Last week, we presented you with the first three projects selected for the 2023/2024 edition of the CPH:LAB. Today we are going to discover three more works, in order to take a closer look at their contents, their most creative aspects and the impact that the CPH:DOX lab in Copenhagen had on their development.
In this article:
Follow the Carnation
A virtual reality experience that uses archives pre and post Carnation Revolution – which took place on April 25, 1974 – overthrowing the longest dictatorship in Europe, to reflect on the fragility of modern democracy.
Follow the Carnation is a project by Catarina de Sousa and Lui Avallos
Looking at historical memory to reflect on democracy today
CATARINA DE SOUSA – Follow the Carnation is inspired by Portuguese poet Herberto Helder’s idea that “memory enters through the eyes“. Helder continues, “but all of this reproduces the relationship with space and time; I mean: a montage, a narrative notion of its own”.
Our aim is for the viewer to perceive the Portuguese revolution as a memory that is always under construction, using the immersion of virtual reality to weave together, through a participatory experience, archives of the past, intergenerational testimonies of those who lived through the dictatorship and the revolution and the democratic experience of the youngest: the children and grandchildren of the revolution.
LUI AVALLOS – The idea behind this work was originally to just create an archive piece on the Carnation Revolution. We did research and tried to put together different stories of that period. But personally I really understood our process the moment I started associating it with the general insurgency of the Far Right today.
So Follow the Carnation turned into a piece created not necessarily to directly discuss the issue but to open a channel for discussion through it. The archive pieces became a way to build a bridge between past, present and hopefully future. Our idea was to take testimonies from before, during and after the revolution and combine them with more recent testimonies from people belonging to groups and identities that are and will be directly affected by this extreme right-wing insurgency: queer people, immigrants and so on.
C. D. S. – Indeed, not only this cinematographic and performative journey recalls the revolution. It also seeks to warn of the dangers to democracy that we face today, with the growth of the Far Right in the country, as mentioned by Lui, with media disinformation and social fragmentation.
A project at the intersection of immersive technologies and auteur cinema
C. D. S. – Beyond the political objectives of preserving freedom, Follow the Carnation has a formal motivation: to investigate the intersection of immersive technologies and auteur cinema, contributing to the evolution of the language of virtual reality and cinema.
Using past and present archives, we want the viewer to expand the relationship between cinema and memory, knowing that fifty years after the revolution, the democratic equality that was fought for is trivialized and questioned.
L. A. – Moreover, I have always been interested in how technology can expand archives, and even more so in how the process of being in virtual reality effects them. This is something I reflected on with my previous work, Queer Utopia: Act I Cruising, too.
I think one of the premises of my work on virtual reality is precisely the question of whether we can, through embodiment, gestures and actions in virtual reality, recreate the archives and, in particular, expand their meaning and our relationship to them. Which, for me, also means to try and give a different meaning to and create a connection with memory in general.
C. D. S. – So, conceptually, we will work on time, images and memory and how memory becomes a tool to make life possible and builds images through time. We talk about memory studied in its functions, but also explored in terms of how it works through the medium of cinema and how we can create memory experiences in cinematographic forms.
In relation to time, we will explore the context of timelessness – crossing memories and archives of the past with intergenerational testimonies of today. The dangers and risks we face with the current threats to democracy, with the growth of the extreme right in the world and in the country, with disinformation, with the attempt to provoke dememory: with this project we want to contribute to ensuring that our future is not amputated.
L. A. – In this regard, I should mention that there are two specific audiences that make the most sense to me in the context of this work.
Firstly, it is important for us to create a bridge between generations through the use of technology. The younger generation is definitely one of our target audiences. With this project we can make the topic of democracy interesting for them as well. I think this is very important nowadays, when these extreme right-wing ideologies are being spread massively on the Internet or social media at a furious pace, and are becoming popular among the younger generation, despite all the possibilities they would have to educate themselves on the subject. Just think that in Portugal many of the youngest people who can now vote have voted for the extreme right, and this worries me a little! Follow the carnation, in a way, is our attempt to bring this topic to them.
But at the same time, we would also like to make virtual reality more accessible to the older generation. Since the one we talk about is a topic that interests them directly, we can use it as a contact to hopefully bring them closer to the technology through exhibitions, cultural centers, spaces where they will be given the opportunity to use it.
Impact of the CPH:LAB on finding the meaning of the work
L. A. – The CPH:LAB is an amazing platform both to evolve the project and to put us in touch with the industry and people who are interested in it and could help us put it together.
I don’t think I can put into words how much it has influenced the piece. At the beginning, last Autumn, our piece was still an archive work. Catarina is Portuguese but I am Brazilian and, to be honest, I was struggling a bit inside to really make this project my own. The subject matter obviously interested me, but it was about a historical event that was not necessarily related to my reality, my identity.
But then the methodology of the workshop – asking questions, making us think constantly – managed to introduce a new level to this piece. “Why are you telling this story?” was the question we heard most often. And I think it was directed at me, precisely to help me find a way to associate this work with something I felt was important.
Doing archive pieces is great, but doing archive pieces with a purpose and a passion is different and it was through CPH:LAB that I recognised this purpose. It made me realize that this historical event and these archives are directly connected to something really important today: democracy. I myself, as a queer immigrant now living in Portugal, am directly impacted by this: I obtained my citizenship this year, in the same year that the revolution turned 50, but also in the same year that the far right elected 50 deputies. Channeling this contrast and the fear that comes with it through this project was definitely possible thanks to the CPH:LAB.
C. D. S. – Follow the Carnation crosses different artistic languages, in particular cinema and virtual reality, to link the past and future of the cinematographic experience and, thematically, a civic and political past and future.
In this sense, it is a project that perfectly unites content and form, looking for new places to build discourse, reinvent images and tell stories. In order for history not to repeat itself, it is vital that memory and the means of communication are constantly being recreated.
This is therefore an immersive multi-voiced essay, bringing together the resistance of those who have been persecuted together with the labor, feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ movements that make up the plurality of Portuguese democracy and that paint a cultural, sociological and historical portrait of the country.
Further developments
L. A. – The project is currently in the initial production phase. We have a 360 prototype that we presented to the decision-makers in Copenhagen and at the moment the thing we need most is definitely funding. We don’t have specific national funds for art development, neither in Portugal nor in Brazil, so certainly initial funding is one of the biggest problems we face. As for the team, we already have one ready to work on the piece.
It would also be nice to make contacts with possible co-producers and find distribution opportunities. I think our job in general is just to keep developing the prototype and make it available so that people can see it and get in touch with us.
The Bald Altuus
Auto-fiction portrait of a Romanian immigrant family settling in the United States in the 1980’s, presented as an infinitely-generative video game. Staged as an American TV sitcom on endless repeat, stock digital avatars perform increasingly dysfunctional variations on the family drama while haunted by memories of the Ceaușescu regime.
The Bald Altuus is a project by Kat Mustatea and Peter Burr
A loop to reflect on family, politics, new media and technology
KAT MUSTATEA – The connection between the game engine and theater came about because I was reflecting on “The Bald Soprano“, a play by Romanian playwright Eugen Ionesco. The piece – theater of the absurd – is written as a textual loop, so it starts and ends in the same place, and has been performed continuously in Paris since the 1950s.
This infinite loop is something that today’s video game technology can easily recreate. NPC’s (non-player characters) are programmed with specific behaviors and then they are let loose in the world: you don’t know exactly what is going to happen, but there are always some patterns as to what they can do.
For me, it was really exciting to think about how to tell a story like this in which the actors, in a way, stage things over and over again, but with more or less subtle variations. It is never the same scene, but there is always a pattern—and these repetitions help to portray people trapped in larger systems of power.
The project is a critique of the three elements that converge: family, politics and technology.
On the one hand there is the family drama the characters enact: in psychoanalytic terms this is like people repeating past behaviors over and over again.
The obvious connection that then opens up is between this behavior and being cogs in a larger system of power, especially in totalitarian systems where one really has no agency or choice.
Finally, there is the reflection on the very technology we use to stage these kinds of mechanics of power. There is blatantly a top-down approach to the way technology is designed today, as evidenced, for example, by the availability of ‘one-size-fits-all’ avatars, which do not reflect all the cultural and physical differences among real-life humans.
This is an attitude towards technology that I have been reflecting on for several years now. I gave a TED talk in 2018 on Artificial Intelligence—no one was talking about it then to the extent it’s in the popular consciousness now. Yet, we could already see these blips on the horizon about what was coming.
At the time I wanted to point out that when people observed machines exhibiting behaviors that seemed human-like, what they were responding to was a kind of mimicry. Building machines that purposely mimic human behavior tends to activate our empathy mechanism, which is similar to what theater does to engage this same empathy mechanism. This led me to an analogy: Artificial Intelligence as a form of puppetry. I recognise the way a puppet might imitate me, an imperfect mimicry. But I also recognise that there is a puppet master that is making the puppet move in ways that seem human-like. There is someone else in control. And in technology it is crucial to understand that for every machine that seems to be exhibiting autonomous behavior, there is a human who made it so. It makes you think about power differently if you can learn to recognize there is a puppet master behind any technology you encounter.
So in Peter and my work we also talk about that: about approaching technology with a critical eye and looking at how we might employ these game engine mechanics in new and evocative ways that help us better understand our relationship with it.
Impact of the CPH:LAB on making the project possible
K. M. – I think the CPH:LAB basically made our project possible. Peter and I came to the workshop with just an idea. We each had our own artistic practices. When we met at Onassis ONX in New York, I told him I wanted to do something around the idea of a self-portrait of my family, but inspired by Ionesco and by the mechanics of loops. It seemed like such a coherent and complete concept, and we both shared an interest in working on live simulations, so it was a question of how it could be realized.
The first workshop, in October, was the first time we sat down to work on both text and visuals, and over the next few months we put together this six-minute prototype, which seems like a huge achievement when you consider we started with just the concept alone.
For the prototype we worked out the language of the world (a mixture of English and Romanian), came up with some conceptual ideas for how loops could work within a narrative, defined the visual language. Peter has a distinctive visual style and I think he was really the right kind of artist to work on this theme.
His visual world is quite brutal in a way, but then there is this very simple colour scheme that can also be read as ebullient. He combines the lavish green landscapes of Miami with brutalist architecture, mixing the Ceaușescu regime and these beautiful, vibrant South Florida landscapes.
During the CPH:LAB we talked a lot about the idea of brutality versus tenderness. You cannot make a work that is only brutal. You have to find those moments of human tenderness within these loops… and I think we succeeded, at least in the prototype.
So I think the workshop pushed us to focus and to set aside the time necessary to take such a project seriously. It was crucial in getting us to the point we’re at now.
Further developments
K. M. – We’ve been able to price out what it would take to make a complete episode, and by complete I mean a fully automated episode with all the mechanics of the game engine enacting these loops. The prototype we produced is six minutes and we imagine developing longer episodes for which we now want to raise the necessary funds.
As for the distribution, this is certainly an unusual project and I think we are oriented towards working with galleries and museums. We had very good meetings with curators at the CPH:DOX market. It is now just a matter of putting together the funding to get to the programming and define some of the other components we need to make a fully automated piece.
Garden Alchemy
Garden Alchemy is an interactive audiovisual multi-user Experimentarium: a dynamic, shared playground where music, hand-painted animation, and immersive installations unite in harmony. The garden serves as an active and sensual space for contemplation, exploring human encounters as ecological acts through an immersive experience of the sublime.
Garden Alchemy is a project by Michelle Kranot and Uri Kranot
Freeing yourself from bodily manifestations to find true connection with the other: the core of Garden Alchemy
URI KRANOT – This idea of experimentation stems from our desire to leave behind what we’ve been doing so far to try something completely different. It is no longer a linear narrative or an already constructed story that we would like the users to follow. Rather, we are developing a kind of playground that people can enter – our Garden – and create their own story, their own existence. And it is that existence that builds the narrative.
The most important part then becomes the connection, the way individuals in a virtual world become a whole with the other participants and create the story with them. It is an experimentarium because it is a much more difficult project to plan, it is not constructed and therefore it can be very unexpected. It could be incredibly effective or disastrously unsuccessful, depending on human behavior.
We are not, of course, throwing people into this world without guidance. We are, in fact, planting some seeds for things to happen. The garden is scalable, but in our vision it’s for 10 people entering the space with a performer. This performer initiates the story moments that might help us achieve what we want players to experience. But the effectiveness of this guide is also very much dependent on how much the participants want to get involved or how interested they are in following these seeds.
The philosophy behind what we do is the creation of a place where people can free themselves from their physical manifestation. We are rooted in our own bodies. We have a certain shape, a certain colour, a certain language, everything that defines who we are, and in fact sometimes even creates prejudices about us. This limits our connection with others. When we see someone else, we immediately have a preconception of who they are, where they come from, and so on.
We want to take all these preconceived notions out of the equation and drop our users into a world where they no longer look like themselves, they no longer look like human beings, but they all become free living beings. This creates opportunities to do things we would not normally do in life. And hopefully it will also open up new channels of communication, even with complete strangers.
Obviously we cannot completely free people from who they are, how they behave. If they are introverted, for example, then we can try to help them to move beyond that. But if they are uncomfortable even in a virtual space, then their path will probably be different. They will see a world that is not our world, it is a painted garden, it is very beautiful, but they may miss the next level, which is the connection and what happens because you are connected.
Impact of the CPH:LAB to go beyond traditional immersive work
U. K. – I was also a mentor at CPH:LAB a few years ago, so my relationship with them is very interesting. When we applied for the lab, I asked Mark (a/n Atkin, CPH:LAB’s head of studies) if he thought it was a good idea. We didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. He encouraged our participation and it was the right choice for us: it was incredibly encouraging and inspiring to be among colleagues and fellow students, and of course mentors, to see and feel that you are at the forefront of this experimental approach, surrounded by people doing things that go beyond traditional immersive work.
Also very important was the week we spent in Copenhagen during the festival. We participated in the market and I think it was a great experience because of the respect we received. Sometimes you feel like a content provider and almost on display when you participate in a market. At CPH:DOX it was the opposite. We were asked who we wanted to meet, we were given advice on which direction to take and every person we met was fantastic.
Presenting at the Symposium was also a great experience that everyone enjoyed. You really get the impression that the immersive part of this festival is not the ghetto, but the main event. I think it was the first time that the documentary community felt like there was a spotlight on this area.
I think the most positive aspect for us was the fact that people took the time to visit and try out our prototype. Some of them almost became our promoters, encouraging people to drop in and creating a buzz around what we had created. It was a good feeling that was reinforced by winning the Eurimages New Lab Award for Innovation, which grants €20,000 to innovative and experimental projects in development.
Further Developments
U. K. – We are quite advanced in the development of Garden Alchemy and at CPH:DOX we presented the prototype, which already shows a very solid concept. People come into a garden and they can already see our style, they can see how the hand-painted organic elements work in our 3D digital space. So the prototype already defines the technology we are using.
Because of our previous experience with multi-user, we are looking at something live that is easily configurable. At the moment we have only presented the work with two participants and some placeholders. But we seem to be on the right track.
We are now moving into production, which we intend to do in the next few months. We also want to develop the whole audiovisual aspect. We want music, we want to accompany the opera with a concert every night.
We worked together with Khora to develop all this, and of course I think it is very important to mention that, like our other work, is a research project.
We are researchers at The Animation Workshop at VIA University College. If part of our work is dedicated to directing, another part is dedicated to research. We will also write about this piece, to gather the knowledge we have gained in its development.
Discover the first three LAB projects in our first article: CPH:LAB 2024: Tales of a Nomadic City, Fully Automated Contact Zone, Hermaphrogenesis
Read more about how the lab works in our interview to Maïwenn Blunat, CPH:LAB and Interactive exhibition Manager
You can read more about Garden Alchemy in our interview on the Biennale College experience.
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