Paper short abstract:

This paper explores multi-sensory virtual reality experiences of both the past and present. In building out a genealogy of what these digital sensorial engagements are meant to achieve, I draw connections between digital and pre-digital arguments about affect and understanding.

Paper long abstract:

Virtual reality promises a hyperreality, in the sense that enthusiasts argue that a VR experience can be more real than an actual experience. While it’s easy to dismiss VR as a highly mediated and ocularcentrist experience, this paper considers multi-sensory VR experiences and the epistemological and ontological claims that accompany them. How do creators of such experiences imagine sensorial feeling to translate into caring and knowing? I compare two experiments in sensorial affect, a contemporary piece about deforestation and a mid-century proto-VR contraption called “the Sensorama.” Drawing from archival research for the Sensorama and from ethnographic fieldwork and discursive analysis for the contemporary piece, I show how both of these projects propose sensory stimulation as essential to catalyzing change in people’s outlook. The conflation of sensorial feeling with emotional feeling connects these 20th and 21st century projects with post-enlightenment battles between reason, sensation, and emotion, including 18th century sentimentalism and 19th century psychophysics and aesthetic theory. This paper thus attempts to briefly situate contemporary VR in longer histories and conversations in order to spur expanded anthropological engagements with these “new” digital mediums and their senso-realities.