How to Make Immersive Technologies More Equitable: Confronting the Medium’s Colonial Legacies and Role as an Empathy Machine.

Presenter: Anna Gedal
Registration Number: 062
Institution: The New School, New York, USA
Abstract: Today, immersive technologies—like virtual reality—are celebrated as empathy machines, capable of fostering meaningful cross-cultural understanding. My MA thesis project interrogates this assumption. I analyze two early 20th-century case studies of immersive rides: A Trip to the Moon (1901), from the 1901 Buffalo World’s Fair, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1903), from Coney Island’s Luna Park. The rides complemented the ethnographic villages surrounding them. The villages allowed visitors to experience a speculative past and present. Taking on the role of anthropologists, they plotted a global racial hierarchy. The immersive rides, however, offered them a glimpse of the electrified future promised by American imperialism. Through the rides, the visitors embodied the role of colonizer, “discovering” new frontiers. Though perhaps experienced simply as entertainment, the rides were consciously designed as a powerful pedagogical and epistemological tool for cultural knowledge sharing that transmitted the imperial imaginary through a collective, multi-mediated performance. The impact was profound, garnering mass public support for American racial segregation, immigration restrictions, and imperialism. Drawing lessons from my case studies, I argue that the early rides were precursors to 21st-century immersive environments, thus it is imperative to critique the medium or risk reinscribing the imperial gaze into contemporary experiences. And the examples of this are endless. This project centers on the pressing need to reconnect immersive tech to its historical context to more fully understand both the medium’s possibilities and limitations. To move toward this goal, I offer fellow cultural producers, curators, strategists, technologists, and designers the beginnings of a shared language to highlight the medium’s fraught legacies and a path toward a more equitable cultural production process.

Bio: Anna Gedal (she/her) is a graduating MA student in Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her MA thesis “How to Make Immersive Technology More Equitable” centers on two historical case studies of early 20th-century immersive, interactive rides, which she argues were designed as embodied colonial travel fantasies. She then brings the story into the present and current iterations of the medium, identifying the manifestations of its inherited legacy in contemporary experiences. She ends with terminology to identify these manifestations and a set of questions pushing toward a more equitable design process. Her goal is to both confront the medium’s risks and explore its possibilities as a space for community healing, historical justice, and memory preservation. Her thesis won the Media Studies Distinguished Thesis Award. Anna is also a senior experience strategist, writer, and researcher. She creates immersive media experiences for museums and brands across the U.S. Her approach is story-driven, community-centered, and aesthetically informed. Her professional background in historical research, writing, journalism, and communications along with her MA in media production, theory, and the ethics of technology all enrich her creative process.

Enactive Experience for Streaming Media Services.

Presenters: Mariana Ciancia and Giulio Interlandi
Registration Number: 029
Institution: Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Abstract: Since the beginning of humankind, storytelling was the way used by people to understand and shape reality. Storytelling has been acting as a mythopoetic engine and nowadays the power of stories is amplified by technological and digital developments. The "narrative paradigm" depicted by Fisher (1984) encounters the "ubiquitous computing" dimension (Weiser, 1999): the result is the interdisciplinary field of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). Starting from the first text-based experimentation of the late 1970s, IDN can be considered a vibrant field, from which different forms of interactive artifacts such as Hypertext Fiction, Interactive Installations, Video Game Narrative (Koenitz et al., 2017), and Enactive Cinema (Tikka et al., 2008) are derived. IDN has been a field of inquiry for more than three decades, but the question remains: is it supposed to be pure entertainment or something more? This paper aims at exploring the possibility of applying the enactive paradigm for designing a tailored experience in using streaming media services. In doing so, we will apply a Research Through Design approach: specifically processes and tools coming from the User Experience Design discipline, using data as raw material for designing meaningful and relevant experiences. Grounding on the research thesis on interactive streaming experiences (Varisco & Interlandi, 2020) conducted at the School of Design (Politecnico di Milano), this work wants to push further the exploration on how the enactive paradigm can be applied, using eye-tracking and emotion-analysis technologies as input for enabling enactivity. Starting from data gathered during the research thesis, it is possible to hypothesize their use beyond the interactive cinematic experience, and towards the design of a tailored media streaming experience. Emotion recognition (through facial expression analysis), and eye-tracking could enable platforms to gather real time data that can impact the user’s watching experience: emotional state, attention, gaze, and environment (presence of other users). The following are relevant questions that are addressed during the paper: what are the possibilities in terms of technologies and data that would enable an implementation of the enactive paradigm? How can this paradigm be applied to streaming platforms and smart TVs, considering the technological possibilities, as well as the user experience? Finally, considering the way in which COVID-19 pandemic impacted our media habits and media environments, what could be the real added values and possible criticalities in applying this technological and interactive paradigm within this existing system? The result will be the proposal of a conceptual and methodological framework for the design of a tailored streaming media service experience to be prototype and tested in a following research.

Bio: Mariana Ciancia
Mariana Ciancia, PhD, Researcher at Design Department, School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. She is a member of Imagis Lab research Lab and Deputy director of the Specializing Master in Brand Communication. Her research deals with new media and participatory culture, with the aim of understanding how multichannel phenomena (crossmedia and transmedia) are changing the processes of production, distribution and consumption of narrative environments. National and international publications include books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference proceedings on transmedia phenomenon, communication strategies, narrative formats (interactive narratives), and audiovisual artefacts.

Bio: Giulio Interlandi
Interaction designer in love with arts, focused on creative and design thinking. Interested in research and prototype for the interaction, passionate with the enactive approach, synesthetic experience, and body language. After a Bachelor’s Degree in Technological Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania and a Master’s Degree in Digital & Interaction Design from Politecnico di Milano, he co-founded the design collective the Bench. He is also a teacher assistant in the “Digital Art” and “Interactive Transmedia Narratives for New Media” courses at Politecnico di Milano. His research is currently focused on the unconscious and enactive interaction in the multimedia experience.

"Walk in your own shoes!" Dismantling the Promise of VR Non-Fiction and Fathoming the Potential of Dis-immersion as Critical Intervention.

Presenter: Anna Wiehl
Registration Number: 060
Institution: University of Bayreuth, Germany
Abstract: This presentation focuses on "new narratives" dealing with the global issue of migration, which, however, stands only as a paradigm of other forms of systemic injustice and discrimination. Taking paradigmatic projects—among others Clouds over Sidra (2015) and This Room (2017)—I will set off to look behind the promise of interactive, immersive narratives to let users “walk in someone else’s shoes.”
I will explore in how far the specific affordances through which the documentary experience is enabled affect the engagement with content and the potential transformative impact the producers are aiming at. Are we dealing with an exploitive gaze, a form of narcissistic spectatorship, are we drawn into a “human rights spectacle,” or do new forms of narrative enable response-able witnessing? And which role do empathy, immersion, presence, and co-presence play in this context?
The theoretical framework of the contribution brings together
- recent theories of VR non-fiction (among others Rose 2018; 2019, Nash 2018, Sutherland 2015, Bailenson 2018) which draw on the tradition of documentary theory and approaches to interactive storytelling,
- findings in neurosciences and social psychology (e.g. Bertrand et al. 2018, Schutte & Stilinović 2017, Farmer 2019), especially as to concepts of immersion, empathy and presence in VR environments,
- and sets them into relation with media-ethical considerations coming from critical theory and critical whiteness studies. The background of the presentation is the early hype around VR non-fiction as "the ultimate empathy machine" (Milk 2015). As such, it was only consistent that NGOs embrace the technology to raise awareness for their causes. However, more recent discourses question the power of VR to achieve social change—not only as the depiction of marginalized groups remains stuck in stereotypes, but especially as the regimes of gaze are accompanied by moral risks—mainly “improper distance” (Nash 2018). Through the uncritical transportation of the “I”/“eye” of the spectator, VR brings forth problematic socio-cultural, socio-political as well as media-ethical constellations: first of all, it runs the risk of dehistoricizing and depoliticizing complex issues, such as migration and race issues; also, the regimes of gaze realized in many configurations potentially reinscribing hegemonic, colonial points-of-view; foremost, however, uncritical exploitation of the affordances of VR invites the spectators to impose their truth over the actual experiences of “others,” colonizing their feelings.
These challenges in view, I suggest a form of critical estrangement and to the opportunity of new narratives to induce not primarily immersion but to oscillate between immersion and dis-immersion, blurring documentary factuality and artistic fictionality, arguing that the potential of new narratives does not consist in its amplification of visual illusion and immediate affective response but rather in its ability to model a different concept of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity altogether, questioning established regimes of gaze and perspective on the “self” in relation to others.

Bio: Anna Wiehl has been a research fellow with i-docs at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, Bristol, UK and a lecturer and research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on digital media cultures, documentary practices and interactive storytelling. Apart from her academic career, she has worked among others for the transmedia broadcasters ARTE and Bayerischer Rundfunk. From 2017 to 2019, Anna directed a research project on interactive documentary and finished her habilitation project The “New” Documentary Nexus. Networked|Networking in interactive assemblages. Currently, she is leading a BMBF research network on The Documentary and the Digital.