Milo Talwani (pronouns they/them) is a curator, and creative technologist who oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. They’re also the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, and they also help curate exhibition events such as the Robot Remix XR.
I talk with Talwani about the process and challenges of curating and selecting immersive projects for the New Frontier in collaboration with chief curator Shari Frilot. Throughput is always a challenge with location-based entertainment experiences, but especially at Sundance where there’s a lot more people than capacity to be able to screen all of the work (I approximated the throughput for each of the Sundance experiences in my real-time Twitter coverage.)
There are only a couple of viable solutions to the throughput issue. Talwani says that either Sundance curates less pieces, or they find additional funding to support expanding out to multiple locations in order to show the existing selection to more people. It’s an impossible tradeoff, and the Sundance staff has preferenced showing a wide diversity of content that they find worthy rather than attempting to expand out the screening capacity to increase the numbers who can see the work.
These capacity limitations have inspired Talwani to collaborate with Paisley Smith in curating their own show that focused on one hour of XR content, and that a ticket buyer would be able to see all of the work that was shown. Here are Smith’s Robot Remix XR field notes reporting on their intentions and lessons learned from this experiment.
Another key feature of Sundance screenings are the installations, and Talwani describes the increasing importance of onboarding and offboarding, and how this is a key consideration for submitting to Sundance. The New Frontier is attempting to create a liminal space of exploration, and so the transitions into and out of experiences is a key factor for the overall program of experiences that they’re curating.
We also explore their journey into becoming an XR curator, the challenges around distribution of Location-based entertainment, some of their favorite experiences, the dream of immersive themselves into a VR experience with interactive characters for an extended period of time, and some of the themes and trends from the 2020 slate of experiences at the Sundance New Frontier.
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Here’s a trailer of the Robot Remix XR exhibition that ran at the Sp[a]ce Gallery in Pasadena, California every weekend starting on Saturday, July 6th until September 8th, 2019
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So continuing on my series of looking at Sundance 2020, including the immersive storytelling innovations, the technological innovations, as well as the experiential design process. So today's interview is with one of the curators of the Sundance New Frontier. It's Marlo Taiwani. They're a curator, creative technologist, and oversees the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. So there's a number of different issues that come up with all film festivals which is throughput and capacity and capacity planning and so Milo talks a little bit about the different trade-offs between Do you want to see a lot of content or do you want everybody see the content? And so they have the Sundance at the Ray which is a ticketed event and you get 90 minutes to see what is essentially around two and a half to three hours worth of content took me about three hours to see all of it with the waiting and everything and And then there's the Sundance new frontier central, which there's a number of different other experiences there. It opens up a certain time of day and then you go in and you sign up for a specific time and then you can either hang out there and see stuff as a more of a wait list. They also have the biodigital theater there where we could see more experiences and they also had like experiences out in the wild. And so just had a chance to talk to Milo about some of the challenges for capacity planning and be able to look at some of the different. options and solutions for how to best have the most throughput. And they have a variety of different options that they're using at Sendance here. And so it's one of the biggest pain points when trying to see the work when it's a lot more people want to see it than has the capacity to be able to handle that. So also just talking about some of the highlights of this year, the trends of this year, as well as some of the other projects that Milo is working on. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Milo happened on Thursday, January 30th, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:05.691] Milo Talwani: I'm Milo Talwani. I use the pronouns they and them. I'm a curator and a creative technologist. For the last three years, I've overseen the selection process for New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. And so that's VR projects and AR projects and stuff in between and installations and performances and a little bit of flat films too. For the last two years I've been the technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, so I work with all the artists to coordinate their tech needs and install everything at the festival, and I train like 50 to 60 people who've never touched a VR headset before how-to, and leave able to troubleshoot comfortably, which I'm quite proud of. and then I curate my own events. I put together a two-month show with my friend Paisley Smith in Los Angeles at the Space Gallery. We did six projects, 15 headsets, 15 people per hour so that every single person who bought a ticket could see everything we were showing and could see it in like a relaxed and comfortable manner and that's really important to me. When I'm working in smaller spaces, you know, not with massive institutions, being able to create human structures for engaging with VR. And then I've done a bunch of work with Alma Harrell's Free the Work, which is an initiative to achieve parity for directors and other workers in entertainment. And so we do galas and parties, but also workshops for advertising executives about VR. And so I'll show people VR by really, really awesome women and non-binary people with the goal that you're going to start advertising in these mediums soon. And wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get this right the first time? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't replicate those same problems that exist elsewhere?
[00:04:08.956] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could share a little bit more context as to your background and your journey into this immersive space as a curator.
[00:04:16.254] Milo Talwani: I'm a composer. That's really, really, really important for my soul. I've been making music since age two. I realized I was a composer when I was nine. And working in contemporary classical music and other modern music forms, technology and human-computer interaction is everywhere, from loops and manipulating samples in real time using MIDI controllers, to digital signal processing, to interactive music installations. And so I was going to the Oberlin Conservatory, which has a really, really wonderful electronic music program, but I also deeply deeply love writing acoustic music and Oberlin kicked out all of my professors and so I dropped out and I think like two days after I got back to Los Angeles I got horrible poison oak and was just like covered in boils and trying to pass out resumes to people and it just failing miserably so I got really really really depressed and there was this dance party perpetual dawn in Los Angeles that I liked to go to and I wasn't 21 yet and so I they would be like, well, we can't let you in, but if you show up early and volunteer, you can get past the security guards. And I did that a bunch of times. And one time, Kate Parsons and Ben Vance of Floatland in Los Angeles partnered with them. You know, they put together, I think like five VR experiences that were happening in a space next to the dance party. And so I got there and I met them and I saw three VR, like really, really awesome optical illusion, VR museum. It's like really hard to, you just need to see it. And it blew my mind, you know. Music for me is about, you know, all these systems of creating meaning. How are, what does the audience expect? What do they know? How are they going to engage with this? What is the setting that's happening in? What instructions am I giving the players to create these emotions? How am I using music to like affect their perception of time, affect their perception of their bodies? And then so I saw VR for the first time and I talked with Kate and Ben and it was like, oh my god. And, you know, I had no coding experience. I knew a little bit of Max MSP for my music work. But so I just said like, They taught me how to set up a Vive, and I said, you know, if you ever are showing at a gallery or anywhere like this and you don't feel like going, like, give me your computer, give me your headset, I'll do this for free. And so I did for four or five months, and then John Rathbun had a piece at Spruth Mager in LA, this really wild piece where, it's just like a bad ketamine trip or something, but I babysat that piece at the museum for two months, Kate got me that job. So that was really simple. That was, you know, like a two-rift setup, you know, nothing intensive technically about it. It was like a very human, like, first large-scale VR job. And then Delta Airlines approached Vice Media about doing parties in Los Angeles, New York, and I think Seattle. And at the one in Los Angeles they had, it was like a nine-day film festival and they also had a VR room. And it was, I think it was like five Rifts and Vives and maybe like 15 Gear VRs and Kaleidoscope, you know, reached out to Kate and Kate recommended me and, you know, I was like 20 and unbelievably out of my league and I got this like massive, massive THL case from Europe with with something like 50 cell phones and all these headsets and all these computers and no inventory so I was like oh my god am I set up as the fall person you know like I wasn't everything was above board it's wonderful to work with them but they sent me all the equipment early enough that Honestly, I had never touched a year of VR before. And so I had enough time with all the equipment. Yeah, I had like a month or something. And so I just played with it and I taught myself how to do all the troubleshooting and run this event. And then Sundance, for the first time, opened up New Frontier, opened up as an open call. Previously had been invitation only. I think 2018 was the first year of the open call and they needed someone who could let people watch the VR because no one in the office knew how to do that or had the time to figure it out. So my position was created and I think they reached out to Kaleidoscope and said, who can do this? and they gave me a call and I've been with them since then. Yes, I came in relatively early and just because, you know, I could work with the technology, you know, I was willing to like, you know, weed through it until it would speak to me.
[00:09:15.205] Kent Bye: Well, as Nouveau Vertier has progressed, I've seen this evolution of more and more of additional trackers, almost like these location-based entertainment experiences that you need to have all sorts of other rigs and other things. And so it becomes this issue of like, it's not just like sending you a 360 video, although there are still 360 videos, but there's all these other additional complications. So as you're receiving submissions for these different VR experiences, maybe you could talk a bit about that process of, you know, if you have to actually go on site to see different stuff, or if you are, like, just watching every single submission that comes in, or just, like, your process of ingesting all of these VR pieces that are being entered for the new Frontier.
[00:09:56.460] Milo Talwani: Yeah, so we actually just rewrote our application last year because we watch everything we are able to. If you send it to us, we watch it. Everything that artists give us the ability to watch in a headset is watched in a headset. projects are submitting in the early stages of their development often. So like most of what we see, you know, at the beginning are rough builds, you know, much like film programmers see rough cuts. You know, we have a certain amount of tech in the office. We have magic leaps and vibes and riffs and quests and goes, we have leap motion sensors, we have basic networking equipment for shared user experiences, we have two computers with an RTX 2080, which is quite nice, but we don't have an OptiTrack system, we don't have an 8-channel speaker set up for the experiences with audio outside the headset. And so we do have to go off-site to see a lot of demos, which is really, really fun to get to step into people's labs and homes and see their work on their terrain. But for a lot of artists, that's not feasible. For a lot of artists, they aren't based in Los Angeles or were not able to... I don't get to travel for work, but Shari travels the world visiting with artists and seeing what they're working on. And so that's why we rewrote the application. So to give the artists who are doing work where they're not able to send it to us for us to set up in Headset and we're not able to go to them, you need a massive amount of information to be able to try to understand what they're doing. And it's not one size fits all, but it's good to explicitly name the things we think are useful in the application. We see a lot of in-headset capture. We ask for really detailed pitch decks. We ask for installation design. We ask people to walk us through not just what the story of the piece is, but what the user experience is from the moment they enter the space to the moment they leave. how you plan to give them information about engaging with the headset, how you plan to give them information about engaging with the world you're built, and then step-by-step, what they do in the world, what their options are, how it functions. You know, one of the nice things about a lot of these LBE projects is that a lot of the LBE stuff is really, really hard to scale. That's not a nice thing about it. That's an unfortunate thing about it. But artists are smart and are often creating multiple versions or versions with demo functionality or versions with, if there's a live performer, you know, bake the performer's movements in. And so you can approximate, you know, there are a number of techniques artists can use to approximate the installation experience and it's about figuring out the right blend of stuff to make it clear to us. And I do my best to answer questions and guide people and steer them in the direction of like, you know, you're presenting this information in a way that maybe isn't super useful and if you could share this, you know, that would be nice instead. People, I think, don't fully understand that it's not just the story, and it's not just the visuals and the headset, but it's this whole world. It's how you're entering the space, how you're engaging with the space. That stuff is really important, and I work to steer people towards sharing that information with us, too, on top of just narrative elements.
[00:13:30.098] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've noticed that for the last number of years of the onboarding and the offboarding, especially from 2016, the first year that I came to Sundance. I think 2014 was the first year they had Clouds and some other VR pieces. And then 2015, I saw some coverage from Upload VR that was here. I was like, oh, I should make that next year. And so then for the last five years, I've been able to come and pretty much see all the different experiences over the last five years. So I've seen some evolution from the days back on Main Street, where it was in a much more cramped space and I like that there's more room here, both the ray in the basement or the box, the box at the ray. And then there's the new Frontier Central, but I feel like every year there's this problem of throughput and there's Content that's amazing content, but there's more people that want to see it then there's capacity to allow them to see it and I'm wondering how you try to approach this throughput issue because there's Different approaches from different film festivals Venice will allow you to sign up for an individual experience but you know you have to stay there for a week to see everything and then and Then there's TrackBeca which uses the queuing system where you have an electronic queue but then it's a mad rush to be able to get into on the list and then there's a lot of waiting around. There's, I guess, a lot of waiting. Living Distance was an example this year that had a video installation which I like to be able to watch a video on two screens. There's a video installation that you can watch as you're waiting and I thought that was nice and I thought that the persuasion machines had a nice approach where they have a staggered approach of every 5 or 10 minutes a new person can go in, and so it was a constant flow of people. But still, the challenge is that a lot of the times the piece isn't done until it's done at the very end, so to know how long the runtime is. You have the onboarding and offboarding and all the logistics there and then potential technical difficulties. And so you have all of these variables that make it so that it's just a handful of people. And how have you tried to solve that approach of throughput in VR?
[00:15:34.139] Milo Talwani: I'm going to need a second with that one because this is a subject I care a lot about. Well, at Sundance, you know, we have two venues that function differently. The Ray is a ticketed venue, so a couple dozen people, I think 27, enter the space, they have an hour and a half, and there are, I think, seven projects that they can see. And if you add up the amount of time that all those projects are, you know, they're not going to be able to see everything in an hour and a half long session. Part of the information that we're asking for in the application is installation design, is approximate runtime of the finished project. So we do our best from when we start thinking about these projects to think about how they're going to function in the space. And so the number of people we let into the array changes every year based on the number of points of access we have. And, you know, that's not a perfect system. Pieces like, you know, Sweet Dreams last year, you know, where like two people can see it, sometimes four people can see it in an hour and a half. You know, those are always going to be unbelievably difficult to get into. And then we have Central, New Frontier Central, where they're public slots, they're open to anyone with a credential, and you show up and sign up for projects, and it's like a waitlist-based system, and they give you an approximate time that you're gonna get there. that you're going to be able to see it, but it's not like an appointment time, it's a waitlist. And honestly, like, they fill up really quickly. And so, you know, pieces this year, like Scarecrow, you know, people are, they run there, and then there's like a 10-person line to sign up for the waitlist, and the last three don't make it on the waitlist. I think there are two solutions, and they're both really, really, really, really, really difficult, which is why they're not implemented. One is, and this one sucks, is you cut the number of pieces you're showing in half, double the number of points of access for each piece, or proportionally based on runtime and the number of people who are going to see it in a session. so that everyone's able to see everything and You know, I think that's the wrong choice I think that being able to show a breadth of work is is the priority and then the other option is doubling the number of our venues, and then splitting the same amount of work over four venues. And yeah, I mean, it's just the ratio of bodies in space to what we're able to afford to put on. And if you're a large foundation who wants to give us... $50,000 and be a New Frontier sustaining supporter. I think that's the term that Advancement uses. We'll set up another venue and we can multiply the number of people who can see our work by one and a half. But I really think those are the two options. Yeah.
[00:18:37.382] Kent Bye: Yeah, at the DocLab in Amsterdam this year, Casper Sonnen was experimenting with having VR cinemas kind of spread out, like in the train station there in Amsterdam. So as people were walking through, as a place where people can come by. And then I think he sold out a lot of the different screenings. And I think, you know, for me, I kind of like how Tribeca used to do the VR cinema, which was that you could kind of like pop in and see stuff. As I was thinking about, you know, a piece like Book at Distance. Amazing piece. Absolutely loved it. One of my top experiences that I saw this year. But it's a 25 minute piece and if you really, really want to see it, then you're going to potentially wait in line doing nothing for an hour. and why not have two chairs there that people could sit down and watch a la carte of different VR cinema. I feel like of all the festivals, the VR cinema here at Sundance is one of the hardest to see just because it's like you have to be there at the screening and to kind of Decentralize that centralization of that screening time and to you know, like the in Amalia some the little short eight minute piece I think a lot of people probably will get to have seen that because it was probably the most accessible Five chairs there with the oculus go it was eight minutes, you know I saw it last because I like as I go and I try to assess the throughput, you know challenges and try to see the longest hardest pieces first and during the press hours and But, you know, as people are going into this environment, and people who may not, maybe this is the first VR screening, it's like a free-for-all, and then it's a lot of frantic energy that then ends up being a hurry-up-and-wait type of situation. And then if you want to wait for an hour, let's say you watch three VR pieces, like from the VR cinema, but you can pick and choose. And I think that would actually make it a lot easier to see the other pieces, because it's actually still very difficult to get in the VR cinema, and they're already waiting a lot.
[00:20:29.526] Milo Talwani: So if you're going to have... Sorry, that's a quite nice idea. I'm going to put that in my rap notes. Yeah, would totally be feasible to put swivel chairs outside of the exhibition spaces and have, you know, like, Oculus goes for people who are waiting, who can see the stuff in our VR cinema. That's very elegant. Thank you for that.
[00:20:47.668] Kent Bye: Well, I was just sort of thinking about it, because it was sort of like, why not? Then it made me think, well, there's actually a lot of waiting that's happening here at Sundance. I mean, people are waiting in lines a lot. I mean, this year, I think, is a year where they started to bring out different experiences out into the world. There's an AR app. There's the experience that's at the swimming pool spaced out. And then, what was the third experience?
[00:21:09.059] Milo Talwani: So, New Frontier in the Wild, this year, is what we're calling that, is three pieces. Dance Trail, an AR app by Gilles Jovin. And that's, you know, a location-based AR experience. So there's like five spots on Main Street where you can, you know, point your phone at a tracker. And then these, like, you know, giants come out in these beautiful, beautiful skin-tight bodysuits and dance in the snow and on the mountains of Park City. And then like a non-location based one, you know, you can put a dancer at any scale in the space you're in. And then like a cute little handheld coaster. They had these beer coasters. And so like the dancers would point at the tracker on those and the dancers would, you know, dance on your beer coaster at your party. So that's Dance Trail. At the Sheraton, we had this really, really cool piece spaced out by Pierre Friquet. Sutu drew a lot of the visuals, and you put on a bathing suit, and a snorkel, and a VR headset, and you get in the pool, and you go to outer space. A really, really abstracted, beautiful outer space. And then A flat film, a short by Terrence Nance. You text tacos to this number and you get this really short, abstracted story about love and missed connections at Guisado's on Sunset in Los Angeles. So there's three New Frontier pieces in the wild. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly like infrastructure challenges to like having 360 videos available at waitlists, but that would be a really, really, really wonderful way to share what we do with a lot of people and to get people who love flat films into some non-flat spaces.
[00:22:56.322] Kent Bye: Well, what were some of the themes that you saw come up in this year's program?
[00:23:01.746] Milo Talwani: like the human body, like connections between connections between humans in virtual space, actualizing your own body in virtual space, connecting your body to the environment at large in virtual space. Yeah, there's so much of it. Metamorphic, in which you're this beautiful hand-drawn character by Wesley Allsbrook, and you meld with the environment and you swap parts of your body with the environment and vice versa, and then you realize that there's another person in there with you. Or, you know, like Scarecrow, where you, like, dance and play and, like, save the life of this scarecrow played by a, you know, a real actor, an actor tracked in real time. You have, you know, a haptic glove on your hand, so, like, when the scarecrow makes a snow person for you, your hand gets real cold. When you're protecting the scarecrow from the fire birds that are eating his heart, your hand, you know, kind of burns up. even a piece like Persuasion Machines, which making visceral, making you feel in your body like the horror that is end-user license agreements, you know, like I think, yeah, I think it's, there are so many, I mean I've touched on literally a quarter of the pieces that are doing something with re-centering you in your body, making you feel things in your body that you haven't previously, making tangible these Connections that are hard to make tangible without the use of VR headsets, you know, persuasion machines or breathe, actualizing the way you're exchanging air with your environment, the way you're exchanging air with other people. Generative art based on weather patterns from the location you're in, generated in real time. Yeah, beautiful connections with the body.
[00:24:54.342] Kent Bye: So one of the challenges that I find in covering these pieces at Sundance is, I guess, a larger framework to kind of make sense of there's going to be a handful of people that see some of these experiences sometimes on the order of 50 or 100 or 500 or maybe up to a thousand. And then the distribution for those pieces is uncertain. And so it's taken me a number of years to kind of figure out how to even cover it. And I've focused on trying to abstract like the experiential design principles and the creative process and talking about the piece, but yet at the same time, you know, some pieces have spoiler dimensions that then, you know, I want to dive into, but then people probably shouldn't listen to them. And so there's this aspect of a chicken and egg problem where because the distribution mechanisms aren't so set, then the journalists who cover it see that maybe it's not worth covering because no one's going to be able to see it afterwards. It's just like essentially like a theater performance that either you see it or you don't. But for me, I think it's still a huge cultural importance. And it's also going to get spread out to different location-based entertainment. But maybe you could talk about this early technology diffusion dilemma, which is that we're still at that early phase where it hasn't reached that mass consumer scale. So a lot of the pieces that are on the new frontier are, by their very nature, still emerging and on the new frontier. But how to think about how to talk about them or how to cover them and how you try to talk to the press about, them seeing the work and for them to consider what it may all implicate.
[00:26:27.871] Milo Talwani: I mean, my goal for the projects is distribution. I want all of the wonderful stuff we program to be seen by literally everyone. And it's hard to express how heartbreaking it is that that is not presently the case. I think we want to present things in a context that makes distribution palatable and exciting for these behemoth entities, powers that be, whatever. So I think a piece like Spaced Out is kind of an interesting example. Because on paper, it sounds like a distribution nightmare. VR headsets in water. You know, what's the insurance cost of that? But that one's quite elegant and easy to distribute. The Ballast VR team has these kits that they send out to hotels across the world. Everyone has a pool, or every hotel has a pool, not every human has a pool. Every hotel has a pool, and there are this myriad untapped spaces that that piece can exist in. And so we made a, we didn't build a pool in one of our venues. I mean, A, that would be fun for our producer, Jamie McMurray, but B, The place that that can happen is at hotels, and so trying to present it in that context. This is doable. This is something that you can just set up for a week if you want, or have it be a permanent attraction for your hotel. I think we work a lot with artists on the onboarding and offboarding so that their pieces feel approachable to humans, so that it's obvious to the people who are engaging with those pieces. If I bought this to set up at my chain or my business or my location-based entertainment center, this is how it would work, this is how my audience would engage with it. So there's a lot of trying to present these works in a maximally human way, comfortable for the audience. But I also think that there's a lot that VR distributors are getting really wrong right now. There's no focus, or almost no focus, on VR distribution for things outside of LBEs. And so a lot of projects will LBE-ify a project that doesn't necessarily need it. And I think a piece like Haifa, like, that's so easy to set up. That's one headset, like, if you have a really good VR dose, and you can comfortably run four or five headsets with one person staggering entrances, For projects like that, where there's not this massive proprietary tech component, it's just a VR headset and controllers, I want to see maximally efficient presentation spaces that don't apologize for the fact that it's It's just a VR headset. You know, people don't feel the need to, like, dress up a movie theater in Frozen 2. You don't need to see that in, like, a Frozen 2 decked-out movie theater. Similarly, like, Haifa is an awesome work, and it is a pleasure just to watch that in headset. And I think you can make VR inexpensive, you know, like, drastically cut down your production costs, make it so that people can actually afford to buy tickets, And for audiences that don't own a VR headset, these are the VR experiences that are human and easy to see, that you can afford to buy tickets for. And I think that's how you get people to buy VR headsets. This is opinionated, but I don't think that these massive LBE institutions are going to drive people to buy VR headsets as much as showing people the joys of what they can do in their home. You know, I want to see a focus on a piece like Anamalia Sun. That's riotously funny. People would love, love to watch that. That is a piece 100% for everyone. And from a distribution standpoint, it's inexpensive to buy a $200 headset to show 360 videos on and train a docent and they can with a piece like that you know you can have like one staff member to like comfortably like five to ten headsets in my opinion and I really wish that people would focus on a distribution strategy like that of these are the works that we're going to show to people who don't own VR headsets at our space, and then we're also going to make those available for purchase for in-home viewing. I really think that joint approach is underutilized. I think LVE's stuff is wonderful, but almost by definition is going to be exclusionary on the basis of financial access. And that makes me really, really sad. And I think that's why I'm more excited about LBE stuff in museums and these public institutions, because those are for everyone, not just people who can afford $45 for a 15-minute experience. And that's opinionated. And I love, I love the beautiful LBE work that's being done right now. But I feel like it's preventing some number of people who can't afford that stuff from entering VR.
[00:31:43.472] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm wondering if you could expand a bit on the show that you created with Paisley Smith at the Space Gallery last year. And I was able to go to the Space Gallery show that Jesse Damiani did back in 2018 and see all the pieces there. And yeah, it's a really nice space. And I know there's different areas. Did you have people set up in different rooms in PC VR, or was it all on the Oculus Go? Or maybe you could talk a bit about how you were able to have people come in and see every experience, which I think is perfect. It's great. It's a model where you want to see everything. You go in, you get a ticket, you for sure are going to see all the stuff. So how did you actually logistically pull it off in that space?
[00:32:20.631] Milo Talwani: So the space gallery is an endeavor of the Eisenberg Advertising Agency. And so they did that show with Jesse and that was spread out throughout the whole agency except for the off-limits advertising areas. And they didn't have like a fixed number of people who could come in. It was functioning like a gallery where you come in and you walk around and you hang out. they approached me and Paisley about doing a show and I said I will only do this if we have a headset for every person. I want to do five headsets of 360 videos and ten headsets of 6DOF experiences and we're only interested in doing this if you'll provide us with ten computers with 32 gigabytes of RAM in a 2080 and because Eisenberg cares really, really deeply about VR and new media. They said yes. So, I mean, that's a really, really, really special circumstance. We were given a prompt for the show, and they had already had this show curated by this artist, Mark Todd. He teaches at Art Center in LA and makes these really, really awesome paintings and drawings and his show was called Robot Remix and it was a bunch of like bootleg Star Wars toys like you know like 40 artists created these bootleg Star Wars toys and like all these robots and it really like fun family-friendly joyful stuff and Paisley and I were like well that's you know, like a really under... There's a lot of wonderful, family-friendly, silly robot experiences in VR, but that's not, like, a focus of curation ever. People like to do the, like, intense stuff and the serious stuff and the, like, really, really deeply meaningful personal stuff. And we thought, what an exciting opportunity, you know, what an exciting opportunity to choose works that are for everyone, to choose works that are simple and family-friendly and can be enjoyed by everyone from an eight-year-old if their parents consent to putting them in a VR headset to you know a 90 year old or older we didn't have anyone older than that but and from the beginning it was like this event is only worth doing if we can make it comfortable and human this event is only worth doing if we can present an audience experience where everyone gets to see stuff and isn't fighting for access I mean that's Particularly if you're like trying to reach out to like families if one kid sees one thing and another kid sees another thing and then they're fighting about that like that's a that's a bummer and so we knew that we wanted to do an hour-long time slot because we wanted we didn't want to over exert people but we also didn't want to have people sitting around and waiting. So hour-long time slot. I think we did like six experiences with a total of like 55 minutes of content so that you had time for really quick onboarding and offboarding. And we chose pieces that are accessible. Pieces that you could actually, if they were available, watch in your home. These like human-level pieces. We showed Your Hands Are Feet by Amelia Winger Bearskin, we showed Gloomy Eyes, we showed Microgiants, we showed Asteroids and Invasion, and we showed Virtual Virtual Reality. And so these are all joyful pieces that aren't difficult to set up, that are easy to get people into, that are easy for people to engage with. I mean, it's easier to do that in the context of a specific show about a specific thing for a specific audience than at a film festival. But yeah, it was like, what a joy to get to put that together. What a joy to get to make that for people.
[00:36:01.028] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you personally, what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:36:06.953] Milo Talwani: The media that I really, really love is primarily about relationships, relationships between people and relationships between people in their world. I love anime. I love Adventure Time. This is bad to admit because I work for Sundance, but I often have a hard time with movies because they're so short. I want to live with characters. I want to live in these worlds. And so I'm I'm excited for VR experiences that are as long-running and massive as anime franchises. I'm excited to get to spend not just 10 or 15 minutes in a space that an artist has designed, but like a sizable chunk of my life. I want to get to know virtual beings. I want to connect with my friends in virtual spaces. I want to spend time in other worlds. I want to spend meaningful chunks of time in other worlds. And so I think that looks like serialized narrative content. I think that looks like well-designed social VR spaces.
[00:37:11.936] Kent Bye: Yeah. What are some of your favorite VR experiences you've ever seen?
[00:37:16.861] Milo Talwani: Oh, and there's so many in no particular order. We showed Kaiju Confidential last year by Ethan Schaftel. It was just like riotously funny. Two years ago, we showed you Spiritual Temple Sucks, which is just a riotously funny piece. I mean, literally everything in their show this year from The pieces that take you to outer space, like Living Distance in space, to the really meaningful connections in virtual space, like Breathe, or Metamorphic, or Scarecrow, or all kinds of Limbo, to the wild mind-bending stuff, like Antigone, or Machine for Viewing. I really, really love Amelia Bearskin-Winger's Your Hands Are Feet. I think that's one of the most joyful pieces I've ever experienced. I... There's just too many. And then there's, you know, honestly like a number of things that I saw during the selection process that haven't come out yet that I can't talk about, but I wish I could have programmed. There is so much wonderful VR. I don't know if people... People sometimes talk about like a content problem or a lack of... I don't know. There is so much wonderful work that no one has seen. It's wonderful and heartbreaking.
[00:38:27.469] Kent Bye: I would love to see by the year 2025, where people are bringing their own XR device, whether it's like the AR glasses or VR headset, you know, that they could just wait in line and then sort of put on their VR headset and then have streamed down to them, like, the latest, you know, experiences from Sundance. Or like, maybe they're site-specific or maybe they're site-specific to this geo-region, but, you know, just to have, like, a future where The technology wasn't the bottleneck here in terms of, you know, needing to have access to it. Maybe it's just getting people into the same location, if that people can, like, experience these things. A lot of, like, the biodigital theater, having some people in the same space, having that type of environment where people could start to bring your own device. And I think that's something to strive for and imagine what that world would look like.
[00:39:13.948] Milo Talwani: I love, I love the term bring your own device. I love the idea of bring your own device events. That's a world I want to live in. Yeah. Also, like, I don't know, some big telecom company who's hyping up 5G right now should donate a lot of money to WebXR development because that's going to be a phenomenal use of 5G and should help us put that together. Great.
[00:39:38.864] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies and immersive storytelling, immersive art might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:49.362] Milo Talwani: Immersive technology is honestly just another medium. Music changes my brain chemistry, and television changes my brain chemistry, paintings change my brain chemistry, and immersive work does too. And so with all forms, there are things that work well in them, there are things that don't, there are things that are only possible in them, there are things that you can hint at but can't fully achieve in them. Immersive art is just really satisfying for me personally. I mean, I think a lot of people will feel that way. I think a lot of people feel that way. But, and maybe, I don't know, maybe this is a boring answer, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's like fundamentally different from music. And I think it will have the same reach as music, you know, everyone. It's a set of techniques for expressing ideas. I think when you get into the enterprise realm, I think that's when you get really, really, really, really wild stuff. Not that immersive art isn't really, really, really wild, because it is, but I just know that that's going to be everywhere in medical applications once we can get systems reliable enough, and architecture. And I know that that is going to, I believe that is going to fundamentally change the way that those fields work. But I think humans have been engaging with art so long, and so many different kinds of art, that this is just another form. And it's a form I love deeply. But humans have been engaging with art since the beginning of time and will engage with art until global warming takes us down.
[00:41:16.375] Kent Bye: What do you think it is about the immersive art? What part of that character do you think you fell in love with?
[00:41:25.382] Milo Talwani: It's such an honor to get to participate in these worlds that these artists build. I love, you know, like, frameworks for thinking and experiencing. I love getting put somewhere I've never been before. I love the fundamental rules of physics being altered temporarily. I love taking a break from my body sometimes, and then I love being re-centered in my body. In immersive work, the rules of physics are up to the artist, you know, everything is. And everything is in flat film too, you know, only the thing that the director chooses make it to the frame, but I think the added complexity of digital systems on digital systems on digital systems kind of explodes out into infinity and so you have That's that's hard to put into words, but you know, it's not separate from authorship because these creators are authoring these worlds but Much like when an architect designs like a hotel they decide how the space functions They decide we're putting stairs here and they can you have some amount of control over the flow of traffic But fundamentally it's like people are gonna do what they want in it and I feel similarly about immersive art it's it's nice to get to have autonomy in worlds we don't have control over. Yeah.
[00:42:46.306] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Great. Well, Milo, I just wanted to thank you for joining me on the podcast and for all the work that you're doing here at Sundance, as well as in the broader world of curation and virtualities and helping to bootstrap people into learning how to actually run and become a docent. So thank you for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:43:05.381] Milo Talwani: Such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you.
[00:43:08.160] Kent Bye: So that was Milo Talwani. They're a curator and creative technologist, as well as oversees the selection process for the Sundance New Frontier. Shari Frillo is the chief curator, but Milo's helping out with Shari and helping oversee all the technical aspects of being able to see all the different content. They're also a technical coordinator for Tribeca Immersive, as well as curator of their own events at places like the Space Gallery. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, it's just helpful for me to get behind the scenes a little bit and to talk to curators like Milo and Shari is going to be the follow up interview to Milo, but to just to get inside of their head a little bit in terms of what they're seeing, what trends they're seeing, what they're starting to look for. So it sounds like what Milo was saying is that there's a lot of different trends around social experiences, especially this year with multiple people. There seemed to be an emphasis on that on the biodigital theater and a lot of the individual experiences where there's multiple people in the experience at the same time and cultivating specific social interactions between those people. And I think that was a big trend of what I saw in a lot of the experiences this year. And also just talking about some of the dilemmas around trying to get people to see the content. And really there's one of two options, which is to reduce the number of content that they're showing, and they don't really want to do that. Even though it's difficult to see all the experiences and for any one individual to see all of them, they still feel like it's important to be able to highlight the work that they feel is important to be able to show there at the festival, rather than prioritizing just showing a handful of experiences so that it makes it available for everybody to be able to see it. At Sundance, it's one of these things where there's scarce resources and it's like a supply and demand issue where they can't actually handle all the capacity. And so in that respect, it's no different than any of the other aspects, except for the fact that it's probably even more constrained resources and more scarce for folks who want to see some of these different types of experiences. So they're taking different approaches. The Sundance New Frontier Central, which you can line up and once they open, you can go in and sign up on the wait list, but experiences like Scarecrow, you only get like seven or 10 people to see it over the course of the entire day. So unless that you're lined up there at a certain time before they would officially open at 10 a.m., then you would have to run in there and try to get on the list. So that's the more open-ended stuff the ray was, you know, they had about three hours of content for a 90-minute slot So you would need at least two different sessions to be able to try to see all the different stuff for me having access to the press hours is really really helpful just allows me to be able to Get in there and try to see as much as I can And so I end up seeing a majority of the content of the course of the first day and then try to pick up the other experiences after that but I was able to see all the different virtual reality experiences, the 360 videos and all the biodigital theater experiences this year. And the only thing that I wasn't able to see was the dance trail, which required iPhone, and I only have Android when I'm traveling. And so I wasn't able to see that. But all the other immersive experiences that I was able to see and For me, what's interesting about the Sundance Film Festival is that a lot of these storytelling experiences, they may be using these technologies or integrations that are not going to be in the consumer market anytime soon, just because it's a lot of logistics and difficult to pull off. But in terms of location-based entertainment and just showing and proving out what's even possible. And having it there at Sundance means that there's all these people that are from the industry that are able to come in and see what's possible with a lot of these immersive technologies. I know there's a lot of people who got into VR because they saw some of their first VR experiences at Sundance from the new frontier. The other thing that Milo was talking about is some of their work in curation at the space gallery, working with Paisley Smith, how Paisley and Milo were able to put together this whole show that was trying to have it so that you could go in and see all the different experiences. You know, having access to experiences is something that's very important for Milo. And in the curation experiences that they created with Paisley, both of them wanted to have it so that they could be able to see all the different experiences that they're able to curate. And also it was just interesting to hear Milo's journey into VR, starting with seeing some experiences from Kate Parsons and Ben Vance, who created the Irrational Exuberance. And they're both artists who create a variety of different experiences and curate. And just to hear that Milo was able to take some of their experiences and showing around to different places and then do the whole gig with Kaleidoscope and Delta and then just be comfortable and familiar enough for how to run the technology so that when the opening came up with Sundance, once they opened up for open call for submissions back in 2018, then they were able to apply and be able to essentially be the person at Sundance who does a lot of the wrangling of the technology to be able to see a lot of these experiences that are coming in and that At Sundance, they don't have OptiTrack. They don't have every single new latest technology. And so Milo does some traveling around LA and Shari travels around the world to be able to curate these different experiences and. You know, as curators, they have to be able to project out what things are going to be when it's finished. And so they have to see where it's at because hardly ever when curators are able to see a project for the first time, is it like fully baked, ready to be launched? There's still often a lot of work that needs to be done once it gets accepted. And so there's a lot of extrapolation to see where things are at, but to imagine where it's going to be by the time that the Sundance film festival is coming around. The other aspect that Milo talked about was the importance of the installation and the onboarding, the offboarding process. I think that's something in particular that I've seen over the last number of years for Sundance, where to have some deeper consideration for transitioning from coming outside of the experience and having some intermediary onboarding process of the installation, or what are the things that you're telling the person as they're entering in this experience, and then entering in the experience and then as they come out, then how do you help decompress or give them an additional way to transition from the VR experience back out into the world. And so that onboarding and offboarding process is something that has had an increased amount of consideration when they're looking at different experiences at Sundance. So this is much more into the physical installation and having like a whole physical installation that goes around it as well. And there's been a wide range of different approaches to this over the last number of years. And so it's difficult to break down without, you know, showing a photo and really being able to analyze all the different aspects. And that's something that I have unfortunately not been able to document all of these different installations, but I've definitely seen over the years that there's been an increased consideration. It's not just like having a headset there. You have to really think about what the larger physical installation that happens in the room, just thinking about how can you bring your world that you're representing within this virtual reality experience out into this physical installation space. And so there's been a number of different strategies and approaches of how folks have been doing that over the last number of years. And that Milo really believes in the medium and wants to see a lot more immersive art and just really pains them that a lot of the experiences that are at Sundance are not widely available for everybody to see. And so they want to see a future where there's enough distribution mechanisms and platforms and ways to get this work out there so that people can see a lot of this. Personally, Milo is interested in different experiences of identity in the body and being able to eventually have really long-term experiences with characters and so being able to build up relationships with characters and have a whole world and be totally immersed into a virtual world way beyond the scope of just a few minutes or even the length of an hour or so, but have much more extended experiences with characters within virtual reality. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to 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 list of supported podcasts, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
