Hearts and Minds: the Interrogations Project is an interactive virtual reality narrative artwork developed by an interdisciplinary team including humanists, social scientists, artists, and computer scientists from four different universities. The project, originally made in the CAVE2™ virtual reality theatre environment at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, attempts to extend and make accessible difficult narratives of war and torture based on actual accounts from soldiers involved. Hearts and Minds uses VR as a narrative platform to represent a complex contemporary issue and to provide a platform for discussion and debate of military interrogation methods and their effects on detainees, soldiers, and society. We have published on this project previously in computer science and technical venues, as well as digital arts venues. Our contribution to this volume focuses on the work from an artistic and narrative perspective and on how the work functions as a digital humanities project: one which brings important documentary material addressing an important contemporary problem to contemporary new media environments for critical engagement.

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Coover, R., Rettberg, S., Tsoupikova, D., Nishimoto, A., Addressing Torture in Iraq through Critical Digital Media Art - Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, & Practices, vol 29, New York, NY, Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, pp. 323–335, James O’Sullivan, March 18th, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501363474.ch-029