The new edition of the CPH:Lab came to an end a few weeks ago and once again it has emerged as one of the most educational and motivating experiences offered to talents of the immersive scene today.
As in the 2022-2023 edition, we met the teams behind the projects selected for the CPH:Lab this year too and again we were thrilled and even a little moved by the wonderful ideas, enthusiasm and humble and inspiring attitude of these extraordinary artists.
We will present their works in this and in the following two articles, giving you some more information on the message they want to share and the state of development of their works.
But we will also see what the CPH:Lab has offered to these creatives, who bring with them so much ability to innovate an industry such as the immersive one and to share stories that make our narrative universe more and more fascinating every day.
In this article:
Tales of a Nomadic City
In a first-person VR experience, audiences encounter Mohamed, a former nomad living on the outskirts of Nouakchott (Mauritania), on a journey to one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Composed of layered collages of film and archives, the experience collapses temporalities, unfolding the extraordinary transformation of the city through time.
Tales of a Nomadic City is a project by Christian Vium and Med Lemine Rajel
A work born from the personal relationship with Nouakchott and its people
CHRISTIAN VIUM – Med is based in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and he is a filmmaker. He has an extensive network of collaborators and his own production studio in the city. We have been collaborating for several years and are also developing a feature film together. I have been involved in research in Nouakchott as an anthropologist for the past 20 years, so I know the city well.
MED LEMINE RAJEL – One of the foundations of this project is precisely this personal relationship we have with the city. I did not grow up here, but I came to it later and spent many years working in this city, creating a vivid and close relationship with it. This is also the case for Christian.
It is a special city because it is very modern and urban, but at the same time it is also a somewhat nomadic city: the whole nation comes from a nomadic background, of people who, fleeing from successive droughts, had to leave their territory and find another place to live. A very peculiar situation, which gave birth to a city that has multiple layers and which is difficult to frame. I think that’s its charm.
C. V. – At the core of the VR experience we are developing, Tales of a Nomadic City, which is now ready for post-production, is the concept of collaboration: we work with local people, to tell authentic stories that resonate with local audiences.
In fact, we think that our main audience is local, mainly young people, and we hope to offer them a meaningful experience. We want every young person in Nouakchott who wears the headset to see this experience to be able to almost imagine their father or their grandfather in the main character of our story. Through this character they can learn more about their city and its history. We are excited to see how the VR experience can facilitate dialogue between generations at a local level.
From the storytelling side, one of the particularities of our project is the way we try to collapse time in our narrative. We use rare archival footage and visual material from local private archives and larger archives and combine it with live action VR footage. The final product will tell the story and evolution of the city. Our production company Khora has some of the leading VR professionals in the industry to make this happen.
The impact of CPH:Lab on reducing complexity to share a simple and meaningful message
M. L. R. – The experience at CPH:Lab was very positive. The workshop helped us identify all the details and clarify the vision behind the creation and how the experience could work. From this point of view, the Lab played a fundamental role in the development of the project.
C. V. – We are new to VR so it was all exploration for us as well. We received a lot of inspiration from the other selected teams, and were put in touch with a very important mentor for us, Jihan El-Tahri (Big Sister Productions), an exceptional artist and documentary maker. This is something that I am certain will have a lasting effect on our work.
Perhaps the best choice we made during the workshop was not to tackle something too complex right from the start. We kept a simple structure for the experience and it was Med who had this insight, identifying the basic concept and logline of the project that we then worked on. In a VR experience you can go anywhere, but I think we had a very simple idea and a very simple message to share. We were able to add layers of complexity later, but we didn’t find ourselves drowning in challenges from the start. I think that was really good for our work.
Further developments
C. V. – We have filmed everything, we have access to the archive material, we have a strong team in place, so what we are looking for now is post-production funding and partners for distribution such as cultural institutions, museums, galleries, and festivals.
M. L. R. – In terms of impact and outreach, we want to bring headsets to local schools and community centers. That’s why we are interested in finding organizations or companies who could help us with the funding and distribution of Tales of a Nomadic City in Mauritania . We had some good meetings at the CPH:DOX market with potential partners, and have already secured partnerships with some of the most important cultural institutions in Mauritania and galleries in Nouakchott that are interested in exhibiting the work locally.
C. V. – In the future, we imagine developing a series out of this work that could look at various cities through a comparative lens. Finding partners interested in following this path with us could be very interesting: it would provide vantage points from which to try and understand what urbanization means on a global scale today. In the global South, it is very rapid and, unfortunately, we seldom hear the stories of people like those we work with. We want to give our audience the opportunity to experience urbanization from their point of view and compare different cities on the same topic.
After all, the 10 fastest growing cities globally are on the African continent and the speed of urbanization is exponential. It is a phenomenon that will become more and more extreme. So we have to somehow address this issue today, understand what it is and especially what it means for local populations.
Fully Automated Contact Zone (FACZ)
Two sites of rewilding – an attempt to rebalance ecosystems by introducing “wild foreign” organisms – collide inside a game-engine simulation: the Swiss Alps and my intestines. Created for dome environments and projection-mapped spaces, audiences are immersed inside ecosystems, zooming from the planetary, to the forest, to the molecular scale. Audio braids together scientist interviews, philosophical questions, and the artist’s intergenerational story.
Fully Automated Contact Zone is a project by Miriam Simun and Elijah Stevens
Rewilding and connecting in immersive environments
ELIJAH STEVENS – Fully Automated Contact Zone (FACZ) is about rewilding, an ecological process that consists of introducing an outside species into a dysbiotic or unhealthy environment, unbalanced in its biodiversity, to rebalance the health of that environment. Our work speaks of rewilding in two different environments: in the Swiss Alps, re-established with translocated lynx captured in Eastern Europe, and in Miriam’s gut where it happens through the ancient Mayan ferment Tepache de Tibicos, which comes from a cactus that grows along the US-Mexico border region.
It will be a work for domes and projection-mapped spaces. Miriam, the director, is very excited about the potential of these tools to immerse the audience and to transport them into their own bowels through the dome itself.
Miriam is a multimedia artist and they have worked in many different mediums; they started this project back in 2021 and over time it has taken many forms. They have taken photographs, done performances, received a commission from the IFA in Germany to make a video work rendered in Unreal Engine that is a 24-hour live stream.
This multiform project will eventually culminate in a feature-length documentary, but we both give great importance to the idea of working with an immersive setting first, either domes or projection-mapped spaces as said, that will allow us to really put people in these environments, where they might never go because they live far away from the Swiss Alps or because as human beings, well, we can’t enter our own gut.
Specifically we are using Unreal Engine to create the environment of the Alps and we will use a laparoscopic camera that Miriam will swallow and that will be sent into their intestines to film it. Our hope is to use photogrammetry software to render the laparoscopic footage in 3D and create a digital rendering, which we would place as a film in the dome for people to really consider the ecological and biological processes of rewilding.
This project is also about different ways of knowing, different forms of knowledge and how we embody it. And since knowledge is charged with sensoriality, I think that being immersed in a video work in a dome or in a projection-mapped spatial environment lends itself very much to this sensory way of knowing that calls for the activation of the whole body.
MIRIAM SIMUN – Elijah said it all so well! I’ll only add – that the digital nature of this work speaks not only to a way to bring audiences to places they can not go – like my gut – but also to the way biology research and science in general is being done ever more digitally. Instead of going into the field and walking around, scientists are using automated cameras, digital GPS devices, satellite cameras and AI to learn and know the ‘wild’ and the world – so Fully Automated Contact Zone (FACZ) is telling also the story about this transitory moment in how we know the wild, the re-wild. And using digital and algorithmically generated imagery to tell the story of knowing the world through digital and algorithmical means.
The impact of CPH:DOX on finding the right medium and mentorship
E. S. – I did not personally attend the Autumn session of the CPH:LAB with Miriam, but I can definitely say that the LAB really made the possibility of working with the dome environment a reality. Coming from a more traditional background, such as documentary filmmaking, and Miriam from the multimedia art space, neither of us had ever worked with domes before, so we hadn’t necessarily considered it as a mode of expression until CPH:LAB.
We were joined by Katy Yudin from Cosm as our mentor and it was a great match. Katy helped us reflect on the work, gave us constant feedback on our presentation and our materials, and even since the LAB ended she has continued to be an invaluable support in relation to the market and the figures it would have been most useful to have one-to-one meetings with. Working with domes, Katy was also able to advise us on people to connect with outside and this reinforced our enthusiasm for the potential of this work.
M.S – The CPH: LAB was amazing! Such a generous, smart and fun group of people coming together – it really fostered a collaborative environment and pushed us to think radically and creatively about how immersive technologies enable us to tell stories in new ways. And working with Katy these last months has been incredible – she has so much knowledge and experience, and sharing it with such generosity – it’s been invaluable.
Further developments
E. S. – Currently the most important thing we need is funding. We would like to collaborate with some technical producers who have worked on creating works for domes, and with distribution partners who are familiar with these technologies, so to find places to show this work: galleries, science museums, art museums or stand-alone domes that are increasingly being created.
We are also looking for a laparoscopic camera manufacturer to collaborate with to develop the part of the work specifically related to Miriam’s intestine.
M.S – And we are always happy to hear from scientists and ecologists working on rewilding! It’s important to create community and conversation around this hopeful – but complex – regeneration practice that is growing around the world.
Hermaphrogenesis
Hermaphrogenesis is a sensory experience that examines relationship with our bodies and the possibility of becoming through rearrangement. Using silicone replicas of internal organs the participants create androgynous organisms which populate a virtual ecosystem.
Hermaphrogenesis is a project by Marcin Gawin
Technology as an extension of the body
MARCIN GAWIN – I think the interest in the body has always been present in my practice: I have been fascinated by biology, by the mechanics of what happens inside us and in relation to us, physically. It’s a subject that can provide a lot of inspiration and which by its very nature can be explored artistically in many different ways.
In particular, I believe that technology can be considered an extension of the body and it’s capacities. From this point of view these external technologies present themselves as a form of appendices of our body.
That’s why I think the theme lends itself very well to using expanded reality or working with artificial intelligence, which is also, in a way, an expansion of words. And it is from this awareness that I decided to work on Hermaphrogenesis.
Hermaphrogenesis: a sensory experience to re-understand our bodies
M. G. – I created silicone casts of organs that participants use in the first phase of Hermaphrogenesis, rearranging them in the composition and order they want. Then in the second phase, this arrangement, which looks almost like a still life, is scanned and analyzed by computer vision and from this construction, essentially, the computer builds a description of the new organism that has just been created.
The description decoded by the computer system tells you what you have just put together, what kind of organism you have developed and how it will function based on parameters such as the position of the organs, the interaction they may have with one another, and so on.
All these different factors are obviously present in any kind of anatomy and have a very specific purpose: the position of the lungs, protected by the rib cage, or that of the liver placed on a particular side of the body. All these are not random decisions, but are closely linked to the evolutionary process of the organs and the body in general. Their location is strictly dependent on the other organs as a whole: the way one grows in a certain shape or manner constrains the adjacent organ to develop accordingly.
All these parameters, made new by the arrangement the user chooses, will be incorporated into the artificial intelligence system, which will analyze the composition and structure of this new, original body and give a response as to what has been generated and its characteristics.
The impact of the Lab on finding the right focus
M. G. – The LAB was an incredible opportunity to allow me to delve deeper into this topic and focus on specific aspects of it that I had not been able to consider until then. Each day we dealt with a different topic and so each day I found myself identifying and extracting different aspects of the project from the whole, on which I then focused my reflections.
From this point of view, I found the conversations with the mentors absolutely fundamental, as they helped me to find a direction. For a long time, in fact, there were so many strands that I struggled to find the clarity of the piece. So I think the main advantage of this first phase – leaving aside the undeniable usefulness of the final one to one market – was that it gave me the time and space to focus my work and really understand where I wanted to go with it.
Further developments
M. G. – At CPH:DOX, we won the ONASSIS ONX AWARD, which is a ten-hour online mentorship offered by the ONX team over a year.
We are therefore considering what the next steps are to realize this work. Certainly production and fundraising are key elements we will have to focus on, but we are also very interested in finding the right partners.
At the moment I have a team consisting of a creative technologist, a CGI artist and an XR researcher, who was also an applied biologist. So, probably the first step will be to have conversations and consultations with people from relevant scientific fields in order to place the project in a scientific context and put together a database from which the computational system can grow.
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