In my final episode of my coverage from Sundance New Frontier 2020, I speak with chief curator Shari Frilot about some of the themes of the line-up of XR experiences that were programmed this year. There were a number of themes the embodiment, social dynamics, and integrating more aspects of theater culminating in the new Biodigital Theatre this year featuring two social VR experiences (Atomu for 5 people and All Kinds of Limbo for 20 people) as well as Anti-Gone, which was a mixed reality play with a capacity of around 50 people.
We also talk about the dynamics of empathy, and how pieces like The Book of Distance and Still Here are providing embodied interactions that create connections to the pain of experiences. Frilot differentiates how a virtual reality simulation can’t replicate the full experience of trauma, but it can create embodied situations and environmental contexts that help to evoke the pains of an experience. Immersive experiences are painting with memories and embodied experiences of the audience, which means that XR as a medium can evoke associations of our own traumas, but it’s impossible to recreate the full context and character of experiences that unfold over a significant period of time (such as being incarcerated for 5, 10, or 20 years).
Another theme that came up this year was the increase of skepticism of technology. That’s seen in documentary films like Coded Bias and The Social Dilemma this year, The Great Hack and The Cleaners in previous years. This was explored more in depth in the New Frontier VR piece Persuasion Machines, and Frilot is actively looking to artists and creatives as they explore the dynamics of this emerging data economy and where they could fit into it.
Finally, we look at some of the underlying affordances of immersive storytelling and how it differs from other mediums like film. We explore the intersection of different mediums that had an influence on narrative feature films Zola and Spree, but also the combination of iPhone video composited in a cubist 360 video in Flowers and a Switchblade, the fusion of theater, Twitch.tv streaming, and open world exploration in Anti-Gone, the fusion of 360 video and literature in Go, and the combination of group ritual, embodied performance, and dance in Atomu.
Here are links to all of my Sundance 2020 coverage:
- ‘Scarecrow’ is a 1:1 Immersive Theater VR Piece with Thermal Haptics
- Group Ritual in VR: ‘Atomu’ & the Kikiyu Tribal Mythology on Gender Identity
- VR in Swimming Pools with AquaticVR Pionner Ballast VR & ‘SPACED OUT’
- ‘Breathe’ Visualizes How Breath Connects Us to Each Other in Social AR Experience
- YouTube VR Update: Google’s Largest Initiative in Virtual Reality
- Disney’s VR Production Design Innovations with ‘Myth: A Frozen Tale’
- Al Jazeera Uses VR & AR to Explore Life After Incarceration in ‘Still Here’
- ‘Persuasion Machines’ is Architectural Storytelling Against Surveillance Capitalism
- Embody The Life Cycle of a Mushroom in ‘Hypha’
- Haptic Chair Ride into Outer Space with ‘Living Distance’
- ‘Book of Distance’ has Breakthrough Immersive Storytelling Innovations
- ‘All Kinds of Limbo’ is a Musical Performance for 20 People in Quests.
- Site-Specific AR Installation with Hologram Ghosts in ‘Solastalgia’
- Questioning AI of Chomsky Trained with 60 Years of Data in ‘Chomsky vs Chomsky’
- Comparing Film to VR in a Series of Film Essays in ‘A Machine for Viewing’
- Combining Live Theater with Open World Exploration in ‘Anti-Gone’
- ‘Animalia Sum’ Blends Humor with a Unique Aesthetic of Photogrammetry-Captured Sculptures
- ‘Metamorphic’ Explores Context-Dependent Embodiment & Social Dynamics with Remixed Quill Art
- Sundance New Frontier Behind-the-Scenes with Curator Milo Talwani
- Sundance New Frontier Recap & Themes with Chief Curator Shari Frilot
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So this is the final episode of my series of looking at Sundance 2020, both the immersive storytelling innovations, technological innovations, as well as the experiential design process. So I wrap up my coverage of Sundance 2020 with a conversation with Chief Curator Shari Frillo, who started the New Frontier back in 2007 and has been doing this world-building exercise with virtual reality starting in 2012 with Nani de la Peña and Hunger in LA, and then 2014, at least two or three different virtual reality experiences, and then 2015 with a big range of virtual reality experiences. I first started going in 2016, so I've been for the last five years to be able to see the evolution, and it's become one of the premier places to see what the latest and greatest of immersive storytelling and immersive art is, on top of Tribeca, the Venice Film Festival, as well as South by Southwest. And so, I always like to sit down with Shari after I have a chance to see all the different work and unpack it, and to see what trends that she's seeing, and to try to make sense of it all as well. And so, that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Wasteless VR Podcast. So this interview with Shari happened on Thursday, January 30th, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival at Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:32.331] Shari Frilot: I'm Shari Frillo. I'm senior programmer here at Sundance Film Festival, and I'm the chief curator of New Frontier. And New Frontier was built in 2007 with the interest of following the innovation of storytelling as it was happening at the crossroads of film, art, and technology. So we've been involved with building platforms for new ways of telling story. The New Frontier, the architecture of it has always been an immersive platform. a kind of lounge space intended for people to interact with each other, as they are also drawn into gallery spaces where individual media works can be experienced very different than the kinds of films that you would find at the festival proper. So the approach itself, since that time, 2007, since the inception, has been to build a show that would introduce new ideas through the audience's body. Of course, the show has generated a lot of, and provoked a lot of innovation, including the reconstitution of VR in 2012, and the 2015 edition was kind of a seminal moment. in the resurrection of VR on the media landscape. That show was drawing engagements with this new realized VR technology from various walks of practice, performance, journalism, filmmaking. And I think it played a pretty big part in spawning what we're experiencing as a VR industry today. But that's certainly not where New Frontier stopped. We continue to keep pace. I mean, certainly, New Frontier is a world-building project, and the fact that so many festivals now have shows that focus on VR and immersive technologies was very much a part of what we had hoped could happen, and it's a kind of like wish-come-true type of thing. So now there is a world, and You know, I think maybe, I don't know if you've noticed that, this at all, but this year we are going deeper into our experimental roots, and looking, going to the edge, being with confidence that other festivals now are taking on the task of platforming really, really high quality VR works. Not to say that we don't have that in this show as well, but There's also now the latitude to engage with works that are still formative. Also to bring in works that tended to speak to each other and to expand the conversation of innovation and storytelling. And to take some experiments. Like build a biodigital theater.
[00:04:16.274] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, as I talk to a lot of different creators, what I find is that there's many different disciplines that are engaged in these immersive technologies. And I always like to ask their background. It ranges from architecture to theater and filmmaking and animation and mechanical engineering. And so there's a lot of different lenses that people are bringing into the space. And it brings in specific perspectives and frameworks to be able to make sense of it. And I love that diversity to be able to bring all those things together. But for you, I'm just curious to get a little bit more context as to your background and how you describe your orientation or your lens is that you're looking at this from.
[00:04:55.050] Shari Frilot: Well, I guess, you know, my background, it was an engineering background. You know, I went to school, engineering scholarship, and I didn't fulfill the degree because engineering, I found that I was really more interested in physics and patterns on a theoretical side. But, you know, I ended up exploring some of these patterns, my interest in pattern from an art perspective. Because at that time, theoretical physics was very much about particles and not necessarily about patterns. So I think through art I was able to explore some of the ideas and investigate the nature of patterns and consciousness and physical manifestation. So I started making collage, drawing images from different places, found imagery. onto paper and wanted to make some of those things move, so that's what brought video into my art practice. There was a curator who saw one of the films, and so it was like, this is actually a film, you should show it as a film. And so it got curated into a showcase of short films. And that's when I started to become more exposed to the theater, you know, film, cinema. I did have a stint in television as well, but it was all because of, you know, my fascination with the moving image and the power of it. But the spaces can quench that when I learned, when I had my first film. and found that my film was being programmed in the same kind of cookie cutter way. And I made a film about the relationship between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic structure of the universe and women's sexuality. But it was always put into this like gay black program that had nothing to do, you know, with what the movie I was trying to, and the conversations I was trying to spark. So I, you know, I came to understand the importance of space and the presentation of the work and the kind of conversations, you know, that that can really maximize what the work is going for. So, you know, it was at the end of the run of that short film that I was offered a festival. And I thought, well, I'm going to take it because I think we need to build another kind of festival to foster, you know, these kinds of conversations and to be more interesting and more exploratory in presenting experimental films. So, you know, that was the Mix Festival back in 1993 is when I did it. So I immediately, you know, not only stopped the practice of programming along themes, but juxtaposing films and their styles within programs. We built a lounge inside of the space so that people could go and hang out, as opposed to just like the regular cinema tech style. You go, you see the movie, and you leave, or you go to have coffee. But this was more a lounge. engaged for you to be really comfortable, and there was a bar. And then we also collaborated with Christine Vachon and Jim Lyon to take over the Anne Street Bookstore in New York City, which was a traditionally very straight porn shop. And we cleaned it all up and filled it with co-ed, queer, highly sexual films in there. It was called A Thousand Dreams of Desire. So it was really kind of like the first fully immersive cinematic installation that took over a whole building that I had ever done. And it was magic when that happened, because people knew that they weren't supposed to be in space, that the space generally didn't look like this. It was in the Wall Street district, which at that time was really just, Wall Street had nothing to do with the Lower East Side, which is where all this funky NASA stuff was happening with the rest of Mix. And you could really see the magic of the unexpected and being in a place where you weren't really zoned to be and doing things that you were not common and what magic that brought out in people and their conversations. I think that probably continues to be of interest to me, trying to design, working with Jamie McMurray, trying to come up with exhibition designs that will crack people open and to find joy at every corner or surprise, but not to let them fall, but to also catch them in a beautiful space so that they have a place to think about it and do something with it and people next to them to talk and not to have to worry about having the right language to talk about it but it's enough to be in the space and enough to feel a little weird and a little new and it's okay and in fact that that's intentional.
[00:09:28.897] Kent Bye: Yeah, I find that as I go into these virtual reality experiences and then talk to the creators, I find that, you know, they have their own language, I have my own language, but there's this calibration process, I think, that in the entire industry, as we go into these experiences, it's, you know, how do we talk about it, how we talk about our own experience and then how to design for it. You mentioned the patterns and the different themes that organically emerge, even if you're not trying to put things into very clean boxes. Actually, when you were talking about that, it reminded me of the film that I saw here of The Social Dilemma, which blends this documentary with the fiction, kind of seamlessly blurring the lines between the genres and and other films that have done that in the past as well. But in this time at the New Frontier, I think some of the themes I see at least are the social experiences, the embodied aspects of those, and different technological innovations, whether that's the, it's been about a year now that the Quest has been out, so we're starting to see experiences and mass social experiences. up to 20 people. And then, yeah, just a whole range of things with the new biodigital theater. So maybe you could just talk about some of the themes you saw emerge out of the pieces as you were programming this year, the things that you just saw as the things that were new or emerging.
[00:10:43.472] Shari Frilot: Well, certainly You know, the increased number of works, VR works, that involved other people, and you actually can see the other people inside of these experiences, and you're meant to interact with those other people inside of these experiences. you know, the pieces here at the festival represent only a portion of the number of works that we saw. And these works tend to be very, very, they need a lot of space. You know, if I had even a larger venue, I might have even shown more. But it was a very exciting thing to see. The works are really interesting, and I imagine you'll see a lot more of these as the year rolls out. The lens through which it made sense to make a selection was theater, because there is something very inherently theatrical to this work, but I saw that it was innovating from what we might talk about as immersive theater. Immersive theater, I thought about this too. We had an immersive theater last year, and we were originally starting to think about it as immersive theaters. And there's something not right about this, because first of all, the term immersive theater is a bit messy. It goes from everything to what Punch Drunk is doing to what DV Group is doing with VR. And I think ultimately what the term is trying to qualify is what a work does to the single viewer in immersing their senses. And this work, this new work, was not so much about immersing your senses, but it's while you're interacting with other people inside the space. It's not so much the senses, it's really more about finding community inside of an environment that is virtual and full of impossibility, and then the dynamic of community, what happens inside of that. And so that's theater. And the works that are inside the biodigital theater, I think, represent a portion of even the works that are in the show. Like Breathe, to a certain extent, is this. And this is not VR. I mean, I'm talking really about... the use of technology and the vision that it can give you these digital experiences, but still having other people within that digital experience, such as Breathe. Scarecrow is probably more the traditional immersive theater, although when you come out, oh, no spoiler. But it's stepping up the engagement of live performance in theater. So yeah, and even like a piece like the Book of Distance, which is really probably one of the more, it's like a one-on-one relationship that you have inside of the experience, but inside of the experience is the maker. He's in there telling you a very personal story about his grandfather offering family photographs and documents and he's physically in there moving you around and you're moving your body to make way for him to tell you this story that he actually is using a lot of the trappings of theater and rendering that in the virtual environment. So that, you know, this engagement with theater and digital experience, immersive experience, VR, it was a huge thing that, I guess, a big pattern or a new, it's a new theme that is emerging in a pretty powerful way. It certainly resonates with a lot of what's happening in Europe. Specifically, there's a huge interest on the parts of lots of theatrical companies there that are investing in the space. So I imagine this is just the beginning. We're going to see a lot more movement into that, even from the mainstream spaces, as we have already seen. So another thing that came up that I was so excited about was work that was engaging with the environment. I just only hoped that that could happen. And we got a lot of work that crossed our desks about the environment and works like Breathe, works like Haifa. You know, these works that tapping the ability of VR or XR, tapping the ability for this technology to be able to perceive your body in a way that is more than just what you can identify as your skin, something that extends beyond your skin. and that it is actually your physical body. These two works managed to do that in really powerful ways. With Breathe, I came out really very aware that my body was also the molecules that I'm exchanging with every living creature and I have a visceral sense that my body now has expanded beyond my skin. you know, with Haifa to embody a spore that becomes this mycelium to go into conversation with the trees and their root system was really profound, especially at a time when we really need to be having these kinds of conversations in an embodied way, not as a theoretical way, not as a piece of science. There's, you know, there's limitations of how engaging science and scientific information, the presentation of it, you know, it's codified, it's monetized, and oftentimes it's not so much a part of, like, your breathing, living experience. And so to, you know, have something like Haifa, where they developed it with the scientists down in Santiago, Chile, to really embody some of the scientific information and manifestation of the fungi kingdom is exactly, I think, the kind of direction and the kind of medicine that our society really needs to be able to have a different relationship to science in this way.
[00:16:18.851] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that both Haifa, as well as the Breathe, well, especially the Breathe, it contains this deeper philosophical shift, which is that we are not these isolated individuals, but we're fundamentally interdependent and interconnected through our breath. And then when I was talking to the director of Haifa, she was saying that, like, yeah, when you talk about the boundaries of what it means for our bodies, we have bacteria in our bodies. So is that a part of our bodies? Is it not? And with breathe, you're exchanging breath. And so trying to give people a direct embodied experience of that sense of the relationships with each other rather than seeing ourselves as these isolated entities, which I think is part of the big root of the crisis that we're in is that we are separated ourselves from the earth and not in relationship to it in a way that's harmonious. For me, just having that visual depiction of the sharing of the breath, I guess I never really thought about it. You can't see it. It's invisible. And so just to see it play out with those particle effects that are kind of drawn into you and to be able to play with them in different ways. And yeah, I think there's a deeper message there that I think is quite profound and maybe a little bit different take of like showing a bunch of statistics about climate change of trying to give a story about the math of the reality of the situation but to give people a much more embodied experience of that profound interconnectivity and you know I don't know how that necessarily will play out or if it'll land in people in some sort of theory of change but I'd like to think of like there would be some VR experiences that could be put out there into the world to help sort of see these different changes and But yeah, I don't know what you think about that in terms of the deeper shift of trying to think about ourselves in relationship rather than isolated.
[00:17:58.390] Shari Frilot: You know, certainly the promise of technologies like the Magic Leap demo one is to be able to make the unseen seen, the invisible visible. You know, there's so much that is a part of our reality that we can't see. And so because we can't see it, we start to think about reality in a different way. But with these technologies, you actually can see these things that have always been there, but you just haven't seen them. So you start to incorporate your perception of reality in a different way. You know with breathe and even with hypha as well. They do this type of thing and for me I come away with an understanding that I'm a part of there's a community of bacteria, there's a community of molecules and that are not separate from me, but I'm interacting with them. I'm in a collaborative relationship with these populations of molecules and bacteria, and it's a part of who I am also as a human being. And certainly the individualist approach of identification and identity is very much a part of who we are. We're individual people, we're diverse. But that's only half of who we are. The other half of who we are, and we're both the same. On a subatomic level, on a quantum level, quantum reality is a wave and particle at the same time. They seem to be separate, but they're not. They're actually simultaneous quantum particles, because a particle has something with mass, but if you try to measure the mass, you don't get the mass, you get the wave function. So that duality in just basic physical definition, it's a fundamental fact that everything is both wave and particle. So if we're thinking about ourselves as individuals, where's the wave a part of us? And so some of this kinds of work, like BREATHE and HIFA, shows us the decisions that we make, how we affect the things around us, people, molecules, bacteria, the environment, is very much also a part of us. It's our wave function. And certainly the ability for us to be able to see ourselves and the effects of our actions on scale is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Because we're doing these things and we're not really thinking or even perceiving the effects of our actions. And this kind of work is really about that.
[00:20:26.743] Kent Bye: And over the last three years, I'd say there's been an increasing number of documentaries at Sundance looking at different issues of technology. I think three years ago, there was The Cleaners that was looking at people who are moderating the social networks and the trauma that they went through. And then last year, there was The Great Hack, which was talking about different aspects of Facebook and the hijacking of our democracy. Potentially and then this year there's a number of different films from coded bias looking at the influence of algorithms and then there's the social dilemma looking at surveillance capitalism and social media and these Addictive loops that we get into and then one of the directors of the great hack created a VR piece this year exploring this whole concept of persuasion machines and one of the other directors, he's an architect, so taking a very architectural approach of having many different layers as they're telling the story through space. You have the projection map and you walk into another layer, then you have the virtual world, then you get oriented, and then you sort of start to walk through these portals and get all this information. So just to try to tell the story of technology and I saw a lot of different approaches this year from the films of coded bias and the source of dilemma and persuasion machines of trying to like Visualize the story that is a part of a fabric of our everyday lives but how do we illustrate the deeper narrative in the arc of what's happening and creating these matrix like metaphors or visualizations with putting a white mask over an african-american researchers face and then you know when she puts it over her face with the white mask and It detects her face. When she takes it away, it doesn't. It's like these very visceral explanations of aspects of algorithms that we have in our lives. But yeah, that was one of the things that you had mentioned to me, that there was a general awareness of skepticism around technology that you had seen. So I'm just wondering if you could speak about what you see in terms of that.
[00:22:16.822] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, I think maybe it's best to contextualize it as before this moment, I think, technology was really something that was blowing us all away and was having this really incredible impact on our personal lives. We could feel more powerful with these devices. We were able to do these things that we couldn't do before. So there's an embrace of technology, these new emerging technologies that really kind of hit a religious fervor after a certain point. I remember when, you know, Facebook and even Friendster, but like Facebook especially, when Facebook came out, and I wasn't on it, I would really get shamed for not being on it. I always had an instinct to not do it, but that was really surprising. And it speaks to a kind of a fervent embrace of this technology that really people were so excited about, they felt the power, it was making them feel powerful, and there was this utopian chapter. And the technology's agnostic, it is powerful, but I think now we've come into the age, in the last maybe three years I'd say, where the agendas that are now able to command particularly mobile technologies through the form of social platforms, you know, that agenda is driving us apart from each other and not necessarily, you know, having human needs or interests, humanity as the priority in those agendas. It's more of a corporate agenda. And, you know, after experiencing something like the last wave of elections, which brought Trump into being, Cambridge Analytica, that scandal and how these agendas were really having an effect on our reality that was completely not utopian at all. It flew in the face of what we were really getting excited about these technologies to begin with. So I think now we're seeing this in the films, we're seeing it in the work at New Frontier, I'm seeing it in conversations, that there is now a growing skepticism of technology. Now some of that is a little bit of, it's just technology, it's agnostic, but there is a shake out of this religious embrace of technology, I think it's a healthy thing. This movement toward becoming more critical about our devices and our relationship to the tech and what are they doing to us. How did we get to this society so fast? The data economy, how did all these big, giant pockets of wealth get generated within the last three to five years? To ask those questions as opposed to being blinded by our religious embrace of this is really healthy for our society. And it's a very, hopefully, timely thing because not only if we continue to go down the path of embracing the technological realm as it exists, as it is driven by these agendas that have nothing to do with the betterment of humanity, It not only will accelerate the issues of our time like global climate change, you know, it will also lead to our inability to understand ourselves and know ourselves, you know, especially the children, you know, the younger generations. There's a whole generation, I worry about them because they may never know themselves because if they have these devices and they go unchecked, it affects their neuroscience, it affects how they spend their time and how they deem what's interesting and what's important, what's of value. We need to stay human. We need to stay human.
[00:25:58.484] Kent Bye: One of the experiences that I had a really moving experience in was a book a distance and I thought that I was able to do a really great job of walking through this journey and to really ground me into this very specific context and to fill in the gaps where there were no other artifacts of memories perhaps but just maybe some photos and then to build the world around it, but then allow me to embody different roles into these spaces that would allow me to feel a part of this community or this family in a way that allowed me to feel connected to that context a lot more when the story progresses on. I loved how VR, its specific ability to put you into a context, whether that's being a spore or whether that's, you know, looking at someone's breath or being on a whole other planet, which is, you know, a lot to do with the site installation here, Solastalgia. But, you know, there's this ability to set a context. Last year, there was Traveling While Black, where I felt like it was able to capture a certain context where if there's African-Americans who have had shared experiences and There's someone who is white who hasn't had those shared experiences that they're in that same circle. It may change the conversation. But then if they're just together, then those shared experiences has a tenor of conversation that's different than if you were there. So just being a part of a context may change the course of a conversation. VR's ability to capture those contexts that we may not have access to, to be able to hear what those shared experiences might be. And Still Here was another example here where they're able to put me into these specific contexts and to show these infographics. And I found myself interviewing seven people in the course of a conversation, and two of which were two black women who were formerly incarcerated. And so But the VR experience had gave me these direct experiences of things that had gone through and I found myself asking them like, well, what was the most striking thing to you? And then they would be able to like isolate, well, being separated from my children or the difficulties in finding a job. Like both of these are being featured in this piece, but it was able to, in a way, the immersive technology pieces were able to set this context so that I was able to have conversations that I probably wouldn't have been able to know how to navigate otherwise. because it set this sort of shared experience, an archetypal shared experience that these people go through. And then there's going to be enough about that, that they distill down into a narrative component, but then also give you like more documentary infographic aspects, but just the power of that ability to go through an experience, have a shared context, and then be able to have a conversation that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
[00:28:34.268] Shari Frilot: You know, the context, I think, is VR can put you in these situations, and if you don't come from that walk of life, you get a taste of what it is. But I think what the shared part, what that is, is the trauma part. You'll never know what it is to be a black woman incarcerated for 17 years and coming back to a community that is completely different. You'll never know that, but what the VR experience of Still Here does is allow you to feel how painful that is. And it's the pain, that's the shared part. Because when you understand the pain, you start to ask questions differently. You develop different sensitivities and you ask the question in a more engaged way. If you're willing to share your pain with another person who is experiencing pain, then you'll have a very interesting, a much more interesting conversation than the, well, why do you feel pain?
[00:29:35.845] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I think there's been a lot of discussions about the empathy machine and the limits of that. Cause it sort of invokes this concept that you are going to be able to like just have an experience and it's just going to automatically imbue into your body, like all of the different contexts that have led up to that point. But I think it's limited in that way. Yeah.
[00:29:52.925] Shari Frilot: Yeah, well that's the problem with the empathy conversation, because oftentimes empathy, it's meant to signify the power of knowing an experience or a context. In the terms of a lot of how it's invoked with VR, like how they're empathy machines, they're giving you some kind of power over knowing something that you didn't know before. But what empathy is, is empathy is actually feeling something that another person might feel. Not having or owning their experience it's feeling something that the other person feels and so you can talk about within the realm of that feeling and You know, my trauma might be coming from someplace totally different than yours but if we both have a trauma we can actually use that lens of the trauma to get to know each other and have conversations about different things and in different ways that will allow us to access and offer way more of ourselves to each other than if I'm trying to tell you I understand now what you went through, you know.
[00:30:56.227] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I went to a philosophy conference, American Philosophical Association Eastern meeting back in 2019 and talking to a philosopher, he was saying this concept of epistemic closure, especially around racism, where you see someone's color of their skin and you say, oh, I know everything I need to know about them. You have all the knowledge you need just by one glance. And I think there's a risk of having a VR experience and having the same type of epistemic closure. Like, oh, I had this VR experience. I know exactly what it means to go through that now. It's a nuanced thing because it's something. And you're like, what is it? It's like you're getting a deeper, I think it's an embodied architectural, you feel it in your body in a sensory way. And so it does feel like it's an experience that's separate, but I kind of think of it as a window into the context or a portal or, you know, at least maybe it's enough to be able to ask the right questions or to get away from that idea of thinking you know everything, but to be able to allow you to ask the right question, to be able to interrogate more. to be able to have a conversation with somebody to maybe have them share their experience because I'm sure there's things that are going to be impossible for people to share and I wonder if things like the book a distance where you know there's aspects of experiences that people have gone through where they don't want to talk about it you know and then maybe there's a certain point where there's enough of the larger shared context that gets through there that maybe then they want to start to share. So I feel like there's this thread of oral history that I feel like there's a part of people telling their stories and their stories being heard and the importance of that. And talking to Roger Russ Williams recently, he's spent a year traveling with Traveling While Black and going around to these different locations and showing it and allowing these conversations between people who are white and people who are black and be able to have conversations that probably wouldn't have been able to happen without people who are in this depth of their trauma versus people who are like, oh, this is a thing that happens. And then to be able to have these opportunities to make these connections and conversations that are able to maybe set a common context between them. I don't know if it's a common context or at least, you know, trying to release some barriers. I guess I'm struggling for the language. Just find out how to describe what that is.
[00:33:07.666] Shari Frilot: It's a wonderful place to be, to build this language. I mean, that's what's so great about this kind of experience is because we thought we had a language to talk about this and we're being pushed to develop it more. And that's exactly where we need to be, you know. With the Book of Distance, that piece, you know, this is a story that we all thought we knew. And certainly I didn't know about the Canadian context until I saw this piece. I didn't realize that Canada shared this kind of history with America during World War II. But certainly you can read, you know, you can read about the internment, the Japanese internment and what it did to the families and, you know, it's academically, intellectually, you know that was wrong. You don't really know what it did to the families. You don't know how it built a psychology for those families that went through it because you didn't go through it. What's so great about that experience is that you actually are cast as a family member. and you're actually building the farm with them, and you're with the maker, and he's talking to you about their dreams, and you're actually going through the motions of manifesting those dreams, and then it's taken away from you, and you feel that. You feel the trauma, and for me, when I felt that, it was so emotional, and I realized that it was so painful that it was hard to talk about. for the first time I understood why it's so hard to talk about that experience and why it's hard to talk about something that traumatizes you. And I think class structures, racial structures, all this kind of nomenclature helps us talk about these really vulnerable spaces in a way that can give us some semblance of control. But really, the true power is at this point, especially the corrective power, let's say, because oftentimes those control structures just exacerbate the situation. When you have an experience, it takes you to this place where like, whoa. I really am speechless. You can actually see another person who is also speechless. And to take on the limitations of language, to build a community in a different way. And I think that's one of the things that is also very valuable in terms of sharing space. That's why it's so important, especially when VR came through the new frontier, make sure that people were staying in the same space after they came out of this and make it feel like it's okay to not talk. It's okay to fumble through conversations because something new's cracked open. I mean, we all live in the same society where there's a lot of injustice. We could talk about the trappings and the historical context of that injustice. But it's always going to be something different from me than it is to you. It's always going to be depending on where we stand in that system. But when art cracks us open to the vulnerable places, and we're able to be in community when that happens, that's really an opportunity to crack the whole thing, really, because that is a place of discovery and really is the frontier, even though that's a very colonial construct itself. But it's a place where it's a fresh place where we can build anew, because everything around us that tends to contribute to these problems of injustice is built to avoid being vulnerable with each other.
[00:36:50.648] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when I think about what's happening with the virtual reality, it seems like it's a combination of all these other mediums in some ways. There's aspects of the cinematic storytelling of film, there's video game components, there's user interface interactions that we can take affordances from the web and user interface design, there's literature and stories and there's theater and Architecture is also another one that we're pulling in a lot of those insights the spatial design different aspects of contemplation and medical applications biometric sensor data all this stuff that you know there seems to be For each of these they have their own storytelling languages that have been evolving and developing for a long long time and there feels like As we're combining them together, there's things that are taking aspects of each of them, but are bringing in new things. And so, how do you start to think about, when you start to compare, what can VR learn from film, and what can film learn from VR? I think the machine for viewing was... conversation where I was, you know, in this conversation with two film theorists and people who are primarily filmmakers, but creating a video essay, but having it seen through the lens of someone watching it in VR, but on a big screen with a theater full of people. But there's different aspects of looking at the affordances of each of these different mediums, whether it's video games and agency or like be able to make choices of user interface design, human-computer interaction, or the way that film can drive your emotions. And then there's aspects of the body that I think the virtual reality and augmented reality that we've had in theater and other environmental design that impacts our body in architecture. To fuse all these things together, it feels like there's this new aspects of presence and context and other things that maybe there's other things that are new that transcend all the other ones. And so I'm just curious to hear what you feel like VR is taking from these other mediums and what VR can give back to these mediums once we look at what it means to tell a story through the lens of VR and what can be fed back into these other mediums.
[00:38:50.641] Shari Frilot: Well, that's an interesting question. You know, certainly, and it's the right question to ask this year because we're seeing not only in the films and also VR, you know, the show, how technologies and digital platforms are engaged with human experience to actually manifest physical things in real time. Or how in a year where we have a film like Zola, that the whole story's just ripped right off of Twitter. And Jeanette takes it and creates a completely new aesthetic for film with these two opposing perspectives. And everybody's very well aware that it was a Twitter and they have their personal relationship to Twitter, so you get this new biometric relationship to the technology through the cinema, and the cinema is looking different, and she's a brilliant filmmaker. We're seeing those films, Spree's another example of that. So to ask the question about VR is actually a really interesting one. kind of that same question of how is cinema, how is technology influencing the aesthetics, let's say, of VR. So, for example, the piece called Flowers in a Switchblade. It's a great example. It's iPhone footage, and they sutured all of the footage into a 360, environment. Really hard to do. And they did it in such a way that you see the sutures. And that resonates quite powerfully with how we actually walk through the world halfway looking through their phones and all of our screens and in real life. And that's exactly what that experience feels like. So that's, in a certain way, the cinematic frame that's being presented through phone and screen culture and life mediated through screens, represented and recreated in a kind of cubist way in a VR environment. I thought that was a very significant piece for that. I've never seen anything like that. With Antigone, that's another kind of example. These are makers that are really thinking about how we equate reality with the thing that we see on the screen, and then really kind of interrogating it in different ways. With Antigone, there's all kinds of fractured perspectives, or bifurcated perspectives in that piece when you're watching it. You know it's a game engine, and it's being created right before your eyes. You're also very aware of how powerful gaming culture is. You know, you think about your kids and they're like, can't get them off the game, but I'm sitting here watching this game and it's a piece of theater and I'm looking at the technologies that the actors, aka players, are wearing to propel their characters on top of this game engine. a VR headset and a mocap suit. And I'm watching this gaming, but I'm also watching a human drama unfold as well. And this piece is taking on a story of these two kids going to the cinema. So it's all within this context of the cinema still being the thing that you wanna do, through all of these complicated cultures of screen culture and tech. And, you know, I remember when VR first came out and there were a lot of people saying, oh, you know, cinema's dead, we've got VR now. This points to where more the inevitability of these different realities, the relationship between the cinema and VR and XR and theater are just going to become more complicated. we're going to see more interesting web of relationships between these practices, as opposed to one taking over the other. And that's the goal. The goal is to create community between these practices that were, that up to now, because of commerce, specialized and industrialized, and you have these areas of film and theater, and VR's still trying to figure it out, but there's still like, They're trying to, the industry is probably more aligned with gaming. It's trying to gadgetize again, you know, so that you can sell, because you can sell gadgets, right? But when you have a theater company or, you know, a storyteller, a choreographer taking on a piece of technology and making work in such a way that you can drop at any point, for instance, like Otomu, right? This is not like a gadgetized strategy. We're going to take this technology, the Quest, or mobile VR headset, and create this experience, and it's the experience, that business model is going to be that experience moving all over the place, as opposed to selling gadgets. It's trying to get people to come together in a different way. And so that's, I feel like I'm not exactly answering your questions, kind of floating around, but you're asking a question about blowing away silos, really. And so it's hard to not talk about some of these that have to do with the theater. But you know, with the cinema, Because again, I think about literature and VR, like Go, that piece Go. I guess I could answer the question through that piece as well, the lens of that piece, because that piece Go is a piece of spoken word that's spatialized. And inside of that work, it's more cinematic than anything. They're not showing you, you're hearing Krauss, Mertz. You're hearing the author read his story and he's, you know, on a stage and you're in a spoken word venue and then all of a sudden as he is reading the story about this guy losing himself inside of his family, what you see starts to fall away and you're no longer in this venue, you are in a more of a cinematic environment. But these images don't have a literal relationship to the story because the story is, it's a story, you know, it's actually trying to evoke different images in your head, different feelings, and the makers of Go construct a cinematic environment around you that really is more of like a collage between the spoken word and what you're seeing as opposed to like illustrating what the story is telling you. And that is classic cinema. That's what cinema does in its finest form. Certainly, cinema does a lot of different things, but there's a tried and true strategy of cinema that really makes that piece unexpectedly powerful and interesting.
[00:45:29.751] Kent Bye: Well, you get to see a lot of the projects on the emerging technology and the new frontier, as it were, and I'm just curious, what type of experiences in immersive technologies do you want to have?
[00:45:42.759] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, one thing that I'm really compelled by the idea of not only an experience but a network of experiences that are alive and and collaborative that allow me to understand and to feel, you know, our reality and our identity as water. That's something that's very interesting to me. I think breathe kind of gets at this as well. Just the conservation of breath, it resonates quite powerfully with the conservation of water. That is to say there's no more, there's no new water ever. There's only so much water on the planet and breathe gets into that with the breath and our air and the molecules. You know, something that really, I'm very interested in an immersive experience that ties me to a lot of different people. A lot of people on the basis of a physical element that we share. Can we feel, there's a toxic waste site in my community and I'm experiencing it because I'm living closer to it. but there's a neighbor who lives a mile away, does not experience it as intensely, but it will affect them. I'm interested in an experience, a network of experiences that can tie us together and allow us to communicate or to at least be aware of a system that's coming toward us that is invisible, but that is key to our survival and putting us into communication, which will be key to surviving this threat. It's a vague answer to your question, but it's really more the contours of the kind of experience that I'm interested in, and I guess it kind of reflects a little bit of the selection in the show anyway, because I'm finding these kinds of things on different subject matters.
[00:47:36.723] Kent Bye: It sounds like it's more relational in the sense of how we're connected to each other, even if it's not impacting you directly, but it's impacting the larger network and just seeing how the macrocosm, as it were, affects your microcosm of your world and how you can connect those dots. I think that's sort of the challenge of what a lot of the issues we're facing as a planet is trying to connect those dots and to take what's not seen and to show it and to show all the unintended consequences and to find ways to give people embodied experiences to be able to give them a taste or a sense of How things that may not seem like they impact them directly are actually impacting them But it may be at one or two or three orders away. Is that kind of what you mean there?
[00:48:18.032] Shari Frilot: Yeah, I guess what it is, it's an experience that lets you embody the general theory of relativity. It's essentially what we're talking about here. And it's always been elusive, but we all know that that is what generates this reality. But it happens beyond the scale of our senses and our perception as we understand it today. But is that necessarily, can these technologies actually allow us to open up our minds to perceive differently and to scale our perception and communication with each other? And to do it in a way that can stay human and can link us to each other so that the value of that communication has to do with vulnerability as opposed to something being sold or bought or how we vote.
[00:49:14.504] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive technologies, immersive art, and immersive storytelling, what the ultimate potential of those might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:49:29.502] Shari Frilot: Well, you know, I think before I could ever answer that question, the challenge of the grip, the corporate grip that is on our immersive media environment, whether it's through social media, whether it's through the fact that, you know, a VR headset is the richest data collecting device that we have right now. That is an immersive environment that has become dangerous on a large scale level. Now, that has to be corrected, that has to be engaged, that has to be adjusted, that has to be imploded to a certain extent, or it has to be met with another engagement of immersion and technology. I don't know the answer to that yet, and that's certainly where, as far as I've gotten, is what the show looks like. And that's why my curatorial statement is called Soul Power. You know, I'm going back to the human and calling out the fact that, you know, our immersive environment has an agenda that is not really working for our best interests. To call it out, I think, is step one. I'm on step 1.5. Because I always look to the artists to find out, well, what are they doing? They're always making something new. They're inventing something that didn't exist before, and they will tell us the story. They will tell us the answer to this question. But I think that, you know, to build something, I guess the job has always been to stay a couple steps ahead of the devil. You know, to invent something, to provide a platform for an artist who's inventing something, and then, you know, that in five steps later, it gets co-opted, and then you just continue to stick with the artist because they're always going to run ahead of it. You know, I'd love to find a way to magnify the ability of artists to stay ahead, to stay five steps ahead of the devil. Cool.
[00:51:31.619] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:51:36.901] Shari Frilot: Well, I mean, we had a panel this year called the Creators Union. And it was intended to look at the data economy and what relationship do creators have to the data economy. Are we actually participating in this data economy? Data now is more expensive than oil. It's rapidly becoming a standard for our economy. And data is harvested when people touch their devices. but they touch their devices because they're going to content. So I would like the creators that tune into this podcast to think about your value in relationship to the data economy. And when you go into developing contracts and to think about your sustainability and how much power you actually have with platforms, to be able to dictate the terms of your data, to be able to participate in the trade of metadata that is harvested on your way to the content, And to have a fruitful and collaborative conversation with the platforms you're talking to, to maximize what happens with the data being generated on the way to your content. I want creators to open and even aggressively pursue conversations with platforms that may humanize this process from inside. The data economy is not going to go away, but I think we can humanize it. And I do think that the creator is going to have a big role if we can be brave enough. Always remember that in the old days of Hollywood, people were going to the Warner Brothers picture or the Paramount picture. They weren't really going to see, they didn't know the actors, they didn't know. But as the systems developed, The actors were like, well, wait a minute. They're coming to see me. They're not coming to see a Warner Brothers picture. And today we have a celebrity-driven society. And that's the power of when a creator takes their power, invest in it, come together around it, and change. Change the values of that industry. Now, I'm not advocating that we create another celebrity-driven culture because the devil will also snatch that and now we have like, really weird things happening in the movie industry around celebrity. But the point of it is, though, that it became artist-centered at a certain point when those actors came together. And we started to talk about the craft of acting, and it enhanced the value of the movies, of the cinema, as that became more important, you know, as opposed to just putting actors in movies and having them do almost theatrical business in front of the camera. The values of the creators need to be expressed, embraced, exercised, if we're going to get out of this inhuman digital landscape.
[00:54:35.006] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know there's some films like The Social Dilemma that I think is sort of laying out these paradoxes of things need to shift, but I don't think there's anyone in the world that has a clear vision for everything. But yeah, just there's a lot of questions that are left open there. But yeah, just I just wanted to thank you for joining me here on the podcast. And you know, I'd love coming to the New Frontier and seeing what you've been able to curate for over the course of the year and to be able to talk to all the different creators and to see what type of innovations that are happening on the different fronts. And yeah, just always a pleasure to sit down and unpack it all with you at the end of the festival. So thank you.
[00:55:09.543] Shari Frilot: Well, thanks for your continued interest in having conversations with me and I really do appreciate you making the space for the level of uncertainty that was in this conversation that I think might be a different tone than conversations in the past and allowing for that space because I think that's where we're at. It's okay to be uncertain. It's okay to not Know where this economy is going to go where this industry is going to go It's a really healthy uncertainty that we're experiencing and I want to encourage people to sit with it Because it's it's a moment that doesn't come often It's a moment that will pass and how it passes is how you will sit with it.
[00:55:47.680] Kent Bye: So thank you for letting me sit with it here Thank you. So that was shari freelo She's a senior programmer at Sundance as well as a chief curator at the new frontier at Sundance So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, some of the trends that Shari talked about saying was the more theatrical components, as well as the embodied components. And so having a whole biodigital theater, explicitly bringing more theatrical components there with some social VR experiences, all kinds of limbo, Otomo, as well as Aintekon, but also just generally embedding different theatrical elements within the production of different VR experiences. particularly Bukka Distance, where there was one-on-one theatrical interactions and embodied interactions. And for me, that was one of the highlights of the entire festival was the Bukka Distance. But also talking about Bukka Distance, as well as Still Here, and trying to unpack and put language and conceptual frameworks to understand what's happening with virtual reality. You know, Shari tends to embrace this not knowing and being on the new frontier, meaning that you're exploring out and just letting the phenomenological experiences settle in your body in a way without putting too much words or language around it. And so I think she appreciated taking the step back and just being comfortable with the paradox of not knowing. And I think that's been the whole point of a lot of the work that she's been focused on with the new frontier since it began back in 2007. But for me as somebody who's seen these experiences, I can't help myself but to try to talk about it put language and conceptual framework so so for me it was helpful to make this differentiation between pain and trauma where if you go through a virtual reality experience you're not actually going through the full embodied trauma that you would go through if you were going through Japanese internment or a being incarcerated as an African American woman in the United States for 5 or 10 or 20 years. Those are types of experiences that you can't distill down into a single virtual simulation. So it carries a deeper level of trauma to actually go through those types of experiences. But I think the differentiation that Shara was trying to make was that, well, maybe you could start to at least address some of the pain of the situation. And if you're able to create a simulation that you're in, that you can somehow project yourself into and maybe have a direct embodied experience to some extent, even though it's a simulation and synthetic and not real, but at least it's maybe able to hook into our previous experiences of our lives and be able to connect what we're experiencing, the virtual reality experience with what other people have gone through. And I think that there's some experiences this year that we're starting to do that in ways that I hadn't seen before. Still Here, as well as Book of Distance, I think in particular, exploring these different types of traumatic events. And with Still Here, trying to paint this archetypal picture of both the collective experience of what everybody goes through statistically, but also trying to boil it down to an individual's experience. And then the process of my interview afterward with the two women from the Women's Prison Association, you know, their direct experiences and how they related to these larger statistical stories that they were trying to show within the experience of Still Here. And, you know, one of the other big takeaways that I have from this conversation is a recognition of the technology industries that are involved in virtual reality and that how they may not all be completely neutral when it comes to protecting our data sovereignty and our privacy in the future. And of being in this situation where there's a handful of big players, especially Oculus and Facebook, and there's also HTC and Valve, which, you know, have a range of different approaches to privacy. I think that on the whole, Valve doesn't seem to be turning virtual reality into a big surveillance capitalism venture, although whatever policies they do have around that, it's been difficult to get them to talk about it on the record, even though I do feel like they're likely on the good side of history in that sense. The whole business model of surveillance capitalism was addressed in a lot of different movies and experiences this year at Sundance. So there was coded bias, which is more about artificial intelligence and the consolidation of AI into a handful of companies, as well as the social dilemma, talking about surveillance capitalism in general, and the influence of these algorithms on our lives, really focusing on a lot of the work from Tristan Harris and the humane technology movement that he's really been helping to catalyze. And then Persuasion Machines, which was covering a lot of the various different issues of data and what happens when these whole immersive environments of the future. So I think there's a little bit of like, what do we do about it? Past year, I did a couple of talks on the ethical and moral dilemmas of mixed reality at Augmented World Expo, as well as did a whole talk about presenting an XR ethical manifesto, but it still needs to propagate out and still continue to do a lot of that type of work. potentially get it published in different academic journals and get more people to flesh out different frameworks and, you know, give more of a pushback towards a free reign of a lot of what companies are doing right now when it comes to the future of our biometric data, what happens to it and how is that being recorded and how is that being potentially fed into these deeper algorithms for surveillance capitalism and creating these various different psychographic profiles. It's going to continue to be an issue and only from this point continue to increase with the risks that are out there so I think this year was different in the sense that both shari and talking to her and Some of the pieces that were starting to be curated was just this general skepticism and backlash to the potential threats for a lot of these technology companies and and what are the ways in that creators could be able to either become more of a conscious participant in the data economy or to find ways to tell the larger stories of how to have different levels of resistance. Lawrence Lessig talked about there's the four major areas to be able to talk about social dynamics of collective issues. He calls it the pathetic dot theory which I'm not a huge fan of that name but if you google that you'll be able to find that He sees that there's these four major influences, which is the economic vector. So the economy and the market dynamics, there's the cultural dynamics of the culture. So the cultural norms and the standards that are coming from a community, and then there's the law and the regulatory bodies that come in. Finally, there's the technological architecture. So the actual technology itself, and how it is engendering specific types of dynamics and communication dynamics and can enable other aspects like the exchange of value as well through things like decentralized networks or cryptocurrency. So you have the market dynamics, the cultural dynamics, the legal and law implications, as well as the technological architecture and code. So those are the different things that are all working together. And the thing that usually comes first is the technology architecture and code. And then there's some sort of market dynamics that usually come out of that. And then there's a certain culture that forms around that. And then from there, there's different legal frameworks that come up to be able to regulate it. So we're kind of at the point of, is there any sort of regulatory initiatives that could come from Congress? There's GDPR in Europe, does that something equivalent to that need to be applied here? When it comes to the future of biometric data, then there's individual states that have different regulations, like Illinois has their own regulations, but There's no federal framework to be able to talk about what happens to our biometric data. So it feels like there's still a lot of work to do because usually the technology and the architecture is so much further ahead, maybe five to 10 to 20 years ahead of the regulatory frameworks to be able to even conceive of the concept of what's even happening and how to come up with different laws to be able to regulate it. Still a bit of an open question as to whether or not regulation is even going to be an appropriate way to handle this type of dynamic. So there's a lot of open questions there, but there's a lot of different factors that this is an issue still needs to be addressed. And I think one of the things that starting to see more of, at least from Sundance is creative works that are starting to try to address different dynamics of this specifically around the experience called persuasion machines, which did an interview here earlier. I think overall, what I really appreciate about going to Sundance is to see a little bit of the cutting edge of what's possible with embodiment, with the different social dynamics, what's happening with trying to innovate when it comes to installations and workflow and throughput of audience through the different experiences, trying to blend different aspects of theater and cinematic film and artificial intelligence and blurring this all together into these immersive stories and to see what works, what doesn't work, how to combine elements of immersive theater, how to combine big social dynamics, lots of people in a situation, how to cultivate second order social dynamics so that you create a whole context, but then you wanna have emergent play come out of that, and how do you give directions, how do you cultivate those different types of behaviors, being able to have embodied interactions and interacting with other people. So there's a lot of different ways in which Sundance is really on the cutting edge of innovating of what's even possible. And so as I think about the dissemination of these concepts and ideas, then you see this go out to these cultural institutions, location based entertainment, you have other artists to see what's even possible to be able to have an experience, maybe it's something that doesn't go onto the mass consumer scale, but maybe there are certain principles that they can take from experiences that they see at places like Sundance and be able to embed that into immersive projects that are out there. And there's this whole movement of immersive art and immersive storytelling that are really trying to push the edge of what's possible. And for me, I'd say like the number one experience that I'd say to definitely try to go experience is the book of distance once that gets released and comes out. If you have a chance to go see Spaced Out, just to feel the experience of being in water and being able to experience virtual reality in water, that's something that is probably one of the most novel experiences that I had at Sundance, just in terms of immersion, in terms of embodiment. Definitely try to check out Metamorphic, because I think they're really doing a lot of really interesting things with embodiment and these group dynamics. All Kinds of Limbo was a favorite when it comes to having a social VR experience with lots of people and something that was just a lot of fun to be able to interact with other people. Breathe, I think is a really important experience to be able to show and have people have this connection between how their breath is connecting them, not only to the world around them and the atmosphere, but also to the people that are around them as well. The Chomsky versus Chomsky. I look forward to see this future of AI and how that continues to evolve. This is a great first iteration. Scarecrow in terms of a one-on-one interaction, able to try to create this emergent story based upon having another person that's there. And also Haifa was also a favorite in terms of an embodied experience, feeling like you're able to really feel grounded within what it feels like to be a fungi and to go through all the life cycle of a fungi. Anomaly is some great sense of humor and really stylistically very interesting. The living distance, having a really great embodied interaction. Persuasion machines, just being able to talk about some of these different issues of Surveillance capitalism and to really take a a spatial way of telling the story from the lens of architecture and space and many different layers of space So that's pretty much almost nearly all of the experiences that I just ran through The one I didn't talk about and do an interview because the creator wasn't there was there was a an experience of DMT called my trip which super trippy visuals, but the director wasn't there and And then I guess finally still here, it's a nice blend of virtual reality and blending that with photogrammetry and be able to tell a deeper archetypal story, but able to ground it into a personal story with 360 video, and then to be able to tell the difficult story of gentrification through augmented reality as well. So, and as I'm going through all of the major experiences, there's also the solastalgia, which I think is probably, you know, the most elaborate installation that was there and to be able to really feel transported into another world. Anyway, I think the connection to the climate was good to see both in solastalgia as well as breathe and, you know, trying to tell these hard stories of how we as individuals are connected to the larger ecosystem. And yeah, just really enjoyed sitting down with Shari to hear a little bit more of the context of her journey into this and to see how sometimes that she would get pigeonholed of art that she was creating based upon her identity and to see how is there a way to show work in a way that allows people to enter into a space where they're open to possibilities, able to see something and then potentially have a conversation with other people one-on-one to be able to explore different dynamics of an experience that they just had. And I think with the New Frontier, Shari and the whole team there has really created these opportunities in these environments to be able to explore these new realms of storytelling and be able to express yourself through this immersive art, and then be able to connect and form a community around that. People from around the world that have been coming year after year, a lot of familiar faces for me and for other folks to be able to see these experiences and hopefully we'll see continued distribution of these to different cultural institutions and other ways to be able to get these works out for folks to be able to watch them. So that's all I have for today and for this series of a deep dive into the immersive storytelling experiences from Sundance, some of the technological innovations, as well as the experiential design process of a lot of these creators. And so hopefully you've been able to enjoy this series. And if you have, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, share some of your favorite episodes with other folks, and please do consider becoming a member of the Patreon. I do rely upon donations from listeners like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. And as we move into what could be a period of economic contraction, I just hope that if you've enjoyed this, continue to support this independent journalism that I'm doing here with the Voices of VR. And I'll have lots of other series that I'll be diving into in terms of education and medicine, and lots of other experiences and work from all sorts of different disciplines and industries, trying to holistically cover the industry as best I can. And I'll be planning on giving some more talks and workshops here soon as well. So if you're interested in a deep dive into immersive storytelling or experiential design, please do sign up for my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.