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Adventures beyond anthropocentrism in virtual reality art
Summary
This essay examines how virtual reality art can leverage the medium's capacity to generate presence and body ownership illusions to challenge anthropocentric perspectives, exploring whether immersive VR experiences can foster more-than-human empathy and ecological awareness. The author investigates several VR artworks to assess whether embodied simulation of non-human perspectives can meaningfully shift viewers' relationships with the natural world.
In the following essay, I consider if and how VR’s uncanny ability to create an illusion of presence and generate a sense of body ownership might be used to go beyond our anthropocentric perspective, towards non-human experiences. By adventuring outside the domain of human experience, my goal is to address the affordances and limitations of VR’s illusionistic potential. Knowing full well that certain economic pressures preclude artists from pursuing the kinds of provocations I describe in this essay, I nevertheless invite readers to follow along as I explore alternative potentialities of contemporary VR. Specifically, I approach VR here in the hopes of finding ways of engaging with different bodies, spaces, and realities, even if illusorily.
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