VR is Blurry. But in Guinea, It’s Exceptionally Clear.
By Lizzie Warren
On the morning of Tuesday, September 19th 2017, there were riots in the Guinean city of Conakry and the surrounding area. Citizens blocked roads and rails in an effort to halt the transfer of bauxite from Guinea Bauxite Company’s mine to its factory. Officials said the protests stemmed from “frustration at electricity cuts.” There were more deadly riots over the weekend, but mining resumed Monday afternoon. The protesters’ barricades went up again that night.
An unnamed CBG official commented to Reuters, “‘Everything is stopped. We must find a solution to this situation because the losses for the company are significant.’”
The comment speaks volumes.
Guinea, located in West Africa, is one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, and also, one of the richest in mineral resources. In addition to diamonds and gold, Guinea houses an abundance of bauxite — the primary material in aluminium production.
Community by community, mining is destroying the environment and also economic sustainability throughout the country. But now local communities and advocates are getting a new tool to speak out and fight back. New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map) is collaborating with local activists to create media and integrate it into the advocacy work of local NGOs in Guinea.
Aboubacar Diallo, the Community Rights Program Coordinator for Le Centre du Commerce International pour le Développement (CECIDE) in Guinea, is one local activist working with N-Map. Together, they are training local paralegals in methods of fostering community resistance against mining companies.
“Communities aren’t taking action because there are misconceptions about mining, they feel overpowered, and don’t know what to do,” explains Katherin Machalek, the Creative Director at N-Map. “However, there is hope for cultivating grassroots resistance because video stories are making an immediate impact and forging important partnerships with local NGOs that will help them organize to protect their rights.”
While N-Map has so far used traditional video in community screenings, they’ve recently begun shooting 360 video. N-Map will use this immersive video technology to train local NGO staff, to help the nonprofit’s supporters and donors better understand the dynamic on the ground, and, eventually, to show other communities facing mining projects around the world, who will benefit from experiencing the devastation of familiar landscapes.
VR JESUS: WHERE WE ARE NOW
Much of the writing about VR has taken on an almost religious fervor — both for and against. One would almost think that the second coming and the apocalypse are both imminent VR ventures. Yet, as people push VR further into humanitarian work as well as large media outlets and advertising, it should come as no surprise that endemic and structural problems aren’t miraculously solved with technology that makes video in a different aspect ratio.
It may seem obvious, but problems around representation are replicated, even magnified, by ever-changing, expensive tech developed on high and separated from makers and audiences by evolving barriers. Ingrid Kopp’s recent piece, Who is VR For, parses the challenges for VR artists and audiences in her home of South Africa and the rest of the continent. There’s a prevailing feeling that we have only moments before the technological and ideological cement around VR hardens and diverse voices are shut out.
The question of how to diversify the VR landscape of makers and audiences on a meaningful scale remains.
For now, grounding projects in successful advocacy practices and engaging with emerging technologies as they are, rather than imagining them to be some kind of utopian tool, can create meaningful results for communities. We can look at one small example.
In the case of the collaboration between N-Map and CECIDE’s project in Guinea, 360 video is well-suited to exploring the relationship between a community and the land the environment they inhabit. Their 360 video allows people to understand the impact that mining brings to the landscape. The ever-present “human scale” in 360 is completely different than that of traditional video. The scope of the devastation, seen as a panoramic barren moonscape, becomes chillingly clear.
ANATOMY OF A HUMAN RIGHTS 360 VIDEO
The experiment with 360 video is serving a unique role in advocacy. The integration of footage shot in Guinea into a 360 video for a wider audience makes clear some of the strengths of this new technology. By taking the viewer through the process of recording 360 video and screening traditional video, one comes to understand that this is an organic use of the technology, rather than an imposition of newfangled cameras to recreate old patterns.
Community Screening:
In this scenescape (please forgive this made-up term and relegate it to the graveyard of embarrassing jargon after you’ve read this piece), each person gets equal visual weight: the local activists, the trained paralegals and the western staff of N-Map alike. Other human rights media that tends to make the filmmaker invisible — an omniscient voice showing the community to the Western audience, but apart from it. When filmmakers and international advocates obscure their own role in human rights video, they also obscure the power they wield through editing and written narration. The relational chain of advocacy is warped and subjects can become abstracted.
Mining Space:
The effects of mining are often as devastating to the social fabric of a community as they are to the environment. Generally, a mining company will come to a village and promise substantial community benefits, including schools and jobs. After signing a contract with the federal government for mineral rights, they’ll proceed to pollute the water and agricultural resources a community has relied on for generations, leading to negative health consequences and eventual displacement — -likely to a former mining site.
Displacement Site:
People in Guinea don’t have a visual framework to imagine how mining will change their land.
“People can take their water and resources for granted. It’s all they’ve ever known,” said Machalek.
The 360 video shot in Guinea will provide advocates and communities with a new tool to help members of a community experience the transformation mining can bring to their land. In some communities, it may be the first video they ever see.
The human scale and omnidirectional view of 360 video help local communities in Guinea understand mining’s potential for devastation.
Community Discussion:
The 360 video includes shots from a variety of locations: the capital, a mining site, a displacement site and multiple sites in the community working to organize (see above). The viewer gets a sense of the diversity within Guinea and the forces, places and people that are involved in the struggle against mining.
Advocacy Training:
The scene depicting advocates learning how use the mobile screening equipment allows viewers to reframe both the advocates and the technology that’s being used.
Including all the participants means that supporters, NGOs and impacted communities will all see some version of themselves and of others in the footage. Communities can better understand the role of advocates. It demystifies them, revealing their journey from the capital to remote villages and the mining and displacement sites they pass along the way, which serve as reminders of the urgency of their outreach work. It also helps people in the West gain a more nuanced understanding of how Guinea’s advocates and international organizations like N-Map interact with grassroots communities.
A MOMENT OF RECKONING
Diallo, the coordinator of CECIDE’s community outreach program in Guinea gave the following assessment on mining: “Any development which does not bother to create better social economic conditions for the grassroots of the communities is sterile and doomed to failure.” His words can also serve as guidance for VR and other emerging media development in human rights. Media created with emerging technologies purely for their novelty that does not serve communities will be sterile.
It seems that 360 video is at a moment of reckoning. VR creators will fail often, and in ways that may seem cringeworthy in the very near future. Our only defense is to embrace the questions that are developing around the use of VR. Media makers and advocates should interrogate how new technologies can be used to serve communities and global advocacy work.
This is the first in a series of articles exploring emerging media around human rights issues for New Media Advocacy Project. I also participated in the development of the 360 video project discussed in this piece.
