How Virtual reality projects can open a new memory portal?
Museums and education spaces have begun to use VR and immersive experiences as a vehicle to emplace people in history, bringing them closer and forging deeper connections to the memories of events and times. These technologies can transport someone in a way that other mediums can’t, and elicit longer-lasting audience engagement. Accused #2 – Walter Sisulu, Reeducated, Surviving 9/11, Traveling While Black, The Book Of Distance, The Changing Same… are just a few examples of a trend that has developed over the last few years and confirms the value of a highly technological medium that can recreate spaces of memory that the flat screen cannot explore.
What makes VR so powerful as a vehicle to carry and share memories?
Immersive is by nature immersive, allowing singular focus on the story in front or around you. Unlike walking through a gallery or reading through a book, with VR, you are committing to an experience away from surrounding distractions like your phone or other people’s behavior.
And while cinema or a 2D screening can immerse you in a place, it’s still in the construct of something you’re watching, not experiencing. “There is a cognitive work behind watching and processing,” theorizes Karim Ben Khelifa, director of The Enemy. “When you’re in VR, you don’t need to extract other memories, because you’re completely immersed. In that sense, it’s really closer to a real life kind of experience… Perhaps the neurological path to memory is faster, you don’t need to deconstruct things. In VR, because of the sense of presence, because it’s active participation versus passive, it affects your emotional being much more than the classical documentary.”
The Enemy, for example, is a VR experience that explores the perspective of fighters on opposite sides of three conflicts around the world. Khelifa, photojournalist and artist, had been presenting the material as a photo exhibit when he found people wanting to go deeper, to unpack the story and context of these fighters. With the VR experience, he saw how people were impacted and remembered the material differently. “We make sense of the world through stories. We remember it through experience,” he says.
The viewer is “entering” a time or place, being asked to bear witness to what occurred there, what is being remembered. This emplacement is also one of the key values of VR for connecting viewers emotionally.
“The narrative VR, in our particular case and I think with any historical narrative, is that it preserves the kind of intimacy and profound impact that a first-hand witness to the history can have on someone here and now,” says Kelley H. Szany, Senior Vice President, Education & Exhibitions at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which commissioned a series of three VR pieces about survivors of the Holocaust. “It’s the power of place, of presence that the VR allows you to be both at the site and with that survivor. It’s really profound.”
Even if the VR work is not physically interactive, the immersion aspect shifts the experience from passive watching to active participation in the story.
“There is a relationship between audience and subject that happens in VR that is different, and I think it’s because of what you’re asking the audience to do. You’re going to surrender yourself to it,” explains Darren Emerson, director of many VR pieces dealing with nostalgia and memories, including the Museum’s recent series. “When you lose a sense of your own self within a piece, you become something…Once you’re rooted in that world, and you’re connected to a character and a story, it becomes a language that you inherently understand.”
Connecting people with history
The technology has the ability to connect people into that feeling and that presence, but it’s important to find the right balance in the artistic design to work towards evoking the memories and not keep the viewer at a distance. “I find [VR] best when it’s used in a more abstract way. When it’s not trying to recreate exactly what the room was like or how everything unfolded, but trying to reach for the feeling of the experience and ground it emotionally in environment, sound and visuals,” Emerson explains. “In that sense, you’re using the tools of filmmaking within VR to try and give the audience, the embodied audience, some of the feeling of what it might have been like to be there and in that position.”
His recent piece, Letters from Drancy, shares 90-year-old Marion’s first-person account of World War II and Holocaust. In it, he shifts perspective of the viewer: either being an observer of Marion as she’s on screen talking to you, or being Marion, to a certain extent, as you experience the memories she’s recounting.
“I think VR, when used correctly, can really articulate a memory in a way that draws and gets an audience closer to the feeling and the inner most emotional state of the person who is telling you the memory without needing a dramatic recreation. It’s more of an artistic rendering of memory that allows it to wash over you.”
But while that sense of presence in VR does a lot of the “heavy lifting” of immersive, it still depends on the quality of the story and the sense of agency the piece gives the viewer.
“We are very hungry for storytelling. That’s how we function, so you still need a very good narrative,” says Khelifa. “The fact that you are in a sense of immersion and feeling present in the place really affects the way memory is impacted…But whether the story is poorly or fantastically presented is going to affect not only the way you remember, but the depth of the need to remember.”
VR also has the ability to preserve someone’s personal memories and testimony to be made available for future generations. While this can happen via film or audio recordings, the ability to evoke the real-life person “remembering” is powerful.
“The ability to have preserved and captured and ultimately be able to share through VR the stories of survivors who are passing away, is very important,” says Szany. “And to combine that with the ability to immerse people in the sites in which these histories took place is equally important. There are finite years when we can merge those two together.”
The impact (and interest) of cultural institutions
Museums and educational spaces are curating experiences from work already made (ie. from the Unframed catalogue) or they can commission pieces directly for their exhibitions. After audiences at the Illinois Holocaust Museum responded well to other new technologies, the museum decided to commission the series mentioned above (produced by East City Films : Letters from Drancy, Escape To Shanghai, Walk to Westerbork) documenting the memories of women holocaust survivors with narratives mostly unknown to the general public. It was a chance to use the powerful tool of VR to preserve and share these women’s striking stories.
The impact has been significant. Museum visitors who walk through the exhibition before watching the films say they were seeing the artifacts and reading the dates and history, but the films transported them to the place and added to their experience in a deeper way. Those who watch the films first then carry those stories with them as they walk through the exhibit.
For the last year, the museum also has trunks with pre-loaded VR headsets that it sends out to schools and libraries. “We’re hearing from students that ‘watching a movie, reading a book is one thing, but to be in this place with this survivor has connected me to this history that I didn’t think was possible”, Szany recounts. “We’re hoping to do more, because the technology keeps changing. What’s possible with virtual reality, continues to grow and expand. And we really feel like we need to meet our visitors and this generation where they are.”
When you’re blending time and space and virtual reality, it creates an eerie and magical sensation, it is something truly special, proper to the medium – it’s the ability to live something you never thought you’d live. (…) In Surviving 9/11 we scanned negatives of panoramic photos of 1990s New York, converted them to 3D and finally rendered them in VR. It was a huge amount of work that created a magical experience – Victor Agulhon (TARGO)
Being careful with memories
It’s important to remember, for both creators and exhibitors, that when dealing with non-fiction remembrances and histories, it is essential to make or show work that treats these memories with care.
It’s these precious memories that fuel the storytelling. It’s transformative to put audiences in these immersive experiences, but you have to take care with the people whose stories you’re using, and be aware of how the stories could impact those experiencing it.
“I was trying to find ways of allowing people to be present within these memories, without people feeling too much like they’re stepping on the memories…trying to step back from what are quite visceral, painful memories in many cases,” Emerson explains.
“How do you make someone comfortable enough that they can open up and share those memories?,” Khelifa points out. “But also we need to be careful with the medium, to respect the viewers. They’re going to be walking into our experiences and the history of the people we are depicting. We have a responsibility to introduce those and do it with great care.”
And for well-crafted VR experiences that understand how to shepherd those memories with care and artistry, the impact cannot be described – it can be felt.
