One of the advantages of VR, according to its proponents, is how the experience can transcend time and place while allowing the viewer to recognise the interplay of familiar cultural elements. Cultural presence is the viewer's experience of being in a specific (familiar or unfamiliar) cultural context at a specific time (Champion, 2011); for example, a European viewer immersed in a VR work that simulates the Forbidden City of 200 years ago; ideally, the distance between the viewer and the work is collapsed when the viewer is immersed in the cultural context and this may change the viewer's preconceived perception about the Forbidden City.

In the previous chapter, I provided a critical perspective for looking at the production of digital immersive art and how viewers react to it as a cultural product. In many cases, there is a disparity between VR creators’ intentions and the audience's reception. Chris Milk (2015), an entrepreneur and immersive art creator, has a much-discussed assertation about audience experience in VR; he claims that VR creates ‘the ultimate empathy machine’ since it allows a user to empathise with another person deeply. However, some scholars and art critics claim that what the user has experienced is not real empathy since 360-degree video of VR is sometimes just a first-person point of view without a ‘phantom-subjective image’ (Hassan, 2020; Messham- Muir, 2018), and empathy requires a permeable boundary between ‘me and you’ allowing two people to mingle in a shared mental space (Rifkin, 2009). As I have discussed in the previous chapters, China's government see digital technology as a way to rejuvenate Chinese culture; and cultural institutions in China hope VR can augment viewers’ cultural experience. In light of the dynamics of digital immersive art production (as discussed in Chapter 5), I focus on whether there is a disparity between the cultural institutions’ display intention and the viewer's actual experience of VR.

In this chapter, I explore two questions: first, how does VR impact the viewer's cultural presence? Second, how do Chinese audiences react to how VR presents Chinese culture?

Journalism, and the news media it supplies, is a vital part of our societies’ cultures. Although it often purports to be neutral and objective and is widely perceived as such, it's actually a varied and complex phenomenon that is affected and shaped by many factors, including power and corporate influence. It is sometimes called the ‘fourth estate’, which supposedly acts as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog on the activities of government, a role that is important to a functioning democracy. While some do this consistently, others regularly betray the Fourth Estate principles because they represent the economic interests of the powerful:

The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

Commercial media in the private sphere is a prime example. If a company involved in the arms industry owns a media company, such as General Electric's ownership of the NBC TV network (and ties to Mobil) until 2013, it's almost inevitable that its editorial policies and the general thrust of its media stories and coverage will be unsympathetic towards and probably critical of any peace activism, if it covers it at all. It's also likely to be supportive of continuing high levels of defence spending because this benefits the corporation's profits.

Linked to this is usually support for hawkish foreign policies, military interventions in foreign countries, and militaristic solutions to problems such as terrorism. It will probably run positive stories on visits of politicians and entertainers to war zones, and will portray ‘our troops’ in a favourable light and ‘theirs’ in a negative light, contributing to a view of foreign peoples as ‘others’ or outsiders, and a threat to ‘our’ values and way of life, even if more objective studies show that most ethnicities share similar values.

Language affects not just how we communicate but how we think and behave. Our language doesn't only reflect our view of the world – it shapes it. For example, sexist language contributes to and maintains patriarchal systems of thought and behaviour, as does ‘mansplaining’, a term recently coined to describe the phenomenon of a man explaining something to a woman ‘in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, typically to a woman already knowledgeable about the topic’.

In another example, the widespread adoption of the innocuous and vague term ‘climate change’, rather than the more accurate ‘global warming’, was pushed by states with oil interests, such as Saudi Arabia and the United States. By diluting the urgency and obscuring the cause, this has delayed action.

Linguist Edward Sapir argued in 1921 that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of society. That is, language has a measurable influence on the formation of thought, which is a precursor to action leading to behaviours, policies and institutional practices. So, language is a powerful tool, and how we use it can make a significant difference to society and to how we think.

It can provide subtle or unconscious support for dominant paradigms on a widespread, everyday basis, or it can undermine them. For example, language can be used to exclude certain people or groups through the use of derogatory terms such as ‘wog’, ‘poof’, ‘nigger’ or ‘slut’. As a result of concerns about how this language can translate into bullying or encourage physical violence, there has been a strong push to outlaw such terms or at least make them socially unacceptable. This in turn has been denigrated, often from more conservative quarters of society, as ‘politically correct’ – supposedly because it limits people's freedom or dictates how they should speak. Others counter this by saying that such language is simply offensive and ‘politically wrong’. According to the Mental Health Commission in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW):

On an otherwise ordinary weekend afternoon in October 2016, I was out with some friends at a shopping plaza in the southern city of Shenzhen when an art exhibition attracted our attention. It surprised us to come across a spacious art gallery in a commercial retail environment. More surprising, however, was the subject itself. The exhibition featured the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the renowned French impressionist painter. The exhibition presented Renoir's masterpieces together with the photography-based artwork of his descendants. At one end of the gallery, a 3D-modelled interactive project displayed stories about the artist's life via a virtual reality (VR) headset. The interactive video was cartoonish and low resolution with occasionally dizzying moments. Afterwards, the viewing staff informed me that the immersive project was created by a Chinese team; they had hoped that VR would help viewers learn more about the artist and attract younger visitors.

Later, I realised that this awkward immersive experience was an example of an emerging trend. Policymakers were encouraging immersive art, entrepreneurs were joining in, and enthusiastic spectators were growing in numbers. In the course of my research, I came across many similar digital and immersive art projects under the aegis of ‘Digital China’, a large-scale government initiative that has generated capital inflows which have in turn advantaged innovation in the manufacturing sector.

Like many other countries and territories in recent years, the Chinese state uses policy models to direct innovation in the cultural and creative industries. The 2016 China Government Work Report (2016 年中国政府报告) (Li, 2016) highlighted the significance of digital technology for China. The central government subsequently proposed the concept of ‘digital creative industries’ (数字创意产业) (later amended in April 2017 to digital cultural industries). In December 2016, the State Council, China's primary administrative organ, listed digital creative industries—including equipment manufacturing and software development, digital and creative content creation, new media services, and services for content application—as one of five ‘Strategic Emerging Industries’ in the 13th Five-Year Plan for the nation's technological revolution and industrial transformation.

Olympic Games, Expos and major festival events provide nations with a global platform for showcasing cultural achievements. At the Olympic Games closing ceremonies, it has become a convention for the next host nation to introduce itself with artistic displays, usually in the form of dance and performances that are representative of the host city. This tradition began at the 1976 Summer Olympic Games (IOC, 2009). At the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, for instance, the renowned film director, Zhang Yimou, utilised advanced digital technology to draw attention to China's 5,000-year-old culture. The international news at the time reported a sudden rise in China's soft power. ARD (2008, as cited in Schneider, 2019, p. 110), Germany's main state TV channel, expressed surprise that the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony had not been ‘a propaganda show’.

Soft power is a term coined by the US political scientist Joseph Nye (1990). In public diplomacy, ‘the term usually describes a government's ability to influence foreign public opinion in its favour and to generate goodwill among the citizens of other countries for its foreign policy’ (Schneider, 2019, p. 205). In contrast to military power, economic power, and technological power (i.e. hard power), soft power is related to ideology, foreign aid and culture. Essentially, it is a form of national branding that emphasises resources ( Jullien, 2021; Pan, 2012; Sigley, 2015).

Today, many people hold the view that China is rejuvenating itself, changing the stereotype of a copycat nation (Made in China) and becoming an emergent technological power (Digital China). The origins of China's technological advance go back to the late 1980s when the four modernisations became part of statecraft. But technology was articulated most clearly in 2006 when the leadership announced that China would become an ‘innovative nation’ by 2020. In his summary report to the nation's Seventeenth National Congress in the following year, Hu Jintao, the former Chairman of the PRC, highlighted China's creative and innovative spirit and spoke positively about the role of digital technology in generating ‘cultural confidence’ (Xinhua, 2012).

About 90 per cent of movies, 68 per cent of video games, 60 per cent of television shows and 15 per cent of music videos have some form of violence, according to psychologist Caroline Fitzpatrick. In this chapter, we will examine the increasing violence of films (mainly English language) through a number of examples, including children's movies. We’ll also discuss how they are often deceptively advertised and poorly reviewed and classified, and how they may support structural, cultural and ecological violence. We’ll look at the reasons for and effects of this filmic violence, and explore ways of reducing it.

In the first movies made, violence was often merely alluded to, or occurred off-screen, or was handled subtly compared to what we are now used to. This caused the on-screen death rate to be very low – even though deaths still occurred as part of storylines. In the 1920s, it was distasteful to show someone being killed on screen, although it did happen occasionally. By the 1940s, violence in films was more prevalent, although it was used mainly to portray the evilness of characters and was often hidden.

In the years after World War II, several UK murders of women by men resulted in extremely light sentencing and even complete acquittals. Numerous popular books and films centred sympathetically on ‘war heroes emasculated by a post-war world and striking back at the women around them’. Examples include the movies They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) and The Flamingo Affair (1948), and the books The Pursuit of Purpose by Raymond English (1947) and A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor (1949).

With the introduction of Western movies, a movement towards more violent movies began, as thousands of ‘Indians’ and the odd bad cowboy were killed, with the killers showing little emotion or reflection on what they were doing. Western movies were also some of the first to show deaths openly, with blood and flesh-tearing gunshot noises often followed by slow and painful deaths.

Sometimes the line between fictional and real violence dissolves, as shown by accidental but lethal shootings on the sets of The Crow (1994) and Rust (not yet released).

History is an important aspect of culture and its transmission. Ranging from the distant past to the present moment, it is often passed on through museums and memorials which can be found in a diversity of places, from great palaces such as Versailles to humble sheds, from parks, statues and fountains in town squares down to small plaques. More subtly, it can also be encapsulated in the names of towns, streets and parks. Although often purporting to tell the objective truth, subjectivity usually exists in the choice of what narratives are portrayed, what stories are minimised or ignored, who tells those stories and how they are told. History and its institutions can support militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism and ableism. Alternatively, they can actively strive to counter them and to create positive peace. This chapter will explore these issues, firstly through an Australian lens before expanding to an international perspective to examine pro-peace museums, memorials, parks and gardens, and find lessons which are globally applicable.

The Militarisation of History

It has been argued that Australia's major cultural institutions are in crisis and its history is being militarised. History and culture writer Paul Daley claims that while there is no shortage of funding for upgrades to the Australian War Memorial, and more than $100 million is available for ‘a questionable ANZAC [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] “interpretive centre” in France’, a number of Australia's national cultural institutions, such as the National Museum of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Australian Democracy, National Film and Sound Archive, National Gallery of Australia and National Library, have faced major funding cuts. This, Daley argues,

The ANZAC myth continues to play a major role in Australian society. On 25 April 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers (ANZACs) formed part of an allied (Entente) expedition that attempted to capture the Gallipoli peninsula from the Ottoman Empire. After eight months of fighting, the expedition was abandoned in January 1916, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side.

This chapter outlines the project's overarching research approach and the methods undertaken to facilitate this approach. It explains the data collection and data analysis stages as part of the research design. To explore the implications of digital technology for China's rejuvenation and global cultural presence through art, I employed a multi-perspectival approach using an entirely qualitative methodology. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, Digital China lends itself to viewing digital immersive art as a cultural product via a political economy lens. An approach combining political economy and cultural studies is therefore appropriate. This multi-perspectival approach, which is often used in studies regarding media studies, cultural studies and creative industries, has three levels of analysis: the production and political economy of culture; the cultural text; and audience reception and effects (Kellner, 2011). This approach provides a reasonable and multiple analytical perspective for cross-checking claims against observational data in qualitative methodologies (Livingstone et al., 2008).

The digital world we live in challenges the foundations of political economy since digital technology accelerates the convergence of products and services as well as audiences and labour ( Jenkins, 2004). Cultural studies scholars Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) point out that cultural objects are diffused everywhere, including information, communications, branded products, financial services, media products, transport and leisure services. Their argument is that it is hard to differentiate between products and services as everything is digitalised. The rapid move to online on-demand content enables audiences to have more opportunities to choose cultural content and be involved in the production, so there is a tendency in research scholarship to focus on audience studies of culture. Nevertheless, some scholars (Croteau & Hoynes, 2013; Kellner, 2003) in the area of media culture and political economy studies have expressed concerns that the focus on audiences can lead to neglecting discussions of production in cultural studies.

A series of ongoing debates have ensued among scholars; those that focus on the control of production (political economy) (Fuchs, 2014) and those that identify the agency of the audience (cultural studies) (Hartley et al., 2015).

People's desire for playfulness is aroused by the use of advanced technology. Playfulness has played different roles across the ages. Cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1998) expands the concept of play into a more general picture, which includes the process of human evolution and cultural practice. He believes that playfulness is a fundamental function of human beings and their culture; in fact, it is its origin (Huizinga, 1998, as cited in Nielsen, 2009). However, playfulness seemed to weaken during the industrial epoch. Max Weber (1946) diagnoses the industrial age as one that is disenchanted with the world, where playfulness was separated from work, and people were not inclined to play anymore. More recently, some scholars suggest that the desire for playfulness seems to have returned, whereby Homo sapiens are once more Homo ludens (Jeon & Fishwick, 2017). With the affordance of digital technology, people use their smartphones for hunting monsters in their gardens (e.g. Pokémon Go, an AR mobile game) and children use controllers to paint in 3D space (e.g. Tilt Brush, a VR painting application). Playfulness seems to be an inseparable part of human beings. As Huizinga (1998, p. 3) notes, ‘You can deny seriousness, but not play’.

In this chapter, I draw on the concept of playfulness (play) to consider viewers’ illusionary experience of digital immersive art and question the authenticity of digital immersive art through the ambivalence of viewers’ perception of Chinese culture in terms of real artefacts and virtual works of art. In focus group discussions of the three case studies that I introduced in the previous chapter, viewers considered the VR experience to be game-like. Sometimes this game-like experience contradicts the perception of cultural presence. Playfulness, as an element of cultural practice, also has connections with illusion. Since the eighteenth century, playfulness has continually been defined by illusion (Scheuerl, 1997); ‘being at play […] means stepping into the imaginary sphere for a specific time without fully surrendering to it’ (2009). The famous hypothesis by aesthetician Friedrich Schiller (2004) even goes so far as to propose that art originated from playfulness.

Eighteenth-century explorers and settler colonials in Appalachia encountered massive old-growth forests and as early as 1742 discovered coal deposits alongside a river in West Virginia, marking the beginning of a highly covetous or vampiric approach to the region's natural resources that has shaped Appalachia ever since. From deforestation to deep coal mining, and from mountaintop removal (MTR) to fracking, time and again an extractive logic has been applied to the region, a logic defined by profit margins and callous disregard for the health of the environment and local communities.

All too often when outsiders think of Appalachia, they struggle to see beyond stereotypes to acknowledge the costs of fossil fuel extraction. Instead, and by a cynical sleight of hand, rural Appalachia and its people are viewed as a foreboding threat, which neatly serves to deflect from the real horrors of extraction. Such misapprehensions are tightly woven into the popular imagination because it is more comforting to accept that rural Appalachians are gun-toting, toothless terrors, than it is to expose and recognize the real monster in the room. That monster, of course, is generated by extraction. In his work specifically on rural horror in Appalachia, McClanahan asks, “What if the horrifying reality of the rural is a result of the ways that those landscapes and people have been exploited and harmed by human activity and capital?” For McClanahan, extraction wreaks havoc and devastation on both people and the environment, therefore across Appalachian literature extraction and the gothic are symbiotic, resulting in a body of work that writes back against fossil fuel extractivism, exposing its horrors and inequity.

Indeed, in her work on extraction and British literature, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues that “literary form and genre produce and extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding because of the deep and durational qualities of discourse.” It is, she suggests, the “durational qualities of lan-guage, genre, and form” that ensures “literature engages with environmental materiality across time, and for this reason it is a crucial archive for understanding the relation between environmental history and environmental crises today.”

Geographic location is a vital component in British Gothic literature, and the location of Gothic fiction has been of perennial interest among critics. If one looks at the Gothic locations chosen by British writers, including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and a host of imitative Minerva Press novelists, Southern Europe was a popular setting. From a British Protestant perspective, the perception of Catholicism was adversarial, shaped by the cultural, religious, and political climate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cannon Schmitt has coined the term ‘alien nation’ to describe Gothic texts that establish a location culturally opposite to the writer's position, helping to conceptualise a sense of national identity. Further afield in fictional space, William Beckford's Islamic Arabo-Persian setting in Vathek (1786) capitalises on the British fascination with Oriental settings. We may observe how the legends and mythology associated with these places are made vehicles of terror and the supernatural. However, it would be a critical cliché to confine the genre to just fantasised regions abroad; English and Scottish locations are also found in the early Gothic novels of Clara Reeve and James Hogg. Within these locales, one can observe that Gothic narratives are often intertwined with local legends and tales related to the setting. To borrow a formulation from Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy about Gothic texts, it is a discernible tendency that ‘space characteristically becomes historicised and history becomes spatialised’.

The focus of this book is on Nordic culture and its association with Anglophone Gothic texts. A key argument I will present is that the familiar concept of the Gothic ‘Other’ becomes difficult to uphold in relation to Nordic terror. This is because writers saw the Nordic tradition as a part of their own cultural and ethnic history. Nordic pagan religion and folklore were seen not only to preserve cultural elements of a broader Germanic ethnic heritage but also to represent a direct lineage to the British past, as Scandinavians were known to have settled in Britain. I propose that British writers tackled the depiction of Nordic terrors as an element in a complex discussion about their historical heritage and the part it played in shaping the contemporary nation.

Appalachia has played a critical role in the growth and progress of the national economy, but its gothic literature demands pause, time to question the costs of a relentless pursuit of growth, from the forced removal of Indigenous people to slavery, and from coal mining to the climate crisis. Of course, the climate crisis is arguably the most existential threat, and pushing beyond the term Anthropocene, Botting coins the term “Monstrocene” to encompass the human and non-human terrors and horrors of the climate crisis. Yet Botting cautions against the pitfalls of dark ecology and a tendency to frame the climate crisis in purely monstrous terms, concerned that climate monsters may “only serve to horrify and paralyze all thought, all imagination, all response.” However, in a region rendered monstrous in the popular imagination, Appalachian authors must turn to the monstrous, not to “paralyze,” but to expose the monster for what it really is and in the case of the climate crisis, the monster is partly formed by the waves of fossil fuel extraction that have wreaked destruction across the region.

The critical reflections on an extractive logic across Appalachian gothic literature are a repeated refrain, a ballad about the destruction of place and the devastating costs to the humans and non-humans. Sharae Deckard reminds us “capitalism is always in search of new commodity frontiers for extraction and appropriation,” and the alternate energy demands of the green transition continue to demand extraction. The lithium required especially for “electric vehicles and battery manufacturing” means the “demand for lithium” just in the United States, “is expected to grow more than six times by […] the end of the decade.” This demand is generating a new boom in Appalachian areas rich in lithium reserves: the federal government as well as several companies are investing in battery factories and electric car plants in the region. In economically depressed communities the prospect of new jobs as part of the green transition is vital, but in a region where extraction has come at great costs to the health of the environment and residents, there are grave concerns about the destructive impacts of this latest turn to Appalachia as a natural resource to be harnessed for the greater good. The question remains about whether the green transition can approach extraction any differently, especially when it is driven largely by the private sector.