In recent years, extended reality (XR) has become a more accessible multisensory filmmaking technology, recognised for its potential to transform contemporary storytelling practices. Whether 360-degree video recordings or entirely fabricated virtual realities, the idea of being immersed in spaces composed of geographical locations, social ecologies, and memories operates through a form of sensory emplacement with enveloping images and soundscapes.
The project Memory Futures is an ethnographic study of XR and 360-degree video that seeks to place the people traditionally behind the camera within the frame. By expanding the visual frame to include the author, XR can be re-imagined as a reflexive tool for exploring the project of making memory after violence and war. It seeks to connect the fields of memory and media studies through critical empiricism – a philosophical approach that emphasises knowledge gained from sensory experience, participant observation, and collaborative experimentation. Examining the anthropological practice of witnessing and evidencing, this approach explores what media can offer to research on memory and invites us to reimagine the role of authors and audiences as not mere consumers but as implicated subjects.
Ethnographic vignette
In 2015, The New York Times launched its VR platform with a documentary entitled “The Displaced” about three children from three war-torn countries who had been forced from their homes by violence and persecution. We are introduced to the children’s lives and memories through captions written into the space and accompanied by gloomy music playing in the background. We follow the children around their destroyed or inhospitable homes, their stories drenched in loss and pain. The intention is clear: Children playing among the rubble of wars fought by adults serve as poignant symbols of the unfolding tragedies in the world. The editor, Jake Silverstein, wrote in his introduction to the platform: “We decided to launch The Times’s virtual-reality efforts with these portraits because we recognise that this new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own. By creating a 360-degree environment that encircles the viewer, virtual reality creates the experience of being present within distant worlds, making it uniquely suited to projects, like this one, that speak to our senses of empathy and community.”
As a teacher and researcher in visual anthropology interested in why and how audio-visual media is used to narrate the afterlives of war, something about that expectation of its impact on audiences didn’t sit comfortably with me. I kept wondering about the means and ends of technologically produced notions of “being there” to evoke experiences of suffering. Part of it was the novelty of the technology that made me ask how real the rubble looked while six-year-old Oleg from Crimea/Ukraine was telling me about losing his home after the Russian annexation. Curiosity to peek into a destroyed and dangerous place motivated me to turn my back on Oleg to see what else I could find in this image. Would the effort of pretending that this was “real” create a sensory experience of the actual place and, by extension, empathy with the people there? For that, I missed the actual connection that I would have had with Oleg if he had looked back into my eyes and seen me. Perhaps it is not the authenticity of what’s ‘real’ that is XR’s offering here, but the questioning of the human pursuit to create such virtual ‘illusions’. What more is there to explore?
2D film shot in 360 video – forthcoming 2026
UNQUIET GROUND
The film *Unquiet Ground* takes us to the Peruvian Andes, where landscapes bear the scars of violence and war. Drawing on two decades of research, the director approaches the aftermath of the Peruvian Armed Conflict from her own experience. Shot with a 360-degree camera and presented in a two-dimensional frame, we meet people dedicated to remembering the “disappeared.” Whether digging into the soil for bones, constructing memorial sanctuaries, or conducting forensic identification of human remains, the work of memory after war traverses social, geographic, and spiritual boundaries. The film’s fractured, nonlinear visual language aims to challenge the idea of a single historical truth. The director’s continuous presence in the frame invites reflection on what it means to create and live by one’s own memories of war. *Unquiet Ground* suggests that war, even decades after the fighting has ended, remains an ongoing social reality—inhabited, remembered, and unresolved.
