BASE SPACE: Resisting U.S. Militarization in the Pacific with Immersive VR Poetry
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 2:15 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 3:15 PM
Location
Narrative & Worlds
Abstract
BASE SPACE is a digital manuscript-in-progress of immersive VR poems set in and around U.S. military installations in the Pacific region. The project’s poems explore the history, current consequences, and possible futures of the U.S. military presence by focusing on contested, liminal spaces including perimeter fence zones, construction projects co-sponsored by the U.S. and host governments, and bodies of water that extend contiguously alongside on- and off-base land surfaces. The poems are composed using A-Frame and set inside spherical photographs of these sites. When a reader views the poems in 3D, the poems extend panoramically around, above, and below. By moving their head and body, a reader can navigate the environment and the text within it. In order to ground this sense of embodied presence in the historical and political context of each site, the project combines the medium of immersive VR with the methodology of documentary poetry. BASE SPACE’s poems draw on materials including oral histories, land use records, and bilateral agreements establishing sovereignty rights, among others. In this talk, I’ll discuss a series of poems set in Okinawa and South Korea that invite readers to make visceral connections between specific militarized places, the individual and communal memories of the people who have inhabited them, and the complex interpersonal, environmental, and geopolitical effects of the ongoing U.S. occupation of sites across the Pacific. Ultimately, the poems press us not only to recall who and what the bases have displaced, but also to identify what, exactly, is there even now that escapes their control, and to imagine what else could be there after they are gone. Electronic literature can uniquely contribute to demilitarization and decolonization movements, I suggest, as well as to broader efforts to imagine and enact alternative futures, through immersive projects like BASE SPACE.
Recommended Citation
Nogues, Collier, "BASE SPACE: Resisting U.S. Militarization in the Pacific with Immersive VR Poetry" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 15.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/narrativeandworlds/schedule/15
BASE SPACE: Resisting U.S. Militarization in the Pacific with Immersive VR Poetry
Narrative & Worlds
BASE SPACE is a digital manuscript-in-progress of immersive VR poems set in and around U.S. military installations in the Pacific region. The project’s poems explore the history, current consequences, and possible futures of the U.S. military presence by focusing on contested, liminal spaces including perimeter fence zones, construction projects co-sponsored by the U.S. and host governments, and bodies of water that extend contiguously alongside on- and off-base land surfaces. The poems are composed using A-Frame and set inside spherical photographs of these sites. When a reader views the poems in 3D, the poems extend panoramically around, above, and below. By moving their head and body, a reader can navigate the environment and the text within it. In order to ground this sense of embodied presence in the historical and political context of each site, the project combines the medium of immersive VR with the methodology of documentary poetry. BASE SPACE’s poems draw on materials including oral histories, land use records, and bilateral agreements establishing sovereignty rights, among others. In this talk, I’ll discuss a series of poems set in Okinawa and South Korea that invite readers to make visceral connections between specific militarized places, the individual and communal memories of the people who have inhabited them, and the complex interpersonal, environmental, and geopolitical effects of the ongoing U.S. occupation of sites across the Pacific. Ultimately, the poems press us not only to recall who and what the bases have displaced, but also to identify what, exactly, is there even now that escapes their control, and to imagine what else could be there after they are gone. Electronic literature can uniquely contribute to demilitarization and decolonization movements, I suggest, as well as to broader efforts to imagine and enact alternative futures, through immersive projects like BASE SPACE.
Bio
Collier Nogues is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She writes at the intersection of digital and documentary poetics, with an emphasis on making connections across decolonization and demilitarization movements in the U.S. and in the Pacific. Her poetry collections include the hybrid print/interactive volume The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground (Drunken Boat, 2015) and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her creative and scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and her writing has appeared in Poetics, Jacket2, ASAPJournal, The Volta, At Length, Pleiades, jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Project, and elsewhere.