extfieldsofstudy: Medicine Psychology

text:
Redesign Me: Virtual Reality Experience of the Line of Life and Its Connection to a Healthier Self

Virtual Reality is used in various ways for creating a storytelling experience. It gives us the opportunity to imagine one’s life events as a story, and in settings that are intended to aid the self, such as treatment of trauma, anxiety, phobia, etc. This paper discusses the ways that challenging experiences change the way people perceive their life narratives and form their memories. This paper suggests that virtual reality (VR) can be used for the exploration of alternative scenarios in order to see one’s overall line of life in a new and healthier way. Considering the theoretical background of the narrative self, this research proposes a novel view of VR immersion as a medium for constructing a new storyline and attitude to the past. The approach would also influence attitudes regarding the present and future, and thus better shape the narrative of the self, which can lead to healthier life experiences.

Introduction
Virtual reality (VR) presents the opportunity for storytelling experiences [1][2][3][4] and representations of the self [5][6][7][8]; as such, it should also be considered a powerful tool for representing events that comprise people's memories. The features of VR have been a topic of analysis in various multidisciplinary studies [9][10][11][12][13][14]. This paper considers the philosophical idea of the narrative self [15][16][17], in addition to reviewing studies which have explored the impact of the virtual on the real self [18][19][20], to propose a novel view on the way the line of life is experienced and may be represented in VR. The line of life, which is an understanding of the self, forms as a narrative explanation of the events stored in the memory [21]. It is an abstract and personalized interpretation that can be represented in VR, and thus it can be analyzed. As VR applications are often meant to be used as entertainment [22,23] and as tools for deep narrative experiences, such as in games, it can effectively represent life events. The narrative nature of the self and the storytelling features of VR, as a tool of great flexibility, allow for movement through narratives the way traditional storytelling techniques do [24], thus forming a truly successful approach to a new look upon one's line of life.

Serious Applications of VR
VR is considered a practical tool in the field of healthcare research for treatment of various conditions, including several interventions for the reconstruction of life narratives. Increasingly, studies are exploring how VR can be used in therapeutic settings as a tool for exposure therapy and recovery [25][26][27]. However, this study focuses on ways of recreating past events and creating novel scenarios. Such exposure, with habituation purposes [28,29], is not the only way that VR can help in the quest for recovery and well-being. VR can also support visualization of one's memory of events or line of life with the purpose of recovering the self and its healthy narrative. In this way, recognition of patterns in the line of life may be enhanced such that one may gain a better understanding of one's life. This study also considers how ideas of reality and time are affected by challenging experiences and events that disrupt normal personal narratives.

VR for Training or Treatment
When VR is used for training or treatment [30][31][32][33], it can help a person to see events or emotions in a new light, perceive stories from a different angle, and/or reorder experiences in a more meaningful plotline. Such therapeutic applications of VR are considered to be treatment for serious health conditions (e.g., behavioral problems such as addictions) or to train a person for situations never experienced before (e.g., earthquake preparedness). However, this suggests VR could be applied in other ways, such as cultivating relaxation or offering viewpoints not visible otherwise, on testing problems [24] (Bucher, 2017). A person's perception of reality and self-identity can change drastically in response to challenging events [34,35]. VR can represent such events from a more objective [36], or at least observational, perspective [37], and with the help of a therapist it can reveal unconscious patterns and revise unhealthy perceptions.
The capacity of VR to help in the visualization of personal narratives and the creation of new stories within the original context is the background of this study [38]. The study explores the ways VR can aid in redesigning the line of life, helping the self-narrative, providing a different perspective, changing the perception of events, and reconstructing the line of life in a healthier way.

Reexperience and Recreation of the Line of Life
This study explored the prospects for using VR as a medium to recreate one's life story [38]. Drawing on the concept that self-narrative constitutes one's personal identity or self, recreation of the line of life through challenging situations can lead to an overall recreational effect on the self. As mentioned above, traumatic events change the way people perceive reality. Moreover, their memory is affected such that they become locked in the past and cannot envision their future [39,40]. People so affected can benefit from VR experiences when guided by a therapist, and specifically, they may regain a more objective view of their life story through the immersion and by construction of a healthier narrative meaning and explanation of their memories of key events [41][42][43]. This paper explores ways of visualizing one's life narrative in VR and specific methods of designing experiences for self-recreation.
In comparison to other studies, here the authors emphasize the role of the medium. VR provides the opportunity to present an individual with a number of options with a view to obtaining resolution and adding meaning to a life story through visualization of the memory of past events and imagining the overall line of life in a consistent and healthy way, rather than a damaged and broken one. In this sense, its contribution is in the quest for clearly sought story meaning and novel narration of the line of life, aiding in the search for meaning in the worst events and in personal evolution. This proposition is distinct from prior works on life representation in VR [44] or immersion effects on the self [45], and is also distinct from initiatives which do not consider the storytelling role of VR in the context of narrative therapy [46,47].

Self-Narrative and Line of Life
A philosophical account of human life regards us as narrative-generating machines, assuming the self to be the protagonist of such storylines [17]. Having this in mind, cases of psychological trauma may be regarded as a break in one's narrative line of life [38]. The self-narrative is used to attain meaning, and attaching it to life events often requires rearrangement of the life events according to their personal significance. Negative events may be of considerable significance, and if one has the strength to overcome them, they can lead to growth and become just as significant as positive events. In this way, explaining unfavorable events may lead to their integration into a meaningful higher-order narrative. However, some events are too deep in the unconscious mind and are thus too hard to integrate into a healthy narrative. People who suffer greatly from some kind of tragic event may be unable to integrate and attach meaning to them. In such cases, it is necessary to help the person to see a different explanation and imagine different lines of life, which will be perceived as different from the narrative breaker, and hence not as a break in the wholeness of self.
For example, often patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have difficulty living in the present [48]. Treatment of traumatic experiences needs to consider the way life has changed for the person experiencing trauma and how to interpret, explain, accept, and intertwine the traumatic happening into an overall and consistent line of life narrative. A traumatic event always damages human life to some degree; however, even so, a search for explanation and self-efficacy amid hardship can lead to resilience and growth [49]. This may be achieved by seeing one's overall life story from a different perspective and integrating the trauma as part of a different story rather than as a break in the existing story. Using explanatory mechanisms and ideas from storytelling that connect memory with emotion, one can step outside the narrative and attach different responses to certain events to change the tone of the story. Nowadays we have the VR tools to create new stories that are immersive and convincing such that they become a visible line of life which can be reassessed and charged with different explanations and meanings.

The VR Experience for Rearranging the Life Narrative
VR visualization of a line of life can help someone understand the challenges in their self-narrative. A healthy perception of one's life narrative helps someone to constitute a future self ( Figure 1). In the case of a broken narrative (e.g., the loss of some ability due to a traumatic event), the self-image projected into the future is not as clear or robust as that of a healthy person [50][51][52]. VR offers a new perspective [53], and so, during immersion, one's life vision can change. A vision of the future serves as a constitution of the self and a reassurance of one's life story.
Behav. Sci. 2019, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 10 positive events. In this way, explaining unfavorable events may lead to their integration into a meaningful higher-order narrative. However, some events are too deep in the unconscious mind and are thus too hard to integrate into a healthy narrative. People who suffer greatly from some kind of tragic event may be unable to integrate and attach meaning to them. In such cases, it is necessary to help the person to see a different explanation and imagine different lines of life, which will be perceived as different from the narrative breaker, and hence not as a break in the wholeness of self. For example, often patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have difficulty living in the present [48]. Treatment of traumatic experiences needs to consider the way life has changed for the person experiencing trauma and how to interpret, explain, accept, and intertwine the traumatic happening into an overall and consistent line of life narrative. A traumatic event always damages human life to some degree; however, even so, a search for explanation and self-efficacy amid hardship can lead to resilience and growth [49]. This may be achieved by seeing one's overall life story from a different perspective and integrating the trauma as part of a different story rather than as a break in the existing story. Using explanatory mechanisms and ideas from storytelling that connect memory with emotion, one can step outside the narrative and attach different responses to certain events to change the tone of the story. Nowadays we have the VR tools to create new stories that are immersive and convincing such that they become a visible line of life which can be reassessed and charged with different explanations and meanings.

The VR Experience for Rearranging the Life Narrative
VR visualization of a line of life can help someone understand the challenges in their selfnarrative. A healthy perception of one's life narrative helps someone to constitute a future self ( Figure  1). In the case of a broken narrative (e.g., the loss of some ability due to a traumatic event), the selfimage projected into the future is not as clear or robust as that of a healthy person [50][51][52]. VR offers a new perspective [53], and so, during immersion, one's life vision can change. A vision of the future serves as a constitution of the self and a reassurance of one's life story. Some authors question whether there is an objective view at all and whether it is even possible to perceive reality in an unbiased way. This very broad topic, including the discussion of how VR may be a more objective medium for reassessing memories, is an issue for a separate study, particularly as it applies to trauma and worldview, and the authors are considering working on this in the future. Moreover, gaining a more objective perspective of past traumatic events is only one part of the proposed intervention here, as it is important to also discuss the idea of altering the flow of the VR memory reconstruction to develop new meaning, etc.
Indeed, VR can be designed in such a way that it is possible to identify if a person's view of reality has been distorted or if memories have been altered by a traumatic event. For example, a person may share his or her view of an event and then when the event is recreated in a more consistent way in VR, using real data, it may add different perception to the memory (e.g., one can understand all the circumstances surrounding the event and release such feelings as self-blame and guilt). While the importance or severity of traumatic events should not be disregarded, a calm view may help the patient to process them faster [54]. An event that is seen, subjectively, as traumatic, is more likely to cause PTSD. VR can change strongly held views that such events were inevitable, are unchangeable, and have been utterly damaging [36]. Presumably, then the patient may be able to understand the memory without the immediate trauma of the event shaping their perceptions.
That is why VR experiences can be enhanced by scenarios which are different from reality and suggest novel ways to view the line of happenings in a life. A therapist, in the case of treatment of Some authors question whether there is an objective view at all and whether it is even possible to perceive reality in an unbiased way. This very broad topic, including the discussion of how VR may be a more objective medium for reassessing memories, is an issue for a separate study, particularly as it applies to trauma and worldview, and the authors are considering working on this in the future. Moreover, gaining a more objective perspective of past traumatic events is only one part of the proposed intervention here, as it is important to also discuss the idea of altering the flow of the VR memory reconstruction to develop new meaning, etc.
Indeed, VR can be designed in such a way that it is possible to identify if a person's view of reality has been distorted or if memories have been altered by a traumatic event. For example, a person may share his or her view of an event and then when the event is recreated in a more consistent way in VR, using real data, it may add different perception to the memory (e.g., one can understand all the circumstances surrounding the event and release such feelings as self-blame and guilt). While the importance or severity of traumatic events should not be disregarded, a calm view may help the patient to process them faster [54]. An event that is seen, subjectively, as traumatic, is more likely to cause PTSD. VR can change strongly held views that such events were inevitable, are unchangeable, and have been utterly damaging [36]. Presumably, then the patient may be able to understand the memory without the immediate trauma of the event shaping their perceptions.
That is why VR experiences can be enhanced by scenarios which are different from reality and suggest novel ways to view the line of happenings in a life. A therapist, in the case of treatment of more serious conditions, may guide the storyline (the virtual experience) in order to obtain advanced therapeutic results. This intervention may be chosen in cases when a different mindset is necessary to improve cognitive disbalances (i.e., to achieve cognitive restructuring) [14] by, for example, changing someone's perspective and giving them a more objective view of events (e.g., accepting inevitability and giving up guilt as in "It couldn't be helped"), giving new interpretations (e.g., adding meaning such as "It was really a hard experience, but I survived and I am stronger now"), seeking resolution in conflicting situations (e.g., "Everyone has some kind of struggle in life that might have made them a bad person"), reassessing tense emotions that remain in memory (e.g., "I cannot hate him/her forever; I must forgive to feel free"), or detaching from personalized interpretations of events (e.g., "Such things always happen to me", "I'm always having this kind of bad luck"). These specific examples of personal narratives shape a traumatized reality, and VR-based therapy can change these seemingly rigid realities into a healing state of mind.

Psychological Trauma as a Break in the Narrative Line
As described, from a philosophical point of view, "[t]he narrative of a life can be one with multiple subplots, digressions, and deviations from the main narrative stream; it need not be linear in a simple-minded way" [20]. Therefore, in cases when unexpected events occur, the unity of human life [55] can be seen as broken [38]. The most severe conditions of broken self-narrative result from traumatic events (Figure 2), inducing, among other issues, a lack of future vision, distorted views of reality, and problems with self-identification. As memories are emotionally charged, they become substantial parts of the life story that someone uses to constitute their self.
Behav. Sci. 2019, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW 4 of 10 more serious conditions, may guide the storyline (the virtual experience) in order to obtain advanced therapeutic results. This intervention may be chosen in cases when a different mindset is necessary to improve cognitive disbalances (i.e., to achieve cognitive restructuring) [14] by, for example, changing someone's perspective and giving them a more objective view of events (e.g., accepting inevitability and giving up guilt as in "It couldn't be helped"), giving new interpretations (e.g., adding meaning such as "It was really a hard experience, but I survived and I am stronger now"), seeking resolution in conflicting situations (e.g., "Everyone has some kind of struggle in life that might have made them a bad person"), reassessing tense emotions that remain in memory (e.g., "I cannot hate him/her forever; I must forgive to feel free"), or detaching from personalized interpretations of events (e.g., "Such things always happen to me", "I'm always having this kind of bad luck"). These specific examples of personal narratives shape a traumatized reality, and VR-based therapy can change these seemingly rigid realities into a healing state of mind.

Psychological Trauma as a Break in the Narrative Line
As described, from a philosophical point of view, "[t]he narrative of a life can be one with multiple subplots, digressions, and deviations from the main narrative stream; it need not be linear in a simple-minded way" [20]. Therefore, in cases when unexpected events occur, the unity of human life [55] can be seen as broken [38]. The most severe conditions of broken self-narrative result from traumatic events (Figure 2), inducing, among other issues, a lack of future vision, distorted views of reality, and problems with self-identification. As memories are emotionally charged, they become substantial parts of the life story that someone uses to constitute their self.
However, therapy, in the context of self-narrative, can introduce an alternative narrative, or in philosophical and storytelling terms, a fiction that "works" [15] by creating meaning out of a traumatic event [38] and including it in a consistent way in the person's life story. In what way is this different from the above examples of cognitive restructuring techniques? When a person cannot envision his or her future self, or life with trauma, he or she must find ways to perceive the past events in a different way. For example, during exposure therapy, a PTSD patient re-experiences the events that resulted in the psychological trauma and builds resilience by reacting in a less emotional way to them. The proposal here is not to stop at this point, but to then provide experiences that are different from those that actually happened, and so give the patient a chance to experience some kind of transformation and cathartic healing. In many cases of trauma this might seem very difficult. However, in VR, imagining different plots within the story and acting in a different way may provide the person with a sense of control over their life and the ability to imagine a future with diverse outcomes. The opportunity to overcome negative events and to see a positive future would re-personalize the line of life and encourage steps toward creating that future. How would this be achieved in concrete and technical terms?

Addressing the Break in the Narrative Line
One way to address changes in the direction of one's line of life is through comparison with other circumstances which were successfully integrated into one's narrative line. Such innate ability can, however, be disrupted by events such as psychological trauma. Reconstructing a coherent story about one's life and imagining a clear line of life, including a future image of self, depends on exercising one's innate ability to internalize stories and their meanings. VR can support this ability; However, therapy, in the context of self-narrative, can introduce an alternative narrative, or in philosophical and storytelling terms, a fiction that "works" [15] by creating meaning out of a traumatic event [38] and including it in a consistent way in the person's life story.
In what way is this different from the above examples of cognitive restructuring techniques? When a person cannot envision his or her future self, or life with trauma, he or she must find ways to perceive the past events in a different way. For example, during exposure therapy, a PTSD patient re-experiences the events that resulted in the psychological trauma and builds resilience by reacting in a less emotional way to them. The proposal here is not to stop at this point, but to then provide experiences that are different from those that actually happened, and so give the patient a chance to experience some kind of transformation and cathartic healing. In many cases of trauma this might seem very difficult. However, in VR, imagining different plots within the story and acting in a different way may provide the person with a sense of control over their life and the ability to imagine a future with diverse outcomes. The opportunity to overcome negative events and to see a positive future would re-personalize the line of life and encourage steps toward creating that future. How would this be achieved in concrete and technical terms?

Addressing the Break in the Narrative Line
One way to address changes in the direction of one's line of life is through comparison with other circumstances which were successfully integrated into one's narrative line. Such innate ability can, however, be disrupted by events such as psychological trauma. Reconstructing a coherent story about one's life and imagining a clear line of life, including a future image of self, depends on exercising one's innate ability to internalize stories and their meanings. VR can support this ability; revisiting one's life with the help of storytelling techniques, such as transformation, can lead to catharsis and growth.
Even though a VR narrative may be perceived as fiction, from a philosophical point of view [15], it can be modified, and hence serve as a cognitive restructuring story. When internalized, this can help a person, immersed in VR, to create a new self-narrative, thus seeing life in a new way in possible new directions. One can argue that someone cannot change the self. However, if the self is perceived as an "abstractum" ( [15] p. 103), then the author of the narrative is partially removed from the story. Separating oneself from the narrative, which includes the challenging event, allows one to see events as part of a bigger picture. Exposure to VR can provide such perspectives.
A conceptual analysis of the ways to address conflict in life can be used as therapeutic treatments. Even if we, and our stories, are merely constructions for keeping track of the history of the body, they can still be considered entities that have been developed in different stages of life, and so addressed in VR, with various positive results. For example, such a view of one's life story could help a person suffering from trauma to step out of the traumatic story. This would allow the individual to identify less with his or her image of a broken self, re-create the past into a more meaningful story, and adopt a new explanatory paradigm or alternative line of life (Figure 3). Even though a VR narrative may be perceived as fiction, from a philosophical point of view [15], it can be modified, and hence serve as a cognitive restructuring story. When internalized, this can help a person, immersed in VR, to create a new self-narrative, thus seeing life in a new way in possible new directions. One can argue that someone cannot change the self. However, if the self is perceived as an "abstractum" ( [15] p. 103), then the author of the narrative is partially removed from the story. Separating oneself from the narrative, which includes the challenging event, allows one to see events as part of a bigger picture. Exposure to VR can provide such perspectives.
A conceptual analysis of the ways to address conflict in life can be used as therapeutic treatments. Even if we, and our stories, are merely constructions for keeping track of the history of the body, they can still be considered entities that have been developed in different stages of life, and so addressed in VR, with various positive results. For example, such a view of one's life story could help a person suffering from trauma to step out of the traumatic story. This would allow the individual to identify less with his or her image of a broken self, re-create the past into a more meaningful story, and adopt a new explanatory paradigm or alternative line of life ( Figure 3).

Detaching from the Self
Whether an individual's self-narrative can be changed or not will determine the effectiveness of VR exposure. People's associations with events may be more or less flexible (e.g., "I cannot change myself, that's the way I am").
Even if complete separation of the self-created in the life story is not possible, it is possible to realize that one's traumatized self was influenced by particular events and is distinct from the self who created the prior life story. Such realization makes it possible for someone to make changes to the self in order to recover from these events. This could happen in experiences when one perceives his or her overall line of life with all the meanings and images of the self he or she has created thus far.
People are always able to change things about themselves, even the way they perceive their past or present, and so reconstitute the future self. Acknowledgement of authorship of one's story can be achieved through self-reflection. Experience of one's life story in VR can encourage self-reflection through observing one's own image [20,56] or line of life. This may elicit understanding of why something is causing pain, how one has interpreted past events, and what one is prone to believe about one's life story. In turn, this may lead to someone realizing that, for example, they are more sensitive than others to certain stimuli. They may be more prone to react strongly to certain events and so experience a break in their self-narrative. A VR experience can aid cognitive restructuring and recreation of self, and the narrative that constitutes that self, through representing one's line of life again.
Restoring one's storytelling ability, as an author who controls the line of the life narrative, would also restore the strength one has lost during a weakening experience such as a traumatic event. Such an ability to influence the narrative that constitutes the self, which everyone possesses and understands, can reach to a very deep level. Therefore, as in Figure 3, people have the capacity to tell a different personal story or retell their own story in a different way with added meaning or

Detaching from the Self
Whether an individual's self-narrative can be changed or not will determine the effectiveness of VR exposure. People's associations with events may be more or less flexible (e.g., "I cannot change myself, that's the way I am").
Even if complete separation of the self-created in the life story is not possible, it is possible to realize that one's traumatized self was influenced by particular events and is distinct from the self who created the prior life story. Such realization makes it possible for someone to make changes to the self in order to recover from these events. This could happen in experiences when one perceives his or her overall line of life with all the meanings and images of the self he or she has created thus far.
People are always able to change things about themselves, even the way they perceive their past or present, and so reconstitute the future self. Acknowledgement of authorship of one's story can be achieved through self-reflection. Experience of one's life story in VR can encourage self-reflection through observing one's own image [20,56] or line of life. This may elicit understanding of why something is causing pain, how one has interpreted past events, and what one is prone to believe about one's life story. In turn, this may lead to someone realizing that, for example, they are more sensitive than others to certain stimuli. They may be more prone to react strongly to certain events and so experience a break in their self-narrative. A VR experience can aid cognitive restructuring and recreation of self, and the narrative that constitutes that self, through representing one's line of life again.
Restoring one's storytelling ability, as an author who controls the line of the life narrative, would also restore the strength one has lost during a weakening experience such as a traumatic event. Such an ability to influence the narrative that constitutes the self, which everyone possesses and understands, can reach to a very deep level. Therefore, as in Figure 3, people have the capacity to tell a different personal story or retell their own story in a different way with added meaning or explanation.

Authoring the Experience of Line of Life in VR
The VR exposure involves creating a new story of the self that is visualized as an alternative line of life. Reconstructing and internalizing a new story in VR is anticipated to be an effective and fast way towards recovery from psychological trauma as it complements the ability of human beings to tell an imaginative story. A flexible way of changing the story in VR, while treating a patient with traumatic disorder, can be especially effective, as this allows the patient to immediately respond.
Immediate responses reinforce a patient's sense of being an author, forming his or her own life story to date prior to the traumatic event. This would then give the patient the sense of also being the author of the traumatic experience, at least in terms of interpretation and inclusion in the overall line of life. Overviewing the story as something linear and happening in the VR helps someone to detach the events from real life and to see everything as a narrative that can be reviewed and even controlled in its effect on the overall life narrative.
Enabling the storytelling ability of the patient would help him or her make an important realization, namely thoughts becoming narratives that in turn become beliefs and shape reality. Understanding that memory is colored by personal interpretation and choosing what to view can help someone see progress in a situation that seemed initially to be a loss.

Designing VR Experience to Create New Meaning and Explanation
Possible steps in workflow design for line of life visualization and creation of a new line that would help constitute the future self and aid healing are suggested below. However, as this study is not able to provide empirical results, it serves as a development in interdisciplinary theory and suggests the way that gradually adapted scenarios can serve the above purpose. In the future, this broad design may be realized and complemented by more concrete and technical design ideas.
Therefore, what could be the exact mechanisms for creating the life story of a person in VR? VR experience can reinforce awareness that one's storyline or line of life are always changing with new lines emerging (Figure 3). A person has the chance to interpret and revisit the line of life through gradual and repeated exposures, and to take ownership of the story; told in a new way as a new line of life. Any kind of event can make sense when seen within a new narrative framework, making it one's personal story, or part of a quest for a personal line of life.
When one's life story takes an undesirable direction, seeing this event from a higher perspective might even offer insights to the self to help one grow. VR can assist people by reminding them of their narrative capability, helping them to regain control over their life story presented as a line of life.
A design for the experience of one's line of life in VR is proposed, considering the following ideas: design an experience of reliving/retelling one's line of life, change the point of view about certain events to gain a healthier perspective of them, perform cognitive restructuring of certain events that lead to a healthier and more positive viewpoint, create personalized interpretations of certain events from the life narrative, achieve authoring and gain control over their life story, redesign the line of life to promote a healthier self.
The following concrete suggestion for workflow design involves the presence of a therapist. A design without a therapist should be considered more carefully and is therefore the subject of a separate study. In order to achieve the best outcome from the experience, all the functions in Figure 4 should be performed. The first two can, however, change places.
This example workflow, relating to a serious case of trauma after physical attack, should only be applied after robust exposure treatment and cognitive restructuring.  Changing self-image from weak and helpless to that of a survivor is the first step. The second step includes avoidance of negative thought patterns that hinder letting go and moving on, such as self-blame, and turning them into a realization that one has done one's best in the given situation; and also, that that blame, whether it is self-blame or the blame of others, does not help in the healing process. Next is authoring the experience; realizing that one has done so many other things that were positive and growing experiences will promote wholeness of view toward life and release from the traumatic event. Searching for growth will conclude the process by provoking a survivalist stance toward life's adversities. Through this procedure, one can take control of one's narrative about the past and develop healthier meanings to integrate into the overall life story. Moreover, through the VR experience, one may be able to construct a new self-narrative and restore a healthy vision of the future self.

Final Remarks
This paper proposes that storytelling and memory restructuring can promote healthier and more positive outlooks on life. The VR medium allows reconstruction of one's line of life, so it provides an empowering experience that returns ownership of one's narrative self. This thinking can be applied Changing self-image from weak and helpless to that of a survivor is the first step. The second step includes avoidance of negative thought patterns that hinder letting go and moving on, such as self-blame, and turning them into a realization that one has done one's best in the given situation; and also, that that blame, whether it is self-blame or the blame of others, does not help in the healing process. Next is authoring the experience; realizing that one has done so many other things that were positive and growing experiences will promote wholeness of view toward life and release from the traumatic event. Searching for growth will conclude the process by provoking a survivalist stance toward life's adversities. Through this procedure, one can take control of one's narrative about the past and develop healthier meanings to integrate into the overall life story. Moreover, through the VR experience, one may be able to construct a new self-narrative and restore a healthy vision of the future self.

Final Remarks
This paper proposes that storytelling and memory restructuring can promote healthier and more positive outlooks on life. The VR medium allows reconstruction of one's line of life, so it provides an empowering experience that returns ownership of one's narrative self. This thinking can be applied to the practical design of immersive VR environments that aim at behavioral change, health improvement, self-development, and so on.

Ethics Statement
The study did not involve human experimentation or data, and therefore did not require approval of an Ethics Committee.


Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art without Artists? Ask the Viewer

The question of whether machines can make art provokes very different answers from pioneers in the field. Harold Cohen refuses to ascribe creativity to his art-making robot AARON, while Leonel Moura argues that since his “Artbots” generate pictures from emergent properties that could not have been predicted by their creator, “they have at least some degree of creativity.” Although the question of whether machines can be artists seems to fall squarely on our definition of the latter, a solution to this philosophical impasse may ironically lie in redirecting the question away from the artist and toward the viewer.

AARON will never make a choice to break the rules, nor will it reflect on those constraints as something that it might want to change. . . AARON has no sense of continuity or sense of experience from one drawing to the next. (Buchanan 2001, p. 17) Artist Leonel Moura (born 1948), by comparison, is a newer recruit to the machine-human boundary. Moura began experimenting with artificial intelligence and robotic art in the late 1990s and since the 2000s has produced mobile robots that make drawings based on color density. These robots look like they could be AARON's younger siblings, but their dynamic is collective rather than individual. Moura releases a swarm of them onto a plastic canvas, each armed with ink of a different color and a color sensor that helps its onboard software decide when to mark the PVC surface. The result is a multicolored drawing emerging from hundreds of such individual strokes.
To explain his preoccupation with artmaking robots, Moura points to the long-accepted tradition of artists who have explored unusual processes in order to divorce aesthetic decisions from their own received knowledge and parochial tastes: Whether a work of art is made directly by a human artist or is the product of any other type of process is nowadays of no relevance. Recent art history shows many examples of art works based on random procedures, fortuitous explorations, objects trouvés, and arbitrary constructions. Surrealism, for example, even tried to take human consciousness out of the loop. More decisive is whether or not new art form expands the field of art. (Moura 2018) For Moura, whether his art is made with or without machines is unimportant, so long as it is accepted by the art world's gatekeepers. This claim might have been controversial for artists of Cohen's generation, and despite exhibiting in some prestigious venues he in many ways remained an outsider artist to his death. Moura's career, however, benefits from the expanded acceptance in the past three decades of a contextual definition of art first suggested by Marcel Duchamp: The main issue of art is art itself: its history, evolution, and innovative contributions. Anything can be considered art if validated by one of the several art world mechanisms including museums, galleries, specialized media, critics, curators, and/or collectors. Only in this way has the Duchampian ready-made and most of the art produced since been accepted and integrated into the formal art realm. (Moura 2018) Moura doesn't come out and say computer programs can be an artists, but his expanded definition of art, which accepts non-human art-making processes, leaves them a place at the table. While Cohen throws a wet blanket on the possibility of art born of an autonomous machine, Moura makes room for robots to act with aesthetic free will, claiming "I teach the robots how to paint, but afterward, it is not my doing." Moura sees this as a positive, and perhaps inevitable trend, asserting that "the autonomy of machines is essential to the best interests of humanity." (Moura 2018) If the shift from Cohen's to Moura's viewpoint can be extrapolated to the longer term, it would seem the time will come when machines could make art independent of human agency. Composer Pierre Barreau is already feeding 30,000 music scores into a neural network to generate what he judges to be a neural network's "original compositions." Barreau looks forward to a time when machines, not people, custom-tailor scores for individual listeners: "What we're working on is to make sure that AI can compose hundreds of hours of personalized music for those use cases where human creativity doesn't scale." (Barreau 2018)

Who Invents the Artist?
Their generational and philosophical differences aside, Cohen's and Moura's descriptions of their process offer contrasting perspectives over the question of authorship in computational art, whether it is assumed to be the human who writes the algorithms (Cohen) or an autonomous robot that has merely been educated by a human (Moura). Yet another, and in some ways more important, perspective on a work's creator comes from its viewer.
A thought experiment will explain why. Suppose proof came to light that the drawings and paintings Cohen had attributed to AARON were his sole creations all along, and that his videos of AARON in action were fictions designed to fool unsuspecting art critics. Such a revelation would not change who the true artist was, because that would have always been Cohen all along; but the revelation would have a huge impact on the reception of his work by lay and professional viewers. In a single stroke, we would look at a blue triangle no longer as the result of an inescapable algorithm but as the subjective paint stroke of a human artist. Some might switch from a judgment such as "not bad for a machine" to a judgment like "my four-year-old could do that." Others might turn from seeing the work as cold and sterile to imagining the work as the product of heartfelt emotion. In this sense, the "artist" as it matters for art history is not the actual person but the construct that lives in the minds of a work's beholders. This is the argument of Michel Foucault's influential 1969 essay, "What Is an Author?" For Foucault, and many of the post-structuralist thinkers who followed him, an artist is not so much a body that lived in particular time and place as it is a conjecture that viewers attach to an artwork to help them make sense of it. Foucault wrote his essay in response to Roland Barthes' 1967 provocation "The Death of the Author," which denied any necessary relationship between a text and its creator. Foucault conceded to Barthes that interpreting a text might not require knowing the biography and intent of the actual author, but Foucault insisted that readers trying to interpret the text would infer the qualities of a hypothetical author nevertheless. To give a crude example, readers of Ernest Hemingway don't need to know he was an adventurous war hero because his writing is already taut and muscular; readers of Marcel Proust don't need to know he was a sickly shut-in, because his writing is already introspective and full of reverie.

The Meta-Artist Function
From this perspective, our central question becomes not "can machines be artists," but whether a machine can give rise to an "artist function" in Foucault's sense. Instead of the artist function disappearing when a machine makes art, it may be split in two. We might ascribe one artist function to the non-human machine-perhaps a limited one based on our understanding of the machine's finite capacity for reasoning. As of this writing, however, algorithms are still programmed by humans, and even neural networks are trained on data selected by humans. So we might ascribe a second, meta-artist function to the machine's human handler-what legal scholar Annemarie Bridy calls "the author of the author of the works." (Bridy 2011) How is this different from simply giving both human and machine collaborators credit for the creative act, as Cohen suggests? Remember that the artist function differs from the artist because it is produced by the viewers. So yes, we might learn that Harold Cohen went to art school or that fellow algorithmic artist Jack Ox studied musicology. But we might also look at AARON's bright shards of blue, green, and orange, and imagine that AARON's creator had seen Matisse's The Dancers. Or we might look at the fractured abstractions produced by Jack Ox's algorithms and infer that the woman who wrote them loves rhythmic composers like Stravinsky.
In other words, the nature of the artist and meta-artist functions and their relationship may vary depending on the analogies viewers are likely to draw from their own experience. Some might see the machine as a tool, in which case they will construct a meta-artist who uses the tool in a more-or-less virtuosic or telltale fashion (as they might when examining brushstrokes in an Abstract Expressionist painting). Other viewers might imagine the machine as a child-in which case, they will construct a meta-artist responsible for educating (setting rules for) the child, but not blame the meta-artist directly for individual mistakes (and thus ally themselves with Moura's perspective). Still others might imagine the machine as a full-fledged collaborator, in which case they will picture a human artist influencing but also being influenced by the machine's choices (thus aligned with Cohen's perspective). In every case, regardless of these differences, viewers are likely to ascribe traces of "personality" in the image to the meta-artist rather than the machine. 1

When Artists and Artist Functions Diverge
As historical motivation for the birth of the author function, Foucault notes that legal regimes bent on repressing writers of transgressive texts had to conjure someone to blame. During the Reformation, for example, broadsides against the Catholic church mass-printed by Protestants on Gutenberg's press did not betray the handwriting of their creators; nonetheless, readers could reconstruct the figure of the author from the tone, diction, and substance of each manifesto.
Despite the legal incentive to identify individual writers, Foucault warns us that these reconstructions are fictions, highly contingent on the nature of the text and our own station: Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts: in the comparisons we make, the traits we extract as pertinent, the continuities we assign, or the exclusions we practice. In addition, all these operations vary according to the period and the form of discourse concerned. A 'philosopher' and a 'poet' are not constructed in the same manner; and the author of an eighteenth-century novel was formed differently from the modern novelist. (Foucault 1992) Foucault presumably had human creators in mind for his author function, yet we can apply his conceit equally to nonhuman agents. And as we shall see when examining hypothetical and real cases of nonhuman agents, the "projected author" may have a bearing that is both aesthetic and legal-reminding us that Foucault identified the law as a potent motivation for constructing an author function when authorship is inherently ambiguous.
A case from 2018 of such ambiguous authorship occurred after a young artist who had just graduated from high school, Robbie Barrat, posted a machine learning program he wrote to the code-sharing site GitHub. Barrat programmed this software to learn visual rules from a sample of existing, human-made paintings and generate new, digital paintings in the same style. Having downloaded Barrat's software, the French artist collective Obvious used the code to generate a new painting in the form of a physical print on canvas, which subsequently sold at auction for $432,500. Barrat later asked on Twitter, "Am I crazy for thinking that they really just used my network and are selling the results?" 2 Barrat's question suggests we should ascribe authorship to the machine learning software itself, for which he is the presumptive owner. In Barrat's case, the copyright issues are mute because he distributed his code as open-source software. However, consider a hypothetical case where authorship had more legal impact. Imagine that an AI researcher ("Harold Junior") rents time on a supercomputer owned by IBM ("Deeper Blue"). Harold Junior trains Deeper Blue in the art of digital painting, after which his silicon apprentice goes on to produce images that its human teacher could not have foreseen on his own. The complexity and aesthetic interest of Deeper Blue's evolving oeuvre attract the eye of the fashion industry, and Nike inks a 7-figure deal with IBM to display these images on t-shirts and sneakers. Not so fast, says Harold Junior, who sues them both for copyright infringement, claiming he must be the artist, since Deeper Blue is only a software agent.
As hypothetical as this example may seem, a parallel case of nonhuman artistry was debated not in a philosophy symposium but a court of law. In a national park in Indonesia in 2011, nature photographer David Slater set up a free-standing camera in such a way that a troupe of macaque monkeys could trigger the shutter and take photos of themselves. An editor at the Wikimedia 1 Indeed, the 2006 European Copyright Term Directive defines original work as an "author's own intellectual creation reflecting his personality." (Guadamuz 2015) 2 Source: https://twitter.com/drbeef_/status/1055285640420483073. Foundation later posted these "monkey selfies" on the Wikimedia website, sharing them freely with the rationale that the works had no authors and were thus in the public domain. The photographer protested, building his claim to the copyright on the allegation that he had created the conditions for the "monkey selfies" to happen by setting up his equipment in such as way as to optimize the chances for the primates to capture their faces. The next year, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against Slater in the name of one of the monkeys, which they called Naruto, claiming that the non-human animal had a copyright over the picture it had taken of itself.
Legal opinions and precedents for Naruto et al. versus David Slater were equivocal, as we might imagine would also be true of the hypothetical case Harold Junior versus IBM. Perhaps the clearest precedent in favor of Slater is the UK law covering computer-generated and other non-human creations, which assigns copyright to the person who sets the rules. Nevertheless even this standard admits "However, as robotic software and hardware becomes more 'cognitive' and learns and adapts from data inputs, the works created may have no relationship to the original author's software and so other factors may well come into play." (Holder et al. 2016) Regardless of legal rectitude, from an aesthetic standpoint the arguments on both sides put too much stress on whether the monkey intended to take a photo. From Foucault's perspective, what determines the artist function in this case is the reaction viewers have to the particular photos in question. The photos show a seemingly self-possessed macaque, in one case reaching out its hand to trigger the camera, in another grinning widely as it stares into the lens. To many viewers, these images suggested a deliberate self-portrait. If, by contrast, the snapshot triggered by Slater's apparatus had showed a blurry paw rather than an expressive headshot, the would have been hard-pressed to describe the macaque as "fascinated by her reflection in the lens." (Daily Mail Reporter 2011) To take a more extreme variation, suppose a photo of a stand of trees had resulted from a branch falling on the shutter trigger after a windstorm; few would have jumped to the conclusion that one of those trees were taking a selfie, because the photo wouldn't betray evidence of its author. Unlike these hypothetical counterexamples, the actual photos precipitated a believable author function. Without access to the macaque's intentions, we have no way of proving this construct true or false, which is why our imagination is prone to fill in the gap in our knowledge. The same is true of viewers beholding works made by artificial agents.
Yet in both the cases of the monkey selfie and art produced by artificial intelligence, our imagined authors need not be limited to the being that tripped the shutter or sprayed the ink on PVC. We can also back up to the meta level and ask ourselves what Slater was trying to construct by positioning his gear in the way he did. Regardless of Slater's actual intentions, his "algorithm"-a tripod-mounted camera with a large wide angle lens, predictive autofocus, and a shutter release within reach-as well as the fact that he selected the most "selfie"-like images among the many taken by the monkeys-suggests that he was carefully crafting a revealing way to depict the primates he was studying. From this perspective, Slater was the meta-artist of those selfies-a distinction that may clarify how authorship bifurcates in the era of intelligent machines.

Can You Kill the Meta-Artist?
The argument made in Naruto et al. versus David Slater sets another obstacle in the path toward the truly autonomous artmaking machines imagined by Moura and Barreau. Apart from eliminating the human collaborator from the equation, such autonomy would also require expunging any residual meta-artist function constructed by the viewer. Viewers have been conditioned for thousands of years to apply empathy and interpretation to imagine motivations for the creators of works they view, and they are likely to ascribe personalities to the machinic producers of such works as well. Yet humans also know computers are programmed by other people; media scholar Helen Hester argues listeners put more trust in the pronouncements of a feminine digital assistant like Siri than they would an actual woman because they "imagine a male programmer" is ultimately responsible for Siri's words. 3 Such empathic impulses may inevitably spur the viewer to construct an artistic persona for the absent creator of an art-making machine, but that hasn't stopped some AI innovators from trying to expunge any meta-artist function from the equation. Moura seems to reject the idea that a viewer would credit him for one of his ArtBot's drawings just because he "taught" them rules to make paintings. He offers the analogy that "No one will claim that a given novel is the product of the author's school teacher." (Moura 2018) This analogy may hold at some point in the future when artificial intelligences are accorded the same autonomy as human children, but given the law's focus on human versus non-human actors, they are more likely to be accorded the autonomous status of animals. And it is central to our construct of those personalities that they are highly influenced by their stewards; we are quick to blame a disobedient dog on its careless trainer.
If animals represent one possible analog for AI trained by human handlers, technology scholar Sherry Turkle has researched the embodiment of that analogy in the form of robotic pets such as Aibo, Furby, and PARO. Turkle's research into purring seals and dancing dogs reminds us that robots don't have to sit still like texts or finished drawings; in art contexts as in toy stores, they are often seen lighting up or spinning around in reaction to viewers or each other. Turkle thinks such interactions with machines raise again the question Darwin posed to his generation about whether humans are unique: "How will interacting with relational artifacts affect people's way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special?" For his part, Moura creates opportunities for viewers to watch robots making drawings, and thus gain even more insight into the artistry of both the machines and their makers: "From the viewer's perspective, the main difference from the usual artistic practice is that he/she witnesses the process of making it, following the shift from one chaotic attractor to another. Even though finalized paintings are kept as the memory of an exhilarating event, the true aesthetical experience focus [sic] on the dynamics of picture construction." (Moura 2003) Turkle calls these new technologies "relational artifacts," yet she stops short of ascribing them the complexity of human relationships. 4 While admitting that the children who play with robots form emotional attachments, she notes the same children understand their metallic companions are capable only of "a robot kind of love." For all the empathy they evoke, Turkle clearly sees computational creatures on a different level from humans: "To say all of this about our love of our robots does not diminish their interest or importance. It only puts them in their place." (Turkle 2006, p. 10) Turkle shows that even children recognize that robots aren't fully autonomous creatures. Were Turkle's research to applied to the aesthetic sphere, it might be concluded that our limited ability to empathize with artificial intelligence restricts it to "a robot kind of art." Perhaps no artificial agent researcher strives harder to remove the meta-artist from the equation than zoologist and artificial life pioneer Tom Ray, whose project Tierra takes a more radical approach to eliminating human influence in a the act of computational creation. Tierra is a self-evolving community 3 Outside of the context of art, the creators of Siri and Microsoft's Cortana exploit this empathic impulse to make their devices seem more relatable: We spent a lot of time with the character design of Cortana. It's not about anthropomorphizing your computer, it's about these little moments of playfulness, and these moments of recognition that she's listening to what you're asking her and what's important to you. (Beres 2015) Despite the strategic anthropomorphizing of computers to encourage users to bond with them, Hester claims the compliant female voice "can even play into people's expectations of male authority because the aren't actual women." (McNeil 2015) 4 "Relationships with computational creatures may be deeply compelling, perhaps educational, but they do not put us in touch with the complexity, contradiction, and limitations of the human life cycle. They do not teach us what we need to know about empathy, ambivalence, and life lived in shades of gray." (Turkle 2006, p. 10) of computer viruses with no fitness function apart from survival. To create this artificial ecosystem, Ray created an environment on his hard drive filled with snippets of program code designed to copy themselves with every cycle of his computer. He further programmed this environment to introduce random mutations in the code of these tiny programs. By competing for disk space, the resulting virtual creatures evolve according to the same logic of self-replication and mutation that drives biological evolution, generating new "species" that Ray never could have predicted. These includes classes of programs that, like biological parasites, evolve to live inside host programs, some of which later evolve to be immune to such parasites. Ray himself claims that his creatures are alive by the very fact that they reproduce and evolve.
Yet as neutral and personality-less as Tierra seems, we may still wonder about the intentions of its human architect. Asked if he felt guilty turning off his machine and erasing all his digital progeny, Ray replied that he could always recreate that exact set of creatures just by resetting his Tierra program to the same initial conditions. Ray thus argued that he had created the organisms only in the sense of creating the potential for them to exist. But this clever abjuration of responsibility only offers the viewer more material from which to imagine the mastermind behind Tierra's synthetic organisms. As in any work of fiction, there will be more than one interpretation: some who hear Ray's response may imagine him a heartless psychopath, while others will judge him a principled man of science.
More important than the judgment itself is the fact that the question came up in the first place. Whether Tierra's critters are alive or inanimate, some viewers want to know the motivation behind the man who created them. 5 Even for a computational system as seemingly neutral as artificial computer viruses evolving on a hard drive, the astute viewer may be able to reconstruct the cultural assumptions of its human meta-artist. For example, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, who analyzed the artificial life scientific movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, argues that works such as Tierra are built upon a dualistic and computationalist vision of the living enabled by a "symbolically masculine collapse of life into instrumentally useful information process." For all their seeming autonomy from their creators, Helmreich finds that such artificial ecosystems embody the historical and cultural mores of the contexts in which they were historically created, such as the Santa Fe Institute. These artificial life meta-artists were predominantly upper middle-class, Judeo-Christian white men influenced by New Age, sci-fi and Western creation stories that did not feature pregnant females. (Helmreich 2000, p. 216)

Conclusions
Art is not a measurable fact, like the temperature of bathwater; it is an interpreted condition, like whether bathwater feels warm or cold. As long as humans continue to infer motivations to creative acts, artists will exist as social constructs. So the question we started with-can machines be artists?-is the wrong question. We should instead be asking, what roles does machine-made art leave for artists-imagined or real, flesh or silicon-and the viewers who imagine them.
Author Contributions: S.A. and J.I. contributed equally to the concepts, analysis, drafting, and final form of this essay.