Abstract: This chapter delves into the immersive experience of watching one's own home videos within the familiar confines of home, challenging traditional notions of immersion typically associated with large screens and exotic locales. By connecting the content of home videos with their domestic reception context, the chapter explores how this seemingly mundane activity can offer a profound engagement with memory and self-reflection. Drawing on concepts of virtual reality and spectatorship, the chapter examines the complexities of familial affect and the role of memory in shaping immersive experiences. It argues that while home videos may lack the technological sophistication of mainstream immersive media, they offer a unique form of immersion rooted in personal experience and memory. Through a close analysis of personal home video footage, the chapter demonstrates how the act of viewing one's own past on screen can evoke a sense of virtual presence and introspection.

Keywords: immersion, domesticity, self-reflection, domesticity, amateur media

Moving image media has always had an intimate relationship with elsewhere. From early ethnographic films and amateur travelogues to the television screen's characterization as “your window on the world,” moving images have long promised spectators the experience of sight-seeing, exploration, and discovery. Frequently characterized by their large screens, big budgets, and ability to all but physically transport viewers to unique locales, immersive media technologies’ capacity to enmesh viewers’ sensoria in faraway or imagined places would especially seem to exclude the quotidian experience of watching run-of-the-mill home videos in the domestic space. Nevertheless, the unique synonymy of home video's content and its likewise domestic reception context evidences the home mode's unique ability to extend spectatorial engagement beyond the screen. Connecting home video images’ there-and-then with the reception context's here-and-now, watching one's own home videos within the home constitutes a counterintuitive but rich instance of spectatorial immersion.

In fact, the experience of viewing one's own home videos within the home sounds eerily like Oliver Grau's pioneering definition of the virtual experience as “immersing oneself in the image space, moving and interacting there in ‘real time,’ and intervening creatively.” Connecting the domestic space on the screen with the domestic space of the screen, viewing home video within the home uniquely immerses the viewer in the home video image.