Webinar Series - Seeing Double: The Multiple Worlds of Virtual Reality

This exciting six-part webinar series will run online from 27 May-1 July 2020 and is opening for registrations soon!

Histories of virtual reality routinely tell a story of progress, in which early attempts to simulate the real are trumped first by photography, then film, and now by the digital. This is perhaps why digital VR is often quarantined from its non-digital doubles - photography and film, but also literature, painting, theatre, and architecture. This online webinar series will highlight this diverse repertoire of virtual realities, focusing on the exchanges between digital and analog, and on the relations that contemporary virtual realities have, or may have, with their pasts.

This webinar series is presented by the ERCC in partnership with The University of Melbourne Digital Studio.

Confirmed dates and speakers:

27 May: Professor Peter Otto (The University of Melbourne), ‘Does the future have a past? / New-old and old-new virtual realities’

3 June: Professor Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University of Technology), 'Virtual Reality and the Optical Explosion of the Senses'

10 June: Dr Caitlin Vincent (The University of Melbourne), 'It Ain't Over Till the (Digital) Lady Sings: Exploring Digital Scenography in Opera Production'

17 June: Dr Elias Greig (The University of Melbourne), 'Pokémon Gone: Loss, Nostalgia, and Virtual Re-wilding in Pokémon GO'

24 June: Professor Keir Winesmith (UNSW), 'Museums and Mixed Reality'

1 July: Dr Miriam Ross (Victoria University of Wellington), 'Virtual Reality: 170 Years of Embodied Transportation'

Format:

All six presentations will be streamed live through Zoom webinar software. Registration details and information about how to download and access Zoom will be provided shortly - stay tuned for updates!

Image details: Model Room (2003) by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Elnar Thorstein. Photo: Peter Otto, Tate Modern, London.