I interviewed director Gregor Petrikovič about Sincerely Victor Pike that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. You can watch this short film here. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different experiences that were being featured at IFA Doc Lab, today's episode is a piece called Sincerely Victor Pike, which is a part of the IFA Doc Lab Digital Storytelling Competition. So this is a piece that kind of at the heart starts with these different audio conversations that Gregor would have with some of his philosophy friends or just friends in general, where he would record these moments of ephemeral conversations that are really getting to some sort of like heart of what it means to be human. And so he would take these conversations and then translate them into a video that is using generative AI to be able to really have a poetic imagination of these scenes. And so, yeah, it's a really unique mix between these different elements. So it's not virtual reality and all. It's just like a 2D video that's integrating different aspects of generative AI as well as this baseline of documentary conversations. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Gregor happened on Monday, November 18th, 2024 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:30.089] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, hi, my name is Gregor Petrikovič. I'm a Slovak-British artist. I usually work with film and photography, but this is the first time when I'm actually trying something immersive in the planetarium. And it was a film called Sincerely Victor Pike, which was initially made for like a regular flat screen in a 4x3 ratio that we were trying to adapt for the dome.
[00:01:51.361] Kent Bye: Okay, yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Yeah, sure.
[00:01:56.734] Gregor Petrikovič: So my background is in, I studied philosophy for undergrad, philosophy and theology. And then my master's was in photography. So that is the kind of education side of things. But yeah, I've been mostly working with moving image for the last couple of years. The project that I'm showing is sort of based on archival conversations. So kind of feels strange doing a podcast now. because it's a similar concept but yeah I've just I started I always say that I had a pretty bad memory and when I was doing the philosophy undergrad people just kept saying amazing things on smoke breaks and just in between lectures and stuff so I would just like you know would you mind if I keep recording this and then everyone seems to be kind of fine with it and then it kind of just started to spin out of control and people just you know I did it like I always say like clubs and toilets, club toilets and streets and whatever. And yeah, I've been sat on the archive for quite a long time. I kind of knew that there was like some sort of value in there because people usually reveal really cool stuff. little stories and anecdotes and stuff but it wasn't until last year when i was in new york at a residency and i started to transcribe them through um like an ai sort of transcriber thing that kind of spits out one of these why called scripts of life and it's It's obviously like a transcript like any other, I don't know if you transcribe these podcasts, but yeah, it kind of, I felt like there was this like strange semi-fictionalized version of what happened. So I started working with those and then kind of started to recreate the visuals with AI. And that's what the project is, yeah.
[00:03:29.522] Kent Bye: Yeah, can you elaborate a little bit more on the interest in philosophy, what you were looking at? Because going from philosophy to photography, but also a piece like this is very philosophical in the sense that people are reflecting on life and living and everything. So imagine there's other students and other cohorts of folks that you're connected to that were thinking deeply about the nature of reality and life and living. But I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of what drew you to philosophy and what specifically you were looking at.
[00:03:54.820] Gregor Petrikovič: Ooh, I feel like I haven't really thought about it ever in that sense. I guess I was always just kind of interested in the more meta narratives in things. There's obviously like so many strands and I only did undergrad, so I'm not like crazy well-versed in philosophy, but... I think I was always driven towards more the metaphysics and the aesthetics, this kind of just like more lofty topics in there as opposed to, I mean, you know, the obvious one would be like ethics or something that I wasn't really keen on pursuing. So yeah, I think I combined those two and maybe it's like there's like hints of it in this project as well. Like obviously some conversations are very like bottom of the barrel like things. And obviously I think like the emotion is perhaps more dominant rather than any sort of philosophizing in there. But I feel like I still need to go almost like I'm expanding the project into like a longer version. So I feel like the further back I go, the more I might be hitting those themes that I was engaging with back then.
[00:04:56.063] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there's some ideas that you have in terms of the way that society and these surveillance capitalism companies are trying to capture all of our data and that there's perhaps some things about who we are and our experience and our personality that are never really expressed or captured in that digital footprint. And so there's a way that these ephemeral conversations are able to get at the core essence of someone's character or their personality or things that maybe are lost or not captured. And so love you could maybe elaborate on that observation of the ephemerality of these type of recorded conversations and what they might be revealing.
[00:05:32.130] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, I think it always started with usually halfway through the conversation, I kind of perk up because somebody says something that I'm kind of just like, ooh, you know, this is either like a strange story. I mean, for instance, like a couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner and this person started talking about somebody they know that staged their own funeral, like a literal thing of just like having a coffee and having people, people crying. And it was just this whole thing. And I was just like, this is so... bizarre like and you know the more they elaborate the kind of the more you realize how like people just like totally live in their own little the choices they make in their little realities um but yeah i think um yeah the surveillance cup is obviously it's just it's everywhere i mean it's almost like everywhere to the point that you start to ignore it because What are you going to do? You know, how would you navigate in life? Where would you go? What kind of spaces would you hang out with if you totally would like to stay out of even just like CCTVs and stuff, right? But I feel like I was always more interested in, as you were saying, like the heart of the project is like very human. And I think that the usual question I keep getting asked is like about the AI side, when actually I think it's always about that. It's almost just like, you know, that unfilteredness of humor and the rawness, which is just like silly. It's cringy sometimes. It's just like melodramatic. The ones of my inputs in the film are very melodramatic. But yeah.
[00:07:01.340] Kent Bye: Yeah, a lot of the AI films that I see on my social media, mostly on X, formerly Twitter, would be people who just are trying to be provocative or show a lot of visuals, but no meaning or no story or nothing that's of interest, really. It just doesn't capture my attention, but I feel like with your practice of what's sort of like a form of oral history or documentary that you're stitching everything together it's starting with something that's actually quite interesting around these moments that make us human that you're able to capture and then from there start to build off but not start with the visuals and let the story that's of whatever is being spoken about drive whatever poetic abstractions that you're going to do with the prompting and so I'd love to hear you maybe elaborate on that process because it feels like that there's sometimes very direct correlations between what's being said and maybe the imagery, like almost as if you took what was said and prompted exactly what was said to see what showed up. But other times it was like, okay, how he's getting this specific image is something that is part of the prompt craft of some sort of magical spell in order to get this really surrealistic way of blending and blurring over the realities that is just part of the practice of being an ARA artist and that prompt craft type of way. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your own process of first coming up with what feels like the heart and the baseline of those audio pieces to start with and then from there start to build out the visuals.
[00:08:25.137] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to say it's kind of new to me as well, because I never really, as a photographer, I would still classify myself as that sort of what I do usually for living as well. I start with the image, but I knew that the value in this kind of practice that I've been like doing almost on the side for so long, I knew that there was value there. So I kind of realized that it has to be the starting point. Like it's kind of like a script, right? Like the script of life that's kind of given to you. So then the question was, yeah, what are the visuals? And obviously I didn't want to. There was a period of time when I tried to almost just like play with it as like a verbatim theater, you know, things like that. But eventually I kind of, I guess the project is loosely, sorry I keep jumping from thing to thing, but I feel like the project is, at least I was told that the poor memory that I have on the sort of like medical level is supposed to be related to the sleep apnea and the fact that like my brain apparently didn't really get into that REM stage where they save the memories and stuff so I thought that it was something interesting about actually like recreating these memories with AI as a, almost like a dreamy little collage of what it could have been and it's obviously like a lot so many memories are not they don't bear a lot of resemblance to how the things actually unraveled so there is this like fictionalizing and of it anyway but the way i sort of approached it was re-listening back to all those recordings and then finding that which was the core of the story for instance there is somebody on one of the recordings talking about how they always drive with the Bible on their dashboard because if they put a slightly gay voice on, and that's straight just for the reference, and they have this like Bible on the dashboard clearly visible, the cop kind of like softens up because they like to be in charge and there's a line that's just like, you know, they like to keep the society safe and if you're acting like a little bitch, it feels like they're doing their job right kind of thing. So it was almost like there's bits like these when you kind of like listen back to it. It's like, damn, this actually says a lot more than just in this little, you know, yeah, you know what I mean?
[00:10:32.748] Kent Bye: It's like a reflection of the larger culture. That's a part of what's happening in the, not only in his experience, but also cops and the power dynamics and how he's able to sort of manipulate that through what he's referred to in that chapter called like queer baiting in order to act very submissive in a way that allows for that power dynamic to be played out.
[00:10:51.161] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, absolutely. So I kind of took that and obviously you sort of do have to chop it up a little bit and sort of contain the story because there is a lot of ahs and ahs and things like that. And yeah, eventually, so the air visuals were tricky because at the time what I was using, the outputs were only three seconds long and there weren't too many options to kind of like extend the thing without the image going totally off the rails into something totally different. So I was kind of fighting it because not only the prompting was just not quite going the direction that I wanted it to go. So it almost like I had to accept that it's going to become almost to a certain extent, this kind of collaboration, like it's not going to go exactly where I want to go. but I can create like a consistent visual language and a lot of the prompts were kind of referencing sort of 60, 70, 60 millimeter film and that kind of like texture look and stuff and obviously like using the 4x3 ratio like a standard 60 mil thing so the first reactions I actually got to it was people thought it was like an archival footage until obviously it starts to deviate and kind of go crazy but Yeah, so eventually it ended up being more of like a, I don't know, like a hallucinogenic collage of things, but I still tried to curate it and kind of structure the story so that it almost like foreshadows it visually before the punchlines kicks in, yeah.
[00:12:16.041] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting that you have this background in photography as well, because a lot of the framing that you have is very deliberate. A lot of, like you said last night at the planetarium show, that there's a lot of geometric shapes that you're trying to invoke. And so maybe you could talk about your entry point into starting to play around with generative AI and first came images so you could prompt and get specific images but then now with being able to get generative video you're able to generate video that has an unfolding dynamic nature to it which you're showing in sincerely victor pike but also there's ways of prompting ai with text And then there's ways of prompting AI with an image, so like a baseline image to start to then build upon. So love to hear about your entry point into this generative AI space and your practice and tools and pipeline that you're using to get this effect.
[00:13:06.676] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, I have to say I'm still very new. I don't think I would even consider myself fully working in that field, right? I'm obviously trying to extend the project, but I don't know if I'll keep working with it until obviously there is a reason for it, I would say. Well, I do have to give shout out to a friend, Adam Cole, whom I don't know if you've interviewed before, but he did an amazing piece called Kiss Crash.
[00:13:28.340] Kent Bye: It was at South by Southwest, but I didn't get a chance to see it because I wasn't there yet.
[00:13:31.451] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah so I mean that was the first time when I saw a piece of AI work which actually I was like wow this has a weight to it and it kind of goes beyond itself because it's both emotional and it's kind of it has a meaning beyond just the visuals. But yeah, I feel like that was the first time when I realized that there is like so much power in this different way of storytelling. But I started to just play around for this particular project, which is like an open source software, which at the time used to run on Discord. And it was very clunky. As I said, it wasn't really going the direction where I wanted it to go. Partially, obviously, I didn't have the access to any of the data sets and stuff. I wasn't responsible for sort of curating the visual language. I guess my take on it is that a lot of the things I was referencing were in the public domain at that point so it was probably having like that information in the data sets and I mean I've tried different things of going about it sometimes obviously I tried to take the actual lines from the transcripts what they were talking about feeding it in there as a prompt just because I was intrigued like how is that gonna break it down and analyze for itself and what things it's gonna pull down but I think I've always followed it with, I had like a consistent set of, you know, words and references, either, yeah, usually like styles, but other mediums as well. And I think like this specificities of like working with photography, I like, you know, like specific lenses for specific focal lengths and stuff. And I was kind of surprised because it did actually know some of these reference points. It did know what a medium or like an ultra wide angle thing is, or, you know, what a Krasnogorix wind up camera is. And I think it started to embody it, but it's obviously hard to pull it apart and figure out exactly like what went into it.
[00:15:19.015] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's like mashing up all the keywords and the styles or mixing all these archetypal ideas that it's got in its latent space of all the features. So yeah, it's kind of like the whole art and practice of AI is blending and blurring of all these things together. And so what was the name of the specific software that you're using for open source thing on Discord?
[00:15:39.381] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, this one's called Pika Labs. I mean, as far as I know, they've now, I think it's now it's its own thing. At the time, I was just running through Discord and all of the sort of prompting was done with also like commands as opposed to, you know, now they have like buttons and infrastructure around it. But yeah, super simple tool, you know, very low key.
[00:15:59.840] Kent Bye: And some of your, you have like four different vignettes that you have in Sincerely Victor Pike where you have different oral history snippets that you've cut together and put together into this full piece. And then the second one was the queerbaiting one that had a very specific, you're on the road and you're driving around and... That specific one was very much like, here's a story that's unfolding and we're going to give visual references to that as the story's unfolding. And it makes me wonder if as you were generating it, if you were doing a very iterative process of like, imagine you had the audio down as a track, but then starting to come up with the story, if you had like storyboarded it out or if you had... did the first scene and then from that, then you went to the next scene and it's very continuous of trying to string it all together. So I'm just curious about your own process of generating these images from this imaginal realm and then starting to kind of piece it together into a coherent story.
[00:16:52.746] Gregor Petrikovič: Once the audio was locked in and kind of like cut down into a sort of cohesive segment, I then started to generate almost like I would say the key narrative scenes from there or whatever the reference points were. But because the outputs were so unpredictable and truly just the seed number would like totally like dismantle, you know, what was in it or whether it was like good image or good video. I ended up maybe using, I don't know, like 5% or whatever was generated. So every single time I would just generate tons and tons of content. Sometimes even the same prompt just with different like seed numbers and stuff or like just slight different, you know, little changes. And then... I think it's almost like more of a curation job rather than creation or like prompting thing because then it just comes down to like you have all this raw material if you like and you just start assembling it but yeah it's pretty much what you said it was just like seeing what works where and it became like a game of associations almost just like does the shot go to that one They all have slightly different ways of doing it. As I was like just making my way through some of the recordings, I tried like different things. Sometimes the visuals were foreshadowing. So for instance with the cars, obviously like that one hits almost like on the beat as soon as they say like, and there were drugs in the car, you know? So it's kind of just like some of them have this just kind of like direct like, okay, boom, kind of makes sense. Some of the other ones is, for instance, in the last one where I'm talking to my friend Helena, there's this like reoccurring figure on a crane and you kind of like don't know what's happening. And eventually she says, if there was my last hour or last day on earth, what would I do? And eventually she says, like, if she knew the exact minute, she would just like jump down from a crane. So I kind of like the idea of almost just like foreshadowing something that you don't know where it lands until the end.
[00:18:49.628] Kent Bye: Yeah, having generated a bunch of content and knowing using about 5% of it very much sounds like what a lot of documentary filmmakers do, which is have a shooting ratio, which is they're gathering a lot more raw footage that they have to sift through and having a shooting ratios of like 20 to one is not. uncommon in a lot of documentary films and so because we are here at doc lab and this is set within the context of a documentary film festival love to hear some of your reflections of this blending and blurring of having the one part of the audio coming from the physical reality and then the prompting the images coming much more from this imaginal realm of ai So almost just like the audio and the visuals being separate, you mean? Well, I just mean that, you know, because a lot of the form of documentary, John Grierson defines it as the creative treatment of actuality. So then as I've been coming here to DocLab over the years, focusing specifically on VR initially, but expanding that out into all immersive art, immersive media, there's this real interesting like expansion of my mind of like, Okay, I typically have thought of documentary film as like, oh, you go physically shoot something in a film and then you edit that together. But then there's like Errol Morris with reenactments. There's like more and more of these fictional elements that are being blended together in these more hybrid forms of documentary that is a trend that has been happening for many, many years. But now here at DocLab is the introduction of artificial intelligence and generative AI to start to bring in some of these other kind of imagery back into the documentary form. So yeah, just love to hear any reflections on as you're starting to blend together this kind of oral history, but also with these imageries from this imaginative realm of generative AI and how there's kind of the fusion of the virtual and the real in a sense.
[00:20:38.547] Gregor Petrikovič: one thing i was really interested in is that fusion that middle point specifically between documentary and fiction and some of the films that i think about or like i come back to they always land in this like a strange middle point this is one film i saw a couple of years ago it's all documentary footage but the way it was done in the edit it's almost like fictionalized or it's wrapped up in like a formal structure that is different from its original format Or another thing is like one of the big sort of references that I had going into this was a Netflix show called Midnight Gospel. And it's based on a podcast. I think then they re-recorded it. But essentially the idea is just like it's about a space caster, right? This kind of animated character. And there's a studio that made really beautiful imagery to it. But it almost sounds like a podcast that somebody created animated visuals to create. And you just tune it into it differently kind of like flows and you taking in very strangely because when there is totally nonsensical stuff going on the screen and they're talking about profound topics and life and death and just he's talking to his mom about like what's going to happen when she passes, you know, and it was really seeping in in like a strange different way and I was like oh I kind of want something like this something that is serious and something you know that is almost like funny and like you know just jumble it up together and kind of see what happens when you don't just stick to those frameworks because yeah it might sort of upbringing when I think of documentaries when I was younger it was always just like you know title card with who it is and what they're saying what the job is and yeah i kind of tried to go into this like jumbled up mix up a little bit of fiction with the documentary because i do think it it's in a different place more emotional at least for me yeah
[00:22:37.099] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought there was some real profound moments that you had in your piece that were quite moving and also the imagery in a lot of ways helped to augment. It feels like there's a sort of altered state of consciousness maybe or like a hypnotic state or like a way that the visuals can kind of like pervert my expectations but also create this beauty in a way that's very abstract but also create this channel for this deep truth of these raw moments and these entertaining stories and deep profound stories and kind of like a silly spontaneity that is happening in these conversations, a rawness of it, but also the deep reflections and I think the juxtaposition of that realness to that more surreal imaginative visuals cultivates this sense of, I don't know, kind of a hypnotic and training state to kind of open up my mind to listen to it in a new way.
[00:23:30.737] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah and a lot of the stories they kind of have the duality as well like a lot of them are kind of like serious and then it cuts off and you're like oh shit like you know it kind of cuts off as like oh god like this is silly you know there's that constant like sincerity and like just a reality check in a very sobering way. But I think going back to the meditative thing that you said, I think a lot of that is also due to the, there's almost like these like underlining frequencies that are kind of in the background, just because it's almost like one of the, I think they're called like solfeggio frequencies and they, I mean, some people connect them to almost like different chakras, right? And they're kind of supposed to unblock different part of you as well. So That was just something that I was playing with at the time as well, because obviously there's the bit about the heartbreak in the film, and I tried to almost match it to some of these pseudo-scientific frequencies and have fun with that. But yeah, it's almost like a constant tone which kind of creates this monotony to it.
[00:24:34.076] Kent Bye: And were they stereo sounds or binaural sounds? Because I know there's binaural frequencies that do a sort of entrainment, but you sent me a link to it and I watched it on my phone. But I know there's also here at IDFA, they have an exhibition that's at the Droog where you can watch it on a TV screen with headphones. But was it just a single mono track or did you actually have like binaural entrainment in there as well?
[00:24:56.468] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, I don't think it was binaural. I think it was just a stereo track, to be honest. And yeah, the recordings for all the voice notes is just for my iPhone mostly or my Mac. But yeah, super simple. I mean, the tricky thing with some of the recordings is like they were kind of the phone is not in a podcast mode is very much just like in a pocket or like on a bag in a corner or something. So it is picking up the sound. from strange directions which are not really clear I mean that's something that I kind of almost like want to work on going forward because yeah obviously the sound is very different if you listen to it on headphones and then when it's into just like I think it was like you know 5.1 sort of version at the planetarium so yeah very different experiences I would say as well listening
[00:25:42.421] Kent Bye: Well, take me back to 2016 when you started to first record these oral history spontaneous moments. Because you mentioned last night to Toby Coffey, one of the curators of If A Doc Lab, that you were recording these and eventually at some point you had realized that you had some sort of issue with the sleep apnea and the lack of REM sleep and that leading to some degraded memories or memory loss. So maybe walk through that process of starting to capture all of these like recordings back in for the last eight years and then creating this archive, but also what you learned later around how that was connected to the memory. If you knew that you had this memory issue and you started it or yeah, just kind of go into the origins of that moment when you decided to start recording these little moments.
[00:26:25.407] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, I think I always say the almost slightly more romantic version of it at the beginning, because that's I feel like maybe I just romanticize the past retrospectively. But the way I remember it was, you know, we used to have little smoke breaks and whatnot in between lectures and everyone was doing different subjects. So like, you know, some of my friends did like a lecture on myths, you know, and we would just like meet up in this little garden and people would just kind of like reference something that they've just learned and you know it could have been someone was studying some sort of ancient scripture or somebody it was the philosophy theology joint honors so like people were kind of like going in and out you know someone was doing metaphysics someone's doing this so i was just standing there and a lot of the time obviously people say stuff that you kind of want to come back to or reference in your essay or something so I started to ask if I could instead of writing it down if I could just record a conversation so I could come back to it and I was surprised that people were okay with it most of the time so I then obviously realized that people say amazing stuff all the time when you kind of tune in into it and I really like the sentiment I think a lot of the times as well that people say it with Especially when it's just pure storytelling and people don't really like try to get anything out of it They're just like sharing something that happened to them. Obviously. This was more just the the more sort of unhinged situations, you know like things that happen in this again, I don't know like the smoking area of like clubs like people discuss sometimes very silly and stressful and you know the whole range of things so And again, people are okay with it because especially as soon as I explained like, yeah, I'm just collecting this, I call it like a silly archive of human interactions. People are like, okay, cool. I don't mind that. Obviously some people would just say no and that's cool. But most of the people are okay with this. So I kept recording and then I was just really put off by the idea of like going back and listening to it. But I knew that there was something there, that there was like some sort of value to what people were saying, but I just couldn't get myself to listen to it until I realized that there is AI transcriptions. And then obviously, you know, I would like copy and paste the five page transcript into ChatGPT in chunks and it would spit out like a summary and suddenly I could generate like a script that had a summary with the whole transcript. And yeah, and it just made life so much easier. So initially I was thinking about, as I said, like the kind of verbatim theater or I played with the idea of it was like lip syncing to the stream of consciousness from these events. But I kind of eventually came to the conclusion that even the process of engaging with the material was mediated by the AI. So it kind of started to make more and more sense that the visuals, it's okay if the visuals are AI driven as well, yeah.
[00:29:24.491] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you also created another format of this piece to be shown in the dome, which the planetarium, the format is that it's a dome, which essentially like you look up and you see it like a full, you know, I don't know how to describe the, you know, it's different than like, well, I guess in a 360 video, you see 360 degrees, but then a planetarium is sort of like the 360 video, but with the bottom cut out. So you're just looking at the top of that. And then there's other dome configurations like at Cosm in the Sphere that has more of a 180 view, but it has more of a stadium seating and people looking forward rather than looking upward at the top of a 360 video. So I feel like with this translation that you did, I actually, and I think you mentioned too, there's something that's lost in terms of the geometric relational dimensions of this piece. I very much prefer it in the just 2D plane version, partly because that's the way it was created and intended, and I think that the planetarium mode of a output to me feels like you really have to create content that's meant for that like planetariums are meant to look up at the sky so that is more of the type of output that you would be looking up and looking at something versus more of the straight 180 view which i think a lot of the 180 videos within the larger industry are moving towards which is more that you're completely immersed in it and i feel like if you were to take another crack at it it would be like designing it from scratch to meet that medium and what that medium can do rather than adapting a 2D thing into a dome. So yeah, that was some of my reactions as I was watching it. I was like, oh, wow, this feels quite different and almost prefer the 2D version. And if you were to have more of an immersive version, like another take that would actually kind of use the affordances of the space, but more of a forward facing 180 dome than looking up at a 360 top half of a planetarium dome. So that was my reactions after I was watching it. Let me hear some of your thoughts.
[00:31:15.965] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah. No, I think I agree with you too, yeah. The thing is I haven't seen the version before and the tricky thing with it was the initial 4x3 format as well. We tried different versions and the guys on the DocLab team were super nice with trialing these different versions and seeing what works. Yeah, turning something that is like that academy-ish ratio into a full circle is kind of confusing because a lot can get distorted in that thing to an already distorted footage, right? So one of the things when they tried it on the full dome, kind of like stretched all over, it became so incomprehensible, partly because it's the, what do they call it, unicentric dome?
[00:32:00.948] Kent Bye: I'm not sure what the name of it is. But yeah, it's basically like the planetarium type of dome, the top hat. But there may be a more technical term. That may be correct.
[00:32:08.666] Gregor Petrikovič: Yeah, so people in this one sit all around in the circle, so technically everyone has a different perspective on things, which is the tricky thing, because then if you place it in the zenith, everyone kind of like sees it from a different perspective. So in order to sort of make it a bit more accessible for everyone, we decided to spin the footage, which I think added another sort of slightly more confusing layout to it all. Yeah, I agree. I think the 2D version, if you saw them like back to back, I think it would be clear to understand that the 2D version, the flat version was the original and the other one was the adaptation. And I think another thing as well was the piece is so narrative driven. I found it really helpful to have the subtitles as close as possible to the visuals so that you could make those associations of what's happening much more easily so that was just like another challenge obviously like having the subtitles quite further away from the image you almost have to work a little bit harder to understand what's going on but yeah glad i tried it but yeah they're like interesting spaces but almost just like i'm thinking about like with the extended version if it was to be adapted for a full dome
[00:33:26.244] Kent Bye: what are the other ways of almost like thinking about it from the get-go when making the work to make it a bit more accessible yeah yeah yeah that makes sense and i think that the original 2d version for by 3 ratio if you were to put that into the forward-facing dome it would preserve a lot of that original context and then have the cosm or the sphere version of that what's more of 180 dome everyone has the same essential perspective. I mean, there's just like in a movie theater, you have different seats, but it's not like in a concentric dome where some people may be looking up and seeing the subtitles upside down, you know, so like thinking about all that. But, uh, the other thing is that there's a lot less of those forward facing 180 domes in the world and there's a huge network of different planetariums. And so, yeah, I think there's like doc lab is this opportunity to kind of experiment and see what works and what doesn't. And both for audiences but also for creators to kind of see how to potentially start to leverage these networks. But yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of this type of AI with media and all the different kind of interdisciplinary art that you're doing and immersive qualities as well and what it might be able to enable.
[00:34:35.120] Gregor Petrikovič: Ooh, let me think. I need to take my time with that. Again, mostly it's about my thing or in general? Yeah, it's just in general, yeah, where you see it's all going. Hmm. I think it's partly the unknowing of the ceiling of the medium is exciting because the way I think about AI visuals specifically is, to me, I describe it as like, you know, it feels like a new way of seeing because your brain suddenly, or at least I get a little... little reality check that like, hang on, like, what is it that you're looking at? You know, I always kind of like perk up because what I'm seeing is not real life and there's no animation and it's this kind of like slightly autonomous creation. So I'm interested quite a lot in that sensory perception of it, the experience of it. And I feel like I always come back down more to the emotion. So I'm kind of intrigued, like, yeah, what are the opportunities, how it can make you feel when it's combined with either recordings or I've done some projects in the past where it's a combination of film and AI and kind of the overlap of the two worlds. And yeah, just kind of see what could be done with it, because I think it's still like baby stages, totally underexplored. I feel like the softwares are popping up all the time. It's almost overwhelming to keep up with it. But at the same time, there's the possibility of making something that's never been made. So that's kind of my thrill from it, if you like. Yeah.
[00:36:17.753] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left inside that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:36:22.529] Gregor Petrikovič: I think discovering places like specifically IDFA, the DocLab, was just like hugely inspirational for me because I didn't really know that there are spaces like this. I didn't really realize that there are opportunities to present projects which kind of do not really fit into a lot of these like paradigms or categories and stuff. So I would just encourage to almost like seek out, because I didn't realize labs were a thing, for instance, but that was due to my own sort of like, you know, for lack of research. But yeah, it was just exciting to be a part of this because I would never even think about showing in a dome or in a planetarium or, you know, anything that is kind of like immersive and And obviously, like, my project is so simple in comparison to some of the really, really complex stuff sort of installed here with the huge production. So it was kind of eye-opening, and I'm glad. I'm glad I saw everything here.
[00:37:25.001] Kent Bye: You've had a chance to see some other projects then?
[00:37:27.342] Gregor Petrikovič: a few yeah i feel like i still need to tap into a lot of the vr stuff but even the ones i just saw at the planetarium kind of and seeing what happens when a work is made specifically in mind for a 360 180 space it kind of unlocked this like oh wow the potential of storytelling really can like be on another level when you have both the possibility of creating for that and the idea that kind of like lends itself to that sort of space yeah
[00:37:56.221] Kent Bye: Yeah, if you have a chance to see the limbophobia in VR, it even has a different quality than that full immersive experience. Because yeah, I feel like that piece is a piece that really is pushing what the affordances of that can do. And the VR piece does even more stuff that the dome can't do because it can only do monoscopic rather than the stereoscopic experience of it. So there's a whole other layer of depth to that piece that you get from the VR. But yeah, I really enjoyed the Sincerely Victor Pike. Like I said, I see a lot of AI generative pieces that seem to start with the visuals, but never really have a coherent or interesting story. Just kind of like random images that sometimes the images look nice or polished and it's kind of like interesting. But at the core of it, there's no heart or no soul or no like meaning to it just feels like random experimentations to more of a tech demo, as it were, rather than people that are using it to tell a story that means something. i feel like you're you're capturing the the heart and the emotion of these ephemeral moments that you've captured and then using the ai to really augment and expand that in a way that gets you even more connected to the things that they're talking around which is all around the human experience so yeah anyway gregory thanks again for joining me on the podcast to help break it all down so thank you thank you so much 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 1500 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 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.
