In 2015, The New York Times launched its virtual-reality platform with “The Displaced,” a documentary featuring three children from war-torn countries, all forced from their homes by violence and persecution. In it, the viewer follows the children around their destroyed or inhospitable homes; the captions tell stories drenched in loss and pain, while gloomy music plays in the background. The filmmakers’ intention is clear: images of children playing among the rubble poignantly symbolise the tragedies unfolding in the world. Introducing the new platform, editor Jake Silverstein writes: “We decided to launch The Times’s virtual-reality efforts with these portraits because we recognise that this new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection with people whose lives are far from our own. By creating a 360-degree, spherical environment that encircles the viewer, extended reality (XR) creates the experience of being present within distant worlds, making it uniquely suited to projects, like this one, that speak to our senses of empathy and community.”
As a teacher and researcher in visual anthropology interested in how and why audio-visual media is used to narrate the afterlives of war, something about that statement – namely, how the technology was expected to impact viewers, creating an “uncanny feeling of connection” – didn’t sit comfortably with me. Could pretending this was ‘real’ create a sensory experience of the actual place and, by extension, empathy with the people there? I kept wondering about the ends and means of technologically producing a sense of ‘being there’ to evoke feelings like suffering. Was suffering a feeling that could be evoked by being placed where suffering happens?
The novelty of the technology also distracted, prompting me to wonder if the rubble looked real and to scrutinise the image further, even as six-year-old Oleg from Crimea was telling me about losing his home during the Russian annexation. I missed the actual connection that I likely would have had with Oleg, had he looked back into my eyes and seen me. Perhaps XR, more than offering a believable version of reality, presents an opportunity to re-examine ideas of connection through technological intervention.
The multisensory filmmaking technology known as “extended reality” or immersive media has gained recognition for its potential to transform contemporary storytelling practices. Whether through spherical video recordings or entirely virtual realities, XR uses images and soundscapes to sensorily immerse viewers in spaces that evoke geographical locations, social relationships, and inner life worlds.
The Memory Futures project…
…is an ethnographic study of the work of memory after war and armed conflict. I explore various knowledge practices – from forensic analyses and administrative procedures to personal investigation and witness accounts – and how they contribute to transitional justice processes. My XR interventions include spherical (or 360) environments where victim-survivors, researchers, scientists, human rights advocates, and state officials gather to seek answers about committed crimes, determine victimhood status, and challenge historical certainties in the pursuit of justice.
In this process, human remains remain lost or are located, discussed, measured, analysed, or returned for burial. In our spherical images, everyone, including the filmmaker, is positioned within the frame. In doing so, we treat memory as “multiple” (Mol 2003), that is, a network of relationships between people, ways of knowing, and various publics. XR becomes a reflexive tool for ‘envisioning’ memory as a picture—not real but fictitious, not true but authored, not connected but implicated.
Examining the social ecologies of transitional justice processes by being present in the frame, this project explores what new media can offer to research on post-war memory and encourages viewers to see author, protagonist, and audience as “implicated subjects” (Rothberg 2019) or part of a broader network of relationships that cross social, geographic, and spiritual boundaries.
Spherical Documentary: Unquiet Ground.
Unquiet Ground journeys into the Peruvian Andes, where landscapes marked by the violence of the internal armed conflict continue to hold its traces. Captured with a 360-degree camera, the film follows those engaged in the ongoing work of remembrance: exhuming the disappeared, constructing memorial spaces, and identifying human remains in forensic laboratories. Through their practices, memory emerges as a force that moves across social, geographic, and spiritual terrains, shaping the living contours of place.
Employing a fractured, nonlinear visual language and an expanded engagement with spherical imaging, Unquiet Ground interrogates the politics of framing, perception, and historical representation. Rather than seeking a singular account of the past, the film assembles a constellation of perspectives, revealing how violence reverberates differently through bodies, landscapes, and acts of care. In doing so, it suggests that war does not simply end with the cessation of armed conflict; it persists as an unresolved presence, inhabiting the ground, the imagination, and the lives of those who remain.
