New Media New Immigrants with Heidi Boisvert, Eric Byler and Annabel Park
Saturday, 10:00 am, Vinegar Hill Theatre
Heidi Boisvert, of Breakthrough TV; Eric Byler, and Annabel Park present two new media productions, ICED and 9500Liberty, which explore the current immigration debate.
ICED (I Can End Deportation) is Breakthrough TV’s online video game, which re-creates the experience of surviving as an immigrant in the U.S. The game uses a multiracial cast of young avatars with varying degrees of citizenship to teach the video game players about the hard decisions many immigrants face every day: “Make poor decisions, you will be detained with no respect for your human rights.”
“People are really ready for new kinds of games,” said Mallika Dutt, executive director of the New York–based human rights organization Breakthrough, which oversaw creation of ICED. “What we’re trying to do is create a whole new genre of video games, games about real-world issues with real-world impact.”
The “interactive documentary” 9500Liberty is about the politicization of the immigration issue. Its aim is to inform the public, and investigate alternatives to the intense polarization that is hindering progress. Last year, Eric Byler and Annabel Park began posting short video clips on a YouTube channel they created called 9500Liberty at http://www.youtube.com/9500Liberty. The project took its name from a street address in Old Town Manassas where a sign had been posted, reading: “Prince William Co. Stop Your Racism to Hispanics!” The sign—on what was known as “Liberty Wall”—protested a county policy that requires police to check immigration status during routine traffic stops and denies some services to undocumented immigrants.
As the Washington Post explained, “The county, like many places across the nation, is in the middle of a demographic transformation: Since 1990, its Hispanic population has quadrupled; today one in five of the county’s 360,000 residents is Hispanic; and the number of Asians has more than doubled.” Since it started, 9500Liberty has been viewed more than 270,000 times and garnered comments from all over the globe, including hate mail and death threats.
