Anja Kirschner

Immersive technology, in particular VR simulations and computer games, have an on-going history of being developed within the military and medical complex. They can be highly addictive and manipulate sense of self and lived reality, affecting unconscious and automatic brain processes directly (Väliaho).

My research claims that computational media also opens up another potential: that of being able to conceive of ana-mersive technologies, which break with the weaponised and totalising aesthetics of immersive simulations (Halpern).

I am developing the notion of anamersion: a multiversal queer feminist aesthetics through which to grasp plurality and multidimensionality (Golding) and counteract oppressive phantasms that structure much of human reality at present (Harrell) - both on the level of non-conscious brain processes and higher cognitive functions such as narrative imagination (Hayles).

Drawing on Gilbert Simondon's notion of individuation, which he applied to technical, psychic and collective processes as well as Roger Caillois writing on mimicry and legendary psychasthenia, my research focuses on the bleed of experiences of anxiety and depersonalisation triggered by the networked yet solitary conditions of contemporary media users and emancipatory forms of disindividuation emerging from anamersive encounters in art, writing and gaming (Unica Zürn, Kathy Acker, Porpentine Heartscape).