ABSTRACT
Ariel Rogers addresses the contemporary experience of virtual reality technology and its long and volatile relationship to ideas of immersion. The multiplication and pervasion of screens has often been viewed as a break from previously dominant forms of screen engagement. Whereas viewers’ encounters with the twentieth-century cinema screen (conceived as singular and static) has typically been framed as an experience of centred space marked by fixity and transfixion, the experience of enclosure in multiple-screen environments has often been conceptualized via concepts of spatial fragmentation and information flow. Contemporary VR sets confound this distinction: not only are they ‘immersive’ and centring, they are also unanchored, breaking the tight identification of frame and screen that has dominated much of cinema’s history.
