The concept of presence, of being virtually and magically transported to a place, real or imagined, and having the feeling of truly being there, has always been and will continue to be, one of the chief selling points of virtual reality. But that concept of presence, and the value that VR gives to it, becomes much more complex when we’re talking about a place and an experience that no one would want to be present for. Such is the case when it comes to “[08:46]”, a new VR piece that recreates the events of September 11, 2001 from the point of view of an office worker in the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
I can only guess as to the motives behind the creation of “[08:46]”. Whatever they may be, it is ultimately the prerogative of its makers. It’s a free country and, as with so many controversial works of art, if you object to an experience that recreates 9/11 then you don’t have to watch it. But this does lead to the question of why I or anyone would want to experience such a terrible event and what we would hope to get out of it.
9/11 was more than fourteen years ago. At this point, you can vote and have little to no memory of 9/11. This distance means that 9/11 has become a piece of history and is treated as such. We care about history because we can learn from the events of the past; the successes that were achieved and how, the mistakes that were made and why. Historical narratives, for their part, seek to do all this while also humanizing and grounding these events; giving us the chance to really get to know the people involved so that we may personally identify and engage with those events and so come to understand them from an emotional level.
Emotional connection is maybe what the makers of “[08:46]” were after, a way to bring the event back out of the history books and to make it a part of our reality once again. This is understandable, precisely because VR’s brand of presence can get you closer than ever before to the human beings and the human interactions that help to define a historical event and our perception of it. But it’s when we arrive at this intention that we begin to discover obstacles and we realize there is a very big difference between experiencing an event in VR and hoping to understand it.
What “[08:46]” reveals is a brutal kind of simplicity in the way that we experience and perceive events as they happen around us, particularly the high-stakes events that usually form the basis for stories. The arc of the characters in “[08:46]” reflect this as they jolt from confusion to fear to panic to either acceptance or denial (or, I guess, neither). Charting that kind of journey is easy for VR, since so much of the experience revolves around real-time reactions to the things that you’re seeing around you. Visceral emotions like surprise and fear are right in VR’s wheelhouse. What is not, however, are the kinds of emotional states that follow: contemplation and analysis; a sense of the event placed in a grander context, removed from the experience of actually living in it.
That sort of emotional state is far less dependent on the events happening around you in the moment. It has a more internal kind of life and so if we’re hoping to investigate and explore a piece of history in virtual reality and not just relive it, the focus must be on that internal life. The thing we’re learning is that the concept of presence in VR is as much about an internal presence as an external one, as much about being in someone’s head as it is about being in some body or some place. And the point where this kind of intimacy meets with the crushing, objective reality of history is the place where VR will really excel.