After Goliath: Playing with reality, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR Immersive Work at Venezia78, Anagram and Floréal return to the Venice Film Festival with a new project: Impulse: Playing with Reality.
Impulse will attend the Venice Gap-Financing (September 1-3 at Lido, Venice) for the opportunity to close the international financing, through one-to-one meetings with international decision-makers. We discussed this new work with the team developing it, May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy, to better understand what they expect from the market and Impulse’s connection to the acclaimed Goliath. Here’s what they told us.
At the core of Impulse: Playing with Reality
Impulse: Playing with Reality is a groundbreaking Mixed Reality (MR) experience that playfully explores what it means to live with ADHD. The piece focuses on four individuals who after looking back post diagnosis had profound insight into just how affected their lives had been. The core message is one of trying to understand the other. To be able to reflect on your own behaviour and from there attempt to hear other people, to gain insight into why they react and behave the way they do.
Connections with Goliath: Playing with Reality
Each Playing with Reality episode uses immersive technology to take people into the first hand experience of a number of mental health conditions—also questioning how we come to see these conditions, question biases and reflect on how individually we perceive our shared reality.
On the choices about technology
This piece is riffing around Mixed Reality. It’s a metaphor for how we process information. We can be in the same room but be drawn by different things. Attention and focus are important elements of ADHD or ADD. ADHD is something that is being discussed a lot and people have a lot of opinions about what it is, but really understanding from the first person perspective how it feels is something we felt was missing.
We believe MR can place an audience in a position of tentative vulnerability and, with consideration, we can curate a sense of searching. In this semi familiar headspace, while hearing someone else’s account, reflecting on how our own mind works, we want to sensitise people to the breadth of what other people might be perceiving. Ultimately it’s about deepening our relationship with others. Mixed reality has the potential to meld the senses, so you have the familiar and the sublime to play between. We are developing for the Meta Quest 3 and keeping the design choices with backwards compatibility in mind.
On the Venice Gap-Financing Market
We are now in production on Impulse to follow Goliath in the Playing With Reality collection.
We have spent the last year in deep research on the subject talking to some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and conducting interviews with people who have the condition known as ADHD to try and get to the bottom of what it is, how it affects people’s lives and where society intersects the condition.
In going to the Venice Gap Financing we hope to amplify the message of Playing With Reality. We have a slate on the horizon and want to find partners and allies to help realise this goal. We currently have Meta, Games for Change, CNC and Tides Foundation (awarded by Unity for Humanity) on board for development of the project. We believe in the project and want to get it out there in the best possible way to as many people as possible.
Impulse: Playing with Reality (United Kingdom, France) is an immersive project created by May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy. You can find out more about their work on Anagram’s official website and follow real-time updates on their instagram page.
The 2023 Venice Gap-Financing will take place at the Hotel Excelsior in Lido, Venice, from September 1 to 3. You can download the official brochure in pdf format at the following link: Venice Gap-Financing
