Paper discussed as part of the Performance and VR working group at the American Society for Theatre Research conference, November 1 2026. The working group met twice, first in breakout groups to discuss individual papers, then as a plenary session to review the key concerns and ideas from each group. The main theme of the working group was “taking stock”; rethinking the group’s 6-year journey.
This was a highly productive session, with a range of concerns including epistemology and the prevalence of speculative futures in performance; the state of the archive in virtual reconstructions of the past; the rapid development of sound and its aesthetic qualities in VR; shared space and coercive structures; rethinking interconnections between computer systems and performance practices (increasing interdiscplinarity); and questioning pedagogic needs in the field.
Below is the abstract for my paper.
Abstract
Is to exist to be remembered? Is what is not recorded not remembered? Do humans now dream of electric sheep? In Find WiiLii (GiiÖii / Ferryman Collective, 2023), audiences are recruited by a fictional corporation to collect human memory fragments that have been dislodged during teleportation. Those memories or ‘WiiLiis’, now statue-like, are exploited for commercial purposes. They become database objects stripped of the social contexts that once gave them meaning. In Deep Sea Aria (Studio Aki / Ao Mihanada, 2025), a woman who uploads her consciousness to a digital city is forced to forego her memories as the price for digital existence. In a final act of resistance, the audience witnesses her shard-like memories momentarily recombined through song, before she undergoes total erasure.
Post-pandemic VR theatre has emerged as a site where different memory formations intertwine. In the field of digital memory studies, a dominant view of the cultural function of memory is that memory is inseparable from the communication technologies that store and transmit it. This has been described as the move from collective to connective memory (Hoskins 2011). If collective memory is a function of embodied social practice by communities of rememberers (Halbwachs 1950), through lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984) and in relation to the archival drive that makes forgetting the hidden condition of every act of preservation (Derrida 1994), connective memory is a function of the digital archive; of unfathomable silos of data which transcend institutional boundaries linking users who co-produce and reshape representations of the past in an ongoing real-time process of production and consumption in the present. Connective memory is a form of ‘database consumption’ in which, following Hiroki Azuma, the grand narratives that once organised collective identity are replaced by the accumulation and recombination of decontextualised fragments, and in which VR theatre, running on cloud-built, code-stored, asset-based, platform-distributed worlds, is already operating, regardless of the critical intent of its practitioners. At the same time, VR theatre also features the embodied, ephemeral, and co-present memory of live performance (Taylor 2003), which is a formation that emphasizes presence over network connectivity, and witnessing over consumption, in response to moments that cannot be replayed.
This paper aims to take stock of how scholars have framed the shifting functions of memory in post-pandemic VR performance, and explores these views through readings of the two aforementioned VRChat productions, which explicitly stage memory loss as a structural condition of digital existence.
