of what role power plays and has played historically in
manifesting inequality. This is because socio-political inequities like sexism and racism
“naturally develop” as a part of human experience, because of “structural” (therefore

25. Peck et. al., 785.
26. Ibid., 779-780.
27. Peck et. al., 780.
Figure 4.6. Image from Peck et. al., “Putting Yourself in the
Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias”.

220
immovable) roots or as an evolutionary byproduct. Therefore they can be best sensed indirectly,
through embodied behaviors that go unnoticed by the conscious mind, and then corrected for
using the same indirect method, that is, virtual embodiment. A study more recent to the time of
this writing indicates that only positive other-body experiences lead to more positive feelings
towards other races, suggesting simply that positive experiences – virtual or otherwise – beget
positive associations.
28
Codifying racism as an individual’s unconsciously held racial prejudices,
the science of VR training purports to “overcome” this social ill by rehashing an old platitude
where material social change follows the correction of the systems of representation.
Jules Holroyd describes implicit bias as among broader “imperfect cognitions” targeted
by empirical cognitive studies and then in turn by proponents of VR training.
29
A basic
understanding of implicit bias are the behavioral factors that cannot be self-reported, amounting
to “a distortion of judgement”.
30
Bias is similarly described as an epistemic failure: “We might
identify bias in the failure to reliably track the truth; in failures of sensitivity to evidence or of
appropriate trust in testimony; failures of epistemic responsibility, or to exercise epistemic
virtues.”
31
For those selling its empirical prowess, VR is the technological, epistemic correction
to the Body of knowledge qua the knowledge of body. “Embodied cognition” extends the body
of knowledge, behaving prosthetically like the HMD, like a second skin, a prosthetic cognition

28. Domna Banakou, Alejandro Beacco, Solène Neyret, Marta Blasco-Oliver, Sofia Seinfeld,
and Mel Slater, “Virtual body ownership and its consequences for implicit racial bias are
dependent on social context”, Royal Society Open Science 7, issue 12 (Dec. 9, 2020), 1-18.
29. Holroyd, “Implicit Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions”, 512.
30. Holroyd, “Implicit Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions”, 512.. This notion runs
counter to most of the “presence” studies that rely on self-reporting in order to define its
parameters; is one’s particular sense of presence an implicit bias? Actually our terms need
rearranging: is implicit bias (or implicity itself, a kind of latent cognitive formation, the
stowaway) a form of embedded presence? Of presence when factoring for milieu?
31. Jules Holroyd, Robin Scaife, and Tom Stafford, “What Is Implicit Bias?”, Philosophy
Compass 12, no. 10 (2017): 8.

221
that makes the body whole again. “At issue in these claims, then, is not some particular aspect of
one’s cognition, nor some observed behavioural effects, but rather some body of knowledge
pertaining to individuals’ general tendencies to manifest implicit biases.”
32
VR legitimizes itself
not only in joining that body of knowledge but by reifying its foundational epistemic claims.
This body of knowledge relates less to notions of systemic “biases” and the individual’s
compelled interaction with social systems often on the global scale, but to the politics of personal
responsibility, tech-solutionism, and moralism.
33
When VR engages with matters of behavioral
training or “implicit bias”, it refers to how completely or incompletely one has internalized its
body of knowledge.
Holroyd finally describes the rhetorical use of “implicit” as a discursive tool used simply
to bring up conversations of exclusion, marginalization and popular complicity in oppressive
networks.
Note that this primarily pragmatic, discursively useful notion of the implicit need not take
a stand on whether there is any distinctive psychological reality underpinning the
responses recorded in indirect measures, that can be distinguished from explicit states or
characterised by a unique set of properties. However, using the notion of implicit for
these pragmatic aims will be hostage to empirical fortune in one sense: it must be true
that it is a helpful way of addressing problems of exclusion and marginalisation and not
a distraction from alternative ways of addressing these problems[...]
34

VR’s faux-empiricism, its scientism as I’ve been calling it, indicates that its capacity to reduce
bias to the point that it purges the body of racism may better be understood as a rhetorical
strategy. Grounded to real-enough facts – a virtual reality if not any other reality – its empiricism
can be used to call attention to and legitimate very real problems. That VR can be used to readily

32. Holroyd, “Implicit Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions”, 514.
33. Rationalists posit that being politically motivated is a form of bias in and of itself, or that
even identifying the political-material embeddedness of tech-solutions represents anti-empirical
bias.
34. Holroyd, Scaife, and Stafford, “What Is Implicit Bias?”, 7 (my emphasis).

222
identify real problems is perhaps the only truly empirical offering of VR training and behavioral
psychology. But it soon poses a distraction when it renders all problems operational, technical,
and sells itself as the solution. How can I better read a blitz defense as the quarterback of a
football team? How will pandemic influence the types and conditions of labor? How can racism
be combatted? All roads conveniently lead back to VR.

The Documentary that Never-Have-Been

In a similar way to how I’ve exemplified The Displaced, Arc/k’s digital Temple of Bel,
Darfur is Dying, the Cyber Banana, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and other products of virtual
documentary, I have not meant to haphazardly conflate VR for enterprise and training – its
material and discursive manifestations – with “documentary” in the traditional, filmic sense of
the term. Nor do I mean to condemn its practices as useless or essentially deleterious. VR
training rather reveals how the mediating claims foundational to documentary become reified in
evolving technological forms, where representing and then simulating the real is a productive
force in its construction. VR bias training is representative of how the claim of “embodiment”
further attempts to define and anchor virtual reality technology to the real, and in doing so it
weaves between the three previous truth claims examined: immersion, presence, and interaction.
These are equally the claims on the real and the forms of (post)mediation that bridge the cinema,
its documentary, and VR. But as we’ve seen, the path to the real bends and curves through
realities unconscious, latent, potential, virtual. The idea of documentary, if not its reality,
extends, in theory and in practice, into VR as a factor of legitimation. In a way the recursive
training platforms of STRIVR help highlight documentary media’s latent scaling, its impossible

223
systems of quantification, of growth, to measure its impact, to harness its Good. It is a form of
virtual documentary, of documentary at its full potential.
Operating in the same way one might use “i-doc”, Peter Wintonick’s “docmedia”
divorces documentary from any one specific practice to instead reference a general set of
mediating principles and truth claims.
35
His “Variant of a Manifesto” intimates a media
ecosystem where “fiction” loses its distinction and really sensed data inform all manner of
narrativization. These technologies of recording and display concomitantly impact the real world
and its political orientation: how global crisis is met, how history is written, how agency is
restored. Docmedia, to put it one way, virtualizes documentary as its own imminent reality. To
this end, if individuals are going to properly engage with the real, or to actualize as subjects, one
must become one’s own documentary. The normalization of recording one’s embodied actions
complicates the individual within the documentary transduction of everyday life . This is
marketed as an empirical project of integration with the other self (the victim other of The
Displaced, the debased other of “implicit bias”). Virtual documentary promises the embodied
and socially bound experience of the outside world, yet now tied to and defined by the virtual
datafication and objectification of its own audiences.
Like docmedia, virtual documentary blurs the distinction between document and
documentary, in part to determine for which mediating systems the status of reality is most at
stake. Although informally applied, this confusion is part of the methodology, to understand VR
documents as mediated and mediating products and to place them in conversation with the
history of documentary mediation. From this vantage point the topography of documentary’s
virtual encounters can be better assessed. As a set of (post)mediating suppositions that people

35. Peter Wintonick, “New Platforms for ‘Docmedia’: ‘Variant of a Manifesto’”, in The
Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 376-382.

224
nonetheless treat “as real”, virtual reality and documentary help determine the boundaries of
reality precisely by claiming to continually break new epistemic ground. Both profess the
infallibility of their “bodies of knowledge” along similar lines of quantification and
potentialization. As Sun-ha Hong says of developing systems of datafication,
The transformation of the everyday into a persistent backdrop of measurements and
nudges promises unprecedented knowledge for the human subject precisely by shifting
accepted norms around what counts as better knowledge. [...] The problem of what we
can and must know is thus brought back from ‘out there’ to the ‘in here’ of the individual
body and life.
36

Having nothing outside of it, nothing excess to its feedback loop, the VR prosthesis guarantees
“[...]a certain epistemic purity: a raw and untampered representation of empirical reality, on
which basis human bodies and social problems might also be cleansed of complexity and
uncertainty."
37
For a recursive system that manufactures its own epistemic purity, only its
failures can point to an outside.
Throughout this dissertation, I have used documentary as a heuristic to analyze virtual
reality as a media concept. Immersion, presence, interaction, and, although less distinct,
embodiment, are containers, signifiers that most broadly and commonly connote post-media,
achievements that overcome the asymptotic confines of mediation. They often are raised in
conjunction with those mediating forms and technologies most insistent on the real.
Documentary is only one of those forms; as a heuristic, it allows many other forms –
ambassadors of the discourses of sobriety – to be put in conversation with one another. For these
discourses, Bill Nichols says, “Power runs through them.”
38
He names “simulations of the real

36. Sun-ha Hong, Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven
Society (New York: NYU Press, 2020): 7.
37. Hong, Technologies of Speculation, 8 (my emphasis).
38. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010),
37.

225
world” trusty tools of the sober disciplines, sober minds.
39
In mis-recognizing documentary and
virtual reality – a kind of intoxication of sober disciplines – my goal is not to derealize the
products of virtual documentary, but rather the opposite, to make them as real as possible. To
place them back in the economy of power that conditions their reality, and in so doing theorize a
virtual documentary that demands a movement from individual implicity to collective
complicity, from mediating potential to media impotential. This requires a framework keenly
attuned to the reality of its failures and abstentions, disavowals and displacements, ruinations and
never-have-beens.
I approached the terms of my chapters as claims not only made of virtual technologies of
capture and display but as claims made specifically on the spectator, on their mode of
consumption. All of these VR claims declare, in some way, this is what makes subjectivity
whole. Immersion promises a complete phase change, an integration characterized by improbable
and impossible subjective experiences of spatial access and trespass. In these experiences, user-
viewers are subject to physical and perceptual extremes – like falling from a great height – in
order to test the fidelity of their worlds. More down-to-earth immersion, as in touring the virtual
real estate of late capital, fulfills the desire to occupy real yet distant and inaccessible spaces,
spaces that are, for one reason or another, more real than my own. And in 360º news
documentaries, a New Virtual Reality, user-viewers are figured as the geographic and moral
center. Liminal spaces marked by crisis, virtual documentary like The Displaced are lent shape
by the history and theory of documentary cinema’s interplay between witness and victim. When
space itself is victimized, virtual documentary not only ensures its reconstitution, but that user-
viewers equally experience newfound presence in that space. The photogrammatics with which

39. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 37.

226
virtual realities are rendered, with which they are written, engage a historical and mediating
practice suffused with imperial nostalgia. As a project of documentation, conservation, and
arc/kiving, the virtualization of Palmyra, Syria, fulfills the spectator’s desire to be at the cosmic
center of knowledge. To interact with this knowledge, then, is to enact it; the virtual interface
conditions the political formations of its user-viewers through computerized gesture. The very
potential of the documentary lies in its unmade possibilities, in the potential realities generated
by an interactive subject.
In addition to being a convenient moniker, virtual documentary is intended to be a
method, a messy and deconstructive provocation of established and budding considerations of
both documentary and virtual reality. This was originally a project about ethics, but I soon
realized this word had been tainted, co-opted by its narrow application in both documentary and
virtual reality discourses. I learned through its iterative and repetitious history that VR was in
desperate need of politicization, and documentary too, for they had both long outgrown
saccharine portrayals as (potentially) emancipatory. Virtual documentary reveals the formal
properties and political assumptions constitutive of contemporary nonfictions, which is equally
the source and driving force behind their legitimation. VR is not the solution to social problems.
Full stop. Additionally, documentary is not the solution to social problems. They do, however,
have other qualities, other effects real and imagined. We must embrace its impotentials, its
failures, if we are going to continue to develop critical practices of reading, interpreting, and
creating documentary in the age of virtual reality.

227
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Asset Metadata

Creator Bohrod, Jacob Bushnell (author)

Core Title Virtual documentary: the virtual real and its rhetorical legitimations

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 04/05/2021

Defense Date 03/09/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag documentary,embodiment,i-doc,immersion,immersive design,interaction,interactive design,new media,nonfiction media,OAI-PMH Harvest,photogrammetry,post-media,presence,virtual reality

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira (committee chair), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email bohrod@usc.edu,jacob.bohrod@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-436774

Unique identifier UC11666542

Identifier etd-BohrodJaco-9402.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-436774 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BohrodJaco-9402.pdf

Dmrecord 436774

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Bohrod, Jacob Bushnell

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA