Visual Medium

A visual medium that would be wildly impractical for my skill, resources, and abilities at this time but would help advance the aims for my Rhetoric Project, which was about pushing the ban on penitentiary solitary confinement, would be something along the lines of an interactive medium, perhaps a VR simulation program. It would aim to more effectively emulate the experiences of a solitary confinement victim through a full-VR first-person simulation of a solitary confinement victim experiencing abuse from correctional officers, sensory hallucinations through visual and auditory distortion effects as well as field-of-view warping to emulate vertigo and loss of spatial awareness, and loneliness. I may have to extend the length of someone being in a claustrophobic room for a while, which may make the experience get boring, but that is kind of what I’m aiming for: the aim of the experience isn’t to be entertaining, it’s to prove my point that it must be dehumanizing, boring, and surreal to go through solitary confinement. It would work better than a static video clip or a poster or any other visual medium because giving a person full visual control of the inmate is arguably a more immersive experience and thus one that can more easily speak to the audience. It is a wildly impractical proposition because I haven’t a lick of clue how to code anything of that caliber or how to gather a sufficient amount of programmers to do said task. Not only that, but hiring the programmers, creating or purchasing a program to run the simulation, and purchasing computers to program and run said simulation must cost a fortune. The VR medium is also still extremely young and inaccessible at the moment, so actually spreading around the simulation program or giving access to the layman might be troublesome. Still, it might be the best and most effective way in speaking to the audience emotionally of how terrible solitary confinement is.