World premiere of virtual reality installation "The Enemy"

With The Enemy, Karim Ben Khelifa delivers a work of art that breaks away from traditional media depictions of war. His virtual reality experience, made to be lived by 20 simultaneous visitors. Each visitor is equipped with a VR headset and a PC backpack, allowing them to walk around freely in a 300 m2 arena, and delve into the confrontation of 6 combatants who fought in three different wars (Israël/Palestine, Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador). The experience is infinitely innovative and immersive.

Visions and objectives

Karim Ben Khelifa, a war photographer for the past 15 years, has always been driven by his ambitious quest to answer this one question: how can we change people’s relationship to war, to the horrors and violence it generates?

The Enemy clashes with the classic representation of war as shown by the media. By giving the combatants the spotlight, by giving them the chance to voice the violence they carry within them, by allowing them to represent themselves with their own words, their motivations, their dreams, the project confronts these points of view and humanizes them.

The Enemy is a result of a war photojournalist’s determination to express – point-blank – what he encountered in the field. To find oneself at the vortex of a face-to-face confrontation and to revisit these long-standing conflicts.

The Enemy offers two interactive experiences:

- A face-to-face installation where the visitor wears a VR headset and is placed in between combatants of opposing sides. This installation, a front-runner in its domain, blends virtual reality with 3D reconstruction for the first time ever. The images were captured during an on-the-ground documentary, thus offering an unprecedented immersive experience.

- A mobile application in augmented reality will also allow visitors to recreate the face-to-face experience at home in their own environment.

The Enemy does not stop there: Fox Harrell, associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), joined forces to render the project even more innovative: the scenario is individually determined by the answers given by the visitors to a questionnaire filled in at the beginning, which is aimed at revealing emotional biases towards one or more of the conflicts presented. Behavior during the experience will also shape the epilogue the visitor will receive. Thus each visitor’s experience is unique.

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With the support of