Virtual Documentary: the Virtual Real and Its Rhetorical Legitimations

This dissertation’s primary objective is to interrogate the intersection of virtual reality and nonfiction media, expanding and troubling the rhetorical limits of “documentary” in order to better understand what role the concept of “reality” plays in contemporary political and cultural discourses. At the basis of my argument is the contention that documentary shares with virtual reality a truth claim, a legitimizing rhetorical position employed to specific, political and ethical ends. I make this connection along two parallel lines: first, I examine VR’s legitimizing rhetorical structures evidenced by academic, industrial, and cultural interlocutors; these rhetorical legitimations are embedded in the fabric of photographic and cinematic documentary practice, as well as the larger legitimizing ecosystem of cinema’s scientism. Second, I conceive of documentary and its new media expressions as their own productive force of the “virtual real”, a political reality that privileges the virtual as a conditioning element. Situating the objects of virtual documentary under the banners of its most repeated truth claims (immersion, presence, interaction, and embodiment), this project uses case studies to illuminate and illustrate the ways in which virtualizing technologies have rhetorically constituted the shape of the real in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It enacts an intervening epistemological framework that critiques and locates in virtual reality nonfictions the expressions of a liberal humanist technocratic worldview, delineating between which (political) realities are made possible and which must be forged through the failures of virtual documentary.