The Eye as Witness - Recording the Holocaust
This immersive multimedia experience about Holocaust photography explores the political and moral motives for witnessing and recording the Holocaust and to encourage critical thinking on racism, hatred and ‘fake news’ today. It is based on research carried out by historians, computer scientists, education experts at the University of Nottingham, and museum professionals from across the UK, to transform the use of images in understanding and commemorating the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.
Visitors to the unusual Mixed Reality Experience will enter a virtual Holocaust exhibition filled with Nazi propaganda photos of Holocaust victims. Using state-of-the-art virtual reality computer simulation technology and techniques they will be able to ‘walk into’ a photograph to see the propaganda photographer in the act of taking the picture. They can explore the space to consider the context of the image and discover what was kept out of frame. The VR allows people to view snapshots of this traumatic period in modern history in a private, personal and visceral way.
Assistant Professor Paul Tennent from the Mixed Reality Lab in the School of Computer Science said: “The Eye as Witness is an exercise in technical and interactional creativity. The challenging context helps us to ask questions as researchers about the nature and ethics of reconstructing sensitive scenes. VR technology gives us a powerful tool to deliver these experiences in a deeply immersive and embodied way, but we have a responsibility to apply this with care. Everybody in that photograph was a real person with emotions and a story to tell. It is not our place to embellish their story, but to tell it as well as we can with the tools we have.”
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