The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the inaugural Quillsfest, which was a two-day event November 19-20 held within the Museum of Other Realities. Each of these commissions paired established theatre makers with veteran XR artists to produce four different types of VR experiences that blend the design practices from a broad range of design disciplines. There were also five behind-the-scenes exhibition installations giving insight into the creative process of a variety of different XR productions, some of which had more live performance aspects. All of these pieces are still available to be seen within the Museum of Other Realities until December 18th, which requires a PCVR system to see them.
I had a chance to talk about all of these XR pieces with Scarlett Kim, who is an Associate Artistic Director & Director of Innovation & Strategy at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We talked about OSF’s journey into immersive technologies, and their collaboration with Artizen in order to help pair established XR artists with established theatre makers. There was a lot of exploratory process to merge the different design disciplines in these distributed and at times asynchronous collaborations that spanned five different time zones amongst all of the creators. We also talk about how XR technologies are part of a larger accessibility roadmap for OSF in order to make immersive art and live performance more accessible to people who are not able to attend their destination theatre offerings within Ashland, Oregon.
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Below is more information provided by Oregon Shakespeare Festival about the four commissioned VR pieces and their creators as well as the five behind-the-scenes exhibitions.
Here’s a teaser trailer of some of the pieces shown at Quillsfest:
Guardian of the Night
Dede Ayite – Lead Artist
Michael Joseph McQuilken – Lead Artist
Joel ‘Kachi Benson – Lead Artist
Michael Thurber – Composer and Sound Designer
Jennifer Harrison Newman – Movement
Tyler Alexander Arnold – Set PA
Costumes Built by The Public Theater Costume Shop in New York
Within a number of West African traditions, there is a belief in spiritual guardians known as Zangbeto, Coumpo or Kwagh-hir. These beings act as spiritual guardians and emerge in a whirlwind of energy during festivals to speak to the people.
This project creates a virtual reality experience that immerses the viewer in a dark, unfamiliar forest. A guardian will appear and through dance and movement, illuminate and guide the viewer.
Raffia and a variety of recycled materials (solid worldly materials) are used to create the body of this otherworldly guardian, who appears only for a brief moment to reflect our existence back to us, and in so doing help us find our way.
This experience is an exploration of movement, and an embodiment of our oneness with the earth and nature.
Anakwad
Ty Defoe – Creative Director
Dov Heichemer – Creative Co-Director
alpha_rats – Developer
Clara Luzian – 3D Artist
Suzanne Kite and Devin Ronnenberg – Music
An Anishinaabe tale brought to life in an Indigiqueer dreamscape summoning the shapeshifter queer ghost as it nullifies linear time and learns to unlock syllabic truths to regain balance in the destructive destiny of now.
Ordinary Gesture
Raja Feather Kelly – Lead Artist, Writer, Co-Director
Illya Szilak – Co-Director, Creative Producer
Cyril Tsiboulski – Art Director, Technical Director, Lead Developer
Christoph Mateka – Sound Design & Score Composition
Ordinary Gesture is a Virtual Reality Theatrical experience that intersects theatre, meditation, and movement. The experience seeks to surrealize the experience of empathy by situating the player in 5 scenes that expand from their body to space-time (the universe) and back again. Inspired by the movies Magnolia, Melancholia, Waking Life, the poem “You Are Never Ready” by Nicole Blackman, and the writing of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, Ordinary Gesture asks the player to contemplate existence, suffering, compassion, and gesture as both ingredients to create theatre and a means to perhaps better understand empathy.
O-DOGG: An Angeleno Take on Othello
Performed by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter
Executive Produced by Nataki Garrett for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Kirkaldy Myers, Shariffa Ali in partnership with Artizen & the Museum of Other Realities
Creative Producers: Joe Brewster & Michèle Stephenson, Rada Studio
Production Company: AliAlea Productions
Producer: Adrian Alea
Line Producer: Emma McSharry
Co-Directors: Shariffa Ali and Brisa Areli Muñoz
Writer & Dramaturg: Alex Alpharaoh
VR Engineer: Sagar Patel
Costume Designer: Tanaka Dunbar Ngwara
Sound Designer/Composer: Josh Horvath
Performer: Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter
Director of Photography: Kris Pilcher
Assistant Director of Photography: Kevin Laibson
Sound Mixer: Christian Guiñanzaca
Video Editor: Micah Stieglitz
Teleprompter Operator: Rudy Dedominicis
Production Assistant: Tanéyah Jolly
In this immersive experience, users are launched into a cacophony of chaos during the 1st night of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. Unable to look away, the participant is forced to contend with a city divided along race, class, and immigration lines as revolt fills the city, provoked by the acquittals of four White LAPD police officers who beat and nearly killed Rodney King. From Shakespeare to Shakur, Black Thought to Alpharaoh, these poets and lyricists have a visceral way of speaking honestly about the history of our times with critical precision. This piece, effusive as much as it is restrained, offers a heated conversation about race, colorism, bias, and culture in America through liberatory practices of hip hop, spoken word, lyricism, rhythm, and flow, inspired by Shakespeare’s well known Othello.
Here are the five behind-the-scenes exhibitions:
- Laila is an interactive work created by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paula Vesala, Tuomas Norvio and the Ekho Collective for the Finnish National Opera, music and visuality evolve and change in interaction with the audience.
- Satore Studio’s Cosmos Within Us delivers a sense of hope and understanding to anyone affected by Alzheimer’s.
- Dazzle by Gibson/Martelli + Peut Porter, recreates the optimistic, rebellious spirit of the 1919 Chelsea Arts Club ‘Dazzle Ball’.
- POV by GRX Immersive Labs is a hyper-digital sci-fi virtual reality series immersed in a near future Los Angeles where personal data is the new currency and weaponized A.I. Police drones enforce the law.
- Finding Pandora X by Double Eye Studios is a modern take on an ancient myth that shifts the perspective on a narrative that has long been misinterpreted.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So on today's episode, I'm going to be talking about Quill's Fest, which was from November 19th and 20th. It was in the Museum of Other Realities. It was co-produced by Artisan, which helped coordinate a number of different XR artists to work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is a regional repertory theater company here in Ashland, Oregon. So they matched up a theater maker with established XR artists to be able to create four different commissions that they were featuring here. And it was showing in the Museum of Other Realities. In fact, they're there until December 18th. So if you're listening to this before that point, you can still go and get access to the Museum of Other Realities to be able to see these different pieces. So if you want to check out these experiences before you listen to this podcast, I highly recommend it. It's definitely worth checking them out. I had a chance to talk to Scarlett Kim, who is at the OSF and working as an Associate Artistic Director and the Director of Innovation and Strategy at OSF. And we talk about not only these projects that they commissioned within XR, but also this larger issue of trying to create the virtual fourth stage and how to make theater more accessible to broader audiences. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Scarlett happened on Friday, December 3rd, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:28.588] Scarlett Kim: My name is Scarlett Kim. I use she her pronouns and I serve as the associate artistic director and director of innovation and strategy at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I oversee transmedia storytelling and immersive and interactive initiatives that intersect with new media technology here at OSF.
[00:01:45.990] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into what you're doing now in transmedia.
[00:01:53.255] Scarlett Kim: Sure. I'm pretty new to OSF. I've been here about, I think, five months. I've been saying that coming back to a theater context feels a little bit like a homecoming. I got my MFA in theater, but a lot of my work has been at the intersection of art and technology across various industries and disciplines. working in gallery settings, internationally, cultural exchange, really looking at live performance and extended reality and how they intersect as a vehicle of social change. So I'm an artist first, and my career has been directing, originating, and collaborating on original multimedia projects. across disciplines and across the globe. So I'm really excited to join this organization at this moment of change. OSF is an 85-year-old organization that's now imagining our next 85 years in a very innovative way.
[00:02:46.605] Kent Bye: Great. So yeah, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it's down there in Ashland, Oregon, right?
[00:02:51.226] Scarlett Kim: Yes. We are in Ashland, Oregon, about 60 miles from California border.
[00:02:56.145] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. I'm up here in Portland and I haven't had a chance to make it down yet. But what's interesting to me is that, you know, I've been in the VR space for a number of years and the museum of other realities has been having a lot of different film festivals, showing different pieces within the museum of other realities and collaborating with artists and helping to curate different pieces. What started as Kaleidoscope and now has rebranded to Artisan to be able to do funding for artists, but also helped co-produce this. So maybe you could just give a bit more context as to Oregon Shakespeare Festival, doing a lot of in real life, live theater, the pandemic hits, and then what were the steps that had you come on board and then start to experiment with what's happening with performance within a virtual context and getting into things like the Museum of Other Realities and collaboration with Artisan.
[00:03:46.703] Scarlett Kim: Yes, you know, it's interesting. Oregon Shakespeare Festival's middle name is Shakespeare. So I think that frames a lot of people's expectations when we introduce ourselves. I had a really interesting experience at the Immersive Summit that happened in Vegas where I was like, oh, OSF, you know, I was expecting to kind of do a lot of explaining, but then I pleasantly learned that a lot of the immersive world folks had been like growing up coming to Ashland every year and their, you know, high school theater program. So I was like, oh, actually maybe OSF has a kind of legibility across these worlds in ways that I hadn't even expected. But yeah, OSF is one of the country's largest theater producing organizations. We present to about 400,000 plus audiences from all states and as many countries across the world. We have over 800 performances a year. Again, our middle name is Shakespeare, but we've been a real pioneer in new work and we've world premiere Pulitzer Prize and Tony award winning plays for decades. And now we're kind of expanding across what we've been calling the theatrical omniverse. So our artistic director, Nataki Garrett, her vision is for us to extend access to the transformative power of theater in all of the ways, all of the forms, in a really artist-centric way, so that we're supporting artists experimenting in a way that moves beyond the traditional boundaries of theater and also moves beyond the kind of siloed vision of like what kind of people come to a regional theater, a huge regional theater like this. So really access and accessibility is really at the center of how we're thinking about expanding into different mediums and different disciplines. We have three physical theaters in Ashland, Oregon, and we're envisioning this digital hybrid work as a kind of fourth stage so that it's not an initiative on the fringes or it's not additive to the physical in-person work we do, but it is actually at the center of how we're imagining the future of our organization.
[00:05:49.630] Kent Bye: Okay. And when you said 800 performances a year, was that pre pandemic or post pandemic that.
[00:05:57.174] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, that's pre pandemic. It's kind of crazy. It's a whole machine.
[00:06:00.895] Kent Bye: Yeah. I didn't realize, I mean, cause I knew that there was like a festival. I thought it was like in the summer, but 800, that's like more than two a day. What were the outlets for those performances and, and what are the performances now post pandemic? Like how many does Oregon Shakespeare festival do?
[00:06:17.937] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, so we operate on this machine kaleidoscope called a repertory. We're a repertory theater, meaning that there's multiple things happening at any given point, which our last name, festival, is also misleading in that sense as well. I think sometimes people think that it's like, oh, it's just a one-month festival or a kind of thing. But we have year-long programming in our three theaters, for example. We also have community productions that are outdoor performances. So it's really an interesting puzzle in a way, like a Rubik's Cube of like, what does it mean to do a giant fun show in our outdoor theater and then like a community performance in our green show space and then an intimate new play in one of our theaters and a Shakespeare in our other theater. And then like audiences come and they have a festival experience of having an entire itinerary. And our vision for the digital work is that when our audiences come, they also can go to our VR lab and experience something like Quills Fest so that it's a part of their kind of full smorgasbord. During the pandemic, we see across the theater industry that a lot of theaters were experimenting with virtual theater or kind of like asking questions about what is liveness, what is theatrical experience. I personally had come into this with a interesting background because I had worked with Culture Hub and La MaMa prior to this. And the mission of that nonprofit to celebrate our 10th anniversary was telepresence and collaborating across different locations, especially across borders and presenting work to audiences, a decentralized audience. So I'm like, that's the norm. Like, that's how you do things. You always want to collaborate across spaces. And then we really saw an explosion of that across the theater industry in the pandemic. Nataki, our artistic director's vision actually even before the pandemic was always, you know, as theater makers, we have an expertise in liveness. We have an expertise in a kind of like populist storytelling, like Shakespeare was very populist playwright. It was always for the masses, right? So it's like she was already interested in how do we bring that into beyond the walls of the theater, which can be very elitist and very siloed. So I think the pandemic really, and I came in kind of as part of Nataki's building of the shared leadership model once she has kind of established that infrastructure. So I'm kind of coming in as like, okay, let's like do it. Let's like develop this initiative as an ongoing sustained initiative. That's in dialogue with our in-person stuff in the longterm.
[00:08:53.595] Kent Bye: Okay. So you said that you've been at OSF for about five months or so, and the Coolsfest that just happened, was that something that was a part of your initiative that you took on or was that already in motion? And maybe you could just give a bit more context for how the Coolsfest came about.
[00:09:08.577] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, Quilts Fest was, as you mentioned, was presented in partnership with Artisan and Museum of Other Realities. It was already in motion before I joined OSF as conversations that Nataki had been having with Renee and Museum of Other Realities, as you said, has been a really interesting partner to a lot of film festivals, like really been pioneering what performance means across mediums. So when I came in, we were at the stage where we were confirming commissions, commissioned artists, curating the exhibition. So it was a very compact process. I kind of joined OSF and it kind of was like, okay, now we're going to make final decisions about all of the programming and then we're going to keep moving. So my time at OSF has been very production heavy so far. And now that we've launched Quills Fest, I'm like looking forward to being a little more vision and dreaming oriented.
[00:09:58.698] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And I think one of the things that was really striking to me was the fact that you did commission a number of different pieces for Quills Fest, which I haven't seen a lot of that. I mean, there's certainly if a doc lab and there's other organizations that are out there that are funding more on the immersive storytelling side, less so a theater specific commissions. And so this may be some of the first theater with XR commissions where you actually paired up a number of different veteran XR artists with some theater makers that may be some of their first XR experiences that they've been creating. And so with a lot of production experience within the realm of in real life theater or immersive theater coming in and starting to produce these pieces within XR with artists who have some background for how to work and manage all the technology. And so, yeah, maybe you could talk about that process of recruiting and collaborating with these existing established XR artists, but to find the different theater makers that would make a good fit for translating some of their work or their vision into an immersive space within these XR technologies.
[00:11:00.778] Scarlett Kim: Yeah. These accelerator commissions, that was our working title for this program because it was such a compact timeline of like, okay, two months, you have an idea. Let's go. Right. So our initial prompt to these theater artists was, Hey, is there an idea that you always wanted to explore, but felt it was just impossible in like a live in-person theater setting? why don't we take that idea and pair you up with these veteran, iconic XR creators and see what happens if we engage different layers of technology and realities. And these theater artists, Dede Aite, Roger Feather Kelly, Tai Defoe, for the three VR commissions are also truly seminal and celebrated artists in American theater for the formal adventurousness of their work, So it was already kind of like, oh, these are the theater artists who are interested in moving beyond what we think of as capital T theater. And then when we brought them together, it was a, I mean, I always say that's the favorite part of my practice as a producer is matchmaking and supporting bespoke processes. So each group had a really radically different process so that the final product was hybrid, but that was made possible by a hybrid process. I think a lot of the artists were exhilarated and challenged by coming to the table with how they usually work. Although in a way, the group that we assembled, they're all kind of like already artists as part of their practices are challenging that, but it's like, okay, now we really have to create a process because usually these worlds are siloed. And usually this kind of exploratory process tends to get cannibalized by like These are ways things are supposed to happen. Another interesting aspect was the global nature of it. I'm just today scheduling reflective debrief meetings and it's like, oh, five time zones. Like let's figure out what that means to schedule meetings. So I know that artists found that really interesting to kind of figure out this kind of a decentralized asynchronous workflow and how that affected the work. And, you know, I was really excited to hear a lot of feedback, especially from the XR artists of like, oh, yeah, we go to a lot of XR festivals, but it's really the same people. And there's a kind of focus on aesthetics over experience. And we're really focusing on these narratives or storytelling aspects of things that I think across the board, artists were excited about that as being a new approach into the XR world.
[00:13:35.165] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And there was a number of pieces that I got to see each of them. And I think it's probably worth unpacking each of them because they had a chance to listen to some of the different discussions as well. Cause during the Quills Fest, you had the artists and the creators being able to talk about their work. And there was actually a plenary discussion with Roxane Gay, a cultural critic and someone who's very immersed within the larger theater scene as well. Just commenting about the larger patterns of gatekeeping and diversity and inclusion and is a good discussion talking about some broader issues within the theater industry. But yeah, maybe we can start to dig into some of the specific experiences that we're showing there. And before maybe we do that, I just want to clarify in terms of they were made available within the Museum of Other Realities. And is there a date as to when they're going to be made available? Because I know that they were there to be seen. And then I think they may still actually be up.
[00:14:22.614] Scarlett Kim: They are still available. You can go to quillsfest.com and register to experience the piece. And there's instructions and step-by-step guidance on how you can go into Museum of Other Reality space and VR to experience the pieces until December 18th. If you don't have access to a headset, you can experience a kind of 2D representation of these pieces, which we believe are not equally but differently meaningful experiences. And we're exploring further distribution opportunities for these projects that actually invites people in the flesh to enter into a VR headset and immerse themselves fully. But for now, we encourage everyone to take advantage of this additional viewing opportunity until December 18th.
[00:15:05.587] Kent Bye: Yeah, because it is in the Museum of Other Realities, it does require PC VR. So for folks who don't have a PC and a Quest only, then unfortunately, then they'll have to only see the 2D version. I think it is worth, if you do have an opportunity to have the PC VR version, that's for me always preferable to actually see the piece as it was intended. Some of them are quite transportive in terms of taking you to another realm. And it's just nice to be fully embodied in that. And I think you lose a lot when you're just looking at it through a 2D portal. So that's my preference and bias. But I know when we think about accessibility, then that's certainly another concern in terms of how to give access to some of these pieces, even if you don't have that. So, but yeah, maybe let's start to dive into some of these. There was Onikwad by Ty Defoe. Maybe you can describe the creators and if there was a provocation or where it begins in terms of like a tale retold from the indigiqueer dreamscape.
[00:15:59.787] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, Anakwa was one of our commissions that germinated from a seed of an idea from a multi-hyphenate theater artist, Tai Dafoe, in collaboration with Dov Haishmer. Sorry, they're awesome names that I'm still having trouble pronouncing, and Alpha Rats as the developer. So this project was taking place across New York, Berlin, and Tokyo to create an Anishinaabe tale retold through an indigenous queer dreamscape. I think the provocation here, again, started with a prompt of like, what is a seed of an idea that you want to move beyond the traditional tools of live theater to explore? So when you immerse yourself into the piece, the first thing you realize is that your hands are bear claws that are shimmering in all kinds of iridescent veins and you're immediately cast in this alternate body that is beyond your own relationship to your physical body, which I guess is always the case in VR. But what's special, I think, and so powerful about this invitation is that it's so present. Like, I feel like my indigiqueer bear claws and seeing my hands, moving my hands through this lush sensory landscape as the piece plays on is like a very central part of the experience. And this process also just, I would say, kind of cast me in that body, right? So this idea of casting the viewer or the audience as a performer so that we are not passively viewing, but we're kind of like central to the narrative unfolding, I think was really present in like a very powerful way in this piece.
[00:17:37.233] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd say this is probably the piece that had the strongest sense of embodied experience of all the ones that I saw. But there's also a very distinct environmental changing where, you know, with the indigenous philosophy of trying to create experiences that allow you to connect to the land, but to show the land that's almost like this psychedelic morphing and It feels alive in a way that is beyond any nature scene you may be in, kind of establishing in this mundane landscape. But then as time goes on, you see this unfolding of time. So it's deep reflections on the nature of time itself, but also through the modulation of the world, starting to pervert your expectations of what the land is, but to create a more visceral connection to this virtual land that you're on. and I thought it was quite a provocative exploration and some nice psychedelic aesthetics as well. Stuff that, you know, when you go into different worlds, sometimes you get very used to seeing worlds that are very driven by 2D models, but to use shaders or the dynamic movement of the land to give you a sense of that this is more alive and it's different, it's more dynamic and to be immersed into the entire world that's pulsing and vibrating, it gives this real visceral sense of immersion that I thought it was really quite a provocative piece.
[00:18:50.425] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, I love that. I mean, the land is definitely a character here and an active character that, yeah, pulses and breathes around you. I just love, one of our visitors left a comment about this piece saying, if one has shapeshifter tendencies, this will lead you into them. So it definitely felt like a kind of call to action of being more, what about, yeah, what about our relationship to time and space is maybe too stilted or we think of it in a certain way, but let's let ourselves meld into a kind of more fluid relationship with our environment.
[00:19:24.407] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know Ilya and Cyril, the XR creators for Ordinary Jester and some of the previous experiences of queer scans they've done in terms of the motion capture. And I had actually a chance to see some of their talk that they did with Raja and Christoph and just how for them as XR artists, they usually go off and make their own piece, but this was like a four month almost like a game where they're able to collaborate with another artist in their vision and have the technical expertise to be able to execute on somebody else's vision. And so, yeah, just the ability to create this collaboration, but maybe you could set up a larger context for the ordinary gesture and what that piece was about.
[00:20:00.050] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, Ordinary Gesture by Raja Feather Kelly as the lead artist, writer, co-creator. Raja is an incredible multi-hyphenate, again, theater director, choreographer, performance artist, with Ilya and Cyril, who have been working together, I think, for a long time in the XR world. bringing really exciting projects like Queerskins. And Christoph, who is an Austrian sound designer, who I think is coming newly into this immersive world. But if you caught the Creators Forum conversation between these creators, it seemed like such an amazing, perfect match. And I know that Christoph is more excited about working more in this world beyond sound designing and composing for immersive projects, which I was so elated to hear that of folks with non-immersive backgrounds. through collaborations like this get introduced because a part of what we were talking about a lot is pipelines for artists and artists mobility of like the theater at least it's challenging for a theater artist to make a film for theater artists to make a VR piece there aren't like really existing especially for underrepresented voices in the theater, right? So it's a part of our kind of meta, it's not even meta, it's actually central goal was like, how do we create this generative space so that artists have an opportunity to work in this way that will lead to further collaborations. And it seems like they're already dreaming up their next project. Yeah, an ordinary gesture, yeah, is a truly unclassifiable in its medium, virtual reality, theatrical experience, the intersex theater, meditation and movement. And I know that kinesthetic empathy was a core key word here in terms of and Raja in the panel conversation quoted the do you see what I see? line from that song of performance is inherently something that puts someone else in other people's shoes, invite people to enter into different subjectivities that are outside of their own. So without giving away too much, there's a kind of linearity to this experience where you move from space to space and certain triggers and moments in time take place that you move into the next space and the next one. But within those spaces, there's a lot of agency and what you can trigger, how you interact with the components of the space. There's a lot of movement, like choreographic movement, like, you know, think about like, what do we think of as dance? You know, what is movement? What is human movement? What is choreography? Yeah, and it's a really epic yet intimate experience. So there's a lot of like very celestial environments that make you feel very like speck of dust in the universe of it all. And then also like very confrontational and intense intimate encounters.
[00:22:40.427] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought that this piece is actually one of my favorite pieces that I saw here, just because I think that the types of narrative innovation that were happening here, like you said, it transcends the genres of what we've seen before, but also just to see how a lot of deep narrative aspects of you know, with queer skins, there's a lot of object oriented triggers with ruffling through different objects and having different stories from someone's life. And so kind of using that as a conceit to be able to have different audio tracks come in and have different dance pieces and to go from room to room and have this sense of exploration and be in different places that are shifting and changing in different subtle ways. So yeah, I thought it was a, again, a provocative piece that actually quite experimental and really trying to push the medium forward in a way that I really appreciated that as well. Yeah. And maybe we'll move on to the guardian of the night, which I'm familiar with Joel Keiichi Benson, which he created a 360 video that was at the Venice film festival a number of years ago from Nigeria. No, is it Africa somewhere?
[00:23:38.312] Scarlett Kim: And I believe he's the first African winner of the Venice lion.
[00:23:42.513] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. So he, he created the, it was a short documentary that he had created there about the Boko Haram victims that were the stories from Chibok. That is a great piece, but this piece was, I guess, using the medium of 360 video to be able to actually capture this indigenous dance. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the guardian of the night and the backstory and how this came about with all the other various co-collaborators on this piece.
[00:24:08.922] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, Guardian of the Night. This was another VR commission led by Didi Aite, multi-hyphenate artist, also a Tony Award-nominated costume designer, just incredible long-term collaborator of OSF's as a costume designer. So it was really exciting to see her be lead mastermind behind this project. Collaboration with Joel and also Michael McQuicken, who is director of film and opera, theater, and new media. So yeah, this project was a really dynamic intersection of spirituality and performance using this in-depth material study of this material called raffia, as well as a bunch of other recycled materials, which kind of created this otherworldly guardian presence who appears to you in a forest in this 360 cinematic setting, and then moves and dances around you in a very kind of provocative, but also almost sensual and intimate to welcoming yet intense all of these ways. It always makes me move and dance with the being when I'm in the experience, which I think is so special. I always love when people's avatars are walking around in Museum of Other Realities, I try to kind of corral everyone to go into this cinematic experience together because I just think it's so special for us to all be in there together and you see other people's avatar bodies and then we, without prompting, because I'm always like, will this happen again this time? But we always end up kind of moving, swaying together. So it really feels like a kind of very literal act of sorcery, in a sense, like a very tangible act of energetic exchange through this form of 360 film, which is so breathtaking and awesome.
[00:25:50.898] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's sort of like a blend of what could be like a site specific performance, but also with the costume background from Dede is pretty epic character in this kind of mythical representation from this indigenous culture. And I was listening to some of the discussion and someone said that they had actually gone outside with their VR headset and watched it. And I, I was immediately like jealous that I didn't think too to try to do that as well. Of course, I'm on a tethered PC, so it's a little bit harder to go out there and watch it in the middle of the night outside. But again, an experience that is very connected to the nature, but also some of these deeper stories and myths. So these spiritual guardians from West African mythology. So Yeah, just kind of cool to see, again, a bit of this translation and using the 360 video medium to translate something that would maybe be a live performance, but to also add different elements of editing to give this spatial theatrical staging of it all, but to add different tension and release by where the character is moving and fading in and out from lightness and darkness between what you can see and what you can't see. And yeah, kind of just playing with that as a form of lighting and staging from a theatrical background as well.
[00:27:00.915] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, yeah. The precision in the rhythm, actually, I think is so interesting. It's an example of something that is so breathtakingly precise and intentional, but as a result, at least for me, kind of summons this like very epic, like full experience within me as someone who's experiencing it. And yeah.
[00:27:24.622] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the last commissioned piece is called O-Dog, An Angelo Take on Othello. And this was kind of like a Depket volumetric capture of a reading of a poem that was about the L.A. riots. Maybe you could extrapolate on that a little bit about what the larger context of this piece is and if it's a beginning of a larger piece or if it's coming from something existing or what this influence of An Angelo Take on Othello and what the deeper story of O-Dog is.
[00:27:50.336] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, Odog and Angelino take on Othello is a volumetric capture, depth get captured experience that started through kind of an engagement with Tariq Trotter, who's also known as Black Thought of the Roots, iconic, of course, culture maker and artists of our time. So Tariq had been, I know, interested in new media and new forms and his work in music and creating really transformative experiences. I always thought it was interesting because whenever I listened to his musical work, it's kind of like already immersive in its music. So like engaging with that artist for a project that is directly immersive, it felt just like a very natural progression in a way. We were thinking a lot about like, what does it mean to, you know, we were working with the source material that the playwright Alex Alfareo had worked on as a play, like an as an onstage play that is set in this cacophony of chaos during the first night of the LA uprising. So this material, which linguistically stems from Shakespeare's Othello, but then mixes it with freestyle and a very collage approach, syllabically, linguistically, syntactically, to begin with, that has been presented as an in-person live production, and then taking an excerpt of that as a beginning of a VR exploration. So it was a really interesting process also to think about all the metaphorical and material nature of volumetric as a medium. Like it's the points of the point cloud. I just feel like that's such a really interesting evocative metaphor for thinking about embodiment, thinking about agency and violence. And this monologue that Black Thought speaks is from the POV of Odog, who is a character caught in this moment in the whirlwind of the LA riots. And to use the point cloud system to tell that story was just very richly evocative.
[00:29:49.632] Kent Bye: Yeah, it felt like a piece where it almost felt like it was part of a much larger play that I was like, oh, it's almost like a sneak peek. I want to see the whole thing. Or is this a piece that is going to be continued to be developed and expanded?
[00:30:01.768] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, that is to hope that this is almost take one or scene one. And this is a great example of, is it a project that purely lives in the virtual VR space, or is this going to be a hybrid experience that has an in-person component and a VR component? You know, that's something that I'm really interested in. OSF is really interested in a VR experience, having a physical footprint, a physical experiential component alongside the VR component. So this, you know, in all the beginnings of conversations we had about next steps, I think has a lot of opportunities there.
[00:30:33.655] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's also one of those pieces that is set during the LA riots, but could just as well be today in any of the modern uprisings and Black Lives Matter movements. And it's within the specific cultural context of that moment in time, but also there's so many things that have continued to be relevant issues. So certainly, very relevant. And what's the Othello maybe you could expand on like the Shakespeare because it's an Angelo take on Othello and not sure if I caught what the Shakespeare reference was or if there's a Shakespearean component to the structure of what this piece is.
[00:31:06.565] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, the full play by playwright Alex uses Othello as a backdrop and a context, kind of like looking at the L.A. riots, looking at Othello. And it's like, how can the chaos, the stories of love and betrayal? There's a lot of eerie similarities. So I think that's one thing. And taking the lyricism of some of the specific moments in Othello that are iconic in the Shakespearean canon to inform the lyricism of this text. So it's a kind of really exciting project because you know, we're only actually interested in takes on Shakespeare that are really thinking about what it means to present Shakespeare in a contemporary sense. Right. So this is a project that really does that and interacts with immersive technology. So it's like a perfect storm.
[00:31:50.783] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Oh, as the Oregon Shakespeare festival, this is certainly the most Shakespearean piece of all the different selections here. So for any Shakespeare fans, definitely check this one out. Um, and I wanted to, to maybe chat a little bit about some of the different behind the scenes. There was five different behind the scenes. I've seen three of the different pieces that had been released before the Finding Pandora X, which premiered back in 2020. Keira Benzing has been doing a number of different theater pieces in VR chat. And so this continuation of going into. Let's see a little bit of that scene and the characters that are involved there. Points of Viewing by Alton Glass premiered at Tribeca this year. A really great speculative fiction world building to play with potential futures and to talk about these larger issues of surveillance and bias and algorithms in the context of science fiction. Yeah, it's just a really awesome piece that I highly enjoyed and appreciate that it's available for folks to check out if they missed it at Tribeca. Then Cosmos Within Us was a piece that I saw originally back at its premiere in Venice in 2019, which was really quite a provocative blend of live performance of a live reading and live orchestra. But one person is immersed within a VR piece and then a whole audience of people are watching the person watch that piece. And so it's sort of like a play within a play in some sense. But yeah, just playing with what's it mean to do live reaction to someone's reactions as you're performing, but also having smell docents, people with like little smell sticks coming up and sticking them up to your nose. You don't notice that they're there, but it's really hard to edit. smell without a smell docent who is sticking something up to your nose. So yeah, Cosmos Within Us I think is a really innovative piece pushing forward and trying to really test what the liveness of the live was. So yeah, just points of view actually to watch the piece in the other behind the scenes for those other two. And then you have the Leila and the Dazzle. These are two pieces that I was excited to see. I had heard about some of this Finnish opera experiments that were happening to commission different artists to come in and reimagine what the future of opera is going to be with immersive technologies and to get us a little bit of a sneak peek of some of the different set designs that were happening with that project with the Leila. And then the Dazzle, which was kind of a really, probably one of the more interesting environmental designs that were in this exhibition where it really felt like transported into another world that I really wanted to spend more time in and see more happening within it. Just kind of a low res exploration that had actually a lot of like, like you're walking around people's offices with lots of things hanging up on the walls. It just felt like a fully fleshed out world that was like, it feels like lived in. It feels like people just went home from work and they're leaving what they're talking about, but this is where you would be having a conversation about something. And it's kind of like, retro futuristic place. So maybe you could talk a little bit about from your perspective, the behind the scenes intentions to either take these already fully released projects that have a theatrical element, or other pieces that are in development that wanted to give kind of a sneak peek to as a part of this Quillsfest exhibition.
[00:34:51.940] Scarlett Kim: Absolutely. You gave such a great summary already. I'll share a little bit about our prompt and our curatorial vision for this portion of Quills Fest, the five behind-the-scenes exhibitions. We were focused on especially engaging pieces that, again, put the virtual world, and I don't even know what to call the non-virtual world anymore because I don't want to use the word real. the flesh world kind of in dialogue so that we had an emphasis of projects that also positioned audiences in more beyond the monolithic way, which is also interesting thinking about Shakespeare's original time. There were always tiers of audiences or concentric circles of banks of audiences. And if you think as a rich royalty person during that time that you're the audience that this play is meant for, actually Shakespeare is making fun of you, right? So it's like in a way that very Shakespearean idea of like audience playing multiple roles kind of translates, I think, in these behind-the-scenes projects. We really wanted to demystify what it means to create at this intersection of live performance and XR, to really create accessible entry points to focus on the artist process, to focus on some of the process artifacts rather than the fully fleshed-out final product. I always go back to this practice in the visual art world of studio visits. As a visual artist, I really rely on that kind of intimate exchange between myself as an artist, process-oriented artist, and visitors to kind of frame my work as a kind of exchange or a relational thing rather than like a product or a transaction or a final immutable static thing. So that kind of philosophy, I think, from my personal end, I think also informed a lot of the choices in terms of the types of works and also how we presented the works. Yeah, Finding Pandora X by Double Eye Studios and Kira. I had supported some of Love Seat and Finding Pandora a couple of years ago through Culture Hub when Kira was, again, experimenting in Love Seat, especially the in-person component and like audiences wearing headsets and also audiences watching them and audiences a little more removed and a little bit more in action, like all of the different audiences. So I just continue to be so compelled and excited by Kira's work and thinking about audience experience in a multiplicity kind of way. So it was a real treat to kind of, in the Quills Fest presentation, you get to go into the set and the environment of finding Pandora X and I actually think there's a show of Finding Pandora Exodus Sunday. I'm not sure what their feature plans on, but highly encourage folks to check it out. And at Quilz Fest, you can check out the kind of environment and roam around, which is also a really interesting kind of spatial experience. POV, as you mentioned, just such an iconic piece that I personally, I think, set the tone of a lot of experiments in this space. Alton was saying in our Trailblazers panel about Alton and Lauren Ruffin from Crux, who also part of this project was like, yeah, we want this piece to be the first VR piece that every high school student sees. You know, and it's really has like an education component to it, has a kind of awareness component to it. It's unfortunately a story that is very relevant and continues to be relevant about surveillance, police brutality. And it's a very powerful experience to kind of immerse yourself again, like through different perspectives. I feel like that's the big theme in our conversation today, being cast in different POVs. Museum of Other Realities had worked with GRX Immersive Labs with Alton for Tribeca. So this was, we were kind of like, oh, like, let's absolutely just continue to present this piece because there's already a build of it in Museum of Other Realities. Yeah, Cosmos within us, I think it's such a inspiring activation of art and research intersection. That's something that I think about a lot. When I was working in VR at UCLA, those conversations we were having about how do we research human experiences or medical themes through art, through immersion, through virtual and augmented reality. So it puts the audience member or some of the audience members in the position of a person experiencing Alzheimer's and there's also many other live components to it. Dazzle, as you mentioned, it's such a, I feel like I've spent hours and hours in there and I feel like I've seen 1% of this giant studio of these two groups, Gibson and Martelli and Poe Porter, who apparently it's actual recreation of their studios, which are opposite sides of London in real life. But then in this Quills Fest presentation, they've literally, I think, very like photo realistically almost recreated these studios and put them right next to each other. You know, I thought it was so delightful that the artist took the prompt of like create a behind the scenes exhibition of your process, very literally, in recreating their studio. There's a lot of Easter eggs and rabbit holes and infinite fun in this space. And Leila, as you mentioned, part of Finnish National Opera's Opera Beyond project, which explores the future of opera. is again another kind of like really interesting literal take on they created an exhibition that showcases different parts of the developmental process. There's a recreation of the set, which was an actual dome in real life that you would go in and you as an audience member, your gestures and your movement would affect the AI world, sensory lush world around you. So we kind of got a glimpse of that in Avatar form through this model recreation of the dome. And yeah, I'm just really excited about that initiative. Like opera, even more than theater in a way, is a world that disinvites and is very kind of stuck in the past in a way. So I'm excited about that project, Opera Beyond Project and what they do in the future. I believe they have another premiere in Hong Kong to show this piece in full. Yeah. So much exciting stuff.
[00:40:52.171] Kent Bye: Yeah. So lots of really cool things to see there, the behind the scenes, especially, but just to start to wrap up things here, I'm very curious to hear from you, what you think the ultimate potential of this intersection between theater performance embodiment and these immersive technologies and what they might be able to enable.
[00:41:11.800] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, um, you know, this returns back to the question of access and accessibility for us. OSF is a destination theater, meaning that people traditionally have come to us, traveled to us, which means a certain thing, which means something about who is able to like travel to Southern Oregon to experience our offerings in person. By doing work that's accessible beyond our physical world, we're able to in a way like invert or expand upon that direction of access and create a portal to OSF anywhere and everywhere in the world, whether it's in your living room, you know, your train park. So I think a lot about how can performance be something that's not separate from life, something that you exit life to enter into, but something that is embedded in the fabric of your life and something that's more closer to, you know, my first experience of theater is Korean shamanism, which is very utilitarian in that the purpose is medical, it heals you, but it is also a community gathering and it's like, you can eat during it, you know, it goes on for 10 hours, you like go in and out. So something that's more fluid, something that is embedded, and also something that more reflects our actual relationship with technology and media in our life, which is very simultaneous, very constant, very intimate. So how can theater evolve alongside that so that it's not a relic of the past, but something that is actually relevant to younger generations, actually relevant to like how we live our day-to-day lives. So those are some guiding questions that are really framing our exploration here at OSF. I also hope that across the theater industry, there's so much momentum, like I said, of like, let's really think beyond what we thought liveness was and the theatrical experience was. And there's a lot of also prejudice and fear about that. So I'm, I feel very lucky personally to be in an environment at a theater that's excited about like actively propelling that forward.
[00:43:08.432] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. As you mentioned the liveness, I noticed that there wasn't any live performances that were a part of this. You know, is that something that you're also looking forward to really explore the liveness of the live by creating either pieces or continuing to experiment with actual live performances within XR?
[00:43:26.615] Scarlett Kim: Yes, absolutely. It's very important I think that this work has a physical footprint, whether it's just in the audience engagement like we had a little kind of on campus hub in our black swan space which is our kind of little black box space we had a very limited appointment only engagement for kind of our local community and that already was like so transformative for people. And that's kind of a prototype for the type of audience engagement we want to do. We're imagining as early as, you know, in the next, between now and next Quilts Fest, like we're exploring if we can create that kind of pop-up experiences in major cities. But that's one thing, but also actively generating work that is native to a hybrid model. So it's not like you made a theater piece and now we're going to adopt it for XR or vice versa. But it's like, you arrive at this experience in the flesh and it has XR components and also live performance components. I think that is at the core of what we're interested in. And that is something that really activates what our expertise is, which is live storytelling.
[00:44:28.984] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive storyteller, XR or theater communities?
[00:44:37.898] Scarlett Kim: Yeah, I'm really excited to cross paths with all this dynamic intersection of industries and communities and spaces in the time to come. OSF is, we're rapidly expanding and Quills is just kind of one milestone in this exploration, but we have all kinds of other projects that you can stay tuned to and keep track of. And also, you know, as an immigrant, as someone who always was in but had a voyeuristic relationship to American theater, we're also thinking a lot about, you know, how we can really think about the global stage and the global community in this work. So I look forward to more paths crossing, whether it's through Quills or something else.
[00:45:19.909] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Scarlett, thank you so much for taking time to describe a little bit about the Quills Fest and all the different projects that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been doing to be able to engage with these immersive technologies. I'm personally really super excited to see this happening because I know that there's been the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK that's been doing quite a lot of experiments over the last number of years. And so it's just nice to see some US-based regional companies like yourself to be able to start to experiment with this and to collaborate with folks at the Artisan and the Museum of Other Realities and also the broader XR artists community and to actually fund commissions and create projects. I think that's such an important part of encouraging new artists to get into the field and dip their toes a little bit and experiment. Yeah, and also facilitate those collaborations that also help to move the medium forward as well. So yeah, just really excited to see where this continues to go. And thanks for taking the time to share not only your story, but also what the OSF is up to.
[00:46:15.400] Scarlett Kim: Awesome. Thank you so much, Kent.
[00:46:18.797] Kent Bye: So that was Scarlett Kim. She's an associate director and director of innovation and strategy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she oversees transmedia storytelling and immersive and interactive storytelling initiatives that interact with new media technologies. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I think it's just really cool to have a regional theater company that puts on 800 different shows a year, which was news to me. I just thought they were like a summer festival. So year round programming at three different stages in Ashland, Oregon up until the pandemic. Now that the pandemic is going, then they're trying to create this virtual fourth stage, which is by necessity from everything that's happening, but also in alignment with their larger goals of trying to make theater more accessible to more and more broader audiences and to maybe have the form factor in a way that is more in alignment with the generation that's coming up using these XR technologies. I think there's going to be more and more young folks that are going to be getting into XR tech, and probably a lot of folks will be seeing their first theater pieces within these virtual worlds than actually being in real life. But the idea is that they would bring audience members to Ashland, Oregon, and it would create this festival experience to be able to see a number of different theater shows. they're going to have like a VR lab to be able to actually show people a number of these different pieces. So it's sort of like an ongoing number of different installations that they're going to start to create. And a lot of the different pieces were not live performance based. There wasn't live components, which I think is, you know, when I said, is there a live component? The live component was that people coming in real life and watching these different pieces, but most of them had these pre-recorded aspects to it. So thinking about the liveness of the live, I think for me, I think about Different ways of using social VR and having performers the Ractors the immersive actors be able to perform in real time to somebody so yeah I think a lot of the asymmetry of that makes it so it's not always make sense But I think something like the under presents were they able to achieve that with folks are being able to play around into this area and there's these immersive theater actors that are popping in and out of these specific locations and Then She Fell is also, I think, a thing to point to in terms of how they were able to create a lot of really intimate one-on-one interactions with 15 different audience members. And I think there may have been a one-to-one or close to one-to-one ratio of as many actors and to be able to have a whole arc as an individual with lots of different actors, but at the same time have each virtual actor very busy and going through this clockwork organization of being able to have all these one-on-one interactions with different folks. Anyway, that's sort of more of a theory as we move forward in terms of how to scale up these live immersive shows. Right now, it doesn't make a lot of economic sense, and so a lot of these different shows are showing at these different festivals, and then there's a number of different shows that are out there, like Finding Pandora X with Kira Benzing has been a pioneer in trying to create the intersection between performance and these social VR spaces, starting with High Fidelity with Loveseat and then moving into VRChat with Finding Pandora X. So, yeah, there's a number of different behind-the-scenes pieces that were shown here, and I have actually seen those three pieces and I have published interviews with each of them. I'm hoping to get them out at some point here. Definitely go check out some of the different behind-the-scenes stuff with both the Finding Pandora X, The Cosmos Within Us, and then the POV by Alton Glass, which is an amazing speculative fiction piece. So definitely check that out. And the other two behind the scene pieces with Leila, just to give a little bit of a sneak peek of the finished opera, the Beyond Opera, investigating the future of opera and the intersection of opera with these immersive technologies. So, that was just interesting to see where they're at with that process and to get a little bit of a sense of a vibe of what that might start to feel like. And then there was the Dazzle, which was these two design companies that basically recreated their offices. really felt like it was lived in is because I think they actually replicated not only the architecture of the place, but also put up a lot of different design pictures of that world and the different places where you'd actually kind of expect it. So kind of a cool experience there. But the four different pieces were also very much worth checking out from their own different ways. They're pushing forward and creating these different fusions and experimenting with the form in different ways. And so there was the ordinary gesture, which is really looking at this environmental presence and also pushing forward ways of triggering different aspects of narrative and having motion capture clips come in and the Anaquad was an Ashinabi tale that was retold in the indigenous queer dreamscape and yeah Just modulating the space and playing with time and you're embodied as a bear So yeah, just a lot of different aspects of both embodiment but also playing with the environment in a way that makes it feel like it's unfolding in a process and it's very dynamic and with the intention of trying to allow you to create some sort of connection to the virtual land. Guardian of the Night was a 360 video, again, that was a performance that immerses you in a forest and you're seeing a spiritual guardian from the West African mythology. And yeah, just a well-produced 360 video in a way that gives you the sense of this live performance. Yeah, and then Oh dog is the final one that in jail take on Othello That's the one with black thought and it's kind of like a monologue and someone who's using a depth kit captured piece So it sounds like it's part of a larger play that be interesting to see stylistically how they would start to play around with creating this sense of space because it was basically a close-up of someone's face and I think as we think about these immersive technologies, what are the other ways to be able to start to set the scene or at least have these different characters that are interacting with each other? And if that was the aesthetic that they would choose for an entire piece, I think it worked for a short piece, but I think for a longer piece, you know, how do you give the sense of spatialization with these different characters and, or is it a series of different monologues? So that's an interesting piece that feels like a first iteration. In fact, all these different things feel like a four-month initial proof of concept prototype but that there's probably a lot of stuff that each of these projects will continue to get fleshed out and maybe have a full final releases for each of these so we'll see what happens with this if we'll continue to see them on different film festivals or if this will be a trend where you have these different exploratory process you know kind of experimentation to bringing these different Design disciplines together to be able to have a more open-ended opportunity to experiment with the form of storytelling and I think that's what I see is really valuable as a process of not only getting the theater makers who may not be familiar with the medium into the medium and start to create a but also the XR artists who have their established processes, break that up and try new processes working with other people with different design backgrounds. And so that was a big thing that I got from listening to Scarlett talk about focusing on that exploratory process and just in general, taking these iterative processes and not just think about them as this static concrete objects, but to think about the iteration and how it's continually unfolding and Eventually, it'll be a final product, but the path to get there is a lot of the focus of what Scarlett was really interested in as a producer, to really facilitate these different types of processes. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the future as we continue to have more and more different regional theater companies start to experiment with these immersive technologies, having more and more opportunities to see these live performances and experimentations. And, you know, the Museum of Other Realities has been collaborating with Artisan, which, you know, it started as Kaleidoscope VR and the Kaleidoscope started to do a lot more of the specific production. And then Artisan was spun off to be able to continue to find ways of funding artists. But because Artisan has a lot of these connections with these artists and to help connect up an organization like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a number of different XR artists to be able to collaborate. So if you're interested in doing something similar then certainly reach out to Artisan and there's lots of different artists that are connected through that network and different funding opportunities and also opportunities to be able to get commissions like this and create different projects. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a necessary part of the podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
