Rethinking Experience in a Virtual World
On November 25, 2026, from 10:15 AM to 4:00 PM, the Methodenwerkstatt »Phenomenology of the Virtual« at the Collaboration Space (GB 8|129) will explore how virtuality shapes our lifeworld and what phenomenological methods can reveal about these transformations. Through presentations, discussions, and a VR session, the workshop examines new modes of experience and the need to rethink key concepts in phenomenology. Registration required.
Computer-mediated applications that open up virtual spaces of interaction are transforming the ways in which we communicate, work, move through the world, and encounter both past and present culture as well as our own and others’ bodies. Virtuality is often associated with increased connectivity and productivity, as well as with enhanced possibilities of empathy and experience. At the same time, however, moments of irritation, intrusion, glitch, and estrangement also belong to the virtual.
In short, the virtual—far beyond virtual reality itself—permeates our postdigital lifeworld and shapes the way the world appears to us. Virtual lifeworlds are not exhausted by digital environments but also encompass historically and culturally constituted forms of worlding through which social orders, norms, and shared spaces of experience come into being. Investigating virtual lifeworlds and the question of how virtuality affects both what we experience and how we experience it therefore emerges as a genuinely phenomenological task. Virtual lifeworlds not only challenge established phenomenological accounts of perception, embodiment, and intersubjectivity; they also open up new modes of appearance and experience. Against this background, we must ask to what extent established phenomenological theories of temporality, intersubjectivity, self-consciousness, or violence retain their validity within virtual environments.
Likewise, we need to consider what a phenomenological approach to phenomena of the virtual might look like when fundamental conditions of interpersonal encounter—shared vulnerability as well as experiences of space and time—are profoundly shaped by technological mediation.
As part of this Methodenwerkstatt—a workshop dedicated to methodological questions—we invite participants to explore which phenomena of the virtual can be brought into view through which phenomenological methods. Our interest extends not only to novel or transformed phenomena made possible by digital technologies, but also to historical and cultural forms of virtual worlding and the constitution of shared spaces of social resonance, as well as to the methodological consequences these developments entail for phenomenological research. How can we approach virtual objects phenomenologically? What might eidetic variation look like in VR? Which concepts require revision—and what does it mean, more fundamentally, to practice phenomenology under the conditions of virtual experience?
Following short presentations by the speakers, we will discuss these and related questions together. As part of the workshop, the SFB’s Xtended Room will also provide an opportunity to put these questions to the test in practice by engaging in first-person VR experiences. These experiences will serve as a basis for reflecting a new on our questions and methodological approaches toward a phenomenology of the virtual.
