42 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
FEED: You started in traditional journalism, as a freelancer and then for major magazines like Time and Newsweek . How did you come to virtual reality and eventually the field of ‘immersive journalism’? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: After years as a journalist, I did a number of documentary films. In 2007, I was working on a film, while teaching myself to code. I got a grant from the Bay Area Video Coalition to take a sequence that featured the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and bring it into the virtual world. I wanted to continue the conversation around that issue and the result was the immersive project Gone Gitmo . Of course, the prison is still open – I should build that project again. Building the art from scratch took a while, so we created the piece in Second Life. We used a heads-up display so you could take control of your avatar and that was a very unusual approach. Essentially, it puts you in a C-17 transport plane and then it puts you in the Camp X-Ray cage. That project led me to start thinking about the ideas of using virtual environments to tell journalism stories. And that became my journey – thinking about putting people inside the story and thinking about body-ness, and what it means to have an embodied experience of a news story. More and more, you think about how you can put people on the scene. I always quote Martha Gellhorn, who was a reporter in the second world war; she called it ‘the view from the ground’. And that’s our goal, right? To put people closer to the story. I thought that we could use virtual reality to offer that connection. FEED: The projects youʼve worked on since are all about pulling people into
a perspective they might not normally have. Recently, for example, you did a film on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet... . NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Yes. Greenland Melting . There were also After Solitary , Project Syria , Out of Exile – which is a project on LGBTQ homelessness – a piece on domestic violence called Kiya , and there is a piece on the US border patrol about the death of a man who is beaten by the border patrol. I just did one with the National Butterfly Center, which is a place situated right on the Mexico/US border that faces losing up to 70% of its land if the Border Wall goes through. And at my company Emblematic, we’ve started a new project called Reach (reach.love), which enables people to assemble their own VR stories. I use the same kind of journalistic practice that I used in films, but then am applying it to letting people be on the scene at an event. And the material that it’s based on is always very carefully researched and calculated to present it as it happened. FEED: How can VR convey new things about these subjects?
IMMERSE YOURSELF VR films, such as Project Syria (above) and Greenland Melting (below) offer viewers a chance to be ‘on the scene’ in locations they are unlikely to be able to experience in real life
NONNY DE LA PEÑA: A lot of climate change science has been very difficult to understand in a visual way. Many people think climate change is something that happens far off in other places and so can’t understand how the science affects them. What’s great about Greenland Melting is that it puts you on the side of a glacier as it’s melting. We also put you on a NASA airplane, with a guy literally dropping a tube down the back of the airplane through the toilet so it’ll land in the ocean so they can measure temperature. You feel like, when you’re standing there, it might as well be you dropping a thermometer down the back of the plane. And we did it in conjunction with two of America’s premier journalistic organisations, PBS Frontline and PBS Nova. To me, what that does is take a subject that was very inaccessible and make it very accessible, so that you can understand
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook