This talk explores the transhistorical reverberations of immersive technology between contemporary and early modern China. Rather than identifying historical counterparts to specific digital technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), it highlights the theoretical potential of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century strange accounts in illuminating the ideas behind VR and other immersive technologies in a proto-digital era. These accounts, labeled as yi 異 (strange, marvelous), emphasize the mutual shaping of technology and perceptual experience in creating a sensation of immersion. Techniques like huanxi 幻戲 (illusion shows), mural painting, and writing transform everyday environments into realms blending reality and illusion, truth and lie, generating sensory stimuli beyond vision—such as sound, texture, and taste—to direct one’s attention. Immersion, or the state of huan 幻, is triggered at moments of cognitive uncertainty, when multi-sensory experiences defy common knowledge or perception. These accounts offer an alternative lens for understanding the essence of immersion, which straddles the familiar and the inexplicable, the mundane and the spiritual—not determined by, but reflected and responded to by evolving technology.

Jiayi Chen is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai. Her research focuses on early modern Chinese literature and culture, particularly their intersections with game studies, media studies, and the history of books and reading. Her current book manuscript, tentatively titled The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China, explores the critical potential of gaming leveraged by the early modern public in China to reflect on how they read, learned, and thought, thereby cultivating new epistemological perspectives for navigating reality.

Introduction by Lala Zuo, Director of Digital Heritage Lab, Area Head of Global China Studies, Associate Professor of Art History, NYU Shanghai.

Commentator: Xingchen Zhang, Interactive Media Arts (IMA) Foundation Coordinator, Clinical Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA), NYU Shanghai.