The Politics of Non-Representational Geography in Virtual Environments: Who’s intra-acting?

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Virtual environments, non-representational geography, politics of representation, politics of non-representation
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

This paper interrogates the non-representational politics of environments in virtual reality (VR).
In this paper, virtual environments (VEs) are considered not just as representative surfaces, but
as active, politically charged events: attention is directed towards the manifold socio-material
agents involved in the processual composition of these VEs. Due to VR’s capacity to provide
immersive, multisensory experiences of embodiment within a digital environment, VE’s
uniquely move beyond the representation by implicating the body in active relation to the
environment. Through interaction, action, and movement within a VE, the VR user becomes
co-producer of the VE experience. Congruently, a non-representational geographic practice
envisions the intra-relation of all components of environmental milieus as involved a process of
co-composition. Due to the applicability of this ethos to the case study of VEs, this paper
employs a non-representational lens to best explore their political form and function. The
non-representational politics of VEs are considered through the topic of accessibility and
distribution on two scales: (1) The individual scale, where access to a VE is determined by a
body’s physiological and sensorial capacities, and distributed differentially according to
embodied positionalities, and (2) the global scale, where VR technology is differentially
accessed in relation to an uneven and politically charged distribution of labor, capital, new
technologies, and internet access. When investigated on these two scales, the politicized nature
of access and distribution to VE’s offers insight into what types of human-environment
relationships take place in this emerging digitally-mediated arena for embodied intra-relation
with an environment