Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I look at approaches to VR that work with cultural traditions and grassroots social formations to project collaborative futures. Ana María Millán's works ground their production in real-world interactions, embodied movement, and storytelling before moving into the virtual world.

Paper long abstract:

The development of new platforms and technologies for virtual reality has often been paired with both utopian and dystopian visions of the future. Theorists from McLuhan onwards have speculated on the ability of new media to shape the ways people communicate about and co-create societies of the future. The emphasis of these discussions, however, often follows a top-down approach to social formations. New modes of interaction are regarded as emerging from the frame of possibilities within a technological platform, with each progressive technological development offering better options to the imagination. In this paper, I propose to look at artistic approaches to VR that work with cultural traditions and grassroots social formation to project collaborative futures. Recent video works by Ana María Millán, such as Este viento amor (2019) and Wanderlust (2015-17) are based on extensive collaborations with different youth and cultural groups. They reflect on the limits of stereotypical video game characters, while co-creating new characters and landscapes linked to surviving environments. I argue that by beginning this process with real-world interactions, embodied movement, and storytelling workshops before moving into a virtual world, Millán reverses the individualized hierarchy of typical VR engagement. Her works provides spaces that address the complex ties between technology and consumption, time to consider and discuss the abilities needed to maintain future-oriented spaces, and opportunities to recognize the non-human agencies that play a part in these processes. They also allow for different levels of opacity and transparency to inform the videos. I posit that Millán’s videos provide an example of a methodology for co-creation that resists the erasure of extractive histories, prevents the appropriation of participants’ accounts, and contributes to ecological imaginations of the future.