Questions from Wednesday’s Class / Stanford Study on VR and Empathy
Hello Everyone,
I think most of my points were covered in the discussion, but here are questions from Wednesday. Also, below is an interesting article about a Stanford study on VR and empathy.
1. In Chapter Five (pg. 138), Lukas describes immersive spaces as evoking the emotions of immersion, which are essentially qualities of awe, the sense of the epic, a sense of completeness, and feelings of imagination. One might initially believe that by illuminating these qualities, Lukas will also evoke a description of the sublime (at least in a Kantian sense), but seems to stop short of discussing experiences that may be overwhelming and/or terrifying in nature. If this is true, is only eliciting such tempered emotive states stunting participants from a truly memorable experience? This is rather subjective from person-to-person, but I found myself questioning how engaged such described experiences were.
2. I found the concept of Sleep No More quite fascinating, notably due to its abandonment of language. To some extent, this reminded me somewhat of John Cage’s 4’33, which was essentially articulated to be four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but in reality, the point was to drawn attend to the impossibility of silence and illuminate the vast array of ambient sound in a given location. Given that Sleep No More removes the linguistic element so fundamental to theatrical performance, do we gain similar insights that would be missed in a traditional setting?
3. The success of Sleep No More also led to other related productions, notably one that took place in China in 2016. In both instances, the production was able to make use of large, aesthetically memorable spaces to carry out the performances. If we were to transplant such a performance in a smaller and/or less ‘spectactular’ space, would the performative aspect still work? If so, how important is the space/venue to an experience such as this one?
4. I found Domination Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination interesting, and it reminded me of an article I recently read by Benjamin Singer, titled From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-Normative Images, which explored ways to challenge systematic methods of gender binary-based discrimination through educating with a rhizomatic array of vastly diverse images. Such initiatives hold great promise in my opinion, but can they somehow be utilized to reach a mass audience?
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/17/virtual-reality-can-help-make-people-empathetic/