Month: February 2022

Roderick Coover. Cinema of immersion, interaction and database

Roderick Coover will present samples from his works ”The Key To Time” (2019), ”Penelope” (2019), ”Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative” (2016), ”Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project” (2016) and others in a discussion of expanded cinema and narrative forms. He will offer a historical view that looks back to his interactive cinema works of the 1990s and 2000s. He will discuss ways that he and others have work with code to made generative and combinatory works in the 2000s and 2010s that build stories out of databases that are different every time you watch them. He will consider how these forms may merge with immersive cinema in its various forms. He will discuss approaches to working with highly experimental, multimodal methods to engage critical issues like climate change and human rights. In doing so, he will also introduce his new edited book ”The Digital Imaginary: Literature And Cinema Of The Database” (Bloomsbury) and discuss ways that emerging forms illuminate trajectories for narrative imagination and production.

Roderick Coover

He lives in Philadelphia, where he is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Creator or co-creator of award-winning works of digital, interactive and emergent cinema, virtual reality and digital arts. His latest works include the VR films The Key To Time and Hearts And Minds, the algorithmic films Penelope and Toxicity: A Climate Change Narrative, and the book The Digital Imaginary: Literature And Cinema Of The Database (Bloomsbury). His works use expanded forms of narrative and documentary cinema to address critical contemporary questions like climate change, migration and extinction.  

www.unknownterritories.org

Sara Kolster. To click or not to click?

Should every story be interactive? Is that where we are heading? A story well told opens up new perspectives of the world around us. How can we involve the viewer (or listener) in a more engaged way?

Sara Kolster
Sara Kolster is an independent interactive director and designer who specializes in digital storytelling. She’s drawn to socially committed themes and within her work likes to combine different media and techniques ranging from animation and photography to Virtual Reality. Her work is shown at international festivals and exhibitions in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Tokyo & Berlin.

Kuba Mikurda. An essay in space.

A discussion of three visual essays created by Kuba Mikurda & Jakub Woynarowski – “Gilliam’s Atlas” (2011), “Corpus Delicti” (2013) and “The Story of Landing” (2015). Mikurda & Woynarowski identify the priority of space over narrative in the work of Gilliam, Borowczyk, Lynch and Tarkowski and draw from their films to develop visual discourses that would properly capture their “spacialized narratives”, including maps, catalogues and 3-D models.

Kuba Mikurda

Kuba Mikurda is a film scholar and filmmaker based in Warsaw, Poland. He started as film critic, journalist and publisher, then worked as TV director and TV presenter for Canal+ Poland. He works as an Assistant Professor at Film School in ?ód? where he runs the Essay Film Studio. 

Gaëlle Mourre. Do humans still have a monopoly on creativity?

AI (with machine learning and real-time story engine) guides you through your own personal journey in an interactive, multiuser social experience, powered by VR and live actors – the time has come!

Gaëlle Mourre
Gaëlle Mourre is a director and screenwriter based in London. Having lived in Asia, the US and Europe, Gaëlle brings her cultural experiences into the worlds that she creates in her films. Her fiction projects include Awakening (“Best Drama” NY International Short Film Festival) and The Feast (“Best Production Design” at Underwire Film Festival), which both screened at various Oscar, BAFTA, BIFA as well Méliès award qualifying festivals. She also produced and directed a commercial for the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, starring Lambert Wilson. Her latest project, Mechanical Souls, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and at SXSW. Mechanical Souls was selected as part of Google Jumpstart’s 2018 program, as well as the 75th Venice Biennale Production Bridge and was a part of the Kaohsiung Film Festival VR Lab. She is currently working on the development of several projects, each tied together by the common themes of emancipation and the exploration of ethics within surreal settings. Gaëlle trained as a director at the London Film School and holds an MA in Filmmaking and a BA in Art History and Spanish Literature. She also produces branded content as well as fiction content. Gaëlle is a classical 2D Filmmaker as well as a VR Director. Bilingual in French and English, she works in both languages and is always up for a new challenge, travelling internationally for her projects.

Ludger Pfanz. Space-Time Narratives

Over the coming decades new technologies, like AI and immersive new media, will change our lives and the way we perceive it beyond our imagination. But most new technologies like VR are not offset by adequate content. In most cases traditional stories are combined with VR effects – that is comparable to provide a silent movie with an audio track. My lecture is based on three hypotheses: firstly, this new technology can only achieve authenticity if the space (topos) is offered meaning already in the script and project development. Secondly, in VR one can no longer work with images (frames), for the technology requires a thinking in spheres. In addition, besides the construction of suspense or tension on the time-line, we also have to consider the tension of space – such as the vertical, horizontal and parallax tension. The lecture will focus on new narrative forms, from “space-time–experiences“ to “space-time narrations” and the quantum theory of digital dreams including an outlook to “artificial and artistic intelligence“.

Ludger Pfanz

ZKM | CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA 

Works as a producer, director and author. After studying theater and literature at the Free University of Berlin, he completed his diploma in filmmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg with honors.  He has been an instructor and head of the studios at the University of Arts and Design at the ZKM Karlsruhe since 1997. In 2010 he founded the research-laboratory “Expanded 3 Digital Cinema Lab”. Pflanz is Founder and Head of the “3D Alliance Karlsruhe”, the European program “Parallax” , the international VR Consortium, the international festival „BEYOND“, the international Symposium „Future Design- Artistic Visions for Europe and BEYOND“ and the „Future Design-Institute“. 

Pola Borkiewicz. New XR narrative paradigm

The XR Media Taxonomy (All Reality) is a subject of an ongoing discussion. This process takes place in the spectrum between the poles of Reality (physical) and Virtuality (synthetic), revealing the continuum of our experience (Milgram, 1994). In defining, in the broadest sense, the concept of cross-reality or XR, I refer to the X symbol as a mathematical variant that allows to describe potential realities (XR) emerging in the process of systematization of the categories of all experiences (VR, AR, MXR, MXYR, multiMXYR or AllR), (Mann, 2018). In practice, artistic and research activities, where the key aspect is communication within the work of interdisciplinary teams, there is a need to develop a common language that transcends hermetic areas of meaning within individual disciplines. From this need a project of codification of the media language of potential realities (XR) is born. It will have the form of a useful tool for both artists and researchers. In my speech, I would like to present the publication project I am currently developing on a digital publishing platform as well as the process related to the shaping of a new paradigm of spacial media narrative, starting with the virtual experience of 3D spherical film or Cinematic VR (CVR).

POLA BORKIEWICZ

Head of VR/AR | Visual Narratives Laboratory | Lodz Film School.

Interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer, director, cognitiveist, writer.

PhD student at the Laboratory of Virtual Reality and Psychophysiology of the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she conducts research on the subject of Cinematic VR (New paradigm of the narrative of the spherical 3D VR movie. Research on immersion and the sense of presence in the film experience of virtual reality). 

She is working on a monograph about the Sign System of Audiovisual Language (SSOAV) and components of potential realities (xReality).

She publishes on cinematic VR narrative language and bioethical consequences of virtual environment development (AR/VR/MR).

She is involved in the broadly understood psychology of perception, new technologies and neuroaesthetics.

Domna Banakou. Being somebody else: the future of narrative storytelling

Research in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and virtual reality has provided evidence for the malleability of our brain’s body representation. It has been shown that a person’s body can be substituted by a life-sized artificial one, resulting in a perceptual illusion of body ownership over the fake body. Several studies have shown that when people are virtually represented with a body different to their own, they exhibit behaviours associated with attributes pertaining to that body. By exploiting Immersive Virtual Reality to induce body ownership illusions over distinct virtual bodies, I will show how altered self-representation can influence one’s self-perception, perception of the environment, and implicit biases, with the potential to bring about positive change.

Domna Banakou

Researcher | EVENT LAB | University of Barcelona

Domna Banakou obtained her bachelor degree in Computer Science in 2009 from the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. In 2009-2010 she did a MSc in Computer Graphics, Vision and Imaging, at University College London (UCL). In 2017 she received her PhD degree in Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology using virtual reality from the University of Barcelona (UB), Spain, funded by the FI-DGR 2014 Grant for universities and research centres by the Generalitat de Catalunya. She is currently a postdoc researcher at EVENT-LAb (UB).    

“My research interest focuses on virtual environments and how people respond to events within these. I’m attracted by the idea of simulating situations that are difficult (or impossible) to realise in physical reality, and I am especially interested in the topic of bodily representation within virtual environments. I study transformations of the virtual bodily appearance, exploring the perceptual and behavioural correlates of body ownership illusions that occur as a function of the type of body in which embodiment occurs.”

Sylvia Rothe. Timeline vs Spaceline

Already the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein had the desire for non-linear movies and books, in which the story can go on in all directions. Presenting omnidirectional movies (360°movies) via a head- mounted display (HMD) we are one step closer to this dream of spherical dramaturgies. The additional space component facilitates interactivity in a natural way. Comparing the historical development of traditional movies with today’s developments of Cinematic VR, many parallels can be found. In the first years, the attraction of the moving pictures was enough to fascinate the audience. Over the years, an own narrative art has developed, which is also subject of scientific investigations. However, the narrative methods of traditional film production cannot simply be transferred to omnidirectional movies. The transition of some activities from the filmmaker to the viewer and new interaction possibilities requires and enables new approaches. In Cinematic Virtual reality, viewers watch omnidirectional movies via head-mounted displays and are placed inside the scene. In this way, the viewer participates in an immersive film experience. However, due to the free choice of field-of-view, it is possible to miss details which are important for the story. On the other hand, the additional space component gives the filmmakers new opportunities to construct non-linear interactive stories. To support filmmakers and viewers, we introduced the concept of a ‘space-line’ (named in analogy to the traditional ‘timeline’) which connects movie sequences via interactive regions. We will present this concept in our presentation.

Sylvia Rothe
Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics, University of Munich.
Documentary filmmaker from Munich. She studied mathematics in Berlin. She took part in numerous seminars and workshops for documentary filmmakers. Since 2004 she has been working on various film projects that have been screened at international film festivals. Her work focuses on socially engaged topics.
Her main research interests are: Cinematic Virtual Reality / 360º Movies; Impact of Camera Positions in Cinematic VR; Guiding Attention in Cinematic VR; Interactivity in Cinematic VR; Cinematic VR as a Social Experience; Accessibility in Cinematic VR.