Insurrection Video Procession

A simulation of the events that took place at the US Capitol on January, 6th 2021. Videos taken on the ground by users of the social media Parler are replayed with an interactive timeline, recreating the procession from President Trump’s rally stage beside the Washington Monument to the literal breaking into the U.S. Capitol Building, clashes with the police, and the shooting of Ashli Babbitt.  Using mixed-reality smart glasses to experience the augmented reality “Insurrection Video Procession,” participants can gesture inside holograms to interact with an archive of videos that populate a map around the U.S. Capitol building and words that connect the dots among users within online conversations. This is an augmented reality (AR) data visualization of over five hundred videos posted onto Parler on January 6, 2021, from the stage where Donald Trump gave his “Stop the Steal” speech to the U.S. Capitol building where the attempted coup took place. These videos were recreated in a table-sized miniature recreation of that location. Wearing a headset, viewers could return to the scene and choose among the videos that were uploaded in synchronicity with others on the same network within proximity to watch. Instead of selecting filter options on a website to visually make sense of data, in this 3D augmented reality, users can still filter through video selections, but through an embodied experience of the context in which these media were captured and shared.

Procession is available as a web experience on vj.live.