Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence (2017) is a brief virtual reality (VR) piece that depicts the artist beating a man to death with a baseball bat. Wolfson uses the haptic possibilities of VR to rapidly induce nausea in the viewer, an act that both relies on empathetic aspects of VR simulation – ‘empathy’ here linked with its history in German aesthetic psychology as Einfühlung – and is a confrontational distancing that questions the politics of ‘empathetic’ immersion. Real Violence demonstrates how contemporary judgments of VR and empathy repeat debates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reinventing and emptying particular political/aesthetic strategies that have long characterized a strain of modernist art that uses the formal possibilities (and limits) of media in order to critique the very same possibilities (and limits). This article, through its discussion of Wolfson’s work, seeks to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today. It examines the limitations of immersion and emotional projection, along with the limitations of interpreting this work (and VR in general) as a means for enacting ‘progressive’ social and ideological change through the immersive, empathetic capacities of media. The article concludes by arguing that judgments of Real Violence (and the politics of ‘transgressive’ art more broadly) require assuming the will or intent of an artist who uses confrontation and transgression to ‘correct’ the experience of the viewer, which is something that cannot be assumed for either Wolfson or Real Violence, and rather his work is exemplary of emptying out the possibilities represented by both VR and critical aesthetic intervention.

中文翻译：

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同理心和恶心：虚拟现实和乔丹沃尔夫森的真实暴力

Jordan Wolfson 的 Real Violence (2017) 是一个简短的虚拟现实 (VR) 作品，描绘了艺术家用棒球棒将一名男子殴打致死的场景。沃尔夫森利用 VR 的触觉可能性在观众中迅速引起恶心，这种行为既依赖于 VR 模拟的移情方面——这里的“移情”与其在德国审美心理学中的历史有关 Einfühlung——并且是一种对抗性的距离，质疑“同理心”沉浸的政治。Real Violence 展示了当代对 VR 和移情的判断如何重复 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初的辩论，重塑和清空特定的政治/美学策略，这些策略长期以来一直是现代主义艺术的特征，这些策略使用媒体的形式可能性（和限制）为了批判同样的可能性（和限制）。本文，通过对 Wolfson 作品的讨论，试图找出并解决当今关于移情、越界对抗以及艺术和 VR 的社会功能的任何讨论中存在的复杂矛盾。它考察了沉浸感和情感投射的局限性，以及将这部作品（以及一般的 VR）解释为通过媒体的沉浸式、移情能力实现“渐进式”社会和意识形态变革的一种手段的局限性。文章最后指出，对真实暴力（以及更广泛的“越界”艺术的政治）的判断需要假设艺术家的意愿或意图，他使用对抗和越界来“纠正”观众的体验，这是不能假设为 Wolfson 或 Real Violence，