When Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu premiered his new virtual reality installation piece Carne y Arena at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it was celebrated as a new high-water mark for the medium. Created in collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic xLab, the project drops participants inside a harrowing run across the US-Mexico border — highlighting both the horrifying steps those seeking a better life for their families are willing to take, as well as the terror and inhumane treatment that can follow if they’re caught.
It’s a mesmerizing, heartbreaking piece, and while the experience of Carne y Arena undeniably delivers on VR’s endlessly-discussed potential as an “empathy machine,” it’s actually the physical, real-world bookends that set-up and conclude the piece that lend it context and emotional depth. Its triumph isn’t one of virtual reality, expertly executed — though it is that — but rather of the tremendous power that different types of immersive experiences can have when they’re woven together, creating bracing new ways to make audiences think and feel.
I recently had the opportunity to experience Carne y Arena at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it recently opened (it’s also currently showing at Fondazione Prada in Milan). Visitors go in alone, and after reading some text from Iñárritu about why he created the piece in the first place — his intention was to “allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts” — my first stop was a holding room nicknamed a “freezer.”
A physical experience as much as a virtual one
It was a cold, sterile space, with a series of uncomfortable metal benches lined up against the walls. Scattered across the floor were battered shoes and a dusty backpack. As some text on the wall explained, the pieces of clothing had been recovered from the desert near the border between Mexico and Arizona; left behind by people that had tried to make their way to US soil, only to be snatched up by the US Border Patrol, or disappeared by the very individuals they’d paid to help them cross in the first place.