Queering cultural memory through technology

Abstract

While cinema boasts of a long history that has placed the representation and aesthetics of memory at its centre, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are only starting to shape their own aesthetic and narrative engagement with memory. Through the analysis of Chez Moi (Caitlin Fisher and Tony Vieira, 2014), Queerskins: Ark (Illja Szilak, 2020), and Homestay (Paisley Smith, 2018), this essay shows how cinematic AR and VR involve the viewers’ movement to produce and transform collective memory and spatial habitation. Feminist digital geographies, film and media theory, and the concept of orientation developed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006) give sense to how sound, images and viewers’ movement participate to rewrite collective memory and cultural symbols. As these artworks present personal memories of struggles to find a home within present spaces, they queer hegemonic orientations of the subject, and invite viewers to re-align body and space within ever-changing virtual and digital spaces.

AR Cinema: Visual Storytelling and Embodied Experiences with Augmented Reality Filters and Backgrounds

“…This paper aimed to investigate the cinematic contexts of augmented reality interfaces and ARmodified bodies-more specifically the ways in which AR experiences can be understood in terms of cinematic composition, characters, and movie sets. We observed the disparities between visual representations on film and in AR and their transitional dimensions between physical and mediated realities (c.f., Ceuterick, 2021) that corresponds to the spatial dimensions of the recorded physical space (e.g., in its size or objects' placement) albeit in a distorted or masked form. AR filters and backgrounds' affective quality, thus, lies in bodily control and in the creative act of choosing and moderating body characteristics, postures, and positions in real-time in relation to the surrounding digitally manipulated or photographic environment.…”

“…Indeed, much of the discourse resurfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic, when theater companies and performers tried to rapidly adapt to the challenges of the lockdowns by making pre-specific applications in terms of, for example, duration, aspect ratio, or quality. Augmented reality functions in what Ceuterick (2021) calls transitional spaces. Transitional spaces not only exist between the digital (fictional) elements and physical reality but also between the recorded past and unfolding present, as well as between memory and real-time interactions.…”