Technological Façade: Virtual Reality, Los Angeles, and the Illusion of Depth

• In Event: Skimming the Surface: Re-thinking “Deep” Analyses.

Abstract

This paper asks how STS scholars might approach a surface adjacent concept like “façade.” Facades were the dominant infrastructure during the ethnographic work I carried out in Los Angeles with the virtual reality (VR) community in 2018. Movie sets are comprised of facades and these features play out interestingly across the city’s urban landscape. People I would encounter put on a façade when speaking with me, and I encountered a methodological challenge in digging below the surface. These ways of being in LA lead to the puzzle at the heart of this paper: how might VR be generatively understood as itself a façade? In other words, how might we think about a technology both as a product of the place in which it is produced and something which has no black boxes to open? VR in particular promises “depth” in so far that user experience is said to be immersive. At the same time, VR as experienced in a head mounted display, is the product of flat screens. This paper considers how some of the technological goals of the community (volumetric and room-scale VR experiences) are valued because they promise depth and yet the materiality of the technology remains flat. Façade “fools” one into thinking there is depth, but what if there is only the surface? Further, how can we elevate rather than denigrate facades so we don’t think of them as sites of folly but rather sites of generation.

Author

• Lisa Messeri, Yale University