September 7th, 2020
Image: September 7th, 2020 by Cait S. Kirby
written by Miranda Allegar
Audience engagement takes many forms, now more than ever in hopes of circumventing the physical proximity the phrase might initially conjure up. Though falling outside of the world of “live” performance and theater, one unusual route to engagement explored is that of the virtual simulation, honed for emotional impact by Cait S. Kirby, a PhD student at Vanderbilt University, in her timely web-based exploration of a day-in-the-life on a college campus in the fall of 2020.
As the viral caseload continues to rise across the United States well into the summer, the conversation now turns to education, to the densely-packed, high-touch environments we call classrooms and the ripple effects of re-opening through students, teachers, and communities at large. Kirby’s piece focuses in on higher education, carrying with it the additional implications of graduate student life, research, and a significant international presence.
The site walks viewers through one of three avenues with limited detail at the outset. One explores a day as either an undergraduate student, a professor, or a teaching assistant. As the simulation unfolds and the user makes choices about their day, the stark changes imposed by life under COVID-19 become apparent and the identities of the user’s characters emerge. For instance, from the unassuming “waking up” scenario of the undergraduate, one soon learns their character uses a wheelchair, has a stutter, struggles with depression and anxiety, and is transgender. The professor character lives with an immunocompromised family member, struggles with hearing loss, and comes up against the “new normal” of life in a lecture hall. The graduate student faces extra responsibilities, the difficulties of childcare, and limitations in personal protective equipment.
In doing so, Kirby deftly highlights the intersectionality of individual identities with the change in lifestyle the pandemic entails. Her use of the second-person point of view and the slow reveal of the identifiers of the characters delicately builds empathy as the viewer comes to identify their own choices with the persona laid out on-screen. Yet, as she describes in her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the viewer’s final interpretation of the piece and of school re-openings more broadly remains entirely their own. As harsh as the world she describes may seem, it is a reality soon to be unfolded. Any value judgment raised by the questions she asks are coincidental.
Further still, Kirby utilizes the form to indirectly pose specific questions about the policies schools may unfold. She describes a college world with plexiglass screens between students in lecture halls, assigned time slots in dorm bathrooms, teaching assistants denied visas back to their schools, and limited hours at necessary locations like pharmacies. She asks about the invasion of privacy that will be necessitated in professor’s pleas for virtual instruction, about the burden of speaking up or living in danger placed on each campus member when confronted by someone without a mask, and about dealing with COVID-19 deaths in the lives of students. She identifies the physical impossibility of social distancing in a laboratory setting, the difficult trade-off between permitted absences in courses and an abundance of caution around symptoms, the enormous dependence created on technological capabilities.
Most powerfully, however, Kirby poses two more questions with the final image in each sequence as each individual finally faces the results of a virus test: what will you do when it happens to you? In this simulation, this is not an ‘if,’ but an unflinching and definitive ‘when.’ Even when a character tests negative, the reminder lingers that the rest of the semester still stretches on ahead. Each flashpoint of the day, each anxious thought will be repeated innumerable times. Then, what is the value of living like this? Is it worth it? As the simulation concludes, “for the good of the students, they won’t let you take your classes online. But what about you?”
