Abstract

Virtual reality allows participants to experience immersive perspective-taking which is key to stimulate empathy and emotion sharedness. Immersive interaction performed by the participants is examined in this article as an experience of cultural embodiment. Following a biosemiotic approach to culture, the study examines the virtual reality movie Waves of Grace qualitatively. It seeks to trace how participants’ interaction with the virtual worlds elicits in them a feeling of being embodied in a world of Ebola suffering that is outside the cultural paradigm of their real world. Biosemiotics provides a theoretical platform which helps in deconstructing the complexity of participants’ kinetic interactions within both physical and virtual spaces, and, in a way, reconstructing the concept of cultural embodiment. Correspondingly, the analysis yields that cultural embodiment is instantiated through kinetic movement and rhythmical interaction where participants are not only told about the story of Ebola but inhabit its umwelt and reconfigure it. Enacting an umwelt-to-umwelt interaction, participants not only alter the visual scenes and affect their affordances, but they also model subjective worlds that scaffold how they feel, and how they relate to the virtual situation. The findings suggest to update the metaphors used to understand the ‘viewing’ of suffering and sufferers (most notably among them is spectatorship of suffering and distant suffering). The world of suffering is embodied rather than communicated. The article makes a contribution to biosemiotic cultural studies by introducing the concept of physical-virtual kinetic rhythms to the notion of cultural embodiment.