The IDFA DocLab is celebrating it’s 15th year anniversary, and I collaborated with DocLab to produce a series of a dozen interviews reflecting on the evolution of immersive storytelling and interactive documentaries since 2007. I’m kicking off the series with an interview with DocLab founder Caspar Sonnen, who takes us back to the very beginning of featuring web-based, digital projects, then onto theatrical screenings of interactive pieces, and now full-on exhibitions, immersive performances, and interactive documentaries.
This conversation was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello and welcome to this latest episode of this podcast series looking at the 15 years of the IFA DocLab. My name is Kent Bye. I do the Voices of VR podcast. I had the chance to visit the IFA DocLab back in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. I'm really excited to have the founder of the IFA DocLab, Kasper Sonnen. Kasper, maybe you could introduce yourself and tell me a bit about what you do in the realm of immersive storytelling.
[00:00:37.872] Caspar Sonnen: Sure, thanks. Yeah, so I'm the founder, I guess, although IDFA was doing a lot of different programs around interactive media back in the day. I think in 2007 we made the decision within the festival to start a program to do more than have panel discussions, but really try to figure out how to showcase digital, interactive and immersive works. Back in 2007, that was mostly screen-based, mobile screen-based or computer screen-based. But yeah, so over the last 15 years, the program has grown tremendously as the field has grown tremendously. So it went from originally in 2007, a purely online program, to 2008, doing live navigations of websites in cinemas, to full-on exhibitions, immersive performances, and yeah, everything we do now.
[00:01:32.925] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space of interactive and immersive storytelling.
[00:01:41.066] Caspar Sonnen: Sure, I would say that that's a good question. The longer that we're doing this, the more things that I used to do that I never thought were part of this field seem to be illogical. progression into this somehow. I mean, going way back, I grew up as the son of a street theater maker, which was like music theater, a lot of interdisciplinary, strange things in public space. I think these days, with a lot of the immersive performance and immersive theater things, there's a lot of parallels to things I witnessed as a little kid. So I think that's been one of the, I would say, foundations was being among a lot of people as I grew up working in different disciplines. and seeing how they communicated or miscommunicated together. But yeah, no, I guess the more clear path was studying film, studying new media. At university, falling really in love with early cinema through people like William Auricchio, who was teaching film history then at Utrecht. And at the same time, feeling very sceptic about new media. This was early 90s. I'd always played a lot of video games as a kid and was really interested in interactive media. But sort of the new media back then, there was a lot of big claims being made about actors being replaced by avatars in five years. And around that time, I was really deeply influenced by John Cassavetes and real sweaty blood, sweat and tear type cinema. And I just was such complete bullshit that I was very sceptic around all the claims that new media were making as a very young medium at the time. I think these days there's a lot of those claims that are actually more true than I ever expected. But I think that skepticism stuck with me for a while and still is somehow. I guess it's mostly progressed into film festivals. started a little open-air film festival with a couple of friends and through there started working at IDFA at some point and really saw the internet take off and really felt like within IDFA being a documentary festival that a lot of the things I remember like having this like late night rabbit hole down YouTube that was just, I don't know, a few months old then. And really realizing a lot of the things that I'm seeing here are actually documentary. This is stuff that people have been uploading themselves. And before that, the only place where you would see things like that would be like America's Funniest Home Videos. But this was not funniest home videos. This was actually like real people sharing real vulnerable personal things. Blogs were around. And I think the idea for DocLab started there where like, hey, there is something to this internet thing that is very real, that is very much mediated reality. And there is something here that we need to explore and investigate. And I think after a few little experiments we did in 2007, that became the idea of doing a program around interactive art. And I think the first year we did it, I still had very much that skepticism of feeling like, are these claims of like, I know video games, I know film, that sort of space in between, does that really make sense? Choose your own adventure novels, Leisure Suits Larry, games like that were fun, but is that an art form? And I think we started the program not knowing whether the program was going to take off, it really was a pilot. And I remember going through, basically browsing the web, putting all the buzzwords I could come up with, interactive, digital storytelling into Google. And I think the first project that really made me feel we were onto something was tanatorama.com, which was this interactive documentary based on a French photographer exploring what happens behind the scenes at a funeral parlor. And the thing they did was a beautiful documentary photo series, but they told it as an interactive story where it basically started with a pompous French voiceover saying, like, you just died this morning. Do you want to know what happens next? And it just gives you yes and no as an option. And I just felt like this is so pompous. And I was like, no. And then it just redirected me to Google. And I just felt like, hey, wait a minute, you actually thought of this in advance. And I had this really nice experience that you have when you watch a great film where you're like, oh, wait a minute, the director was way ahead of me here. And that happened throughout that whole piece. And it wasn't getting lost in endless possibilities. It was a very sparse, slow interactivity, as they called it themselves. And I think that was one of the first projects that really made us feel like, hey, there is something here that deserves further exploration.
[00:06:41.897] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, it's really interesting to hear the original seeds and how things have been developing and I've been personally tracking this pretty closely since like 2014, when I started the podcast and started going to all these different conferences and seeing content. And the thing that I've noticed, at least, and maybe this is a question I'd love to hear your reflection on looking back at 15 years at the IFA doc lab, which is that there's two ways of kind of thinking about genre. One way is to just look at the medium in which that the content is being distributed. So whether or not it's a film or a podcast or a web experience or an interactive media or game or virtual augmented reality, you know, and then that a lot of the doc lab is having the fusion of these different communication media being blended together, which then The next layer on top of that then is the genre in terms of content, of what the existing forms of content are. Specifically, you're focusing on nonfiction documentary, but also expanding our concepts of what the nonfiction and documentary are, and then potentially even going into new genres of content that are enabled by these technologies that were never really even possible before with this fusion and all these different intersections. And so I'd love to hear some of your reflections on both the fusion of these intersections of the technology and if there were any trends of like, oh yeah, it really started with web interactive or new media, transmedia phase here, and then it shifted into now all of a sudden immersive technologies and VR and AR and then immersive theater. What were the sort of influences at a baseline of just the technology And then any other reflections on the other genre questions in terms of what's made possible, what's new with interactive, immersive documentary form?
[00:08:28.204] Caspar Sonnen: Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a very big question. But I think, I mean, one thing I think it's increasingly within the team as we reflect on what are the types of works that we are the place for. That's a question we ask ourselves every year in the beginning of the year, right after the festival, during programming. It's like, are we a place for podcasts? Are we the place for just the latest, newest technologies? I think it's interesting to see that when in 2009, I think it was, we had Ira Glass doing a live performance of This American Life. podcast was definitely within the realm of new media. There was a lot of explanation that had to be done to not just our general audience, but to our professional audiences as well. Like, what is this podcast thing? And there was, of course, a very active group of people who were like, oh, it's Hourglass, the king of podcasting. And everybody was really excited about that. But there was really like, that's always been the interesting thing of Dopplab, of like trying to bridge and bring together these two different audiences, the ones that are very much into this new thing, radio makers who were really into this, young radio makers who were really into podcasting, and at the same time, just audiences who love documentary storytelling. And the reverse, I think, has always been part of DocLab as well, which is, as an example, trying to convince someone like Ara Glass that he should come to IDFA, to this documentary festival, because to him, he was doing radio and we had nothing to do with documentary in his field, because he felt Documentaries is boring, educational, Ken Burns type things, right? I don't do that. And we're like, well, documentaries more than just I mean, even documentary cinema is much more than just that perception that you have from PBS. There's actually a whole spectrum of artistic making just in an existing medium like film. And I think looking at I think in 2007, when we started, it was very much like a vlog was something like video blogging was very new. The iPhone didn't exist yet. Twitter didn't. Well, I think Twitter exists. No, it didn't exist yet. YouTube was like two years old. Like it's wasn't bought by Google yet. Like there was a lot of very interesting. It was an interesting time. So there was a lot of multimedia journalism. We had like mapping mashups, things like that. And yes, you can say like, of course, 2014, around that time with the first prototypes of the, uh, the Oculus DK one coming out, VR started to take off and started like more spatial experiences in digital spatial experiences were starting to become bigger and bigger. So I think there's definitely like the trends of different technologies that have taken off and have evolved at different paces. But I think maybe one thing that we try to do is to step back and not be too focused on the specific hardware or the specific technology. to when we look at works really say like this is a work that you play, this is a work that you read, this is a work that you watch, this is a work that you walk, this is a work that you participate in, to really have these different modes of what the audience is actually doing. That's one way that we look at different trends and technologies. One way is looking at, as you said, the type of device being used or the type of technology being used. I think another one is the type of exhibition format. I was having a conversation recently with someone who was exploring new distribution strategies for immersive content. And I felt like you cannot have that conversation without making a very clear distinction between very physical installations, between live performances in VR, collective performances in VR, and projects that you can just download to your headset at home. There is a lot of overlap. Like certain projects can have a version that is physical, a version that is just digital. But those are different beasts. And I think if anything, it's a cliche, but the modes of expression and the modes of distribution and the modes of experiencing works have grown tremendously. I think the thing maybe at this 15 year point of reflection that I'm somewhat conflicted about is I think with VR and XR we're at a point that is incredibly exciting where I think We've reached beyond the early days of everybody experimenting, working together, who has a device, who can help each other out, having very little modes of getting the work seen by audiences. So very much the festivals playing a key role there. And we're getting to that point with places like the FI Center or the NEXT Museum in Amsterdam or the Guy Tellerich in Paris. Places like that starting to form the beginnings of an ecosystem with the quest to be kind of democratized or popularized. The medium got to a point where it was like the first device that you recommended to your friend who's not in this scene. And I think we're at this really exciting stage where works like Goliath by Anagram has been seen by a lot of people outside of festivals. That's great. But at the same time, I think if you look back to 2007, it's kind of like where screen-based interactive art was at that time. It was nothing new, it's been simmering for years, but then like the Quest now, back then I think it was comparable to what maybe Adobe Flash was. where it really made it possible for much more forms of expression by not just programmers and people who really were into the technology. It made it much more accessible to audiences because they could just open their browser, download Flash, and they could have this rich multimedia experience. At the same time, it was also the beginning of the end, to a certain extent, where interactive media became formatted more increasingly and became less and less independent and more and more dependent on big infrastructural systems that were out of the control of artists. And you can see now there is a lot less platforms for interactive art because they don't fit the main channels, the main pipelines that people now use to access their content, be it Facebook or Netflix or Twitch. Like we can see there's a lot of less richness in interactive media being produced now than there was in 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12. And in that sense for Immersive, I really hope that we learn from that and we make sure that we cherish the richness and the clunkiness. And maybe it's not the most efficient and user friendly right now, but it is an incredible explosion of artistic expression right now. I think that's something we shouldn't lose.
[00:15:26.175] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that in the past we've talked about the dynamics of interaction in the sense that we have a lot of passive media that you could just sit down and watch, but there's something about the interaction that is engaging people. And I've been meditating on this a lot lately as well and thinking about these concepts of potential, of how even in the metaphysics of our physics, we have, you know, kind of like the general relativity that some ways you could say that the world is already made, it's time is already a dimension of space and everything is just deterministically a block universe where everything's already happened. That's one metaphysics that could lead you towards that. But then there's another metaphysics that has like that actually the space-time metric is emergent out of this quantum potential and that potential is not yet decided and it may be that we live in a world that is still in the making moment to moment, kind of like what I've been really into this philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, where he's got this process philosophy that really puts process and relationships at the core metaphysics grounding of all the basis of reality, so that at the core of all of our reality are these unfolding processes, and that when you put it that way, I feel like there's a part of this movement towards trying to create these contexts to invite different levels of group participation and emergence that can only be made by everybody who's collaborating and participating in whatever is unfolding. And I feel like that's where we're headed, but now we're kind of at this kind of local agency or kind of flavoring of the experiences or maybe eventually starting to get first taste of being able to put into an experience and make these choices where you're in this context that you're able to create different situations where you feel like you're able to make some choices that are revealing essential parts of your character. You know, that famous Robert McKee quote that Eric Darnell had told me, which is that stories all about characters being put into situations and making choices under pressure, and based upon the choices they're making, it's revealing a part of their essential character. Well, instead of you watching somebody's story unfold, you are put into that position of making those choices, and it's your character that may be potentially revealed. But I'd love to hear your thoughts and latest reflections on agency and interactivity, since it's such a core part of your own artistic practice through the curation of these different pieces for 15 years now, and what you see is the kind of trends of agency and interactivity.
[00:17:48.340] Caspar Sonnen: Yeah, I think it's... I love how you turn it into a metaphysical conversation, where I feel very inapt to participate. But if we stay within interactive curation of interactive projects, I think maybe in that sense, if we talk about agency or the role of the person experiencing the piece, I think at an early stage, we felt it made sense to make a distinction between interaction and participation. like they can blur into and bleed into each other, but there's a level of both in most projects, but there's definitely projects which, and to a certain extent in these early days of the web, a lot of these artistic experiments were around participation, whether it was like citizen journalism and people participating, co-creating these stories, up until where, I don't know, Kat Cizek is still running the co-creation lab at MIT and doing this amazing research into this. I think it goes from enabling people to tell their own stories or working with people to tell stories together, as opposed to distilling somebody's story out of somebody and turning it into a documentary piece. This is sort of the more playful participation part that we've always very much interested in, which doesn't necessarily require a lot of technology. I don't think we're at a stage where technology is enabling us to do this more now. I mean, take, for instance, the early things that Miranda July was doing or Ze Frank were doing on the internet. or one of my favorites from the last 15 years, The And, the project that we had, which was this interactive documentary, but at the same time just a card game with some really deeply awkward personal questions that you could ask each other. That's a card game you can still play, and it's just cards and questions, just good writing in the end. and getting people to a point where they feel comfortable enough to be awkward with a stranger or with a friend to go through this ritual of asking each other questions that you didn't make up yourself. It's this tension of giving up self-control and giving it to an artist who wrote the question for you that you then ask someone else. In a sense, the technology is not very advanced there. It's a combination of all these different things that makes people crazy enough to ask their loved one, am I the best sex you've ever had in your life? Which is one of the questions in there. I think that's, in a sense of agency, that's probably as far as it gets, right? Like that's a very threatening thing to go through. Is that therapy or art? I don't know. What is that? How do we classify that? I think the key that we feel curating works like this is when works go that approach, where you really ask so much of an audience that they put themselves in such a vulnerable, awkward position. The work really has to deliver. You can't just do that. You can't just give someone a blank piece of paper and say, draw me something. That's almost an offensive thing. I think within interactive art, or maybe especially in interactive art, we need to respect the contract between the artist and the person experiencing the work, that even though you're asking a lot of the person experiencing to do themselves, you give them a lot of agency, they're still trusting you to create a great experience for you, or to make sure that your experience will be great. just like an interview set up like this, I'm still trusting you to come up with interesting questions and not just tell me like, now go talk. And I think that's a big lesson that a lot of interactive artists, sometimes using the most advanced technologies, they then don't get that part right. They still just give me a blank piece of paper in a VR headset. And I'm just, why should I now tell you what my darkest secret is? Like, make me get there. Like, why, why would I? Or why do you give me raw footage to edit my own film out? Why would I? Make it exciting for me, make it worthwhile for me. So I think that's one approach. And there's two approaches to that. It's like if you give people a lot of agency, you have to make sure that you deliver. Another approach is to give people, to really curate the amount of agency or the moments of agency. Like that first project that I mentioned, Tanatorama, it just had a few moments in the piece where it asked you a very clear question. That worked a lot better than just this open world situation where you could get completely lost and have this feeling of like, why am I here? So I think it's on both strategies. Over the last years, I think there's been a lot of lessons learned and you can definitely see in artists that have been in this field for a long time, you can see how their craft is being growing, being fine-tuned further and further in the way that they work. And I'm very excited sometimes by seeing young artists or upcoming artists doing interactive work and seeing that they've really done their work, they've done their research, they've seen some of the classics, they've seen some of the works of the last 20 years. and have learned from that. And that's something that I think is interestingly in a field of new media, and it seems like we have a very, very bad short-term memory. Like, not just the fact that Flash has died, kind of like the nitrate of the internet, and we've lost this whole body of work for people to learn from and look at and take into different technologies and different media, the lessons that you could learn there. It's also this obsession with new media, with the new. It's like, oh, well, if it doesn't have an NFT to it, why would it be programmed this year? Because that's what we're doing this year, right? Well, maybe not. I don't know. Depends. Depends on what you do with it.
[00:23:47.956] Kent Bye: And I guess as we're coming up on this 15 year anniversary, as you look back, I'm wondering if there's any specific phases or turning points that you start to tell the story of what you've been able to accomplish over the last 15 years in terms of where things have started whether it's through different funding initiatives and commissioning or cultivating ecosystem. What's the story you tell yourself in terms of what you've been able to accomplish and what were some of the big turning points where you realized that you had a role to play here with helping to foster both this community and the ecosystem?
[00:24:23.506] Caspar Sonnen: I think one of the big realizations that when we started this, we had no idea what we were doing. And I think because we're doing this within the context of a festival, you have this great opportunity within a festival. You don't have to run the festival year-round and be open year-round. It's a full-on year-round activity. It's an institute, like many of the other big festivals. However, you have this sort of beauty of ten days of being full-on out there, showing everything you worked a year on. condense, curate, create, collaborate, bring for this very brief moment out in the open. And that's a really beautiful invitation because things are allowed to go wrong. You can take more risks than, let's say, a theater or a museum or a television channel or an app platform. Like you can take more risks because everybody is like in that pressure cooker trying to get the most out of it right in the moment. I think in hindsight something we didn't realize initially how crucial that was for what we were doing, like how that put us in a position to just meet a robot artist here and a performance artist there and just go like, hey, actually, it's a month before the festival. But if you want to do something together, this is the deadline we could fly you in. Early, weird conversations like that turned into some of the best works we had at the festival ever. Without knowing it, those were actually sort of commissioned works, but there was not really any structure for that in place. I think that was an early learning where we realized how sometimes it's more important to connect artists and then give them a platform and a deadline. so that they knew there is an audience waiting at the end of that deadline. And that deadline is not going to shift if we're not ready because it's a festival and it's not going to move for this one project. And actually, all my peers will be there. So shit, it has to be really good, even though it's just an experiment and there is a very warm and loving community. It's still everybody will be there going like, hey, is that the best you could do? I think that's something that we as festivals should really cherish. because it's the trust that artists give us, that they bring their work to this venue. That was something we learned I think around like 10 years ago or something, we started to realize not just in talking with artists, how can we exhibit this work or how can we transform it into something that suits the exhibition potential that a festival has? But it was like, how can we stimulate this form of experimentation? And that's, I think, started then and in the end ended up as the foundation for what our R&D program with MIT has become. where now we have like an open call every year where we invite artists to send us proposals and we are able to give a little bit of funding usually more than mostly just gap funding but it's to bring these projects to the festival and it's allowed projects like Collider a lot of different projects that I think in some cases wouldn't have existed without the festival inviting them to bring it to the festival. And I think that's something in hindsight that over the last 15 years we've become more and more proud of and honoured by. That's a position in the field that a lot of festivals share and it's created this sort of shadow circuit of works being created and experienced outside of the regular circuit. And sometimes maybe because there isn't a regular circuit yet, But yeah, I think that's definitely one of the key narratives over the last 15 years.
[00:28:11.920] Kent Bye: Great. Well, as we start to wrap up, I'm curious to hear from you what you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies and the future of documentary and interactive media, immersive storytelling, what the future of all that may be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:28:29.661] Caspar Sonnen: Yeah, I think we had a conversation recently with some people at the Ministry of Culture in the Netherlands who were trying to prepare the upcoming Minister of Culture on how to deal with the field of digital arts and immersive And I think an interesting part of that conversation was defining this field and saying, should there be next to cinema and visual arts and theatre and architecture and design, should there be an immersive or interactive or digital art pillar? Should that be its own strand with its own museums and its own festivals, etc? Or should we see this more as living as extensions of existing forms of artistic expression? Should there be a sort of digital architecture, digital theatre, immersive design and all that? And I think after 15 years, seeing things come and go, I would say I'm very excited about this field hopefully still being both. Making sure that we can still be both. because that means that it's truly interdisciplinary and truly a moving target. Because I think the key thing that this field has brought is, because it's so in motion, that it's a different way of expression, where I think within existing, more traditional media, sometimes when things are formatted, it can almost lead to a, like, rebel against the format. And I think in this field, it seems like there's little to rebel against. yet. It's much more about just establishing a format or creating a format. And I think that's a very special space, both for artists, but also for audiences. It's a very exciting thing to explore. If you're feeling adventurous, it's very nice to sort of go explore all these different things. I think like Will and Riccio said, it's the difference between going on a guided tour or just wandering off and see where you end up. And I think that translates into the works itself as well. I think there's something beautiful about interactive and tech-driven works, or works using interactive technology, that both challenges and asks questions to itself. Like, what is this medium? What is this experience? But also, what is this technology? I think if you want to be critical about artificial intelligence, it makes a lot of sense to explore some of the artists working with artificial intelligence. If you want to be critical of the escapism that VR might, or this sort of metaverse parallel reality that VR might bring as a form of sad escapism, I think there's a lot of great VR work that actually addresses this head on in a way that a film can also do, but do differently. And I think where it differs is that the question is more direct. Going back to the question of agency, you are complicit to the experience. you are not sitting back and watching it somewhere over there. You're in it. That doesn't mean it creates more empathy or any of the other bold claims that are made about new media. But it does mean that it's a different type of experience where you are slightly out of your established comfort zone of how to deal with it, how to interact with it. how to relate to it. And that, when done well, can extend to the topic of the experience. It can extend to the narrative itself, where you're relating to a narrative in a new way.
[00:32:05.020] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive storyteller or doc lab community?
[00:32:12.147] Caspar Sonnen: No, I mean, if anything, I would say it's over the last 15 years, we started to realize more and more is that how much this field has grown and how even though everything is still feels early stage or feels like there is still not a single word that can be used to describe this field. Is it XR? Is it immersive, interactive? We did a little questionnaire within the industry as part of the 15 years, and it was half of respondents came up with an answer, but there was like five or six different answers, and the other half came up with endless amounts of other words to describe their field or their practice. And I think that really shows the fuzziness and the awkwardness and the inaccessibility. And it's all of that, but also really shows the reach and the diversity. And I think that's been really beautiful, seeing some of the new artists we've been working with each year and also just the team. I think starting in 2007, it was just one or two people and a website. Now it's such a big team with the fact that it's not just single people, but it's like a whole team, Botinke Vermeer, Annabel Troost, so many people within our team that we're actually creating the program with together. Just like the artists, some of them we've been working with for 15 years, many we discover each year. Again, I think that growth and that still sort of finding artists in all the wrong places, Like in 2009, when we had to convince Eric Glass that what he did was relevant to documentary, we still have that conversation each year with many artists. Whether it's an indie gamer who's like a game studio, it's like, what is my work to do with reality or documentary? And then they come here and they're like, ah, now I see, or a theater maker like Ondroerend Goed, we're here with TM this year. It's really beautiful to see how a lot of artists and people working in this field realize that what they do somehow relates to reality. It's not just escapism or entertainment or distraction.
[00:34:22.333] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I had a chance to attend IFA doc lab in 2018, just kind of a 24 hour layover that I got a whirlwind tour and really expanded my mind about what documentary is and could be and coming back in 2019. And, you know, I look forward to both the experiences in the community coming together each year and seeing what type of latest innovations are. I feel like it's It's one of the things that I ended up being one of my favorite festivals, just to see what is happening within the broader immersive storytelling community. And yeah, I just always love to hear your insights. And yeah, congratulations on this 15 years of the IFA doc lab. It's been quite a journey and played quite a role of many different artists' lives as I've talked to them. And having a place to go show things, it's a huge thing to be able to have a context that they could really expand their own thinking and to have an audience that will be receptive and to be able to help respond to it and help it grow. So, yeah, it's been amazing what you've been able to cultivate there and looking forward to where it all goes in the future. So, Casper, congratulations and thanks again for joining us here today to be able to unpack your story and reflect on the past 15 years of IFFIT Talk Lab.
[00:35:28.933] Caspar Sonnen: on behalf of the entire team. Thank you very much, and it's been a pleasure having you.
[00:35:34.078] Kent Bye: So that was Kasper Sonnen. He's the founder of the InfoDocLab, which started back in 2007 in order to showcase digital, interactive, and immersive works. It evolved into first showing web-based projects, and then on to theatrical screenings of interactive pieces, and then now into full-on exhibitions, immersive performances, and interactive documentaries. This conversation was recorded on Friday, December 3, 2021, as part of a collaboration with IFFES.club in order to celebrate their 15th year anniversary. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.