I interviewed Telos I co-directors Emil Dam Seidel and Dorotea Saykaly at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
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Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[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 in the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com. So continuing my series of looking at different projects from Venice Immersive 2024, today's episode is with Talos 1, which is a part of the Best of selection at Venice Immersive and originally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. So this is a dance performance that is captured within the context of these holograms that you see using the Pepper's Ghost illusion. There's like a glass pyramid that's kind of like a small sized and then you go up and you walk around this pyramid in order to see different faces of this performance. And so it's a dance performance that we talk into the origins for how they came up with the story behind it. But when you're watching it, it's difficult to discern what the through line of the story or narrative might be. But Just a very unique process of going from different angles and different perspectives and creating this other social dynamic as you're watching this hologram dance performance. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the team behind the Talos one happened on Thursday, August 29th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:27.205] Dorotea Saykaly: My name is Dorothea Sekaly. I'm a dancer and choreographer and work in the moving arts with Emil and also independently.
[00:01:37.789] Emil Dam Seidel: I'm Emil Damseidl and I'm a film director. I work a lot with Dorothea in dance and have just started in immersive here. This is our first immersive work. We did another immersive work for the Biennale for the dancer program, but that was live immersive, so a bit different than this.
[00:01:57.140] Kent Bye: Maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:02:03.007] Dorotea Saykaly: I started in dance. Actually, I started with ballet, which gave me a lot of structure to my dance, and then moved into contemporary dance. So my practice is really about breaking down form and finding authenticity through movement. I guess what moved me into this realm of immersiveness is trying to find a way to connect with the audience in different ways and providing them a bodily experience. So with The Mill, we've really been looking at how to create experiences that shake people out of their brains and into their bodies. So whether that happens through stage art or film or immersive, digital, non-digital, that's kind of our vision.
[00:02:46.670] Emil Dam Seidel: Yeah, and I started in the film business, worked a lot as an assistant director for several prominent directors and moved into creating my own works some years ago. I don't think I know my practice per se. I know I have a very deep interest in dance and I think dance does a lot of the stuff that we are talking about in filmmaking, immersive, all the show don't tell. In dance you don't really have the other option. Those are things that are really easy to say, but really hard to carry out. But with dance, you limit yourself and force yourself to actually explore what that means.
[00:03:28.044] Kent Bye: What was your first intersection with what we could call immersive media, immersive arts, virtual reality, XR? What was the first encounter that you each had?
[00:03:39.830] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, this particular, we were working with Pepper's Ghost, and I had seen that a couple of years before I saw one of Dorothea's shows that she did for the Gothenburg Opera. And when I saw her work, I immediately wanted to put it into holograms, and it took about a year to convince Dorothea to do it. When you say holograms, people are usually like, well, what is that? And so even after convincing Dorothea to do it, we went out and tried to get funders for it and find venues for it. But I think people had a hard time understanding what we were trying to do. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers the question, but yeah, that was our first.
[00:04:19.979] Kent Bye: What was the experience that you saw that was using the Pepper's Ghost that inspired you?
[00:04:25.430] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, I didn't see any experience that used it. I saw that this video, a friend was showing me this video online about how easily you can do it on a phone screen. So we wanted to upscale it a little bit and take the essentials of just seeing something in 3D and try to create more of a story or emotional experience around it.
[00:04:49.201] Kent Bye: So Emile was saying that it took you a while to come on board. Talk a bit about that process of like where you were at at the beginning and what's the turning point for you to decide to explore it?
[00:05:01.186] Dorotea Saykaly: Well, what I love about working with Emile is that his mind is visionary. And so when he says something that sounds a little bit crazy, I know that it's a good path and I just need some time to understand where he wants to go with it or how he wants it to embody. through the dance and everything. So when he talked about the holograms, which is actually a very simple illusion, I needed to actually see it physically to understand how it would actually work, how complex it could be or how complex it would be. And the work that he had seen is called Double-Blinded, and I was working with the fictional narrative of a scientist that was trying to create touch artificially. And so in the sci-fi realm of trying to understand how to be human and how to create touch, he suggested to use holographic projection to embody it. And I remember thinking, that sounds interesting. How are we going to do that? So it was just conversations and understanding. And then he showed me a little like these videos of how holograms were made. And then I remember coming home from tour at some point, he had a little plastic triangle at home that he could put on a cell phone and we were looking at that. So it was kind of this coming and going. It took a little bit of time and I never doubted it. I just really want to understand how it worked. And then after that, once I understood that it was really clicking on how to continue with the work and how to bring it forward.
[00:06:29.198] Emil Dam Seidel: Yeah.
[00:06:30.479] Kent Bye: And most of the stuff that I've seen with Pepper's Ghost, like there was a piece at Tribeca a couple of years ago that had two screens at a 90 degrees angle from each other. And so you were looking at the screen, but there was a screen that was at a 45 degree angle that was giving kind of like a ghostly effect of being able to add in that particular experience around ancestral spirits that were overlaying on top of the scene. So how did you come across this form factor of the pyramid and then kind of the unique affordance of that that you would be able to have essentially four individual scenes that you could walk around in circle and see completely different takes of different holograms that were in the same physical pyramid but seemingly kind of having this spatial edit as you move your body around it.
[00:07:13.067] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, the story is about an AI that after the extinction of humankind creates itself a body in the search of a new purpose. So we wanted the audience to have an experience of non-existence when they stepped into the room. So how do we experience the world from a point of not being in the world anymore? it becomes a spiritual experience. So we were thinking of it as... We worked with it from a point of thinking in singularity terms, multiple dimensions, so on and so forth. How do you experience time and how do you experience... spatial dimensions from this point. So that's one of the reasons we decided to do four different narratives. Actually, I would say there's much more than four, because when you walk around it, the reflections multiply inside. So you actually end up with a narrative that is constantly changing. And even if you go see it several times and you go the same way around the pyramid, you will still experience different things. I think that was the reason why we worked with spatiality or with space in the way we did. The shape of the pyramid specifically speaks in Egyptology. Am I saying that right? Egyptology? Thank you. That form speaks to spirituality and death in and of itself. Even if you are more into the alien narrative and all this stuff, the shape will still give you certain annotations that point towards a specific point and give you an experience that is beyond human at least. That's what I liked about doing it with that shape at least.
[00:09:05.362] Dorotea Saykaly: There was also the whole talk of what is the hologram in the context of the narrative. And it was pretty important, or I would say crucial for us to make sure that the hologram was holistic with the whole narrative and with the whole project. So it wasn't so much about just using a trick, but all the questions needed to kind of answer the need of the narrative and the call into being of this project. AI that was creating itself a body so the structure of a pyramid as Emil was talking about really kind of answered all those questions as opposed to using a flat screen and I think we also batted ideas on how to make the pyramid and do we use another way of creating a hologram and somehow that iconic shape also answered a lot of needs that we had for the narrative and also creating something spiritual something that rises up to the sky and that would contain and be a cage almost for the creature on the inside.
[00:10:05.385] Emil Dam Seidel: If I might add that the whole thing about the four sides, like there was the spiritual question to it or the mathematical almost question to it. Why do we have four stories? We were thinking about just doing it from one side and it was the same thing from different sides. So it would just be about creating three dimensionality. But then one of our things was also, well, what keeps something alive? And if you see something and you immediately, when you go from one side to the other, if it's the same thing, but from the other side, well, then the experience kind of stops there. But if it is something different, you can keep exploring the experience and you never get a full understanding of what it is. And so it keeps posing a question rather than giving an answer.
[00:10:55.515] Kent Bye: So it sounds like that you started with the narrative, then the technology followed, and then the dance to interpret the story through this symbolic language of your dance to communicate this. When I watched the piece, I didn't come away knowing what the story was or to be able to articulate anything of what you just said, because it was all the symbolic abstraction as to what was being communicated. So it was a little bit difficult for me to follow the threads of that story. And so I'm wondering, when you're constructing the story, if you decided to have it as this kind of multiversal, like each one of these is unique and individual, like a potentiality that may or may not be actualized, and then as you go around, you see other potentials or like, how do you think about the narrative architecture of the story?
[00:11:41.024] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, you say physical narrative, and I think we sort of fall back to the creating experiences that shake people out of their brain and into the body, because that is what dance can do. And what is so wonderful about it is that you can go in and you can step away with your own thing. Everybody who's in there gets a communal experience together, but they all feel like they experience something private. or something personal. And the idea for the narrative came when we watched this YouTube video of two chatbots that were having a conversation with each other and they start hallucinating and kind of get into an argument and out of the blue one says to the other, don't you wish you had a body? And so we wanted to try to fulfill that or explore fulfilling that wish and explore what that would look like, what that would feel like and what it would create in us when we see that, see something, get a wish like that fulfilled.
[00:12:42.115] Kent Bye: So when you come on and start doing the actual dance performance, then do you have a sense of different story beats or what was your direction or intention as you were doing what is essentially four separate story arcs?
[00:12:55.273] Dorotea Saykaly: So the way that I see it also is, yes, there is the term performance, but also for this work, we needed to find and I needed to find a movement language that was really talk about creation and birthing, like birthing yourself into the world. So it's states of being and discovery and understanding how would this AI experience the temperature of the floor for the first time? How would they experience light, softness, pain, harshness, without understanding what they are? And that's the fascinating thing when Emil talks about these chatbots that sound human, but there's a little bit of a glitch. That is how I want to be investigating the movement also. So have it be human, have it be based on senses and curiosity and play, but also having these glitches within the structure of it. So these States of Being, we had actually a lot of material. We had a residency, a creation residency in the studio. And we kind of find four different pathways plus the birth at the beginning of the installation. So five different pathways. And they sort of have themes and sort of have different personalities in a way, but it still had to come from the same body. So it wasn't just random movements slapped together. They really had to have a cohesiveness and this emerging emergence of movement coming through fueled by searching for purpose. So a bit complex to crack that code as a performer and as a choreographer, but through a deep dive we kind of found some keys that could open up the doors for it.
[00:14:34.130] Kent Bye: Now, when you're coming out with the timing of these four different states of being that are in some ways they're intersecting when people are moving from one of the faces to the next. And so there's kind of inherent edits that I found myself going through and walking around and. Sometimes it was kind of like a coherent edit of like emotion that seemed to be connected. Other times it was disjunctive or not necessarily connected at all, just kind of a different vibe shift. And so how did you architect the timing of the unfolding of each of these different states of being?
[00:15:07.383] Dorotea Saykaly: That's a good question. You know, it comes down to instinct and a process of analyzing the movement once you're making choices through the choreographic process. And there is something about if you're on a track that is instinctually based, there will be these natural connections that create itself in the choreography and in the movement. somehow the four pathways, I'll just talk about the four sides of the pyramid because those are the ones that are living together at the same time, they kind of all ended up being the same length, which was a beautiful thing that happened by chance. And because there's a language that we were building, then the words create sentences between the four sides. So it's great that you talk about, you know, your editing of the experience because that's kind of what we wanted. We really want people to experience it in their own way. When we were at the Cannes Festival, there was this romanian guy where he's like oh i ran around the pyramid really fast and then it looked like stop motion you know and because you were moving really slow in the pyramid and then i ran around and it got really really choppy and then i slowed down and then it was like this crazy time motion stop thing you know and so that made me really happy that it makes people feel creative in the space and have their own movement and choreography around the structure it's playful
[00:16:22.711] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had my own sort of zeotrope moments where I was walking around and felt like that kind of animation. And yeah, I guess another key part of this piece is the music and, you know, how the music is kind of driving everything. It was so subtle at the beginning that they said, enter in when you hear the music. And so I entered in and then I was like, it sounded like a rumble that could have been the experience next to me or something. Like I wasn't sure if it was like actual. They said, no, that's what you're hearing is what's playing. And so I was like, oh, okay. So I... notice that there's like a very subtle ambient development to the sonic architecture of the piece. So maybe you could just elaborate on the sound design of the piece.
[00:17:00.478] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, it's my very good friend, Stefan. Well, also your friend now. It's my very good friend, Stefan Johansen, who made the music. We had our youth together and have worked a lot together before. And we wanted to create something that gave the atmosphere. And for the beginning that you speak about, we wanted people to lean in. You enter a very dark space. so we wanted to create only a hint of needing to be extra aware and so it grows throughout the whole experience and develops throughout as the narratives unfold also yeah so that was the thought for the beginning i think for the whole thing itself we were looking at machine beats we were looking at wavelengths having those interfere with each other and and run in also four different tracks. I think we're working with four different elements for the music in total. And they sort of glide in and out of each other. Basically, the process was a lot of trial and error, because we had this very simple thing that we actually ended up with in the beginning, and we had that already in the studio when doing the choreography. Then halfway through the process with the music and when we had filmed everything and all of that we started to add layers and try to make it the same as the movement or coherent with movements and interdependent and it just it stole away from the experience because it was explaining or giving away what you were supposed to feel and how you were supposed to respond to certain things and Actually, when you don't need to, and when it's so clear for the body and emotions experiencing it, it was talking down to people, so we went back to the beginning of it again. Of course, there are references to the Space Odyssey, and you see that in the structural, the architecture also. We did work with pop references, but we wanted to constort it all and sort of fuck it up a little.
[00:19:04.170] Kent Bye: So with these four different states of being, and you said you have a whole movement language, is this a language that only you speak, or were you able to decode and read the language? I'm just curious about the collaborative process of something that seems so embodied and nonverbal in a way that, you know, how do you put language or use that to communicate amongst each other to create this project?
[00:19:26.653] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, I think you should start and I'll add something.
[00:19:30.414] Dorotea Saykaly: Well, you know, having years of dance in my body, you know, when I speak about narrative and story in the body, it's abstract in the sense that perhaps it's not clear, but it will be understood. You know, if you curve your back or if you tense your muscles, it will be understood somewhat universally or kind of instinctually again. So I have this history in my body and I've been developing how to make that my own language with all the amazing people that I've worked with and all these phenomenal geniuses and choreographers and digest it and then have my own language to propose in the space and contribute to the world. And with Emil, because we've known each other now for five years and he knows my movement patterns and understands how I move, this was a chance to step out of our comfort zone for myself and to try something new. There was a return to nature. I felt I had to slow down. and come back to some roots of very organic movement. And Emil, he's like, I like that, I like that, but you need to do it slower. And then I was like, okay, so I would do it slower. And then he's like, I like it slower. I was like, okay, fine, all right, cool, cool. And he just kept saying slower and slower and slower. And to come back to the music, what I wanted to say is there's something that is sustained in the music as you experience. It's like, it starts very subtle and it keeps growing and there's a tension that is built in. And that kind of indicated also the process in the sense that there had to be a tension in the movement. It could never be released. It's something like a plant growing. So there always has to be a pressure, even if it's soft and something continuous. So we shot all four sides as one shots. There's no editing. And that was also a pressure that we had to put on me and on the filming that it had to be like... The one take, and we only did it twice for each side, and we probably could have just done it once for each side, but we gave ourselves a little bit of wiggle room. But there's something also very unique in that that I think informed the process very much and how the quote-unquote performance evolved. comes through for the audience members that there is no escape and there is no edit out and there is no visual effects added to the movement and we really wanted that it was the body in the space with the body of the audience and hopefully create physical empathy between both
[00:21:54.776] Emil Dam Seidel: This image came to mind when you were speaking. For me now, how long can you stretch gum or a thread before it breaks? And I feel like that was the exercise that we were doing physically. Keep stretching it, keep stretching it, but without breaking it. Because as soon as it breaks, the drama is lost. So for me, that was very much what we were doing. I think what we learned from each other first, like when you work with dance as a filmmaker, you learn so much about your craft because it as I said, it does all that we're striving to do in film, but which is just so hard to do. So for me, I take away a lot of that working with what happens in between the action rather than working with the action. It gives us sort of a chance to catch up as audience and fill in the gaps. So for me, I think that was what I discovered seeing you move. But there's so much in the pauses. There's so much in the slowness here that is super rich. And from these very few ingredients, we can just get so much richness. I think we were in a collaborative process of just mining that and stretching the thread.
[00:23:14.440] Kent Bye: I think when I first saw some of the images of you dancing in the pyramid, it was just really awe-inspiring because I think part of the technology, the Pepper's Ghost, but also the way that you're able to capture the reflections off of an original recording that then, when they're projected on, it looks like a hologram being projected, and the hologram also has a reflection, which is sort of paradoxical because holograms don't usually have reflections. like shadows or reflections. And so there was a way in which that it gave a little bit extra realism to the illusion, the fact that it did have those reflections. It just kind of is one of those subtle things that when I see it, it's like, wow, there's actually a person in this little pyramid that's dancing.
[00:23:59.704] Dorotea Saykaly: Completely. Yeah, there was all these really beautiful things that happened and I think really... We thought a lot about it. You guys, yeah, yeah. There was a lot of conversations about the practicalities. It's like a simple, quote-unquote, simple illusion that requires a lot of focus, a lot of mathematics. You know, Emil and our DOP, Christopher, were like calculating, okay, if we shoot it at eye level and from this distance, it'll give that and... Okay, we're working in this pyramid, so if I go off track, my arm will be cut off in this space. So there's all the, like in a very simple structure, so many variables that we had to figure out. And there was a very specific lighting that you had come up with to create those reflections that you're talking about without lighting the floor necessarily.
[00:24:45.890] Emil Dam Seidel: Me and Christopher, our DOP, we talked a lot about three-dimensionality. And my problem with this, having seen pepper scopes before, is often that quite quickly you catch that it's flat. The image is flat. It's just on a flat surface. So first off, we started with the floor. That was the first thing. It was like, if we make sure that... It had to be on black floor anyways, but if we wash it before so that it's shiny and... really creates a lot of reflection, we'll get more three dimensionality. With you, we were talking a lot about moving in diagonals and creating 3D shapes. So hiding one limb with another limb as to cheat and sort of like extend the three dimensionality. If you're really sharp in there, you'll also notice that it's shot with a wider lens than the eye. So it actually does have an extension of the three dimensionality that way. With the lighting, we lit it from below the floor, shooting it through mirrors in the floor. Light it from below, but have the edge go just a few millimeters above the floor so that you would get the feet. But if you light the floor, you don't get the reflection. You don't want that. So there was all of these things that it... What's the height that we should shoot it from to create a real sense of depth, even if you're walking around, if you're a different height or so on. And some of the stuff was extremely mathematical and uncomprehensive, made me wish I had listened more in school sometimes. And some of the stuff turned out to just be really simple because the eye wants to make it make sense. The eye wants to be cheated. It wants to make an easy solution for the brain and just say, yeah, that's a person inside a pyramid. And so some of the stuff you could get away with weird things with simple solutions. And some of the stuff was just like felt like rocket science.
[00:26:40.548] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the end result is just really awe-inspiring. The fact that you've been able to create a whole kind of story that unfolds over time that has also other people that... watching it and what's the intention of having multiple people there rather than I happen to see during the press preview I was the only one in the room so I didn't actually get the social dimension but what are some of the things you end up seeing with like is it more of a throughput issue of just practically not having too many people but having more than just one go through it but yeah just how do you come up with that sweet spot of having six people see at the same time but also like what the intent is for what that social dynamic or that experience is
[00:27:20.023] Dorotea Saykaly: With our recent work that we created for the Dance Biennale, it was also an immersive work, but without technology. And there was this play that Emil had brought up about, we want the audience to negotiate the space and have them have that play of negotiating the space between them and with them and the And so for this also, what I've heard from people who have experienced it, they're like, oh, it's so fun, you know, because there's the choreography inside the pyramid and the choreography between us. And there is something intimate in the work, but also distanced. And so to recreate that space between people that there's this maybe hesitancy to be close to each other in the beginning, it's very dark. You want to be careful. There's a trepidation in the air. And then that morphs throughout the 24 minutes. You know, you get a bit more brave. You might pass people. So there's that wish of having people activated and having agency to move around the space themselves.
[00:28:19.798] Emil Dam Seidel: Yeah, and the number of people has been a negotiation, I think, also between us and the space. Like, how many people can the space this size carry before you take away the spiritual experience for people? So there is that practical element of it. People go in, some people come in alone and some people come in three and sometimes they come in six. And any way that you step in changes the experience, but already the experience is so different for everyone. Because as you said, you edit your own story or your own experience. So it was just a question of how do we give people enough space to have an intimate and personal experience while also allowing it to be a communal experience. I want to say prayer, almost.
[00:29:09.869] Kent Bye: So what's next for either Talos 1? Is there going to be Talos 2? Or you seem to have a core technology here to kind of build upon. But I'm just curious where you want to take this in the future.
[00:29:20.253] Emil Dam Seidel: Well, there is going to be a Telos 2. I don't know how or where or even when, but we have things that we're looking into with the Telos 2. We like to call this a call into being as a subtitle. Telos 1, a call into being. So there will be a continuation, but philosophically, I think we're trying to wrap our heads around what that would be.
[00:29:45.396] Dorotea Saykaly: Yeah, and I've always enjoyed, whether as a performer or as a creator, stepping into worlds. So here, in the last years where I've been focusing on choreographic works for stage and working on commissions for dance companies, there's so much richness in the worlds that we're creating and so we want to develop those worlds as opposed to think of it as like this is one work now we've done it move on okay next idea can we expand on telos in a way you know right now we're still discovering so much about the space from the experience in can the space was smaller it was a black box here the space is five by five so it's larger than the space and can taller has a concrete floor There's so many variables that we can still play with to create a different experience for the audience. So there's so much in that world that we can still expand upon. And then I know you were also talking about focusing on the space itself for one of the next iterations of the work.
[00:30:44.892] Emil Dam Seidel: Materials, I think also is an interesting conversation. Size, exterior. If we're creating a temple, is it then just the space inside a temple with a tombstone or an altar, maybe, more correct? Is it only the interior that is important? What would the exterior be? Basically, principally, it's a tombstone or the mausoleum of mankind. So what would that look like and why and how? Those are next questions for me that I would like to pose. But as you say, we're building worlds. My favorite thing about this is that the question I get the most when people come out is like, oh, have you thought about making it human size? And of course, we've thought about it and there's reasons why we don't. But I still love the question because it gets people thinking and it gets people playing and it gets them curious and it gets them creative. And to me, that's good art. When I experience good art, it makes me think. It makes me get ideas and want to do things. Yeah.
[00:31:56.807] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of immersive dance, immersive storytelling, immersive art, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:32:06.363] Dorotea Saykaly: I'm so glad you asked that question because really, like, let's say with Telos, for example, what is the biggest reward for me is when people have a personal experience and it feels like the work is looking back at them and looking at them and they have a chance to reflect on what's on the inside, even if it's not conscious. There's like a subconscious connection. And that's what immersive art has to offer to us is a chance to reflect our world and reflect into ourselves. and for people to have a meaningful experience
[00:32:42.361] Emil Dam Seidel: I think that we've figured out that the body has such a big impact on both the people experiencing it and what we like to explore also. I think immersive art, whether live, digital or whichever else, it has a potential to move people in a way that is physical. And that to me is really, really special. I think the whole idea about an AI that creates itself a body is what do we have that even if we create an AI that would be indistinguishable from a human in terms of personality and all of these things. Well, this is hypothetical because I don't even think it's possible without the body. I don't think it's possible to have a human experience is to have a physical experience. And that can look so many ways, but it is a physical experience. That's the limitations of the human experience. It has to be physical. We have the mind still that can travel and do amazing things. But at the end of the day, we always come back to the same body. And yeah, I think it's important that we learn about our body.
[00:33:54.477] Kent Bye: Great. So is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:34:01.272] Dorotea Saykaly: I don't know if it's to the broader community, but I will say the fact that we can trust some core values, like let's say just trusting the speed of the body and playing with that. Like in our work, it was a non-negotiable for Emil, like we're not going to use effects, we're not going to speed up the image, we're not going to slow it down. To trust those restrictions, it can open up a lot of doors. For me, that restriction blew everything out in the sense like, okay, I've got the body to work with. How can I trick the eye? How can I play with that to create something transcendent? So to really trust some simple pathways that will unlock a lot of richness.
[00:34:46.018] Emil Dam Seidel: I would say one thing that at least interests me in the stuff I see anywhere in art, immersive or non-immersive, is what is the simplest thing you can do to the greatest effect? Our production designer speaks a lot about this architectural... vr experience that he had where it's just a big black room and all you can do is you can draw lines in the room and and and he said that was his that's the most amazing vr experience he's ever had and i really trust that in any art it's what is the smallest thing we can do to have the biggest impact um yeah
[00:35:31.377] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Wow. That seems like a good place to stop and wrap it up. It kind of sums it all up right there. And so my final thoughts is that, you know, I feel like this is a type of piece that, you know, even though the sort of the architecture of the piece has a lot of the sort of story driven, I didn't walk away with the story. I walked away with this sense of embodiment and kind of appreciating how you were able to communicate these subtle feelings of restriction or birth or you know I had my own interpretations of what might be happening but yeah also just this kind of state of awe and wonder of like this magical illusion that I'm seeing and all the all the work that you had to do in order to create it it's something that I've never seen it quite like that before so something that was quite unique in that way and obviously I knew there wasn't a small person in there dancing but I kind of like allowed myself to suspend my disbelief a little bit enough to walk around and just be in this state of unreality in a way of allowing myself to have that plausibility that I didn't have to be like constantly saying, oh, this isn't real, this isn't happening, but just to kind of take it in as a performance. And yeah, just the way that moving around the piece edits the piece in a way that I kind of thought of the... I'm editing the piece with my body. As I move around the piece, I'm editing it. And it's just that kind of spatial editing that I thought was very unique in a way that I'm seeing in some other pieces here as well. This is my heart where you walk around different perspectives and you see different angles and you have different takes on the same spatial architecture. So yeah, kind of an interesting trend that's emerging. But yeah, anyway, thanks again for taking the time to help share a little bit more about your process and intention behind Talos One. So thank you.
[00:37:13.305] Dorotea Saykaly: Thank you so much, Kent. I love it. And I'm going to take away the body editing. I'm going to steal that. It's amazing.
[00:37:19.708] Emil Dam Seidel: Yeah, thank you for your curiosity and for being there for the community so much. We really appreciate that. Thank you.
[00:37:27.079] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
