"Visualising Affect Using Virtual Reality"

by Polly Card & Michelle Ruiz | Xchanges 12.2/13.1

📋 Contents

Introduction
Context
Positionality & Rationale
Experiencing the World From A New Perspective
The Film
The Film Cont.
Works Cited

Introduction

“Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way.”

—Dead Poets Society, 1989

In this scene from Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams’ character invites his students to climb onto his desk to view the classroom from a new perspective.

The text on the following pages and the YouTube film included on this page all intent to invoke this “new perspective.” The film, entitled The Ideological Clarity Machine (ICM), is a short 360 film that follows the day in the life of a transborder student attending community college. It was produced to elicit greater empathy and commitment to supporting men of color in community college.

The film dramatises the experience of transborder students. We interviewed a number of transborder students, including Demitri (see Image 1), and synthesize their experiences into a singular cohesive narrative featuring a singular protagonist. The film’s narrative follows a male Latino student from his home in Tijuana, over the border crossing into California, to community college, then to his place of work and back across the border to Tijuana. The film is multimodal: we see the student’s journey, hear his thoughts through narrative voice over, and use graphics to explore the ideology depicted in the scenes.

Demitri, transborder student — Figure 1: “You’re talking about a 4 hour commute to go to school, it’s daunting, and an exhausting, stressful way to live – but you gotta do, what you gotta do right?” — Demitri, Transborder Student, 2017

The Ideological Clarity Machine can be viewed here:

For best results use Google Cardboard and view in the YouTube app.

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