Introduction: The Humanitarian Digital Revolution

On October 3, 2015, US airstrikes destroyed a hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. This trauma hospital was opened in 2011 by Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), the international NGO active in the country since the 1980s. In its online account of the attack, MSF highlighted that the hospital ‘provided high-quality, free surgical care to victims of all types of trauma’.Footnote 1 In the ongoing fighting between government and opposition forces, the hospital was caught in the crossfire in September 2015. Based on reports sustaining that the hospital hosted active armed combatants, the US Army launched the attack and later admitted its responsibility by claiming it was an accident. The airstrikes resulted in the deaths of 24 patients, 14 staff and 4 caretakers. While the bombings prompted international media coverage and global outrage about their legal ramifications (Bouchet-Saulnier and Whittall 2018), MSF asked for an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission that was never implemented. As a result, the NGO launched an international advocacy campaign to ‘stop attacks on healthcare workers, facilities and patients’, called #NotATarget.Footnote 2 The Swiss section of MSF (MSF-CH) participated by producing a movie using virtual reality (VR) technology, which enables 3D and 360-degree immersive vision. Wearing a VR headset, the spectators found themselves projected in the trauma ward a few seconds before the attack and experienced the aftermath of the bomb explosion. In the mediascape of the campaign, which combined interactive social media events and public mobilisation, this VR movie stood out: it offered an immersion into the devastating consequences of the attack ‘as if’ the viewers were there and elicited emotional responses through the sensory experience of the trauma.

This strategic choice by MSF-CH relied on newly claimed performative and affective outcomes offered by virtual worlds and devices. As such, it highlights the shift to digital media among humanitarian organisations (Vilhalva de Campos 2021). Since 2015, the UN and international NGOs have turned to VR for raising funds or awareness, targeting different communities such as diplomats, military groups or decision-makers. VR technology is considered to induce behaviour change and emotional resonance, which offers considerable potential in education, sports, mental health and humanitarian aid (ICRC Innovation Unit 2019). By pretending to erase the distance, to humanise the story and to elicit empathetic connections between viewers and affected populations, immersive storytelling thus questions the well-known paradigms of distant suffering and compassion fatigue (Campbell 2014; Moeller 1999). However, despite its technological innovation, VR embodies deeply rooted cultural beliefs when it comes to stereoscopic view, illusion, immersion and mixed or extended reality, to name but a few. As seen in this chapter, VR has a long history within the science of the image: ‘The idea of installing an observer in a hermetically closed-off image space of illusion did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computerised virtual realities. On the contrary, VR forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images’ (Grau 2003, 4–5).

Indeed, the divergence between communication, media, video gaming and education studies—which tend to show similarities between virtual reality and real-life experiences (García-Orosa and Pérez-Seijo 2020, 2)—and visual scholars, film theorists and historians, and the few researchers in postcolonial studies—who relativise the illusory power of the VR perceptual experience and criticise its empathy claims—is growing since the 1980s. While this shows the extent to which ‘this confusion of technological prediction with magical thinking has spread to academic discourse’ (Murray 2020, 13), it also emphasises the need to move beyond the long-standing ‘mobilization of empathy’ (Wilson and Brown 2009) as a rhetoric inherent to the humanitarian sentiment since the nineteenth century. In line with this criticism, this chapter opens new lines of inquiry in the potential of immersive technologies to generate the ‘mobilization of shame’ (Keenan 2004; Leebaw 2020), a framework more prevalent in human rights campaigns. Through several examples of humanitarian VR films produced to denounce indiscriminate violence against civilians in war zones, such as MSF’s Not A Target, this paper shifts the analytical focus from technological determinism and the use of VR for philanthropy to the exploration of the development of such movies to advocate for causes. Keeping with Chouliaraki’s critique of the aestheticisation of suffering, it aims at questioning the ‘regime of justice’ instead of the ‘regime of care’ and the affective politics driven by such storytelling (2006, 266).

To do so, the first section of this paper builds on a historical perspective of the immersive spectacle and questions the most significant elements of the VR experience: immersion, presence, engagement and emotional resonance. The second section then explores the creation of VR films by aid agencies in relation to visual criticism of humanitarian representations, thus challenging the vision of VR as empathetic media. Building on the Not A Target case and similar attempts who draw on outrage and indignation, the third section examines the way shame is mobilised and offers an alternative to understand the performativity of emotions in VR storytelling and its illusory power. Finally, concluding remarks review the affective and visual politics offered by VR humanitarian films, insofar as these movies pose technological, cognitive, ethical and moral limitations.

Virtual Realities as Performative Devices

VR technology has gained substantial interest under the concept of immersive journalism or storytelling since a decade. VR has moved outside the niches of military experiment and video gaming to become a cultural phenomenon in mainstream media. It is now accessible to the public through art venues, educational projects, documentaries and exhibitions that feature consumer headsets. With this technology,

Virtual reality (VR) is an immersive media experience that replicates either a real or imagined environment and allows users to interact with this world in ways that feel as if they are there. To create a virtual reality experience, two primary components are necessary. First, one must be able to produce a virtual world. This can either be through video capture—recording a real-world scene—or by building the environment in Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). Second, one needs a device with which users can immerse themselves in this virtual environment. These generally take the form of dedicated rooms or head-mounted displays. Cumbersome, largely lab-based technologies for VR have been in use for decades and theorized about for even longer. But recent technological advances in 360-degree, 3D-video capture; computational capacity; and display technology have led to a new generation of consumer-based virtual reality production. (Aronson-Rath et al. n.d.)

While historical accounts go as far back as the eighteenth century and the emergence of panoramic painting (Berkman 2018), VR’s history emerged more generally in relation to the development of image culture in the late nineteenth century (Evans 2018). From lantern slides and their perceptual spectacles,Footnote 3 stereoscopes and their in-depth vision (1830s–1850s), kinetoscopes and other panoramic motion pictures (1890s),Footnote 4 to the 1962 sensorama, a ‘one-person machine’ providing ‘an immersive, multi-sensory experience building on the novelty of 3D sight by adding sound, smell and touch aspects’ (ICRC 2018a, 2), all were sensory media. These once-new pictorial media generated enthusiasm about the illusion of transparency enhanced through the mechanical image. Thus, the visual mechanics of VR are not revolutionary nor new and build on technological determinism, the old McLuhan’s prophecy that ‘the message is the medium’ (1967). VR has simply brought visuality one step closer to the ‘myth of total cinema’ already present in early nonfiction films: that the experience of reality can be achieved beyond cinematic realism and that the naïve spectator confuses the illusion on screen with reality (Crawford-Holland 2018).

Technological determinism has turned into optimism or utopianism, on the promises that VR technology can make us feel ‘what it is like’. It has prompted heated debates about its capacity to reproduce a true, authentic experience of ‘being there’ (Cizek 2016; Murray 2016; Uricchio 2016). The performative and perceptual environment provided by VR thus questions its four most significant attributes, sometimes used interchangeably: immersion, presence, engagement, and empathy. This chapter explores these attributes in relation to the visual practices of humanitarianism. First, immersion occurs ‘as a perceptual response’ when it is associated with a sensory experience, the feeling of being enveloped or surrounded by multisensory stimuli and multimodal representations delivered by words, images and sounds in the virtual environment (Nilsson et al. 2016, 110). In parallel, immersion also occurs ‘as a response to narratives’ when it is related to mental absorption in the worlds represented, and ‘emotional attachment to characters’ (111). Immersion is not typical of VR. Humanitarian photography has long displayed an immersive spectacle of distant suffering that combined an experience of the senses with a larger complex of settings and injunctions to care about and react to the injustice exposed. Transnational networks—such as the Congo Reform Association—and other human rights activists in the nineteenth century have confronted Western audiences to atrocity images displayed in magic lantern shows, books, lectures and exhibitions so they could authenticate and feel the horrors of colonial violence (Godby 2006; Grant 2001; Twomey 2012). Similarly, the whole cinematic set-up of movies made about famine, war and genocide in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s mixed perceptual stimuli with filmic narratives that involved the performativity of images. Positive emotions related to ameliorative actions could be watched on screen while listening to piano music and verbal accounts of guest speakers who witnessed suffering abroad, or on postcards and printshots available for people to share, whereas blame and indignation could be read in the supplications and prescriptive requests made in humanitarian appeals, bulletins and field reports (Gorin 2021a; Piana 2015; Tusan 2017).

Second, research has also focused on the concept of immersion as presence. It is now deconstructed as the combination of place illusion (being in another world, even though it is fictional) and body ownership (moving in the virtual environment; see de la Pena et al. 2010, 294). Embodied presence in the virtual world is based on first-person position, giving the illusion that distance is symbolically and technically annihilated. For instance, all the verbs used to describe presence in the virtual environment are verbs of motion: to ‘enter’, to ‘be transported to’, to ‘follow the footsteps of’, to ‘navigate into’, to ‘travel to’, to ‘visit’. This questions the long-standing outside/inside position of the viewer in photography, as explored in Susan Sontag’s historical critique:

The whole point in photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects—to fight against boredom. For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. (1977, 42)

But where do we set boundaries between inside and outside? The notion of ‘being inside’ thus offers room for interpretation that cannot be limited to geographical proximity; a similar observation can be drawn for VR. Being inside an image involves an interaction with the people pictured—but in this case, what are the modalities of the interaction? To quote art historian Solomon-Godeau, the insider position ‘is thus understood to imply a position of engagement, participation, and privileged knowledge, whereas the second, the outsider’s position, is taken to produce an alienated and voyeuristic relationship that heightens the distance between subject and object’ (1994, 49). Indeed, the inside/outside position of spectators had already been raised in the 1980s regarding controversial cases of humanitarian campaigns, criticising the objectification and aestheticisation of suffering and the voyeuristic gaze of the charity industry (Kennedy 2009; Lissner 1981). Since then, controversies over the stereotypical use of White saviorism and poverty porn bias in charity appeals regularly arise on social media (McVeigh 2018). Therefore, one can question whether the ‘lived experience’ of VR and the embodied presence in a humanitarian context is not just another form of supertourism in Sontag’s view. Even though the frame of photography totally disappears with the panoramic and 3D vision of VR, engagement does not draw naturally from sharing the diegetic space with characters in the movie. Being a ‘visitor’ who is briefly ‘transported into’ the virtual world might in fact reinforce contemplation, fascination and self-centeredness, rather than participation and other centeredness.

This leads us to the third attribute, i.e., engagement. In his seminal work on distant suffering, Luc Boltanski defines engagement as a situation in which ‘the spectator occupies the position (…) of someone to whom a proposal of commitment is made’, statements and images mix to form ‘a description of suffering and the expression of a particular way of being affected by the suffering displayed by words and images, modes of linguistic, cognitive and emotional commitment’ (1999, 149). Despite mechanical innovations, the level of participation in VR is still limited to vision and sound (and sometimes smell and touch), and viewers are at all times aware they have a physical connection with the actual world via technological devices (e.g., headset and gloves). Engagement, in this sense, relates more to narrative immersion and its spatial, temporal and emotional dimensions (Ryan 2001), rather than live conversations with characters in the film. At this stage, VR films could largely remain a tech-savvy form of ‘chronotopic reversal’—an optical illusion that transports viewers to another space and time already emphasised by Chouliaraki in previous aid posters and human rights campaigns (2010, 116). In this case, the spectator adopts the position of a bystander, with limited agency except the capacity to observe, move and feel. Immersive reality, then, pertains to visual practices of the early twentieth century, during which ‘witnessing publics’ (Torchin 2006) were formed when aid agencies used cinema and eyewitness images to ask audiences to bear witness to war atrocities.

Among the narrative immersion lies, finally, the emotional dimension. Diving into a virtual world (immersion), being there and sharing a diegetic space with characters (presence), and being exposed to their suffering (engagement) naturally evoke an affective reaction in general and the notion of emotional intimacy in particular. It might trigger various forms of responses, though empathetic claims are largely associated with VR, with divergent results on the degree of empathy and resonance with the distant other (Archer and Finger 2018; McStay 2018). Often used as a synonym for immersion, the notion of empathy is not always clearly defined and is understood differently by VR proponents. According to Susan Lanzoni’s history of empathy, ‘As many understand it today, empathy is our capacity to grasp and understand the mental and emotional lives of others’ (2018, 14). These emotional and cognitive capacities to feel for someone are radically different from immersion as a presence or the feeling of just ‘being there’ with someone. Drawing from this observation, we will now turn to the use of VR films by humanitarian organisations and explore the ways they could open new lines of inquiry beyond the ‘fetishization’ of empathy ‘as a revolutionary sentiment’ (Crawford-Holland 2018, 20) and, more generally, beyond the governance of compassion or sympathy in humanitarian imagery (Käpylä and Kennedy 2014).

Humanitarian Virtual Movies

In 2015, the UNHCR launched Clouds over Sidra, the first VR movie in the humanitarian sector, which was filmed in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. A collaboration between the UN Millennium Campaign and UNICEF Jordan, it was written by Gabo Arora, UN special advisor for refugees, and Chris Milk, owner of the VR company WITH.IN.Footnote 5 Following an ordinary day in the life of Sidra, a 12-year-old Syrian girl living in the camp, the movie is a paradigmatic example of the politics of empathy (Irom 2018). Telling the story of refugeehood from Sidra’s perspective, it aims to make the spectator feel good and act as a global citizen (Gruenewald and Witteborn 2020). Similarly, the well-known TED talk by Chris Milk has largely disseminated the motto that VR has ‘become the ultimate empathy machine’ (2015), thus prompting many criticisms about the capacity of digital media to generate empathy on demand (Bollmer 2017; Hassan 2020; Herson 2016).

Unsurprisingly, aid agencies have followed the technological optimism raised by VR’s alleged ability to heighten emotional arousal. Since 2015, about a hundred films have been produced on topics ranging from natural disasters, infectious diseases, climate change, migration, war-related violence, women’s rights and education. The sources of these films include organisations such as UNFPA, UNICEF, UNHCR, MSF, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, Islamic Relief, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Some have entire innovation units dedicated to VR, such as the United Nations Virtual Reality (UNVR) programme, established in January 2015 in coordination with the UN Sustainable Development Goals Action campaign.Footnote 6 While Clouds over Sidra was initially launched at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos and further screened at other UN summits,Footnote 7 thus reaching out to decision-makers, UN representatives and policymakers, the other movies were promoted at international exhibitions, film festivals and public venues to reach a global audience. On specific occasions, technical set-ups were designed to enhance the virtual experience. For instance, MSF used a 9-m panoramic dome to screen the ten VR refugee movies produced for its travelling exhibition, Forced from Home.Footnote 8

This leads to several observations. First, as mentioned above, empathetic claims are made without clear distinction between perceptual and narrative immersion, as can be seen in the organisations’ promotional material: ‘[UNVR] uses the power of immersive storytelling to inspire viewers towards increased empathy, action and positive social change’ (UNVR)Footnote 9; ‘VR is one of the best mediums out there to evoke genuine empathy (…). When you’re watching a traditional video, you’re able to multi-task. But once you don the virtual-reality goggles, the rest of the world around you disappears and you’ve entered into a completely simulated experience’ (IRC 2016). These examples reflect a definition of empathy that ‘leads one person to respond with sensitive care to the suffering of another’ (Batson 2009, 9). Nonetheless, it precludes other emotional and cognitive capacities related to feeling and experiencing empathy, from knowing the thoughts or feelings of the other, imagining how one would react in a similar situation, to distress felt by witnessing the suffering of the other (2009). To experience these other dimensions in full, viewers of VR humanitarian films would need to have a full interaction and conversation with the protagonists and engage actively in the situation.

Second, the VR experience of humanitarian settings is merely visual and aesthetic, with the risk of the viewer being turned off by the visual exploration rather than having a discussion with characters in the movie. In her conceptual approach to distance and moral affordances in VR, Kate Nash shows that because spatial distance is abolished, ‘VR runs the risk of producing improper distance (…) when it invites forms of self-focus and self-projection rather than a more distanced position’ that would allow the viewer to analyse the situation and acknowledge the suffering of others (2018, 125). In simulating face-to-face encounters with distant others, VR films stimulate imagination and transportation to other places, at the risk of privileging visual and spatial exploration rather than offering genuine and attentive witnessing to the stories and words of suffering others. To enhance viewers’ agency, the VR experience should offer more than ‘shared space-time illusions’ (Gruenewald and Witteborn 2020, 7).

For instance, the UN used VR portals inside containers when Clouds over Sidra was screened at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2015. The setting allowed sensorial isolation, as viewers entered those containers after watching the film, and shared spatial proximity and full-body conversations in real time with refugees in camps on the other side of the interactive screen. Enhancing visual immersion, these VR portals created a sort of a ‘wormhole’Footnote 10 or gateway to others’ distant realities through symbolic physical transportation and interaction. Even if he did not visit the portal, Ban Ki-Moon, then UN-Secretary General, shared his experience of confronting VR to direct refugee witnessing. He watched Clouds over Sidra before the opening of the Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria on March 31, 2015, during which he stated:

Last night, I saw a deeply moving video entitled Clouds Over Sidra. It is an amazing virtual reality production of the starkness of life in the Za’atari Refugee Camp through the eyes of a beautiful young girl by the name of Sidra. She says “I have been here a year and a half, and that is long enough … but no one knows when it will be safe to go home, nor what will be left for them when they return.” I often think back on my visits in recent years to refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq. Children asked: “Why am I here? What did I do wrong? When can I go home?” I have no answer. I have only shame and deep anger and frustration at the international community’s impotence to stop the war.Footnote 11

Without mentioning his reaction to the movie, he highlights his outrage against the international community and the lack of long-lasting political solutions for refugee resettlement. Empirical studies have shown that audience responses to visual representations of armed conflicts enhance frustration, resentment, outrage and shame but also resistance and enjoyment (Cohen 2001; Scott 2014; Seu 2010). Findings show that responses are complex and people have mixed feelings, especially because audiences experience various emotional stages when encountering visual evidence (Sacco and Gorin 2017). These feelings are born out of powerlessness, as a reaction against the figure of the oppressor, the political bystander or the policymaker, but they coexist with feelings towards the suffering of affected communities. This leads to subtler forms of compassion, as discussed in Birgitta Höijer’s study of audience reactions to media reports of armed violence (2004, 522–524): tender-hearted compassion towards victims (pity or empathy); blame-filled compassion towards perpetrators (indignation and anger); shame-filled compassion towards ourselves (guilt); powerless-filled compassion (indifference or impotence).

Finally, the case reveals the need to assess the emotional resonance of VR movies within a larger experimental setting. While many organisations invest in VR for fundraising or outreach, the ICRC established its Virtual Reality Unit in 2014 to study behaviour change. The ICRC likes to consider itself ‘a humanitarian leader through its training programs, urban combat simulations, and extended reality (XR) research’ (ICRC 2020). Relying on academic findings and experiments to explore new operating models for VR, the organisation takes into consideration that immersive technologies can also trigger stress, anxiety, trauma or other physiological reactions similar to the real world (ICRC Innovation Unit 2019, 3–4). VR can thus induce strong physical and mental stimuli, which should be considered in the emotional response to the immersive experience. In 2018, the ICRC launched The Right Choice, a VR movie confronting viewers with the situation of civilians trapped in war zones (see Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
A screengrab of a person entering a damaged house holding a weapon.

Two armed combatants entering a family house. The Right Choice, 2018 (©ICRC/Don’t Panic)

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Putting the viewer in an active role, the story simulates the experience of choosing to flee or to stay: ‘The experience gives viewers a choice in the face of attack. But in the end none of the options leads to a positive outcome, underscoring how war gives civilians nothing but bad options’; Christopher Nicholas, the ICRC’s project leader, hence underlines, ‘Virtual reality transports viewers from the comfort of their homes to the horrors of the battlefield in a visceral and powerful way. (…) We want people who aren’t familiar with urban conflict to get a sense of what it looks and feels like’ (ICRC 2018b).Footnote 12 Without further explanation of the visceral reactions to the simulated experience of war (the ICRC has polled its viewers but results were not available as of June 2021—see ICRC 2018c), one can only assume the feelings sensed when exposed to the horrors of the battlefield, which could just as easily harden the viewer’s feelings against either side. Drawing from this observation, we will now explore the case of MSF’s Kunduz attack simulation and the use of VR films to advocate, influence or change policies, which represent only 8.1% of the production (García-Orosa and Pérez-Seijo 2020, 8).

Not a Target

After the bombing of the Kunduz hospital in 2015, MSF President Joanne Liu took the matter to the international community. In her two speeches at the UN Security Council in 2016, she deplored the lack of control of hostilities and the systematic attacks against medical facilities and health workers in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. On May 3, 2016, she recalled that during her visit to Kunduz after the bombing, she met ‘one of the survivors, an MSF nurse whose left arm was blown off during the relentless airstrike’, who told her ‘that when fighting erupted in Kunduz, MSF told its staff that its trauma center was a safe place’. This memory ‘haunts’ her daily, in front of attacks against healthcare that ‘amount to massive, indiscriminate and disproportionate civilian targeting in urban settings, and, in the worst cases (…) are acts of terror’ (MSF 2016a).Footnote 13 Four months later, on September 28, 2016, she ‘deplored the lack of control of hostilities. This free-for-all is a choice. There is a method in the madness. In both Yemen and Syria, four of the five permanent members of this council are implicated in these attacks’ (MSF 2016b).Footnote 14 Her reckoning of haunting memories and the reference to madness and terror thus situate her affects around trauma and resentment, even though she was not present during the attack. Trauma, in this sense, should be considered as a ‘wounding of the mind brought about by sudden, unexpected, emotional shock’ (Leys 2000, 4), where ‘terror and surprise caused by certain events’ mix so ‘the mind is split’ and ‘unable to register the wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are destroyed’ (2). Trauma is reinforced here by accusations against the governments, exacerbating resentment as a social and political expression of the powerlessness of humanitarian and civilian communities against the oppressor responsible of their injury (Martin Moruno 2013, 4). With this accusatory rhetoric as a frame, MSF Canada’s Executive Director Stephen Cornish launched the #NotATarget campaign in October 2016, one year after the attack.

MSF-CH joined the campaign by creating a VR movie in collaboration with the Swiss filmmaker Romain Girard. The 2.3-minute film was written by members of the communication and advocacy units and filmed at the Geneva University Hospital with MSF-CH staff as cast members. It first screened at the International Film Festival for Human Rights in Geneva in March 2017. Within this public arena, MSF-CH chose a rights-oriented media event on purpose. Human rights festivals are places where audiences anticipate their confrontation with the suffering of others as well as learning about social justice (Tascón 2017). Thus, without confronting the viewers directly with the perpetrators, MSF-CH uses resentment to situate the movie in a ‘regime of justice’, ‘when violent action organizes the spectacle of suffering around feelings of indignation against those who are responsible for the misfortune of the sufferer’ (Chouliaraki 2006, 266). Throughout the VR experience at the Geneva festival, viewers of Not a Target went through the same process: once equipped with VR headsets in a private room, they watched the movie without explanation. They then had a debriefing phase (between 15 and 30 minutes) with the communication unit, who asked about their cognitive and emotional reactions (Gorin 2021b). No further action, such as lobbying or petitioning governments, was proposed at this stage. However, MSF-CH moved to a more strategic use of its movie, i.e., influence and policy change. Since August 2017, the organisation has used it in behind-the-door roundtables, lectures and bilateral discussions with military groups, working closely with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.Footnote 15 The VR movie was screened to sensitise pilots. This time, the dissemination process was a bit different, because contextual and legal frameworks were added to the experience: military viewers met the advocacy team, who explained the purpose of the movie and raised awareness about International Humanitarian Law.

The movie’s story projects viewers in a trauma ward just seconds before a bomb blasts the hospital, through the perspective of a person with a broken leg, unable to move in a wheelchair (see Fig. 7.2). Although the location is easily identified as a hospital or healthcare facility, nothing indicates to which specific country or region it belongs. Unlike many other humanitarian VR films, no one tells the story, which leaves viewers in full confrontation with the audiovisual evidence without any explanation given or character to follow.

Fig. 7.2
A screengrab of a doctor welcoming a patient into a hospital.

A doctor greets the viewer/patient in a wheelchair before the blast. Not A Target, 2016 (©MSF/Romain Girard)

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Immersion then works ‘as a perceptual response’ rather than ‘a response to narratives’ (Nilsson et al. 2016, 110 and 111). Without actually seeing the explosion itself, viewers are ‘transported’ into the heart of the shock wave. They observe the trauma and the chaos, they see doctors overwhelmed, civilians covered in blood and screaming in the dust and darkness of the explosion, a surgeon performing cardiac massage on someone with an open chest, an old man wandering with a dead baby in his arms (see Fig. 7.3). While ‘inside’ the simulated blast, some viewers reported signs of panic, anxiety or suffocation.Footnote 16 Hence, the MSF-CH’s purpose was to re-create a ‘traumatic experience’ (MSF 2017) to engage viewers’ powerlessness. This way, the NGO refuses to let the event be part of the historic past, but reenacts ‘the experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in time’, to be shared as a legacy in ‘a painful, dissociated, traumatic present’ (Leys 2000, 2).

Fig. 7.3
A screengrab of a blurred view of wounded people getting helped by medical practitioners and a man holding a baby.

An elderly man carries a wounded baby as civilians run into the hospital after the blast. Not A Target, 2016 (©MSF/Romain Girard)

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The performative and perceptual environment of the movie clearly relies on immersion and presence, but engagement is completely limited: viewers are not part of the story, unhurt and unable to help. Simply present as bystanders, many viewers mentioned a sensation of paralysis, not being able to do anything in the wheelchair. Some said they did not know what was expected from them (i.e., to move away or to help others) because they were not offered options. Without any explanation or choice given, the viewer is not a ‘user-protagonist’, as in The Right Choice, but adopts a position that fluctuates between the ‘passive observer’ (not visible to the protagonists in the movie) and the ‘witness’ (the user’s presence is acknowledged by protagonists; see García-Orosa and Pérez-Seijo 2020, 10). In line with its identity, MSF-CH has thus used the movie as visual testimony to summon viewers to bear witness to the violence of the attack and make judgement about the chain of responsibility for the bombing. Transforming distant audiences into witnessing publics relies on ‘the axiom of “seeing is believing”’, for which prevails the idea that visibility brings to evidence; it relies ‘on a kind of documentary visuality that characterizes the (…) communication infrastructure, with its emphasis on bringing that which is hidden into the light, and its realist insistence on the universal legibility of visual facts’ (McLagan 2006, 192).

Interestingly, the movie raises questions about the way it elicits emotions. Rather than mobilising empathy, the movie mobilises shame, a model dominant in human rights activism. Although the film does not hold the United States accountable for the attack, it clearly aims at shaming the disgrace of the attack and the conduct of war. Shame is an emotion that arises from knowledge or consciousness, an embarrassment that comes from others. Synonyms are ‘dishonour’, ‘disgrace’ and ‘ignominy’. According to Thomas Keenan (2004), ‘Shaming is reserved for those without a conscience or a capacity for feeling guilty. Publicity and exposure are at the heart of the concept’ (436). The mobilisation of shame is used when there is a lack of enforcement mechanisms, and it aims at ‘exposing the gaps between self-professed norms and behavior’ (437). Thus, without adopting a full confrontational strategy of ‘naming and shaming’, commonly associated with the human rights framework (Leebaw 2020), MSF mobilises shame in a subtler way, by stigmatising deviant behaviour and calling to a value that people should take for granted, i.e., the protection of healthcare. Avoiding the usual humanitarian appeals showing helpless victims and heroic benefactors, the movie focuses on an action that is morally reprehensible. However, the final outcome of the advocacy message remains ambiguous. Is it simply to condemn such acts? Is it to look for perpetrators? What can members of the general public do against such acts? While the visual evidence brought by the movie is undeniable, there is no clear designation of the side that should be ashamed. If viewers can feel ashamed for being passive bystanders, the systemic logic at work behind this violation of International Humanitarian Law remains rather blurred because death seems to simply fall from above.

To obtain information about the context of the attacks, spectators have to use ‘mechanistic assumption’ (McLagan 2005, 225) or build on their knowledge about what happened outside of the frame, as no one sees the plane dropping the bomb. However, even if the storyline involves the cognitive agency of viewers, the outcome seems very optimistic, not to mention naïve, especially for military purposes. Can soldiers or pilots refuse to obey an order because they have watched the consequences of an explosion inside a hospital? Moreover, how can the affective and emotional resonance last long enough to turn into bold, political action? Similar criticisms were raised about the use of VR for philanthropy and fundraising, in which ‘the claim that billionaire bankers would experience a fundamental expansion in human sympathy by viewing a 360° film through a headset is pure wishful thinking’ (Murray 2020, 13). This perspective remains open though, because humanitarian agencies still struggle to define efficient evaluation tools. However, a campaign such as #NotATarget has pushed MSF to move ‘beyond the implicit call to action located in the film itself, instead creating formal situations’ such as human rights festivals or military venues that bring together the humanitarian sector, the civil society, the political world and other stakeholders (McLagan 2005, 227).

Conclusion: Limits of the ‘Empathy Machine’

Adapting to media revolutions, aid agencies have capitalised on the immersive experience of the image since the nineteenth century. VR technology has increased the sensory experience and the embodied presence in a simulated virtual world. With claims of enhancing behaviour and changing attitudes, VR could provide a variation in the long-standing paradigm of the politics of pity (Arendt 1963). Far more than emotional and cognitive engagement, VR films used in humanitarian contexts could create a potential shift from contemplative, detached spectatorship to active spectatorship. Despite this promise, future assessments would help to understand whether actions envisaged with VR extend the ‘paying and speaking’ options offered to the humanitarian public so far (Boltanski 1999, 17). More empirical studies are needed to explore the potential of immersive and haptic technologies, as ‘the advent of digital humanitarianism has yet to be contextualized in relation to the broader history of communication [and] its capacity to augment sensory and affective experience’ (Ross 2020, 174). Nonetheless, VR movies produced by aid agencies reveal many limitations at this stage.

The first set of limitations are technological, because the viewers’ engagement in the virtual environment is limited to space and time so far, unless specific hubs or digital installations are designed to propose full participation with the characters or real people in the movie. The intended purpose of VR is to close the gap between those who observe and those who are observed; as MSF underlines it, it is ‘bringing home the horror of attacks of hospitals’ (MSF 2017). Beyond empathic claims, VR humanitarian movies could further explore the regime of justice and the compelling affective responses raised by shame, outrage, indignation or resentment. Besides, these movies do not seem to challenge the visual politics of humanitarianism. Consequently, ethical implications form a second set of limitations. Many concerns are raised about the voyeuristic gaze emphasised by the embodied presence in VR and the risk of grandiose spectacle where people look for movie-like sensations, thus reinforcing the ‘supertourist’ position of the viewer (Sontag 1977). Associated risks also include hopelessness if the viewer is emotionally overwhelmed by an ‘improper distance’ (Nash 2018), whereas affective immersion serves as ‘a cathartic function that alleviates the ethical responsibility of witnessing’ (Crawford-Holland 2018, 26).

Cognitive and moral limitations can also be brought in the balance. Does a movie such as Not A Target provide a true understanding of the situation? Or is it just another form of eyewitness testimony? If VR allows spectators to watch, perceive and even feel the characters’ misfortune, then participation and engagement are limited and do not offer true listening to the needs of the affected populations or empowerment of these communities. These films are never fully participatory because editorial decisions are taken by NGOs and film companies. With protagonists being migrants, refugees or populations affected by all forms of violence, humanitarian VR films aim at giving a voice to people who have long been anonymised, rendered voiceless and disempowered in humanitarian imagery (Bleiker et al. 2013; da Silva Gama et al. 2013; Dogra 2012; Malkki 1996). Yet, critical confrontation with the movies reveals the need for more contextualisation of the experience to make meaning of the suffering and the emotional resonance to it. Perceptual, narrative and emotional immersion into the pain of others does not offer a more complete framing of the causes of the suffering and the will or capacity to act on them.