Visual Peace Technology and Youth

Earlier in 2022, I participated in the 'Youth, Peace and Security'-themed project by the Finnish National Youth Council Allianssi. It is a brilliant project that brought together insights from experts on youth, peace and security to explore how security and peace could be strengthened in Finland and internationally. The full publication can be found here, and since it is only in Finnish, I thought I would post here the English version of my contribution to the publication - "Visual Peace Technology and Youth". 

Cover of the publication. Photo by Lisa Glybchenko, in the Peace Station, Pasila/Helsinki.

Visual Peace Technology and Youth

By Yelyzaveta (Lisa) Glybchenko

In my PhD “Visual Peacetech: Digital Visual Images as Security-Building Tools”, I explore digital visuality of security and peace, virtual reality design for peacebuilding, and augmented reality image-making as means of implementing peaceful futures. As a young Ukrainian woman, I constantly think of how my work can serve to empower young women in similar-to-mine circumstances. I initially started thinking deeply about it through my peacebuilding startup Color Up Peace, which leverages artistic expression and technological innovation for peace. Part of what I do in Color Up Peace is that I invite people from all over the world to submit photos of what peace is to them, which I turn into coloring pages - for others to engage with (digitally or in print, and there is now a VR exhibition) and transform the original vision of peace. Since I started Color Up Peace 6 years ago, I have seen visions of peace from many countries and I have seen metaphors of implementing those visions (through engaging with the outlines). And so I wished I could take this further and give the young people whom I worked with in Color Up Peace more tools - to transfer their visions to embodied everyday experiences of peace. That’s why I started exploring visual peace technology in my PhD research. What I have found so far is that, by combining technological tools and creative transformations of images, we, young women, can empower ourselves as peacebuilders in different arenas and on different levels of peacebuilding work. An example of this is a collaboration with a young creative Yemeni woman for the first subproject of my PhD, based on Color Up Peace. I invited her to send photos of peace and security in Yemen - something we never get to see in the media. I turned the photos into coloring pages by drawing the outlines by hand using a graphic tablet - and I created a virtual exhibition of the photos, coloring pages and colored art. So far, one could color by downloading the coloring pages and coloring them digitally (in, for instance, Adobe Photoshop) or printing them out and then taking a photo of the result. (But I am working on creating a coloring app!) My idea was to show how simple visualizations and digital dialogue through artistic means could be an engaging and creative way to hear from the people on the ground in Yemen (but also in other countries). More importantly, such artistic-technological initiatives can make visions for peace by young women more prominent and hard to ignore. I mean how could one really ignore, let’s say, a 10000-piece VR exhibition of vision of peace, for instance? (I had just a few from Yemen, but the project could be expanded.) And digitality of these visions helps too: it is not easy (and sometimes not possible) to erase something online. So the values that young women hold, express through images, and digitize could guide peace processes to make sure they are nuanced, context-specific and locally owned. Then, technology would contribute to accountability. My exploration of designing virtual reality (VR) environments as peacebuilding tools builds on that too. Even more so than images, VR - especially if it allows co-design - can facilitate development and experiencing (even if limited) of visions of peace and security in their own right, not defined off-conflict. If we can build a peace arrangement in VR and go “visit” it regularly, we can surely use it as a reference/example to build on the same peace values in everyday embodied experiences. I specifically focus on peace and security in their own right because youth can be empowered by building on a ground that is not dominated by violence. Some young people in the contexts where I have been working were born after the violence started, and it is somewhat unfair that they build based on other people’s choices far in the past - choices they do not identify with. Building non-authentic VR versions of peace arrangements gives these young people the choice to articulate what kind of society they want to live in and to remind others that something different - something peaceful - is possible. The most recent part of my PhD research concerns augmented reality (AR) technologies and focuses on supporting my home country Ukraine as it heroically defends itself from Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. I took photos of visual support for Ukraine in Vilnius, Lithuania, and enhanced them in AR by layering digital art that I created over the photographs. I wanted to take supporting Ukraine further to articulate peaceful futures for Ukraine - and ways to get there (like unblocking Ukrainian ports, supporting different communities within Ukraine and providing tangible help to Ukraine’s security). I think AR is empowering for young women because it gives opportunities to transform real environments without physically transforming real environments. Imagine someone who lives in a Ukrainian territory, temporarily occupied by Russia. They could preserve, let’s say, urban features of Ukrainianness by recreating them in AR - for example, if they risk torture or death by Russian forces in case of trying to physically restore e.g. a flag of Ukraine. Of course, the flag of Ukraine should by all means be physically restored as soon as possible. And embodied resistance must continue. Yet, AR-ing Ukrainian features contributes to their perpetuation and reminding the occupiers they are by no means welcome. Visual peace technology is not THE answer, but it is complementary to many other strategies and tools to making peace of quality and making quality peace last.

Lisa Glybchenko holding the publication at the 2022 Kriisinhallinta NYT, Helsinki, Finland.