Toward Embodied Collective Memory by Remediating Vernacular Photographs into Spatial Experience 38

This paper presents December 2022 Beijing , a VR work that remediates vernacular photographs of China’s COVID-19 reopening into embodied spatial encounters. It explores how the spatialization of fragmentary, private, and unevenly documented images can shift spectatorship from record-oriented viewing toward situated witnessing and reflection. The work spatializes vernacular photographs through single-image 3D Gaussian Splatting to construct immersive scenes. In cases where vernacular materials were unevenly recoverable, generative AI was used only as bounded inferential completion. Drawing on participant responses, the paper considers embodied re-encounter, empathy, and the low-fidelity aesthetic of 3D Gaussian Splatting as conditions for reflective, non-spectacular engagement.