In Beyond Manzanar the site of the Manzanar Internment Camp in Eastern California, USA, serves as the "virtual stageset." Manzanar was the first of over 10 camps built to intern over 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry during WW2 solely on the basis of their ethnicity. The historic experiences of the Japanese American families are layered with similar threats to intern Iranian American families during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979-'80.

Beyond Manzanar is shown as a room installation, with the image of the virtual space generated in real-time on a PC and projected on a large screen. Users move through and explore this "virtual stageset" with a simple joystick. Users are free to move within the camp - within the confines of the barbed-wire fence. Archival media built into the virtual space - photos, newspaper headlines, sound - convey a sense of the lives of the immigrants and the media climate of the times.

At specific "hotspots," location triggers in the virtual world, the environment reacts to the' presence of the users. The dramatic arc of the artwork arises through the interplay between users' actions and the subsequent reactions of the virtual environment. When users enter a barrack, for instance, the door slams shut behind them and traps them inside with the ghosts - as a consequence of their own decisions and their own actions. By simulating in scene after scene the constraints and coercions to which the internees themselves were subject, the experience triggers emotions in users and thereby - hopefully - empathy for the emotions of the internees.

In a similar way we will involve users in the storyline of Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall such that they understand not only intellectually but also emotionally how it was to have to live with the Wall.

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