Reality Check
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Index is a partner in Reality Check, an EUR ArTeC research project on immersive media in contemporary investigation and verification. Index’s investigations serve as a testing ground for research-creation prototypes. A research seminar examines the notion of immersion.
Reality Check explores the use of immersive media in contemporary investigation and verification practices. While immersive mediations tend to be associated with the realms of the virtual and of fiction, the project asks what they might offer for a better grasp of reality and the facts.
From the war in Syria to those under way in Ukraine and Gaza, and in cases of police violence, environmental violence, and violence against migrants around the world, so-called “open-source” digital investigation techniques play a growing role in fact-checking and in the search for truth. The project looks to the future of this field of practice, as it is transformed by the development of immersive media. Within the project, the term is not limited to virtual, augmented, or mixed reality technologies: it covers more broadly the mediation set-ups built around embodied navigation in digital spaces. Their use for evidentiary purposes is still in its infancy, even though such set-ups hold major potential for investigation and verification, allowing varied and scattered data to be examined from many directions.
Reality Check runs along two complementary strands:
- Within the Spatial Media research group (EnsadLab), a research-creation strand develops prototypes of immersive set-ups, deployed and tested on real investigations in partnership with Index.
- In collaboration with the ESTCA laboratory, a critical, reflexive strand examines the documentary – and even evidentiary – role of immersive media and set-ups in the construction of reality in the age of digital mediation. This work takes the form of a research seminar held over two years (spring 2024 – winter 2025).
