Introduction Eszter Zimanyi (bio) and Emma Ben Ayoun (bio) Since the mid-2010s, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and artists have increasingly been turning to virtual reality (VR) and immersive filmmaking for its ostensibly unprecedented ability to conjure empathic feelings that lead to humanitarian action.1 Technology companies and charitable institutions alike have touted immersive storytelling's "potential for good"; prominent examples include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees virtual reality program, UNICEF's Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality for Good initiative, and Oculus's VR for Good project.2 These initiatives emphasize the power of immersive media in a variety of instructive contexts, including medical training and diagnostics, physical and psychological therapy, interactive historical education modules, and philanthropic fundraising for humanitarian causes.3 Scholars including Kate Nash, Mandy Rose, and Sasha Crawford-Holland have attended to the possibilities and pitfalls of experiments in immersive media within the context of documentary filmmaking; however, these analyses [End Page 154] primarily focus on immersive media's visual components.4 In the context of VR filmmaking, scholars such as Adam Daniel, Sarah Jones, and Steve Dawkins have drawn attention to the spectator's ability to enact a sovereign gaze within 360-degree spherical images, leaving other bodily sensations un(der)accounted for.5 Although immersive nonfiction media depends in part on the believability of virtual environments, the fantasies at play in immersive media—which attempt to make viewers feel that they have participated in something real—are not only about creating convincing ocular illusions. They are also about generating persuasive haptic sensations and legible bodily responses from viewers. As such, the embodied experience of engaging with and navigating these environments demands sustained attention from media scholars studying immersive nonfiction. This is especially pertinent within the context of humanitarian media, which aims to inspire direct action from viewers and to foment wide-scale social change. What political and ethical concerns arise when rendering humanitarian crises not merely visible but also tangible for public consumption?6 In recent years, industry specialists, journalists, and early adopters of VR have heralded VR filmmaking as an unparalleled breakthrough in narrative storytelling, overshadowing an important element of its lineage: nonfiction media's long history of experimentation with interactivity and immersion.7 In the context of traditional cinema spectatorship, immersion has traditionally been defined as the loss of one's self to the narrative; however, Alison Griffiths defines immersion as "the sensation of entering a [End Page 155] space that immediately identifies itself as somehow separate from the world and that eschews conventional modes of spectatorship in favor of a more bodily participation in the experience."8 Following Griffiths's attention to bodily participation, we conceptualize nonfiction, humanitarian immersive media as media that makes a documentary claim to the real while seeking to directly mobilize spectators' bodies through the use of interactive and engrossing tactics.9 Throughout this introduction, we consciously engage the language used in promotional materials and interviews by the creators of many of these works—language that is often steeped in histories of exclusion and a very abstracted, and limited, understanding of VR's typical viewer. The fact that the majority of VR exhibition takes place in broadly inaccessible spaces—such as museums and festivals—means that the audiences who get to experience these works are imagined to be not only able-bodied but also correspondingly privileged in their modes of access to new technologies and artistic works. We define humanitarian media broadly to include projects engaged with both human and environmental concerns; likewise, our conception of nonfiction media includes contemporary digital projects that use personal testimonies and statistical data to ground their virtual representations of real-world characters and locations. Through this framework, our dossier re-centers and historicizes embodiment across maps, gallery installations, interactive web-based projects, and contemporary VR filmmaking in order to ask how immersive nonfiction media engage, discipline, destabilize, and erase the spectatorial body. What types of humanitarian responses can nonfiction media provoke when viewers are tasked with mastering (virtual) spaces through a mastery of their own bodies? The ethical implications of immersive nonfiction media, particularly virtual reality, have received a great deal of attention in recent years, both within media studies and beyond...
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Jun 30, 2024
Sun Ha Goo 
Open Access