In this sense, the doll-like VR Nayeon does not come across so much as a perversion of a technophobic nightmare (e.g., like the eerily realistic android in Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back”) but more like an artistic tribute. In Meeting You, the storytelling aspect of VR is strong. There is also research that supports the idea that storytelling can offset VR motion sickness and also that VR helps relieve pain during childbirth, suggesting that virtual reality can act as both a receptacle for stories and as a storytelling tool in and of itself. VR has been used to help treat soldiers with PTSD. What Sam Bankman-Fried’s Defense Said in Its Final Chance to Save HimĪ Medical Student in Gaza Tells Us What She’s Seeing Prosecutors Finally Grilled Sam Bankman-Fried. I Am So Sick of “Depressed but Make It Hot” Merch Rather, we tried to focus on the positive memories,” said Kim. But within these self-imposed guidelines we did avoid going in a direction that would force the mother to relive her trauma. We stuck to our original focus of helping Jang Ji-sung’s wish to see her daughter again come true. We did not try to analyze or heal anyone at any point. “We were careful to focus on their goals as much as possible. They proceeded with the understanding that the experience would be a unique, momentous event, preparing to the best of their ability through long interviews with Jang and her family. To prepare Jang Ji-sung for the potentially traumatic physical and mental effects of the VR experience, Kim explained that the producers met with the family therapist. But given the unprecedented and simultaneously public nature of this VR experience, there were a lot of unknowns about how the experience might affect Nayeon’s parents and siblings. The family was selected because it had demonstrated a clear desire for this VR reunification. Jong-woo Kim did not see the issue of consent or representation as unique to his project: “Many of the images we see online are probably there without consent,” said Kim, adding that he considered the family had given consent by proxy. In this particular instance, the postmortem, three-dimensional representation of a child unable to give consent leads to questions about the ethical ambiguities of resurrecting a person as an avatar after they have died, or the ambiguities surrounding the collection and processing of the personal data needed to re-create a person as VR persona. But despite the uplifting ending, a nonfiction project like Meeting You presents certain ethical considerations, which don’t quite have the same weight in fictional speculative exercises like Upload. “Nayeon’s mother has told us that she thinks of the production and the VR experience as a ‘wonderful dream,’ ” said Kim. The documentary depicts these manipulations as a success, and the family as happy. These production details suggest less an independently realistic VR creation-a clone capable of rebelling, in the way of the common science fiction trope-than one whose significance is based on the narrative history of the family, and subject to the manipulation of the documentary producers. This is particularly pronounced when the reality being reproduced is an avatar of a real person, and more so when the person reproduced is a deceased beloved, much in the way that a Zoom funeral feels more like a travesty while a Zoom job interview is just mildly annoying and sometimes even more convenient, depending on the circumstances. But as film scholar Tom Gunning writes, in the 19 th century, inventions such as the photograph and motion picture “were all greeted as technological responses to the ultimate limit to human life, mortality.” They “claimed to preserve human traits (expression, movement, voice) after the subject had died” and were promoted as “an objective form of memory” and “man’s triumph over death.”īut it is difficult to square our present-day appreciation of cinema as an art form with our suspicion of virtual reality and its frequently uncanny reproductions. VR technology is still too young (or, at least, too undeveloped) for it to have developed an independent grammar as an art form.
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