Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive, immersive, and cinematic environment that draws users into the haunting memories of ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country.
This project about human rights foregrounds veterans testimonies of US military enhanced interrogation practices and human rights abuses during the Iraq War, often by young and ill-trained soldiers who never entered the military to become torturers and still find themselves struggling to reconcile the activities they were asked to do.
The work was developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago through a four-university collaboration and tours in other immersive 3D environments and in a 2D version suitable for cinema screening. The production team includes filmmaker Roderick Coover, writer Scott Rettberg, visualization artist/researcher Daria Tsoupikova, computer and scientist Arthur Nishimoto in collaboration with political scientists John Tsukayama and Jeffrey Murer.
During the 2016 Electronic Literature Organization conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was awarded the 2016 Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, the top prize for a creative work in the field. The jury commented: “A major achievement. The authors harness the power of digital technologies to tell a powerful story and in doing so go far in changing the audience’s hearts and minds about torture.”