Anchorhold Afference: Virtual Reality, Radical Compassion, and Embodied Positionality

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This work situates the potential of empathy and affective application in VR systems - as well as explore the role of gamified spaces through digital humanities and critical making. We argue that the material infrastructure of VR technologies make Anchorhold Afference, a virtual reality model of Julian of Norwich’s anchorhold created by Author 1 with Unity and Oculus, an especially vivid experience. In a time when VR is conflated with video games and in which games are most traditionally associated with conquest, winning, and mastery, Anchorhold Afference opposes this and instead fosters radical compassion, as aligning with feminist media and data understandings, to invite users to an embodied experience. This work considers how VR technology can allow us to discover and evaluate the embodiment and materiality of isolation and confinement through a singular, unified and gamified experience, while also retrospectively considering the rhetorical emergence evoked through this process.