Journal of Visual Culture最新文献

{"title":"Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR","authors":"Brooke Belisle","doi":"10.1177/1470412920909990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920909990","url":null,"abstract":"Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If ‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today? What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once?","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"112 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920909990","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48300665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review: Brian Massumi, Architectures of the Unforeseen: Essays on the Occurrent Arts","authors":"Sean Anderson","doi":"10.1177/1470412920904642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920904642","url":null,"abstract":"Perhaps it is best to dispense with a few necessary admissions. Selfimplicating, yes; a desire for the reader to temper their expectations, maybe. ‘Why is he writing this?’, you might ask (see one response below) deploying a concatenation of language(s) that are both inside and outside at the same time. Indeed. So much has yet to be written on the enmeshment of interiorities to be formulated within architecture. Yet within this call and response to an elegant densification of meanings in and around a collection of essays, of perambulations among spaces close and proscriptive, virtual and haptic, we find one who started thinking about this volume from the back to the front, a kind of delinquent recto–verso that has since become one intriguing mode by which to regard Brian Massumi’s challenging collection of essays, Architectures of the Unforeseen.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"137 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920904642","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44822281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy","authors":"Lisa Nakamura","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259","url":null,"abstract":"Virtual reality (VR)’s newly virtuous identity as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ arrives during an overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobic moment in the US and abroad. Its rise also overlaps with the digital industries’ attempts to defend themselves against increasingly vocal critique. VR’s new identity as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology that engineers the right kind of feeling has emerged to counter and manage the image of the digital industries as unfeeling and rapacious. In this article, the author engages with VR titles created by white and European producers that represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris. She argues that the invasion of personal and private space that documentary VR titles ‘for good’ create is a spurious or ‘toxic empathy’ that enables white viewers to feel that they have experienced authentic empathy for these others, and this digitally mediated compassion is problematically represented in multiple media texts as itself a form of political activism.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"47 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46297775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Guest Editors’ Introduction: Virtual reality: immersion and empathy","authors":"Brooke Belisle, Paul Roquet","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906258","url":null,"abstract":"Many of us are ‘over’ virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation. To sustain itself, the enthusiasm that it sparks about what could be over the next technological horizon sometimes rebounds, instead, toward the past to rediscover historical precursors. Witness, for example, the unlikely resuscitation of the Viewmaster in 2015, using a smartphone as a very expensive, moving-image stereoscope.1 As popular interest waxes and wanes, VR seems to have always been around and to be always emerging, but never to have completely arrived.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"10 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906258","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42648467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence","authors":"G. Bollmer, K. Guinness","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906261","url":null,"abstract":"Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) is a brief virtual reality (VR) piece that depicts the artist beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Wolfson uses the haptic possibilities of VR to rapidly induce nausea in the viewer, an act that both relies on empathetic aspects of VR simulation – ‘empathy’ here linked with its history in German aesthetic psychology as Einfühlung – and is a confrontational distancing that questions the politics of ‘empathetic’ immersion. Real Violence demonstrates how contemporary judgments of VR and empathy repeat debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reinventing and emptying particular political/aesthetic strategies that have long characterized a strain of modernist art that uses the formal possibilities (and limits) of media in order to critique the very same possibilities (and limits). This article, through its discussion of Wolfson’s work, seeks to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today. It examines the limitations of immersion and emotional projection, along with the limitations of interpreting this work (and VR in general) as a means for enacting ‘progressive’ social and ideological change through the immersive, empathetic capacities of media. The article concludes by arguing that judgments of Real Violence (and the politics of ‘transgressive’ art more broadly) require assuming the will or intent of an artist who uses confrontation and transgression to ‘correct’ the experience of the viewer, which is something that cannot be assumed for either Wolfson or Real Violence, and rather his work is exemplary of emptying out the possibilities represented by both VR and critical aesthetic intervention.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"28 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906261","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47766215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review: Elisabeth von Samsonow, Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl","authors":"L. McBride","doi":"10.1177/1470412920904654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920904654","url":null,"abstract":"Self-released on cassette and distributed through underground punk DIY networks in 1991, Bikini Kill’s Revolution Girl Style Now ignited the countercultural Riot Grrrl movement in the United States by giving voice to the anger and resentment felt by young, working-class, disenfranchised women in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The power of the movement was situated in the figure of the youthful girl positioned as the site of protest and revolution against patriarchal structures of oppression. It coalesced in the enunciation of ‘Girl Power’ – before its reductive appropriation by the Spice Girls – as a slogan and formulation of feminist identity. In the intervening decades, the figure of the girl and her accompanying ‘girlhood’ has become part of the symbolic order of feminist discourse. She operates at moments as a temporal disrupter of current states of being (Freeman, 2000), as a cynical figure through which to critique notions of empire, capitalism and gender (Tiqqun, 2012), or as a recapitulation toward heteronormative structures through the co-opting of ‘Girl Power’ in popular culture in the late 1990s (McRobbie, 2009). In the social sciences, the proliferation of ‘girlhood studies’ since the early 2000s emphasizes the psychological and social development of girls across varying cultural, religious and geographic backgrounds. The figure of the girl in these discourses becomes either a literalization of the lived experience of young women or an empty signifier to be used. Thus the ‘girl’ is never fully realized or theorized as more than a symbolic tool; or rather, as an empty vessel to be filled with meaning from the outside. She is always becoming something else, even within the social sciences, where the emphasis is on her growth or change. It is this notion of the girl as becoming-woman (via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) that opens Elisabeth von Samsonow’s discussions of the figure of the girl in Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl as a fully theorized being, whose symbolic capital is not predicated on her ability to stand in as a signifier, but rather as a figure whose full realization is crystallized through the formulation of ‘Anti-Electra’ as an ‘outline of a future world’ through her relationship with the pre-Oedipal, the animal, and the technological (p. xvi).","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"145 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920904654","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41505141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR","authors":"Paul Roquet","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906260","url":null,"abstract":"This article rethinks the notion of virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy machine’ by examining how VR directs emotional identification not toward the subjects of particular VR titles, but toward VR developers themselves. Tracing how both positive and negative empathy circulates around characters in one of the most influential VR fictions of the 2010s, the light novel series-turned-anime series Sword Art Online (2009–), as well as the real-life figure of Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset that launched the most recent VR revival, the author shows how empathetic identification ultimately tends to target the VR game master, the head architect of the VR world. These figures often already inhabit a socially privileged position. A better understanding of how VR channels empathy towards VR creators points to the need to ensure a broader range of people have opportunities to take up the role of VR game master for themselves.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"65 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906260","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48782268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Erratum","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/1470412920903578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920903578","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"155 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920903578","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41881212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The aesthetics of reality media","authors":"M. Engberg, J. Bolter","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906264","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the authors examine the aesthetics of immersion in two emerging media forms: 360° video and 3D VR. Their goal is to move beyond addressing technical affordances, to consider the techniques and choices that producers of 360° video and 3D VR are making to exploit these affordances, and what resulting effects those viewing experiences have. They discuss the tension between transparency and reflectivity in two contrasting examples, in particular: the Danish company Makropol’s Anthropia (2017) and Arora and Unseld’s The Day the World Changed (2018). The authors argue that technical affordances are part of a complex process of mediation that includes both experimentation with the technology at hand and a reliance on earlier media forms. It is critical, they argue, to understand the creative tension between established forms and new ones that underscore new aesthetic and narrative experiences in VR and 360° formats.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"81 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906264","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48764541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Developing the ‘best practices’ of virtual reality design: industry standards at the frontier of emerging media","authors":"M. Larocco","doi":"10.1177/1470412920906255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906255","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the author analyzes the ways in which the practices of virtual reality design are being standardized, focusing specifically on the Oculus Best Practices Guide (OBPG). Instructional writings like the OBPG are fruitful documents from which theories of practice can be extracted and, for companies like Oculus, they serve as alternative mission statements, articulating what Oculus wants and needs the standards and practices of its nascent product-medium to be. The author argues that the OBPG serves to create standards and practices that emphasize and maintain virtual reality (VR) user immersion in order to mitigate the weaknesses in the technology and better conform with VR’s idealized, hypothetical presentation in fiction and marketing rhetoric. The Guide plays a key role in Oculus’s larger attempts to mitigate market risk through the standardization of content across its distribution platforms in order to shape an inchoate technological object into a stable and lucrative entertainment medium. More broadly, the OBPG serves as an example of the specific ways in which market forces act on the development of new media practices, turning ‘standards’ into ‘industry standards’.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"111 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1470412920906255","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45393765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}