Diffracting Virtual Realities

Abstract

Diffracting Virtual Realities: Towards an anti-theatre of VR offers a short manifesto for a diffracted, critical virtuality and for wider technological and related pedagogic practices, ones which eschew over determination and simplistic empathy rhetoric. The paper, or rather, manifesto, proposes, instead, a deliberately artificial VR, with a purposeful strategy of diffractive observation and commentary. The manifesto analyses a range of theoretical and critical approaches, evidencing their foundation in a power struggle between deterministic ontologies and what Barad frames as Agential Realism (Barad 2017). Agential Realism emerges from the entanglement and contingency of human and non-human relata, from objects and subjects and their performative co-relations, as explained in this manifesto. The manifesto aligns itself with Brecht's critique of empathy, and with a broader critique of humanist individualism. Diffracting Virtual Realities is positioned against the valorisation of individual, psychological representation, and instead argues for structural methods, conducive to systemic change. The manifesto is indebted to Stephen Unwin's book The Complete Brecht Toolkit (2014), from which many pragmatic and theoretical insights have supported the teaching of virtual reality, storytelling and performance against prevailing constructs of individual immersion and empathy.