Dr Jenna Ng and Oliver Tomkins win Special Jury Award at the Learning on Screen Awards at the BFI

The video essay was written and produced by Dr Jenna Ng (Senior Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media) and directed by Oliver Tomkins (Masters by Research student in Interactive Media), The New Virtuality: A Video Essay on the Disappearing Differences Between Real and Unreal explores the cultural and political significances of blurred boundaries across virtual and actual realities, specifically in terms of how they signal new directions in understanding the politics of misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery in the twenty-first century.   

Dr Jenna Ng, from the School of Arts and Creative Technologies (ACT) at the University of York, said: “Oliver and I are incredibly honoured to receive the Special Jury Prize at the Learning on Screen awards out of immensely strong competition. We are very grateful for funding support provided by XR Stories and the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media (now School of ACT). The New Virtuality reflects on computationally mediated mixed realities as an environment of media blur which sets out a new literacy for reading the significant cultural, social and political changes of the twenty-first century. The grasping of this literacy not only impacts how we may understand our world. It also revises the orientation of our truth values and identification of our moral spaces. We see this new virtuality at work right now as the world grapples with renewed moral regimes of truth and fakery as ushered in by AI systems such as ChatGPT which produce credible text indistinguishable from that written by a human. We are so pleased to be able to tell this story with our film and utterly delighted with the reception it has received.” 

Oliver Tomkins, director of the film, said: “Jenna came to me with a proposal too big to be confined to just the written word — this energetic, complicated audit of virtual unreality and its toll on us and our faculties and this video essay is just one slice of that brilliant boundary-defying idea. It's an honour to be recognised by Learning on Screen for my part in the project: this film made of digital debris about impersonating inhuman replicants, projections of protest, and horror movie monsters climbing out of the cages of our screens.”

Professor Marian Ursu, Professor of Interactive Media and Co-Director of XR Stories, commented: "I am delighted to see The New Virtuality receiving this prestigious award, which responds to our society’s renewed entering the era in which the boundary between the actual and the virtual is no longer absolute. This fundamental transformation makes it categorically necessary to re-evaluate our human condition itself, to re-discover and re-invent it. This essay does this brilliantly, by extending the understanding of “virtuality” from “transfer” to “vacillation” and thus questioning and exposing impacts of “the new virtuality” on our apprehensions and constructions of realities. True to its principles, the essay innovates also in expression, organically combining elements of Logos and Eros and admirably accompanying the exposition of the new concept with audiovisual colourings of its poetics." 

The video essay is part of a larger research project, an online multimedia creative work also co-authored by Jenna Ng and Oliver Tomkins, which explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real-time. Please see https://thenewvirtuality.com/ for more information.