ATLANTIC INSTITUTE | BEING HUMAN WHEN DIGITAL
PODCAST 02 | NARRATIVE CHANGE

TRANSCRIPT

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F Sweeney: Hello and welcome to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.

Today, Alice Wroe, the Atlantic Institute’s Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead, joins me to discuss the use of augmented and virtual realities to effect narrative change.

You will also hear from American journalist and film maker Nonny de la Peňa, Founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, and Dylan Valley, South African film maker and Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity.  They both took part in an Atlantic Fellows webinar on the topic earlier this year.

I began by asking Alice to explain why narrative change is so important.

A Wroe: Narrative change, for me, is one of the most exciting opportunities within AR and VR, because you have this chance to experience a story or an idea with your whole body, to not see something from this distance point of view, but really, really to become immersed in it. And so the opportunity for your empathy to be heightened, or for you really to understand that story in your gut is so much greater. So, when we talk about narrative change, there’s this chance to really shift gear, to really understand an event or an idea in this completely different bodily way than if you were to just read it or to see it passively on a television, ramping up this how do you feel a story.

F Sweeney: How do you feel a story, we’ll get on to the emotions that come from that. But for anyone who’s listening who is in any doubt, explain for us what is AR and what is VR.

A Wroe: VR stands for virtual reality. You experience it through a headset, and when you put this headset on, all that you can see is the digital world that is in front of you. You might experience a 360 film where you’re planted in the story and everywhere you look around you is the story. Whereas AR, augmented reality, is when the digital and the physical world come together as one, and so it’s not so immersive, but, rather, you can exist in your very own space and see the digital content. So, with narrative shift, and in this session that we’re discussing, we’re pretty much talking about virtual reality, we’re talking about planting yourself right there within a story and feeling it with your whole body and, hopefully, your whole heart.

F Sweeney: When we talk about feeling something with your entire body, we’re obviously talking about emotions here. Tell us a little bit more about how that works.

A Wroe: As audiences, we are so inundated with news, with ideas, with campaigns, with things to care about, we’re these completely over-stimulated beings. And, actually, it can mean that we sometimes don’t care as much as we should about the stuff that we’re reading, that we’re learning about, the issues that we should be engaged in. With virtual reality, when you place yourself in the experience, you can’t help but feel it more. You feel like, as Nonny de la Pena puts it, you’re in the middle of a story. All of your senses are so much more heightened, you look around and you feel you’re engaged, you’re present in the experience so much more than if you were reading it on a newspaper, or watching it on television. Your emotions are completely heightened, and, therefore, your empathy is heightened, which means you will probably care about what you’re experiencing in a much greater way.

F Sweeney: I’m sure that there are lots of people who agree and disagree with how much one’s emotions play into how we feel empathy for a story, and whether that’s correct or not for any given situation. Let’s talk more about the discussion itself. Nonny de la Pena, you mentioned, tell us a little bit about her. And, of course, this discussion was also with Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity, Dylan Valley.

A Wroe: It was such a privilege to bring these two minds together. So, Nonny de la Pena is called the ‘godmother of VR’. To be able to be in the same space as Nonny was a really big deal from a feminist perspective. She’s a complete pioneer, and has been in this industry almost as long as the industry has been there. She’s championed this idea of immersive journalism, pushing it to its absolute edges.

Then you have Dylan Valley, an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. He’s a documentary filmmaker, and he’s just recently created his first 360 film, which is called Azibuye – The Occupation. It was accepted at Sundance New Frontier’s film festival, the first South African 360 film to be accepted, and so wonderful to start this conversation with Dylan.

DV01: The Occupation

D Valley: Azibuye – The Occupation is a virtual reality documentary about a housing occupation in Johannesburg by two artists who are also activists, and they name their occupation as a sort of decolonial response to the disposition of land. They also highlight it as a site-specific art installation, so they’re doing two things at the same time. It’s a real occupation, but also site-specific artwork. It’s really dealing with the systematic dispossession of land that came about in South Africa in the beginning of colonialism, all the way through to apartheid, and which is still continuing now in our phase of neoliberal capitalism.

In the film, the two occupiers have to make a difficult decision when they realise who their house actually belongs to now. In the film, you are led to believe it’s owned by a white person, a white South African, who has abandoned the house and left it standing in this affluent neighbourhood. But that house was then bought by a black South African after apartheid. So, the two of them have to grapple with this idea of whether their occupation is still valid, and you see them discussing this ideologically in the film.

For those of you who haven’t watched a virtual reality film before, the viewer actually gets a chance to decide where they look.  You view a film like this on a headset, you can also view 360 documentaries using a browser and scrolling around. Real estate agents will use this kind of technology so that you can scroll around in the different rooms, look at different corners without actually having to be there. So, in a way, our film is a subversion of that. It’s like a house that can’t be sold. It’s a house that’s been occupied, and it’s been reappropriated.

As a documentary filmmaker, being new to this medium, there was a sense of not only having the audience experience this kind of film in a new way, but also a new way of making. Because VR is in the history of film and television, it’s very new, even though it’s been around for quite a while. There are not that many experts. So when people are working on it, often they’re working on it for the first time together, and so there’s this great sense of collaboration and a more horizontal working environment, which was really great on set. The sense that you get from being in the film is yourself as an occupier. It really places you in the occupation, but you, also, have to then confront the news of who the house actually belongs to, and while being there, as well.

F Sweeney: So, that was Dylan Valley, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. We’ll be discussing what he had to say in just a moment, but we also want to hear from Nonny de la Pena.

A Wroe: Yes, godmother of VR, and she’s going to start her talk with a short trailer about her work.

NDLP01: Her story

[Trailer]

N de la Pena: So, I started my journey as a journalist, and the idea was to try to give the reader the view from the ground, which is what a World War II reporter named Martha Gellhorn called it. And the idea, for me, was to put you on-scene at a food bank line. There was these huge food bank lines in the big downturn of the Great Recession, and people were invisible, so I wanted to put you on-scene. In this case, a man with diabetes didn’t get food in time, he collapsed into a diabetic coma, and that’s where I wanted you to be so that you couldn’t ignore what was going on. That’s the part that got into Sundance. And we only had this thing called the Wide Five. They were $50,000 a pair. I was working out of a USC lab, so we had to make headsets.

Across the line is a project that also appeared at Sundance. This was in partnership with Planned Parenthood, and I wanted to put people on-scene outside of health clinics so they could experience and understand what young women went through when they would go to health clinics. What would happen is you would have to walk the line and experience the vitriol that gets hurled at young women. And it was taken to a very conservative area - these are mostly people who are anti-abortion folks - and yet anybody who saw it felt increased empathy for the women, and they wanted to stop this stuff happening to young women at these health clinics. So, there was a really interesting shared concern here. It wasn’t about whether you’re pro-abortion or you’re anti-abortion, but everybody felt that they would even vote for candidates who would stop this situation where women experience this horrible vitriol.

F Sweeney: Obviously, there, we heard the term ‘health clinics’, and that’s a term that’s used in the States sometimes by people who are advocates of a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion or not, and that’s obviously not a term that’s agreed upon by everybody. Other people would have a different point of view. But for listeners who may not be familiar with that term, we’re just providing some context. So, Alice, Nonny, there, is talking about it’s not just the issues themselves, it’s as important to change how women are treated for the stance they take on certain issues.

A Wroe: Exactly. It’s like Nonny is saying that here there was this opportunity for people who would never normally know what it feels like to walk towards that health clinic, never know the kind of anxiety and the feelings, and they would have this snapshot, this tiny sliver of a chance to think, for a moment, what it might be like to walk in somebody else’s shoes. And what’s so interesting about that particular example is that they actually did research around how people related to different political candidates who had particular stances on abortion, and how that changed.

NDLP02: Planned Parenthood project

N de la Pena: We’ve done quite a bit of research. I very quickly touched on the one from the Planned Parenthood project. So, that shifted the narrative. This is a group of very conservative, moderate voters who would not necessarily be supporting candidates who would be in the Planned-Parenthood-supported group, but yet, by watching that piece of content, their ideas about what was happening were shifted. They felt very strongly that women shouldn’t be treated this way. And I think that’s what we’re always looking for, right, is common ground to shift narratives.

A Wroe: That example’s so key, because we’ve got the research to reflect on what it actually means to raise up empathy, to shift narrative change to make social justice.

F Sweeney: And, earlier, Dylan was discussing what it means to be the occupier in this space. Can you expand a little bit on what you think he means?

A Wroe: The story that Dylan tells is just so perfect for this medium, because this is one of the things that I ask people often, “Why did you choose this medium for that story?” because you don’t want it to be tech for tech’s sake, it’s got to strengthen the story. And this story was all about being present in a location, and the politics around one’s body being placed there, and the history of that physical place, and what it means for you to physically be there. So, to use a bodily medium where we, as the audience, we become one of those people that is physically present in that space, it’s just absolutely perfect.

DV02: Filming in VR

D Valley: I had the opportunity to make a VR film, and I knew these artists who were occupying this house, and I’d visited this house, not actually wanting to make a film about it, just curious because I know these guys, they’re friends of mine. And I was just struck by actually being there, that sense of presence, what being there felt like. In this affluent neighbourhood, with these amazing views, it’s Johannesburg, it’s the city of gold, as they call it in Africa, and here’s this house that’s been standing empty for 20 years. You really get a sense for what they’re trying to do by actually being there and seeing all the details in the house, the way that it’s been chipped away by time, and the ways in which they are turning it into a liveable space. They’re still actually living there now, three years later almost.

I just knew that it would work really well. I didn’t really have a full idea, because I was experimenting with this medium, it was the first time I was using it, and then afterwards, I saw all these potentials for it, and the ways in which people were interacting with the piece. There was one scene where Van is fixing the roof, and the camera is up in the rafters, and so when people look down, they get this huge shock, as if they’re going to fall down, because they’re up there with him. That wasn’t something we were trying to do. We just thought, “OK, let’s see what’ll happen if we put the camera up there.”

Also, it was interesting, people’s responses to hearing the owner of the house, actually being inside the house, and then hearing him talk about how he bought this house, how he struggled to put himself through university, and then bought the house, and now people are occupying it. And so you really get into this sense of trespassing, this feeling of what it means to actually be trespassing, and to take this kind of action when you know someone owns this place. And it goes against all our ideas of private property and the cornerstones of capitalism.

A Wroe: Dylan spoke really powerfully about the effects of placing oneself at the very centre of a story, so I thought who better to turn to than the godmother of VR herself to find out what it actually feels like to exist in a story this way, particularly for those of us who have never experienced VR before.

NDLP03: Experiencing VR

N de la Pena: Well, I think most people have had the sensation of going to a scary movie and jumping, right? If something happens, you jump. Your whole body’s along for the ride when you go into these events. So, it just notches it up into something closer to what you experience in the real world. You might jump at a movie when something scary happens, then imagine what would happen if you were standing there. The reason I coined the expression ‘duality of presence’ was because I had so many people, in the beginning, taking their headset off and saying to me, “I felt like I was there. I mean, I knew I was here, but I felt like I was there too.” And, certainly, we have that sensation when you get really immersed in a book, you’re there, you know you’re here, but this just takes you closer to what body and mind experience in the world.

F Sweeney: Nonny talked about being in the cinema and a horror movie, and just having this experience which consumed her whole body. We all know that experience of being frightened at a horror movie and how just totally immersed you’re in it, but the question that I have, and I’ll give some context here, is that when 24-hour television news started several decades ago, it was a new immersive experience, and we began to see more and more stories where people’s heartstrings were pulled because the journalist and the TV camera crew were able to capture pictures and tell the story in such a way that it really tugged at people’s heartstrings and then their moral conscience.

But it could be argued that, over the decades, people have become more and more numb to seeing pictures of people in distress, that we’ve become so consumed with our own lives, and there is so much of these kind of stories around us on so many different channels, that we’re really moving to the next stage of it heightening the emotions through AR and VR. What would you say to that, that we’re going to a more extreme version of being immersed in emotions?

A Wroe: I’m so glad you brought that up, because the session itself was so short that I couldn’t get to this point, and I feel it’s so important. If we position AR and VR as just the next stage in our journey with giving our attention, and feeling moved, and caring, in terms of news, it could be really quite dangerous because, as we know now, news already is quite polarising, the way that we consume it in our own echo chambers. If AR and VR is seen as the next way to keep people’s attention, that will be such a disservice to the medium, because it will mean that it is used as a gimmick, used to grab attention, and then we’ll be on to the next thing, on to the next thing.

With AR and VR, what we have is a completely different way to experience stories and news, and we need to relate to it in a really considered, and kind, and political way. And that’s why what Dylan said about the fact that this isn’t the activist work, this is our way into the activist work. It’s the front door. I really like that thing of this is a way to heighten our senses, to bring us together, to really sharpen how we feel about particular issues, and then we go and do the hard activist work. I really like that way of approaching AR/VR. Rather than thinking it as the next spectacle, the next thing to heighten our heartbeat and make us pumped. Actually, we need to see it as a sustainable new way of sharing stories.

F Sweeney: What about the assertion that it, in fact, in some ways, is emotional blackmail or hijacking? We’ve all seen campaigns, advertisements on television that tug at the heartstrings. What is the answer to that, or the response to that?

A Wroe: Wilneida Negron, who held our ethical space in the session –

F Sweeney: And who is an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity.

A Wroe: - she talked about this: what responsibilities the storytellers have when they’re deciding to use this medium. I think, as an Atlantic community, but also as a part of the community in terms of AR/VR, that’s what we really need to think about. We can’t just run at this technology, shove it all in our backpacks, and run off into the hills to move each other. We have to think about: are we manipulating audiences, how do we hold that space afterwards. If we’re taking somebody to a point where they’re potentially triggered, very emotional, they may well feel physically vulnerable because they can’t see around them because they’ve got this headset on, what are we going to do as a community to hold each other afterwards? So, that’s why it’s exciting to think about this stuff at the beginning of our journey with AR and VR, because we do need to hold each other, and we need to swaddle it in care, and theory, and ethics, and that’s what I hope these sessions will allow us to do.

F Sweeney: And allow us to move from the emotional to the feeling, but, also, the action response where it’s considered, and the solution is thought through by the community, presumably?

A Wroe: Yeah, exactly. So, my hope with this series is that, in these first four sessions, we can immerse ourselves in the inspiration of it – my goodness, was I moved by Nonny and Dylan, what exceptional thinkers and makers – but we’re also grappling with how do we feel when we hear about this stuff? How does it land with our communities, how does it land with our way of working, our methodologies, and then how can we go into it with huge hopeful hearts, but huge critical eyes? And it’s about not seeing those things as replacing each other – you don’t have to do one or the other – it’s about finding a space on this line whereby we can grapple with and champion new and emerging technologies. And that will be the sweet spot.

F Sweeney: It’s about balancing authenticity with how the activist actually disrupts the narrative?

A Wroe: Yes, totally. I think that Dylan’s piece is really wonderful for that, because it disrupts the dominant narratives, it subverts what you’re expecting to feel when you enter into that film. You go in there really thinking you know what you think about a certain topic, and the rug is pulled from underneath you. And because you’re experiencing it in this really physical way, you feel even more shocked. Dylan totally ruptured the dominant narratives, and then really used this to insert ourselves into the issues, and, hopefully, we can then become part of that discourse in an activist way, away from the film, so the film isn’t the ending of the work.

There are a lot of powerful VR experiences that are pitched at training empathy, and I’m really interested in this balance between empathy and appropriation. For example, the VR piece, Traveling While Black, it definitely heightens my empathy, but, as a white person, I absolutely know I will never really understand what it means to travel while black in the context of that film. So, I wanted to know from Dylan how we can navigate this balancing act between appropriation and empathy.

DV03: Appropriation and empathy

D Valley: I think that heightened empathy can definitely lead you towards further action, and I think the only real answer I’d give is that experiencing it in this way is not the work itself, in terms of actually getting to address these issues when it’s a beginning. And when I say ‘the work itself’, I mean in terms of actually undoing these things, undoing structural racism, for example. But Traveling While Black, a great example of something that can really spur on people to do real work, and the work that Nonny has done, as well. I think that’s what it’s really about. It’s not saying that this is the absolute answer, but that this is a really powerful tool that, if harnessed correctly, can be used in amazing ways, totally amazing ways.

What I’d also love to hear from others in this community of people who are doing great stuff in the world is thinking about how can we all get involved in some way in terms of engaging with these kind of technologies. It needs to be demystified. I think we think of it as this thing on the hill that we cannot touch, but it’s actually something we’re interacting with, whether we know it or not sometimes, so we should actually confront it.

A Wroe: I was so delighted when Dylan talked about the fact that this community shouldn’t see AR and VR as something else over the hill, away from them, but actually it’s for all of us to become part of this discourse. And, hopefully, these sessions will give us a chance to start the conversations going, but, actually, this tech is so early, really, in comparison to other mediums, that there is still a chance for us to shift it, pull it, champion it, reject it, to really be in a fizzy and dynamic relationship with it, rather than thinking, “Are we going to use this stuff, be used by it, or are we going to reject it?” It’s not that binary. And if a Fellow was to take one thing away, that’s what I would hope them to take away. There is a place for you in this conversation, and please come and be part of it.

F Sweeney: Tell us about the next session.

A Wroe: It’s about virtual space, about the creative and activist potential of virtual space. So, we’ve lived this whole year, meeting virtually, playing virtually, working virtually because of the pandemic, COVID-19, and this is an opportunity to take stock and to take inspiration by some of the people that have used virtual space in the most innovative and creative ways. We’re going to be speaking to Shari Frilot, chief curator of Sundance New Frontiers. They did Sundance completely virtually this year, and it was exceptional. I can’t wait to talk about that space, because I’ve never existed in a virtual space as incredible as that one.

We’re also going to be in conversation with Cedric Brown, an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. He co-created a virtual exhibition, The Shape of Blackness, which compared different experiences of blackness between South Africa and America. It was a really special way for people to be together whilst they’re very much physically apart this year. So, we’ll be speaking about the creative and activist potential of virtual space, as well as ethically interrogating it, thinking about our relationship with ourself in space, thinking about whether we can truly commit to a decolonising methodology whilst being mediated through big tech. So, there’s lots of issues to be brought up, as well. You will definitely be inspired by Shari and Cedric.

F Sweeney: And that was Alice Wroe, Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead at the Atlantic Institute.  Please join us next time when we discuss the creative and activist potential of virtual space.

You’ve been listening to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.  To find out more, visit our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.

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