Digital Witnessing and my Practice

Digital witnessing is birthed from Technoology allowing instant access in to places that have previously been under represented in the media, controlled or given limited coverage or hard to get to. Nishat Awan, writer of Digital Narratives and Witnessing, states ‘Whereas in the past, such places would remain out-of-sight and out of our consciousness, increasingly they reveal themselves to us’. The growth of technology, such places are being discovered for the internet-sphere to see, discover and react to. 

Awan mentions Clouds Over Sidra, a virtual reality film ‘credited with increasing the amount of aid pledged to the cause by world leaders. It depicts a vlog style journey of a young Syrian girl around the Za’atri refugee camp in Jordan. The author cites Harris (2015) suggesting that Virtual reality, fundamentally, is a technology that removes borders... Anything can be local to you. This work figures witnessing at a distance taking Harris in to account by allowing us to be in her shoes, see what she sees and move when she moves. Even further computation helps nearness in the film as all her movements are felt, from the small jitters she experiences moving her head left and right to the long gazes she takes. Through the digital we witness her point view. 

Anwan goes on the suggest that it relies ‘on the notion of witnessing to mobilize passions’, like Michael Buerk’s seminal report broadcasted by BBC in 1984. Centered around the famine in Ethiopia, it is said to have been ‘instrumental in shaping the politics of compassion that humanitarian responses in the West rely on’ using prompting visuals. With immediate access to such imagery, ‘there is an authenticity and immediacy … but at the same time they are easily exploited, misinterpreted, and hijacked by powerful actors. Two different modes of witnessing are present here, one was presented by a trusted face and the other was shown through the lens of ubiquitous of imagery. Anwan poses the question ‘Whose witnessing could be trustworthy enough?’  her answer is ‘yourself and yourself alone’. The point of view filming style adopted in Clouds over Sidra would suggest that we should trust what we are seeing as we briefly become the young lady; As we are walking through, VR lets us see the living conditions and we should trust what we see with our eyes. Even with digital witnessing putting hidden places on display, this VR lens ‘places the burden of proof on the refugee, in this case a twelve-year-old girl, who has to show us her destitution and her will in the face of it’.