Lauren Connell-Whitney

1 Telling Stories In The Dark

This work explores how women might share knowledge through storytelling in a virtual space. I share my own stories of how feminism has shaped my life. Revealing how spaces of quiet and being alone, like one experiences in a virtual reality headset, can allow for reflective and generative knowledge sharing. The VR space, Aspasias, functions as a pilot project to bring these stories into the virtual space to share them with others and using a rhizomatic structure to navigate through the complexity and multiplicity of knowledge that makes its way into the shape of a story. The findings of this research contribute to how we might think of VR as a space for reflective (un)learning through personal narrative and how story can make its way into the virtual commons.

“This project evolved through research and iteration, but when the content really started to show itself was in writing stories about my life, using the metaphor of the rhizome as the guiding force behind moving the work forward. The VR space, called Aspasias was created as a place of quiet to experience the storytelling and research. A place where one might use the multiplicitous path of the rhizome to explore ideas in the dark.”