Posts tagged Robert-Yang

If we want to empathise, we must always question who really ‘benefits’ from our ‘empathy’. But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any type of critical reflection. To quote Wendy H. K. Chun’s excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you ‘walk in someone else’s shoes then you’ve taken their shoes’.8 If you won’t believe someone’s pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don’t actually care about their pain. I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The ‘embodied’ ‘transparent immediacy’ of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can not. In this political sense, VR can’t actually offer any embodiment, transparency or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.

via https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition_post/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes-then-youve-taken-their-shoes-empathy-machines-as-appropriation-machines/#ref8