trauma narrative | D9 ELMCIP

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint.

c ya laterrr garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018.

Screen shots

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Abstract (in English)

This article focuses on the panoramic digital work Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project, and examines how it uses immersive audiovisual experience to examine the relationship between narrative memory, space and landscape. It argues that the spatial aesthetic of the work forces the audience members, the artists, and the narrators to interrogate their own conflicted positions in relation to the narratives of military power and torture. Hearts and Minds engages with visual perspective and space, and focalization through individual human voices, to consider agency, victimhood, witnessing and trauma, and does this in a manner that denies its audience a detached position from which to observe the events set in its digitally created environment.