“New Immersive Screens: Form and Frame” by Dr Ariel Rogers, Northwestern University (online)


Virtual reality (VR) is often situated within a genealogy of immersive media across art, theatre, and film that are taken to eliminate or transgress a frame (whether aligned with a picture frame, a proscenium, or the edges of a screen). This talk, however, asks how we might instead consider VR and other immersive media as transforming the frame. To do this, it proposes that we move beyond thinking of the frame as a delimited view (and thus beyond the metaphor of the window) and focus instead on its basic operations, which have to do with supplying means of organization and delimitation. This shift in perspective makes it possible to analyze the framing function of even the most immersive of media, and it offers means of rethinking the parameters, operations, and histories of mediatic form.