I interviewed The Gossips’ Chronicles director Corinne Mazzoli and producer Marta Bianchi at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist statement:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from Venice Immersive 2024, today's episode is with a piece that was part of the college biennale and actually ended up winning the grand prize there. So it's called the Gossips Chronicles. And so It's a really surreal piece in the sense that you are going into what is kind of like a reconstruction of a torture museum. There's a lot of immersive theater actors that you go into this physical installation and see these different torture objects. And you are kind of like in this relationship with the docents who are leading you through this, who are kind of bitchy and somewhat kind of just rude characters. And so it created this whole vibe where usually those docents are very polite and this kind of inverting that. And then from there you go into this virtual reality experience where you kind of learn where everything that you just heard is kind of like not really the full truth. And so it's kind of deconstructing different aspects of what's it like to go into a museum and, assume that what they're telling you is the full truth where history actually has many different layers of the truth. And so there's kind of like a walking away with understanding more of a multiplicity of the many different perspectives. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with the creators of the gossips chronicles happened on Friday, August 30th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and.
[00:01:39.958] Corinne Mazzoli: dive right in my name is Corinne Mazzoli i'm a visual artist based in venice i come from contemporary art so this is the gossips chronicle is my first vr piece ever this is marta bianchi the producer of the gossips chronicles and we worked together actually so it is important because it is really collaborative kind of project
[00:02:03.559] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, my name is Marta Bianchi. I run a not-for-profit space in Milano called Keroff. I'm into the visual arts and I'm, since 2012, I'm producing new films by, mainly by Italian artists. So it's my first project in voir and we were so excited to, I mean, participate in Biennale College Cinema Immersive and finally at the end win the grant.
[00:02:33.570] Kent Bye: Nice. And maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:39.645] Corinne Mazzoli: So I have been studying Visual Arts, Academy of Fine Arts than you have here in Venice. And then now I'm doing a PhD in Pedagogy related to Contemporary Art in Milano. So I am basing my art production with, I'm doing mainly videos, but a lot of workshops and pedagogical projects, some of which are actually collaborative projects. So that's it. I think that my aesthetic is very pop somehow in my videos and at the same time I love very much to work with students, with university schools in general, different kind of ages. I think that artists can maybe do a different kind of pedagogy so that's why I'm very much interested in that.
[00:03:33.736] Kent Bye: Can you elaborate a little bit about what your PhD is specifically looking at?
[00:03:38.152] Corinne Mazzoli: So the main theme is the pedagogical process as an artistic practice. I'm collaborating with a museum, MAGA museum in Gallarate, which is a city close to Milano. And the idea is to study the museum, their pedagogical practices, but also to propose a new project as a pedagogical project to them, which will actually be a LARP, a live action role playing. So I'm researching live-action role-playing at the moment, and I'm trying to introduce them as a pedagogical tool inside the museum, because in Italy LARPs exist a lot, they are done a lot, but not so many universities or schools are interested in that. And it's a pity because it's a very immersive technique. It's like a sort of improvised theatre melted together with psychodrama like Moreno Psychodrama or the Theatre of the Oppressed and it's really I mean it doesn't have anything to do with VR but it's actually now it's combining it a lot with VR especially in the northern countries. It is a very good tool to teach directly and in practice so it's to me it's one of the best ways to catch the attention of students.
[00:05:01.897] Kent Bye: A little bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:05:06.441] Marta Bianchi: So I studied arts management in Italy and then I spent one year in Melbourne working into the field between mental illness and arts. After that I came back and I started to really to work into productions, film productions. I mean in a context in a specific organization called Kerov as I mentioned before that has a huge historical archive collecting more than 9 000 titles by Italian artists from the 70s till now so part of my job it's not just producing new art pieces but also protect and share the heritage and hold the videos the titles we have with other people such as students, academies, creators, film directors, film programmers and so on. And in that context actually I met Corinne in a specific project called Artevisione. It's like a project we run every year in which we ask Italian artists to apply with a specific idea related to a new film and then we run a workshop with different kind of professionals coming from visual arts and cinema as well and at the end we select one project to produce. Corinne attended, I don't remember exactly which edition, okay so the 2018
[00:06:37.335] Kent Bye: 19 or 18 yeah and then since then we have been collaborating yeah so long yeah okay well getting a phd looking at live action role play as a form of pedagogical teaching tools and so you know very much involved in these kind of practices of immersion with a lot of theatrical staging but when did the immersive technologies and xr started to come into your radar to start to integrate that more directly to your own artistic practice
[00:07:06.727] Corinne Mazzoli: So last year I was here at the Venice in Merseville Island. I've been here before because I live in Venice, so anytime I was going to the film festival I was trying to come here at least for one day and check some installations. And last year I had the chance to be here for a while, so I studied everything I could and I listened to the main people here, the ones that are more into that, and I tried to understand as much as I could. Then I had this project in standby for a while, because I was applying to artistic residencies in Italy and somewhere else, but with a small, small budget, thinking of this Gossip Chronicles as a tour in a real museum, with a real guide, but done as a performative act. So I never got a grant or anything. So in the end I thought maybe I could just re-elaborate it and think about it as a VR project. So we applied together to the college. There is a program called Vianale College Cinema Immersive. And the first idea was to have a mixed reality piece that could be brought actually inside a museum. Then when we went to the college, the first week we were selected and the first week of workshops, everything of course changed and was elaborated better because we had the chance to talk and to explain our project to several different tutors that helped us a lot. Like each one of them gave a feedback about the topics, about the theme, but also about how we could elaborate it in a proper way to be selected here somehow. and that's more or less how it developed. Of course, there is a lot of research before that I was doing not in an academic way, let's say, meaning that this project is based on what in the academy they call grey literature, so not the academic papers or the ones that are recognized by the academy, but mainly online researches, books, films, sci-fi books, feminist, transfeminist books, and a lot of different, I mean, Reddit as well, or other platforms online to collect information. And then this happened somehow. Awesome.
[00:09:35.445] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, I'd love to hear from your perspective of, like, getting involved in this project, taking it to the Biennale and, yeah, the development.
[00:09:42.386] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, I mean, I was super happy when I got the call from Corinne because I was attending a film festival in Barcelona and she called me, okay, let's do this. I mean, she called me, okay, I'm trying to apply for the Biennale College. And I was, okay, let's do it. I mean, it could be a great opportunity, but I was thinking, okay, we will not get into for sure because we are Italian, because Corinne was so connected to the festival and so on. But I really esteem her practice and her research. So I was extremely connected to the core of the piece and the way she can really push the boundaries and trying to connect different kind of arts and uh yeah i mean it's a theater piece but it's not the same way and it's also a war piece but it's not just a war piece so i was really interested in this kind of yeah push the boundaries and and and trying to be yourself also in this kind of context without any kind of pressure from the external context and I mean it's just because she's like this you know and usually in visual arts we have a lot of pressure we have to be like the context has to be but we try to you know Yeah, open up, open mind. And I think also another thing was trying to cut all the details that actually weren't so important for the piece. Because at some point we get a bit lost in a way. We have so many elements. I mean, the story is really powerful. The images, the sound, we were like a bit overwhelmed, I guess. But then we had this like, I don't know, three days of work really, yeah, really hard. And okay, we did kind of focus and select, we selected the core. I mean, what we wanted to be the core and I mean, within the budget we had. So yeah.
[00:11:56.479] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I noticed in the credits, there was a scholar that you had mentioned in terms of someone who had done a lot of research that was some of the topics that you're covering here in this piece. And so maybe you could just set a little bit of the context of how you came across this as a story and then developed it into what is now the Gossips Chronicles.
[00:12:16.698] Corinne Mazzoli: So let's say that among the first inspiration for this was the fact that suddenly I don't remember even why online I found out some articles and stuff that were saying that some torture objects were actually historical fakes. So I was like, okay, meaning? And then I started researching randomly and basically several people said that some of the tools that you can find in the torture museum were made in the 19th century. to pleasure collectionists that were really keen to have objects coming from the Dark Middle Ages. So this Dark Middle Ages was like amazing for them and they wanted to buy all the pieces possible. So the request was high but then there was no production at all so or at least not enough to like please everybody so they recreated some of the tool torches in the 19th century and this is why they are historical fakes some of which have been changed during the process so Probably a tool that is not there. It's called the chair, the spiked chair. It's not called the spiked chair. It's a chair with a lot of spikes. So it's probably a historical fake. Same is the chastity belt, not a historical fake, but everybody is saying that the chastity belt was to prevent women to betray their husbands. Actually, they say it's the opposite, like it was to protect them when the husbands were away and there was a war coming and they could risk to be raped. So some stories have been created around those objects to make them even darker than they are. It could even be that the Iron Maiden was not with all those spikes, but maybe it was only a sarcophagus, as it could be that several other objects were not made like that, and were recreated like that later on. So that was the first blink in my mind, and I was like, okay, maybe I can... think about the story, the history of objects and change it. And that was the main process. Then I started thinking about why we are so fascinated by these objects which are so gory. Like, you look at them and it's like, okay, it's dangerous. It's not something that I would like to have around my neck or around my head or around, I mean... But there is a fascination. It's like this spectacle idea, like going to the torture museum. Why so many people are going to the torture museum? I'm going as well. I'm not criticizing. But why? Why is it so fascinating? And that was another layer. And then I thought, maybe I can... As I work a lot with museums, I can think about the idea of decolonizing the objects that already are in the museums and think about a different history that's invented completely. But there is a process going on into several different museums outside Italy, in many places in Italy, a lot, like, for example, in Rome. What's the name? The... The Museo delle Culture did a process of re-setting up the entire collection in a less colonizing way. So there is a process of understanding how much colonialism is and has been represented inside those kind of museums for example. So at a certain point I thought about that and that was the main idea. Then the title and the theme came from the story of the word gossips as mentioned in Silvia Federici's book which is called The Caliban and the Witch. She is actually describing the story of the word gossips because the word at the defining friendship among women. So the gossips were the female friends, the friends hanging out together, basically. Then later on, it was used also to define people, women that were present during the childbirth together with the midwife. and then suddenly with the raising of the patriarchal authority especially in the domestic environment and with the private property and like capitalism rising and the private property arriving somehow to privatize also bodies the female bodies were privatized in this way so women were like less free somehow to hang around alone otherwise they would be defined as witches and then burned at stake so I mean their life became a bit more complicated and in the process the word took on the negative meaning of lascivious talks, chitchatting and as if women are incapable of elaborating an intelligent discourse So the idea is just not only to devalue the power of women as a community that was very strong in the Middle Ages, at the beginning at least, but it was also to devalue their words as well, their work, their personalities and their words. So that was a bit the starting point. Then everything took on other meanings, meaning that in here the gossips are not female characters. The gossips is a population living in a remote island. in the celtic sea with their own traditions and they were like the younger so they were more open-minded in connection with the universe the cosmos the gore which is the other population living there is more embodied and connected with the physicality and at the same time with a power to possess and dominate and destroy So I didn't want, I didn't mean in this project to make a dichotomy between male and female, which is absolutely not present here. It is more, everything is more linked to the idea of possession and so privatize and possess something as a way that humans are using against each other somehow. So in this case, of course, they are not humans as well. They are like creatures. but the project touches also a lot of interspecies topics if you want to put it into this there are also trans feminist topics as well but yeah that's a bit more or less i'm sorry i spoke a lot no no that's perfect it gives a lot of really great context because like there's a lot of depth to this piece that i really appreciate and
[00:19:21.292] Kent Bye: Many different things to unpack, but I have two follow-up questions for clarification. So one, there's reference to this torture museum within the context of this performance, but you also just referenced it. Are there actually torture museums that exist out there that you're referencing, or is this something that you've constructed and created?
[00:19:39.597] Corinne Mazzoli: Well, the Museum of Torture is actually a franchise owned by inquisition.srl. I don't want to make publicity, but when I read it, I was like, what? But it's true. So it was created in Italy with the first one probably in Tuscany. And then it was spreading all around the world. So that was another like, OK, it's a franchising. So it's not only something like, OK, you have a castle and you have your own torture tools that you found in your... I don't know, backyard. It's like, I mean, growing up all around the world. And they have sites everywhere from Mexico to United States to many places in Europe. And they're more or less the same all over. I mean, the aesthetic is always that. It's a bit dark. It's black, red, and then metal or this kind of walls, like stone walls, like a dungeon somehow. So it's really stereotyped somehow. And the objects that are inside are more or less the same. Yeah, you will find the similar objects in each museum of torture. So I'm referring to real, real museums. What we took were the most... iconic but at the same time the easiest to create a story around and to also to print out because what you maybe don't know is that all the objects have been printed in 3d so it's plastic it's complete everything is fake in that place you know everything is like not real somehow because the objects are made in plastic the pedestals are in iron I don't know. Everything you see, it's a bit weird, but kind of untrue. So it's, yeah, a mix of unreal things.
[00:21:32.147] Kent Bye: Just another clarification, because this project seems to be, on one hand, deconstructing some of the lies that have been propagated, and then on the other hand, It's hard for me to know to what degree the type of scholarship that you're digging into and making reference in is based in existing scholarship, or if it's grey literature, or if it's your own speculative, imaginal interpretation of things for creative storytelling purposes. So it's hard for me to know as you unpack the truth of these objects, if that is the truth, or if this is yet another kind of theatrical reimagination that's more metaphorical than literal or actual.
[00:22:12.273] Corinne Mazzoli: Yeah, it is an imaginary idea. I mean, I'm very much inspired by sci-fi writings. So it was really the idea of creating a completely new world that would collide with the torture museum, which is dark and related to violence or creepy somehow. And the other world is the opposite, super bright, super colorful. It shines, the objects are shining. Some of the stories are actually not completely fake, meaning that I decided to transform the heretic fork, which is this fork that you torture people, you put below your jaw and sternum, and it's tight around your neck, so it's basically a way to keep people standing in a fixed position, otherwise they will start bleeding. And I transformed that one into this sky blade. And the sky blade for me is a tool to cut the skies, the clouds, to prevent the storms, to destroy crops. So this actually is not completely fake, meaning that There are traditions in the south of Italy, but also in the south of America, of these men, at least in Italy, mainly male figures, that are called, roughly translated, like sky cutters or storm cutters. that had the power to cut storms. So they were performing a ritual, which I am not familiar with, I have never seen one, and they were cutting the clouds to prevent this. And they exist, or at least they existed. It is really an ancient tradition. So somehow that inspired me a lot and I thought I should put it in here as a reference to what we had as a cultural, somehow rural tradition. And it is almost lost. I think we still have something, but not as strong as it was in the past. So we are slightly losing this. Yeah, we're slightly losing it because the capitalistic culture has made a world equal everywhere. But at the same time, it's the same world we see everywhere. So we dress the same, we have the same clothes, we wear the same brands everywhere. We have the same traditions and cultures everywhere. So we are slightly losing what it was really specific and peculiar of a specific region or a specific town. that Italy had a lot a lot and we don't we we take care of it but not enough I think anymore
[00:24:51.622] Kent Bye: I very much appreciate the elaboration of this evolution of the story because it's really quite a fascinating conceit and topic and I thought it was really well pulled off in terms of the contrast between the torture museum and all the theatrical elements that you had and then going into the VR experience and so when you were first coming in to start to produce and work on this project what was it about this idea or this pitch or this story that really drew you to work on it?
[00:25:18.513] Marta Bianchi: Actually, I mean, it was such a great journey. But in the meantime, it was also really tough because as Corinne has just explained, she has so many ideas, so many layers and just shared the whole thing to all the people and the professionals we were involved with was like crazy. And we had, I mean, a specific budget moreover a specific short time so just four months to produce the whole thing so it was just really hard for us to you know keep the whole thing on time and actually I mean another element I don't know if I'm just replying to you but was really important for us to find the right people to work with And so Saverio Trapasso from Arteria and Emanuele Cabu, so a developer and a designer of the whole animations, were just amazing. I mean, they understood each other really well. I mean, but was kind of, you know, having in front of us like not a fight but like continuing discussion between the flatties and the immersives so find the way to to find the same language you know so also technically but also i mean yeah technically but also in in terms of having the right meaning of the same thing no was really yeah it's a marriage in between flatties and immersive somehow Yeah, but and I mean was really, as I mentioned, was really important to find them and really trust them because they are great professionals. So we could really stay into the theatrical piece because it changed a lot in terms of the object. We decided to print the dramaturgy. That's right? Dramaturgy, yeah. The dramaturgy. Thank you. And so we could focus more into this part now because we really trust them. And obviously Corinne did a great job. And also we had this kind of funny and hard thing that Savello works in Montreal so we have different kind of timing and schedule and so was really hard at some point and yeah but I mean everything was really hard and smooth at the same time I guess no and yeah
[00:27:58.308] Corinne Mazzoli: Yeah, I think that having a good team, a great team, is what made it happen. Because without them, I don't think that we would have reached this kind of, let's say, quality in anything. In the real life tour, in the VR part, we were very lucky, or at least we decided very well the people to work with. I don't know which of the two. Probably both.
[00:28:27.423] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that this idea of speculative futures or fiction or these immersive experiences to explore the potentialities of a world that doesn't quite exist yet, you're able to embody a culture or a story that there's a kind of a... world-building process that you're going through in this project and so before we start to dive into the mechanics of how you put it together and the theatrical staging and everything else I wanted to just give you another opportunity to elaborate on any of the other academic or intellectual inspirations because you mentioned trans feminism and other kind of references and so yeah just wondering if you had any other threads that you were trying to weave into this kind of speculative future that you're building out here in this piece
[00:29:10.478] Corinne Mazzoli: Yeah, somehow there is also this idea of always doubting what you see in front of you and what people tell you in terms of in a museum, for example. So when you go into a museum or an exhibition, you assume that what the guide is telling you is real. I mean, you will never, ever say to a guide like, OK, you're not saying the truth. It's something that's kind of stated, especially when you go into historical museums. You assume that everything that's said to you is just like that. Same goes for school. When you go to school, at least in Italy, everything that is told you by the professor or teachers is true. but we know for sure that history has been revised and has been transformed and has been told so you know stories of people because someone was writing them but you don't know if this person that was writing them was writing them like in a documentaristic way or it was writing them in a more interpretative way so somehow i think that at least in this piece i wanted to just relax and don't think about you know being forced to have the academic references that are telling you that this is the truth And this is not the truth. It's a liminal area. You will never know what is real or what is fake in this project. Unless you ask me what I found out somehow. So you can assume that what I'm telling you is real. You can assume that what I'm telling you is completely fake. And that's fine in both cases. so the point is also this to me somehow that's why I'm saying sci-fi I'm a very big fan of of well Ballard but because he has this psychological sci-fi writings but also like Ursula Le Guin or Octavia Butler they have Just to mention a few of them, like, I mean, I could mention the historical, like Philip K. Dick, of course, I don't want to be boring somehow, but still, sci-fi has been helping out people to create technological systems to control other people. So we have to think that sci-fi, science fiction is really It's important in history somehow and it shouldn't be underestimated. And so reinterpreting or opening up your mind to different interpretations of what you see, it's important. and not get sticking to one only point of view. In any case, you know, even if you are the most conspiracy theorist in the world or you are the most realistic person ever, I think just to get stick to that only, it's a bit too close-minded. So the idea of opening up your mind and think about any kind of possibility that you have in front.
[00:32:13.072] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you explain all that, I'm sort of recounting my own journey of going through the piece and then sort of having this conversation and going through this kind of like, in the piece you're deconstructing, like you're saying, okay, you're in a museum, but this isn't true. But then I'm talking to you and you're like, well, what I said wasn't true. So I'm like, wait, okay, so... I'm like there's a little bit of a recursive fractal kind of paradoxical structure to this where the decolonization is a way of deconstructing the truce but yet also using a speculative fiction where at the end you had okay here's the citation of this scholar and I didn't you know have a chance to write it down or look it up but I was like I just sort of like gave you the benefit of the doubt I was like okay everything that was said here is like backed up by the scholar like I could go research and read more information about all this but it sounds like that even though there may be some things that are pulling from that that there's still kind of a creative interpretation and the larger point which is that you know the truth is kind of like situated knowledges or many different perspectives and more the feminist theory of epistemology where knowledge is kind of more relational or contextual or in a way a multiplicity of many different perspectives that are out there where it's not about a yes, no, a kind of binary, but more of a non-binary logic where there's more of a multiplicity of possibilities without, and being comfortable with the paradox of not knowing. And that's hard for me and hard for a lot of people to kind of like settle into a place of a possibility space where there's not clear answers, but I guess one, I guess, experiential design critique I would have is that I didn't walk away from the experience with that ambiguity of multiplicity of possibilities. I came away saying, oh, well, there's this one thing that was now perverted and I just sort of trust the author that that's what the truth is. So, yeah, so I don't know if that's part of the intent to have that kind of ambiguity. That's not something I took away from the experience alone. It only came through a conversation.
[00:34:07.060] Corinne Mazzoli: No, no, there is. I mean, during the experience, I think there is ambiguity about the objects you're seeing in one side and on the other side. But I think at the end, there is not so much of ambiguity because everything burns. So it's like we burn down an entire museum and an entire virtual reality somehow. At the same time, if I can be more clear, it's also very personal in terms of... I have been working a lot of years in my life as what they call now cultural mediator, which is like a sort of guide, between guide and guard inside a museum here in Venice, especially for the Biennale, in Art Biennale or Architecture Biennale. And when you are a guide, you have to be extremely patient, extremely polite, and you cannot be rude at all because that's your job. and our guides are the opposite so it was a bit like of giving the right to our guides to be bitchy when they usually cannot and at the same time it's a bit like okay you know at the end what should i do i just burn down everything something that i cannot really do in the real life and i will never do in real life I promise. So it's like a cathartic idea of burning down everything and recycling, a rebirth somehow from ashes. So the idea of a tour guide that's super, super unfriendly and giving orders, actually, it was really part of that. Because then when you are in VR, you still have the feeling that you are being observed because there is this person there looking at you. so you know that there is someone staring at you while you are looking at this beautiful world so it will probably end soon and the idea that at the end you have the fire and you see the two realities blurring together that's also a way of saying okay so now it's it was also something like that so i i mean yeah there is no ambiguity at the end i think at least for me
[00:36:17.495] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, I guess I missed that part because I saw the fires, but I didn't connect that the fires were connected to sort of a deconstruction of the earlier parts.
[00:36:28.364] Corinne Mazzoli: Burning down the museum, basically. All those torture tools have been torturing us, them, or whoever for a while. Let's burn down everything. Let's burn down all the versions of those franchise museums that exist in the world. and see if we can get rid of this decorative violence we are obsessed with because we are so much obsessed with decorative violence meaning like you have objects coming from military or objects coming from the second world war or whatever that becomes that are becoming somehow tools that you have in your house and you use them as decorations and it is making violence more like you don't even recognize it anymore, more comfortable. It's like you are normalizing violence inside your domestic environment, inside your real-life environment. And in this sense, the torture museums are something like that because the main quote that you see in the main page of the website is that The torture museum is a way to remind that every man, human being has in him or herself like a beast. So that's somehow what they say in their landing pages. And they are funded by Amnesty International. Yeah, some of them, yes. So it is a bit weird. It's like, okay, we have to fight violence, but we finance a place that is actually showing off what is left out of violence, if it is real or not. We don't know, but still that's what you see there. So at the same time the idea of burning down this museum was part of this like burning down this kind of extremely capitalistic product because franchise is one of the most capitalistic thing that exists now.
[00:38:30.598] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it seems like there's lots of different aspects of this piece and certainly the glorification of violence through the spectacle of observing these torture devices. Yeah, it also sounds like that giving the instructions and directions to the docents that we have to the stewardship exam is to be extremely rude and bitchy, like you said. So my experience of that was certainly like, okay, here's some very strict rules. I don't want to actually violate this because I don't want to get kicked out of the experience because it felt like there was a threat to say, if you do this, then... the result would be, okay, you're out. You know, I didn't want to really touch that boundary. Like, it was like, I want to see this experience. But there was also like this line of like the Stanford prison experiment where you have the guards who are like being prison guards and then all the people who are kind of like submitting to this type of abuse. And so it felt like this theatrical staging at Venice, like, okay, like, I was OK with it. I can imagine some people, you know, maybe too much for them or too intense. But there is this performative element that eventually gets resolved in the story that is later deconstructing it. But in the beginning, it's pretty intense. And my experience of it was that I feel like I'm getting initiated into some sort of like secret society where I'm like walking into some sort of ritualistic place. situation here and i better like be extra hyper vigilant to pay attention because i don't want to like say anything or do anything to screw up and like ruin my experience and everyone else and so it was like extra attention to listen to the story of each of these objects and so and then we go into the vr experience and then come out but the whole onboarding of that with this theatrical interaction was very visceral and memorable and i think it was part of why i was like oh this is one of my my favorite experiences just because of how intense it was and how like how that kind of contrast between that level of depth and darkness and creating that whole vibe with the actors and then contrasting it with the VR experience. And so, yeah, but I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of like coming upon this dialectic between that intensity and the bright and shininess of the VR experience to create this narrative tension that runs pretty deep throughout this project.
[00:40:51.499] Corinne Mazzoli: Well, of course it is done on purpose to make really clear that it's two completely different worlds somehow, but at the same time it's also a way of reminding us that our societies impose us to be polite, which polite means politically correct basically, so it doesn't mean that I am polite with someone because I have an affection to this person or I care about that person. It means that I'm doing that because it's a politically correctness. So it's just bullshit. And I see this a lot because we are Italian and in Italy many people are more direct and they use a way of communicating that's extremely direct and then you are not understood by others. When you go abroad you can have let's say cultural conflicts because of this directness but also like I'm looking at you I'm staring at you in your eyes it doesn't mean that I am threatening you it means that it's my cultural way of communicating because we are it's really cultural it's something you learn living in Italy so if you go in other countries you will probably not look at people in the eyes because it's rude so it's really structured that we are born into and so when you I think when you experience that you understand somehow that you are taught how to be polite and how to be treated in a polite way, and you're not very much used to that. That one is connected to more kinky communities, for example. It's a different way of relating to... It's like this master and servant relationship which you consent to, but it's in another environment. In here, we are not doing a BDSM party, so it's completely out of setting somehow. And I think it could be a way to make people reflect on this as well. When I'm inside sometimes helping out and I'm in character, I really feel like bad when of course we have to treat people like shit. It's like, okay, I've been so rude that I have to go out and tell this person I am so sorry. And sometimes we do it, actually. Our actors are doing that. Sometimes they're going out to say, I'm so sorry, I treat you really like shit. I mean, I didn't want to. It's like part of the character. And people are like, no, no, I'm so happy, don't worry. And it's very nice. But still, it's a problem for us as well to... like being character all the time and i think this makes us you everyone reflect on this kind of structures we have somehow then of course in this specific it's a reflection i'm doing now here with you because i have never thought about it before and it's something that came into my mind into these these days when we were doing it but like at the beginning it was just to keep this contrast in between the first part super harsh and the second part super shine and bright and happy somehow till a certain point where it is not happy anymore
[00:44:09.278] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it all really coheres well together. And yeah, I imagine there's going to be a wide range of different types of people and different types of reactions. But I really resonated with it, really appreciated it. But you had mentioned earlier that you went to the Biennale College and that you had won the grand prize. Maybe just kind of elaborate on your time at the Biennale College to kind of help develop this project. And we'll start with you.
[00:44:32.827] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, so we applied for the Biennale College Cinema Immersive in late December, November or December 2023. And then we had the first workshop in January. It lasts like 10 days with different kind of professionals. We applied with just an idea and the budget. and then with them we try to go deeper and further into the ideas in different kind of point of views, so directors, producers, technical issues, technicalities, budgets and so on. And after the first workshop we were asked to represent a document with Not a treatment, but a synopsis, a budget, more detail, yeah, and some images or, yeah, like the storyboard or, yeah, materials. And then we were selected among three finalists. I mean, we were three finalists and we came back in mid-March. We had just four days of workshop really into our projects, really specifically into the development. After that we wait like, actually it was just the day after we finished the workshop, in a few days we found out we were the winner and so we were super happy and in the meantime we were just super scared, oh gosh, it's really our first experience and then the workflow was really intense.
[00:46:14.075] Corinne Mazzoli: We had four months basically to do everything.
[00:46:17.005] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, and the budget was 75,000 euro plus a maximum 15% of the budget in in-kind support. So we couldn't ask or find other extra fundings. And we had sponsors such as the DAR with the fabrics around the room of the Churchill Museum. And as one got the clothes and the dress of the guides and of ourselves. So, yeah.
[00:46:50.568] Kent Bye: What was your experience like of going through the Biennale College Cinema immersive experience?
[00:46:55.424] Corinne Mazzoli: Well it was extremely powerful and really intense because it was really the first workshop was working day and night basically because during the day you had to pitch it to professionals and then get feedbacks then re-elaborate everything then going through another one and then another other feedbacks and then you had to collect all the feedbacks which sometimes were completely different of course and then put them all together and and say okay so now where are we going like of course you had people that were completely deconstructing your ideas and telling you okay this is not something you could should can do or this is something you can do and you should do so in the end yeah we were pushed to do at least what I experienced is that we were very much able to listen to the suggestions and that was very good because we are I think coming from the art world it helped us a lot because the art world is very harsh people are criticizing you all the time you get institutional critics about anything all the time so we got used in the years to have like people telling you this sucks But like that, you know, and it's like, OK, thanks. Can you elaborate? In this case, it was very precise comments that could result in a rush in a very harsh way. But actually, they were very cozy. So somehow they were really cuddling us like, OK, I think this is not working. But. and it was really why don't you and it's really it was really really a supportive way of giving us feedbacks we never felt that we were being like uh yeah abandoned or like i don't know forced to do something that we wouldn't do and then yeah or judged in a bad way which often happens in the art system contemporary art system at least so it was an amazing experience actually what we were actually aiming to do the first workshop when we applied it was like i applied i called her one week before the deadline i was like I have a very crazy proposal for you. Would you like to? And the idea was to actually be able to enter the first week of workshop because I knew that that would have been an amazing way to research and develop at least the idea and then of course with that go to ask for fundings and produce it then we entered the second phase and there was amazing as well but then again we thought yeah we will never go through that i mean we will never win this it's impossible like it's really impossible we will never reach that And then when they called us and they said like, yeah, you won and was like, what? Are you sure? Like, really? It is not a mistake. And then everything started going like rolling in a very, very fast way. So.
[00:49:57.964] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, because we couldn't throw away the other projects we were running at the time or the PhD deadlines, so it was really intense months and trying to find the right balance between the development and the production of this specific piece and... Sleeping! end of life and keeping the other projects we run.
[00:50:26.824] Kent Bye: I think it's probably worth digging into a little bit of the VR experience portion of this piece because we've talked a lot about the larger context and the theatrical part but then in the VR experience you're contrasted into the more the brightness the shininess technically it looked like more Adobe After Effects motion graphics projected onto like a flat plane in the bottom and like a cylinder around you so it had like this Almost like hand-drawn animated feel, but also computer-generated feel, but kind of a motion graphics that were telling the story of the gossips that was deconstructing all the stuff that you had just heard. And so maybe you could talk about the design process for creating the look and feel and the story aspect of the VR part.
[00:51:12.307] Corinne Mazzoli: So I was obsessed with the idea of having this animator that's a friend of mine and I love very much his work so I called Emanuele Cabo and I asked him to do this and then he said I work flat so it's impossible okay but maybe we can try it was like yeah if you find a solution I will be very happy to participate but otherwise I don't know what to do So then we found Saverio, and Saverio said, yeah, no problem, come on, we make a sphere and then a dome, and then we cut the dome into pieces, and then it can become a sort of place where you can put the flat images and it works. And then a lot of different strategies to combine the elements and make it look like it is actually 3D, because it is, but it is flat somehow. like a Chinese theater you know that you have these layers and of course some of the things we wanted to do we couldn't because the images are made like frame by frame they are animated drawn frame by frame and then it's a lot of a series of pngs put together and then you create the animation and then we had to structure it in a very complex way we had to redo it they had to redo it actually a few times in different ways to find a way of putting this together and not having a super super huge and heavy build that could work yeah in the headset but it was really a lot of I mean, we had to work on it for a while, like trying, trying, trying, trying, trying, and in the end it worked. At the beginning everybody was like, why do you want to do flat images in VR? And I was like, because I want to. And we were like, but why? I liked his illustrations and animation and what worked with him. Yeah, but I mean, you have a VR space. It's 3D. Why do you want to use flat? And he was like, why not? Again, it was a constant fight with everybody we were speaking to. And then when we found Saverio, actually, it was not like a wall. It was more like... yeah let's try it's just you know so that was a more or less the process because I already had in mind who would do the animations who would do the sound and the main ideas and who would do the script but then I didn't have the rest the rest was missing so yeah that was more or less the process like to have a few figures that I knew I wanted to work with and then find the others
[00:53:55.558] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's been a number of different pieces that have showed on the festival circuit that have taken like 2D billboarded images and put it into a 3D space. Yeah, and a number of different pieces like that. And this piece was, you know, just kind of wrapping around, which I have seen before, but I think it worked quite well for especially this piece. And, you know, I think it also was fitting into the story and the narrative. At the end, you do blip out the ceiling of the virtual world and you have this mixed reality pass through where you see the red lights of the room. And, you know, at the time, I didn't understand why that was happening. But as you talk about now, the metaphoric use of the blending and blurring of the realities of trying to explore the truth or fiction or the multiplicity of different realities. possible answers to what's happening. So I didn't get that that was a metaphor at the time, but it sounds like that you wanted to start to at least have some illusions to mixed reality as a way of reinforcing some of the aspects of the narrative.
[00:54:52.082] Corinne Mazzoli: Yeah and also I cannot burn down museums so I mean at least I can do it in VR again. So that was like the idea of, I'm joking of course, but yeah the mixed reality parts are a way to somehow get you connect with where you are. So you have a first at the beginning where you are entering, then you have one a bit after when the sky cracks and you see the birds and you see the mixed reality and then in the end when you have the fire and the fire kind of takes over the museum and all around you. Of course it is an animated fire because A real fire, well, this is the aesthetic of everything, but at the same time a real fire, like, I don't know, a 360 fire, a realistic fire, would have been very traumatic and dramatic, too much. But at the same time a bit fake because you already had a physical, real-life experience, then you have a very non-physical and unrealistic experience. In the end you try to melt the two of them together. the best you could. So that's more or less what we did.
[00:56:06.100] Kent Bye: Nice. And it sounds like this is a project that you try to go through a number of different traditional routes and didn't get much traction, a lot of rejection, and then got into like adding different immersive qualities and XR and got into the Biennale College, winning the Biennale College and now four months of rapid development. Now you're here at the Venice Immersive 2024. with your world premiere. How's it been going with showing it to everybody here and what's been some of the reactions from folks?
[00:56:33.862] Corinne Mazzoli: Well, we are in your top 10 list, so I think that's enough for us. I mean, what can we ask more? Yeah, people are very happy. At least they stop us outside and they ask more and they say that it's super interesting and some people are giving us like comments and suggestions for like the real life tour, for example. So it's really interesting to see the the feedbacks like people we don't know because of course when you know someone they would come and say okay i liked it or not but people that you completely don't know that stops in the garden is like i want to tell you this was amazing but then i would love i think that you could do blah blah and it's very very nice very nice usually when you don't care about a piece you don't even go to talk to someone but if people comes to us even saying i would change this That's, I mean, a lot. It's taking care, you know, it's really a lot. So we are extremely happy. I don't know if you want to add something.
[00:57:40.754] Marta Bianchi: No, I mean, no, no. It's just, as you said, we are super happy. Now we are thinking how to, you know, what's next? I mean, how to share and move this piece around. So which kind of channels? So festivals or museums or art organizations and so on. And probably we were discussing that winning here could allow us to go into museums that probably wouldn't happen otherwise, you know. And so we will see. Now we are, you know, here trying to figure out what's next. Yeah.
[00:58:22.906] Kent Bye: My only note on the experience would be at the very end when you're coming out of VR, because when you go into the museum, it's all red and there's a certain look and feel. And then you go into VR, you're completely occluded. And then when you come back, it's still red. And just thinking about how to like switch a color or have another change to indicate that now it's been transformed or kind of reinforcing this ambiguity. So that's that's my only sort of note that I have.
[00:58:48.347] Corinne Mazzoli: It's a very good suggestion. It's also something that we thought at the beginning about playing with light but you know the quest is not very happy when you change light during the process so we need to find a solution for that like and at this time with this amount of time we couldn't really but actually it's a very good idea.
[00:59:09.398] Marta Bianchi: We just add an infrared light just to be sure that the quest tree will work smoothly but yeah for sure at the end we will think to change the light also because happened that people just stayed there because they were so scared even if I mean the title were gone and and then the headset was just off but they were still there just okay so so yeah for sure changing the lights will help just to yeah
[00:59:43.428] Kent Bye: Some sort of indication that now you're entering into a new realm that things have been transformed or some way to kind of reinforce that part of the story. So, but yeah, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:00:00.842] Corinne Mazzoli: Yeah, my target are the museums actually. I've been in the museum since the beginning. The idea was to create a piece to propose to museums in mixed reality so that you can do the normal tour or you can do the alternate tour. As a way of showing that you can visit a place with different perspectives. And I think this could be interesting for young audiences as well. Because when you go into a museum and they tell you the history of I don't know, blah blah, historical, and you have to do it, you have to study it because it's a part of your instruction and they tend to clear that it is something that you must study because this is what you must do, you must learn, whatever. To have the opportunity to have another point of view, another perspective, even if it's not real, but something else, stating that this is completely fake. But here you have the history as it is told in the storybooks. Here you have an alternate story. It means that you as well can be creative, open your mind and think about something else. Think about opening portals to other worlds and showing something else, opening your mind. All the people that are going to museums are people working in the creative sector or potential artists, creators or whatever. People go there to just have fun or enjoy in the weekends. So somehow to show that it is possible to have this kind of different perspective, I think it's important. At least.
[01:01:48.967] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, I don't know how to add.
[01:01:52.228] Kent Bye: Where do you think it's all going?
[01:01:55.874] Marta Bianchi: I mean it's going great and yeah as she mentioned for sure museums for sure we will also think about like why don't we push more into the theater or festival of theater or performance just you know spreading around this kind of interdisciplinary, yeah, pieces. So that could be another chance. Like in Italy, we have Sant'Arcangelo that is really famous, but yeah, Centrale Fies, yeah, other organizations that are working into this kind of, yeah, mixed pieces, yeah.
[01:02:39.681] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? Any final thoughts?
[01:02:45.561] Corinne Mazzoli: Well, thank you and thank a lot to all the community that was very supportive so far today. And thanks to Michelle and Liz and all the tutors that supported us in this project and the people that worked with us because really it was thanks to them if this happened.
[01:03:07.777] Marta Bianchi: Yeah, just that.
[01:03:11.269] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, it was a real pleasure to be able to unpack this experience a little bit more. I really appreciate it just from the visceral nature of it and the depth that I was perceiving, but it's even more of a pleasure to unpack it more and to see how clear your vision was to try to have these deeper intentions of using VR as a medium to push at these institutional power structures and try to deconstruct them in your own unique way. So, yeah, look forward to see where you take it all in the future and best of luck for wherever the Gossip Chronicles goes from here on out. So thanks again for joining me today to help break it all down.
[01:03:44.686] Corinne Mazzoli: Thank you so much. Really.
[01:03:47.368] Marta Bianchi: Thanks. Thank you. Such a pleasure.
[01:03:49.673] 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.
