An Immerse Response
These past two years, I have been working on a feature film and interactive documentary about Brazilian students fighting for better public education. I have been filming and watching more than a hundred hours of archival footage of the marches of 2015 and 2016 there. This gives me a particular perspective on RIOT, the responsive media project that creator Karen Palmer wrote about recently in Immerse.
Caio Castor, a São Paulo filmmaker who has shot the most relevant social topics in recent years, gave me a hard disk with sixty hours of his footage of students’ protests. I see in this footage that when police attack students, Caio goes near the aggressions to record evidence of injustice. Caio is a white man, protected by a camera, and is able to maintain a very calm voice even in the worst situations. In one of segment of footage, he politely asks the police why officers are arresting a young student. The policemen do not answer him, and, after few minutes, Caio is also arrested. After another protest, police destroyed all of his equipment, including his memory card, when he filmed their beating of a teenager. In general, people beaten by police in Caio’s footage are black.
Sitting at my desktop, I watched those scenes recorded by Caio of bombs, truncheons, and disproportionate violence against teenagers. Many times I felt tachycardia, so I stopped, drank some water, and stretched before continuing to edit. This happened every day for the past year. Of course, watching from home was much easier than actually being there. When I am the one recording the protests and I see police violence against the kids, I can’t keep the calm voice of Caio, and I get really, really angry. Why can our governors order this level of violence against the public? Why do those police officers accept orders from their superiors and attack those kids fighting for a better world? That world would be better also for those police and their kids, who probably also study in under-resourced public schools. How can we, as a society, accept this? How should we organize ourselves and react?
When editing my footage, I can listen to my own voice arguing with the police. Maybe because I am a white woman with a fancy camera, I have never been arrested. Maybe because I am not shooting every protest and recording so much evidence against police, as Caio is, I have only been threatened by police.
I was in the process of editing my film and watching those scenes from when I had the luck of meeting Palmer, “The Storyteller from the Future,” and participating in her film and game. Palmer explains that RIOT is an emotionally responsive film which uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence technology to enable players to navigate through a dangerous riot. The user is confronted by a cop: Respond with fear and the film goes in one direction. Respond with anger and it goes in another. Her goal is to enable participants to become aware of their subconscious behaviour, and enable them to consciously build new neurological pathways in their brains. I loved the idea, and thought it could be really useful.
When I experienced RIOT, I felt it as a very quiet counterpoint to the reality. In the first sensor decision, for example, a police officer approaches a protestor. I am used to shooting and watching, which is why the facial sensors recognized my attitude as calm. In the game, I did not argue with the officer as I did in real protests, so I did not deserve to be beaten. I was able to go until the end, and RIOT said I was prepared to go to a real riot.
Palmer’s interactive film suggests that whether or not police attack you depends on whether you are calm, angry, or fearful. This setup means responsibility for the police violence rests upon the victim, and does not consider other factors such as racism, classism, and the desire of the state — the “boss” of those police — to destroy any mass movement that can change the status quo and the inequality and injustices of the state. It also fails to consider that repression in the real world can be much crueler than a single police officer approaching you.
The RIOT experience reminds me that the desire to use innovative technology in our works, specifically when addressing social issues, should not obfuscate the real and important questions—questions that encourage the audience to understand why these events are happening in the first place, or what has happened in the past that made the present as it is, or what we can do to make a different future.
In Brazil, almost fourteen people are killed by police each day, and this number is increasing. Our military police is an inheritance from military dictatorship that ended in the ’80s. Probably that’s why freedom of protest is still not very welcome in our democracy. In 2013, police assaulted seventy-seven journalists in marches. Their crime? Reporting on protests. Between 2015 and 2016, there were 1,244 arbitrary arrests of protestors, and this is not unique to Brazil. In Turkey, for example, more than three hundred people were injured and at least 1,750 detained in the clashes that started with demonstrators opposing the razing of an Istanbul park in 2013. During three months of protest in Venezuela in 2017, there were 3,300 arbitrary arrests and ninety-one deaths. In Iran more than a thousand people were arrested in protests during January this year and at least twenty-one people died after violent clashes between protesters and security guards.
I am sure that there were varied motivations for the protestors and for the police in these different countries. But I doubt that the cause of the violence had to do with whether the protestors were calm or angry.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and is fiscally sponsored by IFP. Learn more about our vision for the project here.