TRACES: THE GRIEF PROCESSOR is a multi-user interactive VR experience where four people are invited to poetically explore and learn more about their grief. Created by documentary filmmaker Vali Fugulin, it features didactic conversations about grief with ritualist Stéphane Crête who leans upon Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief. Fugulin resists describing her piece as a grief ritual with any therapeutic intent, and she sees it more as a catalyst for thinking about or having conversations about your grief rather than facilitating deep emotional catharsis.
The experience takes you through a series of different interactive exercises where you play with different externalized, symbolic, spatial representations of your grief. The experience culminates with an asynchronous sharing of your story of grief based upon a minute-long audio recording that you’re asked to record while looking at an image representing your grief you’re asked to upload before the experience begins.
There were a number of aspects about this experience that did not quite work for me, and it’s hard to know if it’s due to my own peculiarities of VR-induced social anxiety or if there could be changes in flow of the recording and decisions around consent. I’d prefer to see examples of other recordings before being asked to record anything, and I’d also prefer to make decisions on whether I’d like to share my recording with others in the moment after having a chance to record (and possibly re-record) something. These privacy decisions were put up front without the full context of how something you might do in an experience might be shared, and with no options to change your mind later. This meant that I regretted my decision, and there was no way to stop my failed recording from being shared with others in the experience. I did have the opportunity to retract my data at the end, but I would have preferred to be able to make that decision in the moment. Again, this could come down to my unique position of having a really recognizable voice within a small community.
I do believe that there are a lot of great opportunities for developing new types of grief rituals within social VR spaces, but at the same time there are still a lot of missing body language cues that can open doors for some and close doors for others.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2025, today's episode, we're going to be talking around Traces, a Grief Processor, which is also another experience that is starting to look at unique ways of exploring social dynamics within the context of the XR experience. So in this experience, you are going into this social VR experience and you end up going through a number of different kind of interactive experiences. There's no direct interaction with other people. You can see what other people are doing, but you can't hear them in real time. There is an opportunity to record and say something later that may or may not be shared with them. But for the most part, you're parallel playing with these other people as you're going through learning around different aspects of grief. So Valley is actually a documentary filmmaker. So reflecting different aspects of the human experience, but also trying to have this pedagogical educational aspect of it. So she really wants to have this opportunity where you can learn about your grief. You can talk about your grief a little bit less so of like emotionally cathartic and really experiencing aspects of her grief because she emphasizes that she didn't want this to be like a therapeutic experience. And so there's a lot of ways that the experience wants you to kind of distance yourself and dissociate from different aspects of the grief and kind of play with it more so than like fully emotionally cathartic. So she's collaborating with a ritualist to have these conversations and also is leveraging Francis Weller's The Five Stages of Grief as they're going through this whole journey. there is an opportunity to record something and to potentially share it with other people. There were certain parts of how this was architected that didn't necessarily work for me. I would have liked to have seen the full context for what other people have done because you're asked to record something before you understand where it's going to go. And also at the very beginning, you are asked to make privacy decisions around this stuff that is going to be happening in the future. that you don't know quite about what's going to happen. And there were certain aspects of those decisions that I regretted, and there's no way for me to change it in the time. So just having the ability to make those decisions in the moment after you understand the full context, rather than being asked to make those decisions ahead of time with no opportunity to change it. So there were things like that that didn't quite work for me. And this may be just completely on me in terms of the way that this was designed didn't work for me personally. Because I've heard other people that had amazing cathartic experience in this. It could be that I have like this underlying crippling social anxiety that gets triggered within the context of social VR experiences. Somehow within physical reality, it's a little bit less. I still think I have an underlying social anxieties, which I think I use as the voices of VR to maybe... avoid certain aspects of those anxieties to have more of these one-on-one conversations but in group situations there are certain contexts in which I don't feel as comfortable and I think especially in VR what I don't have the full context are some of these different things that get some of those anxieties triggered especially being a public figure and you know it's just a little bit different when I'm participating in some of these different projects where I'm Something goes on the record and my voice is pretty recognizable by a lot of people. So it just ends up feeling like there's a performative element of my grief that was triggered in this experience. So we have a little bit of a debate and back and forth around some of these nuances of these different perspectives. And overall, I'm really excited for the potential of these different types of new forms of grieving rituals or grieving art experiences where you're able to have new opportunities to get in touch with your grief, especially within a social communal context. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Valley happened on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:04:09.443] Vali Fugulin: My name is Valérie Fugulin, and I'm a director of documentary in all formats and forms. So I guess I'm a platform agnostic documentary maker. So I explore many different formats, but always with a documentary-based approach.
[00:04:28.055] Kent Bye: OK. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:04:32.995] Vali Fugulin: Okay, so I made traditional documentaries for TV and cinema for about 15 years. And about 12 to 13 years ago, I felt like a little fatigue of my documentary maker tools. So I decided to change a bit of my career path and I applied for a residency at the National Film Board of Canada's Interactive Studio, which was beginning at the time. So I was a creator in residence at the Interactive Studio and I wanted there to make a game, so a documentary-based game. You know, it was that era of interactive documentaries that were beginning to be made on the web. So I made a few of those, and I guess I never went back completely to the linear world. My first game, documentary-based game, was called I Love Potatoes, and it was a game about social transformation. But yeah, I guess also seeing my kids move away from traditional formats and and be really into the interactive world, I thought if I want to speak to that generation, I better change my tools. So it was a mixture of curiosity and the way that I wanted to keep being relevant to younger generations. that maybe we want to change and learn. So I guess I love to explore. Whenever a new technology comes out or seems to have the potential for storytelling, I like to go and explore it. So since the last 10 years, I've mostly done works that are web-based, app-based, game-based. And VR, I've done a little bit before, but this is my first real personal work in VR, in location-based VR. So that's how I got there.
[00:06:32.772] Kent Bye: Nice. And before we start to talk about your specific project that's here at South by Southwest, I'd love to ask you around this evolution of documentary into what is now more interactive and some social parts, especially in your piece. And so when I first went to IFA Doc Lab in 2018, Casper Sonnen told me of John Grierson's definition of documentary as the quote, creative treatment of actuality. And I really like that definition just because it describes a lot of the types of pieces that were shown at DocLab. I typically would think of documentary as like, oh, it's a capturing of reality. And so you have to have like 360 video. And so when I had all these CGI pieces, there were other aspects of the human experience that is like this creative treatment of that actuality and reflecting of that. And so as we move more and more into these interactive forums with interactive web docs and now With this piece, you're getting more and more into social components, so like these community rituals. I'd love to hear some of your reflections of the documentary form as this creative treatment of actuality and expanding out into interactive forms and now social forms.
[00:07:35.037] Vali Fugulin: Yeah, I guess when we started doing these experiments in the early 2005-10s, I guess people were really critical about these new forms of documentary, the web-based documentaries. the interactive documentaries and they were really raw and sometimes not very well done but it was really about expanding the way we see and define documentary and I guess for some people a real documentary is still camera based you know like live action based But I think we exploded that very much so in the last 15 to 20 years with the new narratives movement where when you interview someone, I think for me, it's still the core of the documentary is that having a real human story, like having a person. tell you what they feel and think and share their own story, that is the basis for a documentary. And then what you do with that, whether you explore it with animation, 3D graphics, interactive mechanics, game mechanics, then it doesn't really matter because the source of the message or the source of the intent is still having just one or many humans share their condition. And documentary for me is not so much about actuality, did you say? but about the human condition. So what does it say about the human condition? That's what I learned at school through my favorite teachers is the difference between documentary and news is that documentary, whatever it is about, talks about the human condition. I find that these pieces that are more experimental or more interactive, I mean for me they are very beautiful and sometimes very effective documentaries when you can relate to the human condition behind. The storytelling, if I may say, or the embodiment of how you see the piece. But really, I'm a firm believer of the documentary format in these new forms. Because I find that if we don't have that medium evolve, it might not reach out to new generations that are very much... I mean, the gameplay has become part of their narrative every day. I speak like this, I'm not a super old person, but I find that between my generation who grew up without interactivity, basically, and we were TV watchers, and the new generation or the newer generations who are born with interactive mechanics in their hands and minds almost. So documentary had to evolve and it has to evolve. And I guess what I'm trying to do in the piece is also to push the boundaries of the new forms of documentary.
[00:10:50.407] Kent Bye: Yeah, it feels like you're starting to lean into more of these ideas of community rituals and a grief ritual that you're creating in this experience. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more context as to where Traces, a grief processor, began. So what was the catalyst for this project?
[00:11:07.927] Vali Fugulin: Well, dare I say, the pandemic. When the pandemic happened, grief became a really hot topic. It was at the forefront of our lives. We were grieving people that were dying, but we were also grieving our social ties, our jobs, what we knew of the world, what we took for granted. So I think grief was just suddenly on people's minds so much. And then I realized that it was very hard to express and there was no space in society to express it. And then there were all these weird experiments with technology. Like I went through a Zoom funeral, which was terrible, but I started looking into technology. how my fellow humans were trying to cope with this time of isolation and grief. And I just realized how many technological experiments were being done in the spur of the moment as that we need connection right now. So there were drive-through wakes, Zoom funerals, things that happened by phone, people were trying to deal with loss in different ways and I thought, well, there must be ways in which technology could help us better to connect, share, share deep feelings, feel less isolated. So I guess the subject, I was going through several griefs on my side as well And I guess one thing led to another and I thought, could we use VR and location-based VR and metaverse to reunite together and share some of the deeper emotions that we feel at this moment? And another inspiration for the piece was going to Burning Man several years ago and going through the temple which is the structure which is burnt last after the man. The next day there's a temple which is a space in which people go through the whole week and they leave pictures and words and they really share their losses. And I went there 20 years ago, but I mean, I think it was one of the most profound contemporary spiritual experiences that I've witnessed. And it always stayed with me. So yes, so why do projects happen? But at first, I guess I was looking for ways to reunite us around difficult subjects. And then it became more of an art project.
[00:13:47.748] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that in society we have funerals and that, you know, there's an experiential design researcher, Ida Benedetto, who did this whole survey of different types of immersive experiences. And she was comparing a variety of them from outdoor adventures and funerals and how the funerals were about trying to achieve this state of emotional authenticity, vulnerability and catharsis. And so with their funerals, we're trying to ultimately have this type of communal grieving ritual. But I think it's not necessarily been evolved or developed or it's kind of stifled by a lot of the funeral industry and all the things that come along with it isn't really optimized for that type of communal grieving ritual. So I feel like any time an artist starts to look at virtual reality as a modality to start to explore new grieving rituals, I get really excited because I think it's a really nice fit. but also still some challenges because, you know, usually when you are at a funeral, you can see other people expressing emotions. And then there's this idea in this book called The Smell of Rain on Dust, where the author is talking around these indigenous practices of how grief should be seen as a gift in a way that in some indigenous cultures, when there's a death, They would have people experiencing loss run down the street screaming in pain and just expressing their emotion and that people would come outside and bear witness to that grief because that grief gets people connected to their own grief. And so it's seen as this gift that's exchanged. So I feel like kind of the spirit of this project is trying to achieve that, but with a number of different steps in the experiential design to get to that point. But I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of this cultivation of the more communal aspects of this grieving ritual. Because there's a lot of ways to take a project like this, and so I'm just curious how you started and how it evolved and maybe changed through the different iterations. But yeah, I'd just love to hear a bit more about your process.
[00:15:45.031] Vali Fugulin: Well, I think the first thing I'd like to say is that I decided at some point to expand away from funeral because for me, grief and this project is not about death. It's really about the many different types of grief that we go through. So losses. And I was inspired by the work of Francis Weller and he works with the idea of the five gates of grief. So the first gate is everything you love, you lose one day. And then there's another one, the second gate, I think, is the places in you that have not known love. And then there's ancestral grief. And then there's the sorrows of the world. So for me, grief encompasses everything we will lose one day. So it could be a friendship, a house, a dream, a vision of yourself. a person might be alive but they're not in your life anymore or they've lost their memory and so they're alive but you're still grieving that person so after the pandemic I decided that this project would not be about death and funerals it's about the act of grieving in our lives and the fact that it's quite taboo in our society so I did work with a ritualist but we created a VR world where you do symbolic gestures And you process your grief in a poetic way to learn about it. Like you go through different states and different stations. But the idea was more to spark a conversation around grief than really to provide a real ritual that people would do in the VR world. It's not therapeutic. It's not a real ritual. But it was inspired by... the many rituals that Stéphane Crête, my co-narrator, he's a ritualist, but he comes from theater and he was always interested in how humans need to ritualize or should ritualize their lives. And so Stéphane and I had all these conversations on grief and he helped me think about my own grief and those conversations. So the documentary base is our real conversations. are in the project right now. So what he told me and what I share with the public is, yeah, how do you deal with grief? So what he says basically is to set it in motion. So he says, if you move it, dance it, shout it, burn it, cry it, then you become a griever otherwise it's just stuck inside you and you can't really feel anything else that you're supposed to feel even the beautiful things because your grief is stuck and it becomes like this very rock-like it crystallizes inside you so yeah so i guess we were inspired by grief rituals but not necessarily funerals
[00:18:46.647] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear around the structure of the piece, because I went through the piece and there was different chapters that we're going through. And so I'd love to just hear a little bit of elaboration of the journey that you want to take people on in this kind of communal grief ritual.
[00:19:01.224] Vali Fugulin: So the piece is structured in different chapters that were inspired by grieving rituals that Stéphane Crête, my friend and ritualist, shared with me. So he mentioned while we were scriptwriting together, The different stages, it's not the stages of grieving, but it's steps that you would do in a grieving ritual that were important, were things like sharing your grief, talking about it, expressing sadness, expressing anger, listening to other people's grief. and then entering an imaginary space where you felt comfortable expressing your grief. So I integrated his teachings into the scriptwriting and it was very inspiring to work with him because he studied rituals from around the world so this is not really associated with a religion or spirituality. it's just based on universal symbols that all humans can relate to and it was interesting for him also to see the tools of the VR world where you could take a form and you know sort of materialize certain things that you cannot see in the real world so hence you visualize your grief your grief becomes your avatar And you transform this grief symbolically. And so the different chapters are really about entering the space, expressing sadness, then telling about your own grief, and then expressing anger. and then listening to other people because showing empathy, having empathy for other people's griefs can help you with your own. So yeah, so that's how I structured the piece and really it was about, because it's not a real world, it's a virtual space, we could create the symbols that we wanted. I really wanted people to be able to go on this journey and that it would be a poetic journey. You don't have to think about it. But while you change your grief avatar in this world and you interact with elements of nature around you, then you can think about grief. And Stéphane's voice is in there and it accompanies you. And some people have told me that two or three weeks later or a month later, They still thought about what he said. So being a documentary maker, I find that what Stéphane says, you know, was perhaps the message that I wanted people to leave with. Not necessarily. I don't have... My objective is not for people to really process a grief in there. I just want to make that clear. It is not a therapy tool at all and it's not a ritual tool that you want to use if you're in the midst of a recent grief. It's really more an art piece to spark a conversation around grief. and what you do in this VR piece is meant to make you think about your own grief and maybe later in your life or in a few weeks you might think again of what you heard in the piece and what you did and that might inspire you to live it differently. So it has no pretense of being medical or therapy or even a usable grief tool. It's really an art piece meant to poetically and symbolically make you think and feel.
[00:22:50.427] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to dig into that difference between the processing and therapy of the grief versus the education or discussion around it. Because I'm calling it a grief ritual. I don't know if that's how you would self-identify this as a piece.
[00:23:04.832] Vali Fugulin: No. I wouldn't call it a grief ritual because I find that that categorizes it as a tool, like something you would use in a funeral home, and that's really not what it is. For me, it's an art piece, a documentary piece, which is VR-based. But then it is inspired by rituals, but it's something that, yeah, I would call it more of an art documentary piece.
[00:23:37.077] Kent Bye: Okay, because the name was the Traces of Grief Processor. So when I saw that title, I was like, oh, I'm going to be able to process my grief. This is like a grief ritual. And so when I went in, there were all these moments where I was starting to get into my grief. And then there was a didactic education about grief that is kind of taking me away from the grief. So I felt like it was more of a pedagogical educational tool around grief rather than an embodied visceral experience of processing my grief. Because it felt like these moments where I was coming close to the grief, but then it was taking me away at these different moments. There was a piece that was by Francesca Panetta called Six by Nine. It was about solitary confinement and she was telling me in the interview that she was doing a lot of interviews with other people who had been in solitary confinement and that when you were put into the solitary confinement cell and you were listening to other people talk about their experiences of isolation and solitary confinement, that it was taking people away from the embodied experience of being in the cell. And so she changed it from that more third-person objective into more of a second person. So all the narration was around, you are going to feel this, and you are going to now experience this. So it was re-centering people in the body. And so I felt like I was going in wanting to have this sort of visceral embodied experience of my grief, but then I felt like it was like this third-person objectification conversation about it that then was taking me away from my emotions in different chapters.
[00:25:04.197] Vali Fugulin: yeah I guess my intent is for people to it's really to spark a conversation on grief it's not really a tool to heal it's How can I say this? For me, art makes you think, feel, sensitizes you. It might change the way you see things. And as a documentary maker, I find that hearing other people's thoughts and reflections on a certain subject can make me reflect on my own. But I never had the intention for people to actually process a real immediate and raw, like very recent grief in the experience. I warn or I ask people when they come into the experience with their own grief. to choose something which is not too recent or too raw because it's not a therapy tool it's not a so it's really more about i see it like when you're at home watching a documentary on a certain subject then yes it makes you think So the balance between thinking and acting in the piece is something I've tried to achieve from what I've had as a feedback here at SXSW. A lot of people have felt very many different layers of emotions. But yes, most people, I would say, are inspired by what they hear. And the personal grieving part is sort of... not accessory, but you enter with something that you think about, but the reflection of the guide, the narrator, is perhaps what will stay with you outside of the experience. But I hear you if sometimes perhaps Yes, if you enter with the intent of really processing a grief, you might feel a little strange in the experience. Yeah, I'm an artist. I'm not a therapist.
[00:27:17.602] Kent Bye: I guess I was like looking at the title, which was Traces a Grief Processor. So just from that alone, I was like, OK, I'm going to process my grief. And then you are asking people before they go in to really set an intention for what they want to grieve. So like there was a way that I was being primed when I entered in that, okay, I'm going to be processing my grief. Here's an object to process. And then it felt like I was being pulled away each time I tried to get close to that grief.
[00:27:44.107] Vali Fugulin: I guess I also tell people to choose something very light that is not too intense for them. I mean, I'm very proud that we managed to push the boundaries in this piece in terms of integrating the user's content into the experience. It's not perfect, but we really had to invent these solutions, technological solutions, so that you enter the piece with some of your own memorabilia, so you upload words, a photo, that will then become part of the narrative. So you integrate your story into the main story, And the body of testimonies that are given by people is growing with each time that we show the piece. So it's UGC based. And I guess, yeah, what we do with art, you know, you have to think about it in a humble way. So I guess the title might be misleading for me. For some people, I'm sorry about that. But it was more of a... How do you say in English? It's a way to... yeah the way to name the project like if it was possible for a machine to process something as big as a grief right it's it's a playful way to see it for me it's like emotions can be processed but in the vr world they are processed in a way that is machine-like so you transform them and you transform them into into water, into fire, into words. So I find that the processor for me was almost like a playful image. Like almost if you put in your feelings and you crunch them through a machine. But I never had any therapeutic intent actually for this. So it's really in the storytelling capacity. And so I guess people get what they want from it. But also, yeah, we might frame it better in the future if that's misleading for some people. But yeah, there's no therapy intended.
[00:30:06.044] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the UGC component of contributing because there's a ritualist, Michael Mead is a mythologist and storyteller that I've attended a number of his men's retreat. And he has a saying that the ritual begins when you commit to attending the event. And so in this way here at South by Southwest, people are signing up and they're coming and they're arriving. So in that sense, the ritual has already begun as they're coming into this grief ritual. Oh, I should maybe I shouldn't call it a grief ritual, like an experiential art piece about grief that one of the first steps you have to do is fill out this form where you are setting intention for what you want to grieve, uploading some sort of image. that is reflecting that, entering it on a text, and then you have to make a choice as to whether or not this information is either going to be just for yourself, private, or if you want to share this with the other people in this experience, or if you want to share it with other people as a part of a community art project that is happening later. And so when I'm making that decision, I don't know the full context of each of these conditions. And so for the entirety of this piece, there was like a not knowing of when I go to each step as to what's public, what's private, what's going to be shared, what's not shared. And so there's a moment where I'm asked to record part of my grief. And at that moment, I'm like, OK, I don't know where this recording is going to be. I don't know where it's going. These are all the things that I'm thinking around, because as a public figure who's very easily recognized by his voice, there's other implications that I have to deal with. But also just the nature of the grief that I had chosen was also complicated in other ways. And so then when it was put within this communal context where people that were in the experience could potentially have the ability to experience whatever recording I had, and then also the potential for that to live on, like all these things were also getting me away from the actual feeling of the grief, but also like there was this other thing of, it turned the grieving process into a performance, at least in that context. And what I like to see in these types of experiences is decisions being made in the moment. Rather than making that decision ahead of time, having the capability to be in the moment process, and then after I process, then, oh, would you like to share this with the other people in this experience? And right now, you know, and then after that, then another decision point, would you like to share this with the rest of the community after you've seen the context under which other people have shared? And so having to make those decisions up front felt like it put undue pressure under each of these different moments, not knowing the full context under which all these information would be shared. So that was my experience of it. But that was also influencing my experience of the overall experience.
[00:32:51.618] Vali Fugulin: Well, I want to start by saying that this is a very modest budget project, right? We made this with a lot of love and care, but the technological feat that is needed to do all these different steps of UGC live in VR are very complex. But we did plan for people can go back after the experience and change their privacy settings. So, once you're onboarding, I ask you to come into this story with your own story, if you wish. But you don't have to. The idea was that the piece was based on my own grieving process. I was not grieving a person, but a relationship. And this is the basis of the narration that I do in the piece. But I thought that, you know, the story is not about me. The story is about everybody that comes into the story. So I asked people to share if they want a part of their own grief. But it's very important for me that people don't feel pressure to do that. So I asked them at the beginning, when they are prompted to upload content, to choose a grief which is not too vivid nor too recent. And it's not a grief of a person necessarily. It could be the grief of a dream, of a house, of a friendship, of a pet, whatever you choose. and then the privacy settings are made so that you can decide to be the only person in the VR world that sees your picture and words or you can share with the three other people because we didn't mention but it's a location-based VR experience so you do it together with three other people and so you can decide to just share with these four people at this session or you can decide to leave it inside the experience for all future visitors And you can always go back afterwards to delete your content or change your privacy setting. So you receive an email in which you can change those settings. But then again, this is the first time we show it to the public. The reactions have been really wonderful on many levels. But I do hear of the things we need to perfect and tweak. And so perhaps, like in another setting, we would have sent that email to people a few days ahead, but here they would not allow us to do that. So people would have had time to read this and there's an explanation. You have time to think about which grief you come into. But for me, the important thing, of course, is that people do not have to share anything, that they don't feel comfortable. And I don't do this in a voyeuristic way. I just feel that people are more invested in a narrative if they are part of it. and it makes it very personal to them. And usually when people see their picture and their words inside the VR world, it's a very powerful moment for them to actually be integrated into the storyline. I hadn't seen anything like this before and I really wanted to make this. And I think UGC, I mean, we live in a world where user generated content is everywhere. People put their stories of love and grief and everything else onto social media every day, all the time. But the VR world has been very hermetic, where when you enter VR, usually it's a world where you cannot share your own stories. And for me as a documentary maker, the next wave of documentary is self-documentary, where you decide what you want to share in the documentary. So that was guiding my thoughts. It was people can decide, like they do on social media or other platforms, what they want to bring in to the world, the VR world, and what they want to leave. And if they just want to look, that's also fine. I never want people to feel pressured on sharing anything that is too personal or too sensitive or... Something you just want to keep private. It's just a way to frame the narrative differently. You are part of the narrative. And for me, it's not gimmicky. It's very crucial that we start thinking about documentary 3.0 that way as creating your own narrative within the virtual world. Because we keep talking about the metaverse. And I think that's the most powerful aspect of the metaverse is exactly that you can be in there and create the world that you want and the storylines that you want and you can leave the traces that you want. That's why the piece is called Traces. It's because I'm really grateful that people want to leave a trace of themselves in the piece if they chose to. But you can always go back and delete it if you don't want to.
[00:38:22.537] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think for me, if I had received an email like a day before or a week before, it still would have faced the same issue of not knowing the full context in which I'm making a decision. Because on social media and other platforms, I know what that is and I can make that decision because I have seen the output of that. And another way to frame it is that Helen Nissenbaum has a theory of privacy called contextual integrity theory of privacy, meaning that in some contexts, When you go to a doctor's office, you share information about medical information. If you go to a bank, you share information about your financial information. But there would be a violation of contextual integrity if you were sharing medical information to your banker, as an example. So knowing the full context helps to understand the conditions under which information is shared. And so applying a contextual integrity theory of privacy to this project, thinking about how seeing the output of other people who have previously shared their grief so you can see what they've done before, then you understand the full context. Because when I'm in the recording studio sharing my grief, I have no idea where this is going, and that just shut me down. Showing some examples of other people have done it, then now I have a chance to record, and then I have a choice at that moment, do I want to share this to other people, or is this just for me? And then with the group ritual and then another choice, would you like to share this to be a part of this collection that you're aggregating? Because it is very powerful to hear other people, but in the absence of knowing the full context on which people are sharing, then my experience at least was I was completely shut down. And so providing more and more of that context so that I think it's a great idea to have people go into it with something in mind that they want to grieve, but asking them to make private decisions about that ahead of time puts other complications not knowing the full context under which it's going to be shared. So that's kind of my take on it.
[00:40:07.720] Vali Fugulin: I mean, the important thing, again, is that there's a fine line between telling people what the story is and spoiling it for them and keeping the pleasure of discovery and surprise inside the piece. So again, it's It's a fine line. I know you went back and deleted your content, which we have a way of operation, very simple for you to do that. So all the content that you share is in a quarantine mode for at least 24 hours. So you can go back and change your privacy settings and you can always go back. however long you want. It's a law also in Canada. I have to give people the ability to delete any user-generated content in there. But I don't want people to be scared. I guess I'm sorry if I scared you with this piece. But most people go through it without having felt this way. But I feel if you did felt that your privacy could have been an issue, you can always go back and erase. But it's a balance between preparing people but also giving them enough of the surprises or discoveries inside the piece. So that you don't know all of it in advance. But yeah.
[00:41:38.444] Kent Bye: I think if you make those privacy decisions in the piece, you can still preserve that type of surprise. It's just more of that type of informed consent is more informed because I'm actually informed in the context. And I guess that's the differentiation is that before the experience even starts, I'm asked to make decisions about stuff that I don't fully understand. And that, for me, that gave me...
[00:41:57.712] Vali Fugulin: Right. You can go back. No, I know. I know. But I think the idea of I just want to be clear that, you know, to me, that's a small portion of the piece. So I don't want to just talk about this, but you are always able to go back and change your privacy settings. And I also do a curation, not a curation, but I listen to the content that has been shared and chosen to be shared by the users just in case something would be wrong in the content for all the reasons we know about. So there's many different layers. We try to take care of people and make sure that they feel comfortable with this. The idea is not to be invasive. The idea is just an experience to make you think about grief in a different way. It has humble. objectives of making you think about grief in a different way, learning about grief, which is a taboo subject in our society and using location-based VR to be together in a space and sharing also collaborating in a soft way but I guess the main message of the piece is that grief is best shared and that's what I would like people to take away from it it's just that message is sharing together is important and that's the message the rest doesn't really matter
[00:43:39.427] Kent Bye: Yeah, and my experience may be very unique in particular, but I'd love to hear some of the other reactions that you've had for people here at South by Southwest going through Trace as a group processor.
[00:43:50.461] Vali Fugulin: Well, it was very emotional for me to see people react to it because it's the first time we show it to the public, even though we've had tests before in Montreal. Because in this piece, you know, it's based on my own journey through grief. So I put my own story out there. So it's very personal, but I did not know how people would react to it. and I've had very beautiful emotional reactions from people saying thank you for bringing this subject out there just because it's a subject that we don't really talk about and you know we all go through losses and it's just very taboo in our society and why is it and i like to make playfully serious pieces of work so i guess in this piece i wanted people to approach it in a light way also because you basically you play with your grief And I like to come at it in a non-dramatic way. So it's a playful piece to think about things a bit differently. But people have been very moved by it. And I've had just wonderful testimonies of people afterwards saying how it changed their perceptions on the way they see grieving. and that it was very special to do it in a location-based group VR. And the interactions that you do with the other people in the experience are not very intense. It's not invasive. But the fact that you are together in a space, that's the main message. The main message is grief should not be experienced alone. So next time you grieve in the real world, maybe surround yourself with your community. And really, yes, lots of emotions when people come out and lots of beautiful thoughts on the way it made them think
[00:46:04.286] Kent Bye: I heard from at least one person who said he had a very emotionally cathartic experience of just really tapping into a wellspring of grief and really able to process it. Have you seen other people that have gone through the experience that really tap into emotional catharsis around their grief?
[00:46:20.310] Vali Fugulin: Again, that was not my intent. I don't want people to think this is therapy. This is not therapy. You don't come through this as a VR for mental health. It's in the same way that you would watch a film that makes you think in a different way about a situation. But yes, I guess some people have had very strong emotions. But you know what happens is that I think people have the strongest emotions when they hear other people's griefs. So the people that have chosen to share a little bit of their voice inside the piece, it's randomly selected. So when you're around the last scene, you can hear other people's shared one-minute voice excerpts. And that has been really emotional for people. The feeling that, okay, we all experience this. So I guess that's, for me, the most powerful moment. And from what I've heard for them as well, is, oh, okay, we all go through this. This is humbly the most important thing for me. About this, yeah.
[00:47:35.069] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's another reason why I would in some ways like to see some of those other stories before I go and record my own grief because it actually taps me deeper into my own feelings and emotions and sometimes there might be something that someone says that reminds me of something that I might be grieving and not even aware of grieving. So yeah, thinking about before I'm asked to go in and being primed through all these other embodied interactions and narration that's happening leading up to that point where I'm recording, listening to it, really centering myself into my heart and being prepared to then do a transmission of recording even if it's just for myself and then making a decision to share and then have maybe within the context of that small group a choice to share or not. I think the part of the paradox of this type of thing I thought initially that I was just going to speak and share live in real time and then when I wasn't then and then I was just by alone I was like okay well this is a way for just in case if there are people that didn't want to share in that context then they would have an opportunity
[00:48:38.593] Vali Fugulin: If you don't want to share, you just don't record and that's fine. Some people choose not to and that's all good also. But yeah, I guess, like I said, I had the support of SADC, which is very wonderful. We have a very modest budget to do LBVR and the many things, the many technological features that we would like to implement in a new phase of this work. There are many ideas to perfect it and perhaps the onboarding will be done also differently. Normally we prepare people ahead of time that they might be sharing some content but yeah, like just a website that we could create where you see part of the piece. but again yeah it's like preparing people to what they're going to go through in the narrative versus the surprise and the pleasure of discovering the piece so it's a difficult balance to achieve because yeah you don't want to spoil it hard not to spoil it and prepare people so i tried to say you know you will be sharing content if you choose to share that's fine if you don't want to share that's fine also but telling them exactly what's happening in the storyline yeah we try to find the balance but yeah we'll keep we'll keep tweaking
[00:50:08.444] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive storytelling in these new forms of Documentary 3.0 might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:50:19.727] Vali Fugulin: Well, my dream is that people can self-document in those virtual worlds, in the metaverse, because I find that right now they're being sold to us as spaces of commercial uses, so you can go shopping in the metaverse, you can go play mini golf, you can go do many different things. But I find that spaces where you can share true human stories are very rare. And humbly, again, what I wanted to try with this piece was a space where you can share some of your own stories and that they stay in the virtual world. My dream would be to have more of those virtual spaces where you can enter and create your own stories, share your own stories and listen to other people's stories. Like I said, we do it every day on social media and some people share a lot of their lives in there. But I find that in the virtual spaces, we've been a bit excluded from it. And so having your real voice, your own voice or normal people's own voices would be very rich and I would like to see more of that in the future.
[00:51:43.080] Kent Bye: Yeah. And likewise, I'd love to see a continued evolution of your project and lots of other people kind of exploring this concept of grief and whether it's a grief ritual or a grief artistic experience. Either way, more people that are experiencing and thinking about their own grief, the better. So, yeah, I just wanted to thank you again here for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. So thank you so much.
[00:52:02.589] Vali Fugulin: Thank you so much.
[00:52:04.636] Kent Bye: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
