Has VR finally come of age?

A heavily made-up Iranian woman in bra and knickers is dancing seductively before me. We’re in some vast warehouse, and she’s swaying barefoot. But then I look around. All the other men here are in military uniforms and leaning against walls or sitting at desks, smoking and looking at her impassively. I slowly realise we are in a torture chamber and this lithe, writhing woman is dancing, quite possibly, for her life. Me? I have become one of her tormentors.

Welcome to The Fury, a bravura attempt by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat to use virtual technology in her art.

‘Have you ever experienced VR before?’ asks the assistant as she adjusts my goggles, while I sit myself on a stool that rotates through 360º. Only once: I was across town at the Saatchi Gallery, masked up and sitting on a chair that came to life, hurling me forward to explore a simulation of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It gave me, perhaps, an experience akin to what Howard Carter felt in 1923, entering chambers that had lain in darkness for millennia.

Neshat’s film similarly puts me in someone else’s shoes. First of all I seem to be viewing the dance through the eyes of a military thug. Neshat tells me she modelled the men in her film on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and indeed the actors she’s employed superbly incarnate the kind of moral void that might allow them to commit unspeakable atrocities.

But then the point of view shifts and I become the nameless dancer, sidling up to a particularly hard-faced brute leaning against the wall. As I approach, he blows smoke into my face.

Then the point of view shifts once more. I’m no longer a patriarchal goon or vulnerable dancer, but a voyeur watching the woman reel backwards from the smoke.