I interviewed director Emeline Courcier about Burn From Absence that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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[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 coverage from IFA Doc Lab 2024, today's episode is with a piece called Burned from Absence. And so this is a piece that is exploring the concepts of memory and family memories and taking these audio interviews with the family to kind of recount family history. But some of that family history in terms of photographic evidence, a lot of it was destroyed. So Emmeline turned to generative AI to prompt some images based upon existing photos and some of them just a creative re-imagination of her family history through the context of this four channel video installation. And Burn for Absence actually picked up a special jury mention as a part of the digital storytelling competition. The jury said, the jury would like to give a special mention to the work which sets out to reconstruct a damaged history in which machine learning technology is combined with complex and sensitive archival storytelling, questioning the nature of shared memory, the long impact of trauma, and the multiple possible truths at play in our experience of reality. The jury would like to celebrate Emeline Corsier for her beautiful and sensitive project, Burn for Absence. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Emily happened on Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:39.464] Emeline Courcier: I'm Emeline Coursier and I'm the artist who just made Burn From Absence. It's I think my first installation and I came more from photography and from cinema and then I started to ask myself how I could write and how I could create but in other type of spaces than only you know the black space of the cinema and I don't really know how to introduce myself. I'm not really good at it.
[00:02:09.585] Kent Bye: Well, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background, the different type of training or disciplines that you're pulling in in order to do your art.
[00:02:17.189] Emeline Courcier: So I started studying cinema in Paris, in the school La Sorbonne. It wasn't great, actually. It was much more theory than practice. So I was a bit frustrated by that. But I started directing at that time. and then I came more to contemporary art and much more photography and so I went to ECAL which is a school in Lausanne in Switzerland and it was much more great than the faculty in Paris and so yeah I started to create for myself I started directing again because I stopped after my first film and So now I tend to create much more in a transdisciplinary way. I like to mix different mediums because to me it's much more reflection about how I can express myself. It's much more easier to be free than, you know, just being only one medium. It's too frustrating to me. So I think more about the theme and then start to reflect on how I can express it. But I don't do it the other way. But born from absence, actually, I started reflecting about the erosion of memory in my family. But it was kind of obvious that I was going to use AI because to me it was such a mirror of my subconscious. So it was really an obvious choice. And I think AI also influenced me to start to ask myself on how I can express these memories and everything. So for this project it was much more both ways, from the medium to the film and from the film to the medium at the same time.
[00:04:09.585] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so in your piece at the very beginning, there's a moment where your mother took out like a lighter and like basically burn the memories or burn the photos. And so maybe you just give a bit more context for the need to turn to AI in order to have some of the imagery, because you're, you're telling an audio documentary in some ways of like going back into your family and telling a part of your history, but maybe you can give a bit more context to how there was a need to add a generative AI for the visual elements.
[00:04:37.066] Emeline Courcier: It wasn't my mother, it was my grandmother actually. So the context of this little story is that my grandmother and my grandfather were a complicated couple. I mean, they met when she was really young, she was 18 and then they flew away because her father didn't want them to be together. so you know there is like a dramatic background there and then he did like so many mistakes to me it wasn't even mistakes at this point but it was because there was like an ultimate arguing and so she was so fed up with him that she really burned their memories and actually this action represents really really much how my whole family works on memory and on resilience also so that's why I put it in the beginning because to me it was like a starting point of you know how you can just do like your parents do or maybe you want to do the opposite but for my family they had to embrace this kind of philosophy so the philosophy of just gathering of everything that was too hard in the past. And so AI, yeah, the big deal. So what was the question exactly?
[00:05:57.680] Kent Bye: Well, I guess where did you begin? Because you have the audio, so you have the story of the arc of the audio, but then you need to have a visual component and you chose to do like a multi-channel video installation that has a couple of different configurations. There's one here at DocLab, and you sent me a video with another configuration. But maybe you could just take me back to the beginning when you're starting to put this story together. Where did you begin to start to tell this story?
[00:06:21.744] Emeline Courcier: So that's quite funny because actually I started this project because I couldn't create anymore so I was like okay I'm just going to go on a vacation and it will be a creative vacation so what am I going to talk about what I'm going to create about And it was I think seven years I was already working on my family so I had the audios so I knew the backgrounds of my family and I knew some of the family history and I think it was like the beginning of AI or maybe I was just late but to me it was the beginning I think I was just late and I heard about stable diffusion And I was a bit obsessed also on the link between my family and the Vietnam War and I think I'm still a bit lost about that because it's like we're part of it and at the same time we're absolutely not part of it so it's really strange. So I just began to iterate on stable diffusion. It was strange, I don't really know why but I started to iterate on visuals with mix of my family archives and with Vietnam War archives that I created because I didn't want to use the Vietnam War archives that were already existing. because I mean it's all about also the representation of these conflicts and of this war and it's to me it's really strange because the most we can see of the Vietnam War is really the American part of you so I didn't want to use these visuals so I created mine with AI and so it was already you know across the documentary it was already a line between docu-fiction And so, yeah, I started to mix that because I think I really wanted, you know, to mix the great history and my family history. And so I think as I was obsessed with the link between these two, I just blended them. And so that's how it started. And then why Burn From Absence is like that today is because I understood that it's like they're connected but at the same time they're not telling us the same history so I prefer to just focus on my maternal family history because I mean it's from where I came and that's why in Burn From Absence the world and the Vietnam war it's much more distant and it's much more like a conflict arriving at some point of the movie, but to me it's not really about that. It's just about members of a family and how they try to survive with poverty, with what's happening in their intimacy and how the world at the end can change everything.
[00:09:25.812] Kent Bye: It sounds like that you started with the visuals and the generative AI and playing with the images. And then once you had those images, and then did you go and do all those kind of source audio interviews? Or were you also kind of doing those at the same time? Or did you have like an audio mix before you even started to do the visuals?
[00:09:42.338] Emeline Courcier: No I already had the audios and then I started the visuals but it was the first time that I didn't think about the concept before making and that's why I really forced myself to just do and then it worked and that's how but I already had the audios I already knew I think I already knew the big themes that I wanted to talk about in this story but it's really thanks also with the reflection on ai that i think it really nourished this concept and how you know the original of memory my obsession with trying to keep things together and to me it's really like a puzzle that i'm trying to construct and i think i won't be able to consult it as a whole. But yeah, I think it's a research. To me, before that, Burn From Absence was really a research project and I didn't even believe that it would finish one day. So yeah, maybe it's the first chapter, maybe there will be other ones. And so yeah, I had the audios already and then I created the visuals. It was more about Vietnamo and then I just focused about the audios again. And so it just came together, you know, with the intimate and with the history. I think it was really obvious that I should do this that way.
[00:11:11.246] Kent Bye: And I'd love to dig into a little bit more of your process of creating these generative AI images. So first question I have is that it's essentially like a photo album or like a slideshow where you're showing family photos. And because you didn't have any of these actual photos, were you having like photos of these people that then you were de-aging and just to kind of imagine what they might have looked like as a child? Or if you just created completely constructed and manufactured people in order to have stand-ins for your family?
[00:11:39.252] Emeline Courcier: Actually I had a lot of family archives from the generation of my mother so yeah as I'm really like for now the only member of the family who works on the family I have a lot of archives at my home and so yeah how it did work I think it was a lot of research of iconographic research and i'm an art director so i mean it's mostly part of my job so i had to do that to have you know for example the composition of an image that i had in mind so after that i put them in mid journey so i just blended this iconographic research with my family archives. Then it started to iterate and sometimes it worked and sometimes I had to pull it much closer to what I had in mind because sometimes I had really precise images in mind. This film actually is really like the materialization of my subconscious. It's so strange sometimes because at the last step of the process is really the face swapping with my family members and that's when it becomes weird you know like even in because i did the fee residency in montreal like in february and yeah they were like asking myself why do you do that i mean can you tell did you ask yourself the question and asked us the question during the whole month. At the end, when we had the first results and it worked very well, it was really uncanny. I think I understood the word uncanny at this time. I was like, yeah. Yeah, this is a bit fucked up. Sorry, I'm going to be censored, but it's a bit fucked up. And so, yeah, so I think there are really three great steps of the process. And it's just a lot of time because you can control AI. Well, you can, but it has its own self-sufficient intelligence. And so yeah, it was much more like guidelines that you had to be really precise. And now, I mean, it's so much more easier because there was some also, I don't know how to say it, but the technology is going so fast that even now it's even more simpler than in February this year. So it's pretty amazing how it evolves so quickly.
[00:14:15.109] Kent Bye: And one of the follow-on questions I wanted to ask is that a lot of times with artificial intelligence, it's very much biased by the data sets that are collected. And so a lot of times, it'll be dominated by white Western culture. And so because you're doing something that's very specific to Vietnam and Asian culture, I'm wondering if you ran into various issues of trying to either de-bias or trying to overcome some of the white Western culture that may be embedded in a lot of these AI models.
[00:14:42.916] Emeline Courcier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because, I mean, the word de-biased, I think, is really accurate because, I mean, sometimes I didn't even put Vietnamese or Lao because there was just the triangle hat because, you know. because western way of seeing Asian people and it was so strange because I was like okay I'm just asking to see like a man walking in a suite and just turning his back to us that's all I mean I just need a guy turning his back to us actually that just because I just put Vietnamese then it became something it's not natural anymore and I was At the same time, I had to precise because otherwise there would be only white people. It depends also on the AI software, but Midjourney, I think it really has a white view of the world actually. and I had so many problems with some of the iterations that I created because so I did iconographic research and then I also created to have sometimes much more precise compositions and to be the more accurate possible even for the face swapping you have to also to have you know precise look of the characters so yes sometimes it was really complicated for example it's a bit strange, but the makeup also on the faces of women or little girls, even though the image doesn't reflect any kind of sexualization, you know, it's just that because I think it's like the human beings must feel beautiful and perfect in these images. And this can be very strange, yeah. I don't have a precise example right now, But as a representation also of family sceneries, sometimes it can be really strange. And sometimes actually it's because I used also the tool blend of Midjourney with family archives and with iconographic research. It really depends because it depends on the difficulty of what I want in the image. And it really happened that the result was really like a picture of my grandfather. Well, I don't know, because there are some faces that Midjourney didn't have any difficulty, you know, to translate. For example, my grandmother and my grandfather, like they're just on point for that. I don't know why. And the other ones, not so much. But yeah, so yeah.
[00:17:32.861] Kent Bye: Well, and because you're dealing with something that's as intimate as these family photos and with a family representing a place in time that you were not physically present, but they were. And so what was your process of either showing them as you went along or were you getting feedback on it? And yeah, I'd love to hear that collaborative process that you had with your family in order to make sure that it was maybe in the right ballpark or if they were giving more specific feedback, if they were saying, no, no, it was less like this or more like that. But yeah, I'd love to hear you elaborate on that a little bit.
[00:18:02.748] Emeline Courcier: Well, I think that's really the hardest part of the project because they didn't see the piece for now because I didn't have the chance to show it in Paris or even in France. It's really difficult because, I mean, they have the choice also not to want to talk about it. And as I say it in the film, most of them don't want to talk. At the same time, they still talk because, I mean, they're talking to me. And as it's old interviews and these interviews were from my first documentary and they saw this movie and they really loved it. So it's just like a continuation of this, but it's still like really a touchy, thing yeah to talk with them because they have their philosophy and i mean my mother is really really really supportive for all of my projects actually and especially the family ones and one of my aunts also the one who's talking at the end but the men much more it's like how can i say it It is suspicious because they don't really understand why I'm doing this and they don't really understand why I want to talk about it. And they don't also understand why my generation would ever have anything to do with where they came from. And I think that's really like the biggest gap of our generations. And one of my uncles who was talking in the piece is actually deceased and was the only one and the only guy who thought that it was really important to talk about the past to the next generations because it's our inheritance. So we will live with that. So we will live with their own traumas because they don't want to deal with it. Sometimes it can get to a point that it can be really hard to deal with it because they don't understand. You don't have the legitimacy also to talk about it as if you live that. I mean, I don't want to appropriate their misery to me. It's absolutely not the case. It's just that sometimes you just want to understand where you came from and that's all. Or why do you have, I don't know, some issues in your own personality? Why some things are much more... hard to live than others or even dreams I mean I have a great relationship with my subconscious that's why I talk a lot about my dreams and everything and I mean I had always the same dream since I was little and and now I think I can understand why because I started to talk with my family members and everything I think it's really interconnected. To me, everything is connected. It's my philosophy. For them, it's not the same thing. It's really like, okay, but if we don't talk about it and if we forget about it, it's like it didn't really happen, you know? It did but at the same time maybe it will just disappear. If it disappears then the other ones won't have to deal with it. And it's not true and I can say it now because also a lot of my cousins started to ask me with the archives, with what I know and they don't ask actually my uncles or my aunts or my mother. They ask me because They know that I did the dull job. And even one of my uncles said it in the film, and I thought it was really great to put it inside, is that he's just saying, yeah, it's like you're just looking for shit. Why are you doing that? And I think he's really the hardest. At the same time, I really love him. We're really close. And I like that we don't have the same point of view. I think it's important that we don't share the same point of view. But I hope that someday he will just say to me that, I don't know, maybe he understands. And for my documentary, actually, he said that because my grandmother passed away at the same time that I was doing the documentary. So she was like the main character of it. And then he really came to me and said, it's really important what you do. You know, it's like you had the last images of my mother and it's so important and it's so great and it will be beautiful. And it was really supportive. And I think he just had, you know, he just forgot about it. And so, yeah, no, it's another big deal and everything. But yeah, yeah. Sometimes it's a bit lonely to work on your family.
[00:22:36.874] Kent Bye: Well, it definitely sounds like there's this theme of intergenerational trauma where the traumas that happened in previous generations are passed down. And was that part of the catalyst for you is to really dig into some of those stories? And I'm curious now that you're on the other side of it and having completed Burn From Absence, what were some of the big things that you took away from that journey and to be able to investigate all of these stories and put it together in this piece?
[00:23:00.383] Emeline Courcier: Well, it's not over yet, but yeah, I think it was really cathartic for me because I don't know, but yeah, I'm always in the reflection of transgenerational history, not only trauma, but just transgenerational in general. to me it's really important to work on that because just for our life we need to heal from a lot of things but also I think it's proven by science that transgenerational is existing and I mean it's really in our genes in our DNA if we just keep thinking that the past doesn't matter, I think it's really a problem for the future and for the present also. But that's how resilience works actually. And for them, it works for them also to forget and to keep moving on. And it worked for their generations. And I think it's really important to respect that. And for my generation, and I think it's like the fourth generation, it's like every fourth generation, you know, there is like a new circle of transgenerational. And I think it's a great way also, you know, to finish the circle right now, because there were a lot of suffering, even the immigration and the exile and the war and the poverty. And there were a lot of problematic issues that they had to deal with. And I think it's the time, you know, you can just also keep moving on. To me, it's a way to have maybe a small window about the past and be like, OK, so it happened and now we talk about it. You know, it's just like we're saying about incest. It's like now we talk about it. It's the only way to heal, actually. If you just don't talk, I mean, it will just keep happening. So yeah, it's a hard subject, but at the same time, I think there is a way that we can be free from everything. I don't want to be pretentious and be like, yeah, this is the only way. I mean, we do, we have to do in this station and everything, but it is my way to deal with healing and with this past. I mean, and now I think I'm much more, more lighter. than before because I just did it and I was like okay yeah I really needed to talk about the erosion of memory because I think it's the third project that I did on my family and I think the more important to me was to talk about this philosophy and how it has an impact on other generations and actually how it forms a family and how it forms the culture of silence And well, I guess I just don't shut up. So that's the problem. But I think that's funny. I mean, I like the fact that we don't agree and we still love each other. So it's really OK.
[00:25:56.069] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to talk about the physical installation that you have here at the Doc Lab, but there's also a video that you sent that was a little bit different orientation. So here at the Doc Lab, people are sitting like in a circle and you're looking straight forward at a screen and then you look to your left and the right and then you see different screens that are showing different things and there's one screen that's behind you that you have to turn around to look at. And another orientation that you sent me a video of I almost preferred that version a little bit more because you had all four screens like 45 degrees apart. So in a 180 degree where you could see everything all at once. And I was able to see the composition of how you were editing across that multichannel installation a little bit better in the video version. than I could hear because sometimes you would cut to black and I would have to look left or right to see how that was editing. But when I would see the full scope of all four video screens together, I saw how there's actually linkage between them and how they were really playing off each other and how you do like little video editing parts that would create a whole other experience that I think was lost because I could only see one screen at a time because it was 90 degrees out of view. And I can only look at one screen at a time in that view. Because you're using the generative AI and you're creating this composition across all four of the scenes, I almost preferred the 45 degree orientation a little bit better. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that.
[00:27:15.747] Emeline Courcier: Yeah, actually, so I think to me the more accurate version will be a mix of both of these two because what I like about the H5 version is the fact that you can only choose one point of view, you know. You will always miss something that will be behind and if you come back you can see the other point of view and I mean That's how life works, you know. You never know the whole truth, you never know everyone's point of views on the same exact subjects and it will always depend on their mental state, on the day, on the weather, I don't know. And I think it's really about subjectivity and I was really obsessed also with a lot of things. I was really obsessed with the notion of truth and of objective truth, you know, the big truth and what really did happen. And then when I did Burn From Absence, I was like, but it's so interesting that actually I'm still lost and I still don't know because, you know, everyone has their own versions. And so to me, the EDFA version is really much more about these confrontations or point of views and the fact that the audience will never have everything at the same time. And at the end of the Fear Residency, well, it was a proposition actually of Sarah. And so, yes, she did it because there was a lack of space. But when I saw this version, I really liked what I saw because I didn't imagine that at all at first. To me, it was much more a house, but a broken house, you know. So the walls shouldn't be so parallel, like in the If I Won, and shouldn't be so cozy, just like the Fee one. so i just saw this version and strangely it really worked and really worked also because so many things happen during the film that's it's very convenient that we have just one point of view it was really cozy but because also we had you know some seats and everything and then we can follow everything and also have the confrontations but it's less aggressive i think than for example in itfa but i also like the fact that it's much more radical here than in film So, yeah, I think these two versions really work. Also in Tribeca Circle Incubator, in the presentation by Onassis in New York, it was only one point of view with four TV screens. So it was also something else. But I like the fact that there is confrontation. To me, the point of views must be... at different places because I view it in my head as a family dinner you know at the beginning also of the installation we can hear the preparation of a family dinner and they started talking about who is sitting where and everything so I really wanted to create this illusion or this materialization of a family dinner So I mean, it really doesn't really matter where the screens are. To me, the more important is that we can understand that it's about photo views, it's about the family, and it's about the notion of resilience, of memory, and the fact that, for example, it's a representation that the truth doesn't exist at all, because everyone has their own truth. So as soon as the installation reflects that, to me, it's a winning. It really doesn't matter. But I hope that someday I can see, you know, that this kind of destructive, destructive home. So, yeah, I think it can be also very interesting, but it should be also much bigger. And yeah, it's another configuration. But I think it's really, really interesting to see all these kind of propositions and of configurations. I mean, I'm so happy that it has different type of lives.
[00:31:34.753] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive media and AI might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:31:43.259] Emeline Courcier: In general? Oh, my god. Oh, my god. That's a lot. Well, are you also suggesting about VR?
[00:31:57.910] Kent Bye: Just this kind of immersive media in general, yeah. Immersive art, VR, AR, just where you think it's all going.
[00:32:06.021] Emeline Courcier: Well, I think it's going well and it will just keep on going like this. But I was asking myself if you were maybe thinking that this will, I don't know, replace the old cinema and, you know, the only one screen viewing. And to me, it's so much different that it's impossible. I think that it's possible that there will be much more possibility of immersive cinema. Sorry, I'm only talking about cinema because I mean, it's really my first love. So to me, like even Burn From Absence to me is just a movie, you know, it's just that there are four screens. I did a fancy thing but it's still cinema so yeah I'm really thinking about that because I heard that Cannes also has an immersive part now of their festivals and I think that immersive storytelling will be much more included in art and in cinema also than before because right now it's still you know a little part of contemporary art it's like oh yeah it's vr it's ai it's new technology but i think it's some years it won't be new anymore you know it's just technologies it's just a way of creating a way of viewing And I think it's really interesting also if we can just mix the old way of writing with the new way of telling. I mean, to me, cinema should also question itself and maybe evolve, even though some movies should be, you know, in only one screen in a dark space. But I really like the fact that, for example, we can change the space. What would it mean? I mean, I'm thinking about Apichatpong Verasethakul, who is one of my favorite filmmakers, and he's from Thailand. And I think he really experiments with this way of telling and how a piece can evolve depending on where it's shown. So, yeah, I don't have a lot of reflection about immersive or on AI, I mean. I was very, very scared of AI just before using it. I was really like, it was a big no to me. I didn't want to use AI like ever, which is impossible right now. But I mean, yeah, you can, it's a choice. But now that I've used it and that I see it more as a tool, and to me it's really specific because I use it as a tool of materialization of my subconscious. It's really my personal choice. And sometimes I use it for work, in an artistic way to me it's really AI is just this possibility of materialization of the subconscious and I'm not inspired as AI as like a subject to me it's not really a medium it's really just part of a medium it's part of the creation and I can see it in another way and I mean I know it was another question about what AI can give you And it's so strange because I think it's really a good way to see the bias of the society where we live in and just how we are kind of formatted. I don't know if it's a word in English, but we are formatted to view the world as in a certain way and not another way. And I think it can be kind of dangerous, but it's also interesting to question that and just to to see this conclusion and to see okay so what can we do and what is the limit of this medium also and it's really important to still use your brain because we are also a natural intelligence I mean we're impressed by AI and at the same time we even to me we are the same and it's even more mysterious to see how human beings and human brains work rather than AI where you can see all the programming and everything and it's also it's a piece of art you know AI so yeah we should be careful how to use it and at the same time I think it's really a great way to explore things with a new perception.
[00:36:22.250] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a follow-up question because, you know, as your piece is very much focused in on memory, and you said that you're using it to express your subconscious, and I think when it does get into memories, I have a couple of touch points I want to bring up in sort of the ethics of memory because there's Google Earth VR where you can go in and see, like, a reconstruction of different places, and when you do, like, zooming around streets, it's got all these like weird artifacts from the photogrammetry. And so I found myself going back to like my college town in Terre Haute, Indiana, and seeing this corrupted version of that from all these kind of weird photogrammetry artifacts. And I'm projecting my own memories onto it. But yet each time we think of our memories, we're reconstructing our memories. And so then you have the technology that is perverting those memories. And there's another piece that was at Venice last year in 2023. It's called Topomancer. where you were giving it imagery and one of the questions was describe your childhood bedroom. And then the bedroom was like way off and like it was way different. So it created this version of my childhood bedroom, but yet it was nothing like my actual memories of it. So then there's a conflict between my own memory of it versus what I was being shown. And so anytime you're dealing with issues around memory and creating these imaginal fake memories, I think it might be a little bit different from your family who maybe lived through some of these different scenes versus you who weren't there. And it is a part of your subconscious, but for them, it may be a part of their memory. So I'm just curious because your piece is so focused on memories, how you start to think around those ethical boundaries between the corruption through the AI and reconstructions.
[00:37:56.155] Emeline Courcier: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I think it's very interesting also the dichotomy between, you know, even the concept of archives. It's really supposed to represent the truth and the reality of the past. And sometimes we can forget that it's still a point of view, you know, of a photographer, of a filmmaker on this period of time. And it's absolutely not representing the truth. And I like the dichotomy also with the fact that AI is kind of the future and using AI, you know, to go back to the past and recreate the past I like the fact that this conference also ethical question and to answer you for your bedroom well it was really the struggling I had for Burn From Absence is really to make realistic and for example simple compositions and simple images and it's really true that sometimes you know AI just use data from films. For example, if you say a scenery in Vietnam during 1970, it will just recreate a scenery of a movie about the Vietnam War. So, yeah, it's really biased. And that was really interesting also to be as closed as the reality as possible. And at the same time, embracing the fact that it is totally fictional and it is also, how can I say, Actually, I think AI is really how I view these memories. This is not the truth. The audios tell their versions of the truth. And what you see is sort of fictional. And I really like to play with this line between documentary and fiction. And actually, the last iterations I did, my mother was just next to me because she was visiting me in Paris. and she saw the pictures that I created of her passed away deceased cousin who drowned in the Mekong and we talked about her in the film and she was a really really important person for the whole family and she saw these pictures and you have to know that we only have two pictures of her and that's all so this is the only remaining souvenirs that we have of her and so my mother saw the pictures and she was super impressed and she was like wow it's just like you gave her to life again you brought her back to life again or yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah and i was so touched that she saw that like this to her it was much more emotional than just you know technology recreating something because I mean, she's also one of the characters that is the most accurate on every picture. Mick Jonny can completely recognize her and put her face in every scenario as possible. It's really, really impressive. So yeah, it's really strange because ethically, there is also a contrast and opposition between truth and false and documentary fiction and just how to use the memories of your family and at the same time it is true that with the distance i can just say that it's really a tribute of my whole family and at the end of the residency at fire i just understood that because i think that as a lot of people who are in the film this is that there are a lot of them who are deceased and yeah when i hear them talking again and having all these pictures it's just like recreating you know like bringing them to life again especially with the uncle who is deceased and who is the one who talks the most about the family history so i don't know i'm still trying to figure things out you know for the ethical parts because as soon as there is ai it's really complicated it's like yeah it can really go in a really weird way and toxic way and at the same time i try to respect their philosophy and sometimes I really need to talk about what happened and how we can still do a tribute to them and I don't know I think I really need to show the piece to them and I can't wait to do that I think it will be kind of hard you know it will be very emotional but I think they will like it still because I don't know why they won't because I mean they love each other and I think there's still some pride of having all these struggles and and be like yeah but we're still here and we're still moving on and and I really didn't want any people to judge my family and that was also one of my fear I was like yeah but my grandfather he did some bad things and everything and yeah the people in from the residency really really reassured me for that so So yeah, I'm so sorry for the ethical parts. It's so complicated because, you know, I'm just the last generation and you need to ask more of them and I need to talk more about it. But yeah.
[00:43:19.279] Kent Bye: Well, it's something that seems like an inevitability. It's going to be in our lives whether we like it or not. the potentialities of both the good stuff and also the ethical and moral dilemmas are kind of the two sides of the same coin where you get a lot of these positive benefits but also the negative side. So I think it's just important to kind of have both in mind. And as you were speaking around the death of your mother's cousin, When I saw it in this installation here at DocLab, you use a lot of negative space of like turning the screen black. And when I'm watching just one screen, it was a lot different when I watched the video and just see how you're using the negative space and the composition where you can see all four screens at the same time. And yeah, also just like the way that you at some times have more of a poetic or imaginal interpretation of some of the different scenes that you have, like with the winter scenes and whatnot, where... I can definitely see the influence of that kind of dreamlike unconscious ways of kind of using multiple canvases and the way that you were playing off of them in a way that was turning off and on because you have the conceit of a slide projector so it's like you're sitting down to watch a slide projector but when you're just looking at one screen sometimes you hear a click but you don't see a change but when you see all four screens you can see how the composition is changing. Yeah, that's why I'm glad I saw this version first here at DocLab, but then seeing all four of them together, I just really appreciated how you were synchronized that multiple channel video installation in a way that you're using negative space, but also like dreamlike imagery in the unconscious. But you had mentioned that you're very influenced by your dreams. So I'm just curious, like the connection between your dreams and using generative AI as a practice.
[00:44:57.069] Emeline Courcier: I think it's just important yet to understand that this is not the reality I mean it's really a world that I created with my own perspective but I will never understand fully of this history I will never be able you know to adapt all of the history family and I won't be able to be 100% faithful to every versions of it or otherwise it will be like a seven hour piece so it will be very complicated but yeah so it's just like a glimpse you know of my subconscious and how I how I leave this inheritance. I think it's much more that. But at the same time, it's true that I'm not really a part of the piece and that was also a question that I was asking myself, like, should I be more here talking also about the effect of the silence and the family secrets and everything on the next generations? I don't know, maybe it will be the next one, but I mean, I really don't know. But yeah, to me it's really important not to see it as a piece of documentary. It's not a documentary, it's impossible to make a really faithful documentary on my family with AI images, I mean. It's really, how can I say, in French it's a party prix. It was really my want to embrace the fact that this is AI and well, does the audience can notice which one is AI and which one isn't? How do you know which image is true or not? Is it really false also because there are still some archives that permit to create these images. So it's really like playing with this fine line between false and truth and also asking ourselves so what is really an archive and what we become an archive also because I think Netflix also did you know AI iterations to recreate some archives or I don't know. And I think it will become a great question in the future. And even we had a conversation with INA, Institut National of Archives in France. And they're also asking themselves the questions. So that's why we're talking to each other. And yeah, it will evolve. I mean, even archives before were a representation of a country about, you know, a conflict. For example, Vietnam War, the representation of Vietnam War is mainly American. Is it the truth? No, absolutely not. But, I mean, USA has much more possibility to explore these visuals than Vietnam. It's really not the same kind of consideration with images and everything. So, yeah, to me, it's not only a question about AI, it's really even more question about the archives and how does it work and what does it represent also.
[00:48:07.259] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that just three or four weeks ago, MIT Open Doc Lab held a whole session of the ethics of AI use in documentaries and archives. Because when you have archival footage and you start to reconstruct and generate, then they were showing around how you can introduce fake hallucinations that are coming from AI. What are the ethics around that in terms of disclosure, of telling people? There's a whole documentary that opened up here, If a Doc Lab Called About a Hero. And at the end, they said, here are all the texts that was said in this piece that was generated by generative AI. They had interviews with people, but then they would sometimes switch and have that... They would clone the voice and have people say something else. So then, you know, they say at the beginning, this whole documentary is around trying to discern what is true and not true and really pushing at that. And so they will have what sounds to be an actual interview that they recorded, and they did record it, but then at the end, it flips into an ad read or something. At the end, they have in the credits all the different things they said. So when I watched it the second time, then I was able to see, okay... I'm looking for this person. And when they're saying this part, I know that's going to be generated. And so I was able to see where they were doing that channel switch. But in the time, they weren't disclosing it because the whole point of the film was for you to question what the nature of reality was. And so to disclose it in real time would kind of ruin the point of it. But they disclose it at the end in the credits. And so there's just this idea of how do you tell people, give them a heads up, oh, this archival photo of this person is actually completely constructed from generative AI. Which Netflix has started to do that a little bit more, and not doing it in an ethical way, and introducing these AI hallucinations into the public record in a certain way. Yeah, it's a big question and certainly your piece is exploring that. But yeah, just point to those best practices guidelines and I'll put a link in the show notes to this episode that has that paper. It was a group of people that were like an association of archivists who were making a statement around, okay, how we're going to navigate this in the future. So it's certainly a topic being discussed a lot and projects like yours is at the very beginnings of exploring it. But I don't know if there's anywhere in your piece where you disclosed that there was any generative AI or maybe I missed it.
[00:50:14.921] Emeline Courcier: Yeah, it's just in the introduction text.
[00:50:17.603] Kent Bye: OK, in the description. OK.
[00:50:18.864] Emeline Courcier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I was talking about next chapters for Burn From Absence and everything. And I have in mind also a photo book project where you can really, it's like the anatomy of Burn From Absence. I would like to be like really like a research book, you know, with every steps also of the process. So where we come from and the results also of all the iterations and playing also with the fact that we had like hundreds of images for each picture chosen at the end. So yeah, to me, it can be very interesting to have also I wanted to have a brain scientist, an AI researcher and anthropologist also talking about our relationship to memory and our relationship to AI and to our brain and how everything can be interrelated. Yes, so it's ongoing. It will be like a huge job because it's like a huge research. But I think it can work really well also to have, you know, this double disco, if I say so. So, yeah, it's sold since the beginning. But at the end, I don't have a disclosure. I mean, if the audience forgets that it's AI, I don't think so because, I mean, there are some weird faces inside the film. But yeah, so I didn't want a disclosure at the end. I really want them to be tricked. because I want them to be disturbed, to ask themselves, OK, but am I attached to real human beings or am I attached to false images of these human beings who are real? What does it mean, you know? And sometimes I had really miserable pictures made by AI, like, you know, I mean, really the perfect example of Western view on poverty, on, oh my God, oh, a sad child, you know, who is in the street and seems hungry and everything. I was like, no, no, no, it's more subtle than that, you know. hunger and poverty that my family suffered, they don't talk about it like this. They just talk about their lives and that's all. They talk about how they played, how they believed in spirits and everything. So, I mean, humanity is complex. And I think that it's really what is AI missing, actually. I think it's that, you know.
[00:53:02.153] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. Well, I did the interview with the curators and they had mentioned your piece that there was a lot of AI generated images. So I was expecting it when I went in, but I didn't see anything in the actual piece. But then I guess in the description you have it. But for other people that are watching it, I think some people have different levels of being able to detect the little weird anomalies in the eyes. the eye lines and like the finger if there's like multiple fingers so there's some clues sometimes that you can pick out whether it's generated or just kind of like an uncanniness sometimes that's very subtle so but in your piece it's if I wasn't looking for it I don't know if I would be able to clock it immediately was watching it so but it makes sense that you were trying to explore this line of what's true what's not true and kind of this pluralistic version of the truth of having multiple perspectives and so yeah anyway I don't know if you have any final thoughts on that point
[00:53:51.989] Emeline Courcier: No, to me it's okay. I just have a question for you. You were talking about the piece with the audios and it was also the same concept with what was generated and what wasn't. Is it this year?
[00:54:05.883] Kent Bye: Yeah, so that's called About a Hero and it was the opening night film here. And it's going to be showing on Wednesday at DocLab. What they did was they took a large language model and trained it on Werner Herzog's films and his scripts. So then they prompted it to create a true crime documentary that then they reenacted and then cloned Werner Herzog's voice to then narrate it. And then they intercut and tie to that experts and philosophers, actors, talking around the nature of AI, but sometimes they would reconstruct those interviewees and they would have clips that was also generated. And so in the credits, they were disclosing, they said, everything that you heard from Werner Herzog was generated. And then this person said this and this person said that. they were disclosing at the end, here's what part of this film was actually generated. So it's like a roadmap that if you wanted to watch it again, you could see, okay, at this point, they kind of flip into it. So it's just a way of thinking around the disclosure of it and what are the ethics around that in terms of assuming that people haven't read the synopsis or they don't have all the complete information. If they're just watching it, then are there other ways to clue them in So it's just a larger discussion around what are the narrative conceits for filmmakers to kind of, oh, we'll take care of that in the credits or we'll take care of that in the show notes. Or in your case, you know, I'm going to do a photo book that explains that or, you know, in the description. So there could be multiple channels of that information coming in where it doesn't always necessarily have to be coming from the media itself. So. Anyway, it was just interesting to see how filmmakers and makers like yourself are starting to navigate that and create new normative standards for how you approach those issues.
[00:55:47.550] Emeline Courcier: So interesting. I would love to see that.
[00:55:50.871] Kent Bye: Yeah, I highly recommend it if you get a chance to see it. I know it's a hot ticket, so a lot of the showings have been sold out. But there is a DocLab screening. So yeah, I guess, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:56:02.217] Emeline Courcier: No, to me it's okay. But thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.
[00:56:05.919] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I really would encourage you to consider supporting the work that I'm doing here at the Voices of VR. It's been over a decade now, and I've published over 1,500 interviews, and all of them are freely available on the VoicesofVR.com website with transcripts available. This is just a huge repository of oral history, and I'd love to continue to expand out and to continue to cover what's happening in the industry, but I've also got over a thousand interviews in my backlog as well. So lots of stuff to dig into in terms of the historical development of the medium of virtual and augmented reality and these different structures and forms of immersive storytelling. So please do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
