Usbek & Rica – “Virtual reality is not necessarily an empathy machine”

Moreover, a large part of the journalistic work produced around the camps in Xinjiang may seem “far-fetched” to a Western audience: it is long articles, graphs, satellite images … In my opinion, the emotional component of all this was missing. reality. Virtual reality has this amazing ability to reasonably relate people to a story, especially when published through hand-drawn images, on white ink paper before scanning it and moving a computer, as it does here.

This process allows people to sense the environment in which they are immersed in a sensitive way, much more than if we used 3D images, for example. in a educate, the elements of each scene appear in a gradual manner – first the walls, then the prison bars, then the landscape, etc. – , because that’s how our memory works when we try to put events together.

Discussions about on-screen representations of shocking historical events – the Holocaust, slavery… – do not go back to yesterday. What is your position on this controversy? Are you really trying to put the spectator in the shoes of the three men whose story you’re telling?

With this project, we tried to be very careful about what we were going to say about the journey of these three guys. Through their testimonies, they tell us about a number of traumatic, sometimes so violent events that we decided not to keep in our final account for a whole host of reasons. Virtual reality itself is already a deep tool, so you have to be very careful about what you show people.

I think it’s dangerous to describe virtual reality as ” sympathy machine “, or means” Put people in other people’s shoes – Two things are not necessarily. This kind of talk can make people believe that by having experience in virtual reality, that’s all, they understood all about the experience of such and such a person! On the contrary, I hope so after seeing it educateEveryone will be curious to know more about this topic – especially with regard to life in Xinjiang itself, where surveillance otherwise reigns supreme, which New Yorker Tell via Other articles dedicated.

All this to say that there are many limits to the capabilities of immersion in virtual reality. Our creation is only concerned with the journey of three men, it is not a documentary about the history of Xinjiang or the Chinese political context. Instead, our goal was to make the viewer feel an emotional connection to this story and this range of narrative.

Again, that’s why we have the privilege of animation: because it allows a layer of abstraction to be introduced between the spectator and the protagonists; Because it makes it possible to illustrate the fact that we can only Re Allegorical images and not a recreation of “reality”. In my opinion, it was a mistake to seek realism in Schindler’s List or in twelve years a slave, two films prefer uncomfortable images, ” In your face With animation, the viewer is left with a minimal choice as to the level of horror he wants to reach. This distance is key.