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#1044: Preview of Sundance New Frontier 2022 with Chief Curator Shari Frilot

January 20, 2022by kentbye

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The Sundance New Frontier 2022 selection of 15 immersive stories is available starting today until January 30th, and I had a chance to speak with chief curator Shari Frilot an overview of this year’s selection. Access to New Frontier Spaceship and Gallery is $50 with the Explorer Pass, which also provides access to the shorts and episodic content at the festival.

I’ve also had a chance to see the majority of these pieces through the press preview on Tuesday, and I leave some of my first impressions at the end of the podcast as well — as well as in a Twitter thread linked below. There’s some really strong pieces that I’ll exploring and unpacking in a series of in-depth podcast interviews with the lead directors and creators. I’ve listed links to projects below, as well as when their Artist Spotlight discussions with the creators will be happening.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/d1icj85yqthyoq.cloudfront.net

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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 today is Thursday, January 20th, 2022, and it's the opening of the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Sundance New Frontier, which is featuring 15 immersive storytelling projects that you can get access to with a Explorer Pass that is $50. They have a online gallery space, it's called The Spaceship. You can get access to it through the Quest 1 or PC VR, or even just on your PC in general. But there's 15 different projects, and I had a chance to sit down with the chief curator, Shari Frelow. She's also a programmer at the Sundance Film Festival, but started the Sundance New Frontier 16 years ago. And she gives a brief overview of each of the different projects that are featured there. And having had a chance to see the majority of these projects now, I think the order in which she shares them is kind of in the same order as I make sense in the memories that I've had in terms of different experiences that I had. And I'll be digging into featuring different artists and interviews with the creators. And so I'd highly recommend going and checking out the selection this year. And at the end, I'll be providing some of my own personal favorites that I had this year and be following up with a variety of different conversations with artists and creators. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Ways and VR podcast. So this interview with Shari happened on Tuesday, January 11th, 2022. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:29.706] Shari Frilot: I'm Shari Frillo, a senior programmer at Sundance and the chief curator of New Frontier. New Frontier was the show that launched the prototype for the Oculus Rift. Nani and Palmer Luckey actually created the prototype for New Frontier. And that just opened up a whole new realm of practice and direction for the program. And we've been supporting it ever since.

[00:01:58.443] Kent Bye: Great. So I know, I think I first started attending the New Frontier in 2016 and have been able to go the last number of years. Last year was virtual and this year is virtual again. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about what you have in store for this year's edition of the Sundance New Frontier.

[00:02:16.149] Shari Frilot: Yes. Well, we're back to the spaceship that we found the surprising success with last year. You know, we built that spaceship. just out of a concerted effort to be able to present a very bleeding edge, ambitious XR lineup. And we did it in an amazing way and so much so that we also built another venue to hold the parties and for the films and the festival. So we essentially achieved our mission to expand cinema culture by bringing filmmakers and film audiences together with the artists and the gallery floor of New Frontier. So we're going to bring that back. That's going to be fun. And we're also expanding the cinema house on the spaceship. Last year, the cinema house was VR only, and we showed films. This year, the entire spaceship will be accessible through VR headset and computer interchangeably. And we'll be presenting in cinema house artist spotlights. where the New Frontier artists will be talking about, giving presentations of their work, their approaches, and giving more detail. But the lineup itself is 15 works that really speak to this moment in time, just where we are with the environment, where we are with our humanity and our society, where we are with performance and how performance got shut down last year, the pivot of performing arts, embracing technology, some just really amazing things are coming out of it. The lineup speaks to that in different ways. But in terms of the VR lineup, there's just some really spectacular works that we, interestingly, the pandemic didn't really cut into the health of this industry. It actually expanded it in many ways. Certainly a lot of the artists that I'm talking to now are entangled with the ecosystem of the metaverse, which, you know, it's good for them. It's healthy for them. The works that we chose for the lineup are really speaking more to the humanity of where we're at right now. So for instance, On the Morning You Wake, To the End of the World, you know, it comes from the makers of Notes on Blindness. This is an Atlas 5 production. And it's about that time, that moment in Hawaii where everybody in Hawaii on the cell phone got a warning that there was a ballistic missile coming to the island and no one could figure out what was going on. So everybody thought they were going to die in a nuclear explosion. And this experience puts you into that situation, including a Hawaiian researcher who was at Princeton. a nuclear researcher in Princeton, and she was getting these texts and she didn't know what was happening, but she knew what was going to happen. The promise of it was just catastrophic. So you really, it was an amazing experience and just beautifully rendered. You know, on the other side of the spectrum is a piece called Flat Earth VR, made by Lucas Brizotto, who's just so brilliant and clever. This is a piece that really takes on the reputation of VR as an empathy machine. You put on VR and can really empathize and understand the new perspective, what another person is thinking. And so this piece is, well, what if that other person is thinking is completely delusional? like the earth is flat. So in this experience you are a flat earther who managed to hijack a NASA rocket and you launch into space and you are able to take a photo of the planet exactly how it is, flat as a pancake. And what's surprising about this experience, beyond the fun of it, the cleverness of it, is just how beautiful the Flat Earth looks. He has created this really amazing rendition of the Earth that It does test that, you know, how do we purpose a technology as powerful as virtual reality that really can give you that sense of empathy, that sense of, oh, I understand a little more the perspective of another person, even if it's, you know, even if it's delusional. So it's a very clever piece. One piece that's really breaking new ground, I think, is Gondwana. This is a piece that's coming from Australia. And this is an immersive environment, 3D immersive environment, that you can enter with your headset or you can enter it through your computer. And it is a simulation that's rooted in dynamic climate data of the Dane tree, which is the world's oldest tropical rainforest that's down in Australia. And the simulation is a 24-hour simulation. So it starts in one place, And then it ends 24 hours in another place. And where it ends, it depends on the climate data. It also depends on how many people enter the environment. And you can come in and out of this piece. You can stay in it. In fact, the first time I was in it, I stayed for a whole hour and I had no idea where the time went. Because being in the space, it's like being in a rainforest. It's beautiful. It's quiet. It's calming. It's right by the ocean. You know, you see the sunset and sunrise. It's just a sublime experience. But then you're also seeing, you know, some of the trees start to bleach and go away as we really get this fully immersive and physical connection to the changing environment and the loss of the environmental loss that's happening inside of this rainforest. So that one's pretty special. When you go into it, you can see each other as fireflies. So when you're in there and you see fireflies, it might be me. There's some, you know, some really great 360 works as well. Child of Empire is a young team that made a piece about the largest forced migration in history, which is the India-Pakistan partition. And it speaks to the migrations that are happening right now for various reasons, including climate. You know, what's really special about this piece, and you'll see it in the artist spotlight, is the intergenerational quality to the spirit that is behind this piece, the younger generation, working with the older generation, and that community that is passing on this information that's so relevant, so important to know about today, never seen this partition talked about in this way, and inhabited this way, because you're a child during the partition, that's your experience in Headset. So it's really important. It's also just really heartwarming. And the creative team is just wonderful. And you'll have a chance to meet them at the Artist Spotlight. We built the Artist Spotlights for the reason. As some other works that young artists, a lot of new names this year, which is really exciting. Faye from Rissio, who made They Dream in My Bones, is a young French artist working in textiles and also VR, has made this real dream of an experience of a kind of fantasy character, a scientist. who invented a science that is looking at the relationship between dreams and our bones. And the experience ends up being a meditation around the relationship and the fabric between dreams and thoughts and our physiology that really allows you to meditate on gender, on species, on symbiotic relationship to the microbiome in our bodies. I mean, it's just really fascinating piece. You know, another really great piece coming from Canada, is this is not a ceremony. This is another 360 work. It comes from Blackfoot country, really. And it's about the experience of a couple of Indigenous men and just what it's like, how hard it can be, you know, for Indigenous men in Blackfoot country, just the injustices. But it's, you know, it's not about this as entertainment. And with the film, you know, this experience is really aiming to tell the truth, asking you as someone in the headset, looking at this to bear witness and take responsibility for bearing witness and to encourage you to share these stories as opposed to keeping and experiencing this as a form of entertainment. And there's just this beautiful sense of redemption. You see these, you travel with these men and you see the redemption that they find within the community. It's really inspiring. And it's so beautiful that it's all in companionship with the buffalo spirit, Ini, that is incredibly rendered. And you'll see it in the gallery. The Ini is there, a golden buffalo, really, really gorgeous. I would say the state of global peace is another important VR project. This is the fruit of a collaboration between the UN and some of the lead artists of Be Another Lab, called Superbright. UN is looking at immersive environments as a way to hold conversations, to hold negotiations. And this piece is a kind of In addition to setting up these places, these virtual places where stakeholders can come together and have negotiations, this piece here is an audience-driven piece where it puts you in the shoes of a prime minister to make an announcement and to make an address. Well, it puts you in the shoes of a prime minister who's going to address the UN. in the very near future. And these students hack the session and ask for a dialogue. So it really puts you on the spot. It puts your values on the spot of how you would engage with these young people who, like young people, you know, young people today are very keenly aware that the decisions, the values that are driving the decisions of an older generation, the generation that has power, it's going to affect them in a way they're going to have to really lift the weight of some of the decisions that are not sustainably fashioned, sustainably concerned. So it puts you in the hot seat, this piece. But in a really great way, you learn a lot of stuff, too, about the state of affairs in the world.

[00:13:20.180] Kent Bye: Great. I think we went through a number of the different pieces. That's a good first cut. I guess another question I always like to ask in these festivals is the live performances and stuff that you have to get a ticket for. So maybe you could talk about some of the experiences that you may need to get a ticket for, because those are the ones that I always want to put at the top of my list because if I miss them, sometimes I'll miss it and won't get a chance to see it. So are there any things that are live performances, live dances or live theater things that are involved this year?

[00:13:48.752] Shari Frilot: Yes, there are. And because everything is now in the spaceship, access is much easier. All you need is an Explorer Pass, a $50 Explorer Pass to access everything that's on the spaceship. There's only one performance that has limited capacity, actually two performances that have limited capacity. One is called Sugar. because that one is in Mozilla Hubs, and it has a capacity of 20 people performance. So you can see that. And Surrogate also has, to a certain extent, some capacity because these are involved with that piece is a one-on-one performance of a womb walk. But the performances of Cosmogony, of 32 Sounds, and even Atua has a performative element. These don't really have a capacity because they all take place in the cinema house on the spaceship. which is able to hold 100 people per instance at infinitum. You just need your past to get to it. So I could talk to you about these works.

[00:14:51.116] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. So just to clarify, it sounds like there's a way to do instancing in the sense like alt space has the front row where they're able to do a live performance, but then broadcast that performance across different instances. So it sounds like there's going to be some live embodied performances that are happening or it could be prerecorded. That's another way to do it is to just prerecord it. But it sounds like though, that they're going to be doing live performance. That's then broadcast across multiple instances. Is that what I hear?

[00:15:14.088] Shari Frilot: Yes, that's fine. That's what's happening with Cosmogony and with 32 Sounds in the Cinema House. So 32 Sounds is a fully realized version of what Sam Green was working with last year, the 7 Sounds piece, which the experience last year was something that got tossed to your phone and you were in bed when you listened to it. This one here, it's a 95-minute presentation, live presentation with J.D. Sampson doing live music. And it's going to happen inside of the cinema house. So you're going to be able to be with other people experiencing this in your headset. And it's just such a, this is one of Sam's best films, I think. You know, it's a meditation about sound and the relationship between sound and our connection with people and with the world. And he's just so good at these meditations of what it means to be human. in such a soulful, accessible, colloquial way. This is, in fact, how we're going to be opening the festival this year. This is the opening night on the platform at four o'clock, where pretty much the entire creative community will be there, plus public that will be there.

[00:16:32.001] Kent Bye: Just to jump in there because last year, the seven sounds was a lot about spatialized audio. So you weren't able to move your head and hear spatialization, but it was kind of binaural recordings that they were exploring, giving these different soundscapes. And so I don't know if they're fully spatializing it to the point where you can move your head around and it's immersed within the environment, or if it's still binaural recording, which is that you could just listen to it and you get the spatial experience, but it's not dependent on how you're moving your head, I guess is the question.

[00:17:00.604] Shari Frilot: Yeah, it's binaural recording and it's very carefully targeting your head and it goes deeper into, I mean, you're, you're actually talking to the person who's, who made the recordings. And so you get to go in depth with him as he talks about binaural recording and nature of sound. And he, I think he works for JPL or NASA. He's a rocket scientist who generated some of these recordings for the film.

[00:17:28.107] Kent Bye: Nice. Okay. And the cosmogony you were just about to say.

[00:17:32.988] Shari Frilot: Cosmogony is from the Gilles, Cy Gilles dance company in Geneva, who were responsible for a VR eye and a dance trail that they are peace. These are dancers. So this is a live performance. This is live dance. The experience will be, you walk into the cinema house and you'll see the live dancers in Geneva on the screen. and they're warming up and they're getting ready and they have their mocap suits on. And then their mocap suits and the dance fades into the avatars and the environments, the avatars of the dancers and the environments that these avatars are in. And it just goes through this beautiful dance performance through different environments, different avatars, and the dance, the choreography is so beautiful, the music, it's otherworldly. And then afterwards, it'll bring you back into the studio and you'll have a chance to talk to the dancers and all the creative team in an extended Q&A afterwards. You know, what's so exciting about this one is people might've been hearing about avatars. I don't know if you know about the avatars.

[00:18:43.889] Kent Bye: Oh, A-B-B-A-T-R-S? No. What's going on with the avatars?

[00:18:48.558] Shari Frilot: So, well, this is ILMxLAB, you know, it's a very high level, a lot of money going into creating avatars of ABBA. So they cut a new album, right? And so the teams got together to make these avatars of them, you know, when they were young and svelte. And they did this so that they are able to give concerts, performing this new material as avatars. Essentially the same thing as what is happening with Cosmogony. except this dance studio has really come to understand the technology so well that they were able to sort of scoop this ability to put dancers inside of dynamic 3D environments and be able to project these environments in multiple places. We originally were going to do that, having one in the Egyptian, also in the spaceship, where the audiences will come together and have Q&A with the dancers. But this is a bleeding edge technology and a preview of what is to come in terms of performance, live performance.

[00:19:48.671] Kent Bye: Nice. And I see that there's at least one augmented reality piece. It sounds like Atua is that, I don't know if we've talked about that yet, but maybe you could describe that if that's like an AR piece that people can see anywhere within their local context.

[00:20:01.737] Shari Frilot: Yes, in fact, we have two AR pieces in the lineup. Seven Grams is a piece that the maker, Kareem Ben Khalifa, really wants to put out there for free. As many people download it, and it's a really remarkable piece about the rare minerals that are inside of your phone. So he's using the cell phone to teach you what's inside the cell phone, the rare minerals that are inside the cell phone, and the supply chain. Where do these minerals come from? Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo. And what is the human cost of getting these minerals out of the DRC and into your phone? And looking at the life of one young miner, you know, what does it mean to have a phone with these minerals and where it came from? You know, really kind of giving audiences the chance to take some responsibility for enjoying this context, but also understanding the human cost of getting these minerals. So that one will be available in the mural. QR code, you can download it and experience it whenever you'd like. The other AR piece is called Atua. And the dynamic around this one is different. Atua is a piece from New Zealand about Pacific Island gods, you know, to kind of like resurrecting these Pacific Island gods, the tradition. Atua, this experience is focusing on the god Te Kore, the god of chaos. And the context of this is there's a sacredness to this, there is a performance aspect to this. So instead of having a QR code where you can download the experience and watch it yourself, this is really more of in the context of a gathering. So what will happen is, there will be scheduled gatherings of people in the cinema house, where the artists will present and hold space and take a collective group of people through how to experience to Corey together. So you will get the QR code in these gatherings to preserve the sense of time and place and the connection of time and place to this God, to Korah.

[00:22:11.175] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And these all sound great. And I just making sure we're covering all of them. Did we talk about the. Diagnostia, which was like a, uh, director locks us inside of his teenage memories. Did you mention that? That's right.

[00:22:23.164] Shari Frilot: Yeah, no, we have not talked about that one, which is kind of an amazing piece. Like I believe we haven't talked about that one. Yeah. Diagnostia, this is like a biographical piece. This is his experience. of being interned into an internet addiction camp. So in the early 2000s in Beijing, kids who did a lot of gaming or just online a lot, parents actually had the license to take these kids and put them into internet addiction camps. So the culture there formulated, you know, excessive use or heavy use of internet, of gaming as a mental health condition, and it actually has expanded beyond Beijing. some of these classifications here in the States. So this experience not only brings you into the director's shoes as he experienced these camps, but also looking at some of the reports in Chinese television of how they managed to classify, you know, internet use as an addiction in a very critical way and just how harrowing it was for him. And it also questions the science too. He pulls out research and the artist spotlight for this one is really great too, because it goes into greater detail on what the research that the team and he uncovered in terms of the very tenuous and questionable relationship between the science of internet addiction and what, let's say the source, the Chinese source. It was just connecting the science in very questionable ways. Let's just put it that way. and kind of blows that open, you'll have to see the piece to really, it's kind of an astonishing, it's almost, you don't believe it's happening kind of experience in every way from being inside of this camp to how the science and how this condition can be the basis of control and military control, how that could even happen. Very relevant to what's going on today in terms of networked information and medical diagnoses.

[00:24:38.263] Kent Bye: And it sounds like as I'm just trying to keep track of all the things we've talked about, there's maybe surrogate and the inside world. I'm not sure if we've talked about either one of those, but surrogate with the birth, but also the inside world around like Las Vegas, AI, NFT things. So maybe you can talk about the surrogate and the inside world.

[00:24:54.437] Shari Frilot: The surrogate is a piece that is entirely accessible on your computer. It's Lauren Lee McCarthy, who's a tremendous performance artist and creative technologist, all in one. She's really a phenomenal artist. And she makes work that is very close to her body, close to her experience. And this one is born out of her desire to become a surrogate parent, to become part of the reproductive experience, to have that experience. In this piece, over the course of the time, elements will unfold. So you'll get to meet the intended parents, you'll get to hear conversations with sperm donors, conversations with your grandma, and Also, there is a performance involved that you can sign up for. It's a one-on-one performance where Lauren wears a prosthetic womb. And you'll see it in the gallery what those wombs look like. It has a machine inside of it, a motor inside of it. So she will be wearing this womb. And she's also developed an app for your phone that you can participate in a performance with her where she's walking around with the womb and you can control her body movements through the custom app. And the machine in the womb tells her where to turn and then she'll turn. And it's a whole piece is about questioning what kind of control should we be having over bodies that are in the birthing process and what control should we have around the lives that are going to be birthed. It's really fascinating work. The Inside World by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, innovators of the digital NFT, they made the first one. They're such great artists, and it's not surprising that this is the one of thousands of NFT proposals this year, that this was the one that ended up having this innovative approach. So the inside world is a story world. It's a story of these 14 managers who have taken over Las Vegas. They are AI managers of Las Vegas. So they run everything, all aspects, except one of them is human and it's causing problems. So this is the setting for this mystery, crowdsource mystery performance where it's launching at Sundance, where a collection of 8,000 in the end, digital art NFTs will be auctioned. When you have one of these NFTs, you can open up parts of the Discord app, the site where the crowdsourcing storytelling will happen. For the festival, there'll be a couple of free events going in there and being able to participate in the crowdsource and also a couple of giveaways of the NFTs, so that's really exciting. What's so interesting about this work is you know, instead of just treating these NFTs, this collection of NFTs as something to be traded and to gain value, monetary value, these NFTs allow you to enter a creative process, to allow you to enter a creative community that you can contribute to and craft the characters that your NFT embodies and through that creative process, increase the value of the NFTs that you might own. So it's just a very interesting, really interesting, innovative approach that uses creativity to expand the value of the community, of the NFTs, and also just of the creative process itself. The fact that you can work with other people to build something of value is really lovely on the landscape of NFTs.

[00:28:51.091] Kent Bye: Yeah. I know there's been a lot of critical discussions around NFTs in terms of the ecological impact and whatnot. And I'm curious if you happen to know if this particular project is using like a side chain or proof of stake, which would be a little bit more ecologically sustainable than a proof of work chain like Ethereum. So just curious if you, if you happen to know.

[00:29:10.256] Shari Frilot: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's proof of stake, but I couldn't right now. I can't, I can get back to you about.

[00:29:15.437] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. I don't know if that's a consideration that as you were looking at these, if you start to look at, cause there, there are a lot of like more ecologically sustainable ones, but also ones that could be actually damaging the environment in terms of the ecological impact.

[00:29:29.279] Shari Frilot: Yeah. It's a, no, it's a, it was a big thing for us. I just couldn't tell you which proof of stake they're using. Yeah. The proof of work ones are, are no bueno. In fact, you know, there was a lot of NFT proposals that came our way. And so much so that we realized that it wasn't just about these individual projects, that these killer apps that are happening on the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, digital NFTs, DAOs, you know, these are indications of the fact that our internet is actually changing. We're moving from a Web 2.0 that is very centralized in structure to a Web 3.0 that is decentralized and collectively held. And it is such an important moment where we're at right now with this, because it can affect everything. It can change everything in terms of our relationship to the internet, to each other, our ability to invest new values in this emerging Web 3.0. So we developed a kind of thread, a kind of track in New Frontier this year around this Web 3.0. We've got links of articles and sites of activity that's really inspiring us right now. We're going to be holding an NFT meetup on Spaceship. that is provoked by really great conversation between Jesse Damiani and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, very steeped in how the NFT is affecting arts and artists, and to be able to speak to the wider fact that we're moving into another era of internet that will look different. I should say that there are also a couple of companies that are launching out of the festival that are really exciting. Rare, which is a way to access films through the blockchain. And Rally is another company that's kind of community oriented around NFT. So it's, all of this is a part of the blockchain track of Web 3.0 track at New Frontier.

[00:31:43.656] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting just because especially this past year in terms of how much big growth we've seen in this sort of blockchain NFT realm and your ethos of trying to listen to what the artists are doing. Clearly there are a lot of artists, even within the XR industry that are experimenting in different ways. And so I've started to see that come into my realm and often I will go to the festivals and see what the curators are doing and talk to those artists. And so it's interesting to see that this may be one of the first NFT type of projects that I've seen curated in a festival in this context. I know that there's been other associations, like there was an NFT gallery at 5R's but as a specific piece within its own right. So I've also been involved in some of the critical discourse. So a lot of the talk about centralization versus decentralization to really understand what was the drivers of those centralization were actually perhaps more economically driven. And even with the valuation of OpenSea, even though there's a lot of claims around the decentralization, there's still these impulses that are economically being driven back towards that centralization. So there's been a bit of a revisionist history that is also happening in terms of this dialectic that's happening. And so it's very beneficial for the Web3 to cast it into the underdog decentralized when actually there's a lot of core of it that's still centralized. So I'm taking it as being open to what the artists are doing, but also trying to listen to the larger discourse that's happening around these. And the Peer-to-Peer Foundation is one entity that I found that is, you know, the hollow chain things that are even beyond proof of work and proof of stake. So I do think that it is something that's interesting enough for me that to get away from monopoly control, we do need to have new economic models of value exchange, and that the blockchain or something similar to that is likely going to be something that we live into the future. It's just like every single transaction ever happens being documented. That's not really ever mirrored within nature. And so there's ways in that there's just going to be inherently and sustainable to do that. So there's other chains like hollow chain. That's a little bit more based on buying mimicry principles. So these are things that I look at in terms of like making sure that there isn't been a lot of hype, but. not jumping on too many trains that are going to be taking us down a very dark direction that are making claims around these things that are actually kind of just reinforcing another crypto oligarchy that is going to not be in right relationship to the earth, which is trying to find the people that are living in those right relationships and an integrity with nature. Yeah. So anyway, those are just some thoughts as I, as I hear all that, but.

[00:34:10.517] Shari Frilot: Yeah, no, that's all so real. And I really relate to the way that you're drawn. to engage the field because it's, yeah, maybe there are artists and making millions of dollars. What's important more is that this is a window of opportunity where our values actually can be actionable with huge effects. And this is the time where we have to ask ourselves, how can this technology help our community? How can this technology help our humanity? You know, how have our values been gilded in a consumerist way? And, you know, the values are always going to shape the technology. and the technology will fabricate the society in different ways. And with this shift over to a decentralized structure, there's an opportunity to bring new values to this field and create something that's more of a responsible networked society, as opposed to something that we would just simply supply data cows and gadgets inside of centralized society. It's all about values.

[00:35:24.575] Kent Bye: So January 20th is the start of the Sunday and some festival. It looks like in the years past, like last year you had the virtual component and then sometimes you'd be able to at least get a link and then you'd have to maybe go onto a PC VR to download it and experience some of these things because some of these experiences you can't see on like say an Oculus quest. I'm wondering, you know, there are going to be some performances, which sound like if you do have access to the quest, you should be able to presumably still experience some of those things. But I'm wondering if there's kind of a similar thing where some of the experiences you need to have a PC VR and other experiences you might be able to experience within the quest.

[00:36:01.305] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, the entire spaceship is accessible, globally accessible. on computer and on Quest. It's optimized for Quest 2, but they're interchangeable. So all of the performances, you know, you can attend on your computer or you can attend on your Quest. In terms of the VR lineup, I would say that On the Morning is a Quest 2 exclusive. The State of Global Peace, Child of Empire, A Dream in My Bones, This is Not a Ceremony are all accessible with Quest. The Tethered projects, are Flat Earth VR, Diagnosia, and Gondwana. We are working with VR installers this year, so the process through which to experience some of these works are so much easier this year. Yeah, so we're excited about that. But that's the breakdown in terms of accessibility and VR tech.

[00:36:56.685] Kent Bye: Okay. And I know in years past, you usually sit down and you write a little bit of a statement. I know you've talked in the past about the biodigital continuum. So I'm just wondering if you have like a theme or a phrase like that for this year of what you've really been thinking about.

[00:37:10.825] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, I live in LA. And I read the paper and I've been through this pandemic and, you know, just alarmist environmental situation along with everybody else. And it's very clear to me that we are entering a new phase of life on earth. And so it's, it's what I've been talking about all along here. This is the time. And, you know, last year gave us the opportunity to really question things that we were being asked to believe as immovable, you know, grand narratives, too big to fail. The oil companies will never fail. You know, the internet is just too big and, you know, racism will never be washed out of American society. All of these things, huge narratives that locked us into certain way of understanding ourselves and our relationship to society had changed last year. We're all challenged in critical ways. And it's happening at a time when the very technology that networks us is changing. So I'm really just pointing to that convergence of a shift in main narratives that bind our vision with a shift in technology. that really allows us to be networked in a much more collective, more responsible way. And we'll be calling upon this convergence as an opportunity to address some of the major problems we have, particularly with the environment, but also with, you know, forced migration, you know, nuclear, this nuclear situation. It's just such an incredible convergence of opportunity of network technology, narratives, dominant narratives breaking down, and what the artists are bringing to the table to open up new ways of thinking about how to move forward, but new ways of thinking that actually might address and stand up to some of these overwhelming challenges of our time, like climate change. like racism, like so many people out of work. So like, you know, these huge narratives, these huge issues, that this big sea change could really make the difference depending what values we

[00:39:38.296] Kent Bye: Yeah, it brings to mind the futures researcher, Monica Bilaskita, who has the protopias futures framework. And she talks about how, for her perspective, it's not the technologists that shape the future. It's the science fiction world builders, world creators, world growers, who are telling the story of a potential future that helps to inspire people into a future that we want to live into. And as we're talking about all this, I'm just thinking of it's not so much a pro-topic, but more of a dystopic cautionary tale with don't look up with being able to watch this comment that's coming towards earth and all the ways in which that the current media and political ecosystem is able to respond to that and how the film production company of Adam McKay is called Hyper-Object Productions, which is this philosophical concept from Timothy Morton about how these issues are so complex that it spans both space and time across many different domains of the human experience of the political, economic and media spheres, the science spheres, and all those things added together creates these really complicated things that are all kind of mashed together, that it's sometimes through the lens of a story that we're able to get access to what is happening. And then I guess the big challenge is whether or not you could take those conceits of that future dreaming or world building, world growing, and then translate that into an immersive experience that puts those ideas into some sort of embodied action that then allows you to move more firmly into that future that doesn't yet exist yet. So I don't know if that's a theme that you see in terms of that describing the nature of the world in a descriptive way, but maybe more of a proscriptive building up our own capacities to be able to cope by putting us through these sort of training simulations or these narratives or these worlds that allow us to either understand the world, but also perhaps put into social dynamics that allow us to move into a world that we need to create.

[00:41:27.241] Shari Frilot: I mean, so much of this speaks to why we decided to put New Frontier on a satellite that orbits the Earth alongside the International Space Station. You know, we wanted to bring these visions, platform these visions of our artists, you know, these works in such a way that engages the values of space exploration and exploitation, that engages life on Earth from a personal view. you know, that engages community in an existential situation, you know, in space, in orbit. It's the reason why we dressed the spaceship with plants and trees to really, you know, especially if you're in there in VR, you know, to really absorb this organic relationship that we have, that we share with the plants, the trees, each other, and how rich it can be when people are there and just how tenuous it is. You know, I don't know if you were there last year for the rapture and the very last day of the spaceship where everybody was packing on to that last day of the spaceship, really wondering what was going to happen to the spaceship because we had been living our life up there for six days and it had just become this really special thing. It's a beautiful environment. But when the time came to close down the spaceship, what happened was that you just ended up being alone. And you saw all the chat bubbles of all the people that were there, but it was just you that was in the spaceship. And it really, really, it was such a profound feeling to understand how, that the beauty of life is the beauty of community. It's a beautiful spaceship, but it was magical when other people were there talking and hanging out with folks. That's where the magic of spaceship life was really coming from. And yeah, perspective is everything.

[00:43:26.814] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I wanted to also give a shout out to Joe hunting, who has a documentary film and the selection for world documentary for we met in virtual reality, which is completely shot within VR chat. And I think starts to show what's happening when the, the culture and almost like an anthropological documentation of what's happening with full body tracking and embodiment within VR chat. And so, yeah, I don't know if you have any other comments about that piece.

[00:43:52.349] Shari Frilot: It's so interesting. You know, that is, that is a documentary that is in our, world documentary competition lineup. And when I watched it, I thought, wow, somebody finally captured just, it's so hard to talk to my colleagues about how magical my life was during COVID, you know, during the lockdown, because I spent so much of it in VR chat and finding new ways and conversations and just a new way of being human. And that quality that exists, we were just talking about in spaceship life, you know, that quality, Joe Hunting really captures it. And we met in virtual reality. It's just a, and it captured the hearts and minds of the entire program team, this documentary. You know, it really follows, it's really kind of an important document of, you know, what life got found, what life got discovered in lockdown, in VRChat, and the power of these social, immersive social environments, what can happen there that doesn't happen in real life. And also, you know, all the way down to just different physics, you know, how you play pool in VRChat, really different than how you play pool here on earth, but there is a charm to it and it really captures that charm. It captures what happened, that process that you go into a virtual immersive environment, not understanding the physics, not understanding, getting reoriented physically inside of these environments and then accepting the new rules and then liberating yourself from the old rules. And then there's new conversations happen inside and these new experiences happen. And because it's happening in an immersive way, there are real memories that happen, and there are real bonds that you form in an environment that is away from your home, that is away from Earth entirely, and it's very much inside of your heart and your mind. Yeah, that documentary really captures that situation, just some impossible car rides, and it just really brings a lot of heart and soul to what might sound like the magic of technology. this experience really, that film really, really gets you to the heart of the experience, the emotional part of being inside of these worlds.

[00:46:11.525] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I'm excited for people from outside of the whole VR and VR chat ecosystem to start to see what's been happening there. It's really quite exciting. Yeah. And just finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive stories might be and what they might be able to enable?

[00:46:28.095] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, I like to just kind of stick with the present, the now. Because you don't get to the future until you make some decisions in the present moment, until you take action in the present moment. And, uh, you know, we have this opportunity right now to create something tomorrow in a brand new way. You know, we have new glasses on, you see the world in a different way. After COVID, after just seeing the economy fail, after seeing the environment fail, you know, we really just are seeing things differently. And it really will depend on how we make decisions and take action right now will determine what happens tomorrow. These immersive worlds are tools to allow us to understand what is important between us, what is important to ourselves, what's important between people, what is important about acceptance and what is important to understand the connection between our actions and the environment that we share. You know, these immersive environments give us the tools to understand that in a very visceral way. So they, they're coming around right at the right time. We just need to purpose them for what we need as a species on the planet and not for the money that we can reap from them.

[00:47:53.713] Kent Bye: Totally. Yeah. And is, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:48:00.752] Shari Frilot: Well, I would like our tribe to make time to come to the spaceship, make time for spaceship life. You know, like you find yourselves in a lot of Zoom holes right now on Zoom talking to people. I challenge you to remember the ones that were important from last week. And I can guarantee that if you make time to join us in spaceship life during the festival, you will not forget it. You will meet people that are going to help you. You're going to have amazing conversations. You're going to meet artists. You're going to see movies and be able to expand your vision. And you're going to inhabit this immersive moment, this community, this space, this spaceship in a way that you will never forget. And you're not going to remember the Zoom halls that you needed to get to. So make time.

[00:48:57.867] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, yeah, the Sundance New Frontier runs from January 20th to 30th, and I guess people can go and register for $50 to be able to get an access pass. It's in WebXR, so if you have an Oculus Quest 2, you can jump into your Oculus browser and find the page and get connected up and be able to start to interact with people. And it's pretty amazing what you're able to do with the open web technology stack and, you know, the type of social experiences that Active Theory has been able to put together is really quite amazing. And yeah, 15 different pieces. I'm glad we were able to kind of get a little bit of an overview today and people can then dive in into the different experiences and then listen to the artists talk throughout the week. So it sounds like a lot of fun that starts on Thursday, January 20th. So Shari, thanks so much for joining me today to be able to get a little bit of a sneak peek for the 16th edition of the Sundance New Frontier.

[00:49:40.519] Shari Frilot: Thanks Kent. As always, really appreciating your interest and your enthusiasm for this field. You really, you're a big plus.

[00:49:51.277] Kent Bye: Thank you. Thanks for your support. So that was Shari Frillo. She's the chief curator of the Sundance New Frontier and a programmer at the Sundance Film Festival. So I have a number of different takeaways about this conversation is that, first of all, well, there's some really strong pieces in this year's selection. And I'm just going to share some of my own personal favorites, including Diagnosia. That was the piece that showed the internet addiction camps in China. Just a really amazing environmental storytelling piece. On the morning you wake to the end of the world, Just an amazing piece. This is really impactful and powerful. Highly, highly recommend checking that one out. I'm looking forward to talking to the team. Gondwala VR, I had a really interesting experiences within that. It's a 24 hour durational piece that changes over time. And so it's a real meditation on time. and had a chance to unpack with the creators already. Just amazing complexity. They've been able to simulate this entire rainforest and how it changes due to the impacts of climate change. It takes place over a course of 100 years, over that 24-hour durational take. Sugar, a live virtual dance performance. It's a really powerful use of open web technologies, Mozilla Hubs, and to be able to talk about the legacy of slavery that's happening throughout the Caribbean and dance performances and explorations there. Child and Empire, I thought, was really impactful in terms of telling this story of the largest forced migration ever in this partition between Pakistan and India. Just a really effective use of the medium of virtual reality to start to tell these complicated stories. This Is Not a Ceremony, I think, was super powerful in terms of the use of the 360 video medium to be able to create these otherworldly, etheric spaces that tap into indigenous culture and these concepts of ancestors and different concepts of time and to bear witness to different traumas that are happening within the community. Just a really effective piece. I had a chance to talk to the creators for that one already. I'm looking forward to that podcast. The State of Global Peace is another piece that I really enjoyed in terms of you feeling like you're giving a lecture to the United Nations and then having a turn that allows you to be more in direct dialogue with the youth and some of the concerns. And some really nice data visualizations that are happening in that piece, as well. Really appreciated that. Flat Earth VR is kind of a light-hearted comedy by Lucas Rizzotto that looks what it would look like if it's the dream of the flat Earth going up into a spaceship and to be able to document the flat Earth. Just a really light-hearted piece. They Dream in My Bones is a really great piece that allows you to take this otherworldly journey into this dream-like landscape. Really interesting, provocative idea of this concept of a doctor who's able to look into the history of your dreams through investigating your bones. So yeah, just a otherworldly type of experience that was really well done. Surrogate was a really interesting web documentary with a live performance element as well and just a really super intimate performance and just using the medium of web interactive technologies to be able to explore different aspects of this process of what's it mean to living and dying and birth and Also, just the type of information of a way of exploring the character of Lauren Lee McCarthy through the process of going through all these different applications. So anyway, that's just a really interesting way to use the medium of a web documentary to explore a topic that I've never really quite seen explored in quite that way. I think it just worked really well. Cosmogony is a very interesting way of doing this live performance. It's not spatial and embodied. It's a live stream that you're in a virtual theater watching it, but starting to push the edges in terms of composition and giving a sense of space with a small number of actors but replicating them throughout the piece in different ways and playing with scales and different scales and zooming in and out and yeah kind of an interesting meditation and pushing forward different aspects of dance as well as you have this virtual representation of these bodies that are kind of flying through space but they're also doing these dance performances that have these particle effects and using extensions of embodiment to be able to change how the dancers are moving throughout these spaces. Also a provocative piece. And there's the Inside World that's launching today. They're doing a number of NFTs. Shari said that they were doing a proof-of-stake, as it looks like they're just doing stuff on the Ethereum blockchain, which is proof-of-work. But it'll be interesting to see how that continues to unfold. They have a number of different events that are happening on Discord that are free and open to the public. So I'll be very curious to see how they start to build out this world by using the different NFTs and telling different aspects of the story. So there's also a number of different artists talk that you can get access to. I'll probably end up posting a list of the times here and the links to each of those different talks just to have another opportunity to be able to hear some of these creators talk about their pieces. And there's a couple of other pieces that I still need to check out. The seven grams is a iOS piece that's available for download. You can check that out. And there's three other performances Attua that you need to go into the, the cinema space and get a QR code and then download the app and then be able to watch the performance with your app next to you. 32 sounds is opening later today. It's at 3 PM Pacific on January 20th with Sam green. And then the inside world is launching the NFT and they have a number of different talks that are coming on later. So that's sort of an overview of the different pieces. Highly recommend checking it out. And like I said, I'll be digging into some of the interviews here. So yeah, go check out the pieces and stay tuned. 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 national support podcast. And so 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 Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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#1044: Preview of Sundance New Frontier 2022 with Chief Curator Shari Frilot