I interviewed director Stanislaw Liguzinski about ROAMance that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive experiences from IFA Doc Lab 2024, today's episode is with a piece called Roamance, R-O-A-M-ance. So you're roaming around, and it's basically a experience for two people as they're walking through these different vignettes. And it's kind of like you're going on a date within virtual reality. And so it's kind of exploring what does it mean to have these different types of encounters and how can you twist our expectations for these different types of interactions and kind of using the virtual world to kind of mediate these different interactions between two people. So as a part of the immersive nonfiction competition at if a doc lab and Yeah, it's really quite interesting to see these different social dynamics, experimentations in the context of a broader documentary film festival that is exploring these different aspects of the creative treatment of actuality. And I should note that my voice continued to give out from this point on through a lot of different interviews that I was having at InfoDocLab. So you'll hear my voice getting more and more scratchy and crackly. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Stanislaw happened on Tuesday, November 19th, 2024 at InfoDocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:37.515] Stanislaw Liguzinski: My name is Stanisław Liguziński. I'm a co-director of Romance. We did it together with my friend Ibrahim Kurajsi. And I've been a VR curator for a number of years. Since 2017 I've been running an XR section of Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam and collaborating with a couple of other festivals including Kaboom Animation Festival, Animator in Poland and Cinema Asia and other institutions and venues. So I've been a little bit in the circuit and the realm but this is my directorial debut. Great.
[00:02:07.075] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:11.157] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah. So I'm originally a film studies graduate. So I started in academia and I started working with film theoretically. I also have a background in critical theory and cultural studies. But at some point I started thinking how we could use medium to reflect on the medium itself. So I went into the area of video essays. And this is around the time where I also started my PhD in film studies. And at some point they were still requesting me to write about it. And that didn't feel quite okay because I was actually advocating for using editing for film analysis and I wasn't doing it myself. So then I started looking around and I found a master course here in Amsterdam, which was a master course in film school, but it was a practice-based master. So I applied and I started working with video essay, but I graduated with a VR piece. And that was an interesting journey and ITFA was actually also involved because I started coming to ITFA at the time and seeing all kinds of different works and including also some first volumetric capture things with DepthKit. And I came across that technology and it felt to me because I was interested in gestures of making So I was watching different editors at the time and editing footage myself, but I wanted to see what critical gestures are embedded in those practices. Like when you make a cut, what informs that cut? And I wanted to look at editors, so I needed a kind of a meta medium to observe the process of editing. And I thought like, hey, maybe volumetric capture is actually a way to do that. And I bought a bunch of Kinects and I started shooting editing sessions of like seven, eight hours. Which was absolutely crazy project at the time which I showed to Kaspar and Kaspar really loved it But he says this is bonkers like this has no This has no future like it leads, but this was basically my first attempt at making something myself And yeah, this is how the journey began
[00:04:00.317] Kent Bye: Can you elaborate if there's film theorists that you feel like also address some of what's happening in VR as a medium? Because there's certainly a part of a cinematic tradition that's a part of VR, but there's also video game tradition, there's game design, and also human-computer interaction, and web design, and social design, and architecture, and theater. But in terms of film, that's a very specific, especially when it comes to narrative and storytelling, but I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts since you're doing a deep dive on the theoretical realm, how you start to either apply some of what has been done or if you have to look to other theorists to make sense of what's happening in the context of VR.
[00:04:38.214] Stanislaw Liguzinski: It's funny because I've had a lot of theory in my mind when I first started conceiving this idea of romance, but actually none of them were film theorists. I was thinking about Erdvar Hall and Hidden Dimension and like the whole idea of proximity and proxemics. I was thinking a lot about this idea of emancipated spectator of Jacques Ranciere and what does it mean to be emancipated and active in the space. So this was more of my frame of reference than the actual film studies. What I work with academically is this notion of essayistic, but not as a genre, but as a certain renewed attempt, which is basically the etymological understanding of the essay itself. And a certain approach to the medium where you actually do the thinking itself in the practice with engaging with the medium. So basically use the medium to unravel the thought differently than you would unravel it conceptually. And that's something that was to a degree a part of the creation process of Romance. This is something I've been also running workshops for artists who transition to VR and we always try to use VR native tools. to start thinking about ideas and we use things like Rezonite for example. And in my case I've been actually using a lot of VRChat when thinking about romance and also it was about the time because the idea originated during pandemic. So we've been doing all a lot of those online VR festivals and you know bumping into each other in a museum of other realities and VRChat and all that. But actually for the first prototype when we were testing how the audience would react to each other We basically built like a little bit of a mock-up in a VR chat, which was moderated by us So like it was weird ghostly presence but that idea of like developing from within and using the medium to think about like certain creative practices that that is I guess like close to my philosophy of making things
[00:06:35.189] Kent Bye: And I know we've had previous conversations, you know, not recorded, but just at these different festivals where you were talking a little bit around the Imagine Festival that you're curating. And I find that the process of watching a lot of content and helping to create selections that is an education within itself in terms of keeping up with what people are doing and selecting like the different projects that you're going to be featuring. So I'm wondering if you could maybe elaborate on the Imagine Festival and how that played a part of your understanding of what the medium was and what it could be.
[00:07:02.586] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah. I mean, this is an absolute privilege, of course, like to be in a position of curator and to be able to see all that works. And we've been talking about that a lot lately, and especially with now dealing with students. I also teach at the Netherlands Film Academy, and sometimes you try to present an idea of a piece that you've seen. And of course, like you can talk about it, but those pieces are nowhere to be found often. So, yeah, it's a very privileged position to be able to watch all those things. And Imagine is a fantastic film festival, so we deal with fantastic genres. But in the realm of VR, like actually you could bend almost anything towards fantastic. Of course, there are some pieces that would be hard to do that, but 90% of things qualify in one way or the other. So, I mean, what I look at at Imagine usually, like I like to present diversity, like a wide range of works that address medium in many different ways. So, for example, like this year I had this theme of interfaces of reality and I really wanted to look at how different Pieces engage with the world in many different forms and the selection was ranging from the tent of Rory Mitchell through Gundam to Tulpa Monster. So it was kind of all across the board and using different technologies, AI. We've been presenting Autosplanet as well in the mixed reality version. So yeah, I think I'm fascinated by all of it and all of those different approaches. I think for me myself, I'm a little less interested in the narrative. I love good narrative VRs, don't get me wrong, but from a creative perspective, I'm less interested in shaping those well-crafted stories and more about actual embodiment and specialization. And yeah.
[00:08:40.970] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, your directorial debut that you're co-directing here and showing here at Iffidoc Lab is called Romance, R-O-A-M, Ants, Romance. So if you say it quickly, it just sounds like romance, but it's Romance. So maybe you could just give a bit more context for where Romance began.
[00:08:59.304] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah, I'm a sucker for bad puns. So actually it is a pun on roaming and romancing. And yeah, as I said already, like it originated in pandemic. So it was a time where actually in Amsterdam we had this regulation where you could only meet with one other person, like you could meet in groups. So basically it was like this kind of reinvention of walking and taking walks, strolls together. So all the meetings were meeting one on one and they were all outside. So basically it was just like meeting people and constantly walking. And that also coincided, I was thinking a lot at the time of what dating apps do to us lately and how this logic of swiping works. Like, you know, in a split of a second, you see an image and you swipe left or right, and you might basically be removing possibly important encounter from your life within a split of a second, basically. and kind of like all those things were coinciding in my head and as i said this was also the time where we were doing all those online vr festivals and i've been bumping to a lot of people that either i've never met or i've met once in a festival years ago and all of a sudden rekindling those friendships or you know relationships in that virtual realm And it was quite powerful, especially that we were we all were, you know, isolated at homes and everything. And then I was really fascinated how all those social choreographies were recreated in those spaces. So Museum of Other Realities, I think it was VR Hum Ulrich's festival from Hamburg. And then I ran into someone and then that person was like approaching the little group in which we were standing the same way as awkwardly would be approaching a group if you don't know anybody at the festival. And then, of course, the voice is spatialized, so all those little rituals were there, and also the proximity. You don't want to stand too close to someone that you don't know. And that was really interesting for me. And of course, I started digging a little bit more at the time into Phantom Touch and all these different concepts of why does the proximity in Six Degrees of Freedom VR actually work. And from all those inspirations, I started thinking, what if we could bundle all of that together somehow and try to imagine different parameters of an encounter? But changing also one very crucial thing that is embedded in, for example, VR chat encounters is that you choose how you want to be represented. So once again, when you encounter someone in VRChat, you can look at the avatar that someone chose and it's already an expression of someone's personality. So like you can already base a first impression on that image that appears. And I was thinking like, what if we go back earlier to those days when we were at IRC or, you know, like early days of Internet where you'd be chatting to strangers, not knowing anything. And then really just building your impression of another person or imagination of the other person, just based on this experience that you're sharing alone. That's why, I mean, also we use this tagline that in romance, romance favors imagination over image. And this is really what we kind of were aiming for a bit. And another thing is that by changing that little parameter, like defamiliarize that process of encountering the other and ask how would it be if an encounter was actually embodied, but if you would remove the image from the picture. So meeting another body in space, but the body with no features and letting you design the features based on the experience that you share. Oh, and there's one more important frame of reference, which is all this genre of movies that are movies on the go, I would say, which is basically almost every other film of Hong Sang-soo and of course, Richard Linklater and his before trilogy, because it has almost like its own dramaturgy, like this conversation on the go. And we've been analyzing a lot those films, but from the position of mise-en-scene rather than the story. So like how the bodies are relating to each other in space. I really recommend that to try to rewatch Richard Linklater's trilogy from that perspective of how he positions them in the train, across from each other, in the tram, in the street, at the table, in a cafe and all those different circumstances. So that was also one of those sources of inspiration.
[00:13:16.832] Kent Bye: And talking to the DocLab curators, Kasper Sonnen said that another potential inspiration point was Collider. I don't know if you want to elaborate on that because I saw that back in 2018 and really blew my mind in terms of what even documentary was, but also just the whole experience of the asymmetry of power and boundaries. But yeah, I'd love to hear how something like Collider played a part in romance.
[00:13:37.475] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah, it was certainly a massive source of inspiration. And I was laughing because we bumped into each other with Kaspar after the selection was announced. And he said like, yeah, you know, it's interesting how this piece inscribes itself in this lineage of works that were presented at DocLab. And he mentioned Collider and he mentioned, I think it was called And I. Yeah, and I. I think there was this card game. And I said like, you know, you won't believe it, but if you read my first funding application for Romance, both titles are actually mentioned as major sources of inspiration. And I've always found the work of Anagram really inspiring, but on many different levels. Like Collider was, of course, quite direct inspiration in terms of having two people converging in a space and of course that work was ingenious in its own way but it was talking about power relations as well and like letting go of control and control and there was this beautiful concept of decoupling controllers from the headset so for me Collider also proved it was possible and it was also possible to make the encounter itself a subject of the piece. I would say that Collider had something that it had this meta reflection much more built into the project itself. So like the voice and the voiceover was also doing part of the reflection for you. And this is something that I found in Collider absolutely beautiful and it was working. But because we asked ourselves a question, what is that main theme? And when we decided the encounter is the main theme, we actually made some previous versions that were much more voiceover heavy. But then we realized where people were playing that the encounter was basically becoming less relevant because people were trying to follow your own reflection on what the encounter might bring. And then we made quite a radical gesture of just removing 95% of that voiceover. and just leaving people alone so they can just be together and just roam through those different spaces and realm. And there's one other thing that I remember there was a presentation that May Abdalla made on her work. And then she was saying that when they started with Anagram, they were thinking a lot of what the documentary in VR could be. and that it wouldn't have to be documentary on a subject. So, for example, documentary about a specific event in the world, but you could actually take a more abstract element. And they did that work with the rope as well before or with Collider that was this relationships of power or letting go of control. And that was an inspiring thought for me as well. But you can take something so mundane as an encounter and try to, I wouldn't say, I was quoting the other day on this panel on awe. There's this book by Georges Perec, which is called An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. where he basically sits down and just describes for, I think, several hours, like everything that is happening. And in the preface to that book, he says, like, we have a tendency of telling stories of spectacular events. So, you know, like when a bomb blows up or, you know, like there is a protest or, you know, like all this turning points. And he says like, what if we were thinking about it differently? Because we have to start talking about what is actually a fabric of our lives. So all these moments that are not spectacular, but we need to find, he calls it a new form of anthropology, but we need to find modes of storytelling to present them in a way that make them exciting. And what makes things exciting, for example, is when they are slightly incomprehensible. So like we need to approach them as if we didn't know what we are facing, even if it's as mundane as meeting the other person. And another concept that I often use is this concept from Wiktor Szkowski, which is the defamiliarization. So like, how can you change something a little bit in this parameters that all of a sudden you're engaged with the thing that is so habituated already that normally you wouldn't even notice that this is happening, but all of a sudden it feels new and you're investing more attention into this.
[00:17:28.717] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as you are speaking around the forms of documentary and coming to DocLab over the last number of years, and this is in the context of a documentary festival. And I feel like at Venice Immersive, there's these experiences that are more social-based and more around the social dynamics and creating encounters in more of a social context. And so you're using this kind of imaginal realm and these virtual spaces and these design affordances to kind of shape different types of social interactions and experiences. And so I'm just curious how you start to think about that in terms of the existing genres and ideas of documentary. I know Casper often refers to John Grierson's definition of documentary as the creative treatment of actuality. And so that's opened my mind in terms of what documentary is. But I'm very curious about your perspective as coming from the film theory background and starting to think around documentary, what is documentary and how this piece of romance fits within the documentary context.
[00:18:26.075] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't care so much about labels, but of course that definition of John Grusin is something that is also very dear to me. And whenever I was actually trying to define documentary, and because I work a lot with essay film, so of course that question of fiction or documentary, it appears a lot when I work with my students, and at first they are puzzled. It's like, so what is essay? Is it documentary or is it fiction? And then you have to basically at least attempt to... work with those definitions. For me, documentary is a certain contract that you sign with your audience, that what you're gonna do in the next, whatever, 10, 20, 40, 90 minutes, it has... How do I even say it? Like, this aspect of truth, I don't know how to define it right now, but it's about agreeing on both sides that, hey, we believe right now that what is being narrated is sincere or the best, at least from your subjective position, for your position of situatedness, like you're telling something true. I think there's another quote that the documentary is about lying truthfully. Of course, all the time it's a staging of reality. So in this case, I think for me, romance fulfills that definition. Because yes, you traverse those fantastic realms and they have nothing to do with reality. It's like these different frozen landscapes and a quiz show that is hosted by a bunny and all these kind of things. Of course, they have no resemblance to reality. But as I said, like what is the fabric of the experience itself is actually the curiosity of who's on the other end and that encounter where you apply all those different features. So in the end, what people mostly talk about is that, yeah, they can say, oh, it was fun to do this or it was fun to do that. But in the end, it's that curiosity when they end up meeting each other after the experience concluded was it was always about that other person on the other end. So.
[00:20:26.548] Kent Bye: And so there's a series of different vignettes and different chapters, you can call it, where you're going from scene to scene and building up of different interactions that you're doing with the person that you're matched up in this piece. And so it seems like the type of piece where you could easily slot in and out different pieces within that structure or rearrange things. But I'm wondering how you came about that process through the process of iteration of what you were thinking in terms of the arc and the journey that you wanted to take people on.
[00:20:54.963] Stanislaw Liguzinski: We had a much more distinct arc in mind in the beginning, but there was one thing that stayed as a kind of a backbone of the piece was that with each stage, the world is a little bit more defined and you become more defined because like with each stage you get to change and create more attributes or more features of the other person as well. So it starts with complete darkness and point cloud. Then you move on to a level that is black and white. Then you move on to a level that is kind of like a desert of ice. It's not really grayscale, but it's kind of different shades of blue, for example, the avatars. And then it becomes a little bit more colorful and defined as you go on. And the initial idea we had was actually that would be a journey that you would follow the sun and you would follow the light that kind of becomes brighter and that lights up. The more you interact with other person, it lights up. But then, of course, you encounter all kinds of different limitations when you develop the piece. But we wanted to have that logic, that you know more, that, in a sense, experience becomes fuller, your idea of the other person becomes fuller, so the world is richer. So that was the first thing. But the second thing was what I said before, when we were analyzing all those films and the dramaturgy of the encounter, we were discerning those ideas for mise en scene. So basically, how do you relate bodies in space? And this is also the arc in that respect. So at first you just face someone and then there are different configurations of like how you relate to each other, like in a quiz show when you face each other, but you press the buttons. Then there is a boat scene, which was very important for us in that arc, because then you are kind of forced to be a little closer. We were also very careful not to ever program a moment where you would have to, for example, be in physical contact with each other, because that was very important for us. We've seen a lot of cases of abuse in social VR and all that, so it was very important for us not to create or at least minimize the possibility of people really abusing that potential of assaulting someone in those spaces. so yeah there is levels i don't spoil too much but there's also levels where you're completely separated and you need to find each other so there is dramaturgy also in the way that we detach the bodies from each other or relate the bodies in space and then there is one more thing that i forgot to mention that was very important for us as well when we thought about it there was um During the pandemic, it's a much older study and much older piece, but it kind of resurfaced and it resurfaced as like 36 questions to fall in love, I think, which was actually completely misguided interpretation of what it originally was, because it was a method that was developed for sociological studies in the 90s. And those questions were devised to prepare people to participate in other surveys. But they needed always people who had some kind of closeness. So, for example, if you wanted to study bias or something else, they would need to have people to survey that already knew each other, but they couldn't find enough people to participate. So they needed to devise a method that they could run people through so then they can participate in other surveys. And those questions were devised to bring people closer together within one hour or so. that later on, when they move on to next stages, they have this idea that they know each other. And we were looking at those questions very closely. In the beginning, we almost literally wanted to embed them in some kind of way. There was this mechanism of cards that was supposed to appear throughout the experience. And eventually we boiled them down because we tried to find a structural pattern of how they are made. And there was this very interesting mechanism in them because like there were questions that were introspective and then more and more the questions were trying to involve the idea of we. For you to try to think not only about yourself, but about both of you in a particular situation. And we were hoping that we can at least like embed that logic, not only in the way, because there are literal questions that appear in the experience in the quiz show, but also in the way that those bodies are relating and how those stages are constructed. Because, for example, in the boat, you have to collaborate and there like it's impossible to row by yourself. And we've seen spectacular catastrophes with that, with people just driving straight into the wall or, you know, like not being able to. And this is actually really what I loved about this. This is the first time I've seen it with a larger audience. And I love seeing people struggle with that because the struggle was the actual point. Because like if you don't work in unison and if you don't find that we at that point, you're just gonna fail but of course like failure is okay you know like it's okay to be with a stranger after 30 minutes and not being able to synchronize but it was like always like a little idea and an experiment and then of course we have a level that follows which also works a little bit with that idea of like okay so what did we establish and you need to think about that a little bit of like Is there something interesting here that maybe we would like to follow up on? And not in a romantic sense. Of course, we're playing with this idea with romance. But I'm always adamant about not using dating with relation to... And of course, everybody does that. Because all of a sudden, oh, there's that dating experience. But it was for me always about the encounter. Because the person on the other end, it doesn't have to have any romantic inclinations. But that curiosity of like, oh, yeah, maybe... maybe we just meet up for a coffee and there's going to be an interesting conversation because I liked what you said before about that subject or another. And we always had also this fantasy that on one hand, we were very interested in what kind of reflection it can cause. But we were interested, like the same way as those 36 questions to fall in love were used to create an idea of closeness. And then you can let people go and, you know, survey them on different ideas or whatever. We were thinking like, could that piece in the future, for example, be a part of, I don't know, a music festival where, you know, you just come to a music festival, you do that experience and then you bump into someone who you didn't know before and then you just, you know, hang out or, you know, maybe it can be just the beginning of friendship or something.
[00:27:04.665] Kent Bye: yeah i wanted to share a few aspects from my experience first there was some bugs in the sense that i wasn't actually able to hear the other person and they were able to hear me but i wasn't able to hear them and what that meant was that there was at least two or three different moments in the experience that were explicitly like like you can speak you know or other opportunities where you it's very clear that you're going to be in communication but yet i was speaking but not hearing anything back so i feel like my experience of it was sort of tented by the fact that there was this confusion or frustration but also i could see the design affordances was like i think i should be able to be talking here and not having that conversation and so it ended up being something a little bit different which was that there was more of these embodying interactions and communication that was happening, but more non-verbally, you know, there's some quiz opportunities to share your personality or your character in a way. But there's a dimension of real-time communication that I think was a part of the intent of the piece that I just missed out on. And so I'm curious if you could recap what you've generally seen as people have these opportunities to communicate and what kind of patterns you've seen, just because that's a part of the experience that I kind of missed out on in my personal experience of it.
[00:28:19.969] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah, first of all, I'm sorry for the bug, but of course, these are the pitfalls of multiplayer VR at this point, that sometimes there's just unpredictable things that happen. And in this case, it's just like every once in a while, when a new session starts, the Quest just loses microphone, and you literally need to restart the headset for that to come back online, and we can't find the source of it. But we now made it almost foolproof, but we'll see. I have to say the range of how people use that feature is massive. I've seen people for whom the microphone worked that still made it very much a pantomime, the whole playthrough. And I think that they felt just more secure, just not talking too much at least and being kind of largely non-verbal. But they were actually playful about being nonverbal as well in terms of waving at each other and doing several things. And then there were people who were narrating absolutely everything. So almost like a stream of consciousness. It's like, oh, there's this rock. Oh, maybe we should speak right now. Oh, you have these tentacles now that are growing out of your head or something, like every single feature that they design. Because there's something important. Maybe I'm spoiling too much again. But throughout the experience, you don't see your own body. You can only see the body of the other and the body of the other you shape, but you cannot see what the other person is projecting on you until the very end. That I won't reveal, but there is an option in the end that you can choose if you want to know or you want to still remain in not knowing. And some people were very playful, very forward in the way that they were talking. All of it was playful and polite. I didn't really see any playthrough where people would be harsh for each other. But that, of course, it's interesting to me. I've received a lot of feedback when people said that There is something in the design, also graphic design of that, and the way that the levels are lined up, actually, that makes it quite, that at least supports this caring attitude towards the other. But of course, you never know if you just release it to general public, how people are going to relate. But yeah, it was mostly like really sweet. And there is something very interesting also because of course, let's say the ideal circumstances are that you don't really know who's on the other end. But I've seen people who are familiar with each other or are friends or actually I've also seen couples doing that. And it's a different experience then because couples mostly use it as this opportunity of defamiliarization. So they take it playfully and they try to pretend a little bit that they don't know who they are. And also like it's kind of mischievous a bit because they are, for example, in the quiz, they are trying to surprise each other with the answers that they give. And, you know, so it's it becomes like a more of a playful experience on just playing with the idea of personality and what you project. Because of course in that respect you can pretend something, or not even pretend, you could just be who you want to be rather than who you are. And then you might choose at the very end not to see the other person and just leave that impression. So it leaves that opportunity of being playful, but of course that's kind of like a margin, I would say, of those experiences. But yeah, I would say that the range of things, and it's very interesting because it's what shows best the dynamic is like how people use that last opportunity when they say goodbye also. Like that was ranging dramatically. Like some people want to exchange because they don't know if the experience is going to give them the opportunity to actually see each other beyond that point in real life. So some people try to exchange as many personal information as they can because they're like, oh, you know, like I'm from Paris. Oh, I'm also from Paris. And, you know, like things like that. some people are just waiting there to say like hey it was nice and you know just just waiting for the experience to end and some are really caring and you know they hug each other and this is very interesting that because the experience leaves you the possibility of not really interfering with the body on the like most people don't until that very end where they often decide it's like oh is it going to be a handshake is it going to be a hi-fi is it going to be like a bear hug or are we just going to part our ways So it's fascinating and I think also because of course there's such a diverse audience at IDFA that there is a lot of cultural elements that play into that. And of course that goes back to this classical works on proximity like Edward Hall's Hidden Dimension where also like he describes how different cultures relate to that bodily contact. And funnily enough, I also got feedback from one person, a woman that really liked the experience. She said like she felt safe. And of course, when she went into something called romance, she was like, OK, like, will I welcome that idea of there being another person? She said that the other person was super sweet and like they had a really, really nice journey together. But she was super hesitant to get anywhere near in her avatar. But when she saw that person in flesh, she immediately just jumped into like a bear hug. And she's like, there was a little bit more of a sense of distance and being careful about shortening the distance in VR than in reality. Like in reality, it was just kind of much more natural to just reach out and hug each other. And here, yeah, like I've seen very few people like really shortening the distance to the point where when they were, for example, like pointing features at each other's avatars and things like that. So it's also a very interesting social experiment in that respect.
[00:33:44.617] Kent Bye: One of the other things that I noticed about this piece is you did have this idea of separating the onboarding. So you have two people coming in separately and ideally not seeing each other. And yeah, maybe you could just talk around the invitation to come into this piece and how you have managed trying to direct people into the right booth and make sure that they don't see each other.
[00:34:07.188] Stanislaw Liguzinski: Yeah, so the ideal circumstances are those that, you know, you don't see the other person. And in a way there is that default installation idea that we have with that spiral and those places are separated, but we've always had also alternatives in mind. And of course, like if you remember Collider, like Collider was actually one space because of course they needed to eventually like physically interact with each other. but people were directed to opposite ends. So we have this spiral that also could be potentially if there is less space on the venue. Actually, it can be installed in parallel that you need to enter to one spiral from one end and to the other spiral from the other end. But the piece is also actually built to be run over internet. I mean, it is run over internet. So potentially you could also be in different cities or countries when you do that. Like you could have one booth in Amsterdam and another booth in New York and like have people actually encounter each other, you know, from super remote locations in that respect. And of course, like we've been talking to Kaspar and we've been talking to Popcraft as well, how to do it specifically for Ritva. What we didn't manage to do in the end is Venice had the system this year that whenever there were multiple slots for a particular work, you would have it reflected on your ticket. So you would have like fragile home A, fragile home B or something, one or two. And initially we wanted to do that so people would just go to the right booth. Right now, I mostly, we have a ticket counter here. So like people at the ticket counter are actually supposed to, it doesn't always work, but they're supposed to direct the first person that comes to the left, second person that comes to the right. But we're still testing that a little bit because also with the meeting after the experience, right now it's just like armchairs and, you know, there's like a little area where you can see each other. And some people just basically see each other. They do the handshake and, you know, like the chats. casually for two minutes and they go away. But I've actually seen that turning into longer conversations or people like continuing having coffee together. And I felt like, OK, that would be cool if we had a little bit more time or in different circumstances, especially if it was maybe in a less busy context, because, of course, it is such a massive, beautiful exhibition that people just run and want to see as much as possible. But if it was, for example, installed in the venue, we could make sure that, I don't know, people meet at the bar of the venue and they actually have a coffee and, you know, like have a little bit of time to unravel what happened. So it is a little bit modular that in a way there is not so much onboarding here, but that offboarding idea is something that we want to we still see as an opportunity to play with a little bit more. Of course, we went a bit safe this time because we just wanted to see how it works. Do people even take opportunity of using that space? But we have ideas of what else we could do. And also, for example, what to do if people do it remotely, eventually, possibly, then what do you do? Do you exchange emails or how would you actually continue the conversation if you would want to? But that's something that we are very happy to still experiment with. And as you said, it's always iterative work with those immersive pieces. And there is still a lot of things that we can take on board and tweak those little details and adjust them. So for us, it's also a learning moment of really drawing conclusions of how to maximize that experience.
[00:37:24.642] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the other features of this piece is novel locomotion mechanics in terms of how you move around the space. Because normally in most social VR or VR pieces, when I want to locomote within the piece, there's stick locomotion where you're actually pushing the sticks. But here you have pull the triggers and point. And I found it at the beginning a little bit more confusing or disorienting or maybe putting me into like a different mode of how I'm engaging with it. Just because it was new and different and novel and I'd never done that type of locomotion before. And I'm wondering if that is with intent to try to get people out of their normal mode of interacting with that, or if it's more tuned towards like people who are new to VR where maybe this locomotion is less intuitive. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more elaboration for why the novel locomotion mechanic.
[00:38:12.782] Stanislaw Liguzinski: I'm super happy that you spotted that because that's been one of the major conversation points in the team as well when we were developing the piece. Because in the beginning we were trying to see if it's even possible to try to make you just move, like physically move in space. but then we thought like okay you already have two booths and i'm a curator myself and i know that basically the the spatial requirement of some of the pieces is just killing me because like i always we always have work with limited spaces so if i required the actual space for people to walk and then would translate that to the design of the levels that would cause a lot of challenges And then that idea of walking, that idea of roaming was always there. So I never wanted to limit those areas to like three by three or something. And then, of course, there are some ingenious pieces out there like Origen, for example, that still give you this possibility of physically moving in space and then encountering new and new. But in a way we would have to invest too much effort into that and constructing those worlds in such a manner so then we said okay like controllers are inevitable in that respect and then joystick felt so disembodied and this idea of walking hand in hand and there are some levels where you really need to traverse quite considerable distance almost nothing else happens like you really need to walk and we thought it would be so tedious to just and also like The idea of walking hand in hand, you need to engage the body in some physical way to have an idea that you're actually walking with someone and you're making an effort. There's something engaged in that locomotion that requires you to do something with your... And it can be as minimal as it is right now, like extending your hands. But if you extend them long enough, actually it still has an effect on your hands. And I also don't want to take credit for really coming up with this super new system, because we also drew massive inspiration from Xinqian Huang, from Bodiless. Of course, in that case, it was flying, but it was also this idea, and this was the first time I saw it, and I was like, okay, that is... And that gives you so much control over velocity as well, of the movement. Like, do you want to walk slow? Do you want to walk fast? And this is also the feature that... We have there and I have to say that also there were some disagreements within the team first and now in the exhibition we've tried it all together again and everybody was like, yeah, I think we made a good choice there doing this. And I was really afraid that a lot of people might not get it, especially people who are not so experienced with VR. But I was quite surprised that pretty much everybody here, after initial tutorial level as well, so that you can really explore that mechanic a little bit more before you are really thrown into the experience itself. But yeah, this was the reason.
[00:41:00.749] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess as I reflect, a lot of locomotion and these virtual spaces are stick based and it is this abstraction where you're, I mean, it is a thumb motion, but it feels more like less embodied than moving your whole arms. And so, and yeah, definitely appreciate Shenzhen Wong's both bodiless as well as samsara where you're able to really use your full body and your arms. And so, yeah, just in terms of like having more of an embodied experience, I mean, it was a little bit more disorienting just because had to go through the tutorial level and figure it out but once i got it it was pretty intuitive throughout the rest there was some times where there's some interactions where you're asking to either click the grab button or the trigger button and so there's like pushing the wrong buttons or trying to figure out which one was which because there's kind of like these forced interactions where you're locked in space and you have to do the mechanic for a certain amount of bit and then you move on but Yeah, I think overall the locomotion mechanic gave me a little bit more a sense of actually roaming and moving through the space rather than if it was stick based I might have just unconsciously moved in a way that I do in any other virtual space and have a little bit more of a disconnection between what my body's doing in physical space and what my virtual body is doing.
[00:42:14.209] Stanislaw Liguzinski: There's two more things about sticks also and of course VRChat uses the stick and every time I'm featuring works that use VRChat and I always show Ferryman Collective for example and I've shown Uncanny Alley this year at Imagine. There's always someone getting sick like because of that disconnection between body and your actual avatar is moving and I think the body like really doesn't handle this that well and especially people of course who have like locomotion sickness and everything like that that puts a real strain on them and I feel that this is a little bit easier on the bodies but there is also and we quite consciously didn't implement that that you have a possibility on usually on left stick or so like to also turn around so for example do like a 30 degree or like or 90 degree jump and And of course, if you're a gamer or if you have a more gamey mechanics, like that works pretty well because you can respond fast and you can move towards a stimuli or something. But that is really something that for me breaks the embodiment because like then you're just really you're just your consciousness. And of course, like with as much time as we all spend in the headsets in this realm, we are all used to it. So I think like it doesn't do anything to us. But for people who are not using VR so much, I think it's really killing it. And here it's sometimes tedious, I know, because like here, if you walked yourself into something, you need to physically turn around and actually, you know, extend your hands in another direction. But I feel that this really adds to that feeling of being there with your own body. And that's something else that we thought about a lot also as a safety mechanism. And I've been talking a lot to Joe Hunting about that, because I at some point asked him, is there any particular difference between desktop users and headset users in VRChat? And after a little reflection, he said, yes, there is. The desktop users tend to be often more abusive. A lot of those kids that just throw slurs and insults are the desktop users. And we tried to reflect why that is. And we felt that when you're there in a headset, with your own body and your own head embedded in the headset, you risk more. Basically, you can be assaulted in a way that involves the physical proximity and everything. That hurts. In a way, you can feel it in your whole body when someone jumps at you, for example. If you're at the desktop, you're separated. There's no embodiment whatsoever. You can be... you can be much more careless with your behaviors. And once again, we were trying to embed all kinds of those soft mechanisms inside the experience that would limit the possibility of people abusing that space and violating someone else's space. And here, really, if you need to extend your hands into somebody else's avatar, that is a bold move. So I think that all together that somehow clicked.
[00:45:06.972] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and these types of encounters that happen in these social contexts might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:45:23.359] Stanislaw Liguzinski: I'm at the beginning of this journey so I'm really curious just to see and like also curious to see who would be responsive to the idea of programming it. Because of course like this is wonderful to be in this circuit and I love it and I would love to present as many XR venues and contexts, but I'm also interested to take it outside of XR realm and try community centers or places that people just can come in and do it for fun. But I think also probably it cannot be done with really small children, really, but teenagers and upwards, I think it's kind of all age groups appropriate. So yeah, I would like it just to see what is the actual potential for planting that little seed of curiosity towards each other through this piece. But I would be also very interested in testing it in different cultural contexts, because I think it has a potential because of this unbiased starting point at least i hope like as little as possible i hope it can neutralize certain tensions that could potentially be there on both ends in the beginning in like conflict areas or you know things like that that you know maybe that would have but of course it's sometimes uh maybe it's like too ambitious to think about it this way. But I'm curious about people from very different strands of life using that and maybe discovering something that they would normally be blind to because they would already cast some judgment about this time. And this is just one thing to add because it's a great kudos to my avatar designers who were like a big, big part of the creative process of working on that project, the collective Xeno Angel, that we were very careful to design avatars that also don't adhere to usual stereotypes. So we don't have natural skin tones. Most of the designs of the characters are really rather non-binary. So it's very hard to just pin one gender on it. They are quite flamboyant, they are quite expressive. So we really wanted to give people the possibility of expressing what they feel but without projecting already like certain stereotypes or biases on each other so yeah like i'm super curious to be surprised but also uh yeah super curious to see like who is going to respond to that invitation and how it's gonna take on its own life now great and is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community um I guess it's fun to be on the other side right now as well. I've been with great pleasure curating the works for the last couple of years, and I love it. And I love giving space to other makers and letting their works shine and meet the audience. And what we do at Imagine, we always try to connect with regular audience there. So we have very little professional visitors. It's mostly regular people. So now being on the other end, I have to count on people that will take it up now and take care of that work. So it's kind of a fun move as well to be now on the maker's side and looking at the industry now from this other perspective. So yeah, I'm happy to be here. Do you have a name of a genre of what this piece is? It's interesting. When you asked me about film theory references, I don't have too many, but I always thought about it a bit as a relational art. So, I don't know, relational VR experience.
[00:48:51.866] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah. I think of it as encounter or... Yeah, that relational art is really great as well. Yeah, I feel like it's kind of like a new emerging genre that I think is unique to VR in a sense that you can really only do this in VR. So it's kind of interesting to see the previous lineage of other pieces that have done these type of encounters, but also just as a form of VR as a way to use that arbitrary, contrived context to have these interactions that are very real of... allowing us to express our different personality character traits and how we start to get to know each other in new ways and i feel like this could be in a romantic context because it is romance but also a friend context but many different contexts for people to start to get to know each other in a way that i could see like something like this being a very popular like vr chat like random stranger get to know you type of thing that obviously could be like filled with like people abusing that but I feel like within the festival context that you've been able to create this set and setting in a way that probably just by self-selecting of who's at that festival and if they are there physically there's like more implications if you're really being evil so you might have to do a little bit less design around preventing that type of harm and abuse but Anyway, I think it's super fascinating just to see the early beginnings of this type of emerging genre. And yeah, very much appreciated having an opportunity to hear a little bit more around your design process and where it's at now and where it may be going here in the future. So thanks again for turning me here on the podcast to help break it all down. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I really would encourage you to consider supporting the work that I'm doing here at the Voices of VR. It's been over a decade now, and I've published over 1,500 interviews, and all of them are freely available on the VoicesofVR.com website with transcripts available. This is just a huge repository of oral history, and I'd love to continue to expand out and to continue to cover what's happening in the industry, but I've also got over a thousand interviews in my backlog as well. So lots of stuff to dig into in terms of the historical development of the medium of virtual augmented reality and these different structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
