Turpin’s Cave: choice and deception in a virtual realm

Abstract

Dr Eleanor Dare is the acting Head of Programme for the MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art, London, her work is concerned with art, computation and the limits of symbolic logic. Turpin's Cave: choice and deception in a virtual realm The VR work Turpin's Cave (2018) began as an account of the author's childhood memories of a chimeric cave in Bostall Woods, South East London. That part of London is subject to dramatic sink holes and subsidence, which in this work are a metaphor for unreliable memory, but also, as the project unfolded, became a potent symbol for the increasingly precarious nature of contemporary employment. In creating this project, the author found herself engaging with a gig economy of actors operating within a creative precariat, in which the 'choice' and 'flexibility' of deregulated work arguably creates a veneer of individual freedom. Through this project the author seeks to deconstruct some of the rhetoric of empathy, choice and immersivity that has grown around VR, evaluating whether the ontological instability of the form has non-trivial connections to the increasing precarity of global employment (Walls et al, 2016).

Diffracting Virtual Realities

“…Although the intention of works designed to invoke empathetic responses are (often) laudable, there is much to critique in the construct of empathy as it relates to VR, as discussed by Rose (2018) and in previous papers and conferences by the author (Dare 2019a, Dare 2019b, Dare 2019c). Brecht was explicit in analysing and critiquing empathy, writing:…”