Sensory Witnessing: VR, Memory, and the Politics of Military Violence

• In Event: Ghosts and Media Futures: Sovereignty, Memory, and Afterlives of Property

Abstract

In this presentation, I explore Gina Kim’s VR film trilogy—Bloodless, Tearless, and Comfortless—as a form of aesthetic intervention into media representations of military violence, particularly in the context of US military Comfort Women system in the Korean peninsula. Using sensory immersion and minimalist aesthetics, Kim's VR works invite us into ghostly spaces where violence is not witnessed but felt. Neda Atanasoski has argued for the need to recognize the “temporal and spatial ecologies of perceptible violence,” that go beyond the familiar images of military violence broadcast within the public sphere. Critiquing news media and journalistic accounts that have focused on explicit, graphic images that dehumanizes violence, Kim’s VR draws on the sensory, in particular aurality, to amplify the ways that the hidden violence of war and ongoing militarism shapes the everyday.

I situate this VR trilogy within a broader context where artists, activists, as well as the state, are turning to new technologies, such as VR and AI, to narrate histories of violence, positioning them as crucial tools in the ongoing battle over commemoration. Within this milieu my paper considers the interventions of everyday felt violence, offering new ways to think about memory, representation, and collective responsibility across the transpacific.

Author

• Jinah Kim, University of California Merced