Lui Avallos’ QUEER UTOPIA: ACT 1 CRUISING a queer man who is losing his memory recalls times from a public bathroom in his past, where he had experiences of danger, pleasure and shame. A project developed through the Biennale College, then presented at Venice Immersive 2023, QUEER UTOPIA has since been selected in 2024 at CPH:DOX, Sheffield DocFest and the Melbourne International Film Festival. A promising international start to an XR career for Lui Avallos, who is also working on several other projects, including FOLLOW THE CARNATION.
Reclaiming memory with virtual reality
KC: Things are much more out in public now, but that was a time where things were very isolated. And people didn’t know what to do in these situations, because it was all fresh and there was no social media, people weren’t always talking to each other. So it really captures this time of history where people now may not truly understand how risky and resilient it was to be in those moments.
A lot of your work is about resilience and resistance, about memory and reclaiming memory, or how are we reflecting memory.
LA: I never necessarily put this as a statement like, “I will work about memory”. It’s something that just happened very naturally. I was looking at things I believe are important and urgent nowadays, and somehow all of those things take us to the past in a way. Like last year, when we had all these laws targeting queer people – I just felt I could use archive, and bits of history, to discuss what’s happening right now. Because history is a cyclical thing.
KC: That archive is an important source for today’s urgent issues, the circularity of what began in the past is manifesting now.
LA: I knew I wanted to do something spatial wise, about the phenomena of cruising. But at the same time, I was having a hard time understanding what was the perspective or angle. It’s a very complex phenomenon, when we think about it, like socially, politically, architecturally.
When I started interviewing for QUEER UTOPIA: ACT 1 CRUISING, the stories that were most shocking to me were from people over sixty years old. Because I felt those stories were really connected to what we live in right now. It was the generation that started this fight, the fight for the rights that are in danger right now.
And these bits of archival memory help us to expand the meaning of what’s happening right now. How can we look at reality nowadays through this? Yes, I believe memory is important, conceptually wise. But there’s something else about reinterpreting and using archive and virtual reality that really interests me, because it’s a new technology that allows a lot more than the traditional mediums can. And for this, I’m very interested in how embodiment and experiences can help expand the way that we look at archive and the way that we think and that we feel, and we preserve and then we reconstruct memory in a way.
QUEER UTOPIA: using archive in VR
KC: We usually think of archive in a very 2D way. How are you exploring using virtual reality as a way to expand the use of archive?
L: This comes from my research. I’m a PhD student at the Fine Arts Academy in University of Lisbon. And I’m developing this investigation about the correlation between essay films and virtual reality. There are a few important things about [essay films], like their reflexivity and subjectivity, but also the use of different kinds of media and formats to construct arguments about something. In essay films, it is done with cinema specificities like montage, the frame, the kinds of footage that you can find. In virtual reality, we have a lot more options and different ways of doing this.
The concept I’m developing is how gestures and embodiment and being present and using agency in virtual reality can help us create a different relationship to archive or to the material displayed or heard in virtual reality.
KC: In QUEER UTOPIA, it’s more ‘traditional’ and less ‘essay’ style, more the protagonist’s voice than yours. Were you exploring that same concept, but maybe in a more traditional way?
LA: To be quite honest, it was informed by distribution strategies. Because we were speaking about cruising, which is something not everybody can relate to and something that’s very political in a way. Since it was a project that was being developed in [Venice Biennale college cinema], we knew it would have some exposure to it and we wanted to make it more accessible to a larger audience. Using narrative and traditional storytelling is a great way of doing it, so we formatted in a way that could speak to the majority of people.
But in a way, these concepts – these stylistic gestures and everything that is behind the investigation – are there. We have a few scenes, for example, where the user has to look through cracks or push walls. Those gestures, they’re filled with meaning for us, and are the materializing of the concepts that are behind my investigation about essay films. There are superficial layers in traditional storytelling that everybody can relate to, but there are a few deeper layers in the piece that are coming from this research.
Falling down the walls
KC: That moment where you push the walls and they fall down – ironically, I felt at that moment actually less secure than when the walls were there. I felt like I was going to fall. And I thought, it was so interesting, because you would think the idea of breaking the walls down is making me free, but it actually makes me feel like I’m on the precipice. Was that what you were just saying about this other layer?
LA: The first time we prototyped QUEER UTOPIA: ACT 1 CRUISING, you were supposed to feel closer to the character, to the history right now. But then, when we tested it, I also felt vertigo, and I started thinking about it.
There, you have this character talking to you, regarding the audience more as a non-queer person. It was important to build this bridge between queer author, non-queer audiences. The process of breaking up your prejudice and getting closer to something that is way different from your reality – it can feel less secure in a way. For the emotional journey that the user goes through in the piece, it ended up being well-placed.
KC: You mentioned you can use tools in VR as ways to reflect certain feelings or things that you would get in an essay film. In this piece, you’re able to convey a feeling in a very visual way that doesn’t need to be spoken. Like the moments where the main character’s being turns red when he starts to feel emotions and anger.
LA: Yes, the emotional map and the journey were very important to us.
[Michael, our developer, and I] worked together trying to come up with ways of [capturing] those things. One of my favorite parts of using interactivity in VR to convey something is in the final part. The character vanishes away and just particles that have been present there in all of the bodies of the narrative… his body that is made of memories, made of particles is transported to the person’s hands and they keep playing with it. It transforms the viewer now that they know the story in a vector of his most of these memories. They’re like a guardian of his memories and they can hold them…They can create a history with them.
About the architecture of a narrative piece
KC: Clearly QUEER UTOPIA: ACT 1 CRUISING is architecturally related. It is also an aspect of VR that you cannot necessarily capture in film, because in VR you’re building boxes, you’re building scenes, you’re building worlds.
LA: The spaces in this narrative were very, very important; they were almost like characters. The first thing is the beautiful apartment of this very proper elderman. But then, when you look at his history, you’re transported back to the places of margin he used to inhabit. Since we’re talking about cruising, the space is very important, how cruising is shaped by its space and architecture. We wanted to play a bit with this, but when it comes to the world-making for us, it was very important that it also felt performative. So it wasn’t just building a place that would resemble a cruising space, but also how we could expand its meaning. This is something I really love about the piece, because it really feels like this speculative, performative way of thinking about memory.
I believe in virtual reality, world-making is very important. But I believe being able to present your world in a way that strengthens the narrative in your piece is as important.
KC: You conceived it, for accessibility reasons, as a queer person speaking to a non-queer person. I’m curious about that choice?
LA: I had a really hard time developing this project, as a queer person in the XR environment where the majority of people are straight, non-queer, white and based in the Global North. So for me, trying to make non-queer people understand what I was talking about, developing this project, was very difficult. Even though I had some amazing people in this environment who backed me up and said that this is important, most of the people I was pitching to had no idea why I was doing this. They were like, okay, so you want to do a piece about gay men having sex in public bathrooms?
Doing this research [about cruising], going deeper, doing interviews, thinking about the intergenerational aspect of it, it felt like I was seeing something that not a lot of people were talking about. So I had two choices: either speak to the queer community and do something that would be a niche experience. Or I could make this more accessible to talk to more people and be able to have a bigger number of people paying attention to this thing that I consider very important. I didn’t feel like I was censoring myself. If the first idea I had was this very essayistic 360 film, very avant garde, a bit more edge, a bit more graphic… cool, it’s gonna be a nice piece that I will love to watch. But we have something important here that maybe using such format will not bring people closer.
I feel like strategically it was a good choice. It made the project go further when it comes to distribution, festivals and people having access to it. But at the same time, I believe we managed to stay loyal to what we wanted to say, in the very strong political position that we had about the piece and how it should be developed.
Next: FOLLOW THE CARNATION
KC: It’s very resonant to watch a piece like this now and learn something about the past, which reinforces that we’re still dealing and grappling with similar issues in the present, just in a different form. You have the same approach with FOLLOW THE CARNATION [which won the Sunny Side of the Doc Award at CPH:LAB]. And you also have another experimental piece in development?
LA: LIMINAL SPACES. This was developed in the Short Form Station from Berlinale Talents last year. And it was cool because the Berlinale now welcomes different formats in their lab. For me, it was a very cathartic experience being amongst cinema people talking about VR, and making them pay attention to VR. Because those are the people that are thinking about mediums, thinking about filmmaking and experimentation when it comes to forms of cinema. This project is also part of my investigation when it comes to essayistic gesture.
The piece is inspired by this online phenomenon of the liminal spaces where people started sharing images of these empty, nostalgic, weird places with a touch of decadent capitalism that will make them feel something weird. And they’re all about places of liminality, of changing the status of something. In a way, we’re in a liminal period right now when it comes to artificial intelligence.
For this piece, we’re going to gather different stories from different people about liminal stages. So if you’re a refugee, you’re in a liminal period. If you’re a trans person going through your transition, you are in this liminal period. We’re going to generate a story from [these stories], as if the machine is telling about its own liminal period. And the piece itself has a very specific way of transporting you from different worlds. It uses hand tracking, and it starts in mixed reality. When you put your hands up, you can see the space that resembles a liminal space, and you listen to the voice of a character trapped inside of it. You have to cross digital levels, but always using this gesture of vulnerability to be able to access them. So in a very experimental way, we want to investigate if it’s possible to create this embodied feeling of liminality…and also discuss the state of artificial intelligence nowadays.
Voice performance in VR
KC: I was just thinking about the role of the voice in performative documentaries, as opposed to the static film, and then thinking about the voice in VR and the role of the narrator and how we develop that. Because it’s a very distinctly different experience in VR than you have in a film.
LA: Yes. There’s a study from 2020 saying the voice of the narrator and the actions that people have to do, they don’t necessarily go together and they sometimes work against each other.
This is something that I’m trying to explore – using the voice but not necessarily basing the narrative in the voice in a way that if people don’t get the voice, they lose something. I believe it should be more towards interactivity, with voice as a compliment. So these next pieces we’re developing are voice based, but we’re investigating ways that don’t rely on the voice for the narrative to make sense.
This ‘God’s voice’, as this study points out, doesn’t necessarily bring people closer. Like essay films – they are pretty much based on text, reading text, voiceovers, and they shape how you understand and how you create a relationship to the film. And in VR, for my surprise, it might not be the same. We’re in a very experimental part of the research of trying to understand how voice can be used in a way that adds to the narrative.
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