Field notes: IDFA DocLab 2023
10–19 November 2023, various locations, Amsterdam
This weekend I am in the Netherlands for the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). Specifically for the New Media exhibition DocLab, which is probably the best place in the world to see innovative digital storytelling and immersive non-fiction work.
The theme this year is Phenomenal Friction. In the words of the curatorial team:
“Technology, from the most recent gadgets to the earliest chopping tools, has always promised us a world where efficiency and convenience reign supreme. But what do we lose when things get too “smooth and seamless”? What are the hidden costs of a reality ruled by efficient algorithms, easy transactions and automated echo chambers? Who wins in this game? And what would we gain if, instead, we allow more space for friction, interaction, complexity and resistance to the status quo?”
As ever, I have only managed to see a fraction of the wonderful work on show. Catching quick thoughts below about those I was fortunate enough to experience:
Turbulence, Jamais Vu
by Ben Joseph Andrews
This profoundly affecting experience is still in my body.
It is a mixed reality piece in which the artist, Ben Joseph Andrews shares with us something of his own experience of vestibular migraine. During an attack he loses his sense of orientation, balance and spatial awareness. He also has the uncanny sensation that reality is no longer real. A neurological phenomenon called “jamais vu” or never seen. Everything familiar seems alien and incomprehensible.
Without giving spoilers, this piece uses the affordances of XR exquisitely to allude to this sensation, transforming everday tasks into agonising, near impossible feats of effort. I get pressure behind the eyes just thinking about it. I tend to avoid using the word ‘empathy’ in relation to VR for lots of reasons but in this case it really is at the heart of the piece.
Sensitive, generous, open-hearted and expertly crafted. Thank you.
Shadowtime
by Sister Sylvester and Deniz Tortum
A philosophical and sometimes haunting journey through some of the key concepts that XR super-nerds like me enjoy endlessly banging on about:
Discussion of the fact that someone in VR is simultaneously present in two worlds, the physical and the virtual — check ✅
Enhancing the sense of embodiment by giving the participant virtual hands and encouraging them to use them to twist, provoke and take action in the virtual world— check ✅
Full on XR geek deep cut to 1966 Ivan Sutherland and the progenitor of modern XR systems, the Sword of Damocles — check ✅
Making full use of the form to go beyond what is possible in screen based media e.g. user-triggered scene progression, characters that move to make eye contact, characters that refuse to continue if you invade their personal space, characters that mimic your movement and appear only when you look away. Characters that break that spontaneously pattern to unsettle your understanding of the system. Sporadic integration of AI generation causing you to doubt the reality as presented.
Check, check, checkidy check checkskidis. ✅✅✅✅✅
Anouschka
by Tamara Shogaolu, Ado Ato Pictures
I pick up a loaner phone on a lovely, lavender lace and head out into the garden to begin this mixed reality experience. I am guided to create a portal and step into another part of Amsterdam, a place of special significance to protagonist, Anouschka. Anouschka is a young girl who’s confidence has been shaken by the racist behaviour of her music teacher at school.
By visiting different parts of the space, and learning about objects precious to her, we gain insights into Anouschka’s life, her family and her heritage. There are a series of mini-games for us to discover, and playing them feels like a supportive gesture, helping Anouschka regain confidence, connection and passion for music.
From time to time I struggled with the user interface, not always sure where to go next or what was expected of me in certain games, which was a little jarring at times. I ran out of time before completing the experience so will do my best to go again tomorrow.
William Quail’s Pyramid
by Piotr Winiewicz, Constant Dullaart
With mysterious red boxes around our necks and big ol’ headphones on, a small group of us head out into Amsterdam, a soundtrack of mostly incomprehensible words, or near-words filling out ears.
Initially I worry I have missed the opportunity to ask for the English-language version but as our walk progresses I realise that I am listening, not to a narrator, but to an AI voice. The voice, I later discover, has been trained on the linguistic elements on Akkadian, a language from the time of the mythical Tower of Babel, and then converted into English subtitles using speech-to-text, further confusing the pseudo language received. When we arrive at our destination we take our seats in beautiful, tiny cinema and the words are joined by an undulating, morphing and wildly disorientating panoply of AI generated images, and subtitles.
Despite the hype and hyperbole, artificial intelligence, of course, never works alone and the hand of the creative team can be felt resting by turns heavily and softly on the evolving sequences. Sometime letting algorhythmic absurdities play out, a new form of jazz or beat poetry perhaps. Other times intervening in the message to call our attention to the consequences of playing fast and loose with such technologies, inviting us to consider not just the creative potential but the potentially ruinous consequences for society of blindly following this path. Big stuff.
I notice that the majority of the spoken text is delivered in a calm, measured, masculine tone but occasionally it is punctuated by the sound of a feminine-sounding voice that appears to be in utter anguish. Nothing from what I now know of the mechanic of this work makes sense of this for me, and I would love to hear from more about it from the artists. Was there a consequence of the AI training and/or artistic process that led to this replication of the the authoritative male and hysterical female trope? There is so much to explore in this work. I would recommend checking it out for yourself if you get the opportunity.
As we contemplate the future and fabric of humanity, the final message:
“ceasefire now”
brings us all crashing back into the present moment. Thunderstruck solemnity passes silently between and amongst us. And we are done.
PHANTOM
by Aluta Null
At first I’m not sure what do here. So I grab a set of headphones from the hat stand and tune in to what turns out to be a kind of inner monologue for the inhabitant of this room, someone who is dealing with the disjointedness of inner turmoil, depression and addiction in a culture that venerates instant gratification. A culture that applies a laugh track to everyday life and tries to skip straight to the happy ending.
When I approach the sofa there is a phone which allows me to peer deeper into this domestic scene, using augmented reality to decode the space, peeling back the layers of truth and trouble. It’s a really unusual, quiet and clever piece. Easy to overlook in the bustle of a busy festival but well worth taking the time to stop and explore.
Borderline Visible
by Ant Hampton
At seventy seven minutes, this is probably the longest (non-feature film) piece I have ever experienced at a festival. It felt deliciously indulgent and somehow defiant to just sit down in the pretend living room, pick up Ant Hampton’s beautiful book, don some headphones and let the pink fog of a nearby smoke machine envelop me for over an hour.
In that time, the audio guides me backwards and forwards through a book that was designed never to be read in isolation. On each page, stories, friendships, regrets and sorrows rise from the pages, revealed as lemon juice exposed to heat.
The story itself moves forwards and backwards in space and time, drawing on the writer’s own experience travelling across Germany, France, Greece and Turkey following threads of language, memory and family. Together we explore historical brutality of murderous regimes and the everyday human cruelty visited on modern day refugees seeking a better life.
The book is available to buy (without the accompanying smoke machine) here if you’re curious.
Yugo: the non-game
by Petrit Hoxha
A valiant attempt to share the more positive elements of social, communal gaming with non-gamers. The idea is that the gameplay itself is stripped right back; an un-failable driving game that allows you to focus on chatting with other players rather than hitting the apex or deploying the turbo. Up to three other people can join me in the car by playing along from multiple points around the festival venue.
I like the idea, and tried it three times at three different stations. Unfortunately, each time I played we hit snags; the first time the volume was too low for me to adequately hear the others, the second time I could not tell where I was in the car or who was driving, the third time there was no microphone so I was left mutely lurking in the car, awkwardly fiddling about with the radio station. I can’t say I felt any strong kinship with my fellow road trippers, but in the spirit of the theme of the festival, I quite enjoyed sitting with the awkward friction of it all.
Cyberfeminism Index Installation
by Mindy Seu
An impressive catalog documenting expressions of feminist online tech activism of the past 30 years. A camera looks down at the book on its plinth, watching for the turning of the page and serving up related videos on a projection when it recognises an image. I found it a tough one to get into in a busy exhibition space and most of the pages did not seem to have companion content, but it was an interesting read nonetheless.
Squeeker: The Mouse Coach
by Jiabao Li
I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what is going on here! This is a projection of a mouse on a wheel. There is a human sized treadmill to the right. I downloaded the app and it woke me up at 6.13 telling me that a mouse had run 1.35 km so I needed to do the same. I…erm…politely declined/deleted the app and went back to sleep.
To be less willfully ignorant than me take a look at the project blurb here.
Offset: Boiler Room
by Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain
Taking a seat in a classic call centre cube, my job is to hit the button and call a CEO/CFO/Head Honcho of a heavily polluting company and try to convince them to buy carbon offsetting products. This is not a performance. Not an AI simulation. It turns out me and my cube-mates are really doing this. We have a script to follow, and one after another, tired, polite and annoyed people answer the phone and tell me that “this is not a good time, ma’am”.
They are right of course. It is a Saturday and the CEOs named on my screen are not at work fielding cold calls. These are most likely the out of hours workers, employed at a not-great wage to absorb the impact of angry customers until their colleagues return on Monday. It’s a rubbish job. I have done that job. And yet here I am calling them up and haranguing them to do something that they have no authority to do.
If I know this, then am I not just taking part for my own amusement? Or to prop up my sense of moral superiority? I appreciate this will be a very different project during the week. And in many ways I admire the attempt to puncture the impermeable membrane that sometimes exists between art and activism. But I’ll admit, this one, here, today, doesn’t feel good.
Work I did not see:
Close by Hana Umeda
Despelote by Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena
Emperor by Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen
Going back home: Mother VR by Catalina Alarcón
Lateral by Charlie Shackleton
Redemption by Mariana Luiza
The School, A World by Iga Łapińska
The Vivid Unknown by John Fitzgerald
