#  Discovery Series Talk: “Placing Virtual Reality: Japan’s Alternative VR History” with Paul Roquet 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 13, 2022** 

 02:00PM - 03:00PM EDT 

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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*](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ambient-media) (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*](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-immersive-enclosure/9780231555968) (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)

 Register in advance for this meeting:

 [https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdeGprzkoG9F37bE7-\_pqmru4XBRGpU1v](https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtdeGprzkoG9F37bE7-_pqmru4XBRGpU1v)

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