Immersive Art and Cognition
SQ3: What are the psychological effects of different creative choices in immersive art?
ChatGPT prompt: “virtual reality non-fiction experience about climate change”
The empirical portion of this research project was initiated via my undergraduate Capstone project, Documentation for Documentarians (D4D). D4D (so far) is a proposal for value-added research into VR non-fiction experiences.
Non-fiction as a communicative medium exists on the border between art and science because it is responsible for organizing data into artistic narratives that are factual and reliable yet relatable and transformative. If we take data as anything that appears to represent reality, considering the way Futurism communicated data, I believe it is important to consider how our modern data-based art could similarly subconsciously construe today’s mass perception of reality. Based on literature about interactivity, storytelling, and media psychology, different media and design choices of each medium affect the way information is experienced, and thus internalized. As virtual reality grows as a creative medium, we must consider that the experience of information in VR, whether non-fictional or not, is incredibly designed — much more so than that of static painting and sculpture. It affords creators with more sensory data to communicate, and thus potentially manipulate, users’ understanding of reality. When using VR to communicate non-fictional information, it is thus incredibly important to understand how different creative choices affect the way a story is internalized. I propose we must establish through value-added experimentation a unified experience design framework for VR non-fiction. I hope this research could be useful for documentarians, culminating in a guide about how to decide which format and choices a VR non-fictional story should take in order to assure its ethicality and optimize its transformative potential.
*Note: I do not have formal research training yet, so this Capstone was more of a conceptual exploration than a formal proposal. I intend to revise and carry out these experiments once I know how to do so.*