Feels Like Power is a collection of immersive VR poems about the long afterlives of the Pacific War.

The project’s poems are set primarily in and around U.S. military bases in Japan, Korea, Guam, Singapore, and the Philippines, but also include locations in the U.S. and in cyberspace.

The poems are written inside panoramic spherical photographs. When you read the poems in 3D, the poems extend panoramically around, above, and below you. By moving your head and body, you can navigate the environment and the text within it. This website enables VR within each poem for those who have VR headsets, but also features 2D versions which are accessible simply with a phone, tablet, or laptop.

The project invites you to experience poems spatially in each site, and to travel between sites to discover resonances and contrasts. What can we learn about war, about its overlap with domestic life, about history and humanity, from bringing these distinct places with their distinct histories into contact with each other?


Credits

This project is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council’s Early Career Grant 2024-2025 (project no. 24612523).

Images are sourced from Creative Commons licensed repositories, Google Street View, and the author’s archive. Some immersive poems have appeared in the following exhibitions:

DOKYU@MOCA Hishio Annex, Shodoshima, Japan. A public exhibition of works created in collaboration with the DOKYU Collective onsite at Shodoshima’s Hishio-no-sato Museum of Contemporary Art, December 2024.

The Fourth Cultural and Arts Festival of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, October 2024

Poems are composed using the open-source web framework A-Frame and the proprietary software 3DVista Virtual Tour Pro.