I interviewed director Aphra Taghizadeh about Speechless Witness of a Wandering Tree that showed at IDFA DocLab 2024. See the transcript down below for more context on our conversation.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive experiences from IFA Doc Lab 2024, today's episode is with a piece called Speechless Witness of a Wandering Tree, which is a part of the Immersive Nonfiction Competition. So this is a VR piece that uses a lot of 360 video as well as with different CGI components and there's also some mixed reality components when you actually go through this piece as an installation because there's kind of like near one-to-one replication of some of the different scenes that you're walking into and so just making it a little bit easier so that you can navigate this space and then sit down on a bed. So the topic of the piece is exploring these blinding events that are happening in Iran where the security forces or secret security forces were using these rubber bullets in order to deliberately blind some of the protesters so this is kind of a recounting of some of those different experiences but also a very poetic reimagination of this as a story it's something that's using a lot more of this kind of dream logic and more oblique and poetic broad strokes in order to cover some of these different issues trying to avoid this experience of re-traumatizing the users but at the same time I often found it was like you're going into a dream and I needed to have that dream unpacked and some of the different symbology unlocked by talking to the director in this conversation. So recovering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And I should note that my voice continued to give out. So apologies as my voice gets a lot more correctly. So this interview with Aphra happened on Tuesday, November 19th, 2024 at IFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:59.281] Aphra Taghizadeh: Hello, I'm Afra Taqizadeh. I'm a media artist based in Cologne, Germany, and I'm a postgraduate student in KHM, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and it's been seven years that I'm working in the film industry very independently and mostly focused on documentary films. And since 2022, I started this immersive project that is being presented now in IDFA DocLab. And I decided to gravitate myself more towards new mediums with the background that I have in filmmaking and documentary, but experimenting more in different forms.
[00:02:50.492] Kent Bye: Great, and I'm wondering if you could give a bit more context to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:55.778] Aphra Taghizadeh: Yes. I began to work on this piece when I moved to Germany for the educational purposes that I had, but it was right in the middle of the demonstrations that were going on in Tehran. It was a very harsh situation and I was so fucked up in the beginning that I was starting everything in Germany and Europe and many of the friends were in prison, some of them were injured by the violence of the police and security guards there. And this situation just was in my mind and I always had to write something on the paper to just release my things. And one night I was just thinking about how it would be to make a very distant experience tangible for somebody's gaze in here who has no clue of what is happening in other side of the world other than press and other than news. So it was just a very basic idea of recreating the blindness experience of a protester using some footage and some recorded things that I had before, like audios and some videos. And maybe somehow using it in this immersive medium, but for the first time. And yeah, it was the beginning of it.
[00:04:27.648] Kent Bye: Just a quick follow on. Can you give a bit more context as to the protests, the demonstrations and the timeframe and what was happening with what was being protested?
[00:04:37.848] Aphra Taghizadeh: It was the beginning of the protests of Mahsa Amini. It was in the news at the time and everybody knew about that. But in the aftermath of that, it was six months of protesting people and harsh oppression by the regime. And about 500 people got blinded during the demonstrations. Thousands of them were arrested and many of them are still in prison. I don't know a number, hundreds of people were executed. And it was a very, very traumatic situation. And as I moved in the middle of that, I felt somehow in over and even making art couldn't make sense that much. And when I got this idea, I was also thinking, am I victimizing them? What am I doing here? And if I make art about them, And I started to rearrange completely the core idea of this work after I thought it may be victimizer or something like that. I just rewrote it in a kind of poetic environment and with a narration with Mahdi Afarjoo who is the co-writer of that piece. And I just tried to explore some kind of unconscious areas of my mind in collaboration with her. not to just focus on something that is in the news. It's kind of journalistic work. If I just go through one experience that, yeah, I think it doesn't make sense to victimize somebody by immersive tools, but more going through broaden the consciousness of people who are experiencing something that they could probably hear from the news.
[00:06:43.769] Kent Bye: And you said there was hundreds of people that were blinded. And was this with acid? And was this from the regime? If you could just elaborate a little bit more of the nature of the blindings that were happening to protesters.
[00:06:56.309] Aphra Taghizadeh: There are some unofficial repressive forces in Iran that they can do some kind of actions that are not allowed even by the rules of the country. And they are protected by the regime and they can do anything that they want mostly. And they use some metal projectiles, metal bullets instead of even plastic bullets that normally countries use for oppression. And they used these projectiles and many people got blinded and injured and they had many of these metal pieces in their bodies and they coped with such a situation. But still they came for six months to the streets and public spaces, although this absolute danger existed there.
[00:07:47.475] Kent Bye: And so you were living there through the time? Were you participating in the demonstrations and the protests? Or were you just watching and having friends involved? Or like, yeah, just trying to get a sense of how you were connected to that?
[00:07:58.426] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well it was like exactly in the middle of the demonstrations I got my visa to Germany and I had to come because I had mandatory military service there and I had to begin my postgraduate degree in Germany so I immigrated right in the middle of the demonstrations and I was completely in that atmosphere and I was just displaced to another place. So I was living still and during the demonstrations I was recording some voices and archiving them also the other footages that came from other people and at the time that I was in Germany I just thought of using those recorded material together with some new filmed materials by 360 degree camera in collaboration with the two other key collaborators and they went to some main public hubs of these demonstrations in Tehran and they brought this very normal 360 degree camera under very risky conditions and they got actually arrested one time because of that but luckily they could be released afterwards and yeah that was how I jumped into the project I think.
[00:09:22.562] Kent Bye: So it sounds like that you were going through these dramatic events of what was happening in your country and that when you're in Germany, you wanted to look to some of these more immersive mediums to explore this as a story. However, you don't want to trigger people. So you want to create a little bit more of a poetic framing to this story. And so I guess, where did you begin in terms of like trying to create the arc of the story? Because you're kind of blending the CGI, some mixed reality components with the installation here. And then eventually you're kind of cutting back and forth between those CGI moments and the 360 video that is also kind of acting out the story. And so as you're starting to put this story together, where did you begin in terms of trying to figure out how you're going to tell the story?
[00:10:09.440] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, I began with just 360 degree materials and I thought I'm going to just make a 360 degree film and I made it actually. And then I thought, OK, I can explore more in other things that I'm imagining and they can coexist with these material together. I just thought, OK, maybe it's possible to do the combination. Then I went to Vienna for one month and worked on it on the prototype of this and it was quite glitchy and very nasty and everything and at some points I was disappointed about this combination and if it's possible or not I mean I knew that it's possible but with no budget and this kind of independent way of working that I was through that I thought it could be really hard. then we just applied for this program here the doc lab and i got presentation support for that and that was kind of a motivator for me to just live my life and simultaneously work more on this prototype with the great developer that we had And we kind of grew together and made this prototype to the point that you can see now. And it's like seamless, relatively seamless experience. And I could kind of work more with those poetic elements in the 3D crafted environment that we have now. It was in collaboration with one animator from Belgium. joran and he did a great work with this frame by frame animation that you can see in the opening of the movie it was not mixed reality till the very ending levels of the project and like that's how i work actually i just grow with the work i don't know where it goes i just give it time and see what it needs and then if it fits I just try to find a way out of that and just introduce that technical aspect into the project I try to do that although always money is limiting me but Yeah this mixed reality also was the consequence of one night that I was just playing around with this pass-through feature in Unreal Engine and I thought okay it's a great feature let's use it in the experience for the opening and ending and in some stages of the project as a kind of distancing effect that Bertolt Brecht used in the theater so maybe it's a kind of good feature for storytelling and immersive works. That's how I got into this point.
[00:13:11.232] Kent Bye: Okay, so the title of The Speechless Witness of a Wandering Tree. So there's a tree metaphor that you're using throughout in your You're kind of entering into this room and then you're seeing the tree through the window. And then it's kind of a motif that you come back to in different parts of the piece as well. So maybe you could elaborate a little bit of the metaphor of a tree and how you are connecting the tree to the overall themes of the story.
[00:13:38.243] Aphra Taghizadeh: It's always hard to talk about metaphors and almost impossible to talk about metaphors because they are there not to be described. But I think anybody who goes to the experience kind of understands what is happening with that tree to an extent. I would say the speechless witness of that wandering tree that you see is you and the Wandering Tree is also what I and many other people experienced after a very sad and big social event in their lives. I think many people experience that in different parts of the world. That's why I also stated in the description of the work, not just my country, because I don't think that if I'm presenting something here, it should be just directly about my country or something that is just around me, but something more internationally understandable. And the tree, technically, I'm going to talk more technically about and express my gratitude towards the wonderful artists who did this great painting of the tree that was crafted by Koji and Mifuko in Kyoto Art Center. They did a great work, but we had some limitations in Unreal Engine and this APK build, and that's why it's not as great as it is. But it is still great, and I like it a lot. Yes, but if you can ask some more specific questions, I would be able to talk about metaphors.
[00:15:31.806] Kent Bye: Yeah, okay, so I saw this piece twice, and the first time I saw it, the chaperones were kind of up, and so I was sort of distracted by that in a way that I wasn't able to really sink into the experience because I was kind of distracted by having the blue chaperone there because I think the controllers were not within the space. So I came back and I did it again. And I had a much better experience. It was much more immersive and I could track the story a lot better. I think sometimes when I see a piece, there's things that are described visually, and then there's things that are described with audio track. And so sometimes when there is diegetic elements in the audio track, sometimes I miss it. So I think if you were to have me explain Why use the tree? I don't know if I would. And so that's part of the reason why I'm asking. And, you know, it's a wandering tree. And so that to me and sort of implies that usually trees are rooted and they're grounded and they're not supposed to be wandering. So that's kind of like a perversion of the natural nature of a tree. There's a displacement to a wandering tree, but I don't typically see wandering trees. And so that's not like a reference point that I immediately, when I see a tree, I think of a tree. I don't think of it as, you know, it is moving around, but it's like, okay, this is a conceit of the VR rather than something that. I mean, I think there are maybe some species of trees that like literally do like walk and move over time very slowly. But for the most part, it's something that is a surrealistic twist on something. And so that's why I'm asking is just to kind of like and especially because it's the title of the piece as well as a pretty significant motif. And I'm just making sure I didn't miss anything in terms of like why, why the tree, why the wandering tree.
[00:17:13.556] Aphra Taghizadeh: I haven't been inspired by the nature for this tree, but it was mostly about the narration that we first wrote. I'm just telling two sentences of the narration. the main character said put the pieces together a tree will grow here when the audience were under the soil and they were being buried and then the tree comes again although you've seen that beforehand but it comes again and kind of connects the narration again to the tree and why wandering and why it has the sound of this spinning well I okay at the end I should describe a bit I think what I'm aiming with this tree well we have kind of intention to participate in a social event and there is a thing at least to my experience that people the whole society sees zero or hundred black or white in a social movement in something a very complicated multi-factor and this wandering tree, a very beautiful, great tree that was making a comic sound out of itself and was being volatile and displaced was a kind of connection to that position of us in between black and white when we are in the middle of a multi-factor, great, big-scale social event that may change the future of us. OK.
[00:19:18.050] Kent Bye: OK, yeah. That helps to explain a little bit more in terms of that design. I think part of what happens in a piece, you have an option to be very explicit and literal. And then the more poetic, then it becomes more of a dream logic. And then it becomes like interpreting the dream and what does the dream mean? Then there's more of a chance of like that type of poetic dream logic that is more difficult to sometimes discern the full meaning of it. I think part of the other thing that I had with the piece that I saw it twice, but I experienced this both times, which was that it's like okay what is it that this is about what's going on why is this face here and you know there's a certain point you know probably around two-thirds or three-quarters it's near the end where it's kind of revealed as to like the full extent of you know the blinding experience that this piece is I think about I'm still not sure I think that seems to be the core since there are like one eye goes black and then you have like some kind of liquid things that are going over one eye. And, you know, there's this kind of floating face that's, you know, speaking around, you know, when I closed. And so there's all these cryptic poetic messages that are kind of building up to what it's about. So I'm just curious to hear around that decision that you said that you wanted to make it less explicit so that it was not traumatizing or victimizing of the audience. And then so then you're kind of using all these other kind of poetic methods to be able to tell the story. And then, yeah, just sort of like that construction of this more dream logic and mythic and poetic way of telling the story. And that decision that you made to reveal information around the full context of what the piece was about, like near the end rather than, you know, at the beginning. And if that's something that was like sort of like... Cause sometimes people will read a description before they go in, but sometimes I just like to go in and have it be revealed to me through the experience. And so that was part of my own experience of like having a certain level of confusion and trying to search through. And so that's, I think part of why if there's like narration and other things, I don't have like a full context for me to be able to understand what's being said in the moment and to be able to encode it in my memory. And it kind of washes over me like of a dream you wake up from and like, don't really understand it and then you kind of move around your day so that's kind of part of what i'm unpacking in my own experience of it so yeah loved it just to hear some of your thoughts on that
[00:21:33.989] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, I wish I could not include description for this work and I did not want to do that but it was kind of necessary for the venue. But the thing is that I believe if you're going through one experience we should be able to make the audience thirsty of something. and we are not here to inform them but we are here to work and play with some forms, with some elements that are visual and audio. And as my personality is also like that, I'm doing the same thing when I'm trying to get into a deep discussion with somebody. Many people just go away and do not want to be in discussion with such confusions and things, but the ones that continue with me at the middle of that, they understand what is going on. Of course, I don't want to just do something confusing or something like that, but I just want to introduce what is going to be displayed. at a certain point as the summit of the experience. And it's not about the summit of the experience, it's about the whole process of that and making that process more important than that exact point of being blinded on the goggles. It's not the point of the whole experience, I think.
[00:23:15.476] Kent Bye: Yeah, I could definitely see that. It was certainly a sub-optimal way for me to see the experience at first. I probably should have just said, OK, we need to stop and start this over. I don't know why I didn't. But it was drastically different the second time I saw it. But the second time I saw it, I kind of knew certain things that were going to be coming that gave me more additional context. I'm wondering if this is a piece that when you design a piece like this, if it's intended for people to come back to see it a second time, or if you really want them to see once and they get what they get, or if it's something that you intend for them to come back and maybe pick up more information a second time.
[00:23:53.838] Aphra Taghizadeh: I think the great work is the work that people want to come and experience once more and it's not like the intention of making some spots that they come back but I can just understand when people want to come back so it's a good work that they want to come back and experience it again and Yeah, I know that this work can be considered multi-layered and many people express that, yeah, I want to experience that once again and it would be different for me if I experienced it once again. And I think that's a good thing. It's not an intention of making something not understandable at the first time, but it's more about the process of making something That is to be provocative for the consciousness of the people about something in a new language, I would say.
[00:24:50.681] Kent Bye: Were there any other VR pieces that you saw that served as an inspiration for how you were deciding to tell the story?
[00:24:58.826] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, I was and I am still an amateur in this medium, and I saw very little VR pieces beforehand, so I just watched, I think, two pieces before I made this VR work. One piece was from Zoe Rowling, and I was in contact with her. She gave me the experience and I really liked it. It was not about any kind of concept that I was working, not technically, not conceptually, but it was really good to have her feedback on the work and it helped me a lot. I also presented it in Cologne game lab and professors there had feedback on my work and it helped me again to be more conscious about what can be done on this headset. And the other work was just a 360 degree video and it was also not relevant to what I did. It was just more based on the awareness of the features that can be used and the interaction of those with what I am trying to tell in a story.
[00:26:17.591] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you have the viewer walk into a room, and then that room is mirrored in a one-to-one, so there's a physical installation and then there's a VR part. And you said that the mixed reality part came relatively late in that experience, but had you always imagined that this would be a physical installation with that room and that people would be ideally experiencing it with the ability to... sit down on what people can see as a physical one-to-one like recreation of this space or yeah maybe just like walk through that decision to create this kind of like one-to-one mapping between the virtual space and the physical space
[00:26:53.819] Aphra Taghizadeh: Yeah, well first of all it's not really one-to-one because it's a huge technical work for also Popcraft and us to kind of be millimeter exact about one-to-one mixed reality experience. That was not my intention also. I just wanted not to make people fall into the ground when the character says sit on the bed and also be able to explore more of the objects that are in the VR installation but for sure it was my intention to create the same cardboardy room of the character that you see in the virtual world in the real world and be able to touch the material of that and when it comes to the ending level it will be again back to the opening of that I always like this circle in the works and also Yeah, I tried to do that. What I was willing to do but I ran out of budget and time was the thing that I wanted to introduce more interactive elements with those frames that were about one historical event that happened in Iran about blinding people again like about 800 years ago a king who blinded one city and the city was named after the city of the blind and I wanted to somehow bring that siege again into the scenery of this room and also the room itself was abstract and it was like the room of the person in the middle of this black and white thing that we've mentioned before that is like very vulnerable and in danger. And she's writing on those cardboards that are the material of her house, her little room. And yeah, being able to touch those papery, volatile kind of material was my intention. And this fear of the audience to sit on something papery and yeah, feeling vulnerability.
[00:29:13.186] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. The mixed reality to make sure that I'm not going to like quickly sit down on something that looks virtual, but actually isn't there. So, and I ended up sitting down and watching a lot of the rest of the piece. And at the end, you have more of the 360 video of the different scenes. You know, there's some stuff that's more explicit and again, stuff that's a little bit more poetic. And I'm not even sure if I could describe exactly what's happening, but. There's one scene when this woman is walking down like a dark hallway and you're kind of on her shoulder. She's talking around a figure who is at the end of the tunnel. And I don't know if that's a poetic reimagination of the blinding or if that's actually like literally the story of how it happened, but. there's this switching between like first person and third person where you're watching the main protagonist and the other time you're watching from the perspective of the protagonist. And that was one moment that I really felt like the, a little bit of that terror of like, Oh, what's going to be at the end of this. And then, you know, you kind of have like, ways that you are telling the story of the blinding that then switch back into the cgi and blacking out one of the eyes so it's like using vr instead of always being stereoscopic you kind of turn into be monoscopic in the sense that you're turning one eye just black which when that would happen i would actually close my eye because it's different to see the black than it is to like close your eyes so it's It's a nice approximation, but it also kind of creates some weird experiential dimensions of it that I can understand why you're doing it in the story specifically because of the story. But if people don't know to do that, then it could give them headaches or whatever. But anyway, I'm well-versed enough VR to be like, okay, I'm going to shut my eyes to live into the full intent of what's happening here. But I'd love it if you could explain a little bit of that. First person moment where you're walking down the hallway and trying to get the viewer some sense of that psychological terror of the possible threat that might be there and that is being spoken about within the context of the narration and trying to feed into the larger trauma of an experience like that.
[00:31:10.521] Aphra Taghizadeh: Yeah, that piece of narration was based on the written text of a person who actually got blinded in the same place and we went to the same place, there were still demonstrations going on and We filmed this piece and we wrote that written piece of her again with a kind of more poetic language. The tunnel was an underpass actually and the underpass had many erased slogans on the wall, if you noticed. And these slogans are being written every day and they are being erased every day. And it creates a powerful aesthetics, this erased and crossed out slogans on the walls, black and white, mostly all over these kind of hidden spaces in Tehran, but still some people are going to come and erase them. I found that location because of that and we filmed that through this location about the creepy figure at the end of the dark underpass. Yeah, it was definitely intended to kind of warn the audience that something is coming as a kind of narrator, I would say. What do you call it?
[00:32:38.624] Kent Bye: Like a foreshadowing?
[00:32:40.265] Aphra Taghizadeh: yeah somehow like that like what you also would expect to come in in a play by brecht for example some someone is warning you yeah that was the intention behind that i think yeah well there's a series of 360 video scenes where the woman who is blinded has a patch over her eye to
[00:33:02.028] Kent Bye: indicate that she has been blinded but there's also she's in a car she's walking in the desert and then later she's like picking up like some sort of bowl like thing and she's walking and but i wasn't sure like what that was a reference to and so i'm wondering if that was explained through the narration i just missed it or if it was more of a poetic description and what the intent was in terms of what that was representing or symbolizing when she's walking with the bowl throughout the desert
[00:33:27.028] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, it had some details in the bowl that many may miss that there were some metal projectiles in that glass bowl. So at that time, it's one year after the incident. And at the same time, I mean, technically, I kind of tried to use editing experience in my filmmaking background in the VR. That's why that disabling the eye was matched with the time that you see, you change the sequence of the 360 degree video and then you see her being blinded by that patch. And yeah, I kind of played with that with filmmaking manner of editing. And then when she's carrying the projectiles, those bullets with the camera itself, and she's going to bury it in a desert, a very dry desert in the middle of Iran. It's like obvious symbol of nothingness and emptiness. and then we go again through the end level that is there are some trees around you and it's also missed by many audience that these trees are some mirages that when people look at them they disappear and there is just one tree that is the wandering tree in the opening and in the other parts and it creates a noise of spinning, that kind of funny noise of spinning because nothing is that much serious as well. The audience should be buried and should be carried by those projectiles and being buried under those soils and then we go to this level of mirages and then the experience comes into the mixed reality part that they come into the room again but this time the physical room and they can see themselves they can be in the real world again
[00:35:44.932] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's an Iranian VR maker named Elie Alsami who is based here in Amsterdam and had a couple pieces here at the doc lab back in 2018 and then 2019. And talking to Elie, he was saying that you can't actually buy a VR headset in Iran. You'd have to smuggle it in or somehow... Get it in in the sense that there's sanctions and they're not distributed or available. But do you think that this speechless witness of a wandering tree, do you feel like that this piece would ever even be allowed to be displayed or shown in Iran? Or is that something that would be putting your life in peril because it just wouldn't happen? I'm just trying to get a little more context as to that.
[00:36:27.108] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, the headset is now available in Iran. But about the official premiere in Iran, I would say there are many works that are being represented there, but without any permission from the government. So it's underground art that is going on in Tehran. Many theaters are now underground, many bands underground, everything. I mean, there is a whole life underground. And it's not a very fancy life. It's a dramatic thing, but it also has its own style. So now the theater is mostly underground in Tehran. I can think of showing this piece also underground. Maybe underground, but underground. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, why not? I'm not making some piece for a limited number of people. Why not the people who are actually connected to the experience in a way? I'm also thinking about showing it in Chile or Bangladesh that had the same experience recently or many other places. Yeah.
[00:37:36.055] Kent Bye: Right. So what's next for the speechless witness of a wondering tree? Where do you go from here? What's next?
[00:37:43.723] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, now I'm working with Mahdiya, my partner, on a documentary feature which is in parallel to another immersive experience, like interactive slash immersive experience. And I'm in the development level of that work. I think in the next two years I will be mostly focused on this work and it's going to be, again, a mixed reality experience. double project in parallel so I'm gonna make this feature documentary in parallel with this immersive work and it's about the portrait of her in relation to her mother who is living in a very small village in Iran and how even a very radical feminist movement in Iran has never heard her voice. And I'm not gonna just be like the speaker of her or something. It's just about the lived experience of a daughter who is in Europe now and a mother who is in a very small village in Iran and what is inherited here in Mahdieh, in Cologne, and how would the mother experience an immersive work in a village and how she would interact with an AI avatar who can possibly represent her daughter.
[00:39:22.970] Kent Bye: Nice. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:31.174] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, of course, there are many things that are possible to come in the future. But what I'm thinking these days of and I'm trying to make research out of that is the possibility of the immersive mediums to investigate cognitive biases. So now I'm mostly thinking about this possibility that people can be in an environment and they can interact with almost real objects, real characters and reveal themselves in a certain ways and it can be used in a very scientific purposes utilizing art or it's not a good term utilizing art but They are together. I see both of them together and I see the potential in this way and I think many great things can happen in the intersection of this research-based artistic works in the future in this medium.
[00:40:39.073] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there anything else that's left unsaid? Any final thoughts that you have for the immersive community?
[00:40:47.978] Aphra Taghizadeh: Well, in the art world, I would say I hope that the artists can, including me of course, can find a way out of being stuck in a geeky ways of using immersive arts. There is a danger of losing the artistic approach when you are dealing with many technical issues, many technical challenges in one way. And yeah, that's what I hope, because both are really necessary. You cannot leave out the technical approach to develop a great work of art in immersive mediums, but also there is a danger of losing the other part.
[00:41:36.115] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Afra, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break down a little bit more of your process and journey in making the speechless witness of a wandering tree. And yeah, I think a lot of the VR pieces that are leaning into those dream logics, it does have, I think, some of the core affordances of what the medium is and what it can do. I've definitely seen at the festivals that there is this trend towards people not being as explicit as, say, a film, but the opportunity to use more of the dream logic and the more poetic interpretations to be able to cultivate a feeling or a vibe and it's less around like explicit knowing everything but more of like how it makes you feel so i feel like you're exploring that in a way that is being unlocked there at the end and um yeah i just think it's interesting to hear a little bit more context as to the process of making it but also some of the other stories and your own experiences of the deeper context of that story so yeah thanks again for taking the time to help break it all down so thank you
[00:42:34.178] Aphra Taghizadeh: Thank you for your time and watching my work twice.
[00:42:37.641] 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 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.
