War and Humanitarian Aesthetics: Notes on Modular Immersion
2022; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cj.2022.0031
ISSN2578-4919
Autores Tópico(s)Violence, Religion, and Philosophy
ResumoWar and Humanitarian Aesthetics:Notes on Modular Immersion Christian Rossipal (bio) In 2009, Swiss ex-artillery officer Christian Rouffaer, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), was tasked with documenting war crimes committed in video games, in a research project called "Playing by the Rules."1 Rouffaer found that human rights law was frequently violated in games such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003). This discovery was mocked in the press, with reporters declaring that the Red Cross was out to incite moral panic, could not distinguish between fiction and reality, and had "virtually lost the plot."2 Bad press aside, the outcome of this rather bizarre episode is interesting if we consider how virtual reality (VR) and so-called gamification would later become key to the organization's media strategy, which lets us examine the convergence of humanitarian governance and immersive media. To shift the sudden media attention to their favor and reach new target groups, the ICRC collaborated with Bohemia Interactive on the first-person shooter game Arma 3 (2013), which simulates infantry warfare taking place in the near future on the islands of the Aegean Sea. The collaboration generated a new add-on for the game Laws of War (Bohemia Interactive, 2017), in which the player takes on the role of an international humanitarian aid worker instead of a soldier. Working for the fictional ICRC surrogate "International [End Page 176] Development and Aid Project," the player is tasked with clearing mines and cluster munition in the aftermath of a bombing campaign. The goal, according to the collaborators, is to foster a better understanding of international humanitarian law (IHL). Bohemia Interactive is currently licensing a military-grade version of the underlying Arma game engine for VR training in the US Army and other military organizations around the world, where immersive media are widely used for training before deployment and to treat soldiers after they return (e.g., for post-traumatic stress disorder).3 As Pasi Väliaho puts it, such military training and treatment function as a "merger between computergenerated imagery, biological psychology and the management of affectivity and memory, based on the foundational idea that affective responses and behavioral patterns are interiorized in the organism's neurophysiological circuits."4 Väliaho further explains that military immersive media have less to do with embodiment or emotional responses on an individual level than with biopolitical governance on a collective level. In other words, the military's primary investment in immersive media is not curing individual soldiers of their trauma but rather managing how affective and behavioral patterns are distributed across a population. As we will see, immersive media from humanitarian organizations operate within this biopolitical domain too. In 2018, the ICRC turned to immersive media for fundraising and advocacy, hoping to raise awareness and build empathy. To date, two immersive works funded by the ICRC have been released for download on mobile app stores: the interactive VR short film The Right Choice (Avril Furness, 2018) and the augmented reality (AR) app Enter the Room (Nedd, 2018). Based on the ICRC report on urban warfare, "'I Saw My City Die': Voices from the Front Lines of Urban Conflict in Iraq, Syria and Yemen," Enter the Room transforms the user's cell phone into a kind of portal: a three-dimensional doorway leading into a child's bedroom. Seeing the steady decay of the room and hearing air-raid sirens from outside, the user indirectly gleans the human costs of war. Whereas Enter the Room does not show any humans onscreen and lets its user imagine the horrors of war, The Right Choice portrays both people and violence up close. Shot in Beirut using a war-damaged building as a set, the film includes staged but profoundly disturbing imagery. By consulting and casting Syrian refugees now resettled in Beirut, the filmmakers were able to achieve seemingly impeccable attention to detail and realism that is further emphasized through the film's high production value. The Right Choice depicts a Syrian family in their home while urban warfare unfolds right outside their building. Specifically, a man sweeps the floor in a ground-level apartment as his wife and their...
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