I interviewed Peupler (Populate) co-directors Maya Mouawad and Cyril Laurier at Venice Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] 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 immersive storytelling, experiential design, and the future for spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences from Venice Immersive 2023, this is episode number 10 out of 35 and number two out of five of looking at the context of place, home, and environment. So today's episode, we're going to be diving into a place called Pouplier, also known as Populate by Maya Mouawad, as well as Siri Laurier. And it's a piece that is an installation piece that is an interactive projection map type of experience where there's an installation of a tree. It's around a 10 minute music experience. And as the music is progressing, it is sort of telling the story, both the relationship between humans as well as nature. And so at the very beginning, someone picks a location on a map and it takes a satellite photo. And then from that satellite photo, it essentially outlines what the human-made roads are versus what the more nature aspects are. And so there's this dialectic that unfolds over the course of this piece where nature and humans are kind of battling it out in different aspects. It's a very abstract piece that is exploring some of those different aspects of the narrative. You really kind of have to work for it. The center of gravity of the context is looking at the environment. It's looking at these different modes of visual storytelling and in communication. It's also looking at the context of death and the destruction of the environment, but also this battle between humans and nature. And so the primary center of gravity of presence is very much in the act of presence and interactivity. There's a lot of ways in which that these projection maps are dynamically interacting to different things that you're doing, whether you're walking around, or there's a number of different Microsoft Connect depth cameras, kind of modeling what you are interacting in a 3d space, and it's projecting it onto the walls. And so you have these kind of mirror moments where you're able to look at your own embodiment with filters on top of it. So there's a another aspect of the environmental presence as well as embodied presence as you start to express your body in the context of this experience. So it's primarily active and interactive aspects, but there's also a mental presence aspect where you kind of have to puzzle together what the deeper meaning of the experience is, but also this aspect of embodied environmental presence. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wists of VR podcast. So this interview with Maya and Cyril happened on Sunday, September 3rd, 2023 at the Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:45.743] Maya Mouawad: My name is Mayem Ouawad and I come from an engineering school in art and technology from 2002 and I worked in many, like digital art, I mainly worked in video mapping and artistic installation in contemporary art mostly.
[00:03:08.946] Cyril Laurier: My name is Cyril Laurier and I come from the same school as Maya. We actually met there. And I specialize into what we call today AI. I call it machine learning because it was more like in academia. I was studying at IRCAM, which is a research center and a cultural center at the same time, from the Pompidou Center in Paris. And I continued with a PhD about music and emotions, and now I'm doing a deal with Maya where we try to apply all those studies to do art installations.
[00:03:42.407] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your educational training and your journey into working with some of this type of immersive art.
[00:03:51.635] Maya Mouawad: So my educational training was this school. Firstly I did this engineering school, so we learned how to code, we learned how to do movies, how to record sounds, how to work as a team and how to mix arts with technology. The school was related to a laboratory that investigated new technologies at the time, so we talk about 2002, where we were coding the first AR, VR, virtual reality, stereoscopic thing, so we had no software at the time, we were just coding them. And then I did theater also and I work in animation and I was very interested into art, concept of art, and how to trigger emotion and create scenography. And we first did our first residencies with a musician that was a beatboxer, Ezra, and We started doing since the 2007-8 residency randomly in France and started to play with new tech connected to the movements and create the loops with gloves that we conceived with them and connected with the sound and this is how we step slowly into this world and then collaborated with Pablo Valbuena, Romain Tardy from Antivijay. We created software at the time that didn't exist to control LEDs and light to make possible a setup very quickly in a random place anywhere in the world. And then we started proposing our own artistic interpretation around climate change.
[00:05:39.765] Cyril Laurier: That was a very good answer. I think a turning point for me was when I was actually at IRCAM in Paris and discovered how composers were using technology to invent new ways of making music, like algorithmically or about the shaping the sound. So I got really fascinated by this world and I wanted to participate in that. So I started to code software for musicians, got into companies that were doing that and then started a PhD around music and technology and then I thought there were so many interesting tools that I could use to create my own music with it and to link it with visuals. So that's how naturally I started to go into those residency with artists, with musicians and with people like Maya that were doing you know like this interactive generative visuals and naturally it was a The tendency was like to go to some more connection between sound and visuals and trying to make art together.
[00:06:39.794] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could talk a bit about how this project that you're showing here at Venice Immersive 2023, Pouple Populate, as the English translation, how this project came about.
[00:06:52.807] Maya Mouawad: Okay, so populate actually starts with the word that is populate because the meaning of populate is very interesting because we only use the word populate for human beings. When we think about it, the trees inhabit the earth, the bees inhabit the earth, while humans populate. Like we were the only one that were worried about how to populate. So we wanted to talk about this word and We just wanted to change the meaning of the world with an installation. We use the tree as a symbol to talk about other kinds of living, to make people feel through emotion that trees have the right to populate as we do. And we use the tree as a symbol. This installation has the tree in the middle. and you can see the roots growing. So you pick up a destination and you get to see the roots growing and looking for, when you see the map on the floor, looking for other trees around and try to feel how lonely or not lonely this tree might be. What's interesting about the tree is that we symbolize the tree with a trunk. So we see trees with a trunk where the trunk is maybe most of it is a dead part of the tree. Everything happens on the roots and we can't see it. So we thought like maybe if humans we get to understand that the roots are alive and we can see it because it's impossible to see. Maybe we can connect with it and we can feel that these trees has a soul maybe or intelligence at least. Thank you.
[00:08:32.501] Cyril Laurier: I think we get into those kind of installations through our interest in general and sometimes fears about climate change, for example, or at least like a strong interest on this topic. And we want to do something about it. And we think that our way of expression, like the medium we use and the impact we can have, can go through this kind of installation. And it often starts with a book. In that case, it was a book from Mancuso. He's an Italian researcher. and he developed all these experiences like scientific approach to understand the intelligence of the plants on the tree in particular. So you get to learn a lot about that and it's quite recent that we know all the details of what's going on underground and how they communicate and like some kind of scientific approach to show that. So it was a big influence on our own sensitivity about the trees and all the life forms. There's also a French philosopher that talks about the life forms in general and that tell us that we shouldn't differentiate nature and humans because we are in the nature so it talks about like living forms in general and all of this like nourish our preparation gets into trying to express those emotions we have into an installation. What was the name of that French philosopher? The French philosopher is called Baptiste Morisot. He's also applying to himself his own philosophy, so he has a lot of interest into any life form, especially forests. He also works with wolves and tries to find them and communicate with them somehow. He's a big inspiration in our work.
[00:10:09.282] Maya Mouawad: And also I would like to add the fact that, because it maybe also sounds contradictory, we're using technology to talk about nature. And we know people are interested and fascinated by technology. There is something about humanity, I think, in general. that thing like if we're able to go on the moon, we can save the planet with our technology. And for us, technology is not a mystery box like something magical that will create all and save everyone. So we want people to understand that nature is the only direction we have to look. So we use technology to create the attraction for the fascination of technology. And we want them to look the other side, to use them, to bring them to the essential.
[00:10:55.220] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a really fun time in this experience, both exploring and dancing, and also this piece is right at the front of Venice Immersive Exhibition, which means that every time this 10-minute loop plays, I've heard it dozens of times by now, it's sort of a nice arc of a musical piece that's been created, but also an interactive piece with lots of projection maps and interactive projection map with Kinect cameras, and you can interact with the floor, you can interact with the wall, And there's like this very interesting tree sculpture that is very angular, has these little slits that have lights that then project out light, but then there's projection map projecting onto it. So yeah, there's a lot of really beautifully designed shader type of routes that are on the ground and tied to a very specific location each time. So yeah, I had a chance to do it a couple of times and really enjoy the experience, just like a fun way to loosen up or to get connected to my body and the world around me in a way, in the sense of that I'm connected to, as I move my body, I can see the impacts of my body moving in the world around me. So it's a very layered piece where you have projection map, you have the music, you have the interactive components. And so they're all kind of tied together. So I'm just curious how you start to piece this experience together. If you start with the music or if you start with the visuals or where do you begin with a piece like this?
[00:12:15.690] Cyril Laurier: I think the way we work kind of changes time, but there's kind of a pattern that emerges and that usually Maya has... We have maybe an idea of a concept, we read a book, we share some discussions about a subject and then she has kind of an idea, that's the vision of the project and write it down and that's kind of the basis of the inspiration for that. And then we usually work on the music. So I did the music with Louis Rafton, he's a co-composer. So we have this concept that brings to a kind of narrative that's still quite abstract in terms of what it's going to look like but that's enough for us like to develop the whole music and with our own vision of it and then it's a kind of an iterative approach where we see what visuals we're going to work with that and and what's also the flow of the installation where we're going to go with it where is the climax, how does it end in a positive way for example it was a big question how do we end this we want to keep some hope at the end so that's why it's a happy way of like cheerful ending in terms of music and also we do a lot of field recording or use like It's very subtle maybe when you listen to it, keep like the melodies very important and the rhythm, but also all these elements that we record in very specific time and important for us like, you know, bring more content to it and more emotional, you know, drive.
[00:13:40.790] Maya Mouawad: For me, the idea usually comes to me before I go for it. There is a context, there is a situation and I just let my brain alone and suddenly it strikes me. and when it strikes me I start to write and then everything like it's like suddenly you had ideas and it's like everything like we need that and suddenly yeah we I need a tree we need this and then we can and then I just have the feeling of what I need so for the roots for example I needed the roots I needed to feel the roots I needed to feel the life and the roots and then it's the team like we collaborate with Ben and Gamgee and Joanne said, OK, I need to feel the roots. How can you translate this feeling? What are your tool? What software do you work? And we work it out together. And as a programmer, I can understand. So I said, OK, we need to work with shader because the movements are really important. And so we started experimenting different kind of Way to have this feeling and then we say okay. I need the shadow would be great But there is nothing like at this moment to get the real shadow of everyone in every side so been starting developing a software especially to get the full 3d point cloud and we ended up innovating and creating software for it which was a well it's really cool because then we can explore a new kind of expression and see how to interact with it and how do you feel in this space so it's a really teamwork and they're using every powerful skill of everyone on the project.
[00:15:20.195] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so it sounds like that you have an idea and a concept when you do the writing. So then did you have a pitch as to what the full arc, where you wanted to go from the beginning, middle and end, if it was more of that, or if it was more of an iterative process of like chasing these individual feelings and kind of see how the structure of the piece is put together.
[00:15:37.969] Maya Mouawad: No, it was a wide card. We didn't have any pitch.
[00:15:43.012] Cyril Laurier: There was actually a storyboard about, but it's more like an emotional journey than a storyboard. It's like if, uh, The narrative is quite abstract, but it also has a meaning for us that we can share with people, but I think it's better that they really feel it by themselves. But yes, there is some kind of, at the beginning, some kind of mood we want to... It's more like an evolution of the mood and some deep meaning that we want to... convey but then it translates into feeling like how people would feel here now they should feel vulnerable now they should feel connected with the tree and we kind of build the story like that and the end should be like more happy like a bringing us together for a better future with the way we populate Earth with other living forms.
[00:16:27.213] Maya Mouawad: I like the scenography, like finding the way to make the people not applausing. I really like the fact that people don't have the space to applause because it's a contemplative journey and then you're in this mood and suddenly everybody applauses and just go out. I just wanted the people to go out with the feeling and not like feeling obliged to applause, for example.
[00:16:51.906] Cyril Laurier: It's pretty nice this ending because you have like this big climax very positive connection with the tree and then you don't know if it's really finished you can hear the birds and it makes a moment of you know like this kind of suspended moment like those 10 seconds are very essential for you to digest I think what just happened and make you think a bit more and like it's kind of a meditative state you're in at that point and we really like that it works like that yes.
[00:17:19.572] Kent Bye: Well, it sounds like that you got your whole PhD exploring this intersection between music and emotion and there's different keys and key signatures and other things like rhythm and lyrics and you know different genres of music and so it's a lot to try to like decode the connections between the elements of music and how to translate that into the spectrums of emotion and I know there's like the Geneva wheel that you can look at the temperaments of looking at like whether or not there's like positive and negative and then different valences of Traditional temperaments of looking at emotions. And so I guess as you are using feeling and emotion to drive this experience What kind of elements were you using in the composition or the music as you're combining everything together? With the addition of adding the embodiment interactivity and other dimensions that can drive emotion so just curious how you start to think about all the elements that to bring together, if it's just something that you intuitively do and have the feeling that you know, or if there's some other deeper theory, considering you got your PhD in that.
[00:18:15.313] Cyril Laurier: Yeah, very good question. I think working on that topic makes me very sensitive to that, but it's kind of an intuitive approach anyway. So I didn't apply like a magical formula coming from the machine learning to make you feel some emotions because I don't feel like ethically I really like that. But still, I've been decoding that for three years, five years actually, the PhD was longer than I expected. So I guess I never really think deeply about that but i guess i'm applying some kind of rules you know in a subconscious way but yeah with the co-composer louis we do a lot of yeah we work a lot on trying to really match the concept match the emotion that we discuss with maya we would like to have so i guess like i'm secretly applying without knowing it's some kind of uh emotion secrets or something like that
[00:19:07.550] Kent Bye: And when you think about the emotional arc of this piece, where do you want people to start and where do you want to take them at the climax and where do you want them to end?
[00:19:16.977] Maya Mouawad: So I want people to, in the first part, I want people to feel emotional about their roots, feeling the tree underneath and projecting themselves connected to the tree, thinking like the tree can feel you. In the middle part, I want people to think about death. Because we are taking decisions, all of us, in our everyday life, under pressure of... I may be a boss, or maybe whatever in your life gives you pressure, but the day you are close to death, what would you think? of the decision that you made under pressure, under other circumstances, what was really important. And also, as the tree gets fed by your shadows, I like the fact that suddenly the tree, like you see something inferior, becomes suddenly, well, at the end the tree is still there and I won't be there anymore. And to feel the life going on inside of it with the LEDs, and suddenly the tree projects light all over the place and we have all this technology to make the projection mapping and everything and suddenly the tree tells you, boom, I'm there, I'm alive and he's taking over the place. And at the end I just want people to feel there is a conflict that is resolved. We resolve that conflict between nature, sound, trees, any kind of living thing, us as humans, because people that experience the installation are part of the installation as representative of human beings and our population, like the places where you have chosen the space, the city or the nature you've chosen to do the experience.
[00:21:09.659] Kent Bye: Yeah, because at the beginning, you give one participant the option to choose a location. And then I had a chance to do it twice. And the second time, I chose Portland, Oregon, which is where I am currently living. And so it had a much more angular, like, in the cityscapes of everything, which was a little bit different than maybe, I think, the first time I did it, which had a much more organic layout of the space. And so it was definitely a different vibe based upon taking a snapshot of, the satellite photo and then tracing out the lines of that shape to give you a sense of that city. And then that forms an underlying basis that has a lot of generative art from there. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about that decision to make that an option for people to choose that and whether or not there's good or bad choices in terms of what type of experiences that creates.
[00:21:59.635] Cyril Laurier: I think the main reason was for the main interest to do that is to connect people with what they are going to live like I like for example myself I like to do it in some places that are in my childhood memory for example or some places I've been or I would like to be but I think it works nicely if it's really connected to to your own story it can be where you live it can be So I think this really helps to give you some kind of deeper emotions, like be more connected with the experience.
[00:22:33.571] Maya Mouawad: Okay, so the idea was this generative art, like what you see, we call it like the slime, it behaves like hunts. So it's like a community of hands that follow each other and we control the way they're attracted to another and this is how actually it moves. So we have a community that draws the streets and a community that looks for nature. So we wanted to have the tree going and designing the streets and another community looking to connect the tree with nature and those parts are green, if you see. So at the end the street disappears and you just have the green part that is left. And this is how you have a bit of a landscape of how busy, in terms of nature, this place is.
[00:23:21.217] Kent Bye: OK, yeah, so I think the second time I did it, there was a lot more streets than the first time that I did it. But there seemed to be, like, what you're saying is that competing, like, the streets overtake the beginning, and then eventually the nature is, in some ways, decolonizing the people who are populating it in a way that gets it a little bit more closer to nature.
[00:23:39.305] Maya Mouawad: Yes, exactly. You said it perfectly.
[00:23:45.570] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so the middle part has a lot of interactivity in terms of, so you have a number of different like motion capture connect cameras or some sort of other spatial capture device that then is able to capture enough people to project them on the walls. You say the optimum number is around six people, which is what is running here at Venice Immersive, but I'm sure you could expand that out and have even more people with the larger space, but maybe talk about in this instance, how many different motion cameras do you have to then recreate the silhouettes on the four different walls that are in this experience.
[00:24:17.552] Cyril Laurier: Yeah, to do the tracking we use four different cameras, like depth cameras. So we have the point cloud of the space and we can merge them together. And it's Ben Cooper, one of the developers that worked on Peuple, that did the software that's merging all the cameras. And so with four cameras we can track many people at the same time and avoid occlusion from one camera to another because we kind of merge the space all together. And there's not really a limit of how many people, it's just like, how many people would be comfortable in that space to evolve together. So it could be good alone, it could be good with a lot of people, but technically we can have it in a bigger space as well, and for this one we thought between four and six is a good number.
[00:25:02.503] Maya Mouawad: We have also another setup with six cameras, so it can be scaled.
[00:25:09.405] Kent Bye: So it seems like that with those four Microsoft Azure cameras, you're having people dancing and moving around, but you're able to capture like a full volumetric capture, but you're able to project them on a wall. So imagine that you're creating like a 3D environment and then being able to kind of project a camera from two of the different angles so that you have the different walls that then you have like this kind of bird-like shader that you first see people like this particle effect that you're It's kind of a subtle thing at first and then eventually you turn into more of a light being so it's a little bit more defined and crisp where it's more of your boundaries being a little bit larger than you actually are and so it gives you a little bit of like you're hidden in the nature but then you have a deeper soul essence of the person as you go forward and the different colors of that with multiple people. So yeah, it was a really cool interactive technique because you're also doing that on the floor for people as they're moving around and the different routes, different moments where you're able to interact with the floor around you. So having those different shaders and being able to locate people in time and space and then track where they're moving and then have the interactivity, which I thought was quite a fun aspect of agency and interactivity and really encouraged me to play around and see how my embodied movements were able to change the world around me as everything was flowing around. So yeah, I'd love to hear any thoughts on that process of being able to create that type of experience for people.
[00:26:30.810] Maya Mouawad: Yeah, this is exactly what we wanted to create and it's really cool that everything was like it works exactly the way we wanted to design it and our main focus was to find the right balance between the interactivity and not changing it to a game. Like when we start having the tracking and we could play with the camera of the position having everyone Walking around and you have the roots deforming. It was really fun when we were playing or say to exaggerate the interactivity But we had to lower it down to keep it at a minimum so people don't start like getting out of the story and Find the right balance between the artistic concept and the fun of the technology by itself
[00:27:19.737] Cyril Laurier: also because it's a contemplative installation. It's interesting to see how the interaction is subtle and so maybe sometimes we don't use it so you kind of disappear and then it comes back. So people are like also like questioning themselves how they interact and how to interact with the roots or with the walls. And I also like the fact that you don't realize that it's you at the beginning that's appearing on the wall because it's like particles floating around but slowly you discover that you can, you know, interact and it's a projection of yourself that you're seeing and then when you start to be in that stage of starting to, not playing, but like interacting a lot with it, then you kind of disappear and go back to the tree. So I think the timing of that moment was very important to grasp and it's working very well with the people we see here.
[00:28:13.865] Kent Bye: I'd love if you could expand a little bit on the very stylized abstract representation of the tree because it's very angular and it's got these sort of triangle. It feels like a low poly representation of a tree that has the cracks in between that you have lights that are shooting out light from it and then you have projection map onto it later, different slits of light that make it have this powerful effect of feeling like it's this real luminous tree. But yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the design of the tree and what you were trying to achieve with its very stylized aesthetic.
[00:28:48.490] Maya Mouawad: Yeah, so the idea was how to get the shadows of the tree to expand and to make an object. So when you enter in the room, you see the tree and it's like a sculpture. You don't need to turn this off anything, any projectors or anything. You have the tree in the space. So by itself, this tree gives an identity and it talks by itself. It's like a piece. And the idea was to create those shadows and having these floating pieces because every piece in the tree is like floating in the middle of nothing. And we have to get the space inside empty so we can put LEDs inside so the shadows could reflect and go through those edges. And this was really difficult for the team that made it. For me it was a 3D I designed and the idea was a tree opens and imagine out of the roof continue growing, right? But at the beginning I even wanted like people to be able to sit on it, but this was too complicated. So they had to 3D print every corner of the tree with a transparent material so the light could go through and create this effect of this constructed floating tree.
[00:30:11.321] Kent Bye: I was talking to Tim, who's the director of Home, which is an installation here that also has a lot of projection mapping, and he was telling me about how he had to get the dimensions of the space and then model everything out in Blender and then have different plugins to be able to get the right projection information in there to start to model it. I'm just curious if you had to take a similar approach of getting all the different room dimensions and measuring all the different where things are at with the tree sculpture and trying to get all the right inputs or at least have an iterative process where you could simulate what it's going to look like before you actually build it out. And then once you get here, all the different tweaking to be able to actually make it all work.
[00:30:48.628] Cyril Laurier: Yes, we did a lot of 3D simulation and plans and tried to see what kind of projector would work. We had an idea of which projector to use because we found some very low consumption projectors that are really efficient and light. that have a lot of good properties and are coherent with our approach as well. So we tried to design the space and Biennale and Venice Immersive, they were very kind to accept us to design the space to the dimension that would fit the need of the projection. So to have it as big as we could do to have this very immersive sensation. So we are very happy about the result, but also they have been very flexible to adapt to all the things we wanted to add, like the tulle to have semi-transparency, like being it open to the world, like not a closed space, so you can see it from outside, you can see through the tulle and see some of the people that are interacting inside as well. So it's been a lot of work in designing the space and finding the right, all the piece of technology that goes inside, it's a lot of work to see how dimensions will work, which camera, where to put them, so the preparation was a huge amount of work, yes.
[00:32:02.464] Maya Mouawad: it was quite an investment of energy because we mounted an immersive room in an island so if we miss one cable it's at least a day to go and pick him up so it was quite a stressy to arrive and be sure we didn't forget anything yeah
[00:32:21.473] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's quite an epic task to be able to do that. And in terms of the simulation and how it came out at the end, were you able to build any of the installation at home? Or was this kind of the first time that you were able to see what everything would look like in the space that it was designed for?
[00:32:37.132] Cyril Laurier: For this space, we couldn't really test it. We didn't have time to test exactly that space. But for the development of the piece, we've been doing some residency. We worked in a residency form with all the people that are involved in this project, all the developers, and also the production, Fisheye. So we could, with them, design some residency program, like a week or two that will all be together in a space that's more or less similar, but not exactly the same. So that was a development last year when we developed the piece. And for Venice we couldn't really try how it would look like, but we knew that it could work. We did some minimal testing so we knew it would look good with those projectors. We are very happy actually with the result. We tested that we could have a bit of light from outside without disturbing the projection. And yeah, I guess when we arrived here, we were like, OK, this is going to work. You know, like there was a lot of doubts about the logistics, how everything was going to work. For myself, it was a lot of preparation for like listing every cable, like Maya just said. But, I don't know, from the day we arrived here we felt like very confident that everything would be easy and also they helped us a lot also to whatever issue we had. So, also the team has been incredible to mount that, the tree, the projectors very smoothly. So, yeah, we are very confident then that we could like, you know, hopefully make Populate go into other places and so we can display the piece somewhere else.
[00:34:10.623] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a bit of a tonal shift in the piece where the music kind of shifts and there's also these rippling out rings of light that go out that are more red and have a little bit more of, it feels like a bomb going off or some sort of sonic impact or at least some impact that's kind of rippling out through the space and love if you could expand on that specific moment of what is sort of happening in the arc of the narrative at that moment.
[00:34:34.752] Maya Mouawad: Yes, at that moment, it's talking between the tree and the humans. And what it draws, there is a first explosion, and then the next explosions, it draws the city. And it draws the city, and when the explosions from human, the tree, human, the tree, human, the tree, you see that the city goes and transforms as it was a community, I don't know, bacteria, or something like natural, like a form, I mean, it looks more organic, so the city starts to become very vegetal, like it's a symbolic that we wanted to have at that moment.
[00:35:14.222] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the piece overall has this very abstract storytelling mode and there's an intention that you have of the story that I'm getting a lot more context about the arc of the story that, you know, as I see it, I'm picking up on little moments and I certainly have a feeling as I'm walking away. But I'm curious to hear any reflections around the visual storytelling language of immersive art and the potential gaps between what you're trying to say and what people may be taking away from it.
[00:35:39.957] Maya Mouawad: Yeah, actually there was one piece, we made a piece, it's a permanent installation at RUINA. There are guides that go and make the visits and our instruction is to explain the piece after they saw it because I really like when people come to me, like when we inaugurated and people come to me and say exactly know what you meant. Here is the birth, and here is the... And it's not what I used to tell the story, but the feeling is more important when the people get this feeling and create their own story around it. Like, we draw the story with my life, my personal things, the things that we worried about, but every human has his own interpretation, and it's fine. I mean, it's great.
[00:36:32.771] Cyril Laurier: Actually, sometimes it's like there is some unconscious meaning or at least we like to understand. I mean, what happens sometimes is like, okay, you have seen that, but yes, you're totally right. Maybe to the intention and I didn't know it, but it kind of nourishes our own ideas and our own way of creating and it's just, yeah, working on the emotional narrative. brings this kind of moment where people give you a lot of feedback about how they felt. And it's good that it's personal. And if people want to know more about what was the intention, it's good and we can talk about it. It's very interesting to have their feedback first, actually.
[00:37:12.918] Kent Bye: Yeah and here at Venice Immersive 2023 there's a lot of demand to see all the different projects here and it's booked out pretty quickly and one of the last ones to get booked is Populate because you have the shortest of all the different screenings at 10 minutes and then you have six people per screening so it's the most opportunities for people to see things so I've often come across people who this is the only thing that they're able to get booked and then On top of that, people can kind of hop in because you can do six people at a time. So you've had probably the experience that's been able to have the biggest throughput and see the most people see it. So I'd love to hear any feedback or any reactions that you have heard from a wide range of different people over the course of the week here at Venice Immersive.
[00:37:54.833] Cyril Laurier: There is obviously like a whole range of different approaches. I think it really depends on the mood people are in. Like if you're stressed for your next session that's coming up like in 10 minutes, then it's a bit harder to get into it. Some people do, some others are too like, you know, in their brains and thinking about the next minutes. It kind of needs to slow down a bit and to disconnect from the rest and be more in the moment, the most meditative mindfulness kind of state. So there are like some beautiful moments where people that know each other often, I mean it's nice to have people that know each other because they were like more likely to interact and some people dance together or just like hold their hands and the connection on the floor like also like enhance this connection. So that rather like very nice moments of people that for those 10 minutes they just disconnect and you know be in the moment.
[00:38:50.296] Maya Mouawad: So it's like some reactions. It happens a couple of times when somebody would come and say, we thought it would be much more interactive. And for me to respond, yeah, but I don't want you to modify nature. And they would answer, you just caught me. They don't know what to say. Say, oh, yeah, you're right. Actually, that was. And they suddenly make like they understand. And I really like that.
[00:39:17.256] Kent Bye: Yeah, I will say that there is a lot of technical innovations that you have to be able to do this type of like group volumetric capture and projection that there was like a lot of novelty in that type of interactions that you have. But even though it wasn't gamified in that way, there was a delightful experience of being able to move my body through space and have the world react to it, which I think is something that I was really taking away from the piece, even though it's also very musically driven piece that the music is driving a certain emotional tenor that is also there. So there's this tension between the agency of like exerting you will into the experience versus the receptivity of just like listening and being in relationship to the world around you and the music. So it's kind of an interesting dialectic that you have between the interaction parts but also the music that has its whole emotional arc to it as well.
[00:40:06.893] Maya Mouawad: There is the smell also. There is an immersive smell. We send different kind of smell like we specialize. So we send different smell from each side of the room. So you can experience while moving the smell going from one to another. So we would like to put wood and fire in one side. And it would depend. We would like in a more advanced version of Peuplet to work more about correlating the
[00:40:35.221] Kent Bye: Place on the world or the season of the place on the world you choose to the smells Yeah, I must forgot to mention the whole multi century component I had smelled the wood in the beginning But is that the only two smells that you have through the entire experience or do you have other smells? I?
[00:40:51.776] Maya Mouawad: Now we have about, now in the machine we have like five or six different smells, and it triggers, for now it's random, but we would like to have a bit more time to choose very precisely which smell at which moment, which quantity, depending on the space. But there is 20 capsules, different capsules, and 10 in each machine.
[00:41:14.855] Kent Bye: Great, and two smell machines in the space?
[00:41:17.619] Maya Mouawad: Two machines and each capsule has a different smell. We can choose which one. We control it with DMX, like the same thing that we use for light. So we control the quantity and the capsule, the smell we want to produce.
[00:41:32.075] Kent Bye: It's a full multi-sensory experience in that sense.
[00:41:36.931] Cyril Laurier: With the music we also worked with Louis on how to make it specialized, so you have like four speakers, one subwoofer, so that's also another immersive part of it. In the studio we worked a lot on those ideas like separating the tracks and trying to think about how we were gonna specialize every element, so at some point when you could see yourself going back to the tree, you can really listen like it's coming from different places at different timings. But that's also, yeah, part of the immersion is thanks to the specialized sound.
[00:42:09.807] Kent Bye: Do you create an ambisonic mix or how do you create the specialization with the four speakers and subwoofer?
[00:42:15.689] Cyril Laurier: Yes, at the beginning we worked in Louis' studio in Barcelona and we worked with a lot of tracks, like so many tracks, and then we think about which one could be at different positions and then we had a lot of work of doing this surround track that's driving Peuple. And it's a huge work when you mix it, but I think it really enhances the... even though probably people don't really realize deeply that, but it's really kind of... We have a lot of good feedback on the music and how you are immersed thanks to the music and I think the spatialization works as a big importance in that.
[00:42:50.263] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's something I really noticed the second time I went through as I was like walking through by myself and just kind of walking around the space and listening to how the sounds were changing as well. So yeah, and yeah, just as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of immersive art, immersive entertainment, immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:43:12.869] Maya Mouawad: Climate change is a topic that touches everybody, but it's also a topic that if I try to convince you with your changing your mind and point of view on something and we argue here talking about yes but this and that, we can talk for hours. But we think that with emotion, with something you live, maybe you get touched and maybe it changes something. Because we would like to grow the spectrum of empathy that we have as a human. Because maybe two or three hundred years ago you had empathy for your neighbor, your family, maybe the people from your village or people from your religion and then people from other countries and we grow up this spectrum of empathic pathy considering brothers and sisters more and more community and kind of living. We included animals, some of the animals and more animals and we wanted here to have the tree included as in other species but here in that piece the tree in particular included in that spectrum of empathy because the tree is a very big symbolic of like the trees and plants is 99% of the biomass of the earth. And it was here long before us. It will be here far after us. It cannot escape in front of danger. How can we think they don't have intelligence? How can we not include those elements as part of a living that we have to empathy with and consider it as an object? This was the big inspiration that, I don't know, touched us from the book from Mancuso e Viola, The Intelligence of the Plants. And we wanted to take that element that's in consideration and do a piece that would say exactly this, but through an installation.
[00:45:08.684] Cyril Laurier: I guess we are kind of discovering also all the different storytelling, new storytelling that comes with VR, because it's originally and mostly now still a VR festival. So we're kind of discovering other forms that are maybe less in our artistic community, which is more like installation-based or projection mapping. But our direction is, like we said before, is more like in an abstract way of telling stories. So we like this abstract, emotional, like very sensorial way of, you know, change your perspective, change your perception of a space and work deeply on those like subtle changes and subtle narrative that can bring an emotion before. And then you build up the story or you listen to us if you want to give you the story we had in mind, but like driving people through this abstract narrative.
[00:45:58.878] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:46:04.105] Maya Mouawad: The immersive community, I think the next step is to have, as we felt, digital art, immersive art is something that is new and is not considered enough, I think, into the art community or contemporary art community, being a whole thing. The technique is just a tool. It's just one more tool. So there is this fascination around it, but it's just a tool. it's great that we use the tool depending on what we have to say what we have people to feel like but it's good to like I think the future would be like to have everything considered as art actually and not be separated like here for example in the VR VS Biennale of Art maybe
[00:46:54.592] Cyril Laurier: It's interesting for us because we are discovering how the community merges between us coming from the installation world and people from the VR world and under the same term of immersive which is very broad and very used those days, like it brings together also different type of medium and I think it's a very interesting moment now to see how things will blend together and of course be considered as like a different or common way of saying things. So it's exciting to see us included kind of in that community.
[00:47:30.290] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I really enjoyed the piece. Just the visceral, embodied, and emotional reaction that I had to the piece and very much appreciate getting to decode a lot of the abstract storytelling that's a part of the piece. I appreciate it at another level and I hope to pop in again to be able to see some of these things a little bit closer and see the different dynamics that are happening between the roots and the cityscapes and the way that that unfolds over the course of the narrative. So yeah, just a really short and sweet and beautiful piece and good luck for as it goes out into the world and beyond Venice Immersive. And yeah, thanks a lot for just taking the time to help break it all down. So thank you.
[00:48:06.108] Maya Mouawad: Of course. Thank you very much to you.
[00:48:08.571] Cyril Laurier: Thanks a lot. I'm glad you liked it.
[00:48:11.836] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this interview from Fitness Immersive 2023. You can go check out the Critics' Roundtable in episode 1305 to get more breakdown in each of these different experiences. And I hope to be posting more information on my Patreon at some point. There's a lot to digest here. I'm going to be giving some presentations here over the next couple of months and tune into my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR, since there's certainly a lot of digest about the structures and patterns of immersive storytelling, some of the different emerging grammar that we're starting to develop, as well as the underlying patterns of experiential design. So that's all I have for today, and thanks for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And again, if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
