[From The Huffington Post, where the post includes additional images and a 6:44 minute video]
‘Hunger In Los Angeles’: Virtual Reality Makes Journalism Immersive, Pixelated
Lucas Kavner lucas.kavner@huffingtonpost.com
01/30/2012
Imagine you’re at a food bank outside the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. It’s a clear and hot Saturday in August. Dozens of hungry people are lining up. The woman who runs the food bank is overwhelmed. She yells people’s numbers quickly. “There are too many people,” one woman complains, as she stands in line, her arms crossed. Others wait patiently, but the mood is tense.
Then someone in line collapses to the ground — a seizure. People surround him, trying to figure out what’s wrong. A woman calls 911, but her English isn’t great, and she has trouble communicating with the dispatcher.
Amid this pandemonium, another person runs to the front of the line to steal food and ravage supplies. Yelling, pushing ensues. The moment seems to last forever as you wait for the ambulance to arrive, to help the man on the ground.
Finally, it does. “Are you a doctor?” an EMT asks someone kneeling near the collapsed man. “Then get out of the way.” The man, it turns out, was diabetic. He hadn’t gotten food in time and had slipped into a coma.
Then everything freezes. The buildings fade away, the people on the scene become translucent. The sidewalk goes on forever. An infographic appears: 1 in 6 people in America are hungry, it reads. 1 in 5 are children.
Now remove your head-mounted display.
The scene you just witnessed is one you can relive over and over again, in real time, thanks to Nonny de la Peña, a former Newsweek correspondent and documentarian who has been attempting to combine both her trades in a rather startling way. Read more on ‘Hunger In Los Angeles’: Virtual reality makes journalism immersive, pixelated…
Call: Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating
BADco. extends an *open call for contributions* for
Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating
/symposium and publication/
When and where:
March 16-17, 2012 in Zagreb, Croatia
This symposium and its topic are a continuation of BADco.’s artistic interest to relate performance and image. More concretely, it was motivated by our most recent work “Responsibility for Things Seen” that was presented in 2011 within the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us, in the absence of performers in the six-months exhibition, to pursue the idea of ‘theater by other means’ and to custom develop a database video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology.
Who can apply:
If you are a scholar or practitioner working on the nexus of performance, image and technology, if you are working in or between any number of fields such as, but not exclusively: performing arts, visual arts, cinema and expanded cinema, human-machine interaction, technological performance, architecture, neuroscience, we are inviting you to present your research interests in form of a presentation and/or participate in the debates at our symposium “Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating”. Read more on Call: Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating…