Join the Charles Babbage Institute and CBI Archives on Friday, Nov. 14 for a presentation by Lisa Messeri, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, about her new book, In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles.

Lunch provided starting at 11:30 a.m.

About the talk

How was it that, in the mid-2010s, virtual reality came to be seen by some as a technology that could repair the ever deepening rifts in social reality? The answer to this question lies in Los Angeles, where a vibrant community of storytellers and innovators posited that VR could bring about a better world by leveraging embodied experience as a way of knowing – and empathizing with – another. Such VR experiences simultaneously validated different realities while suggesting that, in forging understanding across difference, a common reality could be re-established.

This talk draws from In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke 2024), focusing on VR and the community that celebrated its “good” potentials as a prism through which larger questions about shifts in reality can be examined. “The unreal” is proposed as a way to think about reality’s fracturing, a condition that those in LA’s liberal, creative class felt acutely in the wake of #MeToo and amidst the barrage of Trump’s first presidency. While VR may no longer be the darling emerging technology, this recent historical example contains ample cautions as AI fills the slot VR had occupied and the cultural and political salience of Trumpism is as all-consuming as ever.

About the speaker

Lisa Messeri is an associate professor in sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. Her research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. She is the author of In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke 2024) and Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke 2016). Her research has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, PBS’s Nova Next, and Wired. Messeri received her PhD from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society.