VR Stories of Travel and Exile: Forensic Storytelling and the Politics of Dynamic Framing

In this article, I analyse recent VR works that emphasize fictional or documentary stories of travel and exile,and thereby consider an active engagement with the environment crucial to the construction of narratives.In so doing, I re-examine and bring into dialogue three existing strands in film theory from the perspectiveof VR: an aesthetics of discovery (Andrew, 2007), the idea of liberal and embodied perception (Bazin 1953,Sobchack 2004) and an implied connection between film spectatorship and forensics (Benjamin 1931 &1939). I then propose forensics as a narrative model for VR storytelling, and thereby emphasize broaderepistemological and ideological implications of the discovering spectator. As in forensic research, a VRenvironment offers the spectator scenes in which each detail is potentially relevant to the story: meaning isthen achieved through the discovery of relevant pieces information.