VR Webinar: Does the Future have a Past?

Peter Otto delivers the 1st installment of our webinar series, Seeing Double: The Multiple Worlds of Virtual Reality, presented in partnership with the Digital Studio on 27 May 2020. REGISTRATIONS CLOSED.

Date and time: Wednesday 27 May 2020, 1:00-2:00PM AEST

Registration: Closed

Title: Does the future have a past? / New-old and old-new virtual realities

Description: Facebook's purchase of Oculus-VR in 2014 is the latest in a series of events (enabled by the ménage à trois of technological innovation, entrepreneurial CEO, and hopeful consumer) that were each thought at the time to open a new era in VR, which would leave the past behind. In this webinar, Professor Peter Otto argues that the roles we have in shaping our digital futures can only be understood in relation to a cultural field that includes histories of our non-digital virtual realities. Importantly, in the case of VR the 'new' has a very long history, which means that digital VR struggles to find its place within a world already cluttered with (arguably more sophisticated) digital and non-digital virtual realities.

In this webinar, Professor Otto will focus on three immersive/interactive environments:

  1. Thomas Hornor's Colosseum (1829), centred on his 'Panorama of London', which was designed to enable immersants to live, for extended periods of time, in an alternative reality
  2. the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, designed by Kenzo Tange (opened 1955), centred on a deeply-disturbing panorama of Hiroshima in ruins
  3. 'Teamlab Planets', a sequence of linked, digitally-generated panoramic environments, which opened in Tokyo in 2019

Presenter: Peter Otto is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne, Acting Head of the School of Culture and Communication, and Executive Director of the Research Unit in 'Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture'. His recent publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes (Romantic Circles, 2013); and William Blake: 21st-Century Oxford Authors (OUP 2018). He is currently completing a book on 'William Blake, Secularisation, and the History of Imagination', while also working on a project, funded by the ARC, on 'Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds'.

This webinar is part of the ERCC's 2020 Webinar Series, 'Seeing Double: The Multiple Worlds of Virtual Reality', and is presented in partnership with The University of Melbourne Digital Studio.

More Information

ERCC

er-cc@unimelb.edu.au

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