When the Virtual becomes Actual: Indigenous Ontologies within Immersive Reality Environments
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-18

This paper considers the emergence of virtual reality (VR), charting the creation of new potentialities cutting across archaeological, computing, and indigenous ontologies. The increasing use of VR to create immersive environments in cultural heritage and archaeological sectors calls into question how differing ontologies—understood through differing relationalities across human and non-human kinds—interplay within such newly created experiential platforms.  We argue that the immersive platforms are not just simulacra of the archaeological sites, but are novel and new entities in and of themselves. This occurs through  a  recombination  and  reappraisal  of  divergent  ontologies;  these  new  entities  emerge  in  the process of questioning the analytics of animacy, vitality, and agency as experienced through new spatial and,  with  the diffusion  of  such  technology,  social  relations.  Here,  we  outline  this  process  through exploring a newly created VR environment of a magnificent hunter-gatherer rock art site in Southern California.  We then move to consider how new immersive entities create a space through which new ontological relations can be actualized.

David  Robinson  (University  of  Central  Lancashire),  Colin  Rosemont (University   of   Oregon), Devlin   Gandy   (University   of   Cambridge) and Brendan Cassidy (University of Central Lancashire)

TAG Deva 2018
Session: Relational Approaches to Past Hunter-Gatherer Worlds