Swatted
Swatting is the act of making a hoax emergency call to send armed police to someone's home, broadcast live through the victim's own webcam. It is violence engineered for spectacle, where the real and the virtual collapse into each other. Players become both audience and weapon.
The film uses video game engines stripped of their textures, reduced to wireframes and raw geometry, as a documentary tool. The wireframe becomes a metaphor for the networks that connect us, the transparency of our data, the skeletal architecture beneath the polished surface. The game is diverted, turned against itself, made to reveal what it was designed to hide.
Testimonies from victims and perpetrators unfold over these spectral landscapes, where suburban homes dissolve into vectors and coordinates. Swatted is a film about online violence that refuses the comfort of illustration, choosing instead to expose the structural conditions that make such violence possible.
Technical
- Format HD, 16:9, color
- Duration 21 minutes
- Year 2018
Credits
- Director Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
- Sound Alban Cayrol
- Music Disasterpeace
- Producer Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains
"Creating a film where action unfolds within the internet stream opens up endless possibilities for staging. It's the advantage of being able to create without a camera and without shooting on location. The narrative was thus constructed directly during editing, drawing from various image sources: interviews, videos found on the web, different video game streams, and more. Additionally, I used a video game (GTA V) to generate an abstract space that serves as both a mental landscape and the narrative epicenter of the film."
— Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
"Swatted takes us through this fascinating yet anxiety-inducing in-between world, symptomatic of a new era of the spectacle society and its most abject excesses."
— Tënk
"This troubling documentary highlights the pitfalls of the Internet and successfully articulates poignant testimonies with a fine analysis of the mechanisms of digital violence."
— Télérama
"The film raises crucial questions about online responsibility, revealing the profound impact that these acts can have on the lives of targeted individuals."
— Le Monde
"A dive into the depths of Internet culture, which is unafraid to expose the atrocities of trolling."
— Libération
"It was as if the SWAT team had literally crossed through the monitor."
— Short of the Week
"Swatted offers a fresh and inventive look at the world of online gaming, inviting us to cross the boundaries between the real and the virtual in this unforgettable animated documentary."
— Cartoon Brew
"Mauvaises ondes"
— Magazine Beaux-Arts