“Fulfillment: A field guide to the logistical city” presented by Chu, Tsoupikova, Kumar and Huggins

Fulfillment: a field guide to the logistical city is a web-based immersive virtual reality project, currently in production, that invites the user to explore the sedimented landscapes of logistics traversing urban centers of consumption and their related distributive networks of warehousing, transportation,dataveillance, waste and wilderness management. Inspired by Amazon’s logistical empire and specifically, by e-commerce-driven promotions of “seamless” flows in our on-demand economy, this project offers an interactive tour of the dark side of supply chain capitalism – that is, the hidden buffer zones, glitchy seams and uncanny folds of logistical spacetime that enable the “magic” of consumer “fulfillment” to seem always just one online click away.

Our aim is to establish a platform from which to observe the behind-the-scenes realities of supply chain infrastructures and their impact on labor, consumption, wellbeing and the environment. The project opens up new avenues of interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology, design, science, and engineering for our team, while paving the way for new interdisciplinary educational opportunities. Fulfillment contributes to exploring how VR can be used as a medium for anthropological field research and in turn, make anthropological findings more accessible to a broader audience.