KNOWING IS SEEING: distance and proximity in affective virtual reality history

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine perspective taking in virtual reality (VR) representations of the past, which could be regarded as one of the latest developments in the genre of reenactment and affective history. By building on Vanessa Agnew’s analysis of reenactment, I argue that some VR experiences, even though they reduce the distance between the knower and the known and adopt a strong emphasis on emotional engagement, can contribute to historical understanding and promote coming to terms with the past. I emphasize the importance of recognizing how VR experiences situate the audience and the past in relation to each other, i.e., through modes of relation that entail projection, replication, rupture and dialogical attention to the past. These modes of relation are configured through devices of proximity and distance, the combination of which produces a unique approach to the past in each VR experience. By analyzing two VR experiences – The Book of Distance and Accused #2: Walter Sisulu – I demonstrate how they put the tension between distance and proximity in relation to the past on display. The Book of Distance, in particular, makes distance, rather than proximity, much more prominent in its narration, while Accused #2 shifts the focus to the auditory experience, thereby emphasizing the speculative nature of the visual aspect of historical imagination.

KEYWORDS:

• Distance
• proximity
• virtual reality
• affective history
• reenactment
• perspective taking
• historical imagination
• conceptual metaphor

Introduction

Recent years have seen a proliferation of reenactment (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 2020) as a form of ‘affective history’, defined as ‘historical representation that both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect’ (Agnew 2007, 301). The principal features of reenactment, according to Agnew (2007), are the preoccupation with personal experience, social relations, everyday life as well as the privileging of the individual’s physical and psychological experiences over events, structures and processes in understanding of the past. In her article, Agnew (2007) interrogates the German version of the British historical reality television series House as an example of contemporary reenactment and points out the failure of the series to advance new historical knowledge or promote coming to terms with the past. Instead, as she argues, the show is oriented to coming to terms with the present.

The idea of House hinges on relocating a group of present-day people into a historical setting, in which they have to live as people from the past time and context. Thus, at its core, the show is based on the notion of projection of the present onto the past. The show does not address the past as the separate Other, whose experience can be witnessed, made sense of, reflected on, interrogated and contextualized. Rather, the show encourages adopting a first-person point of view on the experience of the people in the past through a simplistic collapse of temporalities. Instead of shifting the focus to how people in the past lived, thought, felt and interacted with and were shaped by their contexts, the viewers of House are asked to imagine how they – creatures of the present – would have lived, thought and felt in the past. Agnew’s analysis of House discloses the significance of perspective one takes on the experiences of people in the past.

House undermines ‘perspective taking’, a concept defined as ‘understanding the “past as a foreign country”, with its different social, cultural, intellectual, and even emotional contexts that shaped people’s lives and actions’ (Seixas, Gibson, and Ercikan 2015, 103). Perspective taking requires a recognition of the distance¹ between the knower and the known (Seixas and Morton 2013). Understanding the perspectives of past individuals entails a reconstruction of people’s thoughts, values, beliefs and actions on the basis of historical evidence (Davis, Yeager, and Foster 2001). Emotional engagement is seen as problematic in perspective taking, as it reduces historical distance and encourages knowers to identify with the people in the past as well as project the present-day values and ideas onto the past (Seixas, Gibson, and Ercikan 2015, 105). Finally, perspective taking implies awareness that ‘a variety of potentially incommensurable perspectives can co-exist within the same historical moment’ (Seixas, Gibson, and Ercikan 2015, 105).

On a first impression, virtual reality (VR) representations of history are at odds with perspective taking, as they diminish the distance between the knower and the known by immersing the viewer – in an emotional and embodied way – into a mediated historical environment and/or stories of people from the past. Emotional and embodied immersion are important features of VR representations, accounting for their impact and high memorability (e.g., Ahn, Bailenson, and Park 2014). In this article, I want to reflect on perspective taking in virtual reality (VR) experiences, which could be regarded as one of the latest developments in the genre of reenactment and affective history. VR experiences, due to the medium’s focus on the experiential, predominantly engage with the past as ‘the lived past’, or the lived experiences of the people in the past. The focus on the experiential in VR experiences requires a consideration of its effects on perspective taking. I argue that some VR experiences, even though they reduce the distance between the knower and the known and adopt an emphasis on embodied immersion and emotional engagement, may contribute to historical understanding, perspective taking and coming to terms with the past.² By providing an immersive and embodied experience of that which is distant and/or absent, VR representations of the past may promote a (multi)perspectival historical imagination that mediates between the senses and thought, perception and evidence-based reasoning (Staley 2021). I emphasize the importance of recognizing how these immersive audiovisual experiences situate the audience and the past in relation to each other, i.e., through modes of relation that entail projection, replication, rupture, and dialogical attention to the past. These modes of relation are configured through devices of proximity and distance, the combination of which produces a unique approach to and a perspective on the past in each VR experience.

The distance and proximity of the past

What is historical distance? Distancing has been associated with historical knowledge in Europe since at least the eighteenth century (Phillips 2013b, 2). In a fascinating discussion on historical distance as one of the defining principles of historical method, Phillips (2013a, 1) notes that distance has been long regarded as ‘the capacity to look back on the past from a self-conscious distance’ and ‘to see events more clearly, both in their origins and impact’ [emphasis here and below – Author]. In conventional understanding, historical distance ‘loosens the grip of prejudice and endows our judgment with a maturity that is impossible to the immediate observer’ (Phillips 2013a, 1). Historical distance helps ‘to define the optimum vantage […] from which history should be studied’ and provides ‘a properly historical perspective’ (Phillips 2013a, 5). What this brief characterization of historical distance reveals is that, as most abstract concepts, historical distance has been and continues to be made sense of by way of metaphors – embodied metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; for an up-to-date review of the CMT theory, see, e.g., Hampe 2017). Historical distance – and historical perspective – are visual epistemological metaphors: To know means to look from a particular point of view and at a particular distance.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1999) were the first to assert that metaphors are embodied conceptual figures, as opposed to being mere poetic or rhetorical devices. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999), metaphors are cognitive tools that allow understanding targets in the abstract domain in terms of the sources in the concrete, experiential, embodied domain. One of the key assertions of the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is that the way we conceptualize and categorize depends on the peculiar nature of our bodies and the way we, as embodied beings, interact with the environment. Further developments in the field of CMT have sought to integrate the findings on the embodied nature of metaphor and cognition with the embeddedness of cognition in the socio-cultural context and its social-interactive nature (Hampe 2017). Thus, cultural and environmental contexts may shape cognition by prioritizing certain aspects of bodily experiences while downplaying others (Kövecses 2005, 283–294; Yu 2008). For example, Knowing is seeing, a primary metaphor, which prevails in epistemology across many different languages (and which informs the visual metaphors of historical distance and perspective), does not apply to the Australian Aboriginal languages, in which the metaphor knowing is hearing is dominant instead (Evans and Wilson 2000). What are the implications of historical distance and perspective being visual metaphors?

Jonas (2001), in his phenomenological study of mind, posits three interrelated aspects of the experience of sight: its simultaneity, stasis and the distancing effect. Sight allows for perceiving many things simultaneously, as if one would capture an image (Jonas 2001, 136). This image is static, in contrast to hearing and touch, which highlight dynamic change and movement (Jonas 2001, 136–138, 140–141). Finally, sight does not require a bodily interaction with what is seen (Jonas 2001, 145–146). One can take a glance and neutralize dynamic content of perception, creating an impression that one captured an image that is separate, or distant, from what is seen as well as from the embodied seer. Hence, the distancing gap between the subject and the object, the knower and the known, object and its representation, world and image, comes into being.

Jonas (2001, 147) notes that the idea of objectivity and a disinterested spectator is based on the visual-perspectival distinction between ‘the thing as it is in itself’ and ‘the thing as it affects me’, between the object and its representation. The choice of a particular metaphorical model has implications for what inferences follow regarding the path to knowledge. If observing entails distance to the object, the knower’s degree of distance – as relation to the known – determines the accuracy of what will be discovered or understood. As I have sought to show at the outset of this section, Phillips (2013a) accurately captures these visual metaphorical underpinnings in the concept of historical distance.

Historians, in their pursuit of knowledge, can attempt to bridge the distancing gap by adopting a proper perspective or, alternatively, emphasize its unbridgeable character, depending on the epistemological preference. The impact of the scientific empiricist method on the discipline of history (Novick 1988) has meant that the visual epistemological metaphor and its distancing features were further fortified by static optical vocabulary, which fathomed the perceiving eye as a disembodied, fixed, monocular vanishing point and an optical lens (Jay 1993, 1988; Crary 1988, 1990). The model of the depersonalized eye of the optical lens was assumed to produce accuracy and veracity; its disembodiment seen as the guarantor of an appropriate distance.

The paradox of the metaphor ‘historical distance’ is, however, that it is corporeal to its core, although the bodily aspect is hidden by the dominant disembodied optical connotations of the metaphor. Seeing into the distance with our eyes requires not only that the eyes but the entire body move, in order to see and look around – in order to come closer or move further away, i.e., to engage in what is a dynamic, interactive process of embodied seeing (Modrak 2011, 20). Moreover, when we see into the distance with our eyes, we can approximate how far something is – and then move towards it to investigate. Movement produces varying perspectives, depending on the distance. Just as the distance between myself and something I am looking at can be approximated, so too can the distance in historical perspective taking be approximated, estimated, although never fully abridged in the way our bodies can potentially move to decrease – abridge – the space between where we are located and what we are looking at.

Due to this dual nature – distancing and approximating – of cognition, it should come as no surprise that, in contrast to the elevation of distance and detachment, there has been a parallel current in historical practice as well as in popular history that celebrates a vision of entanglement, imbued with a sense of closeness in an encounter with the past. The desire to bring the past closer has manifested in a wide range of approaches and effects, which cannot be simplistically reduced to an uncritical, emotionalized glorification of the past associated with the romantic vision or a unidirectional projection of ideological, moral and political ideas onto the past (Phillips 2013b).

Vision, as the dominant human sense, shapes how we make sense of perception and cognition. It possesses both distancing and interactive, static and dynamic effects – both of these features of the visual experience should be included and integrated into the epistemological model to develop a rigorous, rich understanding of what happens when historians (and media consumers) approach the past. What I would like to suggest is a shift of attention from distance as such to modes of relation conjured by a range of devices of distance and proximity in accounts conveying some aspect(s) of the past.

Four modes of relation between the past and the present, the viewer/reader/knower and the past, which I identify here as ideal types, are projection, dialogical attention, replication, and rupture. A range of devices of proximity and distance (and their unique combinations) may configure these modes of relation in a VR representation. For example, proximity may be mediated by personal stories, first-person viewpoints and character focalization (e.g., Bal 2009; de Bruijin 2014), the use of bodily and multisensorial engagement (pitch, timbre, rhythm of voice; facial expressions; gestures, gait, postures and other bodily language) (e.g., Bresler 2004), and an emphasis on the presence of the past or continuities across time (e.g., Zerubavel 2003; Gumbrecht 2006; Runia 2014). Distance, however, may be asserted through a focus on historical structures, processes and large-scale analysis (e.g., Guldi and Armitage 2014), contextualization and critical examination of sources (e.g., Klein 2017, 79), the use of a distanced, third-person narrator, an infusion of fictive and stylized elements into a representation (e.g., Landsberg 2015, 166) as well as attention to how the past is different, strange or foreign, even to the extent of being unreconstructible (e.g., Grever, de Bruijin, and von Boxtel 2012; Lowenthal 2015).

Projection expresses the first-person relation to and a first-person embodied perspective on the past, when the past and/or the experience of historical agents are exclusively understood on the basis of one’s own experience, feelings, values, beliefs, understanding and the present-day temporal context. Characteristically, the first-person route to knowing the past lacks a clear recognition of difference and otherness of the past. The movement in the process of understanding is unidirectional – from the present-day understanding to the past phenomena. If there is an attempt at emotional connection to the past in this mode, it refers to imagining how one would feel in the other’s place without a simultaneous sustained reflection on the context- and experience-dependent alterity of the other.

Replication embodies the third-person relation to and a disembodied perspective on the past, when the past and the experience of historical agents are observed from a detached, optical point of view, with an aim to limit the intrusion of the knowing subject. The focus is on replicating and reconstructing the past accurately, to ensure the mimetic match between the past and its representation. The movement in the process of understanding is once again unidirectional – from the past phenomena to the present-day knowledge. Emotional connection to the past is not the goal in this mode of relation as much as the elimination of subjective affective biases and prejudgments of the knower.

Dialogical attention is the second-person route to engaging with the past, which implies an alternation between attentive engagement and disengagement, as opposed to the third-person detachment from and the first-person projection of the self onto the past. This kind of dialogical, second-person approach to the past implies encountering the past as different and actively recognizing this difference, while simultaneously experiencing the past in emotional, moral or ideological engagement. The second-person mode positions the knower in an embodied perspective that, importantly, does not eliminate the distance to the known. The dialogical attention entails a combination of cognitive and affective aspects of making sense of the past. In this mode, emotional connection does not suggest the loss of sense of distance and difference between the past and the present or between the viewer and the past. The movement in the second-person process of understanding is bidirectional and self-reflexive – simultaneously from the past phenomena to the present-day knowledge and from the present-day understanding to the past phenomena. Imagination is crucial in this mode, acting as a mediator between evidence-based reasoning and the senses (Staley 2021). While it is true that the past is no longer present to be directly perceived, imagination acts as if certain aspects of the past can be sensed or experienced (Staley 2021, 6). Imagination engages the traces of the past in order to form a sense of what it might have been like and to engage in reasoning. As will become apparent in the following discussion of the selected VR experiences, the embodied, perspectival imagination afforded by VR may be conducive to historical perspective taking.

Finally, the fourth mode of relation between the past and the present is that of rupture or complete break. In this reading, the past is unknowable, undiscoverable, alien and incomprehensible. The efforts at understanding or knowing the past are seen as futile or unsuccessful, or else the past is different to such an extent that it is neither possible to project oneself onto the past, nor claim any knowledge of it that would not refer back to the present. The distance that separates the past and the present cannot be abridged.

In what follows, I examine two VR experiences and unravel the intricate ways in which they mediate proximity and distance, resulting in a dialogical, second-person mode of relation to the past that engages emotions and the body of the knower, but does not eliminate the distance between the knower and the past.

The Book of Distance

The Book of Distance is a room-scale virtual reality experience depicting the life of Canadian artist Randall Okita’s grandfather Yonezo Okita, who immigrated from Japan to Canada in the 1930s. The defining feature of the experience, as the title already suggests, is an all-pervading tension between distance and proximity, absence and presence in relation to the past. The experience repeatedly underscores the distance and absence that separate us from the past, while simultaneously providing immersion, emotional engagement, interaction and a focus on the lived experiences of an individual.

The VR experience begins in a darkened room. In front of me, I see a large book on a podium and I open it. A dedication from Randall is inscribed on the first page: ‘To you, the time traveler: This is a love letter to the future. I wrote this for the hearts ahead of us, for the ones growing and wishing, among them my nephew who carries the name of my grandfather Yonezo Okita. May you listen carefully and walk proudly’. At its core, it is an intergenerational story, which Randall tells to reconnect with his family’s past as well as to bridge this past with the future generations. Step by step, the audience is invited to engage with Yonezo’s experiences at different stages of his life. Randall appears in the experience himself, as he reconstructs and reflects on Yonezo’s life and the wider political context of his grandfather’s experience. As the author of the production, he is visible to and interacts with the audience. While watching the experience, it becomes clear that the story holds deep emotional and personal significance for Randall. However, what is special about The Book of Distance is that while being emotionally engaging, it simultaneously emphasizes the complicated nature of reconstructing and reimagining the past – the silences, the absences, and the uncertainties that accompany the process of understanding another person’s experience. This uncertainty and absence felt when engaging with the past is one of the central themes of the experience. In one of the introductory scenes, Randall’s father expresses this motif succinctly, when, sitting in his kitchen, he tells Randall: ‘Well, you knew grandfather. He was so present by his lack of presence’. The past looms in the present through its gaping absence.

This very absence motivates Randall to learn more about his grandfather’s life and attempt to imagine what it could have been like for Yonezo to go through his experiences. However, no claims for mimetic accuracy are made; the imagined, constructed nature of the story is repeatedly highlighted through Randall’s commentary (‘This is an imagined space. Do all places start like this?’) and stylized, animation-like representation of the physical environment and people, whose facial features are indistinct and sketchy. Throughout the experience, Randall engages in constant reflexive conversation with himself and with the audience, when he asks: ‘How do you begin to imagine a whole life?’, ‘What did a house in the 1930s in Hiroshima look like?’, ‘What do you take with you when you go for an adventure?’, ‘What did it feel like to leave the only home he knew for a place he could only imagine?’, ‘What did he hope for, this young man?’, ‘What was it like to build your house yourself?’, ‘How did it feel to have your hopes come true?’. The audience is invited to participate together with Randall in this exercise of historical imagination in perspective taking. One scene, however, is particularly hard to imagine for Randall – the internment camp, to which his grandfather has been sent by the Canadian authorities when WWII broke out. Randall notes that his grandfather never spoke about the experience, perhaps because it was too painful and shameful to remember; for Randall, too, it is hard ‘to see’ Yonezo in the camp.

The metaphor of time-traveling, inscribed in the opening scene of the VR experience, brings out the multilayered, interconnected, and overlapping nature of time. There are multiple simultaneous temporalities in the experience, which sometimes appear side by side in a single immersive space. VR renders these temporalities as an embodied metaphor of spatial experience, as Randall and the audience cross and alternate between Randall’s office fixed in the Randall-narrator’s present in 2019; the kitchen of his father in Calgary, also in 2019; the scenes from the grandfather’s house in Hiroshima in 1935 and 1945; the deck of a ship as it leaves the docks and then later arrives at the port in Canada; the scenes from the grandfather’s house in Canada in the 1930s, the strawberry farm, the internment camp and, later, the sugar-beet fields, where he is forced to work in Alberta. As the experience is intended for future generations of the Okita family as well as the wider audience, it also connects these temporalities of the past and the present to the future. Randall’s and his father’s voices in the background are also layered on top of the scenes depicting Yonezo’s past. Although Yonezo’s story is told in a linear narrative, the overall VR experience produces an impression of an entangled and multi-layered mesh of time.

Randall moves, quite literally, in that imagined space of enmeshed temporalities, as he enquires into the family’s past and tells the story. However, he never interacts directly in this shared space with Yonezo or other family members, but only watches and comments as the events unfold, at a distance, or physically constructs the space, in which Yonezo’s life experiences take place and are represented. He is simultaneously embedded in, interacting with that space and distanced from it. The paradox inherent in this juxtaposition of closeness and distance reveals something important about the nature of reconstructing the past in VR. The reconstructed lived experience is emotionally engaging, visceral, active and physical, yet at the same time it remains to a large extent distant and speculative, especially when relevant testimonies and historical sources are missing because of censorship, erasure or traumatic repression.

The audience’s position in the imagined space varies throughout the experience. In some scenes, I, as a viewer, am in Randall’s office and he is talking to me, addressing me, sometimes even physically constructing the scene around me, or teaching me how to play horseshoes, which is what he used to do with his grandfather. We share the same space and I am invited to participate, to engage in an act of filling in the gaps of knowledge. In other scenes, I am immersed in the scenes from Yonezo’s life and encouraged to interact with the space and objects around me: his little sister hands me a pen for writing a letter; I pack Yonezo’s suitcase; I stand right next to him on the deck of a ship as he leaves the port of Hiroshima; I assist him and his wife in clearing the field of stones, building the fence around his family house and planting strawberry seeds in the field; I help serve a meal to the Okita family and can overhear swing music playing on the radio; I witness how he and his family are being forcefully taken away from their home to the internment camp when WWII begins; I am inside a small wooden shelter, in which Yonezo and his son live in Alberta and I can hear and see wolves howling as I peek through the gaps in the walls. As a viewer, I am invited to engage in an act of historical imagination by means of participatory engagement. By seeing, hearing, touching and moving, I enter a phenomenological world of the past that is no longer present and that is enabled by the imagination drawing on the available evidence (Staley 2021, 23). This imagined world of the past is, however, only a sketch, an approximation.

What is important is that I never experience Yonezo’s life from the first-person point of view; as a viewer, I never occupy Yonezo’s body. Throughout the VR experience, I remain either in the position of a participant in an exercise of historical imagination or a witness, both of Yonezo’s life experiences and Randall’s attempts to grapple with his family’s past. In other words, I remain firmly anchored in an embodied second-person perspective: I share presence in the imagined space with Yonezo (and Randall), but I am neither invading Yonezo’s body, nor am I a distanced spectator of his experiences, observing from a bird’s eye-view.

The distance between me, as a viewer, and the reconstructed past also varies during the experience. The distance gets smaller in the scenes where I am sharing the same space with Yonezo and his family, assist them in different tasks and interact physically by having to touch and move objects. In other scenes, however, as, for example, in the house in Hiroshima, I am positioned a few meters away from the scene and my gaze is focused by means of lighting to only a small portion of the 360 degrees of visual field around me. The effect is that of facing a theater stage. An interesting feature of storytelling, in this regard, is that, as a viewer, I am also encouraged to take pictures of the family scenes by using a camera that appears in front of me several times during the experience. All the snapshots taken by me, except for the one from Hiroshima, are transformed into actual photographs from the Okita family archive, which I can sometimes take into my hands and have a closer look at. Although the physical interaction with the object should create the effect of proximity, the result, due to the distancing effect of the camera gaze, is an amplified sense of distance – witnessing at a close distance rather than projecting myself into the situation or ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’.

As a narrator, Randall is both emotionally engaged and distanced, embodying the second-person approach to engaging with the past. As he reflects on the difficulties of reconstructing a life, Randall offers factual information about the internment of Japanese Canadians during WWII and the photorealistic evidence, which consists of the original photographs, letters, government notices and other documents. This serves to provide a wider political context to the experiences of Yonezo as a Japanese Canadian immigrant. However, he lays bare his emotional involvement with the story. It is a ‘love letter’ to the future generations, a critique of the state-sanctioned racial discrimination inflicted on his family and other Japanese Canadians, and an effort to transform the meaning of his family’s history. As Randall evocatively notes in one of his interviews, ‘Giving voice to my family’s history, particularly one that involves discrimination and shame, changes the way we hold that history in our bodies’. The Book of Distance combines historical understanding with emotional insight and work, which is supposed to be transformative not just for Randall himself or his family members, but also the wider audience. Affective history becomes an embodied understanding of lived experience, which touches and moves, and shapes the way we make sense of the past.

The Book of Distance is about coming to terms with a difficult past as an act of imagination that is participatory, emotional, visceral, and interactive. Distance and proximity, absence and presence intermingle in this VR experience, creating a productive tension that contributes to an understanding of not only the individual experiences of Randall’s grandfather but also the experiences of the Japanese Canadian immigrants as a group. The emotional link to the past serves as an anchor that sustains the imagination and interest in filling in the gaps of knowledge. While The Book of Distance reduces the distance by immersing the viewers into the imagined environments of past temporalities, it never attempts to annihilate the gap between the knower and the known. The medium is employed in a way that promotes perspective taking. The VR experience uses the affordances of the medium for immersive and embodied imagination to engage the historical evidence to understand the lives of people in the past, but not to identify with them or project one’s own experiences onto them. The VR experience combines distance and proximity, producing a dialogical mode of relation to the past that merges a sense of closeness, emotional as well as visceral engagement with a distancing attention to a wider context and an otherness of the past. This is a significant result, attesting to the potential impact of affective virtual reality history in contributing to perspective taking.

Accused #2: Walter Sisulu

Accused #2 is an animated VR documentary, directed by Gilles Porte and Nicolas Champeaux, which immerses the viewer in the 1963–1964 Rivonia trial in South Africa. During the trial, ten anti-apartheid activists from the African National Congress (ANC) testified in court. The VR documentary focuses on the court interrogation of Walter Sisulu, the ANC activist, who was the Accused No. 2. What distinguishes this VR title from other similar productions, is its auditory, rather than visual focus, placing the recently restored 256 hours of original audio recordings from the trial at the center of the immersive experience. Without using any photorealistic imagery, apart from a single picture of Walter Sisulu alongside Nelson Mandela at the end of the experience, the documentary enacts proximity to the past via auditory means.

The use and primacy of sound creates an interesting paradox in an otherwise highly visual medium of VR. Contrary to the visual focus, Accused #2 puts vision at the service of the spatialized auditory experience. The audio recordings of the trial are illustrated with black and white animations, reminiscent of charcoal drawings. The experience begins with Nelson Mandela’s voice recording from 1964, animated as a single white line, against a black backdrop, that loops and twirls, making shapes that correspond to the sounds and words in Mandela’s speech. The absence of intense visual stimulation allows the viewer to focus attention on the intonations, the pitch and rhythm of the speech that conveys an emotional intensity, bringing the past closer.

As the experience proceeds, the viewer is placed in the center of the courtroom, surrounded by Walter Sisulu, his lawyer Bram Fischer, the judge, and the courtroom audience. The position of the viewer allows no physical interaction with surroundings or movement in space other than turning the head while staying fixed on the same spot. The placement of the viewer in the narrative serves the function of encouraging the viewer to listen to and to witness the testimony of Sisulu. The point of view is, however, dynamic and constantly shifting as the narrative unfolds: up and down, center and periphery, close-up and distant. The viewer’s perspective moves from the center of the courtroom to that of the underground gold mines, in which Sisulu worked as a child; then moves up to the darkened interior of a room in which he took night classes in the township; all the way up to the bird’s eye-view of his village, before it returns to the courtroom again. Sometimes the viewer is in the center of the courtroom, in front of the podium at which Sisulu stands before the towering figures of the judge or the prosecutor. In other moments, the viewer is placed at the back of the courtroom hall and looks upon the scene from the point of view behind the audience; or is positioned so close to Sisulu’s face that everything else disappears, except for his eyes, the glass frames and the reflection of the figure of the judge in them. However, not once during the experience is the viewer positioned to see the scene from the first-person point of view of Walter Sisulu or any other figures that are featured in the experience. The viewer remains firmly in the position of the witness, whose proximity or distance to the protagonist varies throughout the experience, but who is never permitted to invade the protagonist’s body. The distance to the Other and his experience is never abridged, only approximated to varying degrees, allowing the viewer to try on different perspectives in the scene. The shifting points of view alert the viewer to the multiple perspectives from which the situation can be and was likely understood.

The evocative, meaning-full human voice takes the central place in this experience. Sisulu’s determined voice – its rhythm, strength and intonations – in the court interrogations by both his lawyer as well as the prosecutor powerfully conveys affectively charged lived experience: ‘I have suffered. I have had a personal experience. I’ve been banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. I have been house-arrested. I’ve been detained. I have been separated from my family’. Simultaneously, these experiences are represented for the viewer with abstract 3D animations that use very simple, easily recognizable shapes and movements of white cubes and black spheres to communicate relations of violence, isolation, and restriction of movement. The shapes and their dynamic interplay function as basic visual primary metaphors that connect the sensorimotor domain with the domain of subjective experience (Grady 1997, 2005). In other words, these primary metaphors communicate the meaning of Sisulu’s subjective experience by linking it to the body’s sensorimotor experience, thus, amplifying the visceral feeling in the experience of the emotions in Sisulu’s voice. The logic of the bodily domain is recruited in the act of conveying the meaning of what Sisulu went through.

The recording of the interrogation of Sisulu by the prosecutor Percy Yutar, which takes up the largest portion of the experience, carries the most intense emotional charge. Both Yutar’s and Sisulu’s voices carry a distinct character and mannerism of speech. Once again, the black and white shapes and patterns are incorporated into the visual representation of the audio recording, where Yutar’s voice appears as a white square and Sisulu’s voice as a black circle, each engaging in a dynamic conversational dance.

Yutar:

How do you know they [the police – Author] arrest people innocently?

Sisulu:

I know. They arrested my wife. They arrested my son. That was indiscriminate. They arrested other people.

Yutar:

Without any evidence whatsoever?

Sisulu:

What evidence?

Yutar:

I don’t know. I am asking?

Sisulu:

I have been persecuted by the police. Special branch. If there is a man who has been persecuted, it is myself. In 1962, I was arrested six times. I know the position in this country.

Yutar:

You do?

Sisulu:

I wish you were in the position of an African! I wish you were an African and knew the situation in this country …

Sisulu’s voice is defiant, passionate, frustrated; he speaks ‘from the heart’. Accused #2 offers affective history as affective auditory knowledge, but one that calls for an ethical engagement with the past injustices and which invites the audience to learn more about the past by forging an emotional link to it – via hearing. Hearing – and listening – requires participation, receptive engagement, and acceptance of proximity across temporal distance. What is heard is also felt: at the very least, it propels us to imagine, in our bodies, what it would feel like to produce these intonations, pitch or rhythm of speech. Hearing enhances the awareness of visceral embodiment in cognitive processes. Hearing the human voice, as expressive as it is in its emotional tone, reduces distance. Sisulu’s intonations reveal not a person who is guilty for disobeying the laws, but a person who feels the urge to speak the truth about the experiences of black South Africans and to share it with others. The emotions pervading Sisulu’s speech hold an urgency, to speak up, to voice one’s lived experiences, as an act of self-determination and a claim for justice.³

The experience provides little distancing contextualization of the apartheid regime, the trial or its aftermath, except for a few brief informational captions at the beginning and the end of the experience; rather, it focuses heavily on the individual experience and affective meaning. Despite this, the VR experience provides insight as to how the affectively charged lived experiences shaped Sisulu’s perception of the situation and his behavior and, as such, it can supplement the more distanced, factual knowledge framework about the apartheid regime. The emotional connection is employed to focus the viewer’s attention on and to listen to the Other rather than to encourage experiencing oneself in another’s shoes, thus, contributing to the second-person – dialogical – approach to the past. Accused #2 demonstrates how the medium of VR can be employed to combine dynamic and more engaging auditory knowledge with the more distancing visual knowledge, revealing the tacit interconnections between the two modalities of cognition. The spatial logic of VR allows for combining these two primary metaphors – knowing is hearing and knowing is seeing – in an act of historical imagination.

Conclusion

The medium of VR, or at least its re-emergence in the market in the 2010s, is a relatively recent innovation, which means that the medium’s vocabulary, affordances and applications are still very much in the process of experimental development. Since the advance of the VR technology is largely in the control of large tech companies and governed by incentives of profit, this should keep us alert to the problems inherent in the VR content that is being created at the moment. However, the examples of the two above-discussed VR experiences, as a form of audio-visual art, should encourage us to remain open-minded about what VR has to offer in terms of opportunities for representation and a reflexive engagement with the past.

The spatial logic of VR together with a sense of immersion and emotional, visceral engagement put distance and/or proximity, so central to historical understanding, on display. By enabling a combination of visual, motor and auditory forms of engagement with the past, VR can simultaneously approximate the past and put forth its absence or difference, expose the gaps of knowledge, highlight the uncertainties and speculations about what it could have been like. It puts the epistemology and its concurrent (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) metaphors on display. The questions ‘What was it like?’ and ‘What did it feel like?’, which emerge in the discussed VR experiences, invite engagement with the historical imagination, while simultaneously exposing its limits. Neither The Book of Distance, nor Accused #2 promise a total abridgement of the past and the present, a mimetic match between the past and our understanding of it. The Book of Distance, in particular, makes distance, rather than proximity, much more prominent in its narration, while Accused #2 shifts focus to the auditory experience, thereby emphasizing the speculative nature of the visual aspect of the historical imagination.

To the extent that imagination is about simulation in The Book of Distance and Accused #2, VR provides an opportunity for the historical imagination to play with different perspectives in an interactive, dynamic, participatory way. At the same time, the attempt to imagine reveals the boundaries of imagination, disclosing the distance or proximity of what we are trying to understand. Attending to others in VR, their experiences and emotions, and receptive listening or even imitating their actions and movements becomes one way to practice the historical imagination in VR that is not, however, reducible to the projection of the self onto the people in the past or occupying their bodies for a coveted first-person point of view. Rather, the two VR experiences, as affective history, provide a dialogical, second-person approach to the past that actively recognizes the difference and otherness of the past as it simultaneously engages the audiences emotionally and viscerally.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Rūta Kazlauskaitė

Rūta Kazlauskaitė is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Trained as a political scientist, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, working at the intersections of media studies, memory studies, and philosophy of history. Her research interests include politics of history and mediated (re)presentation of contested pasts (PhD 2018). Her current project explores how history museums in Poland employ immersive virtual reality (VR) representations of Polish history for delineating a national emotional regime that aims to obliterate the liberal/leftist ‘pedagogy of shame’ and articulate a resurrected national pride.

Notes

1. ‘Distance’ has two meanings: distance as an amount of space between two points and distance as remoteness, withdrawal. ‘Proximity,’ understood as nearness or closeness, and ‘distance,’ understood as remoteness, can be subsumed within the concept of distance as an amount of space between two points. As I sought to emphasize the dichotomy between nearness and remoteness in my argument, I use ‘distance’ and ‘proximity’ as separate, contrasting concepts.

2. To the extent that I will refer to ‘historical understanding’ within the frame of this article, I will use this concept in relation to ‘perspective taking,’ as understanding how people felt and thought in the past and the different contexts that shaped their lives and actions (Seixas and Morton 2013).

3. As Cox (2016) explains, sound comprehension is a part of a more general mechanism of mimetic comprehension via forms of mimetic motor imagery and mimetic motor action. In this account, humans comprehend the sounds produced by another human being or by an instrument by imitating those sounds and/or performing actions that produce the sound. Understanding takes place via embodied simulation that can be overt, voluntary and conscious, but also can manifest in unconscious and covert forms without our awareness, when the perception of a sound or the sound-producing actions are simulated in one’s own motor imagery and activates certain motor areas in the brain as well as muscles involved in speech production. Such imitative knowledge has an affective dimension, as we do not only hear the sounds, but also can feel or imagine what it could feel like to produce a particular sound.