Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that allows immersion and embodiment. It makes it possible for someone to transcend the confines of their own body and adopt another character’s point of view. Clouds over Sidra (2015), a 360-degree documentary video produced by the United Nations, provides such a virtual experience. It allows viewers to peek into the life of 12-year-old Sidra, a Syrian refugee housed in the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan, home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war. In his popular Ted Talk, Chris Milk (2015), one of the makers, states: 

 

 

As Rosi Braidotti writes bodies are not only a socially constructed entity, but an embodied, embedded, relational and affective portal to the world. The embodied self, far from being the unitary point of epistemological verification of lived experiences, turns into a crowd of human and non-human housemates. For this reason, VR has been postulated as a ‘technology of feelings’, one that promotes compassion, connection and intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience the lives of other humans, for example distant sufferers such as migrants or refugees.

Humanitarian VR productions, such as Clouds over Sidra, celebrate the value of the embodied presence of other humans simulated by this advanced technology. Yet, critics point out to the inherent bias of the technology itself as “humanitarian VR is an ambivalent sensory experience of bodily absence triggered by its technological limits” (Zimanyi and Ben Ayoun, 2019). Humanitarian VR should seek to move beyond provoking feelings on the part of the spectator to raising the possibility of tangible action outside of the representative space, in order to avoid ceremonial cosmopolitanism.

This intervention intends to explore how ‘human’ is the human in humanitarian communication and whether the unprecedented success and efforts of UN VR campaigns for example, do not risk fabricating new ideas of the human that inherently disempower, dehumanize and infantilize the distant others, rethought as proximate and alike humans. The drive for innovation and technosolutionism should be understood within a socio-critical context in which humans from different backgrounds are considered, avoiding easy universalism and stereotypes.