Bear 71: In a World of Code, Can Data Reconnect Us to Nature?
“Sometimes it is hard to say where the wired world ends, and the wild one begins”, said bear number 71 — from the Banff National Park located in the Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, in Western Canada. The tale of surveillance and wilderness is displayed in an interactive documentary 360º that shares its name, which debuted in 2012 and was later transformed into a Virtual Reality experience in partnership with Google, developed using the open platform WebVR technology. It was co-created by Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), one of the world’s leading digital media groups, and retails the story of a female grizzly bear that was monitored by the wildlife conservation offices from 2001 to 2009.
Mendes is a Vancouver-based artist with over a decade of experience working on interactive projects and a three-time Webby Award winner. He took part in another National Film Board project, This Land. Allison is a Gemini Award-winning filmmaker who is dedicated to highlighting the experiences of endangered wildlife. She is behind two other NFB projects: Being Caribou and Finding Farley. Bear 71 has its own roll of accolades — it was part of the official selection of both the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the South by Southwest Festival and won The Webby and Digi awards.
Endangered wildlife and tech
Currently, the grizzly bears’ prairie population is locally extinct in Alberta, due to human intolerance, market hunting, rapid conversion of habitat to farming fields, and loss of prey — the buffalo. In the area, the population is projected to be around 690 animals. There were between 6000 and 8000 in the 1800s, and fewer than 1000 in 2002. These numbers are enough to frighten anyone. But it is in this track that we see one of the successes of Bear 71 as an Interactive Factual Narrative.
Leanne Allison examined thousands of photos from motion-triggered cameras from different national reserve areas gathered for over ten years — after having the idea for the project. They showed the forest’s daily motions, the animals, humans, and the impact that they cause. On this, she explains:
I’d known about the photos for several years and had always been fascinated by them, but I knew they’d never hold up to the big screen since the images are very low resolution. This was a small screen project perfect, for interactive web-based media.
The creator wanted to use this particular case to highlight how our dependence on technology, which grows exponentially, separates us from nature, even while allowing us to refresh its feed constantly. Through a critical lens on surveillance, I believe that the triumph of Bear 71 emerges. It might sound optimistical, but with a data-based interface, in which animals, trains, cameras, trees and humans are represented in small shapes, I think it propels the user to reflect on this divorce between earth and humans. It is pertinent to highlight Hudson and Zimmermann’s take on the use of maps and the transformation this practice went through:
Digital media also allows for mapping toward the concept of open space that moves away from trees and branches toward rhizomes and nomads. […] Rather than defining and dividing, which are the domain of conventional cartography and historiography, radical and critical forms of cartography and historiography invite new participation and facilitate new questions.
Narration, interface, data
Bear 71 relies heavily on voice-over narrations to move the narrative along. While one might disregard this choice in an interactive experience, with the interfaced style mentioned above and the cut-scenes relevance when used, it is a powerful combination. Even without experiencing the more immersive version, with a VR headset, hearing this calm voice describe a life so different from our own is incredibly moving. As ironically flat as the mountains appear in blue, green, white and black dots all around our scene, the uneasiness of having to for-go ones naturally wild instinct is ever-present.
Like bear 71, we live in a surveillance economy, and we expect the constant tracking of everyday life as a commodity we accept in exchange for a connected life. But, for her, there is no positive outcome. Trapped, collared, and assigned a number as an identity at the age of 3, then tragically passing away because of a train — her life, even though it is represented through a digital interface, feels like a call to action.
As proposed by the creators themselves — “turning the lens of technology on itself” Bear 71 is an example of working on interaction, immersion and embodiment on multiple levels of a narrative. In this case, interaction works as described by Uricchio as “textual condition enabled by algorithmic rule sets and data about the user, rather than direct user activity” (2017, p. 198). Although in other instances, the relatively uncomplicated use of this affordance could have signified a lack of need for this to be a digital experience as such, it helps to emulate the feeling of being surrounded by data and seeing yourself through the lens of everyday surveillance. By presenting a visualisation of the forest in a binary form, the user becomes the zero’s and the one’s — and there is an uneasiness that creates about it. This white space populated by dots is not what we expect of a grizzly bear habitat.
Embodied interaction
With the 360º feature, we are immersed as long as we interact with the narrative. Most of the time through passive communication, we are listening to the bears’ thoughts, feelings and experience — still, it feels as if we are engaging with this story more actively, by turning the screen and following different pieces of the puzzle as we please. It creates an embodied interaction through the immersive interface. Particularly so in the definition of an embodiment given by Dourish (2004), which relates this movement to the creation of meaning by each person.
It is clear to see in this experience the intentionality of the author. By turning technology, and here, most pointedly surveillance, on its head, as they propose, we see a reflection of what life can become once devoided of its natural habitat and instinct. If I may, it goes even beyond our worries for the environment, by focusing on the data and information gathering it allows the user to wonder: which information is being recorded of me? are there cameras monitoring my every move? will we be assigned numbers and radio frequencies in the future.
To reach this enlightenment, I was taken back to Do Not Track, an online interactive documentary series about internet privacy that relies on entirely different immersion and interactivity techniques. This project relies on personalisation, engaging the user by adding their information into the narrative, with some input autonomy. The docu-series covers topics that range from all sides of internet security, data acquisition and its reasons. The reflection that stems from Bear 71, even though it is not its focus, reaches a much deeper level into this discussion.
And although neither of the projects mentioned above is in the co-creative playing field, if there was one that comes close to what Rose (2017) describes in Interactive Factual productions and activism I believe it is Bear 71. By showing the exchange between nature, technology and humanity, it incites an emotional reaction that could then lead to a call to action.
Finally, it may be concluded, that indeed in a world of code, data can surprisingly reconnect us to nature. It is precisely the contrast between the natural world and the binary language that can shake humans from its stupor and propel them into an empathic experience in Bear 71. In the words of Ryan (2001), “for immersion to take place, the text must over an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world”.
References
Alberta Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan. Alberta: Alberta Environment and Parks. (2016). Available from https://aep.alberta.ca/files/GrizzlyBearRecoveryPlanDraft-Jun01-2016.pdf [Accessed 16 February 2021].
Allison, L., Mendes, J. et al. (2012). Bear 71. Available from https://bear71vr.nfb.ca/
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__ (2012). About Bear 71. Available from https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/bear_71/#:~:text=Bear%2071%20is%20the%20true,interactions%20with%20the%20human%20world. [Accessed 16 February 2021].
Gaylor B. et al. (2015). Do Not Track. Available from https://donottrack-doc.com/en/intro/ [Accessed 15 February 2021].
Hudson, D.M. and Zimmermann, P.R. (2015). Thinking through digital media: transnational environments and locative places New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Available from EBSCOhost Ebooks [Accessed 16 February 2021].
Dourish, P. (2004) Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Available from ProQuest Ebook Central [Accessed 16 February 2021].
National Film Board of Canada (2012). Media kit for Bear 71. Available from http://mediaspace.nfb.ca/epk/bear71vr/ [Accessed 16 February 2021].
The Mountain National Parks: Grizzly Bears. (2014). Canada: Parks Canada Available from https://www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/mtn/ours-bears/generaux-basics/grizzli-grizzly.aspx [Accessed 16 February 2021].
Uricchio, W. Things to come the possible futures of documentary… From a historical perspective. In: Aston, J, Gaudenzi, S, & Rose, M (eds). (2017). I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press. Available from ProQuest Ebook Central [Accessed 15 February 2021].
Rose, M. Not media about, but media with: co-creation for activism. In: Aston, J, Gaudenzi, S, & Rose, M (eds). (2017). I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press. Available from ProQuest Ebook Central [Accessed 15 February 2021].
Ryan, M. L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Available from ProQuest Ebook Central [Accessed 16 February 2021].
