VR cinema

This introduction to the monographic section on "VR Storytelling" aims to outline some of the principal transformations that VR is imparting to audiovisual language and experience, with a particular focus on the impact of these innovations on storytelling. The essays of the section span a variety of theoretical approaches and backgrounds, argumentative styles and case studies (e.g. documentaries, games, art), but all of them share a similar rhetorical attitude: underscoring the potential and novelty of VR but, at the same time, identifying a series of remediations and limitations. In particular, they will show that most of the contemporary discourses on VR need to be reframed critically in order to reflect more objectively on complex notions and dynamics such as screen, interactivity, immersion, presence, embodiment, illusion and empathy.

This book takes its start from a series of attempts to use Caravaggio’s works for contemporary humanitarian communications. How did his "Sleeping Cupid" (1608) end up on the island of Lampedusa, at the heart of the Mediterranean migrant crisis? And why was his painting "The Seven Works of Mercy" (1607) requested for display at a number of humanitarian public events? After critical reflection on these significant transfers of Caravaggio’s work, Francesco Zucconi takes Baroque art as a point of departure to guide readers through some of the most haunting and compelling images of our time. Each chapter analyzes a different form of media and explores a problem that ties together art history and humanitarian communications: from Caravaggio’s attempt to represent life itself as a subject of painting to the way bodies and emotions are presented in NGO campaigns. What emerges from this probing inquiry at the intersection of art theory, media studies and political philosophy is an original critical path in humanitarian visual culture.

Along with the technological advancements in virtual reality (VR) headset technology in the past three years, a new form of cinematic experience emerged – virtual reality cinema. This new form of filmic experience provides a significant departure from the collective spectatorship that pertains to two-dimensional (2D) cinema. VR films offer a 360-degree image when experienced through a virtual reality headset and abolishes the distance between spectator and frame. At the same time, this allows for a spectator virtual presence within the narrative, which in turn implies that the film is designed as an individual experience where a virtual actor and spectator is found at the center of the story, not as a collective one for cinema theatres which is the case for 2D films. There are indeed three possible experiences that a spectator can have in a VR film or three spectatorship modes: the hero – where the spectator is the one that is at the center of everything and retains his/her identity, the witness – where the presence of the spectator is ignored by the characters and the impersonator – where the spectator point of view is assimilated with a character in the film and the character’s identity is forced upon the spectator. Furthermore, we witness an expansion of the cinematic frame and a release from its „dictatorship” as film director Alejandro González Iñárritu described it when presenting his Oscar winning virtual reality film Carne y Arena (2017), which features the stories of South American immigrants crossing the US border and the abuses they encounter along the way. In this article I will explore the frictions between the individualistic filmic experience that VR film proposes as opposed to the 2D collective filmic experience in order to understand the aesthetics of cinematic virtual reality. In this sense, I will analyze four virtual reality films namely Dear Angelica (Saschka Unseld, 2017) for the witness perspective, I, Philip (Pierre Zandrowicz, 2016) for the impersonator perspective and IT: FLOAT (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017) along with Annabelle: Creation (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017) for the hero perspective.

Many agree that the best-known image related to virtual reality (VR) experiences is the head mounted display (HMD). While the history of headset-mediated virtual reality dates back to the sixties with Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles trials, the past two years have seen the release of impressive high definition image rendering HMDs that have also prompted the production of various VR experiences such as movies, games, therapeutic content, documen-taries and even simple interactive movies just to name a few. The cinematic films had no prior precedent for this medium. Can we truly name VR films cinematic? What can we say about the difference between 360-degree fictional movies and  VR  computer-generated  ones?  What  can we say about these new categories of techno-logically-mediated fiction and their spectators? How are they different from the two-dimension-al spectator experience? These are legitimate questions that I will address in my paper

In cognitive psychology, immersive experiences depend on a series of “illusions” – presence, body ownership, and self-identification. Relying on these notions, the article discusses some phenomenological aspects of two forms of Virtual Reality experience – the VR cinema and the VR game – and two respective forms of “incorporation” of the spectator/user in the virtual environment. Self-representation in virtual worlds, in fact, deals not only with the inscription of the avatar in the visual field, but also with the agent’s proprioception and the sensorimotor feedbacks provided by the technological system. Whereas in the VR cinematic experience a conflict between the transparency of the agent’s body and his/her proprioceptive opacity arises, in the VR gaming immersive experience both the avatar partial visibility and the sensorimotor feedback offer a bodily ground to the players’ agency and, consequently, an effective embodied engagement.

How can the wearing of a virtual reality headset in the comfort of one’s own home be seen as having any ethical or political value in relation to catastrophic events overwhelming entire populations in different parts of the globe? To what extent do such devices have the capacity to facilitate spectators in developing a “witnessing gaze”? This article focuses on United Nations projects in virtual reality cinema that promise to enhance the spectator experience, thereby raising awareness of humanitarian operations. By proceeding along a “preposterous”, anachronistic, path a comparison is drawn between the compositional and experiential characteristics of virtual reality cinema and the tradition of “candlelit painting” which was introduced by Caravaggio and further developed by the so-called Caravaggisti in the seventeenth century. In developing this cross-analysis, a few answers are suggested to the main questions regarding the viewer experience of humanitarian-themed virtual reality cinema.

Multimedia VR installation “Carne y Arena” by A.G. Iñarritu surely marks an important step in the history of media production and experience, elevating the potentiality of the creative encounter between technology and imagination, and magisterially using the expressive medium of VR to communicate on a political level. More than ever before, we need empathy and all of the media that can create it in order to illuminate our consciousness in regards to the drama of migration. But while the social legitimacy and ethical necessity of this process is beyond question, we might debate the rhetoric of immersive illusion that surrounds the VR apparatus, casting it as the evolution of the cinematic apparatus and as one for which empathy is both the means and the end.