IDFA DocLab 2026 プレビュー：Shared Realities プログラムと20周年

The Voices of VR Podcast. international documentary film festivals in the world, the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam. And this is actually the 20th anniversary of DocLab. And so it started in 2007. And so in this conversation, I have Casper Sonnen sort of go back into memory lane and kind of recount the origin story for DocLab, but also how there's some really new and exciting public funding that's coming from the CIIIC. This is like a 200 million euro initiative within the context of the Netherlands, investing in all sorts of ways of building up the industry of immersive and immersive experiences, and particularly XR and XR distribution.

And so DocLab is in a more explicit collaboration with this initiative of the CIIIC. And so this shared realities initiative is trying to think about how can you use XR to be able to create a shared context to be able to revitalize aspects of civic society. And so this is a conversation that I had last year with Martine DeWall detailing that. So I'm really excited to visit again to see some of the first projects that were funded to be exhibited this year in DocLab's program. So we get to hear a little bit more about some of these really exciting and innovative and completely wild experiences that I can't wait for you to hear a little bit more about within the context of this conversation. And so I'm really super excited about DocLab. There's always a lot of amazing program. There's lots of like R&D Summit. I'm going to be actually hosting a whole master class with East City Films at the beginning on the Friday. and then I'm also going to be teaching my own master class on Thursday, November 19th, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam Applied Sciences. I've been using this kind of experiential design framework as a critical framework to understand experiences that I'm seeing, and then I'll be using that to kind of host collaborative, interactive, shared realities,

experiential design workshop where we'll have anywhere from 50 to 100 people, depending on how big of a room we get, and then start to actually prototype some of these different ideas and experiences that people have, but kind of play with the fundamental elements of experiential design. So, yeah, always love coming out to DocLab. R&D Summit is also happening. Last year I wrote an entire 121-page report summarizing all the future of location-based entertainment in terms of all the exciting trends of what's happening with this kind of indie revolution of location-based entertainment and cultural institutions around the world that are creating outlets for these different projects that we're seeing on the festival circuit to actually have a life and a way for artists to make a living. So that's also really exciting. and I'm sure they'll be continuing that conversation this year at the R&D Summit. So it'll be a packed trip, but I'm really looking forward to it. And this podcast will give an extended overview of all the different projects are there and everything that's happening with Ifa Doc Lab. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Castor and Vieta happened on Thursday, November 5th, 2026.

So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hi, I'm Verata Kalinska. I joined the FADO glove team this year for the 2026 edition, a very special edition. So more on that soon. I'm new in the team, but I'm not new in the field. I've been working in XR for some time, wearing different hats. Very privileged and lucky and honored to work with Shari Freelo at Sundance Institute, New Frontier program. A year before that, I worked with New Frontier Story Lab, so a lot of research and development in XR there. And after that, I joined L.A. Performing Arts Center called the Music Center, where I hold the position year round as of now, and where I also curate and strategize how do we bring new media and emerging technology, digital art, to a complex in the middle of Los Angeles.

in downtown Los Angeles. Hi, my name is Kasper Sonnen. I'm head of the media programs at ITVA. I started the Dopla program when it was a small online program for the first year in 2007, 20 years ago. And over the years, I've had the honor and the pleasure to work with many amazing co-curators and programmers. Earlier this year, we started the curation with Nina van Doeren, who we've been working with for the past few years, who's still very much part of the team, but decided to focus a bit more on communication this year. And it's been a huge honor to welcome Beata this year to be part of our programming team, to co-curate the program with, because it's, yeah, as I said, it's a special edition, 20th anniversary, and a lot has happened in the past 20 years. And it's been a real joy to make the program together with Beata and Nina, the rest of the team. Also because it's a new year where we're also structured in a new way,

where we also launch, it coincides, the 20th anniversary also coincides with the launch of our Shared Realities Consortium, which is a new R&D program that we launched this year. Awesome. Well, looking forward to diving into all the different programs and more details about all of that. But before we do that, I'd love to hear a bit more context for each of your backgrounds and your journey into this space. So, yeah, I studied film, Film, Television and Theater School in Poland in Łódź and then also studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Łódź. So the interdisciplinary of my years was always there. I always was merging different disciplines and looking for different formats to convey a message or research. And yeah, then I did my Erasmus time in Cyprus, which led me actually to work with a Polish diplomatic mission. So my journey was not an obvious one.

I ended up living in Los Angeles, moving to New York City, also doing a bunch of artist fellowships, including one at Union Docs in New York City, where they're also really experimenting with formats and how nonfiction stories can be told. So I really felt I found my place in the States. And, yeah, I just went through a bunch of day jobs at the VFX animation studios, design studios, lots of great colleagues from Deluxe Media, Brand New School, and Metal Studios both in New York City and Los Angeles, where I really saw production flows. So I think that really informed a lot of my knowledge. and I saw the beginnings how VR and augmented reality projects were entering workflows of traditional VFX studios and everyone knew I'm really interested in this format so I end up always supporting talent and production there but I really missed and I think that's what I had also

you know a little bit of experience from Cyprus, Poland and working for diplomatic missions I really missed working in cultural institutions. I really wanted to work with artists. So, you know, I did quite a deep soul searching, what I want to do, you know, how I want to spend my work hours and identify a couple of institutions I would love to work for and apply to one. And I got the job at Sundance Institute at the New Frontier Story Lab. And I have to say that I really recommend these deep soul-searching journeys because since then I feel like I'm in the right place supporting artists from that angle, from the angle of either helping them develop their project, finding support in that way, or then when I switch my roles at Sundance and I went to work for the festival side, also really deeply looking into how to exhibit the work, what happens when the work meets the audience, you know, seeing the industry side of it,

Of course, big questions and topics around distribution. I also, I guess, was lucky to work at Sundance during the years of pandemic where we really had to pivot and shift rapidly. So I also was there when New Frontier was holding a digital venue called the Spaceship. Amazing experience. It was a really big task to hold a digital product as a small, tight department. But big shout out to all my colleagues from these years. Obviously, Shari Freelaw, Stephanie Owens, Milo Talwani. I'm forgetting Tons, Bergani. Yeah, I'm forgetting probably a couple of folks. I'm a little bit nervous. So, yeah, really formative years for me as well, how to think about this stuff and spending a lot of time also, you know, with Eat for Dog Love and then with Sundance alumni from around the world.

And that really, really informed me with my next role switch and joining Kamal Sinclair, who was leading digital innovation initiative at the music center and really shifting the perspective how it looks, how the perspective of bringing this type of project looks like when you bring them to the venue, year-round venue. and, you know, that comes with lots of protocols, lots of rules and different type of audience and how to open up audience to this type of work and really meet general public. It's been amazing. More than two years right now with the team there, really pushing the, you know, day by day by experimenting with lots of formats on the campus. and the opportunity to join Eat Fat Dog Lab this year came around and I just couldn't resist and I wanted to make it work and I'm also really grateful to the music center leadership they were open to such a solution

I feel that's innovative on its own to kind of see how this could benefit the music center itself but also a kind of building this international ties getting this huge kind of insight into a lot of international works. So, yeah, I feel very lucky this year that I'm working with great leaders on both sides, both at the Music Center and here at Eat Fat Dog Lab. The team is just phenomenal. So, great year for me. yeah so it's funny to think how all of us end up in this space because it's not a space that it's usually not a space that existed when we started thinking about where we wanted to end up so yeah i usually like to say that i like most ended up here by accident or reluctantly without knowing and then i think most of us still don't know what this space is

and where it will go. But I grew up in a family of a father who was a street theater maker and a musician, and a mother who was a visual artist and a carpenter, and who was, I would say, interdisciplinary without knowing what that word would necessarily mean herself, but someone who could make anything with her hands if she wanted to. And growing up in sort of arts scenes, I think as a young kid, The first thing that really was mine was the computer. It was like the Commodore Amiga that I kind of incrementally or like slowly started stealing away from my dad's theater company and ended up in my room. And then I discovered like the BDS and like how you could get your hands on games. And I think that was the first attempt at curating, having only a finite amount of floppy disks and having to figure out which ones. Do I go for the big game that spans across five disks? or do I go for the smaller one that actually is more fun to play

and take five different games? I think from there, after high school, I didn't want to have anything to do with the arts, so I started working in a very boring job where I discovered the Internet. It was around the time that the Internet started to become a thing. So I had access to the Internet at an early age, or from the beginning, and really fell in love with that, sort of the magic of it. This was the early 90s. And also we discovered like some boring admin job was not for me. And I really realized maybe I should go and study something. And I found this general humanities study, which was like perfect for those who don't know what to do. Because you could cherry pick from the humanities department and languages and art. And I did many different things from philosophy of art to Persian culture and language to the American 60s. And I kind of ended up with two things, new media on the one side and film on the other side.

And I think as excited as I was about the Internet and interested in that, I ran away from new media. I couldn't connect with it. I felt it was such an inflated trying to make all these complicated terms, trying to make it really important and trying to sort of study something before it really existed. It didn't feel very scientific. or very connected. I think I was also young and impatient in hindsight. But what I really fell in love with was film through the early film history classes by William Oricchio, who later ended up starting the MIT Open DocLab with Sarah Wallison in tandem with a lot of collaboration that we did within DocLab. And from film, I started an open-air film festival with friends. We started doing interdisciplinary art installations in the open air. I think a very foundational thing that helped when we started DocLab. Like if you can do installations

outdoor in the rain, then you gain a few things that are nice to do during immersive installations. From there, ended up working at ITFA, not really knowing that I actually had a connection to documentary as an art form as much. I started writing for ITFA initially, for the ITFA Dailies, really started to discover the experimental and playful side of documentary, discovering that art in connection to reality offers a special opportunity to create experiences that invite audiences to reflect about themselves, not just about the topic or what they see on screen. And I think in many ways, documentary is part of the start of any medium. And without any rules, first there was documentary, right? Like you invent the camera. What do you point it at? You point it at reality first before you hire actors and build a stage.

And I think within that, we're at the point of around 2007, the internet becoming a mainstream thing. And yeah, me within ITFA saying, maybe we should make a program about this. We were exploring it within the festival. mostly with external organizations and often mostly talking about what was happening on the internet and kind of mixing the internet as a tool for distribution, for crowdfunding, for new forms of reaching audiences for film and mixing that with new potential art forms. And sometimes those were a bit complicated. And I'm still very grateful to still managing director of ITFA, G.S. von Ozenar, who said, And sure, well, write me a one-pager and then make a corner on the new website that you're building. Let's see. So that sort of openness to experimentation within a festival organization is,

I think you see it within festival organizations more than in others. But I think ISA was also, because it's part of the documentary tradition, was a very playful organization, very open to things like that. And it's, yeah, that's where it started. and now we're here 20 years later. Nice. Yeah, I actually did an interview with William Iricchio back in 2022 at IFDA DocLab with a book that they had put out in collaboration with MIT, Open DocLab with the co-creation studio called Collective Wisdom. And in that book, it was co-written also with Kat Cezak, but I'm pretty sure William Iricchio wrote this section of contextualizing documentaries saying that, you know, documentary with every new communication media or technology, The documentary is always on the first lines of experimenting with what's possible with telling stories, including like 90 percent of all the first films were documentary first time for separated sound, first time with color film. And I think even with XR, you have 90 Delapeno with Hunger in L.A. at Sundance New Frontier in 2012, even before the Oculus Rift had been properly launched later that August.

And in fact, Palmer Luckey was there with a very early prototype of Oculus Rift showing that at Sundance New Frontier. So there's something around the documentary where it does get very experimental in terms of like really pushing the edge of what's even possible. And that's the thing that I love about DocLab is that there's always the frontiers of what's even possible with immersive storytelling. and this kind of fusion of all these technologies from XR, virtual reality, augmented reality, digital storytelling, but also artificial intelligence and all of the technologies that are out there for how you can start to tell stories, including no technology at all, which you've had a couple appearances. We're just kind of bringing in more emergent social dynamics with more theatrical traditions. And so really excited to start to dive in to cover this year's program. And I think before we start to dig into what you're showing this year, I think it's important to also call out that there's a new public funding there in the Netherlands called the CIIIC, which is the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition, which has a broader like 200 million euro remit to invest in all sorts of things that are kind of growing the larger ecosystem and industry of XR and immersive, what they call IX or immersive experiences.

And part of that is the Shared Realities Consortium that the DocLab is a part of, and there's going to be a big part of this year's theme and program around shared realities. And so I'll pass it over to you, Casper, to give a bit more context to this larger CIIIC funding, but how DocLab is fitting into this larger section of, you know, you're not getting all the 200 million euros for just your project. But you do get a section there, and I had a chance to talk with Martine Duval to see how this idea of revitalizing civic society and having immersive experiences. But it's been a couple of years that Helene Rao has been speaking at the R&D Summit. Now things have been funded, and it seems like that we're starting to see some of the fruits of some of that funding of some of the first projects that have been invested in by the CIIIC this year. So excited to hear you give a little bit more context to the CIIIC and how it's created this shared realities consortium for DocLab this year. Yeah. No, I think it's a very exciting moment and opportunity within the Netherlands.

For us, it started actually before CIIIC was launched. I think for us, it started around seven years ago when the Ministry of Economic Affairs helped us. they were actually looking at what we were doing within DocLab as an artistic program with a lot of experimentation and innovative programming. And we already worked a lot with MIT, co-commissioning works, exploring works, studying the field, small initiatives around sector building. And the Ministry of Economic Affairs, seven, eight years ago, stumbled upon DocLab and kind of felt like this is, we're seeing a lot of really exciting experimentation and also critical reflection around the role of digital and new technologies within society. So they actually helped us set up our program and kind of reinvent a public-facing program on the outside, but really use it as a living lab underneath to allow artists to be considered as researchers,

to acknowledge that what is happening within our field, the artists that have been inventing new media for the past 20 years, inventing modes of storytelling, they are often just as important as the engineers who build the headsets in shaping and defining what a medium can and cannot be. And also the main point for audiences to have an early opportunity to interact with new technologies, to critically reflect upon the affordances and sometimes the more scary elements of some of these technologies. What works, what doesn't? What do we want to use? What should we use? Look at AI, some of the conversations that we've had here over the years, instigated by projects created by artists working with these tools and technologies. That ran quite successfully for a couple of years. And then a couple of years ago, So that was one of the many inspiration points for the government to say, actually, this whole field of immersive is something that is something we should support more fundamentally across the country.

Because this is where the future economy, you cannot negate this if you want to know where the future is headed. If you want to be a country of innovation, not just within the arts, of course, but more broadly in general. it is really important to both critically reflect on technology and actually experiment with it, use it, and also get to a point where figuring out how does this scale, how can this become something more sustainable and not just a series of isolated experiments. So that's where, on the government side, a long process of talking to the field, talking to stakeholders across different parts of the country and different disciplines ended up with the CICIC program that LA is spearheading. And one big important part of that was to say, this artist practice-based research, that is something that we want to support within this program structurally. So a program called ADRI was started, and we were invited, along with everybody else in the country,

to propose a consortium, an R&D consortium, to, in our case, continue what we've been doing, but within the goals and the structure of CIIIC. And in our case, that meant that our old funding for our R&D program ended. So we had a few exciting years of in-between funding, but we're really, really happy that we were granted earlier this year the funding for initially a two-year R&D program called Shared Realities. and it's an R&D consortium that consists of some of the most pioneering and senior makers within the Netherlands. It combines the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Martijn de Waal, that you've been speaking to, MIT. We continue our collaboration with MIT. And then there is New Reality, an initiative by Cassette, by Robert Wankes and Diversion, that brings VR into arthouse cinemas. who's now also starting with a run in France,

and the Amsterdam Planetarium, or the Amsterdam Zoo's Planetarium. Within that consortium, we started a couple of new activities, but also were able to continue the fundamental ways that we do R&D with audience-facing. So it's enabling artists to explore new presentation formats and for audiences to experience and test them out and for researchers like the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and MIT to take that and distill the knowledge from individual projects as individual case studies in order to build the field. And I think the three main goals for us with We Shared Realities are from a very sort of self-centered, immersive, small, immersive community worldwide is sector building, is acknowledging that the works that we present, the works that we create, are hard to reach audiences. They are expensive to set up.

It's complicated outside of the more free environment of the festival and the more temporarily but highly dedicated context of the festival. It's hard to bring these works to year-round venues. There's a lot of excitement and interest about this. I think within our field, we sometimes get bored and tired of yet another distribution panel, yet another talk about how to... But it is one of our fundamental issues that we need to figure out. I used to love to hate on opera for the cost per user and challenge it as an elitist art form. If I look into the mirror and see what the costs are of some of the works that we present and love, we're still doing better than opera. But in many cases, I think the costs are really high. So that's something we should work on how can we not just raise throughput, but also make costs lower or make it easier to reach audiences. This can be done in many different ways. It can also be done by extending the life of a project so that it can be seen by small groups of people for a much longer period

instead of breaking and not working anymore within one or two years, which is now the reality of immersive. Secondly, we really feel that the works that are presented and allow audiences to interact and engage and get a genuine experience with new technology allows critical reflection to happen, not just within laboratories and within the happy few who have their hands on new technologies, but to start critical reflection as early as possible. This is central to what we do, because we haven't had enough of that over the years. if you look at how certain technologies have been unleashed upon society in the past 20 years and how that has affected our physical reality. And thirdly, we really see in a way, let's say, the more sinister effects of how big tech started as experimental and playful and bringing people together and allowing people to explore who they were and meet strangers online

and of all these vulnerable, beautiful, awkward new ways of interacting, it kind of turned into something else, right? Over the past 20 years where we started to be more isolated from each other, be more afraid of each other, be more afraid of the other than we've ever been. And in a way, interactive art and immersive art, for us, is also an opportunity to start rebuilding some of these civic elements of society by making us have more shared experiences together, have more shared realities together, meet each other in engaging, fun, and strange ways, kind of reclaiming the physical space around us again. So for us, shared realities is many things, but I think for us mostly it's how do we build the immersive arts in a more sustainable way and acknowledge that it's a physical art form, that art is something you go to together and you experience together. Even if you do it one by one, it's a destination.

It's not something you hide or you are sucked into at home like your phone screen right now is. And that's a beautiful potential because also for existing media, like for cinemas, for theaters, for museums, who are sometimes struggling to get audiences in, to get new audiences, art is about surprising us. art is about offering us something that we haven't had before immersive is is has huge potential there um so yeah that's that's where uh where the where the program uh came from and we're now doing it uh in that sense making the festival not just on our own but a large part of the program and festival is really made in tandem with this consortium of makers researchers and practitioners awesome yeah i know over the years uh especially the last five or six years this discussion of distribution and location-based entertainment has been at the top of everyone's mind it's been the focus of the r&d summit there of doc lab the last couple of years which i've been you know a

part of writing up in a think tank report and then also venice had like a whole think tank about distribution for a couple of years and i wrote up a report for them and that the last time that they had done that as well so it's on everybody's mind of figuring that out and i love how doc lab is at the forefront of experimenting with all of that and so maybe it's a good time to start to actually dive into this year's program to start to see how that actually has been playing out with this year's selection and so maybe let's start with the microbiome restaurant which i i got to see a pitch for a couple years ago uh by polymorph which they did symbiosis before which is a really amazing piece very haptic and then i watched this pitch and i was like i went up to that one of the producers, Karine, afterwards, I was like, is this serious? Are you actually going to be doing this? And it was like you described it in the introduction, Casper, as one of the most wild experiences you've ever curated at DocLab. And so I'm curious to hear how you start to describe what is the microbiome restaurant. Yeah, and it's one of our consortium projects, so maybe it's nice to start there indeed.

So Polymorph, as you say, I would say, known within the field as the most out there, one of the most out there studios, I would say, in the world. They love to not just mix different technologies, but also really dive into our human bodies with smells, with pheromones, with soft robotics, all kinds of theatrical technologies you can imagine. This year, the Microbiome Restaurant is in a way opening up a new meaning of shared realities for us by acknowledging that our individual human bodies that we've become so focused on, I would say, like in this sort of self-centered reality that we ended up with thanks to social media and our individual eye devices. they're taking the opposite approach and they say no your body is not your unique only self-centered body you are actually and every one of us is an ecosystem of different microorganisms living on

top of our bodies living inside our bodies and it's a well-known or like an emerging field within science is the intelligence, the collective wisdom that actually resides within our bodies, not just in our individual brain, but within those microorganisms as well. It's quite known that some of the decisions we make are not made in our brain, but are actually made in our gut. The term gut feeling gets a whole new meaning that way. Polymorphs took this as a point of departure for creating different experiences. The restaurant will eventually contain three experiences, and they're presenting the first two this year with us. One is called Plural Tastings, which offers the audience a dinner for two where they get to have a Michelin star food experience, one delivered to the mouth of the audience member and the other one delivered for the microorganisms on their skin. So they're having a dinner together with the microorganisms on their skin.

The robotic arm with a microscope connected to it that will zoom in on your skin, allowing you in VR to see the microorganisms have a little feast as you are tasting with them. The second installation as part of the microbiome restaurant that they're presenting, I think sometimes I like to just leave it with the title. The title is Oat Cuisine for the Rectum. And that is indeed the most crazy thing we've ever presented. it's already sold out and we still have a few spots left for special guests but yeah it's a project where I would I kind of want to have a conversation with each and every one who bought a ticket and ask what they are expecting and also ask how it was when they came out yeah seeing some of the early prototypes it was like people inverted and then just creating a private space to be able to actually deliver the microbiome to your rectum.

It's going to be, I think, probably one of the most immersive experiences I've had. I can't wait to try it out and see how they've been able to set that whole thing up because it was, again, like you said, one of the most wild prototype pitches that I've seen. And then I was like, okay, this is one of the pieces that I'm looking forward to the most to see, okay, how does this play out? And then also, how does it feel? How does it feel when I experience this? So yeah, Very much looking forward to that and, yeah, looking forward to talking and catching up with the folks from Polymorph. So, Bietza, let's dig into, let's say, like three different projects that there's three different selections. And I know that there's the digital storytelling, there's the immersive nonfiction, and then there's also like a spotlight. So I think the next three pieces that you want to talk about kind of covers from each of those. So let's start with a Shrek. Yes, and all of them are part of the Shrad Reality Consortium as well. So, a Shrad is a project by Ali Eslami, artist based in Amsterdam, worth mentioning the Itfa Dog Lab Award winner from 2016 for his death toll experience.

And Eshraq means illumination in Farsi and Ali has built open world experience based on his ongoing research and experimentation that he has been I think developing for three years I believe And it's a simulation that you can explore, walk through, play in it, probably with almost endless possibilities and variation. and Eshrak draws on 12th century philosophy of Sarah Vardy a philosopher from Iran who perceived the world as degrees of light and that's what Ali is bringing in Eshrak simulation that that's a central idea that philosophy in his philosophy is knowledge by presence. So it's kind of just direct, intuitive knowledge that doesn't need to be defined.

It's something you experience like light. So he challenges the conditions of game. It's not something that you need to accomplish, that you need to finish. It's an open world that you can endlessly explore. and I just love hearing Ali talking about it and kind of exploring how your consciousness can move between different agents, different forms, different environments. He built replicas of pieces of Amsterdam as well as ziggurat of Ur. So a lot to explore. And I'm happy to talk about a couple of more from the shared reality. There is another one. There's another experience from shared reality project called Palimpsest by Guillaume Roux and Johan Tuleto.

and this is an installation with a bunch of elements in it. It's a single-player game, sculpture, interactive film within that installation, and it all connects to each other. Visitors can experience this together. and this is the open world where different stories and storytelling traditions coexist and they address the struggle between diverse storytelling formats like oral, written, visual, digital and technological systems that are trying to absorb them and make them as a one model. So in this world, four fictional characters move through this world. They have different play modes, and they are chased by a network of data centers

that wants to bring all the stories into that one single model. You can choose as a player a mode. And what's interesting to mention is that the game will influence what's happening in the film. So your action can create glitches, then can create a little power outages in visuals and sound. And depending on your choices, you can really appear and disappear. within the within the scene so uh the story isn't isn't fixed uh it's also an open world with overlapping stories um and another program from the shared reality uh consortium is i think a very well known um maker um uh to ifa dog lab and international industry

It's Tamara Shogalu, Emmy-winning artist, as well as Idva Doblap, winning artist. And this year she brings VR project to our competition lineup. And in this project, Tamara recovers the forgotten story, forgotten history of a black woman living in the 17th century Amsterdam. and she really explores connections between memory, the power of archives, and identity politics that shape whose stories are remembered, whose stories are preserved, whose stories are forgotten. So in this VR work, Tamara is bringing back, is going back to 1632. that's where it starts in the archival document where a free black woman named Francesca

D'Angola is described as a troublemaker by a merchant that she was in conflict with and but if you read between lines and there was a lot of archives done that she, you can really bring a different picture of Francesca as a woman who ran her own business who played a very important role in the black community of Amsterdam in the 17th century. And Tamara brings that story to life through her amazing skills in animation, direction, interactive VR opera. And I think what's worth mentioning that this project exists as a VR, is in our VR gallery, but also we're going to have a special preview of a work that is still in development as a live performance stage version in the Dutch National Opera.

So, Kaspar, your take on opera is back this year in a very present way that we collaborate with Dutch National Opera. So, yeah, like the VR version, the performance move between Amsterdam in the 17th century and Amsterdam today, because there is a contemporary character from today's Amsterdam who navigates also the same questions of belonging in Amsterdam as a black woman. I think there is one more. We just archive our tapes, I think. Yeah, I think that was the end of that section. Awesome, yeah. What's that? I cover it.

Oh. Yeah, she did that before the visible one. Awesome. And so, yeah, well, maybe let's jump. So just a note for you, Casper. there's a sort of connection to ENTER and Amsterdam 1652. I want to do those two, and then we'll go back to the other archive. Awesome. Well, I know that this is the 20-year anniversary of a doc lab, and that there seems to be a number of projects that have appeared previously and that you're bringing back, and I'd love to dive into some of those. And there's a, Vieta, you had mentioned the 1632. I think they're at Venice this year. There was a piece called Amsterdam 1652, which is like 20 years later, that was also kind of like reimagining the history, but also telling it from more of the perspective of females, because a lot of the sort of feminine perspective of the roles of women in history has been kind of erased and written out of history. But there was, in talking to Ninka as well as Vincent, that there was like new kind of documentary evidence around this kind of time period in Amsterdam that was used to kind of generate stories that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise tell.

So it's interesting to hear another kind of story from that era talking about revitalizing these stories that have been lost to some extent. And so in this discussion that I had with both Nika and Vincent, they have this whole thing called Enter ENTR, which is a bit of a new location-based entertainment location that is starting up. And my understanding is that there's going to be a new showing or there's going to be a bringing back of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, which I originally showed at If A Doc Lab, I think maybe in 2021 or 2022. two and it was a single player version and then as they were like exhibiting it out they realized hey this is doesn't have enough throughput for us to make any economic sense and so they went back to the drawing board and used the same footprint and sort of the same architecture of the experience but made it multiplayer so that it would felt like you were going to a rave with your friends but now you do it as a group rather than in a single player experience which I'm really excited to get to try out the multiplayer I haven't had a chance to see it it's sort of

toured around all of the UK and I had a chance to talk to Dan Tucker in the last year or the year before to kind of hear more around like hey there's all these lessons learned there's actually going to be a master class that I'm going to be helping to moderate at the very beginning of at the doc lab for them discussing some of their lessons learned from what has it been like to do this kind of tour of this location-based entertainment project so I'm really excited to hear to hear some of their insights and also just to see their multiplayer versions so Casper I'll pass it over to you to talk about, you know, some of these other anniversary projects that you're bringing back this year, but also In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats. Yeah, sure. Let's start there. No, so In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, I think, was one of the highlights of the last 10 years of showing immersive works. it has all the it has everything you want from a project

it's a timeless masterpiece but it's also very specific about a specific moment in time when rave culture emerged in the UK so it's a very UK specific version of how rave culture emerged all across the world and I think Darren Emerson, the director, did an amazing job. They're one of the early pioneers of VR and kind of like everything they learned across every project all came together in Beats. It's a project you want that also has this sort of timeless quality. It's a project you instantly feel like I want to show this five years from now again. It also was a huge challenge as you say. It's a single initially was a single person experience that trying to scale it up making it collective but like every single user

needing a 4x6 meter play space was a huge challenge we actually tried to bring it to Amsterdam for a longer period outside of the festival and it was just too the footprint was just too high to justify the costs. But Dan and Darren have worked really hard over the years. So they brought it to the, finally developed the multiplayer user, the multiplayer version that we felt was only fitting for the anniversary. To bring that back, and thanks to support from CIIIC specifically for this, to present it to the Dutch industry as one of the case studies of one of the landmark projects that really shows the potential for immersive experiences to not just cater to niche audiences, but this look at ADEA that was just here

announced on one of the world's biggest dance events. This is a project that captures the energy and the beauty of dance culture. So we're really happy to bring it. And it's really nice to show it within Enter. As you said, Enter is one of the big new immersive venues in the city. They developed the Amsterdam project with Nienke. And they graciously allowed us a space within their building to bring the, or to demo the multi-user version. And I think it's also a really interesting point of research. What is the difference between experiencing a VR experience on your own or with six other people. This version actually allows us to make that comparison. And having gone through both myself, it was really interesting to see how one of the weaker bits in the single-player version

kind of became a really nice scene in the multiplayer. And it's weird because it was a bit repetitive and a bit meh, meh. The one in the middle where it pulled a bit. Doing it in the multiplayer version, suddenly I was like, hey, this is really a nice moment for us all to together explore this one space. It's very subtle. It's hard to explain. As Chris Milk would say, it's like dancing about architecture, trying to explain this. And then it's like dancing about two different buildings. But I digress. Beach, I'm very happy Dan and Darren are here. I'm very happy you're hosting the masterclass with them. And I really hope that venues will come and see it because Beach is one of the pieces that is just a clear success waiting to happen. People just need to bring it and show it for as long as they can.

It's one of the big projects within the anniversary. I think the main thing that started within our anniversary program was also a project from one of our consortium members, Avinash Changa from WeMakeVR. Last year, he presented a new solution to preserve and present VR experiences called IMPRESS, an institute for archiving and presenting VR experiences or future-proofing them. and when within the consortium he proposed to test this system out for the first time we started talking and besides two VR projects I'm very happy that Avinesh kind of accepted our provocation and we said like well if you already technologically figured out how to preserve a VR project

and take it from one hardware system and capture it in a way that you can take it to any future hardware system and future headsets that comes out. Couldn't you also do that with like an old flash-based interactive project that was built for web browsers in 2007? And it was like, well, I think technologically it might be possible. and we asked them to preserve the very first project that we ever selected for InfoDocLab, which was called Panatorama, an interactive documentary by Ana Maria de Fesús and Julien Quintard, produced by Oupian, a French web production company, that in the first 10 years of interactive storytelling were really the leaders of the field together with the National Film Board of Canada and some of the studios connected to that. And Agnes managed to make it work. And it's similar to Beat. Tanatarama is a piece that was very much of its time,

but now 20 years later, it still holds. And on a personal note, it's the first project that when I pitched this little program within it, I was like, can we, let's do a little program about interactive art. I wasn't so sure whether it made sense to do that program, actually. Tanah Tarama was the first project I discovered and felt like, oh, this makes sense. If there's more of these, then there's potentially an art form to be explored. And it still holds. It was like watching it again when Havnash brought it back from the dead was like meeting an old friend after 20 years. We presented it in many festivals and cinemas back in the day, the director's navigations with it. And doing that now again, as we're seeing different works like Eshrak and Palimpsest that Beata mentioned, are similar interactive cinema projects in a way

that merge interactive storytelling and gaming with the cinematic. So it's a really exciting thing for us that Avinash made possible and now makes possible for us to explore again within the festival. And that's not taking anything away from the two other projects that he preserved and is presenting again with his system because one is Natalie Strafecta by Natalie Panning, the youngest project in the archive arcade by a South African interdisciplinary artist who made a sort of crazy project, super personal exploration of like the universe, the imaginary universe of a specific artist. You enter it physically in VR through their studio and sort of enter their imagination. It's one of the projects from the past 10 years of VR

that we felt really captures the potential of VR. It also really shows what happens when VR gets into the hands of an artist who doesn't necessarily think about what VR wants, but thinks about what they want to convey. There's a really interesting process that went into this program or into this project, kind of breaking a lot of the rules of VR. And I remember me and Nina back in the day when we saw it for the first time, we couldn't explain why we loved it so much to each other. But all we knew was it had to go in and it won the award. So it was one of the projects we really felt like, let's bring this one back too, if we can future-proof anything. And the final one is one that I think most of your listeners should have seen if they haven't already. And that's Not Some Blackness by the Atlas V production studio, Henri Labour, de Anne-Colinaire, everybody involved in that project. It was a film and a VR, but the VR specific, I would say, is one of the most canonical projects in the history of VR.

And it's funny, I think, for years when you were talking to filmmakers or people explaining about what is the potential of VR, Nodes on Linus was the project that everybody kept mentioning to a point where I remember giving a presentation to emerging filmmakers and emerging artists and they're all rolling their eyes when you mention Nodes on Linus. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, does VR have anything more to offer than that project? And that really changed, started to change a couple of years ago when you started to see people go like, what, which project? No, no, well, maybe heard of it, but no, I haven't seen it. And it started to make me realize again, like with interactive storytelling in the first 10 years of DocLab, we have such a short term memory in this field. We forget projects after three years. People move to a distant sector after three, four or five years. we really have a memory issue.

And it's not just getting expensive because of the AI boom. Sorry, joke. No, we really have like a human memory problem where we need to keep these projects alive. Otherwise, we're not going to get anywhere. Notes on blindness earlier this year due to an update on MetaSci didn't work anymore on the mobile version. thanks to Avonash and his archive Arcade who were able to future-proof the PC VR version and make it much more easy to exhibit in venues but thanks to Atlas V and additional support from Agog they were also able to update and bring back the mobile version so that will be available for headsets at home again shortly. And to top it off, we were also able to, or they were also able to create a full-down version

that we're going to premiere within the Artist Planetarium this year. So it's really exciting in that sense to use the anniversary to start with a handful of projects this year to bring them back and to make them available for distribution again. And on top of that, maybe just to round up what we're doing in terms of anniversary projects within the program, there is the Hive Mind Pong experiment, which is a beautiful shared game experience that we'll be playing with the audience in the exhibition, but also during the opening night of ITWA, the General Festival. and we're bringing as you said Kent we do love at DocLab to present projects that are not just high tech and the latest technology we have a long history of presenting printed

experiences presenting interactive books and one of them is Rahima Gambo's Rest Guide for Retired Nigerian Artists. It's a project that we commissioned in the beginning of COVID. Back then it really felt like a beautiful commentary on this weird, frustrating, dark moment in history waiting for things to get better soon. I think until yesterday when you had some elections in your country, it felt like that period never was going to end I think we see a little bit of a glimmer of a potential different future emerging not by itself, will remain to be a lot of really hard work but Rescite for Entired Nigerian Artists is really a small printed project that we're really happy to bring back

and we're presenting it as part of our reading room which is a small installation that brings together a lot of books and interactive experiences that we've shown over the years for people to just sit down and read at their own time. Yeah, that's really amazing to hear what Avinash is doing because I had a chance to sit down with him last year and talk about his announcement of this immersive archive and just the ability, like one of the things he was talking about And part of the challenge of this is that because of these big tech companies, they will non-consensually push out updates where you can't have any control as to whether or not there's going to be breaking changes for these updates. So first of all, you have no control over what version you have, and then they'll be breaking things all the time. And there's a sort of ephemerality where you just sort of assume that, oh, we are going to push forward without kind of maintaining any sort of like long sort of preservation philosophy.

And so it's great to hear that Avinash has created this kind of stopgap of sorts the way I see it of being able to go back and preserve all the drivers and to make sure that these experiences that are amazing that have been created don't just disappear because of these breaking changes that are being put out, but that you can actually have a little bit more control over that. But I think moving forward, also thinking about what is a better operating system. SteamFrame has also come out with, like, more of a Linux-based, and so I'm hoping that we'll see in the future that we'll build things with open standards in a way that doesn't be so sensitive to these types of breaking changes from these big tech platforms because it is a challenge with even, like, Flash going out and being deprecated. So to be able to kind of revitalize some of these. I think you're totally right. And I think maybe to add one of the things that for us is really a great opportunity to do this as part of a consortium effort,

is that Avinash is solving one thing, which is the technological thing. But there's also the challenge of how do you present these things. and within the Archive Arcade we're kind of sort of addressing a couple of things at the same time it's a beginning like the works that are now preserved through Avinash's system are future proof as long as his system keeps running so there's definitely a challenge there, how do we make this a thing that is shared by different institutions and not just a single company it's not I think that's a challenge but one of the things it's really solving by his system is kind of like a gaming console so every project he preserves becomes a little cartridge that you can put in which also really solves a presentation problem in a way like our goal for the future

is to take the system and build it into like an actual arcade style unit that you could ship to a venue because it, on the hardware side, really works like you just plug it in into a power socket and you have a working program. You have a working project. That's kind of like a pinball machine. Like if we can take the pinball machine paradigm to immersive experiences, that is a huge opportunity for arthouse cinemas where people are playing an interactive story as they wait for their friends to show up to see a movie together. So there's a lot of opportunity that I think within the consortium we can start addressing with different expertises at the same time. So that's quite a sort of looking forward at the next 20 years. Really feels like not just looking back and preserving, but it's really looking ahead at how can we reach new audiences with this as well.

Awesome. Well, I'm really excited to see the latest iterations of what Avinash has created with this new archive system because what he was saying last year was kind of demonstrating the first prototypes of that, but to actually see it deployed is going to be really exciting. And also to see some of these experiences that due to just not being able to be exhibited in a comprehensive way, just to be able to see it in action because it's really exciting in terms of this larger question of preservation is really great to hear that's also being addressed. year in this year's program. All right, well, let's kind of flesh out the rest of the digital storytelling program. I know at DocLab, there's like the immersive nonfiction, which tends to be things that are more embodied, immersive VR, and then digital storytelling tends to be a little bit more like maybe on a 2D screen or a little bit less XR technologies, but still, you know, very interactive and participatory and other dimensions that are using digital technologies and other ways. So let's talk about the last four visual storytelling pieces, and I'll pass it over

to you, Bieta. Yeah, you know, Kaspar did mention printed experiences that can be very immersive. I think just a book per se can be very immersive experience. And this year, we have Ant Hampton returning with another printed experience. As we know, his practice, he always pushes it to the next level. So, in fact, Dog Lab's audience can know him from 2023. He's bringing new experience called All the Downtime. And in this experience, he explores the physical infrastructures that go beyond, you know, all what's on our minds right now, automation, the physicality of warehouses, distribution centers, data centers, and the people working along machines. And so like his previous experience, Borderline Visible, which won actually an award at Ifa Dog Lab, it starts as a photo book.

So you hold the book in your hands. You turn pages while listening to a soundtrack with narration, with instructions. And you are connecting it to images and stories that you have in a book. This experience, however, comes in two iterations. It comes as individual installation that you can go through this experience on your own or on your own time with other people, but as well as a collective live performance, which brings performer and the audience in the same space. So we're going to have two performances on Sunday to have a shared collective experience with this book and with this narration. And this work really looks into what's very present, how machines are replacing people, but also how people increasingly are expected to think and behave like machines.

And the story introduces a glitch, what happens when a glitch happens, when a glitch appears, and suddenly automated systems, which are designed to predict and control everything, stop working, and the human experience, the uncertainty comes back, and something that cannot be predicted and controlled. So, you know, so this project looks at systems of predictions, and, you know, it ties very nicely to, and in a very different way, to Apocalypse Early Warning System by Kyle MacDonald as well, who kind of ask in a much more playful way, can we predict a global disaster just by watching what the world richest people are doing?

And Kyle MacDonald is an artist, LA-based artist and coder, who is also returning to Isfa Dog Lab with this new project. And as I said, it's asking these questions. What would the world richest and most powerful people do if an apocalypse was on its way? And there might be some sort of a belief that they will know something earlier. And based on a website, a system that Kyle built, it might be some sort of warning based on real-time public available data of private jets. So he has a dashboard that shows a threat from one to five, just really tracking what's happening in private jets traffic.

And the system compares the numbers of private jets flying right now and flying patterns from the same time in previous years. and if there is an unusual increase, it suggests that something might be happening. And also, as Kyle explained to us, that he also excluded major events like the World Cup final or Burning Man, which naturally attracts a lot of private jets so they don't trigger a false alarm. And you could sign up for these LNI systems. And, of course, it's a playful art project. It doesn't really work as a reliable warning system as much as we would want to believe. And also it raises lots of interesting questions that, you know, ties us back to the shared reality theme. Do we really share the same reality when some people have access to information? You know, different power and possibilities that others don't.

who gets to know about crisis first and who has the means to escape. And I would even ask a question, like, is there an escape? I think we really, you know, share this planetary system. Of course, we are experiencing it very differently, as you know. All the projects are talking about it through the type of bodies the geography the borders but a really thought and playful installation in a digital storytelling this year And speaking of escaping an apocalypse, I kind of, you know, was looking at these projects. I was like, okay, they really, in a very fun way, speak to each other. So let's go to the next project and let's talk about Lucas Visoto, Escape the Internet, who shows that the escape route is actually collective.

So Lucas, in his own very fun, playful, chaotic and hilarious manner, is bringing a live performance, as I mentioned, Escape the Internet, where you collectively play video games. in a theater setting, and it's hosted by a game host, which is going to be Lucas himself. Everyone will create their characters, and it starts with that idea. The AI apocalypse has begun, and everyone is suffering from brain rot. And the only cure in all of this, as we'll experience, is human connection. So this experience is really about working together to save the Internet, maybe save each other, maybe kind of challenge the algorithmic demons and, you know, behind all this humor.

And it's all about bringing people together through play. and hopefully by the end of the experience you actually get to know a person who sits next to you maybe deeper a person who came with you or potentially a stranger and so definitely keep an eye on this it's scheduled twice during the festival and yeah maybe let's be a little bit more playful about in this world rule by algorithm and not forget about human connection. And if it comes to human connection, I think this is a nice segue also to talk about Interviews with the Strangers by Carrie Sidza Wang, who asked in her creative practice and project that she's bringing to the EatFaDogLab about essence of what it means to have a conversation.

What is the essence of conversation? So, Interviews with Two Strangers is a video installation that she worked with with nine theater artists who are all over 60. They are from New York La Mama Experimental Theater scene. Each of them, she sets it up that each of them have two conversations. One is with a chatbot that is trained to imitate the artist's way of speaking, and the second is a face-to-face conversation with the artist herself. And then in the installation, you can kind of spend time with these two conversations shown side by side, one as a text and one as a video. and I think this work invites us to really think how we connect with each other,

how technology changes the way we communicate. Carrie mentions language, how chatbots flatten the way how we communicate. And I think what's also meaningful is that we hear perspective of the theater makers who have experienced many waves of technological changes throughout their personal and professional lives. So they bring different perspectives like curiosity, skepticism, sometimes also being a little naive, but also kind of really understanding how these waves work because they just went through it and adapted. And, yeah, so all about human connection.

And I think it also beautifully ties back to the 20th year looking at, you know, how EatFat Dog Lab program critically explored technology through the last 20 years. Nice. Yeah, and I had a chance to see the world premiere of Escape the Internet at South by Southwest with Lucas Risotto. And, yeah, you're in a movie theater watching sort of these little vignettes but also kind of virtual kind of worlds that are run by Unity. But there's a lot of sort of emergent social dynamics of kind of like a mix of aspects of smartphone orchestra mixed in a movie theater, mixed into live performance. And so it's kind of bringing together, like, what are the existing formats of exhibition that are out there? And so I'm really excited to see like there's going to be another piece this year that's going to be in the movie theater with kind of playing with emergent social dynamics in a way. And also reading is very solitary. But, you know, I saw the borderline visible collective reading experience and it's a time based thing.

So it's like over this hour, you're going to get a narrative experience of a piece. And then you kind of have a book, an artifact that you can't obviously read everything that's in the book. So then you have an experience of the story and then kind of an excuse to go back in to read all the details. And so I'm excited to see the latest iteration of what Anne Hampton is doing there, too. And I know there's four more pieces in the digital storytelling selection that I'd love to dive into. and then last year there was a piece called unimaginable red that was about the red light district that was sort of like a reimagining of what this district could be and you know just a part of that i just you know went and just did a little bit of walkthrough of the red light district and just to kind of you know reconnect to because i really hadn't gone there since i was in my early 20s and just like just to walk around and when people visit Amsterdam's one of the things that you said Casper that people just kind of like check out what's happening with the red light

district and so I understand that this year there's actually going to be like a video installation at one of the kind of premier places within the red light district this year so look I'll pass it over to you to sort of talk about that as well as the rest of the digital storytelling program oh wait I think you might be muted happy to thanks I'm happy to pick it up let me delay your gratification and tell you about the red light district project maybe just to connect to what Deatha was saying and what you were saying about some of the projects I've described that are reflecting on the impact of technology and projects that we are at the same time experiencing collectively. I think one project in our selection in 2025 by Kazal Majidi

is a project that kind of confronts us with the way that we're consuming reality right now, usually on our own, on our little screens as we doom scroll through images of war and destruction, increasingly entering our screens in the past few years. Gazelle kind of, without words, invites us to, as we walk towards the screen, use our body, the reflection of our own physical body, as the contour for what she shows, which is the images of war from 2025. So it's a very sort of non-narrative, more immersive visual experience. Subtle, but also quite in your face. and it's yeah

it's a testament to the times that we are living and the connection how disconnected we seem to be even though we're watching everything live 24-7 our bodies are disconnected increasingly from each other which kind of was nice to say before we go into some projects that really are more around love and around sex and other forms of interaction between bodies. So yeah, let's start with Orgasmagoria, the project you mentioned last year that invited, you were not the only one who, after seeing this virtual red light district last year, took the opportunity and take a little trip down memory lane, walking around Amsterdam's old red light district. Dries Verhoeven is a Dutch interactive artist. He's one of, I would say,

the most pioneering Dutch artists over the past years. He was Holland's entry to the Venice Biennale this year. And Orgasmogoria is his seedy little project, as he likes to call it, that he did on the side. And it's a video installation. about digital sex work made together with cyber sex workers and their friends. And, yeah, I think he couldn't have found a more fitting venue for it. So where last year you got to take a virtual walk through the Red Light District, this year Dries is inviting you to go to the Casa Rosso, which is Amsterdam's most famous, notorious live sex show theater. and during the evenings they will be doing their regular live sex show theaters as they do and as they have been doing for decades and decades.

But during the day you can actually visit that same venue and see Dries' video installation or Cosmogoria there. I've seen some of the footage. It's an ongoing video installation that it's going to be really beautiful to see sort of like how that works in that context, to see different audiences discover different types of artistic expression. Let's put it like that. Just a quick follow-on question. Is it also going to be running at night as well for people who, normally be going to the venue, or is it only during the day? At this point in time in the Red Light District, the live sex shows take the prime time slot. Okay. The video art installation is only during the day, but it's in exactly the same venue. Okay. In the same theater.

I didn't know if it was in a lobby so that it would be able to coexist. So it kind of takes over the main space. No, no, no. It's in the main space, so during the day, you get to see the video installation, and then at six they roll up the screen and the live sex show begins. Okay. All right, good enough. All right, carry on. Another one more on the romantic side of love is the love files and more connected to the challenges around that when you happen to fall in love with somebody who lives across another border or who has a different passport than you. Svane de Wilde Multimedia artist that we've Presented different works from In the past Together with Samir Fein Who's one of the people working On immersive theater experiences Who did the Handle With Care Experience last year with us They Joined forces on The Love Files Which is a performative installation

Exploring The challenges of Trying to get a permit of residence for your partner who doesn't happen to share the same passport as you it's an experience that is relatively unknown to those who haven't gone through it themselves but actually many many people have and every country has kind of their own little way of doing it but it boils down to when you want your partner to get the same, get a residency permit and join you in your country you have to somehow prove to cold institutions that you are actually in love and that your love is real nothing more documentary than the challenge of authenticity of the most humane human thing there is, which is love this installation

kind of puts you in the shoes of the person judging somebody's love life. So those who want to obtain a permit, they go through an actual real process of collecting documents, files, text messages, cute pictures from a date, letters sent back and forth. All of those things become a love file that you then submit. There are no rules that tell you what to submit or how to submit or what it should contain or whatnot. That's completely up to you as a person wanting to obtain a residency permit. In the installation, you get to judge a series of real love files and go through an experience with the artist and discover the love file of the artist themselves. It's quite an intimate and quite a provocative experience, I can tell you. And in a way, quite provocative and unforgettable too, is Plum Road Tea Dream.

This is by Samuel Baidu, an artist we met a couple of years ago through our collaboration with the Flemish Interdisciplinary Arts Centre in Drakengrond. an artist from Belgium and Ghana who was working in game engines he was scanning spaces he was rebuilding taking certain rituals from Ghana from his personal life, from queer culture turning it into an open world experience that you get to wander through introduced by himself in a sort of semi-autobiographical experience. This is a three and a half hour game that you don't win, but you really get to learn a universe, discover a universe. It's one of those things that are really hard to describe. It's not a game.

It's not a film. It's not a story. it's an exploration of a world of an artist. We see it, it's a pattern that we see with different projects in the program. But Samuel, in a way, is returning with a project like this to the early interactive storytelling experiences that we were seeing in the first 10 years of DocLab. And similar to how the artists behind Tanatorama were exploring interactive cinema-type presentations, Samuel has been developing both an installation version as a standalone individual game version as a live theatrical version of it and just to show how like as a testament to how some of the formats that we saw for a bit emerge in the early days of DocLab and then kind of were surpassed by the spectacle

of VR installations, we see young artists like some returning to this. They didn't know about what was happening back then. They're discovering this by themselves and they're coming up with new innovations of that old form. And the one for Plum Road Theatre actually won an award at the Dutch Theatre Festival this year. So it also goes to show how I think, thanks to COVID, in a way, when a lot of traditional media makers and traditional art forms were forced to sort of enter the world of XR and the internet against the world because it was the only way where they could still show stuff that has created a cross-pollination that we're now starting to see more and more fruits of where the theatre world is starting to open up to what's happening in this space and starting to not just open up to it but also to acknowledge what some emerging artists are doing so that's Plum Road Tea Dream and I think that concludes all the projects in digital storytelling.

Yes. Very cool. Yeah, I know that I have the quote-unquote Voices of VR podcast, and I think when I go to DocLab and do interviews with people who wrote a book or do a theater piece or a 2D piece, I think over time I've looked at the selections from these types of film festival, immersive selections, and have digital storytelling and immersive. And so the name that I have in my podcast sort of doesn't fully encompass all the stuff that I cover or all the stuff that you're showing there. And so I'm excited to see – always excited to see the kind of range of different projects that I can experience, but also cover from the lens of what it means to have more of an immersive and experiential experience and also social dynamics that are also being pulled in. Well, with that, let's move into – Can I – Yeah, sure, yeah. Can I ask you a question, Ken? Yes. because if there's any consistent in 20 years of DocLab is conversations about what are the words that we use to describe the things that we show. And I think XR, VR are just as problematic

as digital storytelling or transmedia or whatever words we had in the past have been. How many years do you think it will take for us to just call the things that we do art? That's a good question. When will it just be art? I think the Fi Gallery, you know, so Fi started with Fi Contemporary, which was the, like, art world. And then they had Fi Center, which was the immersive selection. And then they're going to be combining in 2028 into just Fi. So you see that once that opens in 2028. So I think, you know, in the next nine or 18 years, I'd say, will just be art. Just like we don't necessarily differentiate the technological mediation of a web doc or interactive doc. I think eventually what's going to happen is I'm going to look to the experiential aspects of something that's participatory, engaging, interactive. There's going to be aspects of social, cognitive, kind of relational. Then there's going to be aspects of emotional, effective, time-based, experiential.

And then there's going to be aspects that are embodied, environmental, spatial, and immersive. And so I think all those words are kind of like all combined together, and each of them are kind of emphasizing one or the other. So I think we're going to move eventually to what the human experience is rather than the technology that's mediating it. Loving it. I look forward to your masterclass on Friday. Yeah, so I'll be basically doing a masterclass sort of taking my critical framework to understand all this through those lenses of those elements and then seeing if we can have some interactive participatory experiences to kind of guide people through how to turn this into an experiential framework to understand the active presence, mental, social presence, embodied environmental presence, as well as emotional presence. And so, you know, there's many different words to kind of talk about all these qualities of presence. But I think each of these projects are exploring combinations of those things in unique ways, giving all the existing design disciplines and traditions. And then there's this interdisciplinary fusion through all that.

So anyway, that's my hot take on that, and I'm looking forward to see how the language kind of continues to evolve. I think immersive and experiential kind of fits broader. So looking at immersive nonfiction, which encompasses, I'd say, more of the kind of embodied experiential aspects, VR, XR. So let's start with body count. Let's start – I'll pass it over to you, Bieta, to kind of start to dig into some of the first projects in the immersive nonfiction selection. yeah let's actually talk about virtual reality and the term that's well established we have a VR gallery within the program within the non-fiction immersive non-fiction competition and the way how it works it's a space in the bracket round where you can book a time slot and choose from five VR experiences that we are presenting as part of this gallery.

And all of them are part of immersive nonfiction storytelling. And we've already talked about The Invisible Woman by Tamara Shugalo. She's part of this lineup. The other four works, Body Count, Uprooted, Tartu Paluk, and Rajin all take us into very different realities. I would say lots of established artists with large creative practices coming from very different angles, but quite a few first-time VR makers. So that's what I'm seeing in our VR gallery. And as I mentioned, very different realities, very different projects, but they all raise questions around who gets to belong, who gets displaced, who has the power to decide. And they all remind us, as I think we talked about this before,

that sharing reality and sharing the same world doesn't necessarily mean that we are experiencing in the same way. so let's go through them Body Count is a VR experience by Chris Bringas and Sonke Kirschhoff a project that comes to us from Philippines and Germany co-production and it's a VR experience that takes place inside a small apartment in Berlin and brings the audience to discover how grief, geopolitical violence and desire can occupy the same space, the same room, and how global conflicts enter our intimate relations and how different contexts, you know, are entangled with each other. So as you explore this empty apartment, you see fragments of a real intimate conversations

between two men. One is a Filipino nurse whose brother was killed during the Philippine drug war. And the other one is a former Israeli soldier who served in Gaza. And this conversation moves between intimacy, grief, their very personal experiences of violence. And so it's a reminder that even in our most private moments, we are connected to much larger political realities and histories. So this entanglement that we carry with us really informs how we go through life. Another project in the VR Gallery is Tatu Paluk by Inuk artist Laku Luk Williamson. It's a Canadian, Danish, and Greenland production. And it takes us to a tiny island in the Arctic between Canada and Greenland.

It's a real place that has been at the center of disputes over borders and ownership. But the artist, LaColique Williamson, imagines something completely different. And she brings a speculative creative practice. And in this VR work, we enter an island that becomes its own republic of lovers. So it's a country built on love, relationship, care. And through this experience, you can go through this imagined Inuit utopia guided by spiritual creatures. you can, you know, along the way you can make choices and think about your own place in this world. And this work really brings Inuit culture and perspective to the center

on how we imagine the Arctic and points out the belonging about connection. yeah and it's kind of a very radical thing that the island decides to not be isolated and also points out that even an island is not an island and it's part of relationship cares, environments, territories that you know intersect another Another project in VR Gallery is uprooted by Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar from South Africa. And here we explore displacement from a non-human perspective, a perspective of a plant, an endangered succulent that grows naturally in Southern Africa. And in this VR experience, you do become that plant who gets to experience your natural environment

until a plant poacher discovers you and removes you from your home, and you are taken on this journey through international trade and eventually ending up in a luxury apartment in New York City. So, you know, something as ordinary That might seem as an ordinary houseplant Actually carries a history of extraction and displacement So this project really brings that A theme of displacement Is not simply about losing your physical place It's also about being separated from everything that makes a place home, the relationship, the histories, the sense of belonging, the landscape. And it raises a deeper question that what happens when someone else has the power to decide where you belong

or where you have the right to remain at all. And I'm talking about this displacement a little bit more just to tie and make this segue to a project, Rajin, which talks about a very different force experience, which explores the reality of Palestinian people. So Rajin is a VR documentary by Karen Manor and Faiz Abu-Hirmala, a German-Palestine production about Palestine communities facing settler violence and the destruction of their homes. The documentarians, very established documentarians, follow three people over a period of three And through 360-degree footage, smartphone videos, security cameras, we witness what life looks like when home is no longer a safe place.

And the work shows how displacement is not a single event, but something that can happen again and again. And it happens to the people in the project. but this project is also about it's a story about resistance and determination to remain yeah and had a chance to see it at Venice where it premiered and it was really focusing in on the West Bank and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and last year there was a piece at DocLab called Under the Same Sky which is really focusing on the genocide that was happening in Gaza So I'm very glad to see that there's sort of ways that the Immersive 360 video is sort of telling these stories of what's happening there in Palestine for both Gaza as well as in West Bank. And so, yeah, and there's a couple of other pieces that I had the chance to see at Venice Immersive that are also a part of the Immersive Nonfiction competition.

And so I'll pass it over to you, Casper, to talk about both Shifting Connections, being you and the rest of the Immersive Nonfiction program. Yeah, thank you I think with Let's see Let's start with With Shifting Connections by Yen Or actually Tung Yang Chu Who Made for a person we missed in the past And Shifting Connections is just a very playful almost deceptively simple experience for a group of people to enter into VR and kind of get rid of their bodies like you lose your body and what remains is points in space that somehow very clearly still relates to the people

you know you are in the room with and Yen I think is one of my favorite artists in VR with a background in theater he really knows how to play with that it's a deceptively simple almost like funny cute little experience but it's one that really struck me as something if we have a program called Shared Realities we need to bring this project in it's one where we can be together and the affordance of VR one of its main affordances is mainly that it isolates us from the people around us and the world around us and transports us into a different space Yen kind of uses that to play to take away our inhibitions to be together and play together in a room without actually having a reason to be there there's no music that unites us

there's no nothing it's just us in a space together as a bunch of strangers and he sort of plays with it and then distorts it and then deceives us and slowly starts bringing actually our bodies back into the space and we start to see each other again using a path through I think it's one to experience it was one of my highlights from Venice and definitely the same goes in a very different way almost a project that does the same isolating power of VR but making a really personal individual experience as Michal Sankovic with Being in You it's a project that me and Beate at Venice looked at each other and we were like yes we both have been following the artist for many years.

I think it's one of the most ambitious pieces in terms of trying to create a monument for someone that isn't with us anymore, namely the singer-songwriter Kat Janis. Mikha has worked together with them while they were still alive, knowing that they were going to pass away. to create a monument, to capture a human being using the medium of VR. Whether you know the artist or not is not relevant. I think it's a deeply moving encounter with a single human being that lived on this earth that is no longer with us, that is without overstating it is captured in a way by this medium a drawing or a painting can capture somebody very eloquently and beautifully

But I think being in you does it in VR in a way that it really connects you to your own mortality, to what does it mean to be alive right now, right here? How long do we have? What does that mean? And there's a few things in there that they do using pass-through, using playing with the ear, inside the headset, playing with the there outside of the headset, opening those doors, closing those doors, in a way that I think really shows the poetry of the immersive. It really shows the artistic language when handled by a strong artist. Really a beautiful piece. similarly I think both a lot of it's funny if I go to the last project from the immersive non-fiction competition it's funny to think the very first project

that we ever selected for Dokla Tanatorama was a project about what happens after you die I don't think we've ever had so much death in terms of human bodies and mortality in the program so there is a sort of parallel there and just like Tanatarama is not a project that is horrific and sad it's a joyous project in a way about wonder and exploration of exploring our own mortality is a way to celebrate our own life, right? Like you can't have one without the other. And we see that this year with a project, with different projects from Being in You, but also to My Father is Turning into Soil, which is similar to Microbiome Restaurant, a project that celebrates the microbiome side of reality. But here it enters into the metabolic sublime,

as the artist likes to call it. Noah Youngsma is a young Dutch artist who has been making different interdisciplinary works over the years. But this is a personal piece that she made with her brother, who's a biologist, and in a way deals with the passing of their father. And what they did was they took a microscopic camera and put it into the soil of the grave where her father was decaying and being, returning to the soil and being turned into soil by the worms and the microorganisms inside the soil. The footage that they captured, they present on, they project on the ceiling, the installation, creating kind of like an image of the universe, a starry sky of small moving microorganisms. and at the same time what they did was they grew beetroots and little carrots inside the same soil.

Kind of, and then fermenting them and slicing them in small slices, offering them to the audience. So in a way you're watching Starry Sky that consists of her father's body as it's decaying And at the same time, you get a food offering which is grown through her father's body. It's one of the most physical experiences alongside Microbiome Restaurant that we have. It's definitely something that people get to opt in or opt out if they want to. But it's a really moving experience. And I'm really grateful for Noah sharing it with us. It's hard to describe, but they're going to do a special live performance version of it within the planetarium, where we're expanding the installation to the full dome of the planetarium. And it promises to be a really moving and intimate experience.

And in a way, using similar overhead projection, we also see the return this year of Anagram, May Abdullah and Berejean Murphy. One of the, I would say, most important studios within the immersive field over the years. Not to take anything away of any of the others, but with projects like Door Into the Dark, The Collider, they've shown us really the potential of, I would say, the immersive medium, both physical and virtual in the last couple of years, where they focus more on the in-headset experience. they're returning now with a physical experimental experience called hello you which is kind of aptly titled as it invites you to enter into an installation lie down under a large overhead mirror that spoiler alert is also a screen and as you imagine as you look at your

own body and look at yourself it invites you to have a playful reimagining of your own physicality and I guess I should leave it at that it's one to experience and not to give away what happens but it's one that I'm really really looking forward to to experience in the exhibition Nice, yeah I know that they were at the playroom either last year or the year before doing some prototypes of that experience so I'm really excited to see how it kind of ends up in its final form and speaking of the planetarium with the rest of the selection and the spotlight I think it's featuring other pieces that are going to be showing in the planetarium there that, you know, is a more of a concentric arrangement at the artist's zoo. But also, you know, a lot of domes are front facing. You think of the sphere or cosme and, you know, probably about 85 percent of the domes in the composition I had last year are forward facing. But this is like what you're looking up and creating like an immersive dome experience that also has like a shared element.

And so I'm really happy that DocLab has continued to kind of push forward and experiment with how can some of these projects either be translated into having a dome experience or just things are creating natively for the dome. And so, yeah, I'll pass it over to you to kind of talk about the rest of the program in terms of what's going to be shown in the dome. Yeah, I could be more happier to work on the Planetarium project as this format is so special, so communal, so immersive. In personal life, I got married next to the Groovey Observatory, so it feels super special to work with the Planetarium program. I have to say that I got really, really great right here. And we have, as Kaspar mentioned, we will have a special performance and special iteration of My Father Turning into Soil with Noah and her brother, Mass, being in a dialogue. and in addition to that

we'll have a project called Benches by Claire Richards and Samuel Loveless that combines documentary film and live orchestral music and the project uses split screens which is I think quite rare in DOM projects and it looks into a subject of I think small things we often overlook like public benches and these benches have been featured in this project have been photographed by Tim Hart for 50 years mostly in Plymouth in England he only takes one picture per bench that's his rule he also notes lots of other tiny things that we usually overlook in our daily rush.

And his nephew, who is a neurodivergent composer himself, discovered this photo archive of his autistic uncle and was fascinated by these observations. And together with the filmmaker Claire Richards, invited the audience to kind of go on this journey where you, on one hand, see the documentary footage. And on the other hand, you see orchestra playing, performing music composed by Samuel Loveless himself. And all that thought about benches also made me think how we build our digital spaces. And I think we can get inspired by benches that, you know, I think our Internet, the Internet that we have, the digital spaces that we use, I think would make a use of benches,

the metaphorical benches in there and how we actually interact in the solo node to thinking about our public spaces as well and how we interact with them. And another project in Planetarium is Temporal Strata by Ping Sheng Tu and Jai Lu. And this project really explores time as a physical form. And the result is something like a cosmic kaleidoscope that, you know, colors, patterns, rhythms shift. And sometimes you feel like you might start seeing sand or clouds, but actually they never really become anything specific. So you are simply invited to just experience the passing of time and slowly the experience starts to even change your own sense of time.

so again that work really reminds us on like how time is not something that we just measure with clocks but it's also something we feel in our bodies it's like it brings back experiencing reality with the bodies that we carry and we can experience completely different from a person who sits next to us and yeah as a reminder the program also will include Notes on Blindness World Premiere moment as Kaspar mentioned I think at the beginning of the conversation Nice Yeah, that reminds me of the Kronos time and the Kairos time the Greeks had two words for time and so the unfolding of the time in an objective sense that you can measure but also the kind of more internal experience of the quality of the moment It's the right auspicious moment to act.

And so, yeah, I feel like, and Bergstrand calls it duration in terms of like the unfolding of time that is kind of this experience. Yeah, well, there's one last project that we haven't talked about to cover, which is a site-specific AR piece. It sounds like it's going to be a little field trip right around the corner of the main exhibition there. And there's also this year some other playrooms that are happening for artists to kind of experiment and prototype different things in a way that has an early idea that allows some feedback and to kind of iterate and have some user testing, which is a really great opportunity to see kind of a design process but also kind of the emerging topics. like the Anagrams group. Anagram did a playtest previously, and we're seeing it this year. So, yeah, I'll pass it over to you, Castro, to talk about Lost Hood as well as some of the Playroom experiences that are going to be featured this year. Yeah. Yeah, so maybe the last project we added to the program is Lost Hood.

As I said, a public space experience, AR experience by Apnar Price. In a way, it connects to what Beate was saying about looking at our own public and physical spaces around us outside of the digital realm. It also connects to Tempelstrata about sort of layers of place, layers of time, the cyclical nature of time. In Lost Hood Apner invites us to take our phone And explore the Spuisstraat Which I am aware is hard to pronounce in English And easy to pronounce wrong But Spuisstraat it is It's a street in the city centre That was connected to A lot of the free spirit counterculture Of Amsterdam as a city from like playful resistance against early bourgeois capitalism

to sort of counterculture, hippie culture, youth culture, the squatter culture, the women's lib movement in the Netherlands. A lot of different elements are connected to the history and the bricks in that street that's just around the corner of our exhibition space. And Apner came to the Netherlands and actually lived initially in one of those back then still squatter buildings. I grew up in this city Wandered through this street I have a lot of stories from that street That I won't repeat Here on air But walking through that street Now A lot of that history Is sort of erased Has sort of been ironed out By what we would Call gentrification And I think

It was Dr. Shrushkov recently who kind of pointed out how that gentrification, that ironing out of the unique, the individual, the free-spirited counterculture from our everyday reality is something that wouldn't have happened without the current digital overlords that are controlling a lot of how society is run. Whether we like it or not, we're contributing to it by using our phones all the time. I think it was Douglas Roshkov who said, like, initially in the 90s, the Internet was a place of refuge. It was a place where you could be weird, you could be different, you could walk away from, or you could get away from mainstream physical reality. In a way, the Internet now has become the mainstream lens of our reality. its platforms, its consumerism

its supply and demand its privacy control and I think Douglas was not joking recently when he said maybe it's time for the misfits and the weird ones to start moving from the digital realm and start to reclaim physical space again as hard as that might be these days but maybe that's a thing to do Lost Foot is kind of really a nice trip down memory lane on the one side with tons of archival footage projected physically onto the places where they happened. Really this sort of layer of place type experience that MIT has been exploring as well recently. But it's also sort of a call to arms. It's an inspiration to say the world is not beyond, like, out of our reach of controlling it or reshaping it. it is a project that also points towards the future besides like tourist shops in that street now

there are still old strongholds that inspire us there are still histories that we can bring back to life if we want to if we can bring back an old flash documentary we can also bring back certain rituals and behaviors that we kind of lost so that project kind of tries to seduce you to do something weird as you're there in physical space. So it's going to be fun to see who gets inspired and who dares to do something out of the ordinary while they're here. Nice. And it's also the system that they use to build the AR experience is something that they're also inviting the audience to play with during one of the playrooms. So I don't know if you want us to... If we have time, we can tell you a little bit about what's happening in some of the playrooms. Yeah, I have time if you have time. I guess we have time depends on who's still listening, right? Have they fallen asleep?

People at this point of the podcast are either going to definitely be there or they won't be there. They want to know everything that's going to happen. So I think I tend to have people that listen that want to sort of get a sneak peek as to what to expect. And so this is one of the things that – Doc Club is one of the festivals that has the absolute – like so much that's going on, including the R&D Summit that we can also sort of mention as well. It's like a day-long gathering. But there's so many events, and it's hard for me to see everything and then also talk to everybody. But the Playrooms is also another great place to sort of see these prototypes. So, yeah, go ahead and talk about some of the other ones. Yeah, maybe just to keep it relatively short at this point. But yeah, the Doppler Play, as I said, when we started using the festival as a living lab for experimentation, on the one side, for us, it's really important to not scare our audiences and scare new audiences, to not scare them away

by showing them prototypes and things that don't work. I think that's a really important thing for us from day one is we want to welcome a broad audience. It's a festival that has a huge public facing side, not just a professional gathering. That has been the start for the ambition from DocLab from day one. Like the very first year we put computers next to the box office. Like that's where the audience was. So within our exhibitions, we do the same thing. Within our live performances, we do the same thing. We want to kind of create an even playing field where a filmmaker feels just as much out of place as a gamer feels out of place, as an XR maker feels out of place, or as a poet would feel out of place. But they also hopefully find something that keeps them there or what makes them want to return. that said in the last couple of years as the field has been maturing the Doc Lab Playrooms were a space that we created in collaboration with Toby Coffey when he worked with us

as guest curator sort of taking taking a cue from the theatre world where in theatre you trust a bunch of artists to deliver something much more than you do in film or that you do in more media-based practice. So the Playroom for us is a way to invite our audiences, to invite professionals, to join creative technologies makers to just play around. There are sort of free walk-in events that last a couple of hours. There's an open bar. people get to play with AI, try to make AI do something it doesn't want to do, play with immersive new technologies, with early prototypes of new projects, and also with new presentation formats. So we have four playrooms this year.

One is time versus space. There's a lot of projects dealing with that. There's a lot of artists playing with the affordances of time, the affordances of space within their projects. So here we'll have artists vibe coding old projects into the future. As I said, we have the AR system used for Lost Hood. There's different things that we'll be experimented with during that playroom. We have another one called Gaming Open Worlds, where we invite different sort of game and projects on the 2D projects that live somewhere in the space between games and cinema. They're doing direct-ish navigations, live presentations for a captive audience, kind of as an inspiration to cinemas and theaters to look at what's happening in the XR space and not just see it as complicated. expensive things that need a lot of people to put headsets on people,

but also something that you can show to groups at the same time. And after that playroom, we'll have Lucas Rizoltos escape the internet. On the Sunday, Tamara Shogalu is doing her playroom around the Invisible Woman project, showing what it takes to bring an archival project to VR and from VR to the opera stage. And finally, on the Tuesday, we'll have the Metabolic Sublime, where we're kind of really diving into the human body. What does it mean to eat ourselves, to eat someone else, to be eaten? We're very happy to confirm that our old friend, Emily Boltz, one of the world's most leading food artists that we've done some really weird experiences with in the past, is coming back to prototype a new experience.

We have our friends from Polymorph sharing some of the insights and early experiences of running the microbiome restaurant during ITFA with us. We have our friends from Tavtu Paluk sharing with us. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. And we will have our Natalie Paneng from Natalie's Perfect creating a live soundscape during that event. So, yeah, it's one to look forward to if you're able to make it to Amsterdam this year. Nice, for sure. Yeah, and I'll be doing a master class, which is sort of in the spirit of this kind of playroom, because this is the first time that I've been able to take this critical and analytical framework that I will watch and experience and kind of break it down into component parts. But now we're going to actually try to, over two hours, take these principles and sort of have people designing their own collective shared reality experiences. And we had like a room of 30 people that basically reached capacity within less than a week. And so we're trying to find a room for 50, 75, or 100 people to sort of actually do some kind of circle with lots of different immersive shared reality experiments and actually put some of these ideas in action potentially.

So I'm excited to do that as well. And also the R&D Summit. I don't know if you want to say anything around, like, at the DocLab R&D Summit, it's really a great time to bring together the larger community and address a lot of the biggest issues. A lot of topic and discussion has been around distribution. I imagine that's going to be a part of the continued discussion, but also kind of collective, emergent, shared experiences and the shared realities I'm sure will be a focus. but I don't know if you want to say anything else in terms of the R&D Summit that's going to be happening there on that Sunday. I think we can say a lot about it. It's been a huge pleasure this year to curate and create the R&D Summit together with Zoe Horst and Beata, like really bringing also some new perspectives and perspectives from what it means to run a venue. We're bringing Amy Rose, who's been running a distribution network called Radius, as part of their work within Watershed.

We have the consortium makers present, and MIT and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences will be sharing some of their early research, like ongoing research from MIT. It works towards the distribution toolkit that they're presenting, as well as research more into specific works and presentation formats that the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences is working on. I think that's, as I said, the R&D Summit is something that we've really enjoyed working on over the past few years. It's kind of like a gathering of the family, but also really an exciting one, because every year people bring new people and new people enter that family. And it's like this one day where we all get together in different sessions where we can talk really geeky and nerdy about very specific challenges

and issues within the field, but also allow us this year, with support from Agog again, we're also doing our reality check panel where we bring some of the, let's say, senior people as well as some of the more unknown voices from the space to reflect on what is it that we're actually doing. We like to joke within DocLab, within this field, like what have we been doing for the past 20 years? Have we been a relatively underpaid or not paid, unpaid R&D department for big tech? Or have we been inventing, discovering, defining, shaping a new art form? sometimes it's been both sometimes it's been neither why do we do what we do we're at a documentary festival the works that we show are not disconnected from reality

there's a world outside of the headset a world outside of art that we are all connected to sometimes and sometimes that's an easier experience than it used to be for, it's a different experience for different people. And the summit is also a place to address that, to explore in a way, like critically reflect on what we're doing ourselves, but also sometimes to feel refuge. And like Rahima Gambo with her rest guide for a tired Nigerian artist, it's a huge privilege to be working in the arts. Let's be honest. there's worse things to do than make something beautiful or show something weird and exciting and see people respond to that but it's also not easy to maintain that to have a sustainable world to not just do the work

but also have people see it because otherwise it doesn't exist so how do we do that? how do we support each other? how do we keep each other sharp? that's what the R&D Summit is kind of an invitation for people to join into. And over the past two years, I've been very happy that it's not just something that the happy few who were able to make it to that event got to participate in, but at least thanks to your report, that people were able to also get a taste of some of the conversations as they took place during that day. So that's the R&D Summit. Yeah. No, it's a privilege to be able to because it's mostly off the record in terms of people having candid conversations. There are recordings that I use to be able to then kind of anonymize it or kind of report back out to the broader community as to what conversations are happening. And this past year was a little bit of like we're in this weird liminal space of things are ending, new things are beginning.

And so it was sort of like, how do I, you know, describe what's happening right now? But it was really this kind of emergence of an NDXR distribution network, but also, you know, this whole art form that is kind of at the very seed phases of it's nascent and liminal and it's emerging and growing and lots of possibilities. And so hopefully it won't be as long as the 121 page report I did last year, but at least try to capture the essence of what's happening and to kind of report back out to the community. So I'm really excited to go there, attend the summit, and also kind of be in charge of helping write up and report back out what's happening. So refer people back to the last couple years report, especially last year, and especially the introduction and the conclusion just to get a sense of the trends, but also just what's happening with the different types of distribution in LBE and beyond for this art form. So, yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is, you know, as you start to reflect and synthesize what is that's happening, what are we doing,

and, you know, kind of what you think of the kind of ultimate potential of this form of immersive storytelling, immersive art, and what it might be able to enable. yeah i think in general like in a festival work or in a venue work um it all ties back to for me at least to like this major question of how how do we gather and uh generally how do we gather in physical spaces how do we bring people together uh how we show up in the spaces what conditions we create for people to have spaces together, to connect to each other, maybe say hello to your neighbor or stranger. I think there is big, you know, resilience and a big thing just in saying hello to a stranger. So I think this type of work really can do that.

And so for me, it's all about gathering. And I think festivals, you know, the summit itself, the playrooms, the projects are about that and go back to that fundamentally. Yeah. Absolutely nothing to add. I agree. Awesome. I know that when I first attended at the Doc Lab in 2018, I saw The Collider, and it absolutely blew my mind in terms of, like, having that experience set within a documentary festival. I was like, what is documentary? What is immersive? What is how – you know, it was kind of like expanding my mind. And I remember, Casper, you said that John Grierson's phrase of the creative treatment of actuality. I think that's sort of like a heart and a root of what I've experienced at DocLab over the years is all these different arts and storytellers that are kind of reflecting what's happening in reality, but using all the affordances of immersive to explore that. So I always love coming to DocLab to be able to see all the latest selection, to see what the artists are doing, because I really think that what happens at DocLab and the theme last year of off the Internet, you know, earlier you were saying Casper around, you know, Douglas Rushkoff saying maybe the next kind of punk move is to move off of the digital and go back to analog and reclaim those physical spaces.

And so I feel like that this shared realities consortium and initiative is, you know, and what Martin Martin DeWall is doing with the kind of revitalizing civic society in a way of kind of bringing people together and finding ways that immersive can start to bring people together and have a sense of shared community that has been really fractured and dissolved and decimated through the kind of having technology solve all of our problems and isolate us in different ways. And so I feel like the art that's being shown there at DocLab and what the artists are doing and saying is really kind of an indication of where this is all going and what it could possibly do. So I always love coming to DocLab to see all these pieces and see all the things and talk to all the artists and hear what the industry experts are saying at the R&D Summit. So, yeah, really looking forward to coming out again here at Amsterdam. And thanks so much for all the work you're doing to put all this together and to join me here today to do a deep dive breakdown of all to expect at IDFIDocLab 2026.

So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody who's still here. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free, make it public accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.