Servicing the Surface Economy, or: The Loneliness of the Virtual Reality

Speaker
Anne Lorimer
Postdoctoral Fellow in Rhetoric & Discourse Studies, Carnegie Mellon University

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Designers of interactive science museum exhibits take pains to ensure their exhibitry will provide pleasurable and enriching experiences for museum visitors. But visitors are not the only ones to interact with these exhibits regularly: museum staff must also do so, much more repetitively. How is their experience of technology structured by their occupational predicament?

This talk will examine one guide’s problematic relationship with the virtual reality exhibit he operates. This guide, Sebastian, constructs himself in part through his childhood desire to move into and explore the flattened background images on the back of cereal boxes. Yet he does not perceive this desire as in any way connected to, much less gratified by, his present post. Rather, he perceives himself as stuck to the surface of things: as a superficial persona co-ordinate with a phantasmagoria of consumer comforts. On the job, he feels unable to become authentic as a science educator: he cannot get “background” knowledge about the Virtual Reality exhibit he operates, from the exhibit itself. Off the job, he websurfs virtual communities built around Gothic representations of the supernatural, but having lost religion cannot imagine “how to get into the Gothic scene without being pseudo”, and wishes instead to literally enter fictional realms. Virtual reality technology contributes to Sebastian’s predicament insofar as this technology is embedded in aesthetic systems of mimesis and in political systems of wage labor and the service economy.

Speaker's Bio

Anne Lorimer’s work draws on fine-grained ethnography of linguistic, aesthetic, and other material practices to examine how people construct “reality” and agency in industrial capitalism. Her dissertation “Reality World” was based primarily on her fieldwork among visitors and staff at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, as well as on archival research and oral histories concerning related Chicago 19th and 20th century business spectacles. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in rhetoric and discourse studies at Carnegie Mellon.

Host
Jodi Forlizzi