Event overview
Roderick Coover (Temple University, Philadelphia) introduces his virtual reality work on US military interrogation practices and human rights abuses.
This talk presents Hearts And Minds: The Interrogations Project, an immersive and interactive work that foregrounds veterans testimonies of US military interrogation practices and human rights abuses during the Iraq War.
The work tells the stories of often young and ill-trained soldiers who never expected to become torturers, and who find themselves struggling to reconcile the activities they were asked to do.
Created by an international team of filmmakers, artists, scientists, and researchers, the work employs interactive arts to give space to the veteran's moving stories. Users navigate through seemly ordinary American domestic spaces: a boy’s bedroom, a family room, a backyard, a kitchen. Triggering individual objects, such as a toy truck or wire cutters, users arrive in surreal landscapes of memory where they encounter moving stories.
Hearts and Minds is formatted for CAVES, 360 cinemas, tablets, ipads and Oculus Rift. Premiered at the Run Run Shaw Gallery 360 Hong Kong for ISEA, and featured at international arts and film festivals, it is winner of the 2016 Award for best work by the Electronic Literature Organization and is selected for presentation at the Nobel Prize Peace Forum in September 2017.
Hearts and Minds was made at the Electronic Visualization Lab of the University of Illinois Chicago and the Digital Scholarship Lab at Temple University in collaboration with Scott Rettberg, Daria Tsoupikova, Arthur Nishimoto, John Tsukayama and Jeffrey Murer.
BIOGRAPHY
Roderick Coover is Founding Director of the PHD-MFA Program in Documentary Arts and Visual Research and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. He makes films, interactive cinema, installations and webworks.
A pioneer in interactive documentary arts and poetics, his works are distributed through Video Data Bank, DER, Eastgate Systems and featured at events at wide-ranging, international museums, festivals and public venues like ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Museo Arts Santa Monica Barcelona and Bibliotheque National De France Paris.
He is also the author or editor of works in print including the book Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology In The Humanities And Arts (University of Chicago Press). Coover is the recipient of Whiting, Mellon, LEF, and SPIRE awards, among others.
About the Whitehead Lecture Series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Mar 2017 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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