Post 04 Reading Response
- Kiki Wu
- Oct 1, 2019
- 1 min read
Chapters 3 & 4, “Hedgehog Love: Engineering Feelings with Social Presence” and “Empathy vs. Intimacy: Why Good Stories Need Someone Else” in Future Presence, by Peter Rubin
Response
"I wonder how can I get the audience into the frame," said Chris Milk. This reminds me of the recent Netflix documentary Abstract, where the Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icenlandic multimedia artist, has been experimenting: how to get the audience participate into the storytelling and experience themselves. It may sounds not like a problem, as we are all interpreting stories around us in our own way, and our understandings of the story are actually having impacts in our emotions. Along with the concepts of intimacy and empathy in the book Future Presence, I think the method here is not simply inviting the audience to the story by merely giving them agency and let them explore, but finding a balance between the marriage of intimacy and empathy.
VR has its own magic in combining these two from a technological stand point: it's almost impossible for two people to share a headset, and the content itself is also always unique. Unlike a movie, which we can pass along to someone else. The intimate nature of VR provide a chance for us to be more emotionally engaged, more importantly, at our own pace of taking in information which will eventually form your own version of story that will invoke empathy from you.
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