concept
main concept installation technical description about us documentation

Historically, it has been common for organized groups to come up with a coded language in order to speak secretly or delicately about matters which they do not necessarily wish to have understood publicly. AI is interested in how, in the historical past, these coded terms were used to mask terrible activities and truths from the greater population as well as from other authorities. These code words, in fact, were instrumental in the perpetual self-denial of the groups and governments of their wrongdoing.

'Special Treatment' or ‘Sonderbehandlung’ was the term commonly used by the bureaucracy and agents of Hitler's Third Reich in German-occupied Europe to describe the program of relocation and imprisonment of Jewish inhabitants in the concentration camps. Our work has taken the form of an archetypal 'camp', a partial yet extended interpretation of the Aushwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland between its establishment in 1940 and its liberation in 1945. While it is not our intent to reconstruct an historical model of this place in virtual reality, details of the original camp structures and architectural forms have been carefully researched to provide the blueprint for our representation. We are sensitive to the ongoing debates regarding the actual Birkenau site and whether it should be preserved by its museum foundation for future generations to experience or whether it should be allowed to decay and pass back into the land. In either case, we do not wish to attempt to design a virtual “substitute” for the real place.

Our intent with “Special Treatment” is to visually reconstruct and explore the memories of Nazi death camp survivors, their descendants, historians, and visitors based upon interviews with them. These memories include portions of life before and in the camp, life since liberation, and contemporary reflections upon that era. We are using these memories to define the depth and breadth of that term “special treatment”. As memories tend to be hyper-focused in some areas and then foggy in others, our visual renderings of them will also weave between focused and abstracted visions. Visitors will hear the voices of individual survivors recounting their personal experiences and at the same time they will see a visual display that compliments the staccato movement and fractured nature of the their descriptions.

Outside of the virtual reality display installation, we intend to have a large touch screen for visitors to interact with before they experience our piece. On the touch screen will be an aerial view of the concentration 'camp' represented in 'Special Treatment'. Viewers will be able to see where previous participants have visited, as those areas will be more clearly and colorfully rendered. Unvisited areas will fade into the empty landscape. Viewers will be able to touch the different human ghost forms seen in the map in order to get biographical information on the person represented. The touch screen interface therefore offers more historical and educational material to the viewers in preparation for actually experiencing the virtual reality piece.

“Special Treatment” was made in collaboration with (art)n laboratory, Chicago, IL.