Thanks staying I know lunch is right
after this so I'll be brief my project
is called priya shakti it's an
interactive augmented reality comic book
that deals with gender violence but you
can use the format of comic books or AR
to pretty much tackle any issue and I'm
gonna hopefully through this
presentation give you something with
some ideas and also give you a motivate
you to tackle gender violence or other
issues that you're that you're
influenced by so I'm gonna start with a
little trailer:
Narrator: Priya Shakti is an innovative multimedia project that addresses
gender and race violence in India and around the world
Priya Shakti provides a new narrative and voice in the mythological canon
by placing the goddess Havarti and a mortal woman
who is a rape survivor at the center of
the story central to create Shakti is an
augmented reality comic book which
uses a popular app to make animation,
videos, and other interactive elements pop out of its pages
in our comic book certain panels are animated featuring real-life stories from the voices of Indian women who
have survived sexual assault and
faced the ensuing trauma in a social state
these pieces are short documentaries where the women are animated in order to protect their identity
the comic book is available as a print
and digital version
and free to download worldwide at priyashakti.com
so I'm not a coder or even a comic-book
artist
I'm actually a documentary filmmaker and
this project started for me back in
December 2012 how many of you remember
there was this horrible gang rape that
happened on a bus in Delhi which got
worldwide news everywhere while I was in
Delhi at that time and I was involved in
the protests that soon followed in
response to the indifference the
government showed to the victim and then
who eventually passed away and at one of
those protests I spoke to a Delhi police
officer and asked him what he thought
about what happened to her and more
particular what was happening around him
and he said something that really got me
started on this entire project
he said no good girl walks home alone at night
no good girl walks home alone at night
implying that she either deserved it or
she provoked the rape so I knew
immediately at that point that the
problem of gender-based violence in
India and probably all over the world
was not a legal problem but a cultural
problem so this began my one-year
journey and trying to understand
gender-based violence because I was
completely new to this topic so within
that year I traveled all over India and
Southeast Asia talking with poets
philosophers people in NGOs working with
gender-based violence issues and then
eventually with gang rape survivors in
northern Delhi outside of Delhi and what
they told me got me deeply thinking
about how to really address this and how
to have social impact and I'll just
recount one of the stories which will
give you an idea of the problem of
patriarchy in India in many other
countries one of the survivors told me
that when she she was gang-raped by a
group of men who videographed the rape on
their phones and threatened her that if
she ever went public they would release
the video to their family and then put
it on the web so that night she went
home took a shower burned her clothes
and never told anyone and never got any
medical hell
she lived with this trauma for an entire
week it was only when this same group of
men raped another woman in a neighboring
village that she went public and decided
to seek legal recourse and it was a long
ordeal it took her many years and
throughout that whole ordeal it was it
was very traumatic the shame was always
put on her her family was ostracized and
eventually her father committed suicide
from the shame that he was experiencing
now she eventually did get justice and
she put those men away in jail but I
began wondering when I was talking to
her if this is the ordeal that rape
survivors have to go through in order to
get justice what incentive is it for
them for to to seek legal recourse now
just imagine going and then when I when
I was interviewing her this was a few
years after she got justice she was
still being guarded by a police officer
carrying a semi-automatic machine gun
because whenever she went back to her
village she needed protection now just
imagine going to the prom or going out
on a date and you're being followed by a
cop with a semi-automatic machine gun
you can never live a normal life and
this is this sort of the problem of
patriarchy and the problem that rape not
only has on the survivors but how
society treats them affects how they
deal with it
so this led to the idea of creating an
Indian female superhero whose name is
Priya who is also a rape survivor and
she would be the symbol or the power in
which to challenge patriarchy originally
she calls upon the gods the Hindu gods
for help but they become more problems
than help and she eventually realized
it's really up to her the change and to
challenge people's perceptions towards
rape and towards rape survivors and and
the goal and really what was really
critical was we try to understand who
the audience for this whole project was
and in fact I did a lot of field testing
and I field tested this whole comic book
with teenagers and they helped develop
the story and gave response to the
character and the artwork and eventually the AR which I'll talk about shortly
and and it was very critical that we
focused on one particular demographic
which it was teenage boys in India
because teenage boys at that particular
time in their life are going through
dramatic changes they're understanding
gender they're understanding sexuality
they're understanding relationships so
I'll talk a little bit about the AR and
I'll eventually get to how we release
this comic book so one of the really
critical components of this project this
was December 2013 that I was working on
this project so AR was really in its
infinite stage
and I developed this idea of AR when I
was at when I was visiting the Sistine
Chapel in Rome and I remember looking at
Michelangelo's artwork and saying this
is the greatest comic book ever drawn
the comic book of life and each panel if
you if you ever been there it's really
high up in the air pretty
difficult to see and I wanted to figure
out a way to scan those panels to learn
about what was happening in each story
and that's sort of where the idea of AR
came and literally I emailed this
company called Blippar I sent it to like
info@blippar.com and they're one of
the biggest AR companies out there
it's like sending an email to info@Microsoft
and getting you know product
service or whatever and surprisingly
they email me back and they love this
idea and they came on board as our
partners and gave us the whole platform
and free services and developing the AR
for the comic book and this was a recent
article in Fast Company about our use of
AR which was very groundbreaking
for India because they were just they
were just starting up in India at that
time and so we launched the comic
book in December 2014 at the Mumbai
Comic Con which is hundreds of thousands
of teenagers go there and again those
were our audience male teenage boys and
we gave out free comic books and
immediately the comic book and the whole
project became viral became a global hit
up to date we had over 500 news stories
written about the comic book worldwide
and about half a million downloads and
over 26 million views of the comic book
worldwide right after we were launched
in December 2014 the UN honoured the
whole project and our main character as
a gender equality champion she was
recognized even before Wonder Woman was
honoured by the UN now one of the really
amazing things about this thing's which
which I discovered organically while
developing it is augmented reality
street art now I mean I really want
emphasize this AR is incredibly cheap to
do like this project is so cheap and
creating street art was incredibly cheap
and all of these murals and street arts
that we've put up in India are seen by
millions and millions of people every
year I mean these twenty thirty hundred thousand
people walk by these murals every day so
I'm gonna show that a video and I'll
explain the meaning behind this
I'm just running out of time so the
whole purpose of this project is to
create empathy and understanding for
rape survivors so the image of Priya who
is a rape survivor on these murals
whenever people walk by them they always
say that's a strong empowered woman
which is what we're trying to emphasize
we just released the second chapter of
the comic book which I have a few here
which deals with acid attack survivors
and the comic book was created and
developed with acid attack survivors in
the U.S. in Colombia and in India and we
launched it at a cafe run by acid attack
survivors and one of them came up to me
afterwards and said she started crying
she said I've never seen myself as a
hero everyone in India always looked at
me as a villain because that's what acid
attack survivors are often portrayed
in pop culture and she was very moved by
this whole project and then the second
one which we released was funded by the
World Bank so thank you thanks for
everyone for coming
