Passive Instruments of Activity

Curator’s Note

The lack of congruence between the presentation of VR and the reality, such as “participating” in activities that we have little control over in VR but would have control over in real life, shatters our sense of agency and limits our potential experience of immediacy. My thesis is established with the use of relevant sources in the first few minutes of my video essay. It is further supported by its more experimental turn: it is or seems interactive, but it does not matter in the end whether the viewer interacts with it. Throughout the video, there are questions for the viewer that direct their thoughts onto themselves, a reflexive technique. These contribute to the limited agency argument. There is also a PSA of sorts towards the end when I explore the ethical issues with Facebook’s expansion of their social media model into the virtual realm, an especially relevant and recent topic in the “real” world.

During the research phase, I found the literature on immediacy and its relation to agency/embodiment to be surprisingly sparse. While it was a challenge, it also almost felt like a scavenger hunt, as many of my sources are not in film/film theory journals but rather in the database for Theatre and Performing Arts, for example. The greatest challenges I encountered during my production process was working with the 360 footage on Premiere Pro (the editing software). I was still relatively unfamiliar with Premiere Pro, so venturing into even more unfamiliar territory with VR editing was frustratingly difficult.  However, I believe I was successful in finding a way to make it work in the end, to which hopefully my video essay is a testament. This experience revealed to me the extent to which we live in a virtual world, the next step being virtual reality.