Rogério Bié

Research · 2025– · Graduate researcher, ASU Narrative and Emerging Media

Immersive media and sacrifice zones

How can communities facing environmental injustice in the Global South appropriate immersive media to build resilience and inform public policy?

This page is the whole agenda, written for professors and advisors: the question, the three cases, the mechanic, the theoretical framework, the timeline of what I have done since college and what I want to do next. In one sentence: invert the vector. The community as author of the immersive record, not its subject.

With Euziane Bastos in front of the kombi, Cumbe Quilombo
With Euziane Bastos, Cumbe Quilombo, Aracati, Ceará. Children of the Wind, 2024.

Three faces of sacrifice

One thesis, two or three cases compared, not the whole world. Water is the thread: the Santa Quitéria reservoir, the Cumbe lagoons, the closed beach at Boca Chica.

Boca Chica, Texas ↔ Alcântara, Maranhão

110 dB Starship's sonic boom measured 20 km from the pad, 10 to 19 dBA above the FAA's own forecast (Gee et al., 2024)

Two launch sites, one logic. In Boca Chica, SpaceX's Starship program closes the beach for over a thousand hours a year and its noise reaches Playa Bagdad, in Mexico. In Alcântara, Brazil's own launch center displaced 312 quilombola families; in 2024 the Inter-American Court condemned Brazil for it. The promise changes (national security, progress, the survival of the species), the people who are sacrificable stay the same.

The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone →
Cumbe Quilombo, Aracati, Ceará

0 public consultations before a wind farm was built on the community's land

Clean energy, the film asked: clean for whom? Filhos do Vento followed the children born to local women and the workers who came to build the turbines, against the community's long history of struggle. It was my undergraduate thesis, picked by Cine Ceará as 1 of 3 features out of 100+, and the place where the question of this agenda first appeared.

Children of the Wind →
Santa Quitéria, Ceará (Itataia)

0.2% of Itataia's output is uranium. The company calls it a phosphate project; the risk is nuclear (Hecht, 2012)

I grew up inside this one before I knew the phrase. The proposed Itataia mine would draw water from the only reservoir that supplies a town of 43,000 people. Nobody has called Santa Quitéria a sacrifice zone in Portuguese yet; with Juskus (2023) and the UN report A/HRC/49/53 (Boyd, 2022), I can be the one to do it.

Where I come from →

Where the work is

Two countries, one corridor: from the Ceará backlands to the Rio Grande Valley, through Los Angeles. Tap a point.

Acre Alagoas Amapá Amazonas Bahia Ceará Distrito Federal Espírito Santo Goiás Maranhão Mato Grosso Mato Grosso do Sul Minas Gerais Pará Paraíba Paraná Pernambuco Piauí Rio de Janeiro Rio Grande do Norte Rio Grande do Sul Rondônia Roraima Santa Catarina São Paulo Sergipe Tocantins Santa Quitéria Cumbe Fortaleza Alcântara Brasil · Ceará · Maranhão
Los Angeles Boca Chica · Playa Bagdad Navajo Nation Austin United States · Texas · California

Tap a point to read.

The mechanic: the Embodied Edit

When the rocket launches, its noise swallows the voices of Boca Chica and Playa Bagdad. Only the visitor who chooses to keep listening gets them back. Drag your attention.

Starship · 110 dB at 20 km
The community's voices

It is not designed to produce empathy; Nakamura (2020) has shown what 'virtuous VR' does to a privileged viewer. It is designed to produce what Kate Nash (2018) calls proper distance: presence with responsibility. I do not want the viewer to become a resident of Boca Chica. I want the viewer to become responsible for having heard one.

The headset reproduces the sound, not the tremor. What the Embodied Edit does not transmit has to be declared as an ethical choice. The arc: arrive as a guest (Derrida), discover you are implicated (Rothberg), leave as an ally.

Technically: a 6DoF room-scale documentary that reconstructs Boca Chica and Playa Bagdad as Gaussian splats (Kerbl et al., 2023) from field photogrammetry (COLMAP), delivered in Unity through OpenXR to Meta Quest 3, with first-order ambisonic sound spatialized by HRTF; a design grounded in selective auditory attention (Cherry, 1953), diegetic guidance in cinematic VR (Rothe et al., 2019) and Slater's plausibility illusion (2009).

The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone →

What a splat of a destroyed place looks like

Out of the Ashes reconstructed homes burned in the 2025 LA wildfires as Gaussian splats. It is the example of visualizing destroyed areas that this agenda wants to put in communities' hands.

Out of the Ashes · the film, on YouTube
Open the splat on Scaniverse ↗Rotate, walk and zoom in the browser
Gaussian splat · a burned home, explorable in the browser (Scaniverse does not allow embedding, so it opens in a new tab)

With whom I think

The core of the theoretical framework: the references that hold the whole proposal, and what each one does for it. Filter by strand. The full bibliography (579 items) is available on request.

Immersive media & ethics · 2010

Immersive Journalism

de la Peña et al. · Presence

The lineage I come from. Out of the Ashes (Mitchell & de la Peña, Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize 2026) is its latest step; mine takes it to the Global South and to sound.

Immersive media & ethics · 2018

Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence

Kate Nash · Studies in Documentary Film

The direct base of the Embodied Edit: presence with responsibility, what Silverstone called proper distance.

Immersive media & ethics · 2020

Feeling good about feeling bad

Lisa Nakamura · Journal of Visual Culture

The critique a committee will raise about 'virtuous VR'. I cite it before being asked.

Immersive media & ethics · 2019

The Implicated Subject

Michael Rothberg · Stanford University Press

For the indifferent audience: neither victim nor perpetrator, but beneficiary of the structure. The arc of the piece: arrive as a guest, discover you are implicated, leave as an ally.

Alterity & encounter · 1961

Totality and Infinity

Emmanuel Levinas · read through Dussel (1977) and Szpunar (2012)

The face interpellates before it explains; the Third leads to justice, that is, to public policy.

Alterity & encounter · 2020

Hungry Listening

Dylan Robinson · University of Minnesota Press

Names the settler habit of consuming Indigenous sound as content. The Embodied Edit rewards attention, not consumption.

Environmental justice & sacrifice zones · 2023

Sacrifice Zones: A Genealogy and Analysis of an Environmental Justice Concept

Ryan Juskus · Environmental Humanities

Where the word in my title comes from, with the 1974 NRC/Ford Foundation report on 'national sacrifice areas'.

Environmental justice & sacrifice zones · 2011

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Rob Nixon · Harvard University Press

The representational problem VR answers: how to make visible what has no event. Each launch is an event; the damage is the sum.

Environmental justice & sacrifice zones · 2015

Wastelanding (2015) / Being Nuclear (2012)

Traci Brynne Voyles / Gabrielle Hecht · Minnesota / MIT Press

Itataia is 'phosphate' in the discourse and 'uranium' in the risk. Navajo ↔ Itataia ↔ Africa: the same ore.

Environmental justice & sacrifice zones · 2017

The Extractive Zone

Macarena Gómez-Barris · Duke University Press

Art, extraction, Global South, decolonial: the frame for a piece made from inside the zone.

Environmental justice & sacrifice zones · 2010

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear

Steve Goodman · MIT Press

Sound is a weapon because it goes through walls and installs fear in the body before thought. The rocket's noise works as a second, invisible fence. Reading now.

Social cartography & participatory research · 2010

Terras tradicionalmente ocupadas (2008) / Cartografia social e dinâmicas territoriais (2010)

Alfredo Wagner B. de Almeida / Henri Acselrad · PNCSA / UFRJ

Brazilian social cartography taught traditional communities to draw the map the state refused to draw. The mandatory question: who is the map for?

Social cartography & participatory research · 2009

Una sociología sentipensante para América Latina

Orlando Fals Borda · CLACSO

Participatory action research and 'sentipensar': a method, not a theme. Systematic devolution to the community.

Social cartography & participatory research · 1999

Decolonizing Methodologies

Linda Tuhiwai Smith · Zed Books

Trust as method. With the CARE principles (GIDA, 2019) and ILO Convention 169: the community decides what enters the map and what stays out.

Global South & community communication · 1969

Extensão ou Comunicação?

Paulo Freire · with Peruzzo (2020)

Not taking VR to the settlement: making VR with the settlement. The whole method in one sentence.

Global South & community communication · 2016

Jornalismo da Terra: the PRONERA journalism degree at UFC

Nunes & Oliveira · Intercom RBCC

UFC already trained 'journalists of the land': 60 enrolled, 45 graduated, 2010 to 2013. The exact precedent for the next cohort, in immersive media.

Technical base · 2023

3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

Kerbl et al. · ACM TOG · SIGGRAPH

The capture tool: a phone that trains splats on-device puts the sensor in the community's hands.

Technical base · 2024

Starship super heavy acoustics

Gee et al. · JASA Express Letters

The measurement behind the mechanic: about 110 dB at 20 km, 10 to 19 dBA above the FAA forecast.

From college to the next step

Everything I have done in this direction, and what I want to do. Scroll sideways.

2019

Youth Ambassadors (U.S. Embassy)

First time abroad, at 18. The exchange that later brought me back to the U.S.

Open → 2020–23

GRUPPE: audiovisual journalism research group

Headed 20+ research projects and productions in filmmaking and audiovisual journalism at UFC.

Open → 2020–22

CACCO: community communication

30+ extension activities with 10 community radio stations. Freire, Peruzzo and Kaplún in practice.

Open → 2021

Cadastra Eu!

Co-founded the student drive that registered people without internet for the Covid-19 vaccine; became an official UFC extension program; national TV.

Open → 2021–23

Midiando: media literacy

60+ activities with 1,200+ students, teachers and elders. Access, not capacity, as the problem.

Open → 2023

Ceará em Cena · Ausências

Four Expocom Northeast awards. Ausências, a podcast, is where my ear became the first instrument.

Open → 2023–24

Filhos do Vento (Children of the Wind)

Undergraduate thesis: a feature documentary on the Cumbe Quilombo and its wind farm. Cine Ceará, 1 of 3 out of 100+. The first face of sacrifice.

Open → 2025–

M.A. Narrative and Emerging Media, ASU

Los Angeles, supervised by Nonny de la Peña. Graduate teaching and research assistant.

Open → 2026

Reality Looks Back · SXSW

Associate producer and docent of a volumetric and 360° documentary: 400+ individual viewings in five days.

Open → 2026

Out of the Ashes · Venice Immersive

Directed and edited the behind-the-scenes documentaries of the Gaussian-splat film that won the Special Jury Prize. The method, proven.

Open → 2026

SIGGRAPH · LA Public Library XR pilot

6,000+ visitors guided through a mocap installation; 10 XR titles in five library branches. Access again.

Open → 2026–28

The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone

Capstone: a room-scale VR documentary on Boca Chica and Playa Bagdad. Prototype December 2026, premiere 2028.

Open →

Other works I build on

Works, collectives, tools and programs that have already done part of what I propose. None has done the immersive piece with the community as author; that is the missing link.

VR works

Out of the Ashes

Mitchell & de la Peña, 2026

Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize. Gaussian splats and survivors' family photographs. I directed its behind-the-scenes documentaries.

 S

VR works

Solwata

NowHere Media + Human Rights Watch, 2026

Three Solomon Islands communities in Gaussian splats, made with the community, taken from Venice to COP31. The exact model of my question.

VR works

Reality Looks Back

SXSW 2026

Volumetric capture and 360° video in one documentary grammar. I ran its SXSW run.

 V

Collectives

Vídeo nas Aldeias

since 1986

Indigenous filmmakers trained to film themselves. The Brazilian precedent for handing the camera over.

 R

Collectives

Rede Wayuri · data_labe

Rio Negro · Maré

Indigenous communicators in the Amazon; data journalism from a favela. Access, not capacity.

 J

Collectives

Jornal Sem Terra · Brasil de Fato

MST, 1981 / 2003

I was born in a communication sector before I read theory. Filhos do Vento aired on Brasil de Fato in 2024.

 M

Tools

Mapeo · Terrastories

Digital Democracy · Terrastories

Offline field tools for community mapping and place-based storytelling. Both are 2D; the gap this agenda tries to fill.

 M

Tools

Manual de mapeo colectivo

Iconoclasistas, 2013

The workshop guide: official map underneath, the community's map on top. The difference between the two is the sacrifice zone.

 J

Programs

Jornalismo da Terra (PRONERA · UFC)

2010–2013

A journalism degree for land-reform settlers: 60 enrolled, 45 graduated. I want to run the next cohort in immersive media.

 W

Programs

Wapikoni Mobile

Québec, since 2004

Mobile studios that travel to First Nations communities. The logistics model for a cohort that moves between settlements.

For professors and advisors

I can send the full research statement, the bibliography (579 items, links checked) and the deck of The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone. Write:

rogeriobie2016@gmail.comabiedemo@asu.eduResume (PDF)The Sound of a Sacrifice Zone