I speak with the curators of the 28 immersive documentary projects being featured at the 18th edition of IDFA DocLab including Caspar Sonnen, Nina van Doren, and Toby Coffey. The theme of this year’s program is “This is Not a Simulation,” and there were many immersive projects that featured AI this year. We talked about each of the experiences in this year’s program, except for the three projects I’ve previously covered at Venice Immersive 2024 (All I Know About Teacher Li, Fragile Home, & Impulse: Play with Reality) . We also briefly discussed the IDFA campaign around being complicit and challenging neutrality. For more information on each of the pieces in this year’s program,, then be sure to check out the time stamps below to hear what the curators have to say.
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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 today I'm going to be talking to the curators of the IFA DocLab Festival. That's the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam. It's one of the largest documentary festivals out there with over 250 documentary films. And they have a section called DocLab, which has been running for 18 years now. And it's an opportunity for storytellers to use all the different latest emerging technologies, starting with like interactive web documentaries and then eventually virtual and augmented reality, XR, mixed reality. And now there's more and more artificial intelligence that's being used by these storytellers to tell stories around what's happening in their lives. So documentary is defined by John Grierson as the creative treatment of actuality, which for me, when I went to doc lab in 2018, it completely changed my mind as to what a documentary even is. What I just saw as a regular VR experience, exploring different slices of the human experience from a definition of documentary that could be seen as a creative treatment of actuality. And these simulations and virtual worlds and these experiences can be seen as a form of that creative treatment of actuality. And so this year's theme of DocLab is this is not a simulation, which I think gets to that point, which is that these experiences are very much reflecting very real parts of our lives. And so I had a chance to sit down with Casper, Nina and Toby to talk around all 28 experiences that are being featured there. Actually, three of them we don't talk about, but I do have previous interviews with those projects that I'll link to in the show notes so you can go check out. But I will be on site in Amsterdam, checking out all these different experiences, as well as doing interviews with creators. In fact, this year, they're going to be taking some of my interviews that I'm doing and having a little space for people to listen to conversations that I have with some of the creators. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Wasteless VR Podcast. So this interview with Casper, Nina, and Toby happened on Monday, October 21st, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:13.772] Caspar Sonnen: My name is Kasper Sonnen. I started the IDFA DocLab program in 2007, a very long time ago. IDFA is one of the world's biggest documentary festivals. And in 2007, we started this program to kind of explore the relationship between art, tech, and reality. Pre-VR. VR was still a failed experiment from the 90s at that time. But it, of course, came back with a vengeance in the mid-2010s. So we kind of saw interactive go down and immersive come up. And it originally started with a very, very small team. But DocLab grew into a big thing. And one of the big people behind it is sitting here as well. Nina.
[00:02:53.735] Nina van Doren: Hi. Thanks, Kasper. So my name is Nina van Doren. I'm one of the programmers at IDFA DocLab. My background is a bit more in traditional art history, actually, where I started studying painting, sculpture, architecture, but always out of an interest in storytelling and how art reflects and communicates human experiences. And alongside this, I've always been drawn to computers, digital tools, digital culture, games, quirky web stuff. And I guess combining these interests led me to admiring artists like Laurie Anderson and Corey Archangel for their innovative use of video games and code and conceptual art. So from this more institutional museum-focused background, I guess, I started working at LI-MA, which is a new media art archive in Amsterdam, where I researched early digital artworks by pioneers such as Peter Struycken and Jody, which really helped me to appreciate the foundational impact of these works on the field of digital art. but also very much aware of all the challenges of preserving new media art, as many of these works are, of course, so, yeah, ephemeral and depend on technology or are performative in nature. So now for the past three years at DocLab under, of course, the IDFA umbrella, and I love really being in the space where all these different fields intersect. And it's been exciting to shift from archiving to programming and to see how new ideas and projects are constantly emerging. And very happy this year also to be working with Toby Coffey, who's also sitting here with us.
[00:04:22.958] Toby Coffey: Hi, yes, I am Toby. I'm very excited to be joining Info.club. It's kind of wonderful to have been invited and to be collaborating with Casper and Nina and the rest of the team. My journey into VR actually started with my undergrad degree, which was psychology, human-computer interaction and AI. But my dissertation, which was in 1994, was how in the future you could use virtual reality to rehabilitate offenders and support people with various social and cognitive needs. So obviously there was a large dot, dot, dot between 1994 and kind of now, as Kasper says, you know, that was kind of left, let's say, on the back burner, as it were. But seeing that all kind of come into play now is really, really interesting. And the psychological element of The way projects are made and humans engage with storytelling and technologies has always been really, really interesting to me. Most recently, in 2016, I set up the immersive storytelling studio at the National Theatre in London. And we've had the privilege of showing a number of pieces at work at IDFA and also co-commissioning some projects, which has been very rewarding. So I think in terms of running a studio, you take on a lot of different roles. And also my relationship with IDFA DocLab has been really multifaceted. So it's just incredible to be actually part of the core team this year. And I'm very, very much looking forward to seeing how audiences respond to what we're bringing to them.
[00:06:05.675] Kent Bye: Awesome. And welcome each of the curators here to the Voices of VR podcast. We are going to also be doing a sort of guided tour through this year's selection of the doc lab, the 18th year. And so it's usually in one major location, the Brachter Grand, and there's also a new location this year of the Droog. So let's start like in the lobby of the Brachter Grand and Usually there's at least three major sections within the selection. There's the DocLab competition for immersive nonfiction. There's the digital storytelling competition. And then there's the spotlight that's featuring the best of from this past year of immersive nonfiction. And so maybe you could start us by introducing us to the overview of the program and then start to walk us through each of the different projects that we're going to be featuring this year at IFA DocLab. Nina, do you want to start?
[00:06:58.250] Nina van Doren: Yeah, I was going to say, do you want to start by saying something about the theme or like I'm already picturing now walking into Brackegrond and what we see there, which is probably what a few songbird, but maybe you want to contextualize that a bit first, talking about the theme.
[00:07:13.861] Caspar Sonnen: Yeah, sure. I think it's an interesting provocation, Kent, to a few weeks before the festival, as we are devising and imagining how things are looking with our production team. to already have to imagine that we're there. But yeah, with a little luck, if you enter the building, you will see an overview of the program and there will be sort of our theme of this year will be revealed there, which is, this is not a simulation. That's kind of the tagline that we've been using or that started to emerge as we were going through the project. And in a way, it kind of was a really nice fit, this little moniker to play with, as this is, as you mentioned, our 18th edition, meaning that we are legally considered to be adult or to have a vote or I don't know what 18 means. I think we're financially not yet responsible in the Netherlands for 18, but it has many different meanings. for us at DocLab, but I think it was also one that kind of coincided with what we've been seeing in the field. I think we can say, as I mentioned before, when we started in 2007, the internet was still being discussed, whether it was an actual thing in many places. Interactive had a wonderful development and then when VR came you kind of saw that in the field of immersive and interactive arts the thunder kind of went to everything that was headset based because there's a lot more impetus to sell headsets through new content than there is to sell browsers So we could see a shift there. And I think interestingly enough, in the last couple of years, we've also seen that the immersive field has been on one side struggling and some of its thunder has been moving towards more AI driven productions. That's where now the investments are in the tech field. And I think we heard somebody say recently that within tech, it's said that AI has about two more years to prove itself as a monetizable entity, as a development that justifies the huge investments that are being put into it right now. and that kind of led us to think like yeah what does that mean like even the conversations around vr is it a viable medium is it a thing is it real or not that same conversation we saw in interactive arts and now that we are 18 as a program we kind of felt like well looking back at the last 18 years this is not a simulation the artworks that we've been presenting that we've seen artists make Those are real. Those experiences are real. Some of them are gone, as Nina mentioned. The archival issues around all of these works are huge. Some of them are really hard to bring back, but they are real. And if we look at immersive, there are initiatives like New Reality bringing VR to audiences in cinemas. We have seen so many things over the last couple of years, examples of how audiences are really responding to these new formats. We're seeing planetariums open up to immersive content in the last couple of years. So there is real maturity to the medium. maybe the business model isn't there yet. But if we look at this through the lens of art, I don't know what the business model of opera is, if I'm honest. I don't know what the business model of poetry is. So I think sometimes seeing everything to the lens of does it scale on a capitalist level Does it have a return on investment that makes it double its income in the next five years? I don't know whether that's the question we should be asking to decide whether an art form is real or not. That kind of was one part of this is not a simulation angle that we really liked to sort of celebrate the maturity, artistic wonder of the field, as vulnerable and weird as it is, the level that is there, the audiences that are there, the artists that are there. and then at the same time the other element of this is not a simulation is of course the fact that i mean we are at a documentary festival there is a lot to be said about what's happening in the real world right now we are sitting right before the elections in your country kent i think we can be clear to say that is not a simulation like it feels sometimes that social media virtual reality technology has kind of disconnected us or desensitize us sometimes of what is real. Like sometimes it feels like on the one side, everything is coming in without a filter through our screens. On the other side, we have very little action and very little agency around these events. The world is burning and it's not a simulation, it's real. So what do we do? How do we deal with technology? What choices are we making? That is something that from us within a documentary festival is a really big thing like which stories are we telling and how using which technologies so in that sense there's also very much that part of this is not a simulation this is something that we are experiencing and going through and what do these artists and artworks show us about this or tell us about this maybe that's a little bit what hopefully uh can be said about the theme at this point but we're back in the beginning of the exhibition so i think nina mentioned already one of the first works that you see there is an artwork right
[00:12:23.484] Nina van Doren: It is an AI work, yeah. But quite an original take on it and use of it. It's called You Can Sing Me On My Way. And it's by Sean Hannan, a Dutch-Irish artist who revitalizes the ancient Irish Sean Noss singing tradition. It's a nearly lost oral tradition. that was used to transmit stories back in the day. And he trained an AI to basically learn how to sing this way in this ancient language and way and is now trained to generate new songs from current events and recent local histories. So it's a big sculpture that you see. It's a big globe that's hanging in the space through which you hear the Shannos singing. And he enables audiences with a translation app so you can actually listen to what the AI is singing about today and what it deems relevant to sing about. Because the original Shannos would be songs typically about big events that people wanted to tell each other about, like wars and wars. I don't know, like things that would be happening. So it's interesting that we're going to hear what it's going to select now, what it's going to sing about and how it's going to sound.
[00:13:37.526] Kent Bye: Nice. And I know that one quick thought that I wanted to share, and we'll dive into other aspects of the selection, is that in talking to William Uricchio from the MIT Open Doc Lab, he wrote, documentary as a form is always on the forefront of emerging technologies. 90% of all the films made in the first decade of films that had copyright to them were documentaries. And the first time that you had audio that was able to capture on the go and color film. And so each time there's new emerging technologies, documentary as a form is always at the forefront of exploring how to use it for storytelling. And so for me, the doc lab is at that intersection of seeing how all these new emerging technologies can be used to tell stories. And so I know listening to Casper during the press conference that even though you were maybe perhaps trying to avoid having so many pieces have an AI focus, it was kind of unavoidable just from not only the pieces that were coming in, but also the stories that were being told, a combination of those two things. that had you in some ways surrender to the zeitgeist of the moment to feature all these projects that were really reflecting what's happening in the wider world. And so looking at this first selection, you can see me on my way as part of the digital storytelling competition this year. And there was a lot of AI projects that were happening this year. And so there's AI as a theme to really kick things off. And so, yeah, maybe could talk about some of the other projects that are in this selection.
[00:15:02.814] Nina van Doren: Yeah. Debbie, do you want to say something about AI and me or should I?
[00:15:07.632] Toby Coffey: I mean, AI and me, I just find completely fascinating, again, from a psychological perspective about how there is so much narrative around the potential dangers of AI, yet when you bring in the human need for self-enquiry, how people will readily surrender themselves to technology. and what that actually says about us. And I think this installation does that really beautifully and in a kind of encapsulated way that results in people queuing to get in and see what they themselves look like through the eyes of an AI. It's kind of got AI, narcissism, humanity all rolled into one. I think it's almost a social anthropological study as well, in a way. So for something that on the outside is relatively small, installation actually philosophically has huge implications for how we as humans engage with technologies.
[00:16:18.638] Caspar Sonnen: And it kind of connects to, I think, what you were saying about William Riccio and the relation between documentary and technology or new media, where it's when a new technology arises before we hire actors and sets, we usually point it at reality. Like when we got a camera, we first started pointing it at workers leaving a factory or a train arriving at a station. before we build a whole set and make people think that it's fly to the moon but here the same i think especially with interactive work what that brings it also shows us as though we said the role of the audience so this is about how we relate to this technology and i think speaking to the artists recently part of the spotlight program they've been going to different festivals and the artists have actually been trying to get audiences not to do it so they've been walking around the queue going like, it sucks. It's really shitty. Like, why would you do this? And people just want to be judged by technology. People want to put their face in the mouth of that beast and see themselves through the mirror of technology. And in that sense, it says so much about all of us giving phones to our children, all of us signing up to all the social platforms that we've done over the years. companies signing up their communication departments to buy ads on social media platforms or all these free tools that suddenly then backfire and create a world around us that we're not quite so sure we signed up for in the first place so i think this as toby said this work really in a very simple direct way makes you reflect on your own agency there and where to use it
[00:17:53.959] Kent Bye: It seems like we're starting in the theme of AI and we talked about one of the AI projects that are in the Ifidoc Lab spotlight. And there's actually one project that's in the spotlight that actually also happens to be the opening night film of Ifidoc, which I don't know if this is the first time that you've had a project that was incubated within the context of DocLab that has been funded and then had some DocLab Live presentation. And then last year was a whole William Wales pyramid that was the precursor to this project. And so this is an intersection of where the opening night film happens to be a project that was born out of
[00:18:32.415] Caspar Sonnen: the cauldron of doc lab and so love if you can maybe say a few words around about a hero of how this is both a part of the spotlight but also happens to be the main if an opening night film yeah i think it's for us a very big thing and it's really want to make clear the role that we played in this project has been ever so tiny in the sense that it's been the artist doing the work we I've just had a very good relationship with the artist, Pjotr, the director and Mats of Makropul. We actually did a first collective social VR screening with Makropul and Diversion and a theater company called Bombina Bombast years ago, of which the tagline was, this is not a simulation. It's kind of where that sentence originated from. And this felt like a good year to bring that sentence back as well. But About a Hero as a project started with them pitching to us an installation that would self-edit raw film footage. It already was the pitch for the film, but they said like this installation is a first step towards seeing if we can get this AI model to work. And we want to see how audiences respond to this and whether it works or not. And that coincided with us starting the DocLab R&D program together with MIT. It was a really good collaboration where we could offer, in that sense, a space within the program to actually test some of these new things that they were developing. And every year we were waiting for the film they initially promised to be ready. It took about five years, longer than expected, but the result is there. And it was, I must say, for me and Nina and Toby, it was quite terrifying to When that film was submitted, we saw it and we really liked it. But then, of course, we are not in charge of the film program. So it was all we could do was wait on the sideline and hope that the film department would love us as much as we did. And yeah, no, I don't think we could have dreamt about this happening initially. That when Orva and Irabia, our artistic director, and Joost Dama from the program department came back to us saying, like, it's a really strong film. Yeah, and then ending up being the opening film is huge. So yeah, we're really excited about that. And it is also a beautiful complementary to, in that sense, the rest of the program. And those links between the film side and the interactive side of this festival, yeah, they are some of the most serendipitous and beautiful things that can happen, actually. Because as I said, I think there's nobody in VR that says film sucks. One of the myths about different media is that people... really like a medium. I think people like art in general, not necessarily for a certain medium. So yeah, we are very excited about this, of course.
[00:21:17.367] Nina van Doren: Yeah, and the film as well. It's completely intertwined with a series of interviews of artists and thinkers, philosophers, scientists, reflecting really on the notion of originality and the soul of the age of AI authenticity, which are also, of course, themes that we very much center in all of DocLab. So it's really nice to be able to make these connections with the film program more.
[00:21:40.999] Toby Coffey: And if I could just add in, I think there's a very happy serendipity that there's something about the craft of this nature of storytelling. And, you know, we've talked about documentary working with emerging technology For me, it's very much about artists working with emerging technologies. They will always push the boundary. And I think, you know, part of the reason that there's so much great AI work in something like the selection for IDFA is because you engage in an artistic community and they're finding out what these new technologies kind of means for their own practice of storytelling. So I think it's really, again, that kind of serendipity is like, you know, the experimental or emerging nature of, DocLab is paving the way for the future of the main program. And I think that's not an insignificant thing. That's really something that a moment should be taken for to kind of analyze, particularly in a time when some kind of immersive or emerging technology programs aren't being given the support that they once were. I think it's a really important statement from IDFA. It's an unintentional statement, but it's an artifact of this work. driving through into the mainstream, which is, you know, absolutely fantastic.
[00:22:56.857] Kent Bye: Nice. And there's a number of different returning artists that you have this year that also happen to have AI projects. I know Tamara Shogolu has a piece this year in the digital storytelling section called Bariza Healing Ground. Maybe you could talk about this piece.
[00:23:10.506] Nina van Doren: Yeah, sure. ORAISA, Healing Ground, is a beautiful sculpture. It's an installation that combines film, sculpture, and AI to trace the agricultural legacy of rice cultivation from West Africa to the Americas. So it's this very multifaceted project that sheds light on black land stewardship. And Tamara Chagallo is here by connecting ancestral traditions to more modern narratives. And yeah, it's a really beautiful use of AI where she used archival material that really enlivened this by generating new images of black people's connection with the land. I'm a bit stuck.
[00:23:51.462] Caspar Sonnen: What Tamara does in Risa Healing Ground is she started out with diving very deep into the archives of the Dutch National Archive, which recently digitized all the records of the Dutch slave trade. which unfortunately is quite a huge archive in terms of the history that the Netherlands has as slave traders. And what she did was kind of taking that as source material, but also doing interviews with people across the territories affected by this. and sort of exposing this problematic relationship that Black people have towards the land, towards working the land, towards agriculture. And the installation uses AR, so there's different ways that you can trigger bits of the archive, but combining all these different archival materials, video footage, interviews, She kind of did this really beautiful thing to actually make it all into one cohesive film by taking some of the textile patterns that actually were found across the different regions. As she was going through the archives, she could recognize some of these patterns in completely different territories, kind of as a visual motif, as almost a painful reflection of how people were moved across the planet. And what she's been doing is feeding actually some of these textile patterns into the visual language model, generating new patterns. And those patterns actually blend together all these different visual materials that make up the film Arisa. It's a really, in that sense, simple but effective use of AI. And I think one of the really beautiful things if we see the discussion around something like the history of slave trade. It's something that's always being looked at from a very local contextual situation. In the Netherlands, there has been a large debate about whether the Netherlands should apologize or not about its role in the slave trade tradition. when it was finally done, that triggered a whole new debate about like, why should we revoke these apologies or not? So those are very active conversations. And the big argument is always like, yeah, but it's been in the past. And what does that has to do with us? I think this film really shows how that story, that big global story, is very much part of our Dutch context, but it's also very much part of the American context. It's very much part of the Caribbean context. That is something we know in theory, but it really is beautiful how this film does create this way more universal realization of the effects, not just back then, but how they live on in the very daily lives of people across the world today.
[00:26:28.536] Kent Bye: And I know Polymorph and Marcel van Broekel have had a number of pieces previously at IvaDocLab. And this year, there's a Future Botanical, which is going to be at the Droog, a new location this year, but also using artificial intelligence. So I'd love to hear a few words about Future Botanica.
[00:26:46.021] Nina van Doren: Yeah, so I think this year it's 20 years anniversary of the Polymorph Studio. So they've been making incredible immersive and interactive works in various different media. We've been lucky to present their works in many different years, but this year they come with an installation called Future Botanica. which is an AR project, essentially, where you get to design new forms of botanica. You get to design what features they have, how they interact with each other, what they look like, and place these through the Argumented Reality app inside a landscape. And then you'll see how they interact with how other audiences have designed their species and create a sort of future garden. Which is a very interesting speculative future exercise, basically, on how to think of how we influence the world around us, but also how the environment is constantly connected. Yeah.
[00:27:44.895] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know Stea Halema from the Smartphone Orchestra is also going to be coming back to the IFA Doc Lab. And I had a chance to see him actually present this at the Venice Production Bridge, where it's essentially like getting a bunch of people together to then have these AI children that's made out of everybody that's there. And there's kind of like a breeding that happens virtually amongst all the people. So yeah, I'd love to hear about this piece called ancestors and ways that you could use your smartphone and AI to have these emergent social dynamics.
[00:28:16.536] Nina van Doren: Yeah, indeed. I think in general, I think ancestral ties and sort of these generational currents were themes that we saw in many of the submissions this year. People diving into sort of the deep connections we share with our ancestors and future generations as well. We're destined to influence and I think ancestors is a beautiful example of that. where audience members basically become part of this one shared family tree. You're using also AI-generated virtual children, grandchildren and beyond. And as participants, you engage in conversations with these sort of future descendants. And in the meanwhile, together with the rest of the audience, talk about what is our collective responsibility for next generations. And yeah, basically really very much in the face of crisis like climate change.
[00:29:08.221] Caspar Sonnen: I think in that sense Ancestors and many of the other AI projects are also a great example of artificial intelligence being used in the piece is in this case relatively modest. It's face merging of pictures of people in the audience. but the real craftsmanship of this piece is the human craftsmanship. It's using existing phones connected through a website, the smartphone orchestra system, but then really to tell this story. It's kind of like, instead of prompting ChatGPT to give you something funny, It's actually prompting each other. The artist is prompting this group of human beings to start thinking about their future great, great, great grandchildren. That is actually something that is quite difficult to achieve on your own or using just your computer. So the technology isn't even that impressive. The impressive thing about this is how human artists are actually applying it. And that's a little bit why for us also, like this is not a simulation. It's not automated, right? Like a lot of these experiences, even though they use AI, they are actually just human handiwork. It is about choosing where to use it and where and where not. So yeah, that's just a thought about ancestors in that sense that it's also reflective of how many artists using AI use it for a very specific thing. But at the same time, the core of the experience is not like, oh, my God, I have never seen the computer do this. Like, it's way more like, oh, my God, I've never thought about this or I've never had this human collective experience in a room. I've never shared three grandchildren with three random strangers and realized that how can I, within two minutes, build a rapport with somebody that feels like we're grandparents. Hmm.
[00:30:50.874] Nina van Doren: Yeah, and if anything, it makes the idea of like future offspring very tangible, like thinking way ahead of like generations from years in the future.
[00:31:01.065] Kent Bye: And another climate change related AI piece that's in the digital storytelling program is called Drift that is around like the rising waters. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Drift.
[00:31:13.516] Nina van Doren: Yeah, I think what's interesting about Drift also, that is a very new and fresh take on podcasting, which is of course like a more traditional media, but it's employing for the first time, like we're using open world game principles to create fictional audio experience that is set in the future in the Netherlands. So it's set from 500 years from now, where different narrators guide you through a sort of post-climate crisis world and shaped by water and technology. And each episode incorporates external elements, making every listening experience unique. And it incorporates responsive factors like the sea currents, the lunar phases. Yeah, this podcast is unique in that sense that it's providing really dynamic, interactive storytelling. Yeah, I think essentially it's tapping into the space that's usually only used by advertisers. So usually a podcast episode would stay the same, but the ads would change and they are using actually that space to make generative content also in combination with AI. So it's a very sort of unique playthrough through this sort of speculative world that they've built through storytelling.
[00:32:19.516] Toby Coffey: I think the thing with Drift that's really interesting for me as well is its form and how an audience will engage with it. I'm going to go into an installation and that's going to inhabit me for the next 25 minutes. It's something that you will re-engage with and how that feels as a narrative experience, that generated story kind of weaving in and out of your day, because there's different content on different days as it's being generated. That's something that I found very interesting is that. you start to fall into a mindset of what next and you anticipate what next and so it just generates a different relationship with the work than you would get with a traditional installation or film for example.
[00:33:00.307] Kent Bye: Nice. And another use of AI to materialize the memory space for Vietnamese family is a piece that's called Burning from Absence. So I'd love to hear a few words about that piece.
[00:33:12.420] Caspar Sonnen: I think with Burning from Absence, this is also a beautiful example of using technology not as a solution, but as a method. Like, the story here is the artist Émilie Courcier, when their family had to flee the country, the photographic memory, all the pictures were destroyed to sort of create their own family history. They try to create this installation through which they retell their family's history, but filling in the gaps, the visual gaps there due to all the missing pictures and information using AI. And I think when we saw an early prototype of this piece at the ONX exhibition in New York, it was really interesting to see the format is kind of like a slideshow of family pictures. If I reduce it tremendously, it's a beautiful immersive piece, but essentially it's family pictures that you're watching, which is something so incredibly familiar. And for those of us who are old enough to have gone through like that slideshow family gatherings where you had to watch your uncle's roof of his expensive holiday somewhere, those are also associated to be quite boring and dull and quite like, yeah, nice for you. And here, actually, it's sort of inverted. Like, you're watching this family history only to slowly start to realize the pictures I'm watching are actually not real, or maybe they are, or they are in part real, in part not real. creating this sort of really beautiful testament to how memory is not something objective or definite. There's only infinite memories of the same thing. There's only infinite versions of reality. And because the technology is flawed, because the technology, even if it works, it's not real. It doesn't make sense. You enter into this space that is much more of a exploratory space together with the artist trying to figure out, you instantly start thinking, what is my history? What am I remembering because of the artifacts that I still have? What am I not remembering because of the artifacts that I don't have? And I think that's what the best work in art does. It's hyper personal, it's hyper contextual, and at the same time, it triggers something super universal or super subjective in different people. This is one of those pieces that we very quickly fell in love with and Also, maybe as I think Toby mentioned, some of the challenges that I think the interactive and immersive community have been going through over the years. At the same time, we see both things, right? Like we've seen the National Film Board let go of its digital storytelling studio earlier this year. We've seen the National Theatre in London let go of its story studio. We've seen different places that have been instrumental in this community struggle or phase out. At the same time, we're also seeing amazing places continue building this field. So the FI Centre, where this project was incubated, and ONX, who we've been co-commissioning with for many years, we're very glad to say that they jumped on board. So together we're presenting this for the premiere of this installation.
[00:36:15.836] Kent Bye: Nice. And I've got two more AI pieces that I want to dive into the main competition. So the last piece that's featuring AI that's in the DocLog competition was Sincerely Victor Pike, which was using AI-generated images to be able to have us reimagine human connections. So I'd love to hear a little bit more context around Sincerely Victor Pike.
[00:36:35.379] Nina van Doren: Yeah, so Sincerely Victor Pike is based around audio recordings that the artist recorded over several years with loved ones, friends and acquaintances. What we particularly liked about this piece is the use of AI here. It's essentially like an AI machine. but it's really like dreamlike, nostalgic, and kind of grainy quality of the images really support what is essentially the core audio messages and creating a very beautiful, heartwarming piece. What's exciting also is that we are presenting this as an experimental full dome piece, so adapting it to the full dome, and therefore I think really tapping into sort of like the universal image themes that it addresses and seeing this together under the full dome is going to be quite amazing, I think.
[00:37:24.648] Kent Bye: Awesome. And I'm going to use the theme of AI to jump into the DocLop competition for immersive nonfiction, which I love seeing each of these pieces as the Voices of VR podcast. It's the most immersive pieces that are integrating not only VR technologies, but other immersive installations, immersive art, expanding beyond XR, and then including some more AI. And one piece that I've seen predecessors of Limba-topia, now we got Limbophobia exploring full dome context, but I'd love to hear a few words about Limbophobia.
[00:37:54.212] Caspar Sonnen: Well, I think if you want to have a sensory experience of some of the existential terrors that all of us are feeling, if we look around some of the things happening to the climate, things happening to reality as a result of technology that is not necessarily very playful and very great, limbophobia is quite an intense, immersive experience of that, sort of taking you full into the anthropocene world and into what that means in a highly simulated 3D built world. Very little words, but some really catastrophic imagery. Really triggering, I would say. Like if climate change is something you're worried about, then this requires a trigger warning. And maybe as it is such a hard message to get across, it does really lend itself to a more immersive format. And of course, it's a Taiwanese project. It's coming from a culture that has been heavily supporting immersive production. And I think a really interesting example also, if we look at field building around immersive arts, Taiwan is one of those examples. If you actually start supporting this seriously, you can see what happens. We can see that theater makers in Taiwan, we can see that game developers in Taiwan, 3D designers, interactive artists, filmmakers, some of the most amazing work is coming out of this country. And in that sense, it should be an example to many other territories of how VR is not a simulation. VR is a real, very serious and beautiful art form. Last year, I've been happy to have Ben Yen's projects here. This is yet another one of those projects with a beautiful production value, really strong, and really happy also that when we spoke to the artist and mentioned that we have a planetarium program here at IDFA in the Amsterdam Zoo, they were definitely open to create a full-done version. So we have the VR version available here, but the version that we're actually premiering in competition is the full-done version of Limbo Dome.
[00:40:00.020] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, I know that there's a number of different taxonomy systems that are on IFA doc lab. I think of all the different festivals, I think IFA has the most robust taxonomy system, go through pathways, arts and culture, human society, nature, sustainability, technology, and innovation. And so this one has a nature and sustainability tag of disaster, which I think is appropriate. And then there's another nature and sustainable ones. If we go to the top of the list of ancestral secret VR, I'd love to hear a few words about that.
[00:40:31.348] Nina van Doren: Yeah, it's a beautiful 360 VR piece that will be the international premiere where you enter the world of the Cuero community of Peru. They're part of the last living Incas and they have this prophecy of the condor and the eagle flying together, which would symbolize hope for an harmonious future. And you're invited to several of their rituals. So you sit in the midst of these people and really take part in the ancient traditions where old and new modern perspectives unite.
[00:41:07.022] Kent Bye: Great. And Toby, I'd love to bring you in the conversation. I know that there's a number of DocLab on stage pieces, and one that I'd love to have you talk about is the Drinking Brecht automated laboratory performance, which I think is likely bringing in lots of these different type of theatrical performance elements, but also I understand you're going to be drinking some things within this piece.
[00:41:28.368] Toby Coffey: Yes. You know, Sister Sylvester is returning again to IDFA and the previous piece of hers that I saw was the Eagle and the Tortoise, which is also live performance. I think she as an artist is really able to hold that live audience and keep them within a world, which is a very valuable skill to have. And also, like, I think the idea of stage is interesting. It's not always proscenium arch kind of stage. It's a platform in which she inhabits a space or they inhabit a space and the audience is intertwined within them. And this is an extension of her previous work. And I think just the fact, you know, it's a stolen hat and it's using the kind of microbiology to kind of draw out of that and then have the audience ingest something is a very provocative action. You know, I've got a severe nut allergy. I've got other things that mean I'm very cautious about what I consume. It's really just the idea of consuming some DNA is also quite a leap for me. So, but I'm very much looking forward to the performance.
[00:42:42.253] Caspar Sonnen: I think ingesting what potentially is Brechtian DNA is is probably the biggest fourth wall to go through. I think maybe one point to add about this, as we mentioned, the collaboration with ONX. This is also one of the works that we're co-presenting with ONX. And the starting point actually was working together with the onstage program within the performing arts program, trying to get this piece to Amsterdam. But as with many immersive performance pieces, the costs were just too high to justify doing this for one or two shows at essentially a film festival. meaning that we were looking for ways to make it cheaper, which is always the most uninteresting conversation there is. And I must say, to the credit of Sister Sylvester, talking to us at some point, we entered into that conversation together with ONX and realized, actually, this is an amazing performance piece, but it requires musicians and a huge setup. And we started thinking about what if this could be an automated performance, like taking a cue from Ant Hampton's Auto Teatro legacy and thinking, what actually if you could automize part of the experience and have the audience maybe take on the role of performer here and there. They're making their own drinks anyway. So how can we get the story as an automated one? So instead of this giant sensory performance, it became more of a interactive speakeasy hidden somewhere in the exhibition. But the goal behind that is not just to be able to say we have a speakeasy in the exhibition, which is of course very cool. The goal that is also very cool here is the idea that we're actually developing a version of this show that can tour way more easily, that can reach way more audiences. So in that sense, that's one of the big goals for us as we see the weakness of this space, like the vulnerability of this space is the cost per attendee. So this is one of the examples where we're exploring new formats that could actually make it easier for works like this to tour, to reach multiple audiences without just raising the costs to a opera performance type level.
[00:44:58.993] Kent Bye: Yeah, this year as part of the Venice Immersive, there's a whole think tank exploring different ways to close the gap between what's happening on the exhibition context and matching up the producers of content with formats that could be scalable or at least sustainable for this as a industry to continue to grow and thrive. So I was a part of recording and writing up that report that hopefully will be launching here at some point in the next couple of months, recounting those conversations. But moving on to the next experience, which is from Electric South, who's producing a number of different experiences out of Africa. This piece is from South Africa. It's Dollhouse for Queer Imaginaries.
[00:45:36.593] Nina van Doren: Yeah, so Dollhouse invites audiences basically to challenge and subvert the traditional heteronormative concept of the nuclear family home and its domestic spaces. There will be a physical dollhouse in the exhibition that's connected to a virtual dollhouse that you enter by putting on a VR headset or remotely through VRChat. And in this dollhouse together with others, you can rearrange furniture, dress up and reshape the environment basically to what you want it to be. And hereby fostering really fluidity and inclusivity, inviting everyone to explore diverse identities and reimagine home more as a reflection of varied relationships and ways of living in there. Besides the real and virtual dollhouse, we will also do an experimental presentation in the full dome together with WeMakeVR, Afinas Changa, who has been working on incorporating VR chat worlds and connecting them to the dome. So this will be a playful experiment also that we'll be presenting one time only.
[00:46:38.297] Kent Bye: Okay, and moving on to some combinations of immersive art and performance, there's a very evocative piece called The Liminal, which maybe you can expand on that a little bit.
[00:46:49.232] Caspar Sonnen: Yeah, the liminal is Alaal Minavi, a Dutch-Lebanese artist, and one of our Tokalab Film Fund Interactive grantees this year. Allah is currently working in between Amsterdam and Lebanon to realize this piece, which today is 21 October. As we can see on the news, what is happening in Lebanon is definitely quite a serious challenge and humbling for us to have conversations with Allah and his team and see how they are actually taking this in almost like any artist is working around setbacks and challenges in a very sort of clear, straightforward way. And this piece itself kind of already originated from what we're seeing in the world today, taking the wall as its main platform, one could say. This is an audio piece, so it's a big physical wall and it invites up to four people. To approach it, the wall starts speaking. So there's different speakers hidden within that wall. It's just a big white plain wall. Within that wall, there's different speakers inviting the audience one by one to come closer and put their ear to one side of the wall, inviting them to follow the sound as it moves through the wall. including Alaa's own story, and it also features different people from within communities talking about how they've dealt with boundaries, with walls, with obstructions, how they've transitioned from one side to the other, how they got stuck, how they were dealing with, in that sense, borders. It's really one of the highlights of the program for us to see this come together. And some of the questions that the audience will be asked as they are moving through this wall, the choreography that the artist is playing with of making different people walk around a wall with their head close to it how they how they cross each other all these different like the choreography of this piece is quite impressive and allah has an extensive history with making projects like this he's made immersive theater experiences inside living rooms inviting people to delve into his history by going through objects in a room In the sort of realm of location-based entertainment and immersive storytelling, we tend to look for things like Punch Drunk as the examples. But I think sometimes it's also really good to look at some of the artists that are doing slightly less large-scale epic things, but doing slightly more focused things. like Anagram has been doing in the past or that Alaa is doing this year. It's really, yeah, a joy to discover this artist earlier this year. And credits where credits due, it was our former colleague Ana Galtos who actually put Alaa on our radar. So a shout out to Ana Galtos from here.
[00:49:41.984] Kent Bye: Nice. And the next performance piece by an artist that has had a number of previous performance art installation pieces at IFA DocLab. So this is Me, a Depiction.
[00:49:51.843] Caspar Sonnen: I guess I'll take this one because I saw an early version of it. And it's one of those pieces that even if you have seen it, it's like, what is it? It's talking about VR. It's like dancing about architecture. I guess Chris Milk or someone else once said, this is one of those experiences. It's performance art. It's one of those experiences where it's really hard to pitch it. But everybody who's seen it, you become this little circle of having experienced something quite subtle, but quite intense at the same time. This piece is by Lisa Schambley. She is a performance artist, also a theater actor and a photographer. And a couple of years ago, we showed her first part of a trilogy. It was called My Toe Uncensored. This was a piece that originated during the COVID epidemic. When she was stuck at home, she couldn't go out to make pictures as a photographer. She couldn't perform on stage as a theater player. And she pointed the camera towards the body part of her own body that she felt least comfortable and familiar with, which was her big toe. That became an installation in which her big toe actually was on display at certain hours. And in an immersive environment exhibition, one of the most exciting things we've ever shown was this physical, actual, real big toe for people to observe. It sounds silly, but it was one of those pieces that people talk about. She made one piece after that exploring female sexuality and its relation to the combustion engine. I'll leave that one to your imagination as we are not showing that one this year. But this year is the third part in the trilogy where she decided she started with her big toe. She kind of felt like I'm taking it in the third part now all the way. So literally what she's doing is putting herself physically on display in an immersive exhibition installation environment that she created. which is made up of video projections of heavily modified versions of her body, exploring the warped body image that we all have. I don't think any of us has a very happy image of their own body. We all have a warped vision of our own body. Just like our voice sounds very strange to ourselves, our bodies look very strange to ourselves as well. That's a universal experience and at the same time something that we forget when we look at somebody else. And Lisa kind of invites the audience in and confronts them with exactly that by doing something as simple as just lying there. And it's not as simple as that. She's actually lying on a giant mirrored surface. There is a wonderful dramaturgy to the half hour experience. And I think one of the things that I took away from this is essentially this is performance art and many immersive theatrical experiences are essentially performance art. And I think we've kind of asked people to name five performance artists and it's probably like Marina Abramovic and then most people get stuck at that because that's kind of the paradigm of performance art. And I think Lisa shows us a different type of performance art. Maybe where Marina, as much as I love her work, feels more like a guitar solo. Like a very impressive, virtuoso experience of durational, painful art. And you're like, oh my God, how can somebody be powerful enough to do something like that? Lisa does the singer-songwriter version of performance art. It's very, very intimate and vulnerable. It's to a level that you're like... The reflections you have are a very different one, but nothing less moving nevertheless.
[00:53:23.078] Toby Coffey: I think there's something really significant about knowing that you're potentially being observed by her as well. There's a kind of implicit control almost. Like your gaze might not be as free as it might be if she weren't there live in the room somehow. So it would be just interesting to actually observe audiences watching this piece as much as watching the piece itself.
[00:53:51.502] Caspar Sonnen: Which essentially is the power of performance art, watching the others.
[00:53:56.586] Kent Bye: Nice. Definitely looking forward to that piece. So Toby, maybe you could give a little more context for the next piece that we're talking about, Walking Alone, Text You When I'm Home.
[00:54:06.133] Toby Coffey: Yes. This is a very important piece, I would say, in... it allows audiences to understand what it's like to be intimidated in a number of different ways, but the audiences, unfortunately, won't have encountered these scenarios, particularly women, which is what this piece kind of focuses on, and it just places you in the scenario where you're observing somebody who is in a situation that they would find intimidating or bordering on harassment, and It's very interesting to see the aggressor and how they behave, but also how she responds and how active or inactive she is in a response and how measured that is. And also quite how forgiving she is in a way as well. You know, as somebody who has been attacked in the street when I was younger, you know there's a lot goes through your mind in that type of scenario and for anybody who's not been in that situation i think it's a very kind of stark education on what it's like to be vulnerable in a place where it's just you and another person and you have to kind of make sure you get out of that situation safely And I think the immersion of VR is also really important because it's that isolation that you can get with VR. It's the same as being in an alleyway or a darkly lit street. There isn't something right next to you that you can kind of reach out or there isn't someone that you can reach out to. And I think sharing it in VR reinforces that aspect of the encounters. Mm-hmm.
[00:55:52.861] Kent Bye: Yeah, this piece has using the camera as a shield is one of the tags. So yeah, it sounds very interesting exploration there. So we have one piece called Rapture 2 Portal, which has the tags of dance, identity, and war, which seems like quite an interesting combination of things. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more around Rapture 2 Portal.
[00:56:13.598] Nina van Doren: Yeah, it's a VR piece made by Alisa Berger, which she explores the concept of the lost physical home through the eyes of a Vogue dancer, Marco. It was his house. And he revisits this abandoned apartment, which is in Donbass, Ukraine. So after many years, he comes back to this apartment. And yeah, you sort of follow him through this place and you're going round and round. So it's a very hypnotic experience. It's a merge of 3D scans and original photographs of the house and also partly of destroyed Ukrainian architecture around it. And yeah, you follow Marko's thoughts as he's also remembering many things of his past in that house. and how he's doing now. But I think what's really striking about this piece is that it also features sort of these cutouts to dance elements. And therefore, you see Marco's folk dancing, which really powerfully contrasts the strength of the human body in dance with maybe its vulnerability in the face of war.
[00:57:16.192] Kent Bye: Nice. And one of the more intriguing pieces that I saw this year is sort of like a social VR blind date type of experience. Romance, where you're going into VR to have a blind date with another attendee. So I'd love to hear a little bit more around romance.
[00:57:32.970] Nina van Doren: Yeah, so romance. Do you want to go, Gus, or...
[00:57:38.095] Caspar Sonnen: We both did it together as an early prototype. Maybe just to start, this is one of those pieces where Stan is a wonderful force in the immersive world that's been doing many different things, teaching, working on preservation projects. But also making their own works. And this is the first time we were able to select a piece of them. And we were so, so happy to do so. Because in a way, this work does so many things right that we've seen done wrong in immersive experiences. It's a two-person VR date where you both start without a body. in this big void. And you actually, without spoiling too much, you actually get invited to shape the body, the virtual avatar of the person you're with. So in terms of like, consent questions are different in the physical world than they are in VR. These are beautifully awkward experiences. It takes you on an entire journey where you end up in a virtual game show together and you end up trying to peddle a virtual raft together. In many ways, what is so real about it is the awkwardness and the fun of this strange encounter between two people is absolutely real. even though it's unlike anything you will ever experience in the real world, but it really uses the best of VR. It's inspired by pieces like The Collider by Enneagram, but also The And, an interactive web documentary that we've presented here years ago. It's really one of the, probably one of the crowd pleasers of this year's festival. And one that would be very interesting to imagine museum or like physical versions of, but also versions maybe in a different, yeah, in all kinds of different settings.
[00:59:33.905] Nina van Doren: And in the exhibition, the two participants enter from different locations. So they haven't seen each other before actually going into this experience. So maybe we'll do some matchmaking this year because they get to choose whether they want to meet in real life after the experience or part ways.
[00:59:50.646] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the collider that I saw if a doc lab back in 2018 and really completely blew my mind around what documentary it could be. And one of my favorite pieces of all time. So yeah, looking forward to seeing that, especially if it's inspired by collider. Okay. So the last piece that's in the doc lab competition for immersive nonfiction is a piece called speechless witness of a wandering tree. It's a piece from Iran that covers topics, including objectors, the camera as a shield activism and women. So love to hear a little bit more context for speechless witness of a wandering tree.
[01:00:23.891] Nina van Doren: Yeah, so this is also a mixed reality VR installation. It's essentially addressing the issue of deliberate blinding as a form of oppression. We've seen over the past years many individuals around the world having been blinded by state violence, and this work really brings attention to that reality. And in the installation, you follow a woman in Tehran who lost her eye after being shot by police during a Women Live Freedom protest. And after her recovery, she managed to retrieve actually the bullets that blinded her. And in the VR, you follow her through going through different symbolic acts, like drawing her eye on a wall where protest slogans are erased, eventually burying these bullets in the desert. And I think, yeah, it's a very clever way use of the interactive elements, allowing you to really connect to the story, to this woman and share in her thoughts and emotions. So it's really one of the highlights also of this festival. And yeah, I really recommend everyone to go and see it.
[01:01:24.668] Caspar Sonnen: And one of the many pieces that we were able to co-commission this year, also a beautiful example of On the one side, we have places like Taiwan or the UK, where the support for immersive has been quite extensive and quite, well, never enough, but healthier than in other places. This is an example of artists from Iran making something with very small means, but also finding support from all over the world to actually get their piece there. Those have shown that, revealing how global this space has become.
[01:01:56.206] Kent Bye: there is one piece that I would love to have you say a few words about. It's called thanks for being here, which is a performance piece. That's going to be a part of the IFA doc club spotlight, but also the IFA on stage by a creator, which I can never actually pronounce the theater troupe. I'll have you say it. It's, it's, it's going to be much better pronounced.
[01:02:17.864] Toby Coffey: I think we should all say it and see which one sounds most accurate. Yeah.
[01:02:24.531] Kent Bye: But I know that Alexander's a creator who's had a number of pieces through DocLab over the years about AI, funeral, kind of ritual, community ritual, and yeah, another piece during the pandemic. But I'd love to hear a little bit around, thanks for being here, just because I think it's quite an interesting intersection between community theater, documentary, and these immersive performances.
[01:02:47.137] Caspar Sonnen: I think I was happy enough to see the tryout three weeks before the premiere. Maybe just to mention, as you said you were struggling to pronounce the name of this theater group, it's Ontroerend Goed, which in Dutch means movingly good as well as real estate. So it's a pun. However, I got introduced to this theater group once when I was part of a creative brainstorm for a new project that Toby actually invited me for at the National Theater. And I remember one of his dramaturgs kept giving me these amazing references from the theater world of theater groups that I'd never heard of. It's like, oh yeah, in Edinburgh, we saw who or who. And I kept trying to write down what he said because it sounded amazing. And I was like, I really need to know this group. And then he wrote it down for me and I was like, oh, ontroerend goed, not ontroerend goed. But that's language barriers for you. They are Flemish. And as I said, as global as this space has become, often the biggest discovery can be just around the corner. So we're very happy to have them here with Thanks for Being Here, which is their new show, which is all about you, the audience. Really hard to talk about this piece without spoiling it. But as you mentioned, the legacy of Ontroerend Goed has preceded them and they are becoming increasingly a point of inspiration in the immersive world. Maybe nice to mention, besides the two shows of Thanks for Being Here, which will be hard to get into but i would say totally try i'm also very happy to say that they are also testing out a prototype of a new thing called handle with care and this is part of a new initiative that we started this year coming out of conversations nina and toby and me were having around where we are as a field Seeing some of the pillars of this field crumbling and falling apart, seeing others being sort of in limbo, waiting for the business model, seeing others actually moving into this space and giving it new energy and new life. I think one thing that we know for sure, we don't know what the elections are going to bring in your country or we know what they brought in our country. We're seeing harsh times ahead in many ways, so we also see a DIY situation coming up where the community you have been supporting with this podcast that we have been trying to support with our festival that Toby has been trying to support, we need to stand together. The ties, we are going to be needing them more than we've had in the past, just to also open up opportunities for new artists. And in that sense, the Handle with Care prototype that they're presenting is going to be part of a thing called the DocLab Playroom. We're inviting a number of artists that we've seen consistently make ground-breaking work, like Anagram, Onderdoer & Goed, but many others as well. And we're inviting them to open up their process, to show an early iteration of something they're working on for the future, to test it with the rest of the community, to play together, to have fun together in a space that is not just all about, here's my finished piece. And Handle with Care, what it actually is, is a show in a box. I know that in distribution formats, this is something that in VR has become a thing, like we need to produce our installation as a show in a box. Oldrood en Groot are actually taking this to the next level. And the show in a box that they are presenting is a prototype of something we hope to present in many places across the world in November 25 together with them. And it's basically a show without actors with the only thing present is a box with some instructions in there and a captive audience that enters an empty theater. No actors, no technicians, nothing. In that sense, a very interesting inspiration also for people in the immersive world, for people making VR, how to actually create an experience with very little.
[01:06:44.884] Kent Bye: Nice. So Entropic Fields of Displacement, another performance piece with cities, urbanism, and women as themes. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more around Entropic Fields of Displacement.
[01:06:57.790] Nina van Doren: So in Entropic Fields of Displacement, it's a project by Iranian artist Pega Tabisinajat. And she looks at how the act of wandering can symbolize freedom, particularly for women who often face restrictions on their movement in public space. And what we present is this eight-channel video installation of documentation of performances that PEGA has done. It shows women who have turned wandering essentially into an act of resistance, using their presence to reclaim public space. And while these women are walking, they're hearing PEGA's voice guiding them through public space with prompts and instructions like walking, stopping, running, talking to strangers. And also during IDFA, we'll have a live performance where audiences can direct this performer or Pega herself as she walks around Amsterdam. So it's kind of introducing game elements into real life. But other than prompting AI or like a game here, the performer can, of course, refuse the prompts or game over the audience by turning around. So it incorporates these elements as well. And I think, yeah, it's a very, especially seeing the different documentations of these sort of different cities all over the world and seeing these women move through public space offers a very sort of powerful reflection on like how free do we feel? How free do we feel in public space?
[01:08:24.406] Caspar Sonnen: And in that sense, I think, as Nina said, it's a really beautiful piece in relation to all the AI work. It's a work that uses nothing other than human voice, instructions and prompts to create an experience that says everything about AI. It really shows you how we sometimes forget that technology is something we choose. We actively choose whether we use it or not. There was a song in Holland when I was growing up that said, there is a button on your TV, there is a dial, meaning you actually can choose whether you watch it or not. You can switch it off. This piece actually really explores that between human beings, like the moment that you get to prompt another human being to walk around the street and do certain things. However, that human being also can look back at you in the camera, meaning, nah, I'm not doing what you're asking me to do. How do we make somebody do something they want to do is a way more interesting question than how do we make someone do something they don't want to do. And I think that's something we kind of forgot in doom scrolling and sort of being in this ever more convenient life where things get delivered to us whenever we want them. Sometimes it's like, how do we actually work together instead of working through technology? Especially in technological art forms, that's something we should not forget. So yeah, we were all three, I remember seeing this project and all three of us really being happy with all the AI works and seeing like, oh my God, this one really adds something to the ones we already have. We have to have this one. We cannot let go of this one. But then when we saw this one, it was like, yeah, this actually really complements the program in such a beautiful way that it really makes us reflect. This is a piece that makes you reflect about all the other works in the exhibition as well, as simple as it is.
[01:10:12.130] Kent Bye: Nice. So there's a book. I know that if a doc lab, sometimes you have the medium of a book. I know last year there was a really great experience, which was like turning the book into a whole immersive experience. But this piece is, I guess, a sequel, a continuation of taking like 21,000 words and picking the top Google image results and then putting it into a book. And now we have actually two volumes. to compare, I don't know if both will be on display, but it looks like a pretty interesting art project of like capturing this as a archive. It's kind of like the physical version of like a internet archive that you can actually like look through. And yeah, it's an interesting slice of algorithmic history. I don't know if you have any other comments about Google volume two.
[01:10:52.930] Nina van Doren: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think there's a couple of maybe more like traditional media pieces in the exhibition that kind of take on a whole new life as they're being presented more as an immersive installation and by leveraging actually the sort of like speciality of the exhibition. And Google Volume 2 is a good example of that. So we will be presenting both Google Volume 1 and 2 in order to, of course, compare. Essentially what the project is, is that they replaced the 21,000 words in the English dictionary with the first image that appeared when the word was searched through Google images. And yeah, you can imagine that in 10 years, the search results have become very different or sometimes maybe the same. It's just a great experiment to sort of see which sort of things became more dominant in popular space or in popular culture, as well as design that has changed over the years. So it's a very fun experiment that will also present in the Dome.
[01:11:50.782] Kent Bye: Nice. And Senna and Their Garden is another piece that's in the digital storytelling that has the tags of Family Album, In Dialogue, Identity, LGBTQ+, IA, Religion and Spirituality. I'd love to hear a little bit more around Senna and Their Garden.
[01:12:05.748] Nina van Doren: Yeah, I think I could also, as this is maybe more traditional media pieces with a whole new life as an immersive installation. Here, Jisoo Lim presents two different indie games, actually, but within one installation. And it's exploring really both the same narrative worlds. It's exploring a mother and daughter's perspectives on the Christian church opposition to queer individuals in Korea. And so the installation offers two entryways. It doesn't matter which order you play them in. But one game, Senna, is a narrative desktop indie game where you navigate a young lesbian woman's story through her personal desktop. You click through and read her diary entries and view photographs as you learn her struggles with her Christian faith and her love for another woman. And the second entry point is their garden, which you play on a phone. And I think the second game really cleverly incorporates elements of sort of like cozy gaming and like mom games. It's more of the mom's perspective. And you... You play these games and in the meanwhile hear audio clips from interviews of this Korean mother and her perspective grappling with her child's queer identity and her own Christian beliefs. So both pieces combined makes, I think, for a really engaging gameplay and really helps you to empathize with both perspectives.
[01:13:24.474] Kent Bye: And the last piece in the Iffidakula competition for digital storytelling is a piece that was only one minute long. I don't know if I've seen a piece that was as short, but Tongo Sondi, which covers the themes of language and literature, colonialism and identity. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about this piece.
[01:13:42.086] Caspar Sonnen: I think the thing we can say about this is when it was submitted as a one minute animation, there was a question of eligibility. which at Toklab we kind of love to bend the rules if we can. And this was one of those pieces that we wanted to bend the rules for. It's an artist from Suriname who made a one-minute animation that just packs so much punch and opens up so much that we kind of felt like, yes, we would love to show this, but... It's one of those things that maybe 10 years ago would have been something that could live on the internet when that was more of a free and playful space. Now we kind of felt maybe it's interesting also as a challenge or as a provocation to figure out would there be an installation here to see whether the artists, how they would like to present it. And the artist actually collaborated with Ruben Cabenda, collaborated with Raoul Balai, to curate an artist in Amsterdam. And they came up with a few installation formats out of which we chose the most complicated one just because it really fits. And it's one of those experiences. It's the joy of seeing somebody who's making animations, 2D screen-based work. What happens when you simply invite somebody to make something more physical and spatial? with ridiculously little budget and means. What they then came up with was something that we were so happy with. It's one of the little treasures of the exhibition and an artist that I think almost nobody knows at this point within our field.
[01:15:15.814] Kent Bye: Nice. And in the, the, the other four pieces that we didn't talk about around the if a doc club spotlight, all I know about teacher Lee, fragile home impulse playing with reality. Each of those three were featured at Venice immersive and also happened to make my top 10 list of some of my favorite pieces. And I also have interviews with each of those three creators doing a deep dive into those three pieces. And the other piece that I haven't seen is bad trip from Hungary, which is the last piece and we will have covered them all. But I'd love to hear a little bit more around Bad Trip as a part of the InfoDocLab spotlight.
[01:15:49.017] Caspar Sonnen: To end it with a planetarium piece, Nina.
[01:15:53.619] Nina van Doren: Yes. So this is a Fool Dome piece. It's developed for the Fool Dome and takes you through the experiences of a young man. You go through a series of Bad Trip-like experiences as he's wandering around the house. The piece is very much about generational trauma and it's done in this very unique mixed media style. It's a bit of stop motion animation, many different techniques, which is something I've never seen in the Dome. It incorporates amazing music. So this will be an incredible piece, I think, in the full Dome.
[01:16:33.956] Kent Bye: Nice, and as we wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling, AI, digital art, documentary, what the combination of all these things might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:16:48.140] Toby Coffey: How long have we got now? We've got another 45 minutes. I thought it was interesting that Kasper said technology is flawed and that there's an implicit assumption that humans aren't. And so I think when you look at AI... 75% of the AI pieces, for me, are about self-reflection of an individual's condition or the human condition. So I am going to be optimistic and say there's a huge potential for us to collaborate with AI as a way to better understand and hopefully better evolve human beings. I got a massive sense of déjà vu then as well. It was really weird.
[01:17:28.069] Caspar Sonnen: I think especially if you had the experience of getting this question before from Kent in this setting, it's quite unsettling to realize I have no idea what I said before to this question.
[01:17:41.516] Nina van Doren: Good question.
[01:17:42.256] Caspar Sonnen: I keep asking it.
[01:17:43.457] Nina van Doren: Yeah, go for it. I've never answered it, but I've listened to your podcast, of course, Kent, many times. And I think many people will have said this before, but yeah, that it challenges conventional ways we experience art and storytelling. And that it's not about sitting back and observing and that you're really actively participating. And it changes how you engage, therefore, with the work, your body, your movement, even your presence in the space with other people changes. They all become part of the experience, so it's more active and sensory and embodied. But I think also from a programmer's perspective, works that take these existing technologies like VR, AR, game engines, and use them in unexpected experimental ways using these tools that we mainly see emerge out of commercial context, but in the hands of artists can really be repurposed to create something reflective or thought-provoking or maybe even unsettling. And I think this contrast with the mainstream entertainment is what sets these projects apart. And it's really the potential of immersive art that they offer more nuanced artistic engagement with the technology, which can maybe serve as a helpful antidote to the purely commercial uses we see elsewhere. And besides that, I think presenting these immersive works is such a complex process that requires a lot of creativity and ingenuity, which is not only about the content, but even if you're presenting an in-headset experience, how the space is arranged, how the technology interacts with the audience and how social dynamics therefore play out when multiple people take part of the same experience or same environment so i'm excited about the potential for this collective effort between the artist and technologist and programmers producers curators the audience and that there is potential to really reinvent stuff from the ways we work together to the spaces where we actually present these things in and how we engage with it
[01:19:44.508] Caspar Sonnen: I wish I said that last time. I think that was a really good answer. And I think Nina, you mentioned the complicitness. And I think maybe if we want to talk about the potential of immersive spatial interactive arts, I think it's all about embracing complicitness. And I think as the internet has become increasingly passive, increasingly something you watch instead of something you truly engage with, I think we're all struggling with our complicitness in many levels. The actual campaign for IDFA this year ends on the question, are you complicit? Which I think as watching documentary films, we all know that feeling. Like you see something and then you walk out with something opened up. but there is very little you can do with it. You have to work very hard to figure out where to go to. It's not very different with immersive arts, although it's a slightly nuanced thing that can be huge when you realize you are complicit to the actual experience itself. During the experience of the work, you are playing an active role and you're already questioning yourself, not just after the credits run. It's something that the work doesn't exist if you don't interact with it to a certain extent. If you sit in a VR experience, you just stare straight ahead. That's a different type of experience. So many of the works in that sense play with different levels of benign complicity or complicitness and sometimes less benign, sometimes directly confrontational. But I think that in a way, as Nina said, is what this art form enables. It enables us to question ourselves, as Toby said, in a way that some other art forms do in different ways. But there is a very special way here.
[01:21:28.819] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was really impressed that Ife had actually invited those two filmmakers to come and make this complicit festival trailer who were actually very vocal critics of Ife last year for not speaking up about what was happening in the war in Gaza from Israel. And there's a whole pathway with lots of documentaries this year around Palestine and stepping up to really embrace some of those vocal critics and be a part of creating the festival trailer. So I'll link in the show notes, the actual trailer that was made that I presume is going to be shown in front of all the different films, or at least is going to be a part of the theme that is really asking people to ask and interrogate their own level of complicitness. So yeah, very much on the zeitgeist of this year. And yeah, I guess, is there anything else that is left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:22:19.665] Caspar Sonnen: see you in Amsterdam very shortly, we hope.
[01:22:23.792] Nina van Doren: Yeah, hope to see you soon.
[01:22:26.977] Caspar Sonnen: And if not, stay tuned to this channel for interviews with some of the artists.
[01:22:33.339] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'll be on site attempting to see all the 28 pieces as a part of DocLab. And as I was looking through the program, there's 271 total documentaries that are being shown at IFA. It's like the biggest documentary festival in the world as far as I know. Such a robust selection of both new pieces, but also reflecting back on the past. year of documentary but also doc lab has the 18th year anniversary so incredibly impressive that you've been able to continue holding this space to have the people who are really tinkering with these emerging technologies to have a place to really show it to an audience and to really push forward what's even possible with these technologies and i know in terms of all the different festivals that i go to ifa is right there on the bleeding edge of the most experimental cutting edge technologies and storytelling forms that I always appreciate seeing what the documentary filmmakers, how they're using the confluence, all the technologies that are available to find new ways to tell these really important and vital stories of reflection of actuality as it were. So thanks again, Casper, Nina, and Toby for joining me here on the podcast to talk about this year's selection. And I'm super hyped to be there on site and to see all the things and talk to all the people. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[01:23:48.344] Nina van Doren: Thank you, Kent.
[01:23:49.805] Kent Bye: Thank you, man. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. This is an independent podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So if you enjoy this podcast and like to see me do more of it, then please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks a lot. Really appreciate it.
