Back Home
a collaborative VR project for inclusion and social reintegration
By Josefina Buschmann and Catalina Alarcón
As different media researchers and practitioners have critically asserted, the contemporary emergence of virtual reality has been marked by the so-called “empathy machine rhetoric”. The ability of the medium to immerse the viewer in another world, creating the sensation of “being there”, is similar to the creation of a deeper feeling of connection with the other’s perspective.
This discourse is particularly used in the case of VR for journalism and documentaries, stressing the “real” in virtual reality, particularly projects created through the use of 360 video. The viewer puts the headsets on, and is suddenly transported into the life of someone else, which in turn generates a stronger connection and can better impact their point of view on a particular issue.
If we take a look at who has access to both making VR projects and experiencing them, we can see that most of them are concentrated in the same northern central spheres, while the depictions they create are mainly about the conflicts of people living in the so called third world. This system of production is replicating colonialist practices disguised under the validation of creating new bridges with peripheral “others”.
So the question is, what can we do to decolonize VR and open it to other peoples and spaces? We think an answer could be the process of co-creation.
Disrupting the prison experience
The prison is a place forgotten by society, an insulating construction that aims to monitor, control, and classify inmates in a violent and dehumanized space. It is born from a class system and is where those without opportunities arrive, where the main objective is punishment exercised without the necessary tools to promote social reintegration.
Chile is a deeply classist and unequal society, where recent discussion has made the death penalty a real possibility, where poor and lower class individuals have no opportunities to emerge, receive an education and work. Under this paradigm, the prison is built as a space of punishment for the working class. It stands as a violent space where health and hygiene conditions are minimal, where human rights violations are part of the daily routine, and where human connection and empathy practically do not exist.
In this setting we created “Back Home”, a collaborative virtual reality experience that gives prison inmates a chance to reconnect with their families.
We initially developed the project as a documentary film workshop, emphasizing the viewing of Ibero-American cinema and cinematographic creation through self-recording. During a five-month filmmaking workshop carried out last year at two different prisons in Santiago and Valparaíso, we created an intimate and respectful space that allowed the inmates to tell their own stories.
The first film workshop was held at the San Joaquin women’s prison in Santiago. It was a small but very enthusiastic group, who wrote from the heart as if they had never had the opportunity to do so before. As we progressed in the workshop and got to know our students, we realized that they were facing two different problems: 1) the need to express their opinion, feelings and stories, and 2) the strong need to see their family again.
We started doing narrative and literary exercises, allowing them to elaborate on their lives, dreams and guilt. We were hoping that the inmates could use cinema as an inclusive tool to interpret and reflect on their current situation as well as their life outside of prison. This project aimed to enhance skills and talents that inmates believed to have lost, or simply thought they would never have.
As the classes progressed, trust grew between us and the students. It gave them enough confidence to ask for favours. Among them was sending messages to their families and receiving pictures of their children, parents and grandparents. Hence, we started functioning as a bridge between them and their families. Many of the inmates have spent years behind bars, which means years without seeing their families. This causes them an enormous amount of stress and concern, which often translates into changes in their personality. Being able to see a family photograph, listen to an audio message, or watch a video that reminded them of their family, resulted in an immediate emotional change in them that directly connected them with their feelings.
We wanted to go even further. What value can a photograph have? How important can the value of the image be in a place like jail? What would happen if that image could be experienced in the first person?
Technology and Power
New media and technologies have always been related to knowledge, but above all, have been related to power. Visual technologies have historically been used for controlling the population: the one who can see has the power to control the other. This is particularly true in the prison system, where inmates are constantly being watched and, at the same time, are invisible to the outside world. They cannot see nor be seen by the ones outside prison, alienating themselves from their loved ones and society in general.
It is enough to think about the concept of the panopticon whose key concepts are surveillance and punishment, to begin to approach the current penitentiary system.
The one who can see has the power to control, measure, classify and objectify the other. The word Panopticon is a neologism created by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and responds to a construction whose design allows the watchman to observe all the space that surrounds him without being seen by those he supervises. It was created as an architectural structure of penitentiary insulation, but whose concept was used and theorized by the French psychologist, social theorist and psychologist Michel Foucault. For Foucault, our society and its doctrines are not far from the panopticon as a surveillance concept, which over time has led us to immerse ourselves in a disciplinary society based on the control of behaviour through the imposition, sometimes explicit and other times not so much, of surveillance. With this, the correction of citizen behaviour is sought, and any behaviour that departs from the expected is punished.
Virtual reality as a bridge
The virtual reality experience worked as a great bridge between both spaces: the interior and exterior of the prison, allowing them to not only see the outside world again, but to give them access to a technology they had never used before.
Getting in touch with the families of inmates one by one, we explained our intentions: to have them record their most intimate and familiar places and take that video to the prison. The work process was always the same: contact the family, travel to the house, give them a tutorial on VR technology, record the house, check the video with the family and move to post-production.
While it sounds simple, we did not realize the impact and importance of what we were doing. It was only when we met the first family that we began to feel the magnitude of this project. Each house is in a different part of Chile, which means some of them live in the capital, others in the suburbs or outskirts of the city, and some of them in dangerous localities or in rural places.
Each was a different world, a different reality, and a different life story. The families saw an opportunity to connect with their relatives in prison, making the recording process for the VR experience very emotional.
The instructions we gave each family were simple; that each record a story created entirely by them. We, the film crew, hid somewhere in the house and monitored the recording from a distance. This gave families the opportunity to be sincere, to send intimate messages full of love and also pain. Often this recording process was the only way they had to communicate with the inmate.
They prepared for the moment by asking distant relatives to be at home on the day of the recording, making the house as beautiful as possible and setting the table with food, receiving us as guests of honour. They treated the 360° camera as an everyday object. Suddenly, a group of people who were not familiar with the technology of virtual reality and to whom cinema was just a form of entertainment, were using this new technology to narrate the story of their lives in a collective way. Suddenly, a group of people who were not familiar with the technology of virtual reality and to whom cinema was just a form of entertainment, were using this new technology to narrate the story of their lives in a collective way.
Thanks to the trust formed during the workshop, we were able to record specific moments that the inmates wanted to witness. One of my students told me his father was about to get married. He said: “I want to be there but I can’t, so the only chance that I have is for you to be there instead of me”. We made it happen! I taught his young brother how to use the camera so he could film the bride and groom going out of the church. He was right there, holding the bride’s dress in one hand and filming everything for his brother with the other.
For the inmates, each of these stories meant not only seeing their homes and families, but also an intimate connection with their place of origin, with their memories and personal history, which is nothing short of connecting them with their own identity.
Each video was different but it had a similar pattern. Someone in the family led the process and carried the 360° camera with a mini monopod. Some videos started on the outskirts of the house, others in the neighbourhood, others on a bicycle in motion with their children. Then, most of them went through the house to finish in a common space where the whole family sat around the camera and spoke directly to the inmate. The messages were diverse: excuses for not being able visit them to jail, reproaches for being in it, messages of encouragement to endure the remaining years and messages of love, affection, grief and joy.
The workshop
For us, it is important to highlight how this experience of virtual reality is part of a documentary film workshop that works as a small community, where week after week the inmates have a space for love and connection, where they are allowed to cry, tell their sorrows and joys.
We decided to run this workshop in jail to make a small difference in the lives of prison inmates. There, through a long process of collective creative construction, cinema and virtual reality functions as a great political gesture that tries to “knock down the wall” that separates them from society. This creates a space for collective reflection transporting them to another place, a better, more familiar and dignified one. This place is full of memories and identity, appearing in front of their eyes through VR, allowing them to reconnect with their loved ones by returning to a personal space that connects them with their humanity, something profoundly necessary in a space like jail.
In an enclosed space such as the prison, where communication with the outside world becomes complex, cinema and culture in general open a small door that will take those who see it to the outside world. It is a space for collective and personal reflection, and also for a reunion with family memories and therefore with personal identity. This fosters in the inmates a real changes, from their artistic capacities to softer life-coping skills.
Beyond the individual impact, this experience was a powerful political gesture that shows that change always occurs from the humanity that exists in each of us, and a from the connection with those we love. Knowing what we now know — that 1) images of home create internal changes in people deprived of freedom, 2) art in its most poetic and ethereal form generates shifts in human sensations, 3) cinema is capable of generating feelings, sensations, intense and invaluable emotions — we wonder: what would happen if we tried a using cinema and art as a permanent political measure to change the conditions in prison?
