Virtual Bodily Harm and the Reality of the Virtual

A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Romein, NYU Alumnus, multimedia artist, and performer. Per his website, “His current artistic research explores how the physical body is represented in digital spaces and how those bodies can be manipulated in evocative and unsettling ways in order to challenge ideas of identity, autonomy, and ethics”. A host of interesting conversations ensued during this class, but I wanted to touch upon a few moments in the conversation that stuck with me. 

Romein’s work “Meat Puppet Arcade” is a series of arcade-style ‘minigames’ where you use physical controls to manipulate virtual ragdolls of his body. An early exploration of this concept involved a game where you hit a suspended avatar of himself with a bat, or more specifically a hanging cord (so you ‘feel’ like you’re hitting his virtual body) while wearing a virtual reality headset. With both of these, Romein wanted to - in an Abramovich-esque manner - see how people interpreted the boundaries of what “violence” they were willing to commit on a virtual body. This led to a really interesting discussion, from this perspective, on the way that many video games in the west default to a specifically violent mode of interaction, especially as overlapping with the issue of gun violence. 

This “violence as default” concept ended up making an appearance, actually, during the final presentations for our class. One classmate’s final project was a first-person navigable maze, and they had used the Unreal Engine’s “First Person Shooter” prototype as a baseline to build their project off of. Because of time constraints, they had left in the default character, and one of the guests remarked on what purpose the gun had in the game - which it didn’t, it just wasn’t removed. This strikes me as dually interesting, both for re-codifying violence as this ‘default’, but also in that its presence is so unsurprising within a virtual context that it wasn’t a priority to remove.     

Matt spoke additionally about a recent project of his running a “Virtual Reality Travel Agency” in VRchat, where he and a partner created a series of custom ‘tourist’ avatars, videos, flyers, and more, to run these guided virtual tours through a variety of virtual spaces. While getting a peek “behind the curtain” in his explanation, the magic of the whole experience seemed to be in how for the folks who weren’t in on the joke, this was as real of an experience as it was pretending to be. This collectively shared fiction - or at least the willingness to believe and participate in it - strikes me as a wonderfully salient microcosm of social VR. The “reality” part of virtual reality is intrinsically a construction; it’s inherently artificial. However, in the suspension of disbelief and willingness to “make-believe”, it becomes as real as anything.