Introduction
It is not easy to name our pain, to make it a location for theorizing
—bell hooks
Before the documentary Fly in Power (2023) was screened at the Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, the organizers led a breathing meditation to orient the audience toward the film’s intimate glimpse into migrant women’s lives. We were reminded that this moment was not only about the first-generation American mothers and massage workers featured in the film, but the generations of Asian women made victim to police and public authority, subject to stigmas projected on their bodily labor at transnational scales. My performance of A Place of Care in April 2021 was a response to the heightened racial violence in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic and the pervasive cultures of repression surrounding body and service work, and stood as a call for healing our relationships to bodily touch. This performance was a critical intervention to my fieldwork in social virtual reality (VR) and a methodological reorientation toward interiority, cultural memory, and, ultimately, the discovery of a collective voice.
The title of this article presents three keywords: “media art-ritual,” “feminist praxis,” and “diasporic worldmaking,” which are domains that characterize the performance of A Place of Care. Specifically, I am proposing the media art-ritual as a mode of virtual embodiment that transgresses the Avatar Dream of being an Ideal Self, as critiqued by Harrell and Lim (2017), and as one that opens up a relational view to 3D-virtual space and being aesthesis, sense-making liberated from what Mignolo and Vazquez call the “colonial matrix of power” (2013).
First, “media art-ritual” refers to a lineage of contemporary media arts practices that embody a transgressive folk poetic, such as through the invocation of musok, Korean folk religion, and the figuration of the mudang, a shaman-priestess, in avante-garde expression. Nam June Paik’s first solo exhibition in 1963 summons the mountain gods of Galerie Parnass, the home of the very goddesses called forth in Theresa Ha Kyung Cha’s 1982 novel Dictée, placed in dialogue with revolutionary women—mothers, martyrs, and activists for independence—in Korean cultural history. Media art-rituals in the Korean diasporic context emerge from a desire for ancestral connection, a cultural value rooted in the peninsula’s indigenous beliefs, and is akin to the “art-kut” termed by Sooran Choi as an artform performed to “free” oneself from “the social and political restraints on women and academist art,” often integrative of intra-ethnic spiritual codes effected within a performative world (2023). Our media art-rituals recognize the violence of everyday life, from personal to political domains, and view the performative space as one with transformative power.
“Feminist praxis” refers to a commitment to a feminist analytic in all of our teaching, artmaking, and research. bell hooks emphasizes how theory can serve a liberatory function, reparative of the “psychic fracture” caused by patriarchy and racism (1994). Seen this way, feminist praxis is fundamentally about reclaiming ways of thinking and knowing, from the psychoanalytic domains of language and cultural mythologies to the material-semiotic frameworks for how the body is entangled with the artifacts that make up digital technology and our 3D-virtual worlds. Through a diffractive reading of phenomena in social VR through my documentary and activist practice, I refigure the meaning of “social virtual reality” to center the lived realities of transcultural Asian women and the political formation of a feminist, cultural imaginary.
Finally, “diasporic worldmaking” refers to the production of new, ways of thinking and being rooted in diasporic histories and geopolitics. From the displacement caused by imperialism and war to the ongoing divide as embodied by the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, my notion of diaspora speaks to the experience of forced migration and search for ethnic belonging. Worldmaking is an alternative approach to the epistemic violence of “worldbuilding,” or colonial notions of “worlding,” critiqued by Spivak (1985). The worldmaking of media and performance artists like Paik and Cha, for instance, is of a post-national, virtual space of signifiers traveling across an “electronic superhighway” reaching pre-modern ontologies. Within the pedagogical space of my instructors Young Joo Lee and Agatha Park, two Korean women and media art educators, the making of A Place of Care brought forth a shared cultural consciousness about the history of sexual labor and state-sanctioned gender-based violence in modern Korea, as well as the forms of racism and voicelessness encountered by many Korean women abroad. In a sense, what I myself had found difficult in articulating on behalf of my maternal voice, of a transnational wartime marriage beginning my own family’s immigration story to the US, had found its language through A Place of Care, connecting my practice to ancestral belonging and a new political consciousness.
This article discusses A Place of Care as a case study of a media art-ritual, which I propose as a generative, energetic feminist praxis at the core of diasporic worldmaking. The performer takes on a hybrid role that is uniquely embodied within both physical and 3D-virtual space and acts as a mediator of the cultural imaginary, maternal history, and ancestral belief. This alternative embodiment within VR is a radical shift from Western, technocultural approaches that privilege empiricism, biometric phenomena and the “Avatar Dream,” which drives the engineering of virtual technologies to the image of an Ideal Self, reproducing social bias, colonial epistemologies, and the erasure of difference by consequence (Harrell and Lim 2017). Instead, I reimagine the Avatar Dream to a new imperative for virtual identity and of virtuality, all together—one that is not contained within any one body, material, or avatar alone but is relationally produced through multiple intersecting cultural imaginaries, material histories, and collective practices. bell hooks highlights the virtues of having a “critical awareness and engagement,” or a responsiveness to one’s sociopolitical surroundings (1994). This approach enables intra-ethnic interiority, “aesthesis” as a pre-Aesthetic way of being, and greater ethical attention toward the liveness of the world around us.
The Avatar Dream and Feminist Body Politics
Computer scientists and theorists Fox Harrell and Chong-U Lim in 2017 defined the “Avatar Dream” as “a culturally shared vision of a future in which, through the computer, people can become whomever or whatever we want to be.” A familiar rhetoric in the virtual reality and hardware development space as well as a science fiction trope, the Avatar Dream drives the development of games and virtual technologies without critical attention toward the “box effects,” or experiences emerging from the failure of classification systems, made along racial and gender lines (Harrell and Lim 2017). At the time of my analytic study of avatar maker ecologies in VRChat of 2018–2020, the .mmd-format 3D model as a standard for a humanoid figure over-saturated the user-generated VR content space in videos, 3D repositories, and in virtual reality (Kim 2021). From English-speaking learning tutorials, VTuber livestreams, and commentary on forums, to Japanese dating games and erotic web dramas, the anime-girl avatar was hard at work, moving transculturally throughout the web. A psychoanalytic reading might yield the anime figure as constitutive of the “ego ideal,” a narcissistic wish contained within the digital image itself, the avatar-child perhaps being the “perfect human” we seek to recover that was lost in the womb. The spillage of an archetypal image, such as a 16-year-old school girl, makes apparent a certain “social womb” embraced by its community, a sort of childlike, libidinal space close to their “local gods,” in this case, a pop idol such as Hatsune Miku (Rao 2015). Taboos and myths of purity proliferate in her image, and these perversions are in part the cause of her “stickiness” and popular appeal (Ahmed 2004). Perhaps it is both a strong ambivalence, or more so, an immense attachment toward “moe elements,” such as “a particular way of speaking, settings, stereotypical narrative development, and the specific curves of a figurine,” that produces the iconic value of the virtual girl in a hetero-patriarchical digital economy (Azuma 2009).
Despite the notion of the “openness” often spoken of in the early web and metaverse of today, the Dream of platform democracy and participatory culture may actually not be as inclusive and emergent as promised, but rather, concentrated within particular image economies and forms of inclusion. As documented in a 2017 VRChat community forum, ENDGAME, normative dynamics of techno-culture may manifest as follows:
Host: How long have you been in the anime community?
Participant: Like, in VRChat?
Host: Yeah. Were you in an anime character primarily when you first joined?
Participant: No... When I first joined I had a default [inaudible] avatar. Eventually, someone made me a custom avatar and then I became anime.
[group laughter]
Host: So why? What drew you in that direction? That aesthetic choice?
Participant: Anime girls are pretty. [group laughter]
Participant: Yes, it's mainly aesthetic.1
“The rigs on anime girls look the best, at a technical level,” one user says, “anime girls are the easiest to find.”2To be a digital creator using free online tools for 3D design, however, also requires ignoring the pornographic results of searching “Korean melons” on 3D asset markets when searching for the fruit. As media scholar Noel Brett writes, 3D avatar livestreams and maker cultures reproduce common “heteronormative, cisgendered, and racialized tropes'' about Asian women’s bodies, demonstrating the persistence of these ideologies at the entry point of digital practices (2022). Ideologies governing digital culture are tied to a pervasive logic of nonconsent present in the making, sharing, and remixing of digital bodies, from revenge porn, deepfake, and image blackmail of South Korean Telegram cults, to the coercive “voodoo doll” Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) program run in a NYU dorm room on March 1993 (Heikkilä 2022; Hwang 2022; Dibel 1998). Learning how to create 3D avatars and participate in digital space requires one to confront, and tacitly “ignore,” the biases at its front gates. Digital space is not open and participatory in a neutral way, both at the level of making 3D avatars and embodying them in VR, but rather one predicated on exclusions difficult to articulate within cultures of normalization.
Michelle Cortese, an artist and researcher at Meta, has written with Andrea Zeller about regulatory design principles for body sovereignty in social VR after an influx of sexual harassment was reported on early social VR platforms (2022). In defining the experiential triggers of trauma in social VR, her work can be seen as a form of hybrid exposure therapy and empirical study of her lived experience with the aim of designing safer interfaces for virtual embodiment. In 2019, Cortese performed a series of four-hour performances over three days at a SoHo storefront in New York, interviewing VRChat users about their gender expression through the choice of embodying an anime girl avatar. Cortese’s study concludes with the ultimate insight that everyone loses from gender-normativity and that the virtual girl most visibly serves a function for toxic play between male users, though more expansive practices can be found in subgroups of queer and trans users as well (Cortese 2019).
The status of sovereignty of the anime girl in the avatar itself, however, remains in omission and largely unanswered, as does the stakes of the gendered or racial codes latent in its image. My fieldwork in social VR was colored by disdain for the blatant ornamentalism (“through the minute, the sartorial, the decorative, the prosthetic, and design”) and libidinal value placed on the digital body and Asia at large (Cheng 2021; Kim 2021). In that sense, for users like myself, the virtual girl was not yet posthuman, but still gendered, raced, and bound to ideological systems affecting broader life. The fetishism surrounding the virtual girl archetype and the conditions of virality was not just cultural fantasy nor permissible social norm, but rather, a greater symptom of sexual repression, imperialist exploit, and racial bias concurrent with the realities of targeted violence of Asian women. When a mass shooting in March 2021 took the lives of Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Young A. Yue, Delaina A. Yuan, Paul A. Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng in three Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, by reason of a “sex addiction” and gun violence, my inquiry shifted its focus to dynamics of gender-based trauma from a Korean diasporic perspective.
As written in a blog post by activist and research practitioner Yin Q, director of the documentary Fly in Power, the massage room is not a place of fetish, but of touch. Not of violence, but of care (Q 2021). The Korean spa and act of massage are to me associated with my sisters, mother, aunts, and girlfriends finding casual respite among ourselves in a healing space of feminist solidarity. Trauma, which speaks through the languages of body, of poetry and song, begins at the point of inarticulation. The writer and in many ways a media-ritualist Theresa Ha Kyung Cha explores this idea in her language of affect—a voice—between mother tongue and “martyred tongue,” forgetting and remembering, being and not being, and gone (Dumitrescu 2017). A Place of Care follows Cha’s media art-ritualist impulse by virtually assembling sinawi ritual music, the salp’uri dance (“sal'' referring to spiritual or emotional forces causing grief and “p’uri,” its resolution through cleansing and prayer), and 3D-virtual massage room together as a place to explore ethnic interiority and a new virtuality of being.
Creating Immersive Artworlds and Digital Pedagogy
As a research practitioner in media arts, Young Joo Lee taught her studio course, Immersive Experience as Art, at Harvard University, with teaching artist Agatha Park using video conferencing, a social VR platform (VChat), and Oculus Quest headsets. “Consider immersion at sensorial, narrative, cultural, and political scales,” the class prompted, and “locate shifts in worldview and perceptions of reality.” Using private worlds in VRChat as a tool to develop work and gather during the pandemic, Lee’s approach of creating “immersive artworlds,” in which a “network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, and is what produces the meaning from which the artwork derives,” enabled critical thinking about the relationship between our shared virtual space and that of our everyday lives (Becker 2008). The background of Lee’s own artistic work draws from science fictional, historical, and mythological narratives to raise issues of migration, colonialism, and the identity of “the Other.” Akin to hooks’ position of the classroom being an opportunity for critical reflection on political orientation, Lee’s pedagogical practice enabled not only new relations between the body and virtual space to emerge, but also its implications on everyday life and activist practices outside of the classroom space.
Within social VR, once a degree of trust is established within the group, Lee mentions that “people suddenly lose their innate fear” in a way that brought out a unique sense of playfulness between classmates and peers—“you don’t see yourself, your normal body,” she said, “so people started to dance.”3 This connective affordance of social VR, predicated on a sense of trust and inclusion, enacts a procedural dynamic between not only the users but also the digital artifacts and space between them which together creates a shared, collective experience. “I think social VR is avant-garde in a way that it's similar to maybe like happenings or the Fluxus movement where, in the performance, the distance between the performer and the audience is much closer and you need the participants, or you need the audience for the performance to exist,” she says. Moreover, important to note is that this performative space is also shaped by the digital material—the avatars, 3D artifacts, and virtual enframings—that are also agents in relation to the way meaning and experience unfolds. It is through mutual recognition and acts of articulation from which a shared experience and language is then defined.
Throughout the course, Young Joo Lee and Agatha Park assisted each student with the development of a digital artwork. The mentorship of two feminists, ethnically Korean women with transnational backgrounds, enabled my own explorations of identity and ancestral connection to the Korean diaspora, as a Korean-American born in the United States. Addressing gender-based violence in Korean history and its relation to anti-Asian violence in the US in a way that centered healing and transformation became a culturally-situated practice that required a degree of intimacy and trust in the personal domain. In this way, the intra-ethnic interiority afforded by the immersive artworld of A Place of Care and the pedagogical space cultivated by Lee and Park was critical for a connection to cultural memory and new consciousness to emerge.
A Place of Care as Media Art-Ritual
The performance of A Place of Care begins with the performer in a VR headset and their field-of-view projected as a livestream in front of an online audience. Viewers are instructed to turn off their cameras and microphones. On screen, a video plays; the audience is moving through a tunnel, as they hear the police dispatch call of a woman calling 9–1-1 after shots fired at one of the sites attacked in the spa shootings.
Drawn into this moment of urgency, the viewer is brought into a 3D strip mall and a building with front doors of a spa resembling one of the impacted sites. The viewer watching the stream takes the point of view of an impossible spectator, like a ghost roaming at a site of death.
Once entering the spa, the users then hear the spatial audio of sinawi ritual music and pass a 360 video-sphere of a woman performing the salp’uri dance (“sal'' referring to negative spiritual or emotional forces causing grief and “p’uri,” its resolution through cleansing and prayer). The performance then continues into a 3D-virtual massage room.
In the 3D-virtual massage room, the performer begins an audio meditation, massaging their hands, neck, and shoulders, while inviting viewers to do the same. This act of massage brings self-touch back to the body within a virtual space, and produces a new embodied relation. The body is an anchor for a shift in consciousness at sensorial and political scales. The performance concludes by exiting the massage room as we hear an audio recording I recorded while passing Chinatown at a solidarity march with my friends Lauren Shin and Christopher Bhikoo, as we were walking along the sounds of traditional Korean pungmul drumming, echoes of Black Lives Matter, and the flurry of New York City. In a media art-ritual, virtuality becomes a rite.
Virtuality as Rite
The folk poetic of media art-rituals comes from Korean diasporic art practices that includes centrally the figure of the mudang, or a shaman in musok, an indigenous religion to the Korean peninsula, in the practice of kut, or ritual, which is deeply tied to cultural memory, the affect of political violence, and storytelling. The haewon chinhon kut of 2003, which translates to an “untying of vexed or restless spirits,” was a shamanic ritual for Korean “comfort women” and the decades of wartime sexual slavery ordained by Imperial Japan—a ritual that creates expression to the “inexpressible,” a modality Theresa Ha Kyung Cha also explores in her poetics before herself suffering assault and murder in New York by a parking lot security guard at her thirty-one years of age (Kim 2013). As a victim of violence as a woman and an ethnic minority, Cha herself too soon enters the virtual space of signifiers, a phantasm of cultural imagination. In 2018, Yang Song, dubbed by police as “Jane Doe Ponytail,” fell off a four-story building to her death in escape of the violence and violating assault of a police raid. The trauma of Asian women and our triggers are associated with generations of violence at the borders of migration, from the Korean women immigrating to the U.S. as war brides to sex workers at U.S. military bases with no legal protection. A Place of Care enacts a folk poetic by assembling the virtuality of rite against the virtuality of digital space, blending into “a space whose dynamic interrupts prior determining processes” and reorients, reimagines, and redirects the everyday circumstances of life (Kapferer 2004). This “phantasmagoric space of ritual virtuality,” Kapferer argues, is a site of virtual production; ritual dynamics after all are, as a form of sensorial immersion, “structuration of perception and of cognition” and domain where “particular human potentialities both of experience and of meaningful construction may be formed" (2004). As he writes:
the virtual of ritual is a thoroughgoing reality of its own, neither a simulacrum of realities external to ritual nor an alternative reality. It bears a connection to ordinary, lived realities, as depth to surface. I stress the virtual of rite as one in which the dynamics of cosmological, social, and personal construction—dynamics as a field of force—achieve their most intense concentration. (Kapferer 2004, 37)
These domains—cosmological, social, and personal—constitute the media art-ritual dynamic, coupled with the elemental, the “marine, celestial, volcanic and organic aspects” of sexual difference, as the Irigarayan might say, and a fundamental rethinking of “matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time,” sensorially “fish-like, bird-like or snake-like components which construct our corporeal existence” (Grosz 1989; Barad 2007). Key to the dynamics of media art-ritual is a materialist ontology grounded on animist belief and the praxis of being-with 3D virtual space. Being-with 3D virtual space is a non-hierarchical approach for existing relationally as a responsive agent within inter-media space and its various enframings of the world. The virtual embodiment afforded by the media art-ritual carries a capacity to alter, change, or transform the existential circumstances of nonritual realities, and are driven by life not solely attributable to the human agents.
The techno-orientalist imagery and infrastructural violence of digital space are not neutral phenomena, but deeply rooted ideological forces that have shaped modern and contemporary history in significant ways. To have the ghosts, or “phantasms” in the sense of computational media, from this past haunting the corners of our technological futures and persisting in the global imagination, as is the case of online worlds, destines the repetition of colonial violence and erasure of the voices and bodies in need of address (Harrell 2013). As Lee suggests, performance in social VR may be connected [to practices] such as shamanism where you can somehow imagine yourself as being connected to something like another role or another being.” Through the practice of diasporic worldmaking, moments of crisis find an ethic for healing, the honoring of ancestral memory, and allowing new forms of language to flourish.
Conclusion
This article describes media art-rituals as the core feminist praxis of diasporic worldmaking. Media art-rituals are a mode of virtual embodiment that transgresses the Avatar Dream of being an Ideal Self, and rather opens up a relational ontology of being-with the 3D-virtual world in non-hierarchical ways. Media art-rituals also carry a folk poetic of animist belief and the virtual embodiment of ancestral memory as stewarded by the mudang, a shaman figure, of indigenous folk religion. This integration of the personal to the political, as pushed forward by bell hooks, to the degree of political formation and racial consciousness against the policing of and violence on to Asian women in the United States, is a pedagogical approach led by Young Joo Lee’s use of immersive artworlds. The creation of the media artwork A Place of Care under the mentorship of Lee and Park enabled an exploration of intra-ethnic interiority, in particular, of gender-based trauma from within Korean diasporic cultural perspective. In effect, the immersive artworld created through this work reframed the notion of social virtual reality to center the bodies of ethnic women, bringing forth a new, agential framework for digital space as well as an activist praxis outside of the classroom.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge Dr. Fox Harrell and Dr. Manduhai Buyandelger whose patience and generosity made possible my research on avatars and virtual embodiment. Their coursework, expertise, and guidance throughout the pandemic shaped my understanding of virtuality and the impact of remote education in significant and formative ways.
