Affect and Place Representation in Immersive Media: The Parragirls Past, Present project

Abstract

The emergence of a genre of virtual reality at the nexus of human rights is arguably transforming the documentary testimonial genre into one of an affective experience. This is a field of research that raises fundamental questions on the relation between sensation, testimony, evidence and memory. This paper outlines an investigation into the affective potential of immersive media and visualisation technologies to produce appropriate subjectivities for difficult memory and traumatic experience. The 3D immersive project under discussion presents a digital reconstructed reality of the former Australian punitive child welfare institution, Parramatta Girls Home. In this paper, we delineate how we have used the unique aesthetic properties of ambisonic sound, point-cloud representation and scenes of photographic veracity, and how the apposition of these formats provides an encounter with memory itself. Five former residents of Parramatta Girls Home direct our path through a complex visual and ambisonic acoustic environment, a combination we suggest empowers these women to attest to the embodied experience of contested memory.Immersion. Empathy. Narrative. Memory. Imaging and video. Modelling. Point cloud. Multimedia.

Immersive visualisation for a large metrological data set

“…We have visualised the raw data set shown in figure 4(a) in an immersive environment of the EPICentre's 3D cylinder. The cylinder compromises a 116 million-pixel screen covering 340 • [9]. Being immersed in the data as an observer as shown in figure 5(a), a completely different impression the scale and details can be obtained.…”

Psychosocial aesthetics and the art of lived experience

“…Photorealistic imagery of a corridor and sandstone 'dungeon' area, of a segregation room and a laundry-each sparking different recollections-are interspersed with point-cloud representations which, while topographically accurate, create an aesthetic of fragmentation as objects and surface textures appear to break into pixels-delicate luminescent points of colour that "simultaneously generate the perception of authenticity and scientific accuracy while presenting a fragmented and broken world" (Kuchelmeister et al, 2018). The project, however, is not simply about what is remembered but how it is remembered, encountered, shared in a context where the truth of the women's experience was systematically denied and undermined, often leaving them with only the defences of dissociation and self-harm.…”