Podcast & resources : Sharing knowledge from the IDFA DocLab R&D Program
In addition to developing their research at DocLab, the artists who participate in the R&D Program are out there sharing their knowledge abroad. Take a look at some of the critical discourses taking place in the world of interactive and immersive non-fiction, and what our beloved program participants have to say.
This article summarizes the key takeaways from the 2022 R&D Summit, offering valuable insights to individuals who couldn't participate in the event. It aims to foster meaningful discussions and encourage continued dialogue within the industry.
This survey conducted by Cassette describes a number of recommendations, as well as potential strategies and future models for the VR sector in the Netherlands.
The IDFA DocLab R&D Summit 2021 in retrospect.
On the occasion of its 15th anniversary, IDFA DocLab presents a series of interviews with pioneering artists, creative technologists, and industry leaders that have been part of the DocLab program in the past decade and a half.
This episode of the Voices of VR Podcast discusses Diagnosia, a VR piece that premiered at IDFA in 2021 and was supported by the DocLab R&D Program. In this interview the artists talk about their work and some of the debates around internet addiction happening within China.
LAYERS OF PLACE: The Art of Augmenting Public Spaces and Places with Stories and Technologies
Documentaries have long helped us to challenge dominant narratives and to see the world anew. They have explored the “real” by bringing its images and sounds to the screen, radio, mobile phone, or VR headset. In these conversations, we want to consider a different approach that is less about bringing the world to the participant, and more about bringing the participant into the world. We will explore how artists today are appending information directly onto public places and spaces, using augmentation technologies to carry on the documentary mission. From audio walks to projections to holograms, we will consider how the act of layering virtual media in physical environments changes our relationship to place. How can accessible media technologies and techniques enhance inclusivity, giving voice to more people and bringing to light stories that are hidden, buried, and left out of dominant narratives of place? What role can augmentation play in reframing how and what we see in physical public spaces? Can we use it to radically reimagine our condition and to generate dialogues within, between, and beyond communities?
An interdisciplinary group of pioneering artists including Jackson 2bears, Halsey Burgund, Glenn Cantave, and Tamiko Thiel will discuss the aesthetics, audiences and ethics of working with and within communities to augment public spaces and places with new meanings, stories, and voices. Moderated by ODL director Sarah Wolozin.
Documentaries have long helped us to challenge dominant narratives and to see the world anew. They have explored the “real” by bringing its images and sounds to the screen, radio, mobile phone, or VR headset. In these conversations, we want to consider a different approach that is less about bringing the world to the participant, and more about bringing the participant into the world. We will explore how artists today are appending information directly onto public places and spaces, using augmentation technologies to carry on the documentary mission. From audio walks to projections to holograms, we will consider how the act of layering virtual media in physical environments changes our relationship to place. How can accessible media technologies and techniques enhance inclusivity, giving voice to more people and bringing to light stories that are hidden, buried, and left out of dominant narratives of place? What role can augmentation play in reframing how and what we see in physical public spaces? Can we use it to radically reimagine our condition and to generate dialogues within, between, and beyond communities?
An interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, and civic leaders including filmmaker Carla Bishop, urban planner Lafayette Cruise, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and interdisciplinary artist Shey Rivera Ríos will discuss the potentials and challenges of augmenting places within communities and with stories to build bridges and bring people together. What policies, strategies, and environments are needed to make them work? Moderated by civic media scholar Benjamin Stokes.
April 15, 2021
As we warm up for another year of the IDFA DocLab R&D Program, our DocLab colleagues are currently processing the 200+ R&D proposals that artists around the world recently submitted. To tide you over in the meantime, we used this opportunity to catch up with some of the artists who participated in the program’s third year.
Launched in 2018 in collaboration with MIT Open Documentary Lab, the R&D Program seeks to challenge the boundaries of traditional research and development frameworks. Since then, the global interactive and immersive network has been steadily coming together to discuss, support, experiment, adapt and innovate through the living lab of the festival, including the DocLab exhibition, live events, and various industry sessions.
But the work hasn’t stopped there. As our 2020 program participants continue to respond to the challenges of this moment and share their knowledge abroad, some are also starting new conversations and collaborations, exploring the potential of new technologies and documentary forms. Without further ado, here’s a look at what some of our R&D artists have been up to since last year’s IDFA DocLab.
Distance Disco
Created by DuoDisco; Mark Meeuwenoord, Arjan Scherpenisse, Klasien van de Zandschulp and Frank Bosma (the Netherlands)
In a time of social distancing and lockdowns, Distance Disco proved to be a very successful social online event during IDFA 2020. After the festival, the project travelled to Sundance and SXSW where festival goers enjoyed the digital matchmaking disco parties. You can still join the dance floor every Friday night, or create your own party. Distance Disco also received press attention from Canada, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the US.
The team is now developing a hybrid experience that invites a physical and online audience to dance with each other and create intimate moments of connection. The team’s goal is to design the ultimate embodied hybrid experience, as so many of us continue to shift between virtual and physical spaces. Stay tuned for pilot events in June!
Echoes of Silence
Created by Tamara Shogaolu, ADO ATO Pictures (the Netherlands)
One of the winners of the the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant in 2020, Tamara Shogaolu premiered her audio experience with dome projections Echoes of Silence at the ARTIS-Planetarium during IDFA 2020. This full dome experience takes the viewer on a trip into space as seen from different viewpoints on Earth. Recently, Régine Debatty of we-make-money-not-art dived deeper with Tamara into the idea that the cosmos sounds differently depending on where you are in the world or your culture. MIT Open Documentary Lab director Sarah Wolozin also spoke to Tamara about the potential of pushing the boundaries of sound. As one of the DocLab Creative Covid Response Support winners, the ADO ATO Pictures team is currently exploring options to adapt the artwork to location-based experience that can tour.
Motto
Created by Vincent Morisset, AATOAA (Canada)
Presented with the National Film Board of Canada, Vincent Morisset’s team created a special live edition of the digital interactive experience Motto for IDFA 2020. Using thousands of ultra-short fragments of video from users all over the world, the project recounts the disappearance of a friendly spirit that continues to nourish itself from visitors’ participation following seasons and moods.
The Canada Media Fund presented a case study of this remarkable piece “that plays freely with an infinity of possibilities on an ever-expanding web, where users are invited to become co-creators.” Motto continued to travel after IDFA, touching base at the JEF Festival in Belgium, the Elektra Virtual Exhibition at the Zero 1 Festival, and FIPADOC in France. Recently it won the Digital Dozen: Breakthoughs in Storytelling award presented by the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab in recognition of the year’s most innovative narratives. You can still try Motto on your phone here.
Oxygen Debt
Created by Bart van de Woestijne (the Netherlands)
This interactive and collective piece about mortality and the limits of the physical body was performed in an old nightclub-turned-spinning-studio during last year’s festival. In a hilarious twist of fate, the gym’s owner actually spotted one of the performing artists and approached them to become a real spinning instructor.
This year, you can experience Oxygen Debt at Cement op Reis and Over het IJ Festival. Additionally, Bart has developed a version of Oxygen Debt for your home trainer, so you can virtually join the philosophical spinning class. Details coming soon.
Sylvia
Created by Ziv Schneider (USA)
Leading up to IDFA 2020, we witnessed on Instagram how virtual influencer Sylvia aged rapidly in the hands of artist Ziv Schneider. A project on themes like ageism, mortality, and simulated authenticity, Sylvia was added to the Virtual Humans database. “This is the most upsetting account on Instagram,” was one of the many comments Sylvia received, as Ziv recounted on Immerse. Variety, among other press outlets, dived into the phenomenon of this unconventional virtual influencer as well.
The project is now developing in new directions that relate to ownership of virtual assets. One of the recipients of the IDFA DocLab Creative COVID Response Support scheme, the project will receive support to work on a performance that expands Sylvia’s story and auction off her assets. Sylvia was also included in the Digital Dozen: Breakthoughs in Storytelling award presented by the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab in recognition of last year’s most innovative narratives. You can still find Sylvia’s profile on Instagram, where she continues to amass new followers.
Symbiosis
Created by Polymorf (the Netherlands)
After pitching this performative, multi-sensory, and multi-user VR experience at the online DocLab Forum during IDFA 2020, Polymorf continued to develop the project futher and present it in different phases. At MU Eindhoven, they'll present a preview of the first two storylines via a COVID-proof experience. Discussing the different possibilities of presenting this project virtually, the team had to conclude that physicality was at the heart of this piece. They are now in talks with different film institutes, museums, theater festivals, and scientific partners to exhibit the project after the lockdown in a safe way.
Virtual Crossings
Created by Cie Gilles Jobin (France)
The next stop for the international collaborative project Virtual Crossings is Shanghai and Melbourne. This project aims to connect clusters of artists to collaborate remotely and is studying further learnings from Geneva and Buenos Aires, where two dancers connected to dance together in real time despite the physical distance. Gilles is now experimenting with collaborative tools around motion capture with the hope that when we can connect physically again, our virtual encounters will still prove to be meaningful and here to stay.
The Leaked Recipes Cookbook
Created by Demetria Glace, David Desrimais, and Mathieu Cénac for JBE Books (France)
The Leaked Recipes Cookbook is the offspring of the IDFA 2018 project Leaked Recipes, and the result of the subsequent collaboration with JBE books and photographer Emilie Blatz (co-creator of EAT | TECH | KITCHEN). A real cookbook with over 50 recipes from the world’s biggest e-mail leaks, the project contains “secret barbecue sauce” recipes from companies like Enron and Sony and plenty of insight into office culture, politics, corruption, hacking, family, and friendships.
The cookbook was published in January 2021 and featured in Printed Matter’s first Virtual Art Book Fair via a live event with Demetria and Emilie. Since then, it’s received attention in outlets such as The Happy Reader (UK), Elephant Magazine (UK), Vanity Fair (France), Le Quotidien de l'Art (France), and Muxmäuschenwild Magazin (Germany). An interview with Demetria will soon be broadcast on the influential German radio station Deutschlandfunk as well as on the highly regarded Polish podcast ODBIORNIK. In summer 2021, the book will begin distribution in the US, and it can already be purchased via JBE.
TM
Created by Ontroerend Goed (Belgium)
Co-commissioned by the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and IDFA DocLab, Ontroerend Goed is back with the one-on-one performance TM which premieres April 21, 2021. Their latest show is the result of the further development of Artificial: Room One, known from IDFA 2019. The live contact and indispensable presence of the audience are a main thread in the work of the theater-performance group. With TM, Ontroerend Goed have created an interactive performance about conspiracy and fear, arising from current themes such as media manipulation, populist ideas, and conspiracy theories.
TM is co-produced by partners such as Almeida Theatre (UK), Cambridge Junction (UK), Chicago Shakespeare Theater (US), Kunstencentrum Vooruit (BE), Le Carreau - Scène Nationale de Forbach et de l’Est mosellan (FR), Marche Teatro/Inteatro Festival (IT), Theatre Royal Plymouth (UK), and Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond (NL).
What Is Left of Reality
Created by Pierre Zandrowicz, Ferdinand Dervieux and Atlas V (France)
During IDFA 2020, the pandemic forced Atlas V to present a digital-only version of its innovative installation What Is Left of Reality. By scanning the viewer’s position in space and adapting the perspective of a projected volumetric movie, this spatial video installation enables a truly immersive experience without use of a virtual reality headset. The artists conducted extensive testing during the pandemic, and the physical installation will now be presented at the prestigious Gaîté Lyrique in Paris in collaboration with Fisheye and Arles Photography Festival.
July 8, 2019
As we warm up for another year of the IDFA DocLab R&D Program, our new media colleagues catch up with some of the artists who participated in the program’s first year. Where are they now?
Launched in 2018 in collaboration with MIT Open Documentary Lab, the DocLab R&D Program seeks to challenge the boundaries of traditional research and development frameworks. Artists are researchers in this setup, and the interactive/immersive art born from their praxis — whether an algorithmic installation, a physical encounter in virtual reality, or some undefined collective data performance — helps weave together a field that is still largely undefined. As a result, valuable knowledge from the landscape of emerging media and art can be shared between artists, organizations, and audiences, no longer hidden behind institutional walls.
The first year of the R&D Program saw the IDFA DocLab festival setting transform into a living lab: a pressure cooker for the global interactive/immersive network to come together and discuss, experiment, and innovate through festival activities such as the DocLab exhibition, Interactive Conference, live cinema events, and various industry sessions.
But the work hasn’t stopped there. Our 2018 program participants continue to share their knowledge abroad, starting new conversations about the art of interactive and immersive non-fiction all over the world. In many ways, these artists show the potential of re-thinking research and development within new media art, and what can be achieved in the process.
Here’s what some of them have been up to since last year’s IDFA DocLab:
The Collider: Chapter One by Anagram (United Kingdom)
Presented in collaboration with Creative XR (Digital Catapult), The National Theatre Immersive Studio, and IDFA DocLab, The Collider is an immersive machine that uses VR to decipher the mysteries of human relationships. Fresh from its world premiere at IDFA DocLab, the project has continued to captivate audiences at Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes section and the Sandbox Immersive Festival in China, where it won the Best Immersive Art Award. Read an interview with the artists here.
A Dinner with Frankenstein AI by Nick Fortugno, Rachel Ginsberg, and Lance Weiler (United States)
Extending the Frankenstein AI research program at Columbia University, this interactive dinner performance by digital storytelling pioneers Lance Weiler, Rachel Ginsberg, and Nick Fortugno had its world premiere at IDFA DocLab. Developed in collaboration with the National Theatre Immersive Studio and IDFA DocLab, this immersive, multi-sensory performance combines food, conversation, and AI. It has since received attention in IndieWire, The Verge, Film Comment, and The Washington Post. Listen to the artist’s research podcast.
Algorithmic Perfumery by Frederik Duerinck (the Netherlands)
In Frederik Duerinck’s AI system, a machine learning algorithm creates custom scents based on visitors’ unique data. Since its premiere iteration at IDFA DocLab, the AI has continued to adapt and learn at the FoST Story Arcade (New York), the Phi Centre (Montreal) as part of the exhibition >HUM(AI)N, and Sheffield Doc/Fest, where it won the Alternate Realities Audience Award. It also took home the Septimus Piesse Visionary Award at the Art and Olfaction Awards 2019. Watch this interview with Duerinck for more about the project.
Eat | Tech | Kitchen by Emilie Baltz and Klasien van de Zandschulp (the Netherlands, United States)
In 2017, IDFA DocLab introduced food artist Emilie Baltz to interactive artist Klasien van de Zandschulp, and commissioned the pair to create an interactive and edible work for the festival. This resulted in Eat | Tech | Kitchen, an interactive installation inspired by the 1932 book La cucina futurista (Futurist Cooking). Using the audience, food, and machine learning, it creates new recipes for human behaviour in the digital age. Realized with support of the Netherlands Film Fund, it went on to win the IDFA DocLab Immersive Non-Fiction Award in 2018. Eat | Tech | Kitchen will be further developed at the 2019 Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab, in addition to continuing development this year as part of the ongoing research conducted by the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
I've Always Been Jealous of Other People’s Families by Shirin Anlen (United States, France, Canada)
Created by former DocLab Academy participant Shirin Anlen and co-produced by Atlas V (who previously presented Notes on Blindness at IDFA DocLab) and the National Film Board of Canada, this project explores the psychological well-being of artificial intelligence. What is the possibility of mental illness in the intelligent machines we create? Based on the learnings of presenting the project at IDFA DocLab 2018, an extended version with new chapters is currently being developed by Anlen and her team. Get a deeper look into Anlen's research with this article on Immerse and its follow-up piece. Check out this essay by Anlen for more on AI and mental illness.
The Social Sorting Experiment by Steye Hallema and The Smartphone Orchestra (the Netherlands)
This collective performance invites audiences to experience what happens under the hoods of their phones, where social media and dating apps access raw data to categorize and profile them. After the world premiere at IDFA DocLab in 2018, The Smartphone Orchestra went on to develop and perform this piece at the Esplanade theater in Singapore, SXSW in Austin, Texas, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and BIFAN in Korea. Most recently, The Social Sorting Experiment has been selected for De Parade festival this summer, in addition to being nominated for a Golden Calf award at the upcoming Netherlands Film Festival, in the category Best Interactive 2019.
That's all for now! Additional resources, case studies, and updates will be shared by IDFA and MIT in the coming months and at various IDFA DocLab events during IDFA 2019. As part of our festival exhibition and living lab, a new lineup of R&D projects currently in development will also be presented during IDFA DocLab in November.
A discussion about using augmented reality to explore gender identity in Rob Eagle's work Through the Wardrobe, that during IDFA DocLab 2019 took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam’s Central Station.</div> A discussion about using augmented reality to explore gender identity in Rob Eagle's work Through the Wardrobe, that during IDFA DocLab 2019 took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam’s Central Station.
December 3, 2019, By Vladan Petkovic
William Uricchio is one of the world's top media scholars, a professor of comparative media studies at MIT, and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University. At MIT, Uricchio is the founder and principal investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, a close collaborator of the IDFA DocLab Research & Development Program. We talked to Uricchio about his research with DocLab, the nature and development of new digital media as well as their relationship with traditional forms of expression, and the cultural and technological trends in the field that we can expect in the coming years.
This year we're looking very closely at user experience particularly as it pertains to story. How do people connect the dots of their experience? Do they find the same story that the author told? Even the most abstract media experiences create distinctive impressions, sometimes even stories. So I'm interested in what user experiences are, what forms they take, and how they are expressed. And I’m especially interested in variations in how people make sense of their experiences, even the most clearly labeled and defined projects.
In Event of Moon Disaster [an immersive installation which includes a deepfake of a Nixon speech supposedly recorded in the event of the Apollo 11 crew getting stranded on the Moon] is a clearly labeled project, and I can't tell you how many people we heard say, "I didn't know they filmed contingency tapes." The installation says "deepfake" everywhere you look, yet some visitors didn't get the point. How is that possible? So I'm interested in interpretative variability, in why different people find different things, and in the patterns of that variation.
We’re still in the early days of artificial intelligence and media like virtual reality. These forms are still "soft" and makers are exploring their possibilities. Users are also orienting themselves, which partially explains their variable interpretations. I feel as though we're in the first decade of cinema, when filmmakers were trying to copy theater, with its proscenium composition and language of the stage, and slowly discovered that they could take close-ups, and cut time and space… It’s amazing to watch new media acquire cultural form. It’s like watching a new generation of makers "invent" their own language, just as film pioneers such as D.W. Griffith and Edwin S. Porter did over one hundred years ago.
Just as some early filmmakers took their lead from older theater conventions, we can see some VR makers taking their ideas of storytelling from older media such as film and games. I'm trying to make visible this tendency to retro-fit VR into earlier media forms. It's fine if people do it, as long as they know that's what they are doing. But meanwhile, let's find a vocabulary, a conception that's more specific to VR. This does not necessarily entail a complete break from the past. I suspect that there are many good sources of inspiration to be found in discovery-based forms like games and immersive theater. We need to pick our historical precedents carefully, since some seem to address VR’s affordances better than others.
I think we're reaching that moment where VR will find its own way, its own specificity as a medium. It may take a few jabs with a sharp elbow to keep things moving, and that's the self-appointed task of critics!
VR and developments such as AR offer a great way to shift the balance of power between authors and users, letting users find their own stories rather than simply listening to the author tell them one. In this scenario, authors become more like the designers of environments loaded with narrative potential. Think Disneyland (a theme park where we can wander and connect whatever dots we would like to) rather than The Lion King (where we are told a particular tale). There’s nothing wrong with well-told stories, as literature and film prove every day; but VR has a distinctive potential. It can put the user in an authored world where she can follow her interests, discover things, and find her own story.
Embodiment is also a pretty important issue in VR, and happens in good ways and bad ways. The bad way is when users feel physically ill or dizzy and have to stop the experience. The good way is when users feel out of body. This can take many forms, such as feeling that we are in another place, or physically identifying with a character we see, or even literally leaving our own bodies. Sometimes embodiment is an attribution that we give to the characters we encounter. We react as though they are really there, even if we know differently. As with story-finding, we don’t have a great way to talk about this. We still need to better understand how this works, and develop an appropriate vocabulary.
For example, Ayahuasca - The Shamanic Exhibition [a VR installation that represents the psychedelic experience of using Ayahuasca, expanded with a special exhibition at IDFA] created an out of body experience for me, but I think the chanting on the soundtrack created this effect rather than the images; or perhaps it was the combination of both. I say this because I’ve encountered a similar feeling with several other Indigenous VR pieces, all of which were built around mesmerizing chants in the soundtrack. We need to better understand how these experiences work in order to deploy them predictably and effectively.
We are about to experience a radically new form of VR with systems that track our eye movements, and with them, potentially our pupil dilation and heart rate as well. This matters for three reasons.
First, with systems that use foveated rendering, the computer generates only that part of the world where we are looking. This contrasts sharply with our current strategy of creating the whole world, only a small portion of which we can see. Foveated rendering is relatively efficient, meaning less drain on the computer and higher resolution images where we are actually looking.
Second, this technology coupled with AI will enable us to build much more responsive worlds, including with characters and worlds that acknowledge and respond to us. This will be a game changer, and mark the end of the Madame Tussaud effect, where characters seem unaware of our presence.
And finally, we need to think proactively about data privacy, because where we look and how we physiologically react will surely be seen as a treasure trove by marketers. Just as we have to invent a new vocabulary and set of techniques to work with these new possibilities, we need to think about ways to ensure our privacy.
There will certainly be other technological changes that will enable us to develop a new language for VR. But VR is different from most of our classic media technologies in the sense that it has not yet stabilized. Consider, say, film, which was pretty much in its current form of 35 mm way back in the Lumières' day. Sure, we added color and sound, but the basic medium was fixed. Compare this to the various forms of VR such as 360, real-time capture, and foveated rendering, together with the ever-changing technologies coming from companies like Oculus. VR remains unstable. And VR’s story is complicated by the pressure exerted by huge corporations, which is arguably deforming the medium in its still nascent days.
The tech giants need to maximize their return. Innovation means churn, and churn confuses the marketplace. So the large corporations exert a conservative impulse, putting the brakes on the development of the medium.
What we see here at IDFA DocLab is mostly work done by artists who are pushing the boundaries and exploring the potentials of the medium. Their work is often difficult to classify: where would it be located in the Oculus store? Artists are the medium’s research and development department. They often seek out constraints and push them to the breaking point; they take assumptions and so-called best practices, and turn them on their heads. Artists are developing the VR language of the future, or at least they are provoking critics to think hard about that language and to discover what the medium can really do.
Constraints can be a creative incentive. Artists are really good at finding a wall and breaking through. And that's what a festival like this does—it's terrific as a place where new ideas, new applications, new possibilities for the medium take form and are tested. So despite the pressure from tech giants to simply sell more stuff, what happens here is that a lot of new ideas are born and hopefully the medium will keep up and learn from this and grow.
We're at a very interesting junction right now. In the film world everything is now pretty much digital, even though much of it emulates the work of the celluloid past. I mean by this things like genres, and the language of film (establishing shots, parallel editing, and the rest). The idea of cinema has been remarkably persistent, even if the technology of film has been largely replaced by digital video alternatives designed to mimic film. Given this disjunction between familiar film form, and quite different video technique, it’s rather remarkable that so much of the digital video technical pipeline has been retrofitted to fit with the old celluloid world.
In the next five or so years, I think we are going to see some big changes in that pipeline in the form of the engines we know from VR, AR, and games such as Unity and Unreal. A new generation of these engines is going to be used for prefiguring and editing film and various related texts. This is as much an acknowledgement of the cross-platform circulation of texts (tie-ins in the form of promos, phone versions, VR, games, and more), as it is the simple efficiency of these digitally-native technologies.
I don’t mean to say that cinema is ending any time soon! When I say the word "cinema" in the classroom, students immediately think "fiction," "two hours," and as mentioned, a whole battery of techniques. But if we are lucky, we will also see some exploration of new possibilities. Imagine the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror, except that instead of clicking your way through the branched narrative, your eye movements alone will seamlessly navigate you through the ecosystem for a personalized story. That would be quite a chore to produce with today’s systems, but with game engines like Unity (plus eye-trackers), one can imagine quite interesting possibilities.
Cinema’s conventions and assumptions will stay with us, I think, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with cultural stability! And media industries will certainly do their best to make their products predictable—both for us as consumers, and for themselves as revenue producers. But this should not preclude an expansion of cultural possibility, and an exploration of the affordances of new technologies. When it comes to culture, I think that we can have our cake, and eat it too. And as I said earlier, that’s where the artists and festivals like IDFA come in.
Of course, it's a business model and it works. Remember the cinema’s key operating principle: first you pay and then you walk into the dark room. The customer has to be convinced that the product is good even before seeing it. This means that predictability in the form of famous directors and actors, genres, remakes and the rest are important in order to reassure the audience that they are facing a low-risk investment. This contrasts with how we buy clothes (we try them on first or we can return them), or purchase meals in a restaurant (first we eat, then we pay, but not if we are dissatisfied). Cinema’s economic and cultural logics are tightly twisted together, and this accounts for the default conservatism of industrially-produced media products.
This episode of the Voices of VR Podcast explores the preservation of avant-garde digital culture and VR embodiment, with a special focus on Ali Eslami's work Nerd_Funk (official DocLab 2019 selection).
A Dinner with Frankenstein AI: storytelling, food & artificial intelligence
In this episode of Sandbox, Lance Weiler, Rachel Ginsberg, and Nick Fortugno sit down to discuss A Dinner with Frankenstein AI and share their experience of collaborating with a machine.
#767: THE COLLIDER: Exploring Power Dynamics with Your Body as the Platform
The Collider, realized with the support of IDFA DocLab and part of the official selection of 2018, is an immersive experience that uses your memories and your body as a platform to explore asymmetrical power dynamics with another person. In this episode the co-founders of Anagram discuss how they explore power dynamics in this work and use body as the platform.
5 reasons why I believe AI can have mental illness
Shirin Anlen, the artist behind I’ve Always Been Jealous of Other People’s Families, interrogates the dominant narrative of machines as rational beings in this Becoming Human essay.
Following the DocLab showcase of I’ve Always Been Jealous of Other People’s Families, artist Shirin Anlen documents her research process in Immerse.
Exploring Power and Connection Through VR with ‘The Collider’ (Q&A)
A conversation with Anagram’s Amy Rose and May Abdalla about their two-person interactive encounter.
Conducted by Montreal’s Phi Centre, this interview explains the machine learning behind Duerinck’s intelligent, interactive perfume installation.