Hard Life with Memory: Prison as a Narrative Space in Animated Documentary and Virtual Reality

Artists have specific courage to confront the tragic truth. They challenge suffering through their artistic creations. This paper explores the animated documentary and VR artwork becoming a weapon for social criticism and a platform to rethink injustice. In the past ten years, unjust verdicts have become an important subject to discuss, especially thanks to contributions from the animated documentary Crulic: The Path to Beyond (2011) and Truth Has Fallen (2013). Later on, artists in VR also pay attention to prison, a marginal space and the weak unit in the justice system that allows such injustices to occur. In 6x9 (2016) and After Solitary (2017), tVR artists establish “Live Prison” by making use of the seemingly disadvantage of VR, causing people to feel sick or dizzy while playing. These works demonstrate the interdisciplinary collaborations among artists, scientists, lawyers, volunteers, social funding and mass media from all over the world, because they show solutions to the problems of prison, which should be a global collective effort.