Virtual Nekuomanteia

Virtual Nekuomanteia is an experimental immersive essay on the long history of media in the age of virtual reality. As Friedrich Kittler notes, “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” Virtual Nekuomanteia traces this realm across a series of virtual reality (VR)spaces that correspond to ancient portals to the underworld. It invites the user traversing these spaces to reflect on a media history deeply entangled with necromantic rituals and deeply phantasmatic. The experience encompasses four spaces that graft places meaningful to my life onto the Hellenistic world’s four sacred portals to the realms of the dead–Acheron, Avernus, Heracleia Pontica, and Tainaron. The aim of the experience is to conjure a collaboration among all those within in the space—living or non-living—and the technologies that sustain the encounter. In the VR experience, the user traverses the essay world through physical movement, teleportation, and encountering objects that trigger text, audio, video, and animated events. One can move through the essay sequentially or select different level experiences from a menu accessed via a hand controller.