Playing VR Against Itself. Immersive Environments between Hypermediation and Remediation

This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of empathy, illusion, and self-reflexivity within contemporary virtual reality (VR) storytelling. After outlining the ideological and technological premises that have led many artists and filmmakers to conceive of VR as an ›empathy machine‹, the essay questions this assumption by highlighting the structural contradictions inherent in immersive media. The first section analyses the affective and ideological implications of empathy-oriented VR projects, showing how their apparent immediacy conceals deeply mediated frameworks. The second and third sections then turn to two case studies – Michał Stankiewicz’s Wish You Were Here and John Hsu and Marco Lococo’s Great Hoax: The Moon Landing – that deliberately challenge the rhetoric of transparency by exposing, respectively, the illusion of immersion and the instability of authenticity. Through these analyses, the article proposes that VR’s artistic and critical potential lies not in its capacity to simulate presence or evoke compassion, but in its ability to reveal its own mediological and performative construction. In this way, the essay contributes to reframing the debate on immersive media from a rhetoric of empathy and immediacy to one of awareness, opacity, and creative reflexivity.