The Visual Narratives Laboratory operated at the Lodz Film School from 2019 to 2024, established through a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science’s “Regional Initiative of Excellence” pilot competition. The Laboratory successfully explored new spheres of artistic practice beyond the School’s traditional expertise in film, theater arts, and photography, responding to the digital revolution’s transformative impact on media and artistic creation.
Project Directors: Krzysztof Pijarski, Krzysztof Franek
Laboratory Mission and Achievements
Over its five-year operation, the Laboratory conducted creative and scientific exploration in narrative-related technologies, including cinematic VR, stereoscopy, interactive documentary and other interactive visual forms, film essays, and digital multimedia publishing. All projects were accompanied by scholarly reflection through audience research analyzing the impact of produced works and regular conferences that documented the Laboratory’s activities.
The Laboratory’s primary focus was producing experimental artistic works through open competitions for individual artists and teams working in contemporary visual narrative media. This approach fostered innovation while maintaining rigorous academic standards.
Studio Activities and Accomplishments
VR/AR Studio
Management: Pola Borkiewicz, Jacek Nagłowski
The Virtual and Augmented Reality Studio conducted interdisciplinary art and research projects resulting in immersive experience realizations. The studio successfully operated a competitive development program, admitting at least five teams annually. Following pre-production phases, the vnLab Artistic Council selected multiple projects for full realization, documenting processes and identifying solutions to technical, artistic, and production challenges.
The studio’s creative experimentation was systematically analyzed to formulate new audiovisual language, with particular emphasis on critical reflection regarding immersive narratives. Completed works underwent audience perception research using neuroscience tools, resulting in recommendations and scientific publications that expanded understanding of contemporary audiovisual messages and human interaction with digital reality.
S3D Studio
Management: Piotr Matysiak
The S3D Studio explored artistic and dramaturgical possibilities in stereoscopic stop motion animation techniques. Through a comprehensive four-year research program, the studio completed innovative experiments that expanded cinematic language dedicated to stop motion animation in three dimensions. Major achievements included producing an animated puppet short film and creating a comprehensive textbook on stereoscopic techniques that systematized the possibilities and challenges of stereoscopy.
The studio successfully conducted competitions for artists interested in participating in research projects, as well as for producers, institutions, and universities seeking to develop S3D projects under the studio’s guidance.
Perception and Audience Research Laboratory
Management: Magdalena Sobocińska (2023-2024), Anna Zarychta (2019-2022)
This laboratory conducted extensive research on cultural participants and creators. Research examined the role of new media in creation, promotion, distribution, and participation in visual culture broadly defined.
The laboratory employed both classical research methods and innovative approaches drawing from neuroscience and neuroaesthetics, utilizing oculographic (eyetracking) and biometric emotion research (face reading and GSR). This research provided answers to fundamental questions about cultural reception processes and the role of new technologies in cultural sphere creation and management. The laboratory also provided crucial research support to all other Laboratory studios.
Live Experience Studio (2019-2021)
Management: Dariusz Kaminski
The Live Experience Studio developed several research projects including “A system for immersive recording of ‘live VR’ events” and “New Forms of Performing Arts”. These projects explored new technologies as media for creating immersive stage experiences through VR recording of musical performances, plays, and theatrical presentations. However, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the studio discontinued its operations, supporting the creation of two VR pieces, produced in the VR/AR Studio.
Film Essay Studio
Management: Michał Matuszewski, Kuba Mikurda, Stanisław Liguziński
The Film Essay Workshop approached the film essay not merely as a genre, but as an attitude and cognitive-artistic method. Drawing creatively from the tradition of canonical essayists like Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, and Orson Welles, the studio treated “essay” as a continuous attempt to understand phenomena through the process of describing them.
Through seminars, discussions, and film projects, the studio explored what the film essay could become in contemporary hands, investigating available instruments, methods, and poetics for today’s essayists. The studio successfully examined how artists could draw from both cinema history and contemporary audiovisual forms in innovative ways, developing new approaches to writing with images (cinécriture) and audiovisual sketching.
The studio created production conditions that allowed for experimentation, multiple solution testing, and radical course changes. This open-ended research approach enabled testing various formal concepts through trial and error, generating workshop and scientific value from both final versions and intermediate solutions.
Studio of Interactive Narratives, Digital Scientific Publications and UX
Management: Krzysztof Pijarski
Project Manager: Katarzyna Boratyn
Collaborators: Frédéric Dubois, Sandra Gaudenzi
This studio successfully developed new forms of narrative utilizing digital interactive technologies in documentary film and related forms including reportage and film essays. The studio identified interactive documentary forms as the most active area for experimenting with viewer interaction and activation, where photography and film successfully merged with literary forms, auditory experiences, animation elements, and computer game components.
Through both creative and research processes, the Interactive Narratives Studio supported the creation of narrative interactive forms, helping creators find appropriate narrative structures for their stories. Participants explored questions about target audiences, story experiences, and optimal narrative structures and technologies for achieving desired outcomes.
A significant achievement was developing digital scholarly publications using various media and interactive technologies for presenting and disseminating research findings. The studio became a publisher for Visual Narrative Laboratory works, creating new spaces for making both artistic and scientific works public. The digital publication format successfully incorporated fragments of digital and film works into theoretical articles, included contextual audiovisual forms, and integrated contemporary visualization methods into scientific expression.
The Visual Narratives Laboratory’s five-year operation successfully demonstrated the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration between artistic practice and academic research, producing innovative works while advancing theoretical understanding of contemporary visual narrative media.
