I have been spending a lot of time lately diving into the “Of Other Realities” archive here, and it’s got me spiraling a bit regarding the current state of immersive non-fiction. Last night, I caught a showcase of VR projects that used AI-generated environments to “reconstruct” historical traumas. While the tech was undeniably slick, I couldn’t shake this weird, uncanny feeling. Are we actually documenting a reality, or are we just curating a digital hallucination?

It feels like the “Visible Evidence” we used to talk about—grainy 16mm film, the shaky handheld aesthetic of cinéma vérité—is being replaced by something much more polished and, frankly, terrifyingly malleable. When the “reality” is built from code and predictive algorithms, where does the testimony end and the simulation begin?

I’ve noticed this shift not just in the high-end festival circuit but in the way students and emerging researchers are approaching the craft. I was chatting with a colleague who mentors film students in Ontario, and she mentioned how the pressure to produce “perfect” theoretical frameworks is reaching a breaking point. She joked that half her class is so overwhelmed by the technical demands of 360-video and the heavy lifting of media theory that they’re constantly looking for Assignment Help Canada just to stay afloat with their written submissions. It’s a bit of a vibe shift, honestly. We’re asking creators to be ethnographers, coders, and scholars all at once, and something is starting to crack.

If the “Other Realities” we are exploring are purely synthetic, do they still hold the same moral weight as traditional documentary? Or are we just creating a new form of speculative fiction and slapping a “non-fiction” label on it because it’s based on a database?

I’m curious to know if any of you have seen a project recently that managed to use these “synthetic” tools without losing the human soul of the subject. Or are we just headed toward a future where “evidence” is whatever the most powerful GPU says it is? Let’s discuss—I’d love to hear some counter-arguments before I get too cynical about the whole thing.