Procession is an interactive augmented reality recreation of the infamous storming of the US capitol building that took place on January 6th 2021. I built it in Unity for the Hololens, commissioned by Assistant Professor of Media Practice Dr. Laila Shereen Sakr for the UC San Diego CALIT-2 exhibition.

To achieve a bird's eye view of what went down on that day, the piece uses roughly 1200 videos with geolocation and timestamps scraped from the conservative social media Parler to replay the day's events with extreme precision of location and timeline.

The interactive timeline lets users jump to notable moments, including Trump's incitation beside the Washington monument, the eerily quiet procession of supporters from Trump's stage to the capitol building, the cacophony of hopeful and angry jingoism on the capitol steps, the somewhat contested storming of the capitol halls, and finally the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt as she attempts to climb into the Congress chambers.

The simulation is accompanied by two network visualizations created by collaborator Mohamed Rahman using Parler text posts. One shows the frequent use and co-use of words on Parler from the day of the insurrection, and the other visualizes the 'echoing' (Parler's version of retweeting) between notable conservative figures like Alex Jones and Ted Cruz.

You can check out a video demo of the piece below: