Immersive hybridPlace

The post-truth immersion (Virtual Reality)

The installation is designed to question the practice of urban video recordings in the contemporary media condition. The installation includes the playing of video testimonies while the audience is in immersion in the spatial environment where the facts took place. By resituating its audience in the situation of the witness who captured the scene, the installation establishes makes the spectator committed, transforming the process of searching for truth in the images into an immersive spatial practice.

The audience is immersed in a 3D rendering of the scene of events in each video, taken from Google Maps 3D renderings. They can move around in this "low resolution" urban fragment, grab a smartphone, activate the playback of a video, and position their frame so as to see the scene again from another angle, immersive this time. The direct experience of the recorder's position, as well as the contrast between the familiar view of these urban environments provided by Google and the images of what took place "in the same place" invites the audience to think on the different processes of mediation that both generate and put in tension the contemporary public space.

An aesthetic of investigation

The installation underlines the relationship to the use of the smartphone in the post-truth context which requires the player to activate the reading and interpretation of the images. The project is part of the research for an "investigative aesthetics" - a concept designed by Forensic Architecture, the spatial and media investigation laboratory based at Goldsmiths University in London.