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Paper short abstract:

With the rise of the so-called "Metaverse", Virtual Reality (VR) holds the promise of being the ultimate empathy machine. This ethnography analyses how an art-science collective has been prototyping and researching empathetic VR methodologies for over ten years through different hacking practices.

Paper long abstract:

Apart from being a software and cybersecurity practice, hacking can also be a method of challenging and revealing facts through collaborative practices. This type of hacker figure attempts to eliminate hierarchies and show how vital collaborative learning methods are for mastering complex, ever-changing infrastructures and social processes to achieve change (Knox, 2021).

The proposed ethnography elaborates on the possibilities of interdisciplinary practices between neuroscientific research and artistic exploration to generate new forms of knowledge production regarding empathy. The members of the studied community hack together laboratory methods, artistic performance, documentary practices and computer science. In this setting, crafting and experimenting with virtual reality software and hardware enables unprecedented material and bodily assemblages through which a particular epistemology of otherness arises, a way of knowing otherwise that is not achievable in institutionalised settings.

In this context, cognitive theories and data are equalised to subjective experiences. Hacking empathy mobilises bodies and emotions, catalysing affect as a productive force to generate new links with present lives and envision possible futures. The outcomes are frequently unpredictable and erratic but impressively effective in triggering a peculiar curiosity and sensitivity toward the other’s perspective, feelings and body.