The DocLab section of the IDFA is a key event for digital creation, in the broadest sense of the term, and returns this year with a new program of excellence, and a professional Forum showcasing future projects in the sector. Caspar Sonnen, programmer since 2007, talks to us about this essential event.
- IDFA DocLab Forum
- IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling
- IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction
- IDFA DocLab Spotlight
Cover: ROAMANCE, Stanislaw Liguzinski, Ibrahim Quraishi
Happy 18th edition, IDFA DocLab!
Karen Cirillo – So let’s start with the theme: This Is Not a Simulation.
Caspar Sonnen – DocLab is turning 18 this year, which is a reality check and a great provocation to look around and explore the relationship between art and technology. Technology has allowed us to create unbelievable and truly personalized versions of reality. But having digital access to everything everywhere at once has taken reality out of context, obscuring our perceptions and making it harder to connect with things that we don’t want to see.
Over the years new media, AI and VR have enabled us to step into astonishing new worlds, so much so that some people seriously believe reality might actually be a simulation itself. Something to play with, disrupt and walk away from if we don’t like it anymore.
But for everyone else, reality is not a game, It is not something we can walk away from. Reality is a shared experience, and in many ways, it is that collective experience of reality that feels increasingly broken.
The title for this year’s theme was inspired by THE SHARED INDIVIDUAL, a project we presented in 2016 when VR still was this magical new thing. Mads Damsbo from Makropol and Bombina Bombast pitched us an experiment that, if it worked, would allow 40 people in VR headsets to collectively see a 360 camera feed from someone live on stage. We joined forces with POPKRAFT and Diversion Cinema to make it possible. In the experience, 40 people became one person. It felt like a coming-of-age moment for VR, the first time we had a collective, live VR experience in the same space. It started with the artist on stage saying, ‘This is not a simulation.’ And it ended up with everybody taking off the headsets and finding themselves in a completely different space than they originally sat down in. The artists showed us the power of VR to transport us beyond reality, but also radically grounded and connected the audience to the physical here and now.
Looking back at 18 years, this is what makes immersive documentary art such a powerful art form. With the program this year, we present 28 works that invite the audience not to escape, but embrace reality. To explore both the playfulness and pain, the beauty and the unpredictability. To discover and come to terms with the fact that reality is not a simulation.
Funny enough, one of the program’s biggest works is not in the DocLab exhibition, but is a film created by the same producer who brought us THE SHARED INDIVIDUAL. Back in 2019, they came to us with an early-stage artificial intelligence project, a rudimentary installation that tried to generate a Werner Herzog documentary.
The project went through different iterations, including last year’s William Quayle’s PYRAMID, that was created out of ‘the leftovers’, all the gibberish their AI churned out. But finally this year, they submitted the realized film, ABOUT A HERO, which ended up becoming the opening film of IDFA 2024.
K.C. – It’s really nice to see the development, not only of the work within DocLab, but also the legitimizing of these formats in a way that’s no longer just segregated into this is just this, and that is just that. I think there’s more of a fluidity and an interactivity now.
C.S. – Yes, totally, and it’s something we should celebrate. That’s why “This is not a simulation” came back to the forefront for us as a moment for this year in two ways.
One, reality is broken. Reality is not a joke. The world around us that we see through the lens of documentary arts and that we see through our own very eyes can be many different things. reality is real, but it’s broken. This is not a simulation refers, on the one hand, to the fact that it is happening. Climate change is happening, the things that are happening politically, the wars that are happening, are real. And it means that this is not a drill, this is not a simulation. How we relate to that is real.
Two, if we look at where we were 18 years ago and where we are now, we can say that immersive art is a real art form, it’s a real community. It’s still incredibly fluid and undisciplined and undefined and complex in many ways. But it is not a simulation. This field is not just testing technology. We have gotten to a point where the movie created out of AI is not a gimmick. It’s interesting to think why, and I think that’s because not just the technology has gotten further, it’s also the artists. First and foremost, it’s the human factor. It’s been beautiful to see how the field has been maturing, still incredibly young and playful as we are at 18, but how these new art forms are getting to a point where they have a lot to say.
The evolution of digital works, then AI
K.C. – You have some of AI pieces that are about AI, but also pieces that use AI to generate visuals that are playing with this idea of memory, like BURN FROM ABSENCE or SINCERELY, VICTOR PIKE. And how we use AI to fill in the gaps of histories that aren’t recorded by more traditional documentary methods. So this idea of ‘This is not a simulation’, and then these pieces are using AI in a way that is reflecting on what is reality.
C.S. – We’re as dazzled by new developments and technologies as the next person. When we started, interactive web experiences were the thing that got all the spotlight and where the investments went. As the internet matured, VR came around, and that’s where all the money and attention went to. Now we are having this interesting moment where we see the investments are moving to AI. And we also see the pressure to deliver and ‘return on investment’ is on the horizon for AI as well.
Thanks to the investments in people and computing power, AI creates amazing results quickly. But for artists, this is also a challenge. Where lies your skill, your authorship? What do you want to say with AI? New tools are coming out at a crazy pace, but what doesn’t go really fast is creating meaningful art, establishing a new language with this. In 2018, with MIT we started exploring the relationship between authorship and AI, and just like with interactive and VR, we have seen that it takes time to create a new artistic language.
And that goes hand in hand with the existential questions around the ethics of new technology. Just like filmmakers struggle with parts of their industry, new media artists struggle with the terms or ways AI is being developed and marketed. With the rise of AI, there’s a very strong and important debate happening within the art, media and cultural worlds around where this data is coming from and where the technology is used. It is very interesting to see how different artists navigate these ethical challenges.
But not all AI projects are about AI. For many it has become just one of the tools in the toolbox.
K.C. – It’s also about how the artist is using it.
C.S. – Yes, but it’s also how we are seeing it.
There’s a lot attention on AI production and lot of beautiful projects being made there. But in our program, you can also see so many other forms of XR, interactive storytelling and immersive art. We have the theater group Ontroerend Goed presenting THANKS FOR BEING HERE, one of the most beautiful hybrids of interactive theater and movie making. There is Sister Sylvester returning to the festival with DRINKING BRECHT, a project that explores DNA and bio-art. Or the physical live performance ME A DEPICTION by Lisa Schamle. We see the whole spectrum within the program this year, and we’re quite excited to see how those different trajectories of different technologies and different types of storytelling and different formats, how they influence each other and inspire each other as well.
This Is Not a Simulation, an IDFA line-up 2024
C.S. – Looking at the overall selection, this might very well be our most undisciplined program ever. There are very clear formats and technologies being used, but we can see how artists flow increasingly between them. For instance, in our planetarium program we’ve been doing R&D into the potential of full dome to create collective experiences and versions of different works in the exhibition.
For instance, DOLLHOUSE FOR QUEER IMAGINARIES is a project developed for VRChat, and through conversations with Electric South and POPKRAFT we developed a physical installation version where multiple people get to meet in the VRChat world and on site. But then, with our friends at WeMakeVR and the Amsterdam-based ARTIS-Planetarium we’re also creating a live performance version where the artists will be on stage in the center of the planetarium, and everybody in the audience gets to see what they see inside the headset. We’re sitting in a planetarium watching somebody the same size as us standing in a virtual dollhouse projected around them, so it’s going to be quite an interesting game of scale and, if all goes well, people in the audience will also step into that virtual space, as well as people from the community that helped co-create this project being present remotely from South Africa.
Other projects we have created experimental full dome versions for include BURN FROM ABSENCE (in collaboration with ONX and Phi Centre), the AI film SINCERELY VICTOR PIKE and our first full dome presentation of a book – GOOGLE VOLUME 2 – in collaboration with JBE.
K.C.- I’m excited to see works that are both in the VR gallery, but also as a version in the planetarium, to see the two very different kinds of interactive and experiential experiences.
C.S. – It’s also important to analyze why and to see how important it is to acknowledge there is a crucial difference between watching a film on your phone and watching a film in a cinema with 500 other people. There’s a crucial difference, context matters. Distance is real. Sometimes we need to work harder to get a story from afar seen or felt in the right way in a different place. Sometimes we need to work harder to actually open our eyes for a story that’s happening next door to us. I think that’s one of the things that in the program, we see so many different versions and different formats being explored by artists really playing with the meaning of collectivity, the meaning of individuality, the meaning of being in control or giving away control, the meaning of inviting somebody to have agency within an experience.
I think a great example of this is THE LIMINAL, which is a physical installation that primarily uses spatial audio, inviting up to four people to engage with a physical wall that the artist has taken as a symbol or a metaphor for the story he wanted to explore, thinking about what is in between space – in times when space is so violently being fought for. The audience is invited, simply through audio, to approach this wall and find stories within this wall. This is an artist, Alaa Minawi, that we haven’t shown work by before, but we have been following them over the years.
There is a sense of exhaustion within the XR field, of having no business model yet. We’ve seen how there’s a lot of artists and studios, production companies, venues showing these works – there are amazing case studies of success. But there’s also decades of hustling and trying to create this space. Sometimes it’s hard to keep sticking your neck out and radically play. I think at the same time, if we look at the field, we see more amazing works being submitted than ever. And I think it’s that sort of willingness to play, that sort of radical need for experimentation towards something new and real, that we also wanted to acknowledge in the program.
To honor and fuel the inherent playfulness and curiousity of the immersive field, we’re doing a new thing this year called DocLab Playrooms, which is a way to open the quite closed festival programming setup to have three days where we invite new and established artists to present in a very playful way to explore something new. One of them is called THE BODY AMORPHOUS, where Anagram is going to be testing out some early ideas and creating a space and inviting the audience to play with the perception of their own body. It’s going to be fun, and it’s also a way for them to playtest certain ideas that might end up in a future VR project that they are also pitching within the DocLab Forum, our co-financing market for XR. It’s a way of acknowledging that as harsh and serious as reality is, we do need to play and test out and interact, including the friction that comes with that.
Another example of a playroom is the HANDLE WITH CARE, where Ontroerend Goed are presenting an industry-only prototype of a new automated theatrical experience without actors. And the third playroom is HOW TO NOT MAKE IT ABOUT AI. Because I think, as we’ve seen also in this conversation, it is hard to not talk about AI. There’s so much work there, so much investment in it, so much resistance against it. When we were going through the different projects, the projects that we liked the most in AI were all the ones that we could very clearly see what the role of the human artist was. AI has gotten to a point that it’s very easy to create something impressive, and then if you’re looking at it, you often feel like, ‘what did the artist actually do besides connecting a few things together and creating some fun prompts?’ In this playroom we’re inviting some of the artists here, both working with AI and not working with AI, to see if they can make AI do things that it can’t do or see what happens if you use something other than AI for certain tasks and questions.
The collective side of an (digital) experience
K.C. – Can I ask, just to bring it back to 18 years ago – have the collective pieces come a long way since that first one?
C.S. – As far a collective experiences go, it’s also the definition question, right? Is cinema a collective experience or not? It’s a fact that we watch something at the same time in a cinema, but it’s also essentially an individual process. You’re not interacting together as much as in a VRChat
experience. Watching a film alone is not the same though. Kind of like the experience of reality, there is a difference between a collective context (cinema) and a collective experience (VRChat). We all have a very different individual experience of reality, however, we all feel a lot better when we realize that we’re not alone and we share it with others. This is one of the most powerful artistic elements of spatial art to play with. So whether you experience it at the same time, in the same space, live in synchronicity or generated by a computer is incredibly meaningful.
So yes, we are seeing a lot more collective experiences this year. ANCESTORS by The Smartphone Orchestra is a great example of this, because it’s using the smartphones we all have in our pockets. It’s creating a story, an audience experience where it’s more than just our devices being the platform for something collective to be distributed through. It’s a beautiful interactive experience turning the captive audience into one big generational family. We have ROAMANCE, which like all great new media artworks uses both the potential and limitations of VR to create a deeply unique, immersive, non-physical and physical experience by allowing you to go on a virtual date with somebody. You go through various stages of what a date traditionally includes, but then by creating this within a virtual environment and having two people both in headsets, they open it up to what I think is very meaningful. You start the date without a body, just as a voice in a virtual void. There you find somebody else, and if all things go well, when you get to the next chapter, you sculpt each other’s virtual body. That’s a moment where you realize, yes, there is something happening here that allows me to have an experience I could otherwise not have. What we see all the time is people shaping their own avatars, curating their own body image online, but actually having somebody else do that for you creates a conversation around agency and consent and awkwardness and around what is the other, and what is real.
K.C. – With technology and these experiences, sometimes you have really moving moments with another human being, because you’re thrust in this very vulnerable space where you don’t have control over your own body, and the spaces are scary and anonymous, but yet also very intimate. And it’s ironic that it can make you feel so much more than you would in a traditional situation.
C.S. – Let’s not forget the beauty of art is that it is real, but it is not the real world like it is.
As our world has become increasingly digitized, simulated, intangible, it is really important that we keep reminding ourselves from second to second that reality is physical and real. Reality is amazing, because our perceptions can be played with in such beautiful ways. This is the foundation of art. It is challenging our perception, it is restructuring our perceptions, it is refocusing us to different things. It doesn’t change the fact that we are all sharing a single planet that is very real. This is not a simulation.
More: #1492: IDFA DocLab Curators Preview 2024 Slate of AI & XR Immersive Documentaries by Kent Bye
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