I spoke with Philippe Bedard about States of Immersion Across Media: Bodies, Techniques, Practices at Tribeca Immersive 2023. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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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 I'm continuing my general coverage of things in and around Tribeca Immersive. I'm going to go back a couple of years from 2023, where I had a chance to do an interview with Philip Bedard, who... He's based out of Montreal and is an academic. He went through his post-doctorate research at McGill University, and he was studying different aspects of immersive storytelling. Some of his work has been looking at the installations around immersive storytelling, but he's also been doing a number of different write-ups, reviews, critiques of different projects that were coming in and around Montreal. For a while, he was the curator of Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, so it's a new cinema festival based there in Montreal. And he also was a co-editor of a book called States of Immersion Across Media, Bodies, Techniques, Practices. Philip actually interviewed me for a chapter that's at the end of the book talking about the ultimate potential of immersive media, where I was sharing some of my thoughts and reflections on how I approach my oral history project and ways that I think around XR through the lens of these different qualities of presence and And yeah, just trying to document some of these different immersive stories for folks who may not have a chance to be able to see them. I think one of the challenges within the context of the broader field of immersive storytelling is that so many of these different projects that are shown at the immersive film festival circuit don't always get wider or broader distribution. And so it creates a challenge for doing academic work on something that you can't always see. So in the absence of having everybody be able to see the same experience, then it's difficult to theorize around it and develop some more of these thinking around the process of immersive storytelling. So that's certainly something that has been a challenge for the academic community to go super in-depth into this field. There is, however, lots of different research that's happening. This book actually covers immersion across all forms of technology, not just XR specifically. And so it's just like looking at the states of immersion across media. I actually got sent a copy. So I have a hard copy. I haven't had a chance to dig into it too much. Although I did look at Philip's article that he wrote because we did have a little bit of a conflict where he's kind of relying upon this double birth idea of a medium where it first gets introduced as a technology. And then at some point it becomes like much more fully formed as a medium. I think as I look at the development of XR as a technology and as a medium, I It's gone through these different stages. I lean upon Simon Wardley where he talks around going from academic idea to custom bespoke enterprise applications to consumer product into like the mass distribution of the medium. We certainly haven't crossed the chasm into like wide distribution of mass adoption of these immersive technologies. And so in the absence of that, then we're still in this consumer phase where it's out there, but it hasn't been fully developed. People are exploring both in terms of creatively, but also in terms of like as audience and as we're consuming this type of immersive media. So I wanted to just read specifically some of the different passages just to get a little bit more flavor of the dual birth, just because in the moment I was leaning more of what Simon Worley, my own kind of conceptualization on it. But I think it's worth kind of like seeing the source material of what he actually wrote up in his article. So this is from an article titled The Many Births of Virtual Reality. It's from the book States of Immersion Across Media, Bodies, Techniques, Practices. It came out finally this year in 2025, even though we talked around it in 2023. And then I think he interviewed me like in 2022. So the timelines for academic projects can be quite long. So this is from the article by Philip, The Many Births of Virtual Reality. Page 193, he says, in their book, The End of Cinema from 2015, Giroux and Marion present the idea that cinema was not invented all at once in 1895, but also some years later in the 1910s. The authors explain the reassessment of the established narrative of the invention-birth of cinema by alluding to the shift in paradigm that occurred in the 1910s when the, quote, cinema of attractions, end quote, prevalent in the early period of the cinema gave way to a media different from those that had previously existed. When it was first invented as a technology for recording and reproducing moving images, cinema was not yet cinema per se, but rather a proteome set of uses of a particular technology. This is what the authors call the, quote, kinematograph, in reference to the technological apparatus born at the turn of the century. In the early years of invention then, the kinematograph was not a medium in itself, but rather a technology that grafted its capabilities, recording and reproducing moving images, onto other pre-existing cultural series. It is not until the 1910s, then, that a clear and unique identity is discerned for cinema. And what the authors describe as a paradigm shift, quote, "...of such extent that we would be justified in seeing the two entities as completely separate," end quote. As they make clear, and then there's an extended quote that says, "...changes of paradigm do not necessarily occur at the same time as the invention of new techniques and the sudden availability of a new technology." does not necessarily revolutionize the surrounding culture or the behavior and activities of the various cultural agents who latch onto it. Nor does it make it possible to accede immediately to a new cultural, artistic, or media order. Necent media take their first steps by reproducing in a rather servile manner the other media from which they are to greater or lesser degrees derived. This was the case with cinema. so the argument is that vr technology and xr is still technology until it finds its own unique identity as a medium which is interesting from media theory and to look at what's happened before with film and to think around how it's still developing in terms of it's not like widely distributed i do think that when i go to these festivals and see these projects it feels like a developed medium in the sense of like artists are making projects that are trying to communicate a feeling a thought a story and the medium is able to do that so even though it's not widely distributed that becomes more of a question of over time and the infrastructure and the culture that develops around it but from my perspective it's like already there in terms of you know as a medium But I still agree that it's not like widely distributed and there's still stuff to get fully figured out. Although people are still figuring out different innovations in the language of cinema. So that's something that's going to be fundamentally incomplete and continually evolving. And so at what point do you draw the line and say that this is like officially a medium now? So I see it as an unfolding process and that it's it's already got so many of the key components that are there. And, you know, I have my own way of seeing the different lineages of different influences from different design disciplines, from like architecture and dance and theater, different sensory experiences and contemplative practices to video game and game design and then like human computer interaction and web design and like social media and cultivating social experiences together. And then also like the more cinematic tradition in terms of like filmmaking and music and music videos. And basically like VR as a medium is able to like recreate all different domains of human experience. And so across all those different domains, then you are replicating actually having like a spatial presence. I think like presence is probably like the clearest way that I can start to articulate the unique affordances of VR. And then. Fleshing out the different contextual domains that then show all the different ways that the technology is being used. So the talk that I gave back at South by Southwest in 2023, the ultimate potential of VR promises and perils. And then the talk that I gave at StoryCon 2022, looking at the elemental theory of presence goes to the different areas. qualities of presence for me is how I start to think about this and orient it. And, you know, I'm continuing my work to cover these different stories, just trying to be the beat reporter of going and bearing witness to these different projects and continuing to put out there these oral history interviews with the artists and the creators just to get more context as to what's happening in the industry. And Just this morning, the Venice Immersive lineup was announced. And so I'm like gearing up to go to Venice and cover this year's selection, which again has like nearly 30 hours worth of content and experiences that I'm really excited to dig into here at the end of August and beginning of September. And I'll be finishing up my expanded Tribeca Immersive coverage here and then digging into Augmented World Expo and then digging into my coverage of what was happening at Raindance Immersive, which is looking at the social VR context of seeing how the art and culture is continuing to develop there on that platform. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Philip happened on Sunday, June 11th, 2023 at the Tribeca Immersive in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:08:55.874] Philippe Bedard: My name is Philippe Bédard and I wear many hats, so I think we'll go through many of them today. I do research on VR as a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University. I also write and do research for a couple outlets, XRMust, XN-Québec and the NFB. Well, we might get into that later. And also more recently, I've started programming for Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, more specifically their FNC Explore section, which is the immersive new media interactive section.
[00:09:30.883] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:09:36.089] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so I tried thinking about that and condensing it into something manageable. It's quite a circuitous story, so I hope you'll allow me this indulgence of going through the story. So I think it starts in my PhD. So I've been doing research on cinema and technology for the past 10, 15 years or so, and mostly focused on filmmaking techniques and technology, motion capture, virtual production, and the like. And in the context of the PhD, I've also dabbled in phenomenology, which will come back later into my interests in VR. And in that PhD that I did at Université de Montréal, one of the things they asked us to do was have a second area of research, so not be a one-trick pony, over-specialized, which happens with a lot of PhDs. And I happened to be interested in VR at the time. That's around 2015 or so. I had seen VR in the past at fairs, you know, the usual roller coaster experiences. But since 2015, I'd been going to Festival du Nouveau Cinema just as a attendee and critic and noticed the VR creations they had there mostly in 2015. That was Machine to be Another and The Dog House. So two really extremely interesting experiences that both had the feature of putting you in someone else's skin which was a trend that was really prevalent at the time especially 360 or 180 degree video putting you in someone else's skin we can talk about that a bit more if you're interested but that's what I focused on in this paper that I did as a second area of research That paper was focusing on this inherent subjectivity of VR, the fact that it's a device meant for a single user, that every experience that you go through is your own. And then also the feature that around 2015 or so, I was noticing many experiences were also very subjective in putting you in someone else's subjective experience. So with this confluence of subjectivities, that of the experience itself and the stories that were being told. That paper was published in French in 2019 in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and an English version, updated version, is coming out in 2024 in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Yeah, academic timelines can be quite long. I've only just learned that it was accepted and it'll be out in a year and a half. Yeah, so as I mentioned, I was going to Festival du Nouveau Cinéma as an attendee and critic, and eventually I wrote a review of the festival for Immerse in 2019, and that got me a job at XN Québec. They were looking for someone doing research on VR. Extend Quebec, just for a bit of context, is the association of producers of digital experiences in Quebec, so everything that's not cinema or television. It includes immersive experiences, in-situ installations in public spaces, podcasts and the like, but I've focused on VR. So we have a lot of really great VR producers in Quebec. Félix and Paul, Département, also known as DPT, And a lot of great players, the Phi Center is one of them as well. And I can't name them all, of course. We have 160 plus members, not all VR. And yeah, just doing research on VR with them, like one thing led to another. And I contributed as a coordinator of part of a research project, which led to the publication in 2022 of the Crafting a Market for Independent XR Study, which Senator Rodriguez wrote. She wrote the study, I wrote the executive summary and part of the accompanying text. That experience was just great. Being able to work with people in the industry, doing the interviews with Monique Simard, who you spoke to a couple of years ago. She's terrific. And being able to interview 20 or so people from around the world in this field was a great experience to get experience in that field. And I guess the last pin in the cushion of like, who am I and what I'm doing in this field is since around 2018, I think I've been trying to get into the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma as a programmer or, you know, get my foot in the door and see how it works, how it works behind the scenes. I've been going as an attendee, but how do you choose these experiences? How do you program? And in 2022, 2023, I was finally able to get that experience. So 2023 is my first year now as a programmer for this festival.
[00:14:32.479] Kent Bye: So I just did an interview with Kata Yoon. Was that the same festival that she was curating?
[00:14:36.663] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, exactly. That was the festival she was curating probably since 2014 until 2022. She stepped away and I was very lucky to be able to get her position.
[00:14:48.530] Kent Bye: Great. So one other thing that you had mentioned, I don't know if you went into too much detail, but you're also working in some capacity with the National Film Board of Canada. Maybe you could talk about what you're doing with them.
[00:14:59.076] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so I think as part of my work doing research and writing for XRMUS, XN-Québec and so on, I've been doing this kind of what I've been calling public-facing scholarship or research, which is very different than what we've been talking about, the academia with the timelines that are so very long. In this public-facing scholarship, I can publish something the day of, which is great. And I think as part of that, I've been approaching a couple of players in Quebec. We have a really robust research field adjacent to culture, like research about culture. And the NFB eventually approached me as part of this project that they've been trying to do to make knowledge about their projects known so that the end product of their projects is not just the experience itself, the film, the animation, the VR experience, but also the knowledge about how it was created, and the knowledge you gain from creating these kinds of projects. So our first one will be coming out very shortly, August or September. I'm not sure if I'm at liberty of saying what it's on, but yeah, I'm very excited to be working very closely with the NFB on that as a freelancer. And yeah, just being able to follow projects behind the scenes and publish something that will be useful to creators, to scholars, to everyone who's interested about these kinds of experiences to see how they're made and what kinds of knowledge is other than just the one from doing the experience itself.
[00:16:37.162] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess one other thing that I'll throw in there that some of our first interactions that we had, or at least the ones that come to mind, is that you were working on a book project that you're helping to edit, looking at immersive storytelling, and did an interview with me exploring some of my explorations on the topic. So yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to what that project is and where that's at.
[00:16:56.946] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, I failed to mention that particular project because there's just so many to mention. But yeah, that one is a book that's called States of Immersion Bodies Media Technology that's coming out of a conference we organized in 2020. called Immersivity and Technological Innovations, which was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek. Technological innovations would lead you to think we're looking at the very bleeding edge in tech, but technological innovations can include the spoken language or written language, or we were looking at technology writ large and how they promote immersion. So we were looking at theater, the novel, cinema and different gimmicks in cinema as well. That was in October 2020 and the process has been going on ever since of coming out with a book with some of the presenters who turned their talks into chapters and some other contributions. So that's going to be coming out hopefully in 2024 at Amsterdam University Press. We've just sent it out to the presses for their internal evaluation. 700 pages at the moment. That's for the reader's ease of reading. It's double space and everything, but it's really magnificent. I've just read it cover to cover from our introduction, which I should mention the book is co-edited by myself, Carol Therrien, and Alana Thain. I'm not doing this by myself. We have 20 chapters, six or seven interviews. And yeah, we conclude with yours, which I think was because of your ultimate potential was a good question to finish the book with.
[00:18:37.947] Kent Bye: Very cool. I'm definitely looking forward to checking out that book and being able to dig more into it, because I feel like in some ways coming across you and your work, there's some of a parallel of the ways that I'm looking at immersive storytelling, as well as a lot of other things, but a particular focus on immersive storytelling. And that's something that's also captured your imagination with your work. And so I'm just curious to get a bit more context for what do you think it was about what's happening with VR and immersive storytelling that has led you down this path to have so many of these different paths that you're investigating this as a question that's driving your research and your career.
[00:19:12.045] Philippe Bedard: So I think part of it, if I want to be frank, is this novelty and academia is a tough field to work in and you kind of need to make yourself needed in a sense. So working on the bleeding edge of technology was a way of writing research which will be useful in the future. So kind of guaranteeing myself a job in the future. academia being what it is, there's not that many jobs. So that kind of didn't, I'm not going to say backfired because it's been extremely useful, but that was part of the impetus for looking at the GoPro originally when I was in the undergrad and masters and eventually VR, virtual production, all these new technologies. But With that being said, there's something about VR which keeps me interested to this day and I think it's part of my interest in phenomenology and just the nature of experience and how we experience the world. My dissertation was about a particular filmmaking technique which I argued would allow us to see the world in a way we can't in our normal lives, not this egocentric mobile body moving in a perceived as static world. So film allows us to do that partly, but VR allows us to do so much more. And yeah, I've been just so fascinated with what we can do with VR to push ourselves beyond our own perspectives. I've been really inspired by the work that Andrea has been doing. I followed a workshop with her last year, I believe, in around June or August. I can't recall. which led to the publication of an article called Adventures Beyond Anthropocentrism, trying to look at VR experiences that don't limit us to a human body or to space as we normally perceive it. But yeah, just I guess this phenomenological interest in modifying how we can perceive the world is what is keeping me interested to this day.
[00:21:09.537] Kent Bye: Is that Andrea Ayan Kachikaro?
[00:21:11.919] Philippe Bedard: Yes, exactly. I didn't dare try to pronounce her last name to not butcher it, but I think you did a good job there.
[00:21:19.710] Kent Bye: Yeah, I first met Andrea at the VR Now in 2018, and we just happened to run into each other. I had given a talk about what was the early phases of my elemental theory of presence and experiential design. And then we just happened to have a connection and we did an interview there on the spot where she did a deep dive into phenomenology, because that's been a huge inspiration for her of looking at these philosophical approaches to phenomenology. And I don't know if you had a chance to hear our last conversation from South by Southwest in episode 1200, where she details her transformation from the ways that VR has changed her idea about this underlying metaphysics. And we kind of co-coined the process relational architecture and having this more process relational philosophy. So yeah, I don't know if that's something that has come up in your own intersections of looking at these process relational approaches of looking at the nature of reality, but also philosophically, for me, it's been a big inspiration. I know that Andrea has come across orthodox Hinduism. She said that she was starting to look in from her own embodied experiences. But for me, there seems to be this transformative potential about having the direct experience of VR that is almost catalyzing this deep inquiry about the nature of reality, but also the nature of our own experiences. And I feel like it's a catalyst for a potential philosophical paradigm shift. But yeah, from your own journeys into this, I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts on that and reflecting on some of the either what Andrea has been talking about or some of the conversations that we've been having.
[00:22:46.252] Philippe Bedard: I kind of feel like I want to be asking you questions to help me navigate through these things. So I guess I'll kind of answer in a way that will probably not answer your questions, but bringing it back to my area of research in the past few years, which would probably be helped by this kind of process relational approach, which has been empathy on this problematic topic in VR. And precisely my goal in my first postdoctoral project at Carleton University was to dismantle this idea of empathy machine in vr work building off of the work that i've been doing with this putting yourself in someone else's skin trying to look at how it's a toxic empathy machine like this notion itself is toxic building off of the work of robert yang lisa nakamura wendy chun and I forget the other person's name I wanted to mention. Yeah, and trying to dismantle this idea of the empathy machine and trying to argue against it completely. But in talking to my supervisor, we realized that there is something that VR does that does allow you to change in some way, does allow you to share in someone's experience. My attempt ended up being trying to find a third way, a reconciling third, I guess we could call it, to quote Jung. So it's not... That's Carl Jung.
[00:24:08.276] Kent Bye: So me quoting Carl Jung with the reconciling third, yeah. And sort of the Hegelian dialectic is also sort of a reconciliation of the synthesis, antithesis, and it's the synthesis from Hegel. So yeah.
[00:24:19.925] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so this isn't quite what it truly is, but instead of being totally for or against the notion of Empathy Machine, I was trying to find a third option somewhere in the middle of, you know, maybe we don't have to become a character, maybe we can use VR to simply be with them. So I looked at pieces like the Book of Distance or The Choice or This is Not a Ceremony, which all allow you to be with characters instead of becoming them and making them obsolete in a way, taking up all their space by becoming them. There's an interesting parallel with Colored, which you can happen to or choose to sit in the character's position because it's kind of a hologram. But you get the feeling, or at least I got the feeling, that you shouldn't. It would feel extremely mistaken to take up her position. And I feel that experience was really great at showing you that you are taking up her space. If you step in her shoes, you're kind of displacing her. Whereas a lot of 360 live action video VR puts you in the character's body, you look down, you see arms, perhaps of a different gender, color, ability than your own. But there's something problematic about that. Or there's something potentially problematic. There's people who do it very well, Pierre Sandrovitch in iPhilip, I think, did it well. Felix and Paul in Miyubi did it well. But, you know, it's a robot. It's a android bust. It's not a human character. So you lose the problematic aspect of embodying someone of a different race, age, gender, ability, etc. Yeah, so getting back to your question, I do think process relational philosophy or process relational architecture I think would be quite interesting to approach this and trying to see how can VR allow us to see things either from someone else's perspective or through the lens of how someone is telling us their story. I think that's usually more productive. It's not through their eyes, but in their worldview, perhaps, like not literally embodying them, but being with them and letting them tell their story. In the end, yeah, it's all about listening is usually the conclusion I come to. If you're not open to receiving what the character has to tell you, then you're not really ready to empathize with them or whatever word we would want to use. Yeah.
[00:26:58.208] Kent Bye: Also a conversation with Eric Ramirez, who's written a book and approaching empathy from much more philosophical perspective. And I know that one of the things that he's advocating for is rather than saying empathy is to focus on sympathy. So ways that we can maybe have an experience that we can relate to from our own experience. So we're sympathizing, but not necessarily trying to fully empathize. So yeah, there is something about the impossibility of trying to have all of the embodied experiences and trauma that would shape someone's worldview with all the cultural influences, that it's really quite impossible to recreate all of that within the context of a virtual experience, because you're talking about so many different contextual relational dynamics. So some of the insight of process relational philosophy would start to elaborate these contextual dimensions that are difficult to fully recreate. You can give someone an impression, and I've certainly had the experience of, say, like in the book A Distance, for an example, where I feel like by being embodied with the other characters, that there is something of taking the embodied interactions that does get me a little bit more connected to their context, but it's also tapping into my own embodied memories of that context of home and having that taken away and then being in prison. not able to fully recreate it, but I think it's able to do more than if I was just watching a 2D version where I'm just abstracting out into the experience. So I feel like having a sense of embodiment does have a difference that goes beyond what other media can do. And so I think if we look at embodiment and embodied cognition and these other things that I think a process relational approach helps to elaborate the importance of how our cognition is relational to not only our body, but also the contextual dimensions of distributed cognition of the world around us of how there's this continuity between how the world impacts our thinking as well as our body. So I don't know if I've seen any process relational critiques or approaches that are deliberately approaching empathy, but just from what I know, I think there's some resonances that are also similarly deconstructing the limitations of what empathy and VR can and cannot do.
[00:29:00.680] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, you made me think of something when talking about embodiment and the book of distance, because the point that I usually make with that particular experience and others that I could probably think of is that I think there's a real power in that experience about removing agency, let's call it like that, where you are asked to act, you're asked to nail in stakes, take pictures, pick strawberries. But at a certain point, you are not able to interact anymore. And the experience really shows you that, yes, you can put clothes into his suitcase, but you can't put his favorite belongings. And you can't actually do anything to stop the RCMP from taking him into incarceration camps, to not call them internment camps, let's use the right terminology here. So there's something so powerful about showing, using an interactive medium to highlight the impossibility of acting, of being able to act. And Janet Murray in 2016, I think for Immerse, in a paper called, not a film, not an empathy machine, I believe is what it was called, was arguing like, was giving an example in which she was saying it's in the impossibility to act that perhaps the user might be compelled to act in their real lives. You know, you feel that you would like to help the character in the story. You're not afforded that capability of helping the character in the story, which would just give you the impression of I did my job. I'm a good person. You know, I felt I helped this person in the story, but If you're unable to help in the story, it might foster something in you, a desire to help. So I feel like more experiences should use this power of interactivity to say something also about the impossibility to act. There's an experience here that I won't mention that has interactions, but not acting doesn't do anything and it doesn't necessarily always need to have an effect but in that particular context i felt like i should have been maybe not um something should have happened from my refusal to act but i was coerced into acting otherwise the The experience couldn't go on. So yeah, there's some more thinking I think we need to do about what you make your user do. And I could go on about that particular fact.
[00:31:28.743] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I guess as you're coming here and seeing the selection here at Tribeca Immersive, you have a number of different experiences that, you know, you're having that maybe catalyzing some of these different questions like you just brought up here, but also like you're curating potentially for selecting for this festival that you're helping to curate. But yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to know exactly what you're talking about, what experience, but I guess as you are going away from Tribeca Immersive, what are the different things that you are going to be exploring or thinking about or writing about or trying to do reviews of stuff? Or what's your plan after you leave here from Tribeca?
[00:32:04.542] Philippe Bedard: Well, I'm supposed to write a review for XR Must, so I should probably collect my thoughts and think of something to do for them. I probably have to do something also for my postdoc, which is currently on the design of VR exhibits, specifically those that include pieces that put you in someone else's perspective. I'm curious as to what the exhibit does to help you get into a character's position. So probably Maya and Colored will be really interesting examples for that, as well as many other experiences, I'm sure. But what I'm bringing back as programmer is I feel invigorated to focus on experiences that not only tell an interesting story, but also give the user an interesting experience. Because there's a lot of very interesting stories that are told. And I'm not just talking about Tribeca here, but also a lot of stuff I've seen in the past few weeks curating. But sometimes I feel like the medium is left behind. And I feel like we're at a crucial point right now where I hesitate to even call it a medium. I feel like we're building towards an eventual medium, but we're in a crucial phase right now where we're figuring out what it is. So I'd really like to offer experiences that capitalize on what we're building right now. And this can include 360 video or the like. Passivity can be very productive. I don't want to look towards always the bleeding edge or always new technology. Something very simple can be very effective. For instance, I'm thinking of rock, paper, scissors. So simple, but so powerful. I think it really nails what it tries to do very well. So yeah, I think that's what I'm going to be focusing on. Powerful stories, of course, but powerful affordances or powerful experiences, hopefully as well.
[00:33:57.934] Kent Bye: Yeah. Interesting to hear you say that you don't think that the VR could be called a medium yet, because I feel like that it's crossed that threshold, that there's enough novel experiences that I've seen across the last nine years and done over 2000 interviews and seen lots of different experiences that I feel like transcend what's possible in other media. So I think it's already there, but I'm curious to hear from your perspective, what do you think needs to happen still for it to be considered a medium?
[00:34:23.717] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so when you read the book, the 700-page book, I contributed a chapter in it on the many births of VR, the fact that it was born as a technology in the 1980s or however far back we want to go. Some go to the 1950s or so on. So born first as a technology, but it's the same with cinema, so maybe a bit of context. In the case of early cinema, and this is a comparison we've made very often, or we've heard very often that we're... William Riccio, for example, has made that comparison very often, that we're right now in a phase that's very similar to early cinema, where we're experimenting a lot with this new gadget, this new tool for reinvigorating previous media, for creating new experiences. So that happened with cinema in the 1895 or so, all the way up until 1910, the 1910s more broadly, where at a certain point, a particular identity of what cinema was emerged. So I'm taking this from André Gaudron and Philippe Marion, the two theorists who theorized this multiple birth of media approach, thinking of its first born as a technology, the cinematograph in 1895, and eventually it's reborn as a medium with its own identity with, I guess, a director's guild, for example, a screenwriter's guild, all working for this more homogeneous medium that we all recognize for having these or those qualities. And I feel like we're still in the kind of experimental phase with VR right now. It's been invented once, it's been reinvented now in the 2010s. And we're still in a phase of experimentation, of figuring out what this medium of VR is. And sometimes I'm a bit more skeptical about if we'll ever reach this stage of everyone agreeing on it's this medium with particular features. Because right now there's 360 video, there's 6DOF animation, there's social fitness, entertainment, games, films. So from this perspective of the double birth of media, we still haven't reached the institutionalization phase where there is something like the Society for VR that recognizes a more, I don't want to say single, but more compact, let's say, definition of what constitutes VR or not. And in a sense, it's not necessarily what we want. Many people are against terms like XR, for example, because it's limiting. It excludes certain things that are immersive and or interactive, but don't use a headset, for example. So yeah, I don't know. We're in a strange phase where we're still exploring and I'm looking forward to eventually reaching a stage where we can call this, where I can call this a medium. But yeah, that's not to deny all the work that's being done. Like we're seeing tremendous work every year. It's not because it's, I wouldn't call it a medium that we're not seeing really interesting media experiences.
[00:37:33.243] Kent Bye: Yeah, I would disagree with that dual birth theory just because it is very object oriented as a singular moment that is sort of rooted in a substance metaphysics way of having like a static moment. But, you know, I'm a big fan of someone like Simon Wardley, who has this evolutionary approach, which is much more process relational, where he breaks it up into four evolutionary phases where there's a academic idea that's like the sort of Damocles in 1968. Then there's the phase of the enterprise, the custom bespoke enterprise applications phase, which is in the mid 80s, up in the early 90s with DPL, Silicon Graphics, where virtual reality is being commercialized in a sense that is for both academic institutions and militaries. But then we're moving, the next phase is the consumer phase. So coming up to the point where people can buy virtual reality headsets and have a larger distribution ecosystem. So we have distribution platforms from MetaQuest with what used to be Oculus Home, now the Quest Store. We have Steam. We have Viveport. We have itch.io. We have WebXR. We have all these distribution platforms that are facilitating the consumer phase. And the last phase is the mass ubiquity. So that's the phase where it's just ubiquitous and everywhere. So there's an evolutionary approach. And I think from a more process-relational approach, this idea of muriology. So it's nested context. So there's context within context within context. And so all of reality is in the context of the Big Bang. And then we're on the Earth, which is in its own context. But then in the context of VR, there's stuff that is already at the phase of gaming, is already a widely accepted medium. And it's sort of like this idea that Hegel had that we would reach some sort of idealized end to history, and I just don't believe that. I think it is an ever-evolving process that's continuous and evolving, and we're already at so many of those different phases of moving from that academic idea from the enterprise bespoke into the consumer phase. However, there is, even within context of the consumer phase, each of these different disciplines and domains are at different phases of that evolutionary growth, so some stuff is only in the enterprise phase. But eventually, some of those techniques of, say, medical XR will be more commercially available for people to just buy on their Quest and be able to have that. I mean, arguably, some applications are already doing that with trip.vr or Helium or other ways for consumers to be able to have medical-grade applications. So I think, for me, I see it as an ever-folding process in that By my definition, we're already there. It's already at that consumer phase. We're not at the mass ubiquitous phase, but it's just a matter of time and a matter of scale for more people to reach that. So maybe that's where with the cinema of attractions phase of cinema of once it was commercialized to the point where it was found to have an economic model, maybe that was moving from that custom bespoke handcrafted phase into the commercial phase that was more of a mass distribution medium. So anyway, that's a little bit of my take on that.
[00:40:22.236] Philippe Bedard: I think we agree essentially on the same differences of terms, semantics maybe, but I think we ultimately agree because it might seem like I was pointing to a specific date to go back to the example of early cinema. But I think we were only able to talk about this kind of moment as a coalescing of different forces into a uniform thing we could call cinema that could only have been done years afterwards. We need this kind of historical hindsight. So I think that's usually the perspective I try to adopt, that we're too close, we're too in the moment right now to know. And I will be able to know in 10 years looking back of, okay, yeah, that was the moment, 2023 at Tribeca, when things coalesced and really this was the birth. But again, I agree that it's too pointed. It's like a singular moment. I don't think we'll be able to pinpoint a singular moment, but in hindsight, we'll be able to realize that we've crossed a threshold.
[00:41:24.462] Kent Bye: Well, you mentioned that you're looking at, as part of your postdoc, installations in the context of immersive stories. And I know that going to a number of different immersive festivals since 2016 was the first time that I went to Sundance. And even then, there were some very early stages of having an exhibition space to create a bit of a magic circle for people to go into. And then they go into the experience and when they come out, then there's an offboarding process. So the going in and going out is mediated through setting a deeper context by this installation. So love to hear some of your thoughts of what you're specifically looking at with how some of these immersive stories are exhibited and the role of that installation as a part of your postdoctoral research.
[00:42:04.588] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so that idea came out of Cartier Yarena, which a lot of people were talking about it as a VR experience, but it's so much more than a VR experience. It's the lobby, then the first room, then the second room where the VR happens, and then the third and final room. So it's about so much more, the onboarding, the offboarding. I like this idea of the magic circle. And the way also Anna Brzezinska described it last year, I think for Trebek, as this embassy into the virtual world where you're already stepping into it before you've put on the headset. So that's what I've been trying to focus on in this current postdoctoral project. It's a two-year project, which will lead to a couple of publications, talks, and so on. Trying to focus on how do you bring users into the virtual world, especially in contexts where you're trying to have them live moving experiences, potentially traumatic experiences, and how you're equipping them with the tools they need. So that's usually how I've been describing it, not VR as an empathy machine, but VR as a tool towards empathy that users need to know how to use, have to be willing to use, and actually use them to further develop their empathy. So how does an exhibit give these tools or train the person to use these tools in the experience? Because if you go out of Carnier Arena and don't look at the portraits and read the stories, aka listen to what these people have to say, I feel like you've kind of failed that experience. You weren't moved to a point to listen to what these people had to say. went through your experience, you were perhaps shocked or amazed, but did you spend time to then listen to what these people have to say and then to speak nothing about afterwards? Did you do something to better the world, make the world better for migrants trying to come into the United States in the specific case of Carnia Arena? So yeah, that's been my approach in the past few months, looking at the design of exhibits that include VR experiences that try to put you in someone else's skin or that try to move you. And probably, I don't want to burn myself by making promises that I won't fulfill, but the paper that I'm trying to work on compares On the Morning You Wake to The End of the World as it was shown at the Museum of the Moving Image. in January, I believe, earlier this year, and how it was presented in Montreal as part of Oasis Immersion's Transformé exhibit, Transformed. So it was a modified version of On the Morning You Wake as part of seven other experiences, all with the goal of empathy and conveying courage and a more positive outlook. So I'm going to compare how each exhibit equipped its users to make the most out of what the experience had to offer.
[00:45:01.530] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually had a chance to record an interview with Michaela Tarnaski-Holland, who was the impact producer for On the Morning You Wake to the End of the World. And at New Images, she actually presented a pretty in-depth case study of looking at all the different varieties of contexts in which they showed On the Morning You Wake to the End of the World. I have an unpublished interview that I recorded with her in Paris, France that I've just been traveling a lot and haven't had a chance to publish it yet, but hope to get that out. She actually has a piece here called Mahal Reimagined Volume Two. But yeah, I'm curious if you had a chance to come across her write up and her white paper and how that might feed into your research.
[00:45:36.721] Philippe Bedard: Yes, I came across the white paper and I've recommended it to people at Oasis as tools for how to equip people, because the white paper is great for many things, for just the basic tech specs of what you need to bring along. It has so much resources for people trying to do that work. But I also was able to interview Michaela earlier this year, and she gave me much more than I was expecting about not only on the morning you wake, but past experiences as well. just these amazing ways in which for either very low budget or very high budget, her and her team have been able to create these experiences that really give people the tools to go through the experience as best as possible. And even if that includes not going through the experience, in some cases, it's probably better if someone, you know, giving them the tool to know that a particular VR experience is not for them. That's amazing, like giving people out
[00:46:36.550] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's one of the dynamics of these festivals is that people have created a immersive story and then they get into a festival and then they have to produce a whole installation around it for a lot of these different festivals. And oftentimes there's not any financial resources and there has to be a whole other production to be able to either have other folks come in and support that. But as important as it is, it's also something that doesn't have a lot of resources for folks to do. So they end up having to have a lot of obligations onto the creators to be able to jump through. Well, it's, it's something that I think is very important, but it does feel like after all that, there's yet one more thing they have to worry about with all the different costs to be able to produce that. So anyway, I know that as you're going to be curating and producing your own festival, I don't know how you start to recognize on the one hand, the importance of it, but also the challenge of both the resources and time to be able to produce something that's going to have a real meaningful impact to set that magic circle as they go into an immersive experience.
[00:47:30.871] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, that's a big issue at the moment where I'm wondering if I'll be able to put my money where my mouth is and put together a good exhibit. But it's also questioning what good means. So even though as part of my research, I do focus on exhibits that give users the tool to go through and make the most out of an experience. I'm trying to figure out what if I don't have the resources to put together an exhibit as interesting and show-stopping as what we see here at Tribeca. Is giving users a seamless and enjoyable experience enough? I hope so, because I'm trying to focus this year on experiences of quality so that users come out of it satisfied with what they've seen, even if maybe the scenography is not as elaborate. I'd much rather, I think at the moment, put that money towards docents that help people go through the experience in good material and good locations. So we're in talks with the FI Centre to host the exhibit as it was there last year as well. And they've done a bunch of VR installations for festivals. Installations in the sense of just setting up the means for festivals to be able to show VR. So yeah, I'm investing more in the quality of the experiences at the moment than on the show-stopping nature of the exhibit itself. Yeah. So kind of going against what I do in my research, but at a certain point there's the reality, uh, the world of ideas and the world of facts is a bit different.
[00:49:03.950] Kent Bye: Yeah, definitely. Uh, I figured that might be the case. Cause it is, it is something that does take a lot of resources in it. You tend to see it at a lot of like the top tier festivals that are setting the agenda for what the programming for the different festivals are. But I did want to follow up with you in terms of like criticism and some of the writing you've been doing about the immersive pieces. I find for myself, I'm doing a lot of oral history interviews. I sort of embed my own impressions in the context, but I oftentimes prefer to have a conversation with the creator before my opinions are fully formed because sometimes I've learned so much about what it even took to create the project that I guess there's a certain value for criticism where you just take the emotional side reaction that you have from a piece but if it's an interactive piece and there's like a branching narrative and you know i don't know the complexity of how that was produced by just going through it one time and i learned that from a conversation then that changes the way that i think about the piece so i don't know i'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this process of doing criticism in emerging media and the writing that you've done to be able to push that forward and the historical importance of the relationship between criticism and film and how film has evolved and what role criticism might have when it comes to the development of the medium of immersive storytelling.
[00:50:17.341] Philippe Bedard: Right. So I would use the term criticism lightly because what I've been doing is mostly reporting. I think I know I said criticism myself a bit before, but it's mostly been documenting. In French, we have the term compte rendu. So report, I think, is the good translation for that of simply explaining what has been going on and communicating it to audiences. Because I kind of see my role as a scholar of a very... in progress nascent medium of being at the very least documenting what's happening at the moment. In the past I've read stuff that was very future looking ahead at what would be possible one day. And I didn't see the value in terms of academia of making these kinds of shallow promises of one day we'll be able to do this or that with technology. There's plenty of places where that can be done. So I kind of have given myself this role of documenting what's been going on. Like, for instance, I mentioned the 2019 paper on the subjective nature of VR, that got proven wrong so quickly because the industry moved on so fast, but I knew it was going to be moving on so fast. So the paper is very about also my own subjectivity, going through these experiences and assuming that what I am describing perhaps only speaks about my own experience and not about everyone else's. So yeah, not so much criticizing than documenting what's been going on. yeah for historical i don't know for hindsight perhaps of looking back at what things were at a given point in time for documenting how these things develop and in more terms of criticism i think we're still a nascent like industry so i feel like I don't feel there's room to be openly critical about certain things. I'd much rather like talk one on one with someone and tell them like, you know, I see an issue here and perhaps discuss it. Like you said, maybe I misunderstood something or Talking to people often reveals another side. So even though I might be miffed at first by a particular experience because it didn't go as I might have planned or it frustrated me for whatever reason, talking to the authors often clarifies things. So I would never publish something that's scathing without talking to the people beforehand. I hope I've never done that.
[00:52:48.055] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of my frustrations with this field in some sense of the, you know, that a lot of the beating edge is happening by the immersive creators and at festivals like Sundance New Frontier, South by Southwest, Tribeca, Venice Immersive, and then if a doc lab and there's lots of other regional festivals one of which that you're also participating in curating and bringing in you know i think the ones i list often have a world premiere requirements which then creates a tenor for other regional festivals that are looking to these other festivals to program but also have their own world premieres and stuff that may have not been premiered i think that that diversity is really quite important but I guess one of the frustrations I have from the academics looking at this issue is that I don't often see that the folks who are reading or writing about this have the budgets to even travel to these places to see these works, and so they often have to rely upon only a small subsection of pieces that end up getting broader distribution onto the different distribution platforms. Yeah. I'd love to hear some of your reflections on that. Cause you've you're here at Tribeca. You managed to make it here, but there's also lots of other festivals and there's also lots of other people who may be writing about this, but not also attending these events to be able to see what's happening at the bleeding edge. So you mentioned the long delay that can sometimes happen in academia. And yeah, I'd love to hear some of your, your thoughts on reflecting on the role of academia when it comes to the craters. When, from my perception, it seems to be lagging behind from what's happening at the bleeding edge.
[00:54:11.857] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so you have to be lucky in living somewhere where there will be a regional festival or national festival or whatever, or something like the FI Centre, which will bring stuff over. So I've been extremely lucky in that regard of being able to access more experiences than if I'd been living away from a metropolis. But the pandemic was great in this regard. I don't want to make it seem too positive, but just having access to Cannes, to Venice, to Tribeca Sundance online, I'd never seen so much work and I'd never been so productive as an academic then during the pandemic. Also for having more time, but for seeing much more and being able to write much more also reports or criticism and just this kind of public facing scholarship that I was talking about before. But yeah, it's a whole issue too with premieres. It's something I think we're butting against because of the history of festivals and this importance of premieres. But ever since we did the Crafting a Market for Independent XR and we were talking to a lot of people about their qualms when faced with distributing their XR, mostly VR projects. the premiere status has irked me. And it's something that I'd like to fight against a little bit. I've been told that we need to have certain types of premiere status at our festival as well. But I feel like it kind of works against me in part of what I'd like to do in offering audiences a way of accessing VR productions from years past as well. And this is a discussion I've been having with Daniel Giroux as well of like, Festivals are great, but if you're not here during the 10 days, I can't go to Venice. I probably can't go to IDFA this year. I can't afford it. What if we were able to offer these experiences for a longer time? I need to look at what... Is it IDFA or DocLad that's been doing something year-long
[00:56:11.974] Kent Bye: Well, DocLab is a part of IFA. So yeah, I think talking to Casper, the last IFA DocLab, that there was plans to potentially have more of a year round space. I haven't heard any updates on that, but that was part of the plans is to like very similar to perhaps the Phi Center in Montreal, where there's a physical building context where some of these immersive works could have a home apart from the one time a year. So have more extended runs, but I don't know the specific status of that yet.
[00:56:38.038] Philippe Bedard: So something like that, a physical location where you know you can go and find the latest and greatest, but perhaps also a back catalog of some of the experiences. I know it's probably more complicated than I'm imagining it. There's issues with publishing or licenses and rights and so on. But yeah, I'd love to figure out ways of going away from the usual distribution model of festival premiere then perhaps nothing for a little while then publishing on a store but then you know if you don't own that particular headset or you know there's some limits so we're also investigating at mutec the festival of electronic arts and music mutec forum more specifically i'll be moderating a talk with Tami Padon from the NFB, Myriam Machard from the Phi Center, Antoine Carolle from Atlas 5, and Alexandre Teodoresco from the circus company, Les 7 Doigts de la Main. About XR distribution, and what I'd really like for us to discuss, and I haven't told them yet, as this is a premiere, is that I'd like to go outside of the usual distribution models of like, can we perhaps think of focusing on particular communities and making sure the right people see an experience. And so maybe I'm not thinking about the kind of very commercial experiences that you would want for everyone to see, but there's certain experiences that would be better served by bringing them to the right people or by building out a network throughout which either headsets can circulate or you can send headsets to those particular locations. Kind of more of a grassroot network of distribution. I'm trying to think if that would be better than trying to assume that eventually everyone will own a VR headset. I've been moved by what Landia Engel and Amaury Laburde said to you in a podcast, those are the filmmakers of Okawari, about just there's not enough resources for everyone to have a VR headset. So that's something else that I'm trying to think about of like, what are ways of distributing this work that would not need for everyone to own this kind of apparatus and does that mean assuming that it's a niche medium that not everyone needs to have access to not necessarily that has its own problems yeah I feel like
[00:58:56.354] Kent Bye: I know that the BBC has done some different experiments with, say, doing distribution to the libraries in the UK. So yeah, there's certainly ways that they can use the existing infrastructure of things like libraries to start to get some of these things out there. But I had a chance to do a conversation with Daniel Giroux at South by Southwest. And, you know, Estrella has been acquiring the rights of a lot of these pieces that have shown at these film festivals, and they've acquired quite a backlog. In fact, at New Images, the market, they had a whole XR library that had selection where you basically can go up to this computer and see a whole backlog of all of Estrella's works. experiences that they're going to be distributing, Diversion Cinema and other like Lucid Realities and Kaohsiung Film Festival and some other emerging distributors and publishers that are starting to acquire the rights of some of these pieces and find other ways of getting them out into the world. So I feel like with Astraea within the umbrella of Atlas 5 is got the majority of all those different pieces that have shown. And so there's certainly been, at least in the context of the New Images XR library, that was more for curators to be able to see those. But it was quite a great experience to just go up to a place and go through the backlog of some of these pieces. And for a talk that I gave for the European Developers Lab, I wanted to just do a bit of an audit of different experiences that are now made available because there sometimes can be a gap of one year, two years, or three years from when a piece will premiere at a festival and when it might be available on a store for people at home to be able to see. And I think that's in large part from a lot of the work that Estrella has been doing, but you can look on everywhere from the Quest store to Steam and to Viveport, you know, these different distribution channels where some of these pieces are starting to show up. And so I think it's on one part, some stuff is available. Maybe there's commercial licenses to be able to show it at a context like a festival, but i feel like it's a good idea to start to aggregate these pieces from the past at new images this year they actually did a whole feature of different creators from montreal that had pieces from the past so that you can see some examples of other festivals that are already starting to do that where you have the new pieces but you also have pieces that are specific to a theme or specific to a geographic region that are starting to give access to people because There's lots of stuff that's out there that even folks like myself have been in the industry that I haven't come across or haven't had a chance to see yet. Anyway, I think there's a lot of options that are there. As time goes on, this has been one of the deepest challenges and problems in the industry. I think you're at an intersection where now is a good time to start to innovate and try new methods to bring more people and to be able to experience what has already been produced over the last decade.
[01:01:37.659] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, and I'd definitely love to have more time and resources to focus on that because I think it's one of my cheval de bataille, my warhorse. I don't think that's the right translation. That's what I'd like to fight for, the cause of making XR or VR more accessible, one of many causes. I tried to start doing it also as part of my teaching. Last semester, I was teaching a cinema new technology class where I... taught two weeks on VR and we worked with the library at Carleton University to acquire 30 Oculus headsets, meta Quest headsets, to have a whole infrastructure they're building at the moment. But my class was kind of an experiment. I don't have the word to try out like what are the needs to showcase these kinds of experiences. And I think we had some 20 or 30 experiences that are widely available on the Quest store. But just to and make these experiences available to students because you can't just watch a walkthrough online. You have to experience it for yourself. But to kind of come back to our discussion, I'm wondering if it further speaks to libraries as perhaps a resource. You know, it does require quite a lot of space and material and technicians who know how to manipulate everything. But I think we're inching towards a possible future where you don't necessarily have to have it at home or to be in a metropolis that has a fi-center or analog in another city.
[01:03:07.250] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that you've been tracking this space really closely, and we've had the publication of Immerse, but I understand that they're gonna be winding that down, no longer continuing that as a publication, which was on Medium to be able to do this more up-to-date reports. It's more of a quarterly publication rather than something that may have an indefinite amount of time for academic publishing. But yeah, after publishing this whole book that is looking at virtuality and other academics that are thinking and writing about it, I'd love to hear some other resources or other people that are really digging into what's happening in this space and folks that if you want to get more information for some of the other academic discussions obviously the book that's coming out i think is probably going to be a good resource and maybe help guide people towards that but yeah any other pointers that you look to to keep up to speed as to some of the academic discourse that's happening about the future of immersive storytelling
[01:03:57.290] Philippe Bedard: Well, I will start with the obvious. There's you. Everyone should follow Kent on whatever podcast app. It's been a huge resource to be able to follow when I've not been able to go to festivals or aspects of this medium that I've never even thought of thinking about. It's beyond the festival circuit. Another resource I would mention is XR Must. They've been doing great work, not only with the publishing side of trying to publish more timely reports out of festivals, including mine, I'm hoping next week or so in the next few weeks after Tribeca, but they're also working on building this IMDB for XR and this huge resource, which once they release it, you should really talk to Mathieu Gaillet for that, but
[01:04:42.401] Kent Bye: I had a bit of a sneak preview conversation with him at Venice, but it's still, I don't think it's fully launched yet, but it's getting closer and closer. But yeah, this IMDB of XR and he's aggregating both a lot of the people who are working on it. And just like you look up for IMDB who worked on what, you know, this just as a database for the work that's being created, but also all the deadlines and everything else. It's a great resource that whenever you Google for stuff, it often comes up on the search results because they have been doing a great job of covering a lot of the broader industry. You know, I cover the stuff that I attend
[01:05:12.202] Philippe Bedard: but they're looking at the full spectrum and everything and doing a lot of writing and interviews as well yeah so xr must is another great resources and then social media i guess would be the obvious except for like personal connections of like having people in my entourage who work on that field lucky to be surrounded by great many young scholars doing terrific work on this medium just want to shout out a good friend of mine carolyn klemec who's doing great work about XR an artist run center, another like more grassroots approach to XR. And I'm just blanking now on all the other wonderful people working on that film as the stage fright or the being on mic. But yeah, just social media has been great, but it's been more difficult more recently. I feel like I've fallen off the wagon. Yeah, it's been more difficult recently to catch up with what's been happening in the field.
[01:06:06.208] Kent Bye: Yeah. I think once Elon Musk bought Twitter, it sort of threw a monkey wrench in my own communications on different platforms. But yeah, I guess, and you have your book that's coming out, I'm sure within there, there's other researchers that are also looking at this field as well.
[01:06:20.103] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, so there's 20 chapters. They're not all on VR. They're on immersion writ large. Some have a very philosophical approach. The very first chapter by Polanchik and Mucha is on being in and out of sync. So it's looking at immersion as this active process of you need to make yourself be in sync with the wave of a situation. These were air quotes of not immersion in a static body of water, but immersion in a moving and active body of water, such as the metaphor of the wave kind of illustrates. So some more theoretical, some more historical, such as my own, looking at the genealogy of VR, what it's been borrowing from cinema at the moment. Some do look at VR. We have a great piece by Claire Châtelet and Mathieu Prada. Mathieu Prada is an artist who has been doing encounters, rencontres, which is kind of like Carnier-Arena, but with water, which is really reductive to just talk about it that way, but it's this wonderful experience immersion in a body of water, both literally your feet in water, but also in the larger context of the experience. And they've contributed a great chapter. And we have a couple of interviews as well with practitioners. Carolyn Klimak has done an interview with five women working in the fields. It's titled A Much Needed Conversation with Women in XR or VR. Brenda Longfellow has contributed a chapter and I'm very biased, but I think it will be a great resource looking at cinema, literature, video games, VR and immersive media writ large.
[01:08:02.455] Kent Bye: Yeah. And the process of this conversation, there's been a lot of French names that have come up and being in Montreal and the five center and Atlas five and diversion cinema and Estrella all based out of France. And so what is it about. France and French speaking folks that are so drawn to these aspects of immersive storytelling and also the history of cinema itself. But what do you think that is that has this French connection to immersive storytelling?
[01:08:27.887] Philippe Bedard: So I don't know that I would say that it's French so much as socialist countries with like robust funding of the arts, because we could look at Denmark as well, or Taiwan has been just terrific in that what they do to support and fund this field. So yeah, even though I said a lot of French names, French Canadian as well. So yeah, being from Canada, we're really lucky to have a robust funding of the arts and immersive arts as well. The Media Fund, the SODEC, which is the Société de Développement des Entreprises Culturelles, so like funding cultural enterprises in books, movies, televisions and immersive as well. We're lucky to have a lot of funding, but I think there is something to what you're saying about French. I don't want to get into too much of a political discussion about the state of Francophones in Canada, but I think as part of our desire to make an identity of our own, culture was a big factor in that. So I think there was a big push for funding in the cultural sector, which is somewhat lacking perhaps in some other areas of the country. We did a cartography or mapping out of XR in Canada a couple years back and there were some other issues with the project that stopped us from doing as exhaustive of work as we would have wanted but there was such a concentration in Quebec and I was worried there was just our bias, our looking at our own industries but Yeah, we had difficulty finding the Felix & Pons, the DPT, all these other studios equivalent from Quebec in other parts of the country. But it all comes back, I think, to robust funding of arts for art's sake, which we don't really see in the US.
[01:10:17.964] Kent Bye: Yeah, definitely. Over the years of going to these festivals, I've appreciated what public funding can do in terms of pushing forward a new medium like virtual reality. So definitely grateful for all the governments around the world that have been investing in the medium. But yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'm curious what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:10:40.461] Philippe Bedard: So, I mean, from having listened to so many interviews, I should have been more ready. I tried to prepare an answer and I could try to look further ahead to 15, 20, 50 years in the future, but I feel like that's too difficult. So I'll just focus on the next few months or the next few years of what I'm as a programmer and looking forward into this formation of a medium eventually. The ultimate potential is this formation of a medium onto its own, distinct from cinema, distinct from games, distinct from theatre and dance, who have all contributed a lot to VR as we see it today. We saw here at Tribeca Craig Quintero, Over the Rainbow, I think it's called, just terrific contribution from theatre to VR. And I'm grateful for that contribution, but I'm also looking forward to the day when VR is a medium onto its own. So that's, I think, the short-term ultimate potential among others, of course.
[01:11:39.218] Kent Bye: What about the long-term? The ultimate, ultimate potential.
[01:11:43.969] Philippe Bedard: I mean, if we had an hour or two more, we could get into the mind-altering. That's something that's interesting to me, being focused on phenomenology or process relational philosophy as well. Potentially, just the way it changes the way we see the world. I'm working on a project called Eccentric Images or Eccentric Points of View, looking at how cinema allows us to de-center ourselves. But VR allows us to do it even more of stepping outside of our privileged position and trying to adopt other points of view, which itself is privileged, this capacity of stepping outside of ourselves, to be able to do so as a luxury onto its own. So yeah, I would gesture in that direction for the ultimate potential without offering a significant or a concrete answer.
[01:12:36.263] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:12:41.585] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, I think I'd like to ask everyone to pay attention to Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. You know, you were listing earlier the main five, let's say, or the main however many, Sundance, South by, Tribeca, Venice, then skipping over Festival du Nouveau Cinéma to IDFA, which I can't blame you, but I would really like for Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. I mean, it's the festival of new cinema. It's looking at everything new that's being done. I dream of a day where it's on the same status as the other one. So for the moment, I don't have quite these ambitions for this year, but do keep a look at what we'll be doing. The festival takes place in early October 5th to 16th, I believe. So yeah, keep an eye out for the programming, which should be announced over the next few months.
[01:13:25.842] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I think we managed to cover a lot of ground with lots of the work that you're doing. It's really broad scope across lots of different dimensions of the industry and both from a researcher and practitioner of curating and now also looking at some of the more pragmatic aspects of installations and whatnot. So yeah, it's really fascinating to hear a little bit more about your journey into the space and to get a little bit more sense of all the different stuff that you're looking at and researching. And I'm also really looking forward to the book that's coming out. What was the name of the book again?
[01:13:55.020] Philippe Bedard: It's called States of Immersion Bodies Media Technologies. I always invert the three names, but yeah, it should be coming out early 2024 at Amsterdam University Press. I'll post a reminder to ask your library to purchase it. It being an academic book, it'll probably be very expensive, but there will be ways of getting access to it.
[01:14:16.027] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, yeah, definitely looking forward to checking that out and putting VR into a broader context for all these different other modes of immersion. So. Anyway, thanks again for joining me here on the podcast and help share a bit of your story and all the different stuff that you're working on. So thank you.
[01:14:30.473] Philippe Bedard: Yeah, thanks so much. This has been a bucket list item for me.
[01:14:34.495] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
