Writing the Virtual: Diverse Modes of Development in Cinematic Virtual Reality

In order to speak of CVR as an emergent paradigm of practice, one must develop a vocabulary concomitant with its formal and aesthetic principles—its operative and experiential ground rules. Towards the end, this chapter offers a historiography of practice, that traces the development of ideas and evolution of form in this emergent medium, through a close reading of some early trailblazing works. While Morton Heilig’s Sensorama of the late 1950s, and Char Davies’ Osmose (1995) may be considered early precedents of CVR as we know it today, it is around 2015, with VR consumer headsets becoming widely available in the market, that a spurt of documentary and fiction content begins to proliferate in this fledgling medium. Among them Notes on Blindness (2016) Invasion (2016) and Testimony (2017) stand out for shaping CVR discourse in terms of their development process, the nascent screenwriting concepts they employ, and the experience design they propose. In each instance the approach of the CVR writer-designer tends towards an aesthetics of revelation and epiphany rather than purgation and catharsis as I will show, suggesting that this is the new paradigm that CVR heralds.