Editorial⎪Coming back from Tribeca Immersive 2023

Although festivals have been back in person for some time now, this past edition of Tribeca was my first experience attending a in-person XR festival outside of my hometown of Montreal. More importantly, this was also my first time attending an event as a festival programmer, having recently been put in charge of the immersive program at Festival du Nouveau Cinema. And while I went to New York hoping to find new works to bring over to FNC Explore, I also got the chance to meet new people and have thought provoking discussions along the way.

In what follows, I want to accomplish three things. First, I want to share a few thoughts about the amazing experiences I got the chance to see at Tribeca Immersive 2023. Second, I want to say a few words about a debate I had during the event regarding the state of immersive media. Finally, I want to touch on the state of XR distribution; in film festivals and beyond!

A highly curated program

I was as surprised as many of you when I saw that this year Tribeca’s immersive slate would only include thirteen projects. However, I was also just as quickly delighted at the variety and quality of projects that Ana Brzezińska selected for this highly curated program.

Winner of the New Voices award for 2023, MENEATH translates the mixed media animation style of Terril Calder through what we could call an analogue augmented reality. Using a sort of beamsplitter, the bespoke installation—an arcade cabinet-sized structure reminiscent of a puppet theatre—displays three views which come together to show a character being torn between two opposing value systems. Much like THIS IS NOT A CEREMONY, which the National Film Board of Canada brought to Tribeca last year, MENEATH tells an important (if difficult) story, especially in the current context of truth and reconciliation; in Canada and across the globe.

Other notable highlights include OVER THE RAINBOW and REIMAGINED VOLUME II: MAHAL. The former is Craig Quintero’s follow up to ALL THAT REMAINS, and continues exploring what 360° VR has to offer. In a sea of interactive 6DoF experiences, the work that Quintero has been doing with the help of Funique in Taiwan shows that there is value to be found in restricting the viewer’s agency, in carefully orchestrating what information is accessible at any given time, and in exploring the proxemics of immersive media.

Conversely MAHAL is the second episode in REIMAGINED, an animated series which revisits myths from different cultures, all from the perspective of female protagonists. Specifically, MAHAL offers a charming foray into Philippine mythology. It also has the merit of being the directorial debut of series producer Michaela Ternasky-Holland. The project is a brilliant showcase of what VR animation can look like. Don’t be surprised if you see it featured in many festivals in the coming months.

Unparalleled Variety

One notable aspect that strikes me from this year’s Tribeca selection is the sheer variety in the types of experiences one could see on display. PIXEL RIPPED 1978 is a video game; two video games actually! FORTUNE is a series of AR filters for both Snapchat and Instagram. IN SEARCH OF TIME is a short film which uses AI tools to play around with the idea of memory. THE FURY uses both 360° video and a two-channel video installation. MONSTRORAMA leverages the passthrough capabilities of the Meta Quest Pro to bring its animated story to life. EMOJIII is a live collaborative experience organized by The Smartphone Orchestra. In other words, the term “immersive” still covers a broad range of media, each with their own affordances.

This should not be seen as a criticism. Rather, it aims to recognize that “immersive media” are still a fractured lot. This is what I meant when I mentioned to Kent Bye (in an upcoming interview of his Voices of VR podcast) that we are still in the phase of emergence of what might one day become a singular medium of VR (or AR, XR, Immersive, Spatial, etc.). I have been trumpeting this argument for some time, but others were making a similar argument years before me. And it is a discussion I think will continue to be necessary for years to come, at least until the point when, looking back at festivals past, we will have the historical hindsight necessary to recognize the kind of paradigm shift needed to bring about the birth of a singular medium.

Limited Duration

Sadly, one thing that does not change with each new edition of an immersive festival is the fact that many of the experiences from a given program will see very little to no distribution afterwards. Don’t get me wrong: distributors were present to discover new projects and I know for a fact that LBEs will be bringing some of these thirteen projects to other countries. That being said, distribution remains one of the most pernicious roadblocks towards greater access to what the immersive industry has to offer.

An experience like COLORED – which tells the story of Claudette Colvin, a lesser-known figure in the American civil rights movements—deserves to be seen by scores of people. However, it is a massive installation, currently showing at Centre Pompidou, a smaller version of which was shown at Tribeca that could only accommodate three people at a time. How can we reconcile the need for this experience to be seen by more eyes and the logistical headache of getting such an installation in cities across the globe, to say nothing of bringing this story into people’s homes?

A model I personally want to investigate further in the near future is the one with which the NFB has been experimenting, notably with This is Not a Ceremony. After Tribeca last year, the project toured across Canada, including in public libraries and other such public facing spaces. More recently, the NFB partnered with imagineNATIVE to bring the experience into various indigenous communities who might not otherwise get the chance to see this kind of production. I will discuss this example and more during MUTEK Forum, as part of the roundtable “Beyond the headset: Tactics and circuits for XR distribution.”

Another model which merits further attention is that of the impact campaign. A great example of this approach is On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World), the central case study of a recently published white paper. Michaela Ternasky-Holland—who co-authored the study as Impact Producer for XR for Change—makes a crucial point when she “describes an impact campaign “as a mobilization strategy versus a distribution strategy.” In other words, a key takeaway from this frame of thought is that it is no longer about distributing a given project to the masses, but about building an “intentional, coordinated distribution strategy for a project that centres on a topic or issue and engages targeted audiences to achieve social impact goals.” I think more of the industry could learn from this kind of focused approach.

I can already imagine many of you will bring up the issue of means: resources, time, and, obviously, the money needed to sustain them both. While it is true that someone has to pay for the more focussed distribution strategies I describe above, and while I concede that most studios would most likely prefer to invest such funds elsewhere, the fact is that structures have started to emerge in recent years that can offer the kind of support for which I am advocating.

For example, TAICCA has been at the forefront of the industry for some time now, helping Taiwanese immersive creators shine on the world stage. They were notably part of the reason COLORED could be brought over stateside.

They remain, in my opinion, a model of how cultural organizations can support our creative industry.