CRchange / Roderick Coover / Scott Rettberg
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive, immersive, and cinematic environment that draws users into the haunting memories of ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. The project foregrounds veterans’ testimonies of enhanced interrogation practices and human rights abuses during the Iraq War and was developed through a four-university collaboration at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Photos of Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project by Lance Long, Scott Rettberg, Roderick Coover et al.
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an immersive digital media project that foregrounds veterans testimonies of US military interrogation practices and human rights abuses during the Iraq War, often by young and ill-trained soldiers who never entered the military expecting to become torturers and who find themselves struggling to reconcile the activities they were asked to do.
Drawing upon extensive interviews with veterans carried out by political scientist John Tsukayama following the Abu Ghraib accounts of abuse, this project is unique in building understanding of how a military with a just vision of its practices might allow the conditions for human rights abuses to occur.
The hybrid project was developed through a unique collaboration between filmmakers, artists, scientists, and researchers from four universities and developed in the immersive 3D CAVE2 at the University of Illinois-Chicago for exhibition, educational institutions, museums and libraries, and distribution using tablets/ipads and Oculus Rift.
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was originally developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago for the CAVE2, a next-generation large-scale virtual-reality panoramic environment providing 3D stereoscopic content at a scale matching human visual acuity. Here, the immersive 3D environment is intended to produce an affective space for interpretation, serving as a dispositif for enacting individual and cultural memory of institutionalized atrocity.
The project begins in a reflective temple space with four doors opening onto ordinary American domestic spaces: a boy’s bedroom, a family room, a suburban back yard, and a kitchen. Users navigate the environment with a wand functioning as a 3D mouse. The virtual scene updates continuously according to head and arm trackers, so the 3D view remains focalized through the participant’s perspective.
As viewers move through the rooms, objects such as a toy truck, a Boy Scout poster, or a pair of wire cutters can be activated. When triggered, the walls fall away, revealing a surreal desert panorama while one of the voice actors recounts memories metaphorically tied to the object. These objects work much like hyperlinks, carrying viewers through domestic spaces and interior landscapes of soldiers transformed by traumatic experience.
The work extends disturbing but vital narratives based on actual veterans’ testimonies and offers a different affective experience of oral history through visual and auditory immersion. Rather than representing “big data,” visualization technologies are used here to narrativize a complex contemporary issue and create a platform for discussion and debate about interrogation methods and their effects on detainees, soldiers, and society.
Electronic Visualization Lab at University of Illinois-Chicago, Temple University, University of Bergen, Norwegian Research Council, Arts Council Norway.
Initial production script of Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project.
Full-length video documentation (37:58).
Five minute sample on Vimeo.
Introduction and panel discussion with human rights experts and interrogators from the 2015 Oslo Human Rights / Human Wrongs Festival (51:54).
I was lucky enough to see this in Chicago; it's one of the best marriages of technology and narrative that I know of... a smart use of the technology in the service of the story, and a story that transcends the technology. The result is a profound docu-drama / memoir that engages the viewer in a visceral as well as intellectual way, and it really does haunt you long afterwards.
The combination of computer-game-like artificiality in the setting and the documentary realism of the narrating voice is uncanny. This uncanny-ness creates a cognitive dissonance in which we are both estranged from and immersed within a performance of the space of violence and trauma. Our agency is suspended; we are left with nothing to do but look and listen.
During the 2016 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project received the 2016 Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, the field’s top prize for a creative work.
At ISEA 2016 HONG KONG CULTURAL R>EVOLUTION, the project was one of four works selected for the juried exhibition of VR artworks in the Gallery 360 theatre at City University of Hong Kong.
Official Selection, 2016 BIFF-EXPANDED, exhibition of works of expanded cinema, Bergen International Film Festival, Bergen, Norway.