Here are additional background materials provided by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand for their presentation at the Virtual Pilgrimage to Manzanar on April 25th.
VIDEOS
Beyond Manzanar demo video
(2000, 4 min.)
This video gives a very brief, edited description with voiceover explaining the artwork. It is from 2000, so the quality is pretty vintage at this point.
Beyond Manzanar walkthrough
(2017, 7 minutes)
A quick, brisk walkthrough of the entire piece, ending with the monument in the cemetery acting as a "radio tower" broadcasting the fact that in the 1940s, the Justice Department "suppressed key evidence and authoritative reports from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, and Army Intelligence which flatly contradicted the government claim that Japanese Americans were a threat to security.
Project origins and artistic motivations
Never to repeat. Hopefully. Art inspired by prejudice - Zara's account of the trip to Manzanar after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, that led us to create the piece. Includes her poem "Mandala for Manzanar," which also concludes the VR experience of "Beyond Manzanar." https://iranian.com/Arts/2000/December/Manzanar/
Beyond Manzanar website links:
Besides the "History and project origins" mentioned above, there are several pages that help people understand the material of the artwork. Here is the main page: http://mission-base.com/manzanar/
History and project origins - Gives insight into the motivations behind the piece, using historic and background images that help illustrate the poetic motivations behind the piece.
In the wake of Sept. 11 - Our statement in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. We discussed updating the piece at that point - 9 months after it debued at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in December 2000 - but decided that the piece was strong and clear enough as it was to stand in for many more specific incidents that were bound to come in the future. This page also emphasizes the role that the US government played.
Beyond Manzanar: Screenshots - A list of screenshots that take you on a walk through the piece.
Poetry - This page lists all the poetry used in the VR experience, starting with Zara's "Mandala for Manzanar," which is also the concluding scene of the VR piece. The other poems are all "Fence poems", poems on exile and imprisonment built into the barbed wire fence in the opening camp scene, in Farsi, Japanese and English. They include Zara's own Rumi translations, and poems by Sojin Takei and from the Manyoshu (calligraphy by my mother Midori Kono Thiel, whose calligraphy also graces Brush the Sky.)
Credits - The link that might especially interest your audience is the media credits, which gives the sources for the images and audio used in the piece.
