In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology, hailed for its potential to reshape how audiences perceive and engage with histories and memories of violent conflicts. As societies worldwide strive to address the legacies of trauma, conflict, and historical injustice, VR offers an experimental platform for witnessing and evidencing memory through immersive, interactive experiences. The project Memory Futures is an ethnographic exploration of the potential of VR as a collaborative tool to approximate and share notions of truth and justice in transitional societies through the lens of critical empiricism – a philosophical approach that emphasises knowledge derived from sensory experience, observation and experimentation.
VR experience – forthcoming 2025
HOW TO SEE IN THE DARK?
Step into the immersive 360 experience that journeys through the lingering legacies of Peru’s internal armed conflict. How to See in the Dark invites you to navigate landscapes scarred by violence and the unwillingness of some to forget. Whether a relative of a missing person, a forensic anthropologist, a state official, or a shaman, the work of memory cuts across social, geographical and spiritual territories.
Drawing on her decade-long ethnographic research in Peru, the director weaves a complex web of personal histories, historical narratives, and state intervention, reflecting on the experience of being implicated as a citizen, a scientist, and a person. War, she concludes, is not the consequence of a string of political events or violent episodes but an inhabited social structure, and there are people committed to dismantling it.
