Carne y Arena by Alejandro González Iñárritu: Subordinating VR Technology to Refugee’s Human Condition.

 
Presenter: Hudson Moura
Registration Number: 077
Institution: Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Abstract: Carne y Arena by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu is an immersive mixed reality installation that allows visitors to walk barefoot across a beautiful sand desert while experiencing violent incidents by crossing the Mexican–U.S. border with illegal immigrants. Later, the visitors realize that they witnessed real-life accounts, which they can hear displayed in videos at the exhibit’s end. Thus, the visitors can get a better sense and understanding of refugees’ traumatic and powerless experiences.

 

The installation comprises three different rooms, a waiting (cold) room filled with authentic immigrant shoes, the actual six-minute VR experience, and a wall displaying the refugees’ video portrays. The waiting room is freezing like the rooms migrants stay in if the border patrol captures them. To feel the refugees’ vulnerability, the visitor needs to leave behind all their possessions, including their shoes and socks, before entering the VR area. 

 

Carne y Arena’s mixed reality combines VR performance with physical components turning it into a multisensory and bodily immersive experience (Jerald 2015; Kors et al. 2016; Lanier 2017; Uricchio 2018; Raessens 2019). While the VR headset creates a 3D virtual world, the installation considers the visitor’s body to invest it, embed it, and inhabit it with physical reactions and emotions provoked by the wind, temperature (heat and cold), ground texture, etc. Thus, sound, smell, touch, and sight operate at once, enhancing refugee’s storytelling. Another crucial component is the documentarian aspect. Engaging real-life stories through VR assist visitor’s recognition of characters’ traumatic experiences and their emotional reactions.

 

According to Iñárritu, he intended to subordinate technology to the human condition. “I despise technology,” says the filmmaker. According to him, technology does mean nothing unless it can reveal or denounce a human’s situation. Therefore, technology must be subordinated to humans, to humanity, and to the arts. However, has the film lost the power to engage the viewers emotionally? Can virtual reality simulate refugee’s dispossession (the sense of the self) while alleviating society’s consciousness?

Bio: Hudson Moura is a lecturer on film, new media, and global justice at the Department of Politics and Public Administration and an associate faculty at the Immigration and Settlement Studies Program at Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Ryerson University. His scholarly work has been presented at numerous international conferences and published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Currently, he is writing a book on refugees in films. As a documentarian, his films portray artists, writers, and culture. He served as a film programmer for several film festivals in Toronto. He has also facilitated numerous hands-on workshops on documentary, mobile filming, and video editing in universities and film festivals. He is a member of the Betinho Project Group, which aims to promote human rights, food security, and participatory democratic processes. He chairs the Interactive Narratives and Interculturality on Film and Media Research Group, focusing on the politics of race, migration, gender, and minorities (Indigenous, Black, anti-racist trans- feminist and queer) related to technology, media, and digital practices. (http://www.hudsonmoura.net)

Interactive Documentary as Form of Public Narrative in Digital Age: Migration Crises in Borderland and Roxham.

Presenter: Weikun Fan
Registration Number: 061
Institution: Communication University of China/ Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Abstract: This paper will examine how migration crises in North America are represented in two award-winning interactive documentary projects—Borderland launched by National Public Radio (NPR) and Roxham presented by National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Though Borderland focused on the US-Mexico boundary and Roxham is centered on asylum seekers around the US-Canada unofficial border, they both portray detailed stories and imply critical point of views through various combinations of images, texts, video, surface designs, and visual presentation. Drawing on a range of previous literature around major aspects, concepts for interactive documentary and digital narratives, such as shared authorship (Nash, 2012) and user’s active role (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012), this study probes the terrain of unique features of interactive documentary. Based on reflection on interactivity, hypertextuality, and multimediality that are afforded by digital technology, this project is guided by the main research question: how do features of interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to be a new form of public narrative? With the analysis of Borderland and Roxham as case studies, remixes of multimedia visual elements, narrative structures, contributions from users and variation in user’s narrative routes are also discussed within sub-questions: how does the story of individual (figures in projects and producers) open emotional dialogue in those two projects? In what way users can experience the shared values through emotion that may lead to moral choice? Public narrative aims to use personal values to galvanize others into action through storytelling (Ganz, 2010 & 2011). A concept in the leadership of practice notwithstanding, this framework that Ganz embarked upon provides an alternative viewpoint when we tap into the interlocking plots and the power of narrative—story of self, us, and now. Two projects will be analyzed by Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to evaluate the structure of stories and interactivity constructed by moving images, perspectives and storytelling. MCDA is deployed, especially within the visual intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Wang, 2014), to scrutinize in addition to the interplay between texts, voiceover, visual elements, and editing methods. As a conclusion for the aforementioned paper, I will argue that interactive documentary forms a unique public narrative when tackling social issues, allowing self-experience to intertwine with collective experience, and let individuals meet in this temporal public sphere through authorial expressivity, narrative routes, and interactive participatory engagement.

Bio: Weikun Fan is a second-year PhD student in media studies at Communication University of China examining documentary, audio-visual content distribution and cultural industries. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at Utrecht University, where she conducts research on the shifting landscape of European Documentary funded by the China Scholarship Council. Weikun obtained her BA in Drama, Film and Television Literature with a minor degree in Journalism at Communication University of China, and her MSc in Management (Cultural and Creative Industries) at the University of Sheffield. She worked at Phoenix TV and Cheil Worldwide in media and marketing before starting PhD programme in 2019.

Interacting with Gender Violence: Interactive Documentary as a Means of Social Engagement and Affective Mobilization.

 

Presenters: Patricia Nogueira and Inês Amaral
Registration Number: 049
Institution: ISMAI—University of Maia and University of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract: Interactive documentary presents a fertile opportunity to explore social engagement and intervention for social change since such format provides the audience with the freedom of exploring a variety of contents and delving into the perspective of the story that interests them the most (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012; Galloway et al., 2007; Nogueira, 2020). Beyond the classic inference that documentary is a representation of reality (Bruzzi, 2000; Grierson, 1934; Nichols, 2001), its interactive form grants a chance of reshaping the narrative and playing an active role in negotiating with reality (Gaudenzi, 2013; Whitelaw, 2002). Regarding interactive environments, several authors (Yaros, 2009; Wiehl, 2009, 2020; Miller & Allor, 2014) argue that interactivity enhances the audience’s emotional engagement and social mobilization. However, there is little or no literature focusing specifically on interactive documentaries and social change. Therefore, the main question is to understand if interactive documentary may effectively engage audiences towards social change, namely, to address gender violence. This paper explores social engagement and affective mobilization through the analysis of two interactive documentaries focused on the representation of women’s violence: Mujeres en Venta (2014), an interactive project denouncing women’s trafficking for sexual exploitation in South America; and The Quipu Project (2014), a collaborative interactive documentary focused on testimonies of women victims of unconsented sterilizations in 1990’s Peru. The complexity and multimodality of web pages present an additional research challenge and presuppose a comprehensive methodological approach (Herring, 2004). As such, we will employ an articulation of methodologies that combines content analysis and discourse analysis (Neuendorf, 2004), drawing a three-dimensional exploration: 1) discourse analysis of the testimonies; 2) the type of media format available in each documentary; 3) the navigation structure designed from the available links. Whereas discourse analysis follows Roman Jakobson’s linguistic meta-functions (1960), to include the various media elements such as still and moving images, graphics, and the navigation interface, we will also conduct a multimodal analysis based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006). An in-depth analysis of the two case studies has concluded that while each interactive documentary presents a different format, as well as distinct strategies of collaboration and engagement, both work as a structuring device for denouncing gender issues and provide to the audience a multifaceted affective encounter with a variety of powerful testimonies and rich materials. Such findings allow us to understand that interactive documentary adopts a diversity of approaches and emerging social engagement practices to address gender violence. Also, preliminary results lead us to consider that interactive documentary is particularly persuasive when blurs the boundaries between representation, advocacy, and social activism, while enhancing the audience’s social engagement and affective mobilization.

Bio: Patrícia Nogueira

Patrícia Nogueira is an Assistant Professor at ISMAI—University of Maia and an invited Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Digital Media under the University of Texas at Austin - Portugal international program, with a master's degree in Documentary Film and Photography. She is also a documentary filmmaker. Nogueira is a researcher at ICNOVA—iNOVA Media Lab and co-leads the European research group CCVA—Cinema and Contemporary Visual Arts, under NECS. During 2015, Patrícia was in residence at the National Film Board of Canada and in 2016 she was a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bio: Inês Amaral
Inês Amaral is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. With a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho, Inês is a researcher at the Centre for Studies in Communication and Society. She is the PI of project Mediated Young Adults’ Practices: Advancing Gender Justice in and Across Mobile Apps, and a member of the projects teams (De)Coding Masculinities: Towards an Enhanced Understanding of Media’s Role in Shaping Perceptions of Masculinities in Portugal and Deconstructing Risk and Otherness: Hegemonic Scripts and Counter-Narratives on Migrants/Refugees and "Internal Others" in Portuguese and European Mediascapes.