BYSTANDING

2009, Tel Aviv.

Israeli rowing champion Jasmine Feingold lost consciousness and capsized in Tel Aviv's Ha'Yarkon River. She remained underwater for nearly five minutes. Dozens of people stood nearby. Eventually, one person entered the river and saved her life.

Bystanding returns to that moment - not to recreate a rescue, but to examine the human hesitation that preceded it.

Recognition:

• SILVER at the TELLY AWARDS
  “Immersive & Mixed Reality - Social Impact”
  (The premier award honoring video and television across all screens)

• GOLD at The LOVIE AWARDS - "Best Virtual Narrative Experience"
  (Honouring the Best of the European Internet \ Selected by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, IADAS)

• GOLD at The w3 AWARDS - "Best Immersive Documentary Experience"
  (illuminating Brilliance in Digital Experiences, Content, and Creativity \ Selected by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts)

The Concept
Virtual reality often promises agency, presence, and interaction. The story of Jasmine Feingold's accident is defined by inaction. Bystanding uses the medium against its most obvious promise. Participants can move, choose, and enter different points of view — while the one action they most want to take remains permanently unavailable to them.

The Question
Rather than judging the bystanders from a distance, the work asks participants to inhabit their psychological space. Who were these people? What did they believe was happening? What did they tell themselves in the moment? And how does a crowd change the way each individual understands their own responsibility?

"The experience does not excuse inaction. It asks participants to examine it more closely."

The Experience
The experience begins above the Ha'Yarkon River. Feingold, who survived the accident, recalls the events from her point of view. As her narration ends, participants find themselves suspended above the capsized boat. They are placed inside a photogrammetric reconstruction of the park. Around them, volumetric figures of bystanders stand frozen in time. The clock is running. Feingold is underwater. Participants have only a few minutes to choose which bystanders to approach and which confessions to hear.

Each encounter moves into a 360° animated inner world — created in a distinct visual language — for a wedding photographer, a young mother, a man of faith, a paramedic, a recluse, an environmental activist. Each perspective is built from research and interviews connected to the event, performed by a cast of leading Israeli actors. Because all confessions unfold simultaneously, no participant can hear them all. At the end, the reconstruction gives way to the real footage filmed that day — returning the participant from speculation to evidence.

Form & Technology
Built in Unreal Engine, the work combines real-time interaction with a structured linear countdown. The riverbank was reconstructed through photogrammetry. The bystanders were captured using volumetric video, allowing participants to move around them in six degrees of freedom. Once inside a bystander's perspective, participants become stationary. The shift into 360° video reinforces the work's central argument: to witness and understand, while remaining unable to act. Technology is used as structure, not spectacle. The form mirrors the subject.

Why It Matters
Bystanding asks participants to spend time inside a moment most people would rather judge from the outside. Its purpose is not to absolve the bystanders, nor to turn hesitation into virtue. The work is built from a more uncomfortable premise: that inaction can be ordinary, social, and human — and therefore must be examined. By placing participants inside the perspectives of those who did not act, the experience turns a public incident into a private ethical encounter. It asks what responsibility feels like before it becomes action, and whether understanding hesitation can help us recognize it faster the next time someone needs help.