Affect and Place Representation in Immersive Media: The Parragirls Past, Present project

The emergence of a genre of virtual reality at the nexus of human rights is arguably transforming the documentary testimonial genre into one of an affective experience. This is a field of research that raises fundamental questions on the relation between sensation, testimony, evidence and memory. This paper outlines an investigation into the affective potential of immersive media and visualisation technologies to produce appropriate subjectivities for difficult memory and traumatic experience. The 3D immersive project under discussion presents a digital reconstructed reality of the former Australian punitive child welfare institution, Parramatta Girls Home. In this paper, we delineate how we have used the unique aesthetic properties of ambisonic sound, point-cloud representation and scenes of photographic veracity, and how the apposition of these formats provides an encounter with memory itself. Five former residents of Parramatta Girls Home direct our path through a complex visual and ambisonic acoustic environment, a combination we suggest empowers these women to attest to the embodied experience of contested memory.