This paper examines how CVR depicts illness experiences through the following works: Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2019) and Goliath: Playing With Reality (2021). The developing CVR medium is populated by narratives focusing on underprivileged groups and individuals, driven by the rhetoric of VR’s capabilities as an “empathy machine”. Of these works, several depict stories of illness. Drawing from Kleinman’s distinction between disease and illness, the former describing physiological dysfunction and the latter as its accompanying lived experience, we explore how CVR formally presents illness through its immersive spaces. This paper analyses how CVR creators employ user positioning within narrative space, mise-en-scene, and interactive elements to represent illness. Through these devices, we examine the ethical implications of rendering illness narratives in VR. 

 

We adopt a phenomenological approach, reading both works through the lens of the absent body since CVR withdraws the user’s physical body from view and redistributes embodiment across audio, gesture, and interaction. NoB uses Professor John Hull’s original cassette recordings documenting his experience of blindness alongside an immersive and interactive audiovisual interpretation of these thoughts. In Goliath, the narrator “Goliath” recounts his struggles with schizophrenia, taking us from his troubled childhood, to his first psychotic episode, ending with the solace found through gaming. NoB aurally orientates users beyond the visual frame, while Goliath adopts split subjectivities to stage instability and partial agency as a representation of schizophrenia. Both works adopt a stylised form of visuality to emphasise the subjectivity of illness. NoB and Goliath provide an avenue of understanding through their narrativised and embodied renderings of illness, simulating its experiential aspects through VR’s immersive and interactive capacities. However, the narrativisation of illness into a linear journey ending with methods of coping and acceptance, underpinned by the belief that enacting is understanding, oversimplifies experience into an empathy exercise.

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CVR Films: Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2019) and Goliath: Playing With Reality (2021)

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Cecilia Chen is Global Creative Industries and Film Studies PhD candidate on the University of Hong Kong and King’s College London joint PhD program. Her research draws from the intersections of film and new media theory with phenomenology to develop a spectatorship theory of virtual reality experiences, addressing elements such as space, time, and depth. 

 

Yi (Luna) Wang is a PhD student in HKUMed. In her PhD study, she is interested in what happens when illness narratives move from words and images into immersive environments, where feeling and attention are shaped by interaction design.