PERCEIVING EXTRACTIVELY IN THE APPLE VISION PRO Presented at the 2025 CITAMS Media Sociology Symposium

This presentation explored the extractive history of augmented and virtual reality devices, beginning with the 19th century stereoscope, as contributing to modern understandings of the “real” and colonial understandings of gender, power, and labor that continue in AR/VR devices today. Drawing on media studies and understandings of extraction to discuss the Apple Vision Pro or AVP, a wearable augmented reality headset released by Apple in 2024, this presentation frames the AVP as an extractive zone and as a device that constructs an extractive vision. The AVP marketing website acted as my main object of analysis as my focus is how Apple constructs the meaning of the AVP. This presentation approaches the Apple Vision Pro as both a visual technology with specific affordances that further extractive understandings of visual media and technology, and as a symptom of 19th century technologies of vision that formed along the contours of European colonialism.

Works Cited:

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke University Press Books, 2017.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2007.

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