Towards Proprioceptive Storytelling: Unfolding Perceptual Narrative Structures In a VR Documentary

This research-creation project explores how virtual reality's influence on the body's proprioception can enrich a film's relational performance beyond visual and auditory rhetoric toward the transmission of embodied signification. The paper provides an overview of the creation of the expanded documentary Homeland ofAliens, which uses a perception-based narrative enabled by virtual reality's aesthetic and phenomenological affordances.As aesthetic concepts connect to notions of perception, taste, and feeling, the paper includes a framework for virtual aesthetics articulated through existing analyses of aesthetics. Virtual reality can effectively build a world of narrative that relies upon perception since signification forms within the viewer, who must dwell in their resources of embodied emotion, building a relationship with imagery, dreams, and memory. This research engages with its inquiry not only as a way of producing but as a way of experiencing knowledge.