Diffracting Virtual Realities: towards an A-effected 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), it forms a new connection between Barad's nondetermination and Brecht's A-effect, which seeks to replace over-determined, hypnotising immersion, with alertness to systemic power structures. 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.

Is there a connection between pedagogic practices of confessional reflectivity, online learning platforms, and the massively scaled surveillance of Higher Education student transactions via data analysis? It is the contention of this paper that there is an ideological and processual logic which connects these practices and platforms. It argues this logic has been benignly embedded in pedagogy, but has now become scaled via technologically deterministic paradigms, providing companies such as Pearson Ltd with monopolistic scope to dominate the epistemic foundations of teaching theory and practice. How these forces converge on the learning platform is the theme of this paper, which draws upon an arts and creative computation educational background rather than a specifically architectural context.

The Phi Books have used the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration by using narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. This has lead to the production of books and interactive material produced by the authors and the participants, which are both fictional and imaginative while also being methodologically reflective. We would like to present the development of the Phi Books Project, showing its different stages, from the initial formulation of algorithmic fictions to technologically mediated and embodied systems for collaboration.The Phi Books use the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration. The two researcher-artists use narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. This has led to the production of two books and interactive material produced by the authors and the participants, which are both fictional and imaginative while also Keywords collaboration participation performance narrative fiction algorithms

Dr Eleanor Dare is the acting Head of Programme for the MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art, London, her work is concerned with art, computation and the limits of symbolic logic. Turpin's Cave: choice and deception in a virtual realm The VR work Turpin's Cave (2018) began as an account of the author's childhood memories of a chimeric cave in Bostall Woods, South East London. That part of London is subject to dramatic sink holes and subsidence, which in this work are a metaphor for unreliable memory, but also, as the project unfolded, became a potent symbol for the increasingly precarious nature of contemporary employment. In creating this project, the author found herself engaging with a gig economy of actors operating within a creative precariat, in which the 'choice' and 'flexibility' of deregulated work arguably creates a veneer of individual freedom. Through this project the author seeks to deconstruct some of the rhetoric of empathy, choice and immersivity that has grown around VR, evaluating whether the ontological instability of the form has non-trivial connections to the increasing precarity of global employment (Walls et al, 2016).