Fractured and fragmented selves: Queer approaches to designing virtual experiences1,2 | Intellect Skip to content
1981
  1. Home
  2. A-Z Publications
  3. Virtual Creativity
  4. Volume 13, Issue 1
  5. Article
Volume 13, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2397-9704
  • E-ISSN: 2397-9712

Abstract

This article presents an overview of three queer virtual reality projects, (2016), (2017) and (2020). These are considered alongside other examples and design experiments by the authors that also take a critical, queer approach to representing bodily forms in virtual environments. This consideration includes looking at how bodies are represented in the environment that the participant explores, as well as the embodied experience of the participant visiting the environment either via a head-mounted display or via desktop. Through the discussion of queerly performed embodiment offered by these precedents, we propose a queer sensibility of disembodied presentness for virtual reality that embraces a position of immersion and presentness in multiple physical and virtual realities at once, as a theoretical and aesthetic grounding principle. Queering of presentness is a key concept that emerges through these works, in part due to the multiplicity of perspectives that VR affords. In (2016) by Alison Bennett, Megan Beckwith and Mark Payne, we see the use of photogrammetry and glitch aesthetics to bring ideas of queer performativity and drag ‘realness’ to the fore when imaging bodies with permeable, porous boundaries in virtual reality. In (2017) by Jacolby Satterwhite, the virtual environment is populated with multiple avatars that repeat recordings of the artist’s dance performances; in this multiplicity of repeated traces, a viewer is unable to settle on a fixed representation of the artist’s self. This effect is amplified by the participant’s non-corporeal presence, demonstrating the creative potential of queer disorientation in virtual environments. In (2020) by Tarik Ahlip and Tactical Space Lab, we are immersed in a cinematic environment, filled with simulated light. There, we encounter the artist’s body, disembodied and forcing the viewer into the role of virtual voyeur and onlooker to actions out of time.

© 2023 Intellect Ltd
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/vcr_00072_1
2024-03-22
2024-04-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Ahlip, Tarik and Tactical Space Lab (2020), Untitled, virtual reality experience. Not publically available.
     [Google Scholar]
  2. Ahmed, Sara (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Art21 (2022), ‘Jacolby Satterwhite crafts surreal 3D animated videos while transporting characters from his virtual worlds into the streets of New York City’, Instagram, 16 September, https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiiFEcNjdI4/. Accessed 1 July 2023.
  4. Artists’ VR (n.d.), online installation, The New Museum, https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/artists-vr. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  5. Barnett, Fiona, Blas, Zach, Cárdenas, Micha, Gaboury, Jacob, Johnson, Jessica Marie and Rhee, Margaret (2016), ‘QueerOS: A User’s Manual’, in M. K. Gold and L. F. Klein (eds), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 50–9.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Bennett, Alison (2016), ‘Virtual Drag: Speaking academically’, exhibition material, Midsumma Festival, Melbourne, 17 January–6 February, https://www.academia.edu/23556431/Virtual_Drag_speaking_academically. Accessed 1 June 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Bennett, Alison, Beckwith, Megan and Payne, Mark (2016), Virtual Drag, virtual reality experience, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3sTRVKZUyU. Accessed 1 June 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Burrell, Andrew (2021), ‘Between the physical and the virtual: The present tense of virtual space’, Virtual Creativity, 11:1, pp. 91–109.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Dement, Linda (1995), Cyberflesh Girlmonster, MAC CD-ROM.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Dement, Linda (2020), Cyberflesh Girlmonster, lindadement.com, http://www.lindadement.com/cyberflesh-girlmonster.htm. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  12. Freeman, Guo and Acena, Dane (2022), ‘“Acting out” queer identity: The embodied visibility in social virtual reality’, Proceedings of the ACM on Human–Computer Interaction, 6:CSCW2, pp. 1–32, https://doi.org/10.1145/3555153.
     [Google Scholar]
  13. Fribourg, Rebecca, Argelaguet, Ferran, Lecuyer, Anatole and Hoyet, Ludovic (2020), ‘Avatar and sense of embodiment: Studying the relative preference between appearance, control and point of view’, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 26:5, pp. 2062–72.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Giles, Jim (2006), ‘Concept of “personal space” survives in virtual reality’, Nature, online first, https://doi.org/10.1038/news060911-3.
     [Google Scholar]
  15. Haraway, Donna Jeanne (1991), A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, London: Free Association Books.
     [Google Scholar]
  16. Jerald, Jason (2016), The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality, New York and San Rafael, CA: Association for Computing Machinery Morgan & Claypool Publishers.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Josh Harle (2020), ‘TACTICAL SPACE LAB X Tarik Ahlip’, YouTube, 13 April, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKXKXaBo07o. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  18. Kalidoscope (2017), ‘Virtual Drag: 360 VR Video’, YouTube, 22 November, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3sTRVKZUyU. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  19. Keeling, Kara (2014), ‘Queer OS’, Cinema Journal, 53:2, pp. 152–57.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Kilteni, Konstantina, Groten, Raphaela and Slater, Mel (2012), ‘The sense of embodiment in virtual reality’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 21:4, pp. 373–87.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Kivi, Sean (2022), ‘Gay VR is the ultimate experience for the modern queer’, HomoCulture, 1 January, https://www.thehomoculture.com/gay-vr-is-the-ultimate-experience-for-the-modern-queer/. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  22. Lanier, Jaron (2017), Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, New York: Henry Holt and Company.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Levy, Stephen (1990), ‘Brave new world’, Rolling Stone (Australia), 488, October, p. 90.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Misra, Sonia (2020), ‘Queer VR: Orientation and temporality in Jacolby Satterwhite’s Domestika’, Spectator, 40:2, pp. 40–44.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Muñoz, José Esteban (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Rubin, Peter (2018), Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, San Francisco, CA: HarperOne.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Sandra Fauconnier (2012), ‘“Cyberflesh Girlmonster” by Linda Dement’, YouTube, 26 December, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpRe1B0rJ4. Accessed 1 June 2023.
  28. Satterwhite, Jacolby (2017), Domestika, virtual reality experience, https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/artists-vr. Accessed 1 June 2023.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Slater, Mel, Gonzalez-Liencres, Cristina, Haggard, Patrick, Vinkers, Charlotte, Gregory-Clarke, Rebecca, Jelley, Steve, Watson, Zillah, Breen, Graham, Schwarz, Raz, Steptoe, William, Szostak, Dalila, Halan, Shivashankar, Fox, Deborah and Silver, Jeremy (2020), ‘The ethics of realism in virtual and augmented reality’, Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 1, pp. 1–13.
     [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/vcr_00072_1
Loading
Fractured and fragmented selves: Queer approaches to designing virtual experiences1,2
Virtual Creativity 13, 7 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/vcr_00072_1
/content/journals/10.1386/vcr_00072_1
/content/journals/10.1386/vcr_00072_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): avatars; embodiment; LGBTQIA+; new media art; presentness; queer theory; virtual environments; virtual reality

Most Cited Most Cited RSS feed

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error