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A+RC Public Lecture by Dr. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli: “Spectral Forensics: The Haunted Spaces of VR-Film”
Using examples from Lily Hibberd Gina Kim’s work in VR, that 360º films offer us something far more radical than stimulating our affective responses: they question our sense of presence, our subjectivity, and sense of embodiment as well as our abilities to immerse ourselves within the world. Hibberd’s Parragirls Past and Present (2017) is concerned with interred traumatic events, but rather than evading a troubled past, it attempts to reclaim unwanted memories.
Completed in 2017, Parragirls Past Present is a 23-minute, 360-degree 3D film, viewable both as an immersive installation or through a VR headset. It is the result of a long-term collaboration between the “Parragirls,” a collective of Australian female survivors of childhood abuse and brutal mistreatment at the hands of state officials in state run institutional care and the artist. Kim’s 3D immersive VR trilogy, Bloodless (Dongducheon, 2017), Tearless (Soyosan, 2020), and Comfortless (South Korea, 2023), instead, trace the twin legacy of “comfort women” and US militaristic settler imperialism in South Korea.
What interests me with these VR projects is how the mapping of real-life physical spaces like the Parramatta Girls Home, the Dongducheon camp town and the “Monkey House,” do not free us to explore these virtual spaces as many VR projects promise to do. Rather these projects seemingly trap us in what feels like the scene of multiple crimes. While the signs of women’s presence are omnipresent, and appearance of ghostly women is truly shocking, it is the feeling of being trapped in a space that is closing in on you and at the same time feeling disembodied, that produces such an acute sense of trauma—one that is experienced indirectly, second hand, through some spectral gaze.
Rather than attempt to make a case for identifying with ghosts or being able to feel their trauma, I am interested in how the feeling of being immersed within such uncanny spaces produces its own sense of distance and proximity—a critical as well as emotional understanding without creating some form of individual subjectivity. I argue that this uncomfortable type of thinking-feeling helps us grasp what the Australian governments and both the South Korean and US governments have tried so hard to render invisible.
About Dr. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. She is the author of Unmaking Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Mythopoetic Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Digital Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is currently working on a co-authored book with Martine Beugnet, “The Trouble with Ghosts: Film Television and Other Spectral Media” (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).