Date:
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Description
Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure?
Bio:
Paul Roquet is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Japan Studies at MIT. He studies the use of media as personal technologies of perceptual and emotional self-regulation. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmosphers of Self (Minnesota, 2016) explores how music, video, art, film, and literature came to be used as tools of individual atmospheric mood control, theorizing what it means to treat media as a sensory resource for self-care. His forthcoming book, The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (Columbia, 2022) critically rethinks the cultural politics of consumer VR as a project to perpectually center individuals within a privatized virtual space. All of Roquet’s work engages closely with Japanese materials and social contexts, drawing on the country’s history with media technologies to offer new perspectives for a global media studies.
When: Apr 13, 2022 2:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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