New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021

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New Paths Forward: Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021p>

Breonna Garden, at Wagnerp Park>

by < / p>

Randy Astlep>

Festivals & Eventsp>

Filmmakingp>

Transmediap>

June 30, 2021p>

Augmented Realityp>

Interactive filmp>

new mediap>

podcastsp>

Tribecap Festival>

Tribeca Film festival

p >

tribeca film festival 2021p>

virtual reality

as the first major festival to return in person than the pandemic backs down, Tribeca has given us one more sign that New York is coming back.

In the heights, p>

which opened the festival at the Palace Kingdom on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with movies. It also seems that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year's event was pretty jam-packed with new types of content of course the short and long films were still the center of attention but the festvial expanded with a new category of video games, stand up comedy, storefront art, lower Manhattan installations, and other works.

in fact, it may be largely due to the expansion of its immersive works that the festival changed its name this year, dropping 'Film' to become more enigmatic, but, arguably, festival-wider Tribeca. Moviegoers may lament the change still doesn't ring true to my ears, but it does reflect the growing perception of Tribeca as it grows into something like an SXSW-esque holiday umbrella.

The original film festival was eleven years old when it introduced Storyscapes in 2013, a collection of five interactive films, no VR or AR in sight (which jep>

examined at the time

). Before long, festival organizers began differentiating this core program, which now consists mostly of high-end virtual reality bits, from its broader immersive and interactive offerings. Everything however, has always been housed in the same space at Spring Studios on Varick Street, making the split face value and arguably unnecessary. But because of the pandemic, this year it was crystal clear: the spacious room that normally hosts everything was now limited to just five Storyscapes experiences—while other pieces were split between “outdoors and interactive experiences” and “Virtual Arcade” which this year was truly virtual, primarly thanks to an agreement with the Museum of Other Realities home VR films for remote users of Vive and Rift headsets.p>

Limiting the number of rooms in Storyscapes, although obviously occasioned by social distancing requirements, has allowed for other innovations as well. In the present pandemic virtual reality is potentially an even bigger problem than a movie theater, as in recent years Tribeca customers have crammed into tight queues to every ride in a headset. This year's solution was to not only reduce the total number of participants, but to admit them in periodic waves of four, so that they could move from room to room together. The order was curated to create a sort of narrative flow, and the extra space allowed designers an opportunity to create great works of visual art, essentially casting the moods of their pieces, which helps clients begin onboarding mentally on a new project before even reaching for a helmetp>

Tribeca's divisions into three categories still allowed for different technologies in each program. for example, there were two AR pieces at Storyscapes. Rather than going through the pieces the way the festival has arranged them, I'd like to look at all the immersive pieces I've been able to experience in like-categories of two-dimensional film, audio, AR and VR works. One downside to the ever-expanding catalog of projects is that it's getting harder and harder to see everything, especially compared to 2013, and there were several this year that I couldn't see. But here is what I am able to get.P>

TWO-DIMENSIONAL FILMSSp>

Republicp>

is a surprisingly ambitious interactive film by French writer Olivier Demangel

and directorp>

Simon Bouissonp>

, a team that has collaborated on several films before. Forp>

Republicp>

Demangel took the November 2015 terrorist attacks across Paris as a model, while moving much of the action underground to the subway, thus drawing parallels with subway attacks in London, Madrid, Tokyo and elsewhere. The film begins with a young couple livestreaming as they giddily explore the maze of abandoned subway foot tunnels, but, rather than sticking with them exclusively, the film soon offers the opportunity to watch a second group of office workers on the point of catching a train, then a third group of friends who are above ground near Place de la Republique, just north of the city center. As the attack rolls on we can see how each of these three groups is affected, putting together the wider action of attack and police response while learning about the personal relationships between these people who are caught up in the action of a young woman on the street worried about her missing husband, who viewers know is injured and being picked up by two office workers, while two other characters set out on their own, to get to another group.p>

"I've seen this type of film before, but perhaps without the sprawling scale or seemingly large budget that Bouisson had to work with. What feels most innovative?

Republicp>

is the mechanism by which viewers choose what to watch: where the most interactive movies have breakpoints where viewers can choose the next segment, here each of the three branches plays simultaneously and non-stop, whereas viewers can switch between the two by sliding up or down, like three video tracks stacked in editing software (by the middle I thought of them in terms of "top story," "middle story and “background story”). This is a slick and intuitive way to move between stories at any time, but it also gets a lot of FOMO, that viewers may wonder what they're missing in other streams and switch endlessly. back and forth between them. I realized that this is quite similar to watching three shows on TV in pre-pause/day streaming, where we click back and do our best to put the fragmented stories in our minds. The filmmakers are well aware of this, however, and as well as the story wraps viewers are presented with a story map (three horizontal bars, essentially) with the offer to go back and watch pieces they have missed.P>

Creating three simultaneous/linked movies is obviously an ambitious undertaking, increasing the total running time of the movie to 40-70 minutes, and it actually exceeded all my expectations. After accepting that I couldn't see everything, I enjoyed the chaos of jumping into each medias group's story, with no context of what just happened ("Oh, they're on the streets now," "Okay, now they're hiding in a closet", etc.). Eventually, the three groups reunite and the branches are cut, so to speak, but still the mental chaos that only comes from having partial knowledge of what's going on remains-which is exactly how each of the characters in the film would have the experience.p>

Unfortunately, this also means that the time was sometimes when bands were destined for Intersect. At one point the wife calls her husband's mobile and I went to video to watch the conversation end but no phone rang. At another time, I took a character in two places at the same time. The difficulty of any planning and production schedule must have been immense, so these slight anachronisms weren't very distracting. Far more distracting, in my opinion, was the smugness that each of the three videos were presented as filmed by the same characters on their cell phones, a 2020 version dep>

The Blair Witch Project>

, which is here updated to the era of Facebook live. Each video also included a stream of comments (and emojis) from viewers who felt spot on for this serious topic and could be muted thank goodness. The film's site touts the comments as another character interacting with the on-screen actors, and I don't have the idea that muting them may reflect more on me and my age than on the film. Still, the idea that the characters are constantly filming themselves, especially in a life-and-death crisis, doesn't stretch me any plausibility—wouldn't they want to turn off their phones and save their batteries while they're barracaded in a dark room? And I don't think the film would have lost anything if it had just presented the action as a traditional film, with no justification for the cameras that recorded it. Still, it's a quibble, and that would have made for a film quite different from the one Demangel and Bouisson wanted, which even in this form is a towering achievement and intuitive new way to get through interactive films.

AUDIO PARTS>

streamp>

, which won the festival's Best Creative Nonfiction competition award, is a walking audio tour by multidisciplinary artist

Annie Saundersp>

, with the dep> contributions

Andrew Schneiderp>

and others. Beginning and ending in Zuccotti Park—a decade after the Occupy Wall Street movement centered there—Brookfield's arts development arm Brookfield Arts Properties was commissioned to connect their buildings to One Liberty Plaza and New York's Plaza. Saunders took this rather corporate commission and created an engaging meditation on Lower Manhattan's history, reminding you that it's an island with a waterfront and human history stretching back centuries before the Dutch arrived. She employs images of air and water to materialize the notion of Manhattan as a living entity, its coastline artificially growing past Pearl and Water Streets, its buildings rising and falling to make way for ever newer , tallest buildings. The living island analogy is thoughtful about listeners explaining how to take your pulse and have them witness their own breathing and heartbeat; when my tour returned to Zuccotti Park my walking partner and I automatically checked our pulses without even being asked. Sometimes the changes are cataclysmic, as in Schneider's memories of the neighborhood when Hurricane Sandy hit (and, but not mentioned, the shadow of 9/11 hangs over the entire room), but more often it reflects evolution phase of what is now the United States' most urbanized square mile. Colonial-era buildings like Fraunces Tavern and Trinity Church are now landmarks dwarfed by glass and steel skyscrapers, remnants of centuries past that Saunders wants listeners to stop and notice.

But it's not just about the landscape. Again and again, she and Schneider repeat the theme that "it won't always be like this", and they talk about our lives and relationships as much as downtown buildings. Time is relentless and, for better or for worse, everything is constantly changing. The subtext to being in the present moment, taking in the past, and heading into the future is reinforced by the actual buildings around you as you listen. The namep>

streamp>

, of course, is a play on words, obviously including the currents of water and air that flow and Lower Manhattan, but which also involves around the flow of time and the . preciousness of the current moment

the play is at its best when it brings voices outside: a man whom Saunders merely asks for directions, but then goes on to explain the history of Pearl Street and the waterfront; a Native American man who eloquently discusses how to connect with the island and how its tunnels and streets are like airways that help him breathe, before adding that he also enjoys taking the subway to the Metastases games at the CitiField. The sound design is superb, especially in the final moments. It lasts about an hour and covers nearly one and a half miles, which isn't very far, but sometimes the pace goes very fast and listeners may find themselves jogging to catch up. At one point early in my visit we were interrupted by a man asking for money so with no way to pause the audio we missed the line to turn off Wall Street and passed about ten minutes of determining where we should be and catching up. Of course, this unpredicability is what makes New York New York: Currents of vehicular and foot traffic make a prerecorded walking tour through midtown Manhattan very difficult to time, but they do reflect the lifeblood of the city today

streamp>

is free and will be available through September (it starts every half hour from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., to encourage groups to go together); look for large QR codes to scan in Zuccottip Park >

Knot. A Trilogyp>

takes place, as the name suggests, in three separate segments, each lasting approximately 20 minutes. Asp>

streamp>

, the audio is designed to be site-specific, but unlike

streamp>

the listener has complete control over what those places are specifically. The first episode is designed to be listened to while sitting on a park bench; the second, in the passenger seat of a car; and the third in a living room or at home. The desired effect, of course, is to relate the audio to the physical environment of the listener, and it may be worth adding touch (wind, for example), sight, and sounds. from the real world to audio mixing. It requires a bit of effort on the part of the listener, of course, although film critic complained about having to go to a theater to watch a movie?

Knotp>

's creators at audiop-centered theatre/technology company

Darkfieldp>

simply demand the same attention from their audience. Of course, it also introduces an element of variability: in the episode I used a bench in Inwood Hill Park away from any road, so the moment a car pulls up breaks the verisimilitude a bit, and, more specifically, since I didn't have access to any cars (not wanting, say, to get a Lyft) I had to listen to episode two in my apartment and just imagine the situation. This limited the effect to just the audio, but that was still an engaging experience.P>

The titlep>

Knotp>

can have several meanings, but of course it refers to the story itself, as it is. It's probably no spoiler to say that the plot loops back on itself, so the three episode ends where an episode begins, with recurring lines of dialogue and small events in different orders and settings, or coming from the mouths of different characters. It's like peeling through the layers of the Gordian knot to find that you're no closer to unraveling, and this is reinforced by the stilted and deliberately flat language of the formal readings of the lines (think Bresson 'ironing out' its actors emotions). Amnesia infiltrates: no characters can remember where they've been or what they've done, and one can't even remember their name, defining themselves by their "character trait" of smoking alone. Another woman laments, “I don't know what I stand for. At no time does anything feel naturalistic - we are in the realm of the absurd and surreal.

The tones feels like resulting

Waiting for Godotp >

or, even more strongly, something from David Lynch. Is it a dream sequence? Is it all real? Is this character or am I, as a character in the drama, just mind blowing? This surreal feel is strongest in episode two when a character recounts a dream in which a little boy terrifies a previously existing man by jumping on him, presumably destroying him from within. The boy is actually a motif throughout all three episodes, and if there's any logical explanation to the narrative, it revolves around the trauma caused when he's hit and killed by a car while chasing his ball (which was looking in the park earlier). Episode three is largely a group session in which the boy dies over and over again, the other participants claim they are all fragments of the listener's upsetting psyche, and a mysterious box (which the listener has been transporting in previous episodes) has the solution to break the knot and the time loop. Of course, this is straight out of p>

Mulholland Drivep>

, and offers just as much closure, as in this case the disappearance of the box from the apartment is what causes the need to return to the park and recover (again). Sip>

Knotp>

doesn't quite rise to Lynch's level, it does create a wonderfully dark atmosphere in which to spend an enjoyable hour. Through all its sounds of urgency and ominousness and fury, in the end there really is nothing, but

Silent>

.P>

In addition to Tribeca Immersive plays, the festival has expanded to include 14 fiction and nonfiction podcasts (p>

listen to them here>

). This was an addition that was planned for the aborted 2020 festival, meaning some pieces that were unable to premiere then are now included. There's a wide range of news, from a documentary look to a police raid of a tantric temple.

Maricopap's Mother>

to a fictional Christmas teenage love story in the projects

Brooklyn Santa

to hallucinogenic comedy

the Imperfection.p>

A podcast

One (re)solved,p>

is linked to an AR piece of Unsolved Murders of African Americans from the Immersive Range.p>

AUGMENTED REALITYp>

After the trauma of 2020,p>

Breonnap Garden>

is probably the most emotionally satisfying play in Tribeca this year. Breonna, of course, is Breonna Taylor, a victim who soon became a martyr and an icon as pain and rage boiled over the nation last summer.

Breonnap Garden>

is an augmented reality memory of his memory, crucial not just as an icon, although that is inevitable, but as a human being. The piece was created by her sister Ju'Niyah Palmer, in collaboration with artist Lady Pheonix, and it bears the fingerprints of those who knew and loved Breonna long before her murder.

The piece, essentially a 3D sculpture, exudes tranquility from start to finish. When you fire up the app, it starts with a photo montage of family photos of Breonna, which I haven't seen before in the news, accompanied by the sad music. This transitions to the AR part, a full-fledged garden that surrounds the animated character of Breonna. Palmer appears next to him to pay tribute to Breonna as she remembers their grandmother missing them - snuggling up on the couch, 'not as the media has portrayed her' - and then as she disappears the attention shifts on the garden itself. As the viewer moves their handheld device near each flower, it triggers an audio recording. In my display the first few were also friends and family who knew Breonna well, which shows that this is a personal tribute from her closest loved ones, as they deal with her directly from recalling how boring she could be, traveling from the road, and other experiences. The proximal audio works well in enticing viewers to move around and explore, getting closer to each flower. Soon we move on to voices of people who don't know Breonna but have been moved by her death, and then there are others who take the opportunity to pay homage to their lost owner of loved ones who influenced them. Viewers can, of course, record these messages themselves, plant their own flower, and do

Breonnap Garden>

include everyone who cried. With the simple graphics of the flowers, this documentary sound of people simply speaking their grief and gratitude is extremely powerful, much more than an AR handheld app could be should be.

During Tribeca the piece was housed at WarnerMedia's Innovation Lab on 21 West Street, where it created with Palmer in attendance. Another space, however, has been set up and remains open at Wagner Park, which is the northwest corner of the Battery, south of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and near West Street where Little Battery Strikes Place. Large QR codes invite passers-by to download the app and watch there experience; I took the photo above facing south towards Pier A, the first pier as you round the battery waterfront. But the app is also p>

available onlinep>

for anyone who wants to see the experience, making a permanent, if digital, memorial to Breonna and everyone who remembers here. < / p>

While most of this year's AR parts were designed for wearable devices, p>

Criticalp>

Distancep>

was developed with Microsoft for use on their HoloLens 2 headset. Co-created by Adam May and Amy Zimmerman, the room deals with Southern Resident Killer Whales who are residents of the Washington Coast. This pod is both bred and endangered well studied by biologists asp>

Ken Balcomb>

, each of the approximately 75 people named and related. And then there is the insufficient status to determine the conservation status of killer whales globally, this pod has been declining for years as they deal with issues such as the busy shipping channels off the Salish Sea tender and dwindling salmon which are the chief food supply for resident killer whales ( Ip>

director interviewed Josh Murphyp>

on his documentary p>

Artifishalp>

on salmon depleting in Tribeca two years ago). The main environmental problem dep>

Critical Distancep>

is underwater noise pollution caused by ships and how it interferes with whale echolocation and communication with each other. If they can't echolocate they can't hunt the few remaining salmon. And engine noise affects them in other ways: Zimmerman told me that in the calm of the Covid-19 shutdown three calves were born, indicating that vessels may interfere with mating andp>

The piece as housed at Storyscapes. and how it will appear on a tour of science museums like the Smithsonian's Natural History and London Museums, consists of a large circular space with white walls that allow for video projection. This two-dimensional screen (which reminded me a bit of a Jon Favreau shot>

The Mandalorianp>

) enables the communication of information, such as the entire pod family tree and the lifespans of all known whales that have lived and died there, and seeing it through the nature of HoloLens allows these two display levels. The truly mesmerizing content, of course, occurs in the helmet as first fish, then a few individual Orcas, then the whole pod swimming around you. This is interrupted first by a small fishing boat and then by a large ship, and the audio and visual scramble to convey to human viewers how disturbing this noise is for the creatures who depend so much on their hearing. Viewers are in sync, so they can point out animals to each other, even from different locations in space, and this social aspect of the play is what made Zimmerman, a five-year veteran of the unit , want to create in AR rather than the more visually siled technology of VR. While catalyzing action is always the most difficult task for films about the environment and art, she hopes that if viewers have a social experience, it can better foster social change.

The animals in the piece are ethereal and ghostly, somewhat translucent monochrome beings that glide past or by you and seem to respond to your touch. This is thematically appropriate, as the whole piece is about the precarious nature of these whales' very existence. But there's something about knowing that these are digital recreations of actual animals living in the Pacific right now - each one has a name and a story that makes it all the more spellbinding. These whale ghosts may soon be all that's left of them, and, as close as they get in this room, the absence of physical whales, from, say, a building in Manhattan, eerily echoes their potential future in water. It may have something to do with the ontology of the photographic (or digital) image, or the work of art in the era of mechanical (or even, digital) reproduction, but there is something seeing the image of Orcas in this way that was different, for example, watching a traditional documentary about them. There isn't nearly as much information conveyed in p>

Critical Distancep>

like in a book or function movie, but there's a different emotion to it. You manage to touch them, but feel nothing. Far so close! Perhaps it's an unintended sense of the title, that even while we're away from these animals we can somehow feel or be close to them. And it is essential that we do.P>

Jupiter Invinciblep>

tells the story of a light-skinned slave in the Southern Antebellum. The most deceptively simple room in Tribeca, it's told through a comic book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, with art by accomplished artist

Ashley A. Woodsp>

. Alone as a print work, it is a terrific addition to black-created graphic novels, and its topicality by focusing on the heart of the historical African-American experience, in the evils of slavery, couldn't be any better. But Komunyakaa and Woods also recruited documentary filmmaker and ARp artist>

Ram Devinenip>

to enhance the book: by downloading an app to a handheld device readers can hover their phone over each page to see Woods' artwork come to life. The variety of Devineni's work is impressive, with things like three-dimensional page-bursting drawings, character animation of a horse herding, a man walking with his dogs—and images—a live stream— action in the woods, for example, bubbles to life. Audio matches all of Devineni's visuals, increasing the immersiveness of the work.P>

Nine years ago I read (seen?) The book and the appp>

The Fantastic Flying Books by Mr. Morris Lessmorep>

from Moonbot Studios, in one of my first encounters with augmented reality ( p>

cineastep>

subscribers can come back to this articlep>

here

). While their work was groundbreaking at the time, it's very gratifying to see how the quality of book AR combos has improved, both the ease of triggering the app to view AR and the impressive depth, reach and the resolution of Devineni's work. This isn't his first foray into print AR, as he previously used his fictional film background to include documentary interviews with rape victims in his comic book series.

Priyap Shatki>

.P>

Storyscapes Devineni told me that the next step in their work will be to use green screen technology to create a full AR comedy movie book hybrid. Like a movie where you literally turn the pages, this will be a delightful new medium as it's perfected, especially when AR glasses become common enough to remove the handheld device between readers' eyes and the page.

With all these exciting advancements in technology, it might be easy to overlook the power of p>

Jupiter Invinciblep>

the story of. Komunyakaa has created a magical realistic tale that infuses superhero elements into a runaway slave story, as Jupiter gains the power to heal from any injury. This makes for an exciting character himself, but there's more at work here than a Black Wolverine or an Antebellum Luke Cage. Au centre de c'est une vision Jupiter a la moitié du livre, après qu'il a été battu presque à mort et est frappé par la foudre, dans lequel il rend visite à sa mère en Afrique et de la majesté prend connaissance de son peuple. Quand il se réveille, sa peau, assez d'abord la lumière d'albinisme que je ne réalise pas au départ, il n'a pas de race blanche, est devenu un brun riche, et il est maintenant un fier homme africain. C'est la même fierté que le grand public a découvert avecp>

Black Pantherp>

en 2018, et en effet Woods a attiré Shuri pour une couverture dessinée Marvel. Et c'est une façon appropriéep>

actionp>

fierté pour le moment actuel, comme Jupiter met alors la tête vers le bas et se met au travail en libérant son peuple. L'histoire reste inachevée à la fin, donc je l'espère, avec ou sans AR, plus de problèmes, suivront.P>

Cinéastep>

Lauren Wissot de 'a parlé en profondeur avec Komunyakka et Devineni à Tribeca, que les lecteurs peuvent trouverp>

icip>

.p>

Processionp>

est une nouvelle œuvre par l'artistep>

Dustin Yellenp>

qui se base sur sa pratique sculpturale en ajoutant un composant AR pour les appareils portables. Les travaux de Yellen, alors que multidisciplinaire, repose en grande partie dans la sculpture, en utilisant des feuilles empilées de verre feuilleté pour insérer des images en deux dimensions et d'autres objets pour créer des tableaux vivants congelés; thématiquement, son travail est souvent centré autour de l'anthropocène et la façon dont les humains manipulent l'environnement, généralement à des fins catastrophiques. Dans le cas dep>

Processionp>

, une petite pièce verticale, à la hauteur d'un être humain, a été installé au sixième étage du printemps Studios, un vol à partir des Storyscapes Galerie. La sculpture elle-même dispose d'un gratte-ciel construit essentiellement chancelant des colonnes et des sols ouverts, couverts de végétation d'une manière qui évoque des scénarios post-apocalyptique. Peuplant ce bâtiment est une foule de mini-anthropomorphes animaux lion de mer vêtu d'une veste verte et un jean bleu, un rat dans une chemise bleue portant un champignon géant, un kangourou dans une œuvre salopette avec des planches de bois à travers son dos tous construits à partir de photographies et collaged ensemble entre les feuilles de verre.p>

une application de réalité augmentée anime ces personnages, et non pas la création d'un récit linéaire, mais donnant vie aux images figées de la sculpture. Il est disponible sur place à Tribeca, mais plus d'une pièce d'accompagnement d'un élément lié au travail physique, ne nécessite pas réellement la sculpture du tout. L'audio apporte le monde sonore de la nature, filtrée à travers la musique tonale, à la pièce, tandis que le mouvement des créatures augmente leur intérêt visuel. Malheureusement, quand j'ai essayé d'exécuter l'application sur mon téléphone plus tard, échoué à plusieurs reprises à la charge, un risque de pièces AR de poche. La pièce est décrite comme impliquant les spectateurs dans les ravages causés par le changement climatique créé par l'homme, donc je suis à me demander s'il y a plus d'une structure narrative à l'AR si elle est laissée courir plus longtemps que je regardais au printemps Studios-toute la pièce est chronométré à quinze minutes. In any scenario, it will be interesting to watch as more traditional artists like Yellen incorporate AR into their work, opening new creative avenues for them and their AR-centered collaborators.

It would have been easy to miss

Un(re)solved

in its installation in the northeast corner of the Battery, behind the Netherland Monument. There a large but unassuming wooden sculpture resembling a roofless pagoda held up sheets of colored glass, each bearing rows of names. It was a memorial to African Americans killed by Whites during the civil rights years, and it tragically contained 151 names. The sculpture, of course, was contemplative on its own, but the augmented reality portion brought each of those names to life. A work created by multiple partners under the direction of creative director Tamara Shogaolu,

Un(re)solved

in this format represents some of the best AR sculpture there is today. Still, viewers who missed it there can watch an online version via web browser

here

In the sculpture, each name had a small QR code to the side, and scanning this would bring up that person's data. It didn't launch straight into their story, however; first the viewer had to speak the person's name aloud three times. This ritualized “saying of their names,” loud enough for others to hear, felt like a respectful way to embody them once again and remember who they were and how they died; since this is a crucial part of memorializing them, the online version contains this element as well. It's similar to

New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021

Procession

in that it's a sculpture that triggers a handheld AR component, but the key difference of course is that where

Procession

shows just one large, intricate animation,

Un(re)solved

contains a legion of small ones. Perhaps the greater similarity is with

Kusunda

, as noted above, because these are people who are in danger of being forgotten, whose deaths may slip into the fog of time, and the act of saying their names brings them back and makes their memory that much stronger.

Once this was done, the app would present any information that was available about the person. I saw information presented in text, audio, and video, and, moving around the sculpture, I found names that were remarkably different in their stories, but all wrenchingly similar as well: a fifteen-year-old boy shot by a White police officer while waiting to go inside his New York City school; a girl killed in a drive-by shooting by three White men on the day she graduated from high school; a middle-aged couple, active in the civil rights movement, killed by a bomb in their home on Christmas night, which was also their anniversary. Fifty-eight-year-old Bessie McDowell was asleep in bed on June 14, 1956, when two White men, a father and son, came to collect on a loan they'd made to Bessie's nephew, who was staying with her. The young man told them he didn't have the money, and one of the men reportedly slapped him, causing him to run inside for safety. The father then shot a handgun through the window, striking Bessie in the face. He later claimed his shot was in self-defense—he thought the boy was going for a gun—and he didn't know anyone else was home, so he only served 12 months in prison and paid a $500 fine. Of course this story, which I chose randomly, bears uncanny resemblance to Breonna Taylor's, and it was fitting that this piece was so close to

Breonna's Garden

in the Battery as part of Tribeca's celebration of Juneteenth.

Un(re)solved

is deceptively simple, but I suspect that the more time you spend with it, the more similarities you'll see in the stories, causing you to not only honor these victims but wonder how far our society has actually come. In that way, it bears a striking resemblance to the VR piece

The Changing Same

, discussed below.

VIRTUAL REALITY

I wrote about

Tea

Changing Same

, which won Tribeca's Best Immersive Narrative Competition Award, when it

premiered at Sundance in February

. This time, however, I was able to view it on a proper headset that the film was designed for, rather than on my own Quest 2 at home, followed by a wonderful in-person conversation with the creative team (a small joy of the vaccine roll-out). Focused on the Black American experience, the title riffs on the fact that the more things change the more they stay the same; for all the country's progress in race relations and civil rights, many parallels with the past remain sadly ironclad. Realistically animated (seemingly from volumetrically captured performances) in six degrees of freedom (or 6DoF, meaning viewers can move around the space and change their perspective), the piece starts in what seems like a southern bayou, where the viewer meets the film's narrator, a young Black man, before flying through the air in a beautiful interlude and landing on a peaceful suburban street at night, where a police squad car pulls up, lights flashing, and the cops, one White and one Black, proceed to arrest you and your guide because of a match to a vague description. The situation escalates as the cops assault the young man, but as the scene shifts to the precinct the blame is falling on him, throwing him into a racist prison system through no fault of his own. A flashback to a slave auction house—where the same actor is protesting that he was born a free man and is not a runaway slave—drives the parallel between chattel slavery and modern policing home. It ends on an optimistic note, however, as viewers leave that reality and envision a future—or a present—of African-American equality, beauty, and pride.

For me, a white male, VR pieces like this and Roger Ross Williams'

Traveling While Black

(2019) are incredible tools for building empathy. As with

Critical Distance,

there is a definite educational component, but it's not the facts as much as the emotion of going through those situations that reveals new insight—insights that are sadly far too common for so many Americans today. Again, something about being embodied in the VR space, helplessly facing a police officer who could destroy or even end your life for no reason, feeling yourself getting sucked into the system, has a different impact than watching films, reading, or engaging in real-world activism—at least for me.

And that's the goal, the kind of empathy it's meant to catalyze. The creators Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster, and Yasmin Elayat want to lay bare the systemic roots of modern racism, and they want to affect how people feel about it so that they become involved in ending it. This is the first of three

Changing Same

films; future episodes will deal with topics like conditions in contemporary/1825 New York City and the horror of spectacle lynchings. And they plan on releasing the films not just online but through controlled venues and events like tent shows, museums, festivals, and community gatherings. They want viewers to see the films in public so that conversation can immediately ensue, community can be built, and societal progress made. Perhaps their most important outlet will be schools, where young people can be exposed to these issues with more emotional power than they would get from a textbook. At a time when many pundits and lawmakers are making hay out of critical race theory, works like this will provide educators a welcome counterweight to provide their students with accurate, impactful information. I can't help but think of

The 1619 Project

(and the recent political pushback over Nikole Hannah-Jones's tenure) in conjunction with

The Changing Same,

in terms of how both elucidate the connections between the present and the past, and I hope that as the films are finished they can help countervail those who would rather bury the United States' racist past. As many have said, it's only by understanding our history that we can alter our future.

Inside Goliath

, a British-French coproduction led by co-creators

Barry Gene Murphy

and

May Abdalla

, is an animated documentary about mental illness. An anonymous narrator recounts his story about living with schizophrenia and psychosis and his descent into alcohol and drug addiction in London's seedy streetlife. Meanwhile animation in 6DoF illustrates his morphing flat that grows increasingly claustrophobic, or his isolation at a club as his addictions surge. One fun sequence near the middle is an ironic video game, presented as an arcade machine, that the viewer plays; a side-scroller that approximates a 16-bit game at best, you navigate the narrator through the streets as he gathers booze and drugs and avoids the violent gangs that, in his real life, were far too common. This was a surprisingly engaging moment in the piece and could point the way for two-dimensional pieces that could convey a similar educational message.

The title

Inside Goliath

makes me think of a giant that not only stands in front of someone with severe mental illness, but that has fully enveloped them so that there's no way out. Another apt metaphor might be Kronos devouring his children, leaving them helplessly inert in the darkness. In fact, the narrator's despair, leading to indifference about the inevitability of his fate, is perhaps the most chilling part of his story; while there obviously is help for those battling mental illness,

Inside Goliath

does a wonderful job conveying how difficult it can be to reach out through the fog and try to reach it. Like

The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite

, discussed below, this piece conveys less factual information about mental illness than it re-creates what it's like to live with it and the trauma that can result; in that way it resembles

The Changing Same

and some other of this year's pieces as well.

Kusunda

, which won the festival's Storyscapes Award, is a wonderfully timely document.ary about disappearing languages, a global phenomenon that's receiving far too little attention. Kusunda is a language so endangered that not only have most people never heard of it, fluent speakers probably barely reach into the double digits. The people all live in the mountains and jungles of Nepal, where Nepali has subsumed it as a dominant language. VR filmmakers Felix Gaedtke and Gayatri Parameswaran, co-founders of the Berlin studio

NowHere Media

, saw a chance to shine a light on the language, and perhaps help rescue it, through a woman named Gyani Maiya Kusunda who taught it to younger members of her community. Initial filming took place, but she died just as they were about to journey together to film the majority of the production in the backcountry; filming was then further hindered by the COVID pandemic. Parameswaran recounts all of this in voice over, and she told me that they decided to include the making of the film within its narrative to show how tenuous the language's position is. Her narration describes the difficulty of setting up a volumetric capture camera in a remote hillside village, for instance, and at one point their camera array overpowers the electrical supply and causes a blackout. This illustrates the remoteness of Kusunda speakers as much as any information conveyed in the film.

Despite all these difficulties, they succeeded in making an intriguing interactive film, with wonderful visuals and 6DoF; at Tribeca viewers were seated, but nevertheless they could physically lean and move around the space slightly to take in new perspectives, an effect that always increases a VR subject's verisimilitude. The Kusunda speaker who became their new subject, a shaman named Lil Bahadur Kusunda, has nearly forgotten it. This fills him with regret, and he seems delighted with the film crew and their interest in the language. He recounts some stories from his life, which are animated in TiltBrush, and is pleased with his granddaughter Hena Kusunda, a young woman who is determined to learn the language and keep it from extinction. In the end she performs a song for him in Kusunda, making it the only song that exists in the language, and it's a quietly moving moment that gives a dose of optimism in the face of such harsh odds. Capturing her singing with a 3D volumetric image enhances the presence of both her and her song.

Since

Kusunda

deals so much with a spoken language, it's appropriate that one of its most compelling features is in its audio. A language dies when it's no longer spoken, so at various moments in the narrative the viewer has to learn a Kusunda word and speak it out loud in order for the story to advance; in two cases this determines which animated story you see—choosing between a story about a bear or a tiger, for instance—which adds an element of interactivity to the film. But the emotional function is much like that in

Un(re)solved

: by speaking these words out loud, you become a partner in ensuring that this language and the people who spoke it are not forgotten, are still in a way present today. In this case it's also rather fun, and made me think more about how audio prompts can be used for interactivity in the highly visual medium of VR.

Parameswaran also told me some of the things their team is doing to preserve the language. The VR film itself will be available on Steam for the general public, and they're working to get it into museums as well for those who wouldn't encounter it online. Perhaps more importantly, they've made a traditional 2D film and are working in the community in Nepal to educate people and spread the use of Kusunda among those whose ancestors may have spoken it. This outreach, which is in the best tradition of Griersonian documentary, may be the most important element of the entire project, because if they succeed in exciting more young people like Hena, then Kusunda is in good hands for the future.

I just found out that you can play #VRChat without a VR headset. I still want to get a VR headset but man they are expensive.
— Shinigami Bass Tue Aug 24 07:47:57 +0000 2021

Lovebirds of the Twin Towers

is the latest work from filmmaker and VR documentarian Ari Palitz, who is known for work like producing

Clouds Over Sidra

(2015), about the Syrian refugee crisis, and co-directing

The Last

Good-bye

, about the Holocaust. This latter piece, which I

spoke with him about

when it premiered at Tribeca in 2017, used volumetric capture to record the testimony of survivor Pinchas Gutter at the Majdanek Concentration Camp, creating a physically palpable presence of the place as Gutter guides viewers through the various rooms (even though it was stitched together in postproduction).

The DNA of

The Last Goodbye

is present in

Lovebirds of the Twin Towers

, but the technology has only improved—and the tone is remarkably lighter. Created for this September's twentieth anniversary of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, it focuses on a couple, Carmen and Arturo Griffith, who both worked as elevator operators there. They met, fell in love, and had innumerable wonderful experiences in the towers and the surrounding plaza; they also lived through the 1993 car bombing—Carmen was right there when it happened—and the September 11th attack, when they were in different buildings and, both injured, didn't know the other's fate for several days. Their reunion made the news in 2001, and Palitz told me that he wanted to focus on an uplifting story like this for the anniversary because there was so much goodness and joy that came out of the place but that has been neglected in the face of the immense tragedy. While this is obviously appropriate, for this piece Palitz wanted to focus on the positive human stories of the WTC rather than just the attacks and their aftermath.

The piece at Storyscapes largely consisted of an interview with Carmen, who, like Lil Bahadur Kusunda, is seated but filmed volumetrically. She sits against a black background, allowing her words to carry the weight of her story, but while she talks the scene shifts to the outdoor plaza, the view from the roof, and other locations from her memory that no longer exist. The photorealism of these animations is remarkable, and, as someone who first came to New York in 2002, a year after the attack, it was a wonderful way for me to experience this part of the city's heritage, being fully immersed in a space that I had only ever seen in photographs and films. Visually, then, the accomplishment here arguably exceeds that of

The Last Goodbye,

and hearing Carmen describe her story is as emotionally fulfilling as anything else at Tribeca this year.

Arturo's interview remains to be completed by September, and the piece will be installed at other sites. As amazing as the finished VR piece should be, the piece also includes 2D interactive interviews with Carmen and Arturo, with innumerable questions that promise to be just as enlightening and educational; this was how I heard the details of her story about the 1993 bombing. Palitz is excited by the educational opportunities that this format presents, telling me that he's recorded his largest oral history yet with William Shatner, covering his entire life and career. If the topics are already ranging from 9/11 to

Star Trek

, the interactive video interview may be one of museums' prime tools in the next few years.

The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite

is an immersive theater piece presented in VRChat. Designed as a social space where users can don animated avatars and then physically speak and interact with each other, VRChat has recently been adapted by theatrical innovators to create interactive theater pieces, where audiences and live performers alike inhabit the same world. This not only allows for geographically dispersed people to come together into a shared online space, but for actors to speak directly with viewers to create unique experiences with each performance; with titles like

The Under Presents: Tempest

and

Finding Pandora X,

this is a surging collaborative space between theater and VR professionals that filmmakers would do well to be aware of.

The Severance Theory

, writer and director Lyndsie Scoggin and her team address childhood trauma, specfically dissociative identity disorder. One participant takes the role of Alex (a name that fits multiple genders; during the setup the viewer has a chance to identity their pronouns), while others observe unseen. After the initial introduction Alex enters the narrative world by thinking back to their childhood, circa 1993, and an evening when they had just returned home to their parents after staying with their aunt for some time. Life at home varies wildly between loving and fraught, with both parents exerting obvious effort to make Alex feel welcome and cover over the cracks in their marriage: the mother involves Alex in making macaroni and cheese, and praises their drawing—in my performance the actress did a commendable job incorporating a picture of a unicorn I drew—while the father takes them up to the attic to experience a star projector and recount how he named a star after Alex the night they were born. But despite these efforts something more sinister than their marital struggles lurks in the shadows, literally, and revolves around an unspoken trauma that Alex experienced with their aunt. When the mother plays a music box that was a gift from the aunt, a dark mist oozes down the staircase and toward the viewers; in two subsequent episodes this cloud becomes more brazen, attacking Alex's self-worth through a disembodied voice and finally attempting, apparently, to become physically violent. These moments allow the rest of the audience to participate, as they come to Alex's aid as unseen voices, chanting that they must protect Alex and fight off the shadow. The visual metaphor is poignantly done, although it's broad enough that it could serve as a symbol of many types of mental illness and distress. After the piece ends—happily but ambiguously—a final salon includes information about dissociative identity disorder specifically for those who are interested.

There was enough locomotion between different rooms of Alex's house that by the end I was developing a good case of motion sickness, a common ailment in VR, but there was much more to praise about the piece, and I hope it has a post-Tribeca release as well. Scoggin uses her background in escape rooms to create a kind of metaphorical escape room here, with the feeling of claustrophobia and entrapment permeating even the piece's gentler moments, and some simple puzzle-like work to push the narrative forward. I saw the piece near the beginning of its Tribeca run, and even then the actors were tremendous in their adaptability and improvisation to my own actions, their clarity in helping shepherd a non-professional actor/VR performer through the process with them (including in the group onboarding process), and their vocal and physical performances—acting is no easy task when one's face is no longer visible. While in the role of Alex it was hard for me personally to not think like a screenwriter or actor performing for the rest of the audience, but with interactive VR “theater” set to grow exponentially it's something I think audiences will grow increasingly accustomed to in the next few years (it could be argued that we're seeing the emergence of an entirely new art form, not film, theater, or video game but something that uses parts of each). And hopefully in a few years improvements in photogrammetry, volumetric capture, and similar technology will allow us to see actors' actual bodies rather than animated avatars. That's the future of VR theater that I'm most looking forward to, and in the meantime pieces like this are developing the narratives that will get us there.

We Are At

Home

comes from the married team of

Michelle and Uri Kranot

, experimental animators and founders of the Danish animation studio

TinDrum

. An international co-production with

Floreal Films

in France,

Late Love Production

in Denmark, and the National Film Board of Canada, it's a VR adaptation of their 2D film

The Hangman at Home,

which in turn is based on Carl Sandburg's oft-adapted 1922

poem

. Sandburg muses about the home life of a man whose occupation is to kill, and whether it's a typically domestic scene, the horrors of his day buried or even blithely laughed off. The Kranots focus on a few key phrases—”play horse,” “bonfire”—and spin a series of tableaus, which, remarkably for a film based on a poem, are poignantly wordless. Presented in miniature within a proscenium arch, these moments are drawn mostly in inky, flowing black and white, and the hangman and other characters have a listless, uncomfortable feel to them, like a hybrid of Robert Crumb and Munch's

The Scream

—especially when they break the fourth wall and stare directly at the viewer. Topics go beyond the poem's literal content to evoke its tone of unease, with the hangman performing tasks like mourning a woman dying in bed, masturbating under his own covers, or arriving home to a bombed-out apartment with a view of a warzone through the missing wall.

In between these moments of miniature theater are full-scale 6DoF interactive scenes, where the viewer has to open and pass through a door (drawn in a chalky outline), or duck down to climb through a cabinet. At Storyscapes this meant that the four participants circled around a large open space, as they moved clockwise from one scene to another (and requiring a fair amount of wrangling by the staff to avoid collisions). Knowing this made these moments of walking forward somewhat uncanny, like a Kierkegaardian step into the dark, as I've rarely had license to move quite so far in a VR headset before. But it was also quite clever and entertaining as the four of us somewhat simultaneously figured out the tiny puzzle to move to the next scene.

The final scene breaks this pattern, as the proscenium is gone and the viewer is now within a full-scale drama in which a pregnant woman contemplates burning a stack of books and committing suicide by jumping out the window. This scene ends on a final moment of interactivity as the viewer now holds the matches and can decide whether to light up the books or not. The ending is enigmatic—it could literally go either way—but still encapsulates the tone of the entire piece, that just beyond these tranquil scenes everything is about to catch on fire. The Kranots, in fact, seem to have abandoned Sandburg's last line, “Anything is easy for a hangman, I guess,” in favor of its exact opposite: everything seems fraught for this character, on the brink of annihilation.

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Cinematographers

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Directors

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