WE WILL NOT TORTURE YOUR AVATAR

Our plans for the site are far broader than what we can accomplish during these few days. We have plans for Camp Delta, including two more “avatar experiences” to portray an interrogation chamber and a solitary confinement cell. We design both experiences, the layout and reference for Camp Delta as well as ambient sound and imagery for the entire camp. We need soldiers, dogs, iguanas...

We have extensive talks, throughout the nights and days and weeks afterwards about how to handle these experiences. No, we will not trivialize torture or imprisonment by torturing an avatar, we recognize that kidnapping and imprisoning an avatar is not the same experience as the real thing.

And yet, with this sensitivity in mind, we work at designing experiences to expose prison practices to visitors. It’s been documented that many of the detainees were “purchased” with ransom offers in poor countries. We discuss the possibility of a day-long event to offer Linden dollars (the currency of Second Life) for bringing in an avatar. We take a “hands off” approach to torture: there are audio transcripts of interrogation sessions – we can recreate them in audio and offer them for listening and contemplation. We finally come back full circle to a “game” – while in a solitary cell you try to question your situation: How long will I be here? Can I call a lawyer? Can I call my family? What am I accused of? In the absence of habeas corpus rights, the answer will always be negative.

Insertion of Documentary Video and Film Clips

A critical component of the experience is to augment the 3D computer graphics with video. The film clips serve to authenticate our depiction, and as moving, rather than still, images, they serve to immerse the viewer in a cinematic experience. There is the orange jump-suited detainee, gaunt, unable to support himself, dragged by guards past cages. My youthful, blue haired avatar, piloted by my well-fed self, is aghast.
We place several clips in different orientations. This, after all, is a prototype, a proof of concept and the concept of 3D spatial cinema, ie, experiencing a sense of place within a 3D virtual environment with the addition of filmed components, is relatively new. We experimented with different triggers for the films: as you stand up and exit your cage, you immediately view an image of a detainee in a similar cage; as you walk between the cages, an image appears on the ground of a detainee walking between cages – to evoke a strangely effective “mirror” effect.

At the end of the walkway Ben built a large screen for interview footage. The enormous projection of Mozaam Begg’s father’s face, broken with emotion, reading from his son’s letters, is a compelling example of a new place for cinema: instead of the dark, sequestered theaters of the real world, here is the drive-in of the virtual world: a large “outdoor” place to gather and watch a communal screen.

Arrival

Unlike prisoners in U.S. prisons who presumably know how and why they are incarcerated and the nature of the charges against them, detainees in Guantánamo prison arrived there with minimal, if any, information

Nonny wanted a visitor to our site to be similarly stripped of rights and orientation and to experience a sense of the violence and despair of being hooded and herded into a cage. This posed a challenge for Second Life, a virtual world as opposed to a MMORG, avatars are not accustomed to role playing. However, we could around this by offering a visitor a HUD (Heads Up Display) which, when accepted, gave us the power to control their avatar.

Nonny scripted the experience cinematically: first the hood would come down, accompanied by audio of the C-17 transport plan landing, shouts and kicks to get moving, arriving, shackled and kneeling in a cage in Camp X-Ray.

BAVC made its extraordinary video and audio resources available to us and we grabbed a camera. In order to simulate a hood under the bright Cuban sun we put my black sweater over the lens, shot at the pavement and hoped it would look like sunlight percolating through wool. Nonny worked in BAVC’s audio suite to mix the audio track and Ben did the programming to attach the experience to the HUD and thus, the user.

We contract with a contact of Ben’s to make an orange jumpsuit, It feels strange to be “wearing” an orange jumpsuit.

Trapped!

The next morning at BAVC, Nonny signs on to Second Life. She’s set up her account to enter Second Life where she last signed off and she last signed off from inside a cage. In the meantime, Ben has begun work again on the site and sealed up all of the cages. When she signs on, she is trapped! Although rationally she knows it’s virtual, she’s more than virtually frantic trying to get out and, once again, we get a sense of what this experience might offer.

(posted by ndlp)
I log onto Second Life to learn that Ben has finished the Camp X-Ray cage – and I am trapped inside! Ben had no way of knowing that I had logged off while still standing inside the cage. The software just put me back where I had last been, except now I am looked in and I don’t know how to get out.

Ben, our builder, had been up late working on the project and is nowhere to be found. When at last he shows up, we have the inevitable discussion about how real and unreal the whole thing is. How “I” felt imprisoned. How such feelings were nonsense especially given the truth of the prison. But it was effective – and maybe it can work as a teaching tool and help raise awareness about it what means to lose habeas corpus rights.

More than Make Believe

It is evening, Nonny, Ben and I are in different rooms at the same San Francisco Hotel. It is after 11PM but I can’t resist going online and checking the site. I wander by the half completed cages and start to enter one. It’s on a computer screen, it’s virtual, it isn’t even completed, but, I feel twinges holding me back. I don’t WANT to enter the cage, even a virtual one. I begin to get an inkling of the impact this has viscerally, it’s more than make-believe.

Insomnia

(posted by ndlp)
I haven’t been sleeping well. We only have a couple of days to pull this together and I want to see it done in a way that maybe, just maybe, it can help make a difference. The tools are new and I wish I could learn them faster, better. I can’t stop thinking about the project, so even though I am tired and it is late, I go back in world and run into Peggy.

Flying blind

I log onto Second Life to learn that Ben has finished the Camp X-Ray cage – and I am trapped inside! Ben had no way of knowing that I had logged off while still standing inside the cage. The software just put me back where I had last been, except now I am looked in and I don’t know how to get out.

Ben, our builder, had been up late working on the project and is nowhere to be found. When at last he shows up, we have the inevitable discussion about how real and unreal the whole thing is. How “I” felt imprisoned. How such feelings were nonsense especially given the truth of the prison. But it was effective – and maybe it can work as a teaching tool and help raise awareness about it what means to lose habeas corpus rights.

Ben puts in a “script” to allow users to open the door. We begin our discussion about how to incorporate mixed media into the site – what sort of material I could shoot, audio I could record to enhance what we want to do. I feel like I’m flying blind – this part is new to everyone, even our master scripter/builder.

Can't sleep

I haven’t been sleeping well. We only have a couple of days to pull this together and I want to see it done in a way that maybe, just maybe, it can help make a difference. The tools are new and I wish I could learn them faster, better. I can’t stop thinking about the project, so even though I am tired and it is late, I go back in world and run into Peggy.

Building Cages

The fundamental building block for Camp X-Ray is a unit of razor wire. Thanks to google image, we can replicate it virtually. The first object Bubbuhcuh makes is a cylinder. In no time at all we have a cage, no a bank of cages. It’s starting to come to life.

BAVC Producers Institue for New Media Technologies

We are thrilled to be included with an amazing group of grantees at BAVC's Producers Institute for New Media Technologies with extraordinary documentary projects and Wendy Levy, Director of Media Arts and Education, has set up a program of panels and workshops on new media practice. We are mentored by Ben-Batstone Cunningham (aka Buhbuhcuh Fairchild) who will help us build the prototype. Where do we start? What are the fundamentals?

We start with the basics:
1. Camp X-Ray
2. Arrival
3. Insertion of Documentary Video Clips

Our list is much longer, but we do triage and plan to complete what we can in the remaining four days of the residency.