IN THE ROOM WITH THE ENEMY
Approaches fighters from three conflicts
How would you feel standing face to face with a Palestinian resistance fighter? An Israeli soldier? A hardened Salvador an gang member? A Congolese military police officer, or rebel fighter?
You can find out in Karim Ben K he li fa’ s virtual reality( V R) exhibit The Enemy, which runs through March 10 at the Phi Centre.
The Berlin-based, Belgian-Tunisian war correspondent’s CV includes work for New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Vanity Fair and Newsweek. An invitation to be an artist in residence at MIT in 2013 led to a chance meeting with a VR company called Oculus, and an opportunity to reframe his work.
“I was at MIT with a project called Portrait of the Enemies,” Ben Khelifa recalled, returning from a smoke break Monday morning at the Phi Centre.
“For that project, I had one photo on one side (of a room) and another photo on the other side; when you crossed the border you could stand in front of a photo and hear the fighters talking to you. When you crossed to the other side, you could hear the other fighters.”
The Enemy functions in a similar way. After donning VR headsets, headphones and backpacks, viewers stroll through a blackcurtained room for the next 50 minutes, approaching, observing and hearing from combatants on opposite sides of the three above-mentioned conflicts.
“When I discovered VR, I wondered, ‘What would happen to journalism if the guy (being interviewed) was in the room with us, and you could feel his body language?’ ” Ben Khelifa said. “It tells a lot of things beyond words. It really helps make sense of things.”
Using variations on a series of basic questions, the director probes each of his subjects on themselves, their enemies, their experience with violence and their hopes and fears. The result is sobering, at times scary, and emotionally disarming.
Using his journalistic instincts, Ben Khelifa manages to get surprisingly unguarded answers from these men. Which is precisely what he set out to do.
“The idea came from being a war correspondent and going from one side to the other,” Ben Khelifa said.
“Between photos and stories I’d do of people, I would have conversations that would reveal their humanity.
“Even though I didn’t want to live in the world they’re fighting for, I couldn’t deny the fact that they were human. In very simple terms, they want their kids to have a better life than they have. That was very different than what we expect from those fighters, in terms of man hood and being tough guys .”
A co-production between France’s Camera Lucida and immersive technology studio Emissive,
in Paris, The Enemy features an augmented reality app for iOS and Android devices developed in Montreal by digital creative studio Dpt. and the NFB, allowing users to access much of the same content from their phones.
The most effective experience of the project is with VR, and Ben Khelifa has already seen the results first-hand as The Enemy has been presented in other parts of the world.
“The closer you are to these conflicts, the more cracked up you are when you come out,” he said.
“In Tel Aviv, a young Israeli walked out and said, ‘We all want the same thing. We want the same thing they want. I had no idea. Now I’m in trouble because I’m in the army.’
“That’s exactly why I wanted to have this intervention. The information makes you reconsider the other. But it’s valid in North America and Europe, too, where people are starting to be tempted by nationalism.”
The Enemy may not be the most cutting-edge use of virtual reality. It doesn’ t have the wow factor of Montreal company Felix& Paul’s visit to NASA in Space Voyagers: A New Dawn, which recently premièred at the Sundance Film Festival.
“I’m not bringing you to the top of Mount Everest or to space,” Ben Khelifa admitted. “I’m just asking you to meet people and see what happens. It’s a very simple thing. But I discovered it’ s extremely complex to do something very simple .”
There is an interactive component to the exhibit, as viewers’ reactions are monitored, affecting what they see in subtle ways.
The movement soft he animated, life like forms standing across from you are based on the actual movements of Ben Khelifa’s interviewees as they answered his questions. And their eyes react to a motion capture system in the VR headsets, allowing them to look you in the eye as they speak.
“People talk about (it as) a meeting,” Ben Khelifa said, “a feeling of hearing someone you have never heard before. I found that very interesting. That means we’re moving from story to experience. We make sense of the world through stories, but we remember the world through experience. So what happens to my journalism if it becomes experience?”