#1408: Documenting Arts & Cultural Trends in Social VR with The Metaculture Online Magazine by K. Guillory + The VRChat Origin Story

Voices of VR

K. Guillory (aka Aemeth) has been writing The Metaculture online magazine since August 13, 2021 with over 70 articles covering the latest trends in arts and culture on social VR platforms such as VRChat. She focuses primarily on the live music and performance scenes, but also has been tracking the historical evolution of the underground clubbing scene in VRChat, virtual fashion, as well as many other artistic trends from painting in VR to film in VR to VTubers. In fact, I mention some of her intrepid work in my own interviews with Starheart on VTubing and BabyBonito on painting within VR as her previous interviews on these topics and coverage on these trends came up they were continuing to evolve and be featured at the Raindance Immersive festival in 2023 and 2024. Guillory has been ahead of the curve in terms of tracking some of these trends of virtual culture before they get picked up and highlighted by other curators and virtual cultural critics and essayists. Guillory was inspired to start The Metaculture magazine from a conversation that I had with her on July 24, 2021 at Nanotopia's Mycelia exhibition in VRChat as a part of the AMAZE festival. She was sharing with me all sorts of insider tips on the underground dancing and clubbing scene with VRChat, and so I suggested to her that she find a way to archive, document, and publicly share more of this oral history knowledge as most of the information about the nuances of these hidden corners of the VRChat cultural scene were scattered across disparate Discord servers, ephemeral Twitter announcements, as well as insider community knowledge from knowing someone who knew someone about it all. Starting in 2021 and 2022 there started to be more and more YouTubers creating documentaries about VRChat's underground clubbing scene trend with Straszfilms' The Virtual Underground: An Introduction to VRChat's Rave Scene published May 5, 2021. Then Phia's The EXPLOSIVE Rise of VRChat Clubbing published her take on it on her The Virtual Reality Show channel on Mar 12, 2022. Then I actually conducted this interview with Guillory featured here on March 25, 2022 right as the zeitgeist about the clubbing scene started to explode. I knew she was tracking it very closely, and I wanted to get a bit of an insider's perspective on it all. Then a few weeks after I recorded my chat with Guillory, PBS Voices published their I Went Clubbing in Virtual Reality: Raves of VRChat on Apr 6, 2022, and then Guillory/Aemeth was featured as a subject matter expert on Resident Advisors' piece The music, venues and creators driving virtual reality clubbing that was featured on Sep 28, 2022. You might able to detect some of the parallels of how she tells me the story in this interview as well as some of the points that she also makes within the Resident Advisor video. The Origin Story of VRChat In the process of producing this episode, I came across this documentary by YouTuber Twice about the History of VRChat 2014-2022 that does a really great job of establishing the major platform developments, UI/UX changes, as well as turning points in the cultural evolution of the VRChat platform. Twice first came across VRChat in 2017, and so his video aggregates some archival footage before he started creating his own content, but for everything after 2017 he weaves his own personal history, footage, and memories on the platform to help flesh out the broader story of VRChat as a platform. This documentary inspired me to go on my own trip down memory lane as well as a entering into a bit of a rabbit hole of research into the origin story of VRChat itself, and so I wanted to share some of the results of my archeological dig here. I first ordered my Oculus Rift DK1 on January 1, 2014, and I received it about a week later. I along with many VR enthusiasts and VR developers ended up obsessively following the /r/Oculus subreddit as this where a critical mass of the community was congregating to share ...