Virtual Drag

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Bennett, Beckwith & Payne, 2016, Virtual Drag, virtual reality, 10 minutes, supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, http://virtualdrag.net/ BACKGROUND Virtual reality is an emerging field of media with affordances beyond the paradigm of a 2D frame. At the time of making, most VR development was based on film or gaming. Featuring 3D scans of drag queens & kings, Virtual Drag sought to queer the process of making VR & explore potentials of an emergent medium. CONTRIBUTION If drag reveals gender identity as performative, through the making of Virtual Drag we were prompted to rethink the proposition of VR as a medium. We propose that drag offers useful pathways for rethinking the construction of virtual reality as a media paradigm by considering 'reality' as aspiration & contingent. SIGNIFICANCE Virtual Drag was recognised as contributing to VR as an artform through extensive international exhibition & media coverage. First shown at Testing Grounds, Midsumma Festival 2016; Virtual Drag was shown at Melbourne Queer Film Festival; ACMI; UNIT Festival, Berlin; Kaleidoscope Summer Showcase in London, New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Seoul, & San Francisco; Videonale Festival of Video & Time-Based Arts, Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Twist360, Seattle; DiGRA, Swinburne University; CinemaQ, Shanghai; amongst others. Online presentations included 360Vision app by Screen NSW; Thisisit in the UK; ACTIVATAR, Brooklyn; & the KaleidoscopeVR 360 channel where it gained over 20,000 plays within two weeks. Media coverage included Prosthetic Knowledge, Creators Project, Killscreen, Motherboard & Bennett was ia speaker on queer VR at SXSW in 2017. The project was included in The Additivist Cookbook, a compendium of artistic strategies utilizing 3D technology for activism, & Bennett & Beckwith authored a peer reviewed article "Queering virtual reality with drag realness: a case study of a creative investigation", Refractor