Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence

Abstract

Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) is a brief virtual reality (VR) piece that depicts the artist beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Wolfson uses the haptic possibilities of VR to rapidly induce nausea in the viewer, an act that both relies on empathetic aspects of VR simulation – ‘empathy’ here linked with its history in German aesthetic psychology as Einfühlung – and is a confrontational distancing that questions the politics of ‘empathetic’ immersion. Real Violence demonstrates how contemporary judgments of VR and empathy repeat debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reinventing and emptying particular political/aesthetic strategies that have long characterized a strain of modernist art that uses the formal possibilities (and limits) of media in order to critique the very same possibilities (and limits). This article, through its discussion of Wolfson’s work, seeks to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today. It examines the limitations of immersion and emotional projection, along with the limitations of interpreting this work (and VR in general) as a means for enacting ‘progressive’ social and ideological change through the immersive, empathetic capacities of media. The article concludes by arguing that judgments of Real Violence (and the politics of ‘transgressive’ art more broadly) require assuming the will or intent of an artist who uses confrontation and transgression to ‘correct’ the experience of the viewer, which is something that cannot be assumed for either Wolfson or Real Violence, and rather his work is exemplary of emptying out the possibilities represented by both VR and critical aesthetic intervention.

Rage against the empathy machine revisited: The ethics of empathy-related affordances of virtual reality

“…It should be noted that VR critics are well-aware of somatic effects. Bollmer and Guinness (2020), for example, identify ‘centripetal’ somatic empathy with beating and beaten characters in Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017), as well as opposing ‘centrifugal’ sensations of nausea and disorientation interpreted as empathy (Einfühlung) of feeling-into the image. In another account of VR works about nuclear disasters (Guinness, 2020), Guinness regard the user’s missing presence in the virtual world and the related dashed hapticality as a kind of phantom pain that effectively resonates the apocalyptic content, they still overlook the uniqueness of self-specific embodiment and its possible ethical merits.…”

Embodied parallelism and immersion in virtual reality gaming

“…In VR’s perpetual failure to achieve disembodiment and transcendence, however, immersion is often framed as a ‘problem’ to be solved by a range of corporate ‘best practices’ for designers and programmers (LaRocco, 2020: 99). The failure of immersion reveals more than the desire for immersivity alone, it speaks to the absolute persistence of the body, its experience of nausea and sickness (Bollmer and Guinness, 2020), and the necessity of embracing a parallelism that relates embodied motion and space ‘outside’ the simulation with the world ‘inside’ the game and the visual representation of the player as ‘avatar’ (cf. Frow, 2014: 41–49).…”

“…But this removal requires, often, an extreme control over embodied movement. Even though this means, at a physical level, the medium and body never actually disappear, the goal is to deny the possibility of the medium or body becoming visible – otherwise, and unlike other forms of media, the body literally becomes nauseated the moment the link between simulation and body are severed (Bollmer and Guinness, 2020). The representation of hands in VR further challenges both the very possibility of virtual disembodiment as well as the seeming ‘goal’ of inventing ‘simulations’ in which the player can perform actions otherwise impossible outside of the VR simulation (or of simulation permitting one to transcend their own subjectivity and ‘empathise’ with others).…”

‘Forced empathy’: Manipulation, trauma and affect in virtual reality film

“…Hassan, for example, summarised a 2015 TED talk: Milk claimed that 360 degree VR creates 'the ultimate empathy machine' where 'visceral emotional reactions' are generated to the point where the participant 'feels present with the people' they see within the digital 'world [you] inhabit'. (Hassan, 2019: 2) Following the popular success of this talk, a range of critical perspectives on the empathy machine narrative have been published recently (Andrejevic and Volcic, 2019;Bollmer, 2017;Bollmer and Guinness 2020;Bystrom and Mosse, 2020;Clifford and White, 2020;Gruenewald and Witteborn, 2020;Hassan, 2019;Irom, 2018;Nakamura, 2020;Nash, 2018;Rose, 2018). To add to this, our reading of the assertions made by advocates for immersive technologies and their potential to produce empathy rests on a wider engagement with discussions in cultural theory and specifically with what has been termed the 'turn to affect' (e.g.…”