6 x 9

In my opinion, the VR movie 6x9 about solitary confinement rooms transmit a strong experience about isolation. The room’s walls, the floating effects, and the few objects, together with the use of the light and the voice over narration make the viewer’s experience quite realistic. The texts are easy to read, however, I thought the amount of text and the simultaneous pop up difficult the reading experience. Using light and voice over narration is something that I would like to experiment with on my last project.

 Moreover, this movie makes me reflect on how inhuman and inefficient are the prison systems of many countries. I believe that any person, who is deprived of contact with other human beings won’t improve his/her character. The opposite is likely to happen if the person survives to the isolation, probably will be angrier and with a more violent attitude towards others. Additionally, countries spend an enormous amount of money on isolation rooms and prison systems instead of creating rehabilitation centers were prisoners can work and contribute to society.

Reactions to Note on Blindness

At the beginning, I experienced Note on Blindness watching the visual while I was guided by the sound. I thought that the images were quite attractive, however, I felt my attention to the sound was less intense. After that, I decided to close my eyes and let the sound guided me through the experience. This time, I realized that my reaction to the sound was stronger than before. I had a stronger sense of space, I was able to focus on the different sounds, (footsteps, cars, kid’s voices, etc.), and where they come from. This two different way of experiencing Note on Blindness makes me think on how as a society and also as an artist, we prioritize visual experiences over acoustic ones.

Codes and Modes

Mandy Rose is Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England and a contributing Editor to the i-docs website. She researches the intersection between documentary and networked culture.

During Codes and Modes, she said that interactive documentary is like an interactive text in which participants engage with the content and that participation exists at two different levels, one is the production, and another the reception in which the audience acts as an active agent in the process of the experience.

Rose considers interactive documentary as an evolution from the traditional documentary form. She ponders storytelling as an important part of the social documentary, like a choreography of many voices for the audience to reflect about.

In relationship to VR documentary, she supports the correlation of the story in opposition to a reaction to technology.  Rose also made a distinction between real body presence and the idea of VR presence, in which there is a lack of empirical experience and body movements. In this context, she thinks that a visible voice over narrator can play an important role on VR documentaries by creating trust and emotions, and by helping people to better connect with the story.

Geetu Ambwani leads the data science team at the Huffington Post which is in charge of building data products for social sharing, engagement, and distribution of Huffington Post editorial and advertising content. At Codes & Modes, she presented her research about media and personalized algorithms, a method that she uses to search and understand how people receive and filter information.

Through this method, her team found that 6 in 10 Americans get their information through social media. This way of getting information is what she calls: Filter Bubble, which resulted in the cultural and ideological user’s isolation.

As a result, media is trying to find different ways to change this reality. They are investing on friendly user’s websites with new, compelling interfaces that help people to easily get a more balanced information.

Other approaches that they studied were: show people the opposing view, which was not well accepted by the public. Show people their bias, which denoted a moderate change towards a balanced information search. The third option, show people source credibility has been the most successful one, changing how credible the reader perceived the news and their disposition towards a more balanced news sources.