Virtual Nekuomanteia is an experimental immersive essay on the long history of media in the age of virtual reality. Developed in the Unreal game engine, the work is optimally experienced in a VR headset as a multi-level interactive environment. Virtual Nekuomanteia explores how the hermeneutic practices that have shaped textual and media studies share a lineage with hermeticism and more occult practices of communicating with the dead. The experience encompasses four spaces that graft locations important to the artist onto the Hellenistic world’s four sacred portals to the realms of the dead–Acheron, Avernus, Heracleia Pontica, and Tainaron. Users traverse the essay world through physical movement, teleportation, and encountering objects that trigger text, audio, video, and animated events. Online exhibition includes a narrative accompanied by highresolution images, headset capture videos, and 360-video panoramas of the main experience levels.

Here are links to downloadable VR panoramas of some of the spaces in Virtual Nekuomanteia:

As Friedrich Kittler notes, “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” Virtual Nekuomanteia traces this realm across a series of virtual spaces that correspond to ancient portals to the underworld. It invites the user traversing these spaces to reflect on a media history deeply entangled with necromantic rituals and deeply phantasmatic. As a modest intervention into a media ecosystem that encourages people to blindly spew truth claims untethered to common understanding or consequence, my project aims to conjure sacred space out of which we can imagine new ways of thinking about and making media.