When the virtual becomes actual : Indigenous ontologies within immersive reality environments

This paper considers the emergence of a virtual reality (VR) rock-art platform called PleitoVR, charting the creation of new potentialities cutting across archaeological, computing, and indigenous ontologies. The increasing use of VR to create immersive environments in cultural heritage and archaeological sectors calls into question how differing ontologies—understood through differing relationalities across human and nonhuman kinds—interplay within such newly created experiential platforms. We argue that the immersive platforms are not just simulacra of the archaeological sites, but are novel and new entities in and of themselves. This occurs through a recombination and reappraisal of divergent ontologies; these new entities emerge in the process of questioning the analytics of animacy, vitality, and agency as experienced through new spatial and, with the diffusion of such technology and social relations. We consider tensions between philosophical and indigenous ontologies with ontologies developed for information representation in computer science which are problematic due to the abstract nature of computing ontologies. However, the concepts of class, attributes, and instances present in object-oriented programming could provide a template for comparing and evaluating emergent entities and their ontological relationship with pre-existing archaeology. Here, we outline this process through exploring a newly created VR environment of a magnificent hunter-gatherer rock art site in Southern California. We then move to consider how new immersive spaces create novel entities through which new ontological relations can be actualized.