VR and Empathy

 Chris Milk's TED Talk on VR machines and how it connects to human empathy. He managed to get extremely specific on the representation of VR frames and the meaning behind them, which I found very interesting, especially after we closed out the Rettberg text with divergent streams and then took the path of this TED talk about VR. VR puts us in the thick of it, where we can experience this human, almost tangible experience. And that is the point of immersive technology. In Milks talk, we are on a journey with him through his adolescence to how he went into virtual reality and creating it as an emotional immersive experience. It allowed me to make sense of the other VR experiences such as "Clouds Over Sidra" to experience the raw human emotion and creating different perspectives for users to feel and experience in a virtual realm. 

This is Not Private, describes the possibilities of empathy as "meta-language," which I thought was a fascinating term. It is used through the human face, and we can never see our faces outside of things like a mirror. The artist wanted the audience to disregard the barriers between languages to incorporate the emotional connection between the six people in this piece. I love the interactive element that allows audience members to paste their faces over the screen so that the stories each individual says can be understood on an emotional level, disregarding the language.