2 videos, colour, sound, 20 minutes (loop)
[Exposé – text written in 2008 in advance of the production of Immersion.]
We are familiar with worlds of artificial imagery from computer games. We would like to show how they are used constructively in ways that go beyond self-contained fictional universes. How they are used against the sobering backdrop of military reality, namely in the training of US troops before their deployment to combat zones and in the provision of adequate post-deployment care on their return.
The possibilities presented by virtual reality offer obvious advantages when it comes to preparing soldiers for the difficult tasks awaiting them in often unfamiliar, exotic surroundings.
A hybrid of actual and virtual reality known as augmented reality is employed in the Advanced Simulator for Combat Operations and Training at Camp Pendletonin, California. In shadowy light, soldiers comb through plywood structures in front of projected backgrounds. They act out stressful situations in the studio and practice communicating with the virtual inhabitants of the foreign country. The scenario can be modified at any time; it is controlled by a ‘director’ who can add imponderables and vicissitudes at will. Just as pilots of passenger aircraft use a flight simulator to practice flying at night or how to respond when they run into computer-programmed storm clouds, recruits practice what to do if they encounter injured persons when searching a house and how to form a convoy when driving through the desert in enemy territory. The aim is the same: optimising responses to difficult situations.
Precisely the opposite happens when soldiers sustain injuries in the reality of Iraq and Afghanistan. They often only become aware of these much later, when what they have experienced leads them to react in ways they cannot control, with frequently fatal consequences, and the neural pathways formed in their brains cause them to return home as traumatised veterans. For those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a simple car trip can become a nightmare because they have witnessed vehicles blown up by bombs exploding under roads. A family outing to a crowded shopping mall can be sheer torment because it brings back memories of how a buddy at their side was fatally shot in a Baghdad market.
Albert Rizzo of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey has developed a new form of behavioural therapy for the treatment of war veterans suffering from PTSD. Using their accounts of what they experienced, the reality they lived through is recreated virtually in the console game Full Spectrum Warrior. The scenarios devised in the lab in California are then compared to the frame of reference, i.e. they are sent to the Iraq Combat Stress Control Team and submitted to a ‘reality check’.
The veterans are taken back to the time and place where they suffered the traumata now affecting them in ways beyond their control and relive the situation that triggered their disorder. In this form of exposure therapy, patients are literally immersed in the experiences they lived through during the war.
However, the traumatised soldiers do not have to face the situation alone: this time there is someone at their side – the therapist – who can intervene. For instance, the therapist can increase the level of threat and thus provide clients with the experience of coping successfully with a difficult situation. Alternatively therapists can use the Wizard of Oz, the game’s control unit, to modify the virtual reality so as to mitigate the situation, suspend it, or break it off altogether. The aim is to reprogramme the neural connections that have such a devastating effect on patients and help them come to terms with their trauma by facing the original situation that triggered it rather than remaining in denial. With this form of exposure therapy, Rizzo has succeeded in finding an effective means of treating deep emotional scars that break open repeatedly and uncontrollably and help patients find closure by reliving their traumatic experiences cathartically.
Rizzo and his co-workers have devised several ingenious modifications to the video game that enhance the therapy’s efficacy even further. The veteran wears a
head-mounted display. The perspective of the images he sees on the data goggles change in accordance with the position of his head and body, and the sounds he hears over the headphones – children screaming, fragments of words in Arabic, shrapnel exploding, rescue helicopters approaching – are spatially modulated. The low-frequency rumble of engines and explosions sends shudders through the platform he is standing on. Olfactory cues can be fed in, as well: the fragrant aroma of Arabic spices, the acrid odour of sweat, biting smoke of burning oil-fields, the stench of singed hair. The ex-soldier holds a gun in hand, just as he used to on the battlefield. But this weapon is not loaded, it is merely the ballast of the soldier’s reality, for Rizzo is convinced that revenge is not the way to come to terms with traumatic experiences.
During the sessions, patients are encouraged to put what they are experiencing and feeling into words. They are hooked up to various monitoring devices so the therapist can see the curves of the heartbeat, perspiration, brain activity, adrenalin output on his screen. The various peaks and troughs in the curves tell him to what degree patients are affected by what they are reliving at a particular moment. Simply by assuming this small degree of responsibility for the patient, the therapist takes part of the burden off the patient’s shoulders.
This is not the first time wartime experiences have been reconstructed using virtual reality. The method has been used in the past with Vietnam veterans and to treat 25,000 survivors of Portugal’s colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau from 1961 to 1974. It has also been applied to help the traumatised witnesses of bus bombings in Israel and those who lived through the horrific attacks and collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Exposure therapy incorporating virtual reality is also used to help people overcome more commonplace problems such as acrophobia, arachnophobia, social phobias, fear of flying, abnormal fear of pain during medical treatments and learning disorders.
We would like to give viewers an insight into how therapists succeed in making the imprint left in traumatised individuals’ brains by a real-life spatiotemporal experience recede and replacing it with an artificial reconstruction of reality. The aim is to fade out the painful memories and involuntary mental images that cause such torment by using state-of-the-art technology to achieve a virtual reality that is as vivid and convincing as possible.
This new therapy developed by Albert Rizzo, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-related PTSD, is the focus of our documentary film.
In the fall of 2008, Rizzo will train military psychotherapists in Fort Lewis, Washington in the techniques of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Combat-related PTSD; the therapists will subsequently test the techniques on themselves.
The fact that theoretical instruction and practical application will be so closely linked and concentrated in a period of two days will allow us to elucidate the technical equipment, its use, and the approach employed in treatment without the need for explanatory comments or interviews as an aid to comprehension. The therapists learning the technique themselves will ask the questions required to understand the principles on which it is based and how it works. We will not need to add anything to the footage filmed on site; it will be self-explanatory because we are there each step of the way.
As we film the therapists and test subjects, we will use a scan converter (which is hooked up to VGA or DVI and interposed between the head-mounted display and a computer to simultaneously record the images the soldiers see on their display and the arousal curves (heartbeat, breathing rate, etc.) the therapists see on their screen.
If possible, we would like to go beyond the laboratory situation by being present at three or four therapy sessions, even if we will not go into any details of individual stories and will not show the faces of those undergoing therapy to protect their privacy. Maintaining their anonymity is made easier by the fact that their features are obscured by the head-mounted display anyway – they are already wearing the ‘black bar’ on their faces, so to speak.
To render the principle of inversion, we will also show how virtual and augmented reality are used in the training of soldiers – as exemplified in Immersive Infantry Trainer and Advanced Simulator Combat Operations and Training.
To illustrate that this kind of therapy is not limited to use within the military, we will extend our observations to include ‘civilian applications’ such as its use in the treatment of acrophobia, arachnophobia and social phobias.
We will be filming with a crew of three people (director, Harun Farocki; camera/cinematography: Ingo Kratisch; sound: Matthias Rajmann). We will be using a high-speed camera so that we will not require any additional light sources. Our approach to documentary filmmaking means we never intervene in the situation, we simply allow it to unfold as (it would) if we were not there.
Director, scriptwriter: Harun Farocki
Research: Matthias Rajmann