LFF Expanded 2021: Field notes
On Thursday 14th October I spent the day zooming up and down the Southbank checking out some of the treats that the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) has to offer as part of their LFF Expanded programming. Jotting down a few thoughts here whilst they are fresh(ish):
Future Rites (work in progress)
by Sandra Rodriguez, Alexander Whitely Dance Company and Normal Studio
Location: Mercury Studio, Rambert
VR, motion-captured contemporary dance, and a playful exploration into folklore and ritual. When I saw the blurb for this one it felt almost algorithmically generated to suit my tastes so I had pretty high hopes for it going in. However, as the host gently remind us, this is a work in progress, the first 11 minutes of what they hope will be a full-length performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a tentative first experiment to gather feedback, so here goes:
For my part, I loved all the onboarding rituals that they created for us — not one but two briefing/staging areas to get us ready to dive in. I loved the invitation to take off my socks and shoes, and the way that we were each allocated a dancer who greeted us, showed us to the performance area and took us via a deliciously unnecessary, circuitous route to get to the starting points from which we would don our VR headsets.
What followed was a perfectly lovely sequence of natural and supernatural imagery, incorporating the live mo-cap’d movement of the dancers, and of the audiences into a sort of ceremonial, dance ritual playing with kinematics, cloning, scale and dislocated embodiment in a way that…sounds super-fancy when I put it like that.
In practice though, all of the clever techniques, like one that was designed to keep my avatar moving in time with the music, regardless of how ungainly my actual movements, ultimately stopped me from feeling much kinship with my avatar or the other humans in the room.
At times I tried to dance along a little with the performers and couldn’t help but feel that my auto-tuned dancebot was fighting me, shoehorning my movements to a base set of 3 or 4 standard motions that it deemed more palatable than my own waggly flailings.
At various points I wanted to know how the movements of the abstract, animated characters in VR related to the trained dancers hidden from view in front of me. About half way through I started raising my chin and peeking through the nose gap of my headset. Sure enough, I saw some wonderful dancing going on. Dancing with a quality of movement that just wasn’t translating into the virtual world due to the limitations of the technology. I wonder if in later iterations, the company will enjoy exploring more of a back and forth between the physical and virtual worlds as a possible way to capture the best of both.
Eulogy
by Darkfield
Location: A container on The Queen’s Walk
I have been enjoying a range of auditory delights via Darkfield Radio during the various lockdowns, however this is the first time I have personally experienced one of the infamous ‘container experiences’. Without giving too much away, I will say it is incredible to move from the busy Southbank into a space that is pitch….and I mean hand-in-front-face-and-still-can’t-see-a-thing…pitch black. From the moment I put my headphones on and the lights go out, every movement, every noise, every rumble, every voice that I hear for 30 minutes is part of an exquisitely crafted, unsettling and fantastical audio world exploring questions of agency, control, and our tenuous grasp on what is, and is not ‘real’. Eulogy toyed with my sense of reality to the extent that I am still not fully convinced that I have left the container, nor whether the act of typing these field notes back in Bristol is just another plot twist in this fantastically slippery story world.
Next it was off to 26 Leake St for an incredible array of immersive artworks, films and experiences. Massive applause to Bertie Millis, Samantha Kingston, Verity Nalley and the whole team for pulling out all of the stops to make this place (and the whole festival) such a weird but welcoming cave of wonders. My session in Leake Street was just shy of two hours long, and the programming is so generous that, in that time I only got to experience a fraction of the content. I left feeling well taken care of, extremely fortunate to be able to do stuff like this for my job, and more than a little discombobulated about the state of the world/humanity/reality.
All of which I take to be A Good Sign.
Inhibition
by Zoe Diakaki and Marina Eleni Mersiadou
An experience for two people on either side of a screen. One wears a VR headset, the other (me in this instance) wears headphones and we both wear heart-rate sensors on our wrists. A soft, poetic voice speaks to us both in a way that floats and drifts such that I barely hear the words. Images of a clearing, maybe a swamp and some foliage are projected onto a wall in front of me, and I believe my partner is seeing the same thing in her headset. I may even be witnessing her point of view. A nearby tree is throbbing in a way that I imagine has something to do with my pulse. Or hers. Or both of ours?
I clumsily start hopping about to try to raise my heart-rate and induce a change in the tree. Nothing I can discern changes and now I feel foolish and ungainly. I am happy when the lighting changes and the partition becomes transparent. I can see my partner, she is reaching out to touch something in her headset. Maybe me? I reach out too. Nothing.
This all feels somewhat reminiscent of The Collider by Anagram, where a pairing of participants, one in the headset, one with the controllers find myriad delicate ways to connect despite the asymmetry of their experience. Unfortunately here, unlike The Collider, I find myself with nothing to do, no clear way to connect with or reach out to my partner. I feel a little impotent and start to suspect that I am doing something wrong. Even the act of watching my partner requires me to turn my back on the projected visuals, further adding to my sense that I should not be looking at her whilst she has no way of knowing that I am doing so. I spot a depth camera in the corner of the room tracking my movements and a few times I try to wave to signal to my partner that I am here with her — perhaps she can see me now? No response, I guess not.
All of that said. This piece is beautiful and mesmerising in many ways. I love that the makers have chosen to play with the relationship between those in, and out of headsets. It feels like they are searching for some sort of middle space where audiences can exist betwixt and between realities. This is the first time this piece has been shown anywhere in the world and I’m sure the makers will have been fascinating to see how people (I imagine mostly less waggly than me) have responded as they continue to develop the platform. I am not quite sure I fully know what was going on here, but I look forward to seeing what comes next!
Captured
by Hanna Haaslahti
“be careful what face you make” a well-meaning stranger calls to me as I place my feet in the vinyl footprints and look up at the screen. “What’s tha…?” I say, just as my image is ‘captured’ and a version of ‘me’ that would never make it to Instagram pops up on the screen.
My gaping, sleepy face then becomes that of a character in a bright red, smiley faced unitard that gradually migrates from the screen in front of me, to the projection wall beyond. Here it joins a crowd of my fellow festival-goers and we form a sort of mob, taking part in a series of unpredictable and often violent acts. Imagine if the ‘elf yourself’ Christmas card people stopped whimsically dancing to ‘Rocking Around the Christmas Tree’ and started beating the **** out of one another.
This is a wholly surreal experience, but incredibly effective in getting me to think about my ‘digital self’, the amount personal data and consent that I haemorrhage to the internet every day, and the illusion of control that I have over my ‘digital twin’. I find myself vainly wanting to go back and ‘fix’ her, creating an avatar that better flatters my ego, but it’s too late, she is out there now and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Atomic/Ghost in the Atom
by Felicia Honkasalo, Akuliina Niemi and Masi Tiitta
I open the door into a room within a room, a small-ish space with white walls, deep purple lighting and a few swivel stools, each with headsets on. One of the stools is occupied by a guy who is trying to watch the piece, I have disturbed him. I clatter about trying to find a comfy spot and somewhere to put my bag. I am really aware of how separate this space feel compared to the more open, communal spaces of the rest of the Leake St venue. I’m not sure why we are in this more confined space but I head into the headset anyway, awkwardly and noisily getting tangled and untangled in the headphones and battery pack. I peep out of my nose hole again and the other person has gone. I hope I didn’t ruin this for him. In the headset, some perfectly nice landscape is emerging around me and someone is talking poetically about quarries, but I can’t settle. I feel the old pandemic-jangles kicking in and I am too enclosed. Too out of context. I leave before I get anywhere close to understanding how radioactive waste has fundamentally altered the ecosystems surrounding nuclear power stations. My apologies to the makers and programmers for not being able to offer more helpful reflections. I guess we are all still working through our covid stuff.
Adult Children
by Ella Hickson, Sacha Wares and ScanLAB Projects
A thoughtful and well written drama set in lockdown, following the daily struggles of a connected group of characters as they attempt to negotiate the personal and global consequences of their actions on a day-to-day basis. The piece is set in a scanned replica of the Donmar Warehouse theatre in Covent Garden and there is a scanned audience sat mutely on benches to one side of the stage, whilst I sit on another.
I found this to be quite a peculiar dynamic, as though the makers were looking for a way to replicate the experience of being at a theatre through virtual reality, rather than building something with VR in mind. I would have loved to have seen more made of this dynamic and found myself obsessing a little about the fixedness of this moment, as neither the performers nor the audience were live with me, and yet we were all somehow pretending to be in a space which normally bristles with the energy of the live encounter.
Missing Pictures: Tsai Ming-Liang
by Clement Deneux and Kuan-Yuan LAI
A nostalgic and tender auto-biographical tale, hosted by filmmaker Tsai Min-Liang. We meet the artist in a cinema as he leans convivially against a stage and explains to us that his early childhood is one of the things he has never felt able to put on the silver screen. We move into a painterly, three-dimensional story world, offering glimpses of a young boy living a simple life with his grandparents whom he adored, and his nightly ritual of going to see two movies, one with each grandparent at his local cinema.
I like the way this format plays with the sense of intimacy that you can achieve in VR. The feeling that you are in a private, hidden and personal space in the company of someone whom you are unlikely to meet in real life.
Museum of Austerity
by Sacha Wares, John Pring, All Seeing Eye, ETT and Dimensions Studios
This is a powerful piece. It’s going to be hard to do it justice.
In a quiet room at the back of 26 Leake Street, I spend half an hour sitting with volumetrically captured holograms representing James Oliver, Sophie (Faiza) Ahmed, Moira Drury and Philippa Day. There are others but I don’t have the time (or the fortitude) to visit with all of them today. I move closer to each of the holograms in turn. Close enough to feel that I am attentive and present with them, but far enough away so as not to invade their personal space. From here, I am able to listen to interviews with their family and friends, sharing tender memories of lost loved ones, and bitter tales of how (at best) the inadequacies and (at worst) the cruelty of the UK political system during ‘austerity Britain’ contributed to their deaths. When I step backwards I hear the voices of Members of Parliament publicly announcing or attempting to justify the policy decisions that have contributed to the circumstances of the person in front of me. It is devastating.
This is one of those pieces that really shows me what headset-based AR (Hololens 2 in this case) is capable of. At one point I was standing next to the hospital bed of a frightened looking older woman. Her daughter spoke about the abuse that she suffered, and mentioned in passing that she did not like people standing behind her. I was standing behind her. Despite knowing that neither she nor the daughter were physically in the room with me, I felt dreadful and moved immediately to a respectful distance at the end of her bed, making myself as small as possible so as to appear unthreatening at the foot of her bed. I can’t imagine any other medium feeling more intimate, more emotional, more immediate than this.
Museum of Austerity makes full use of the ethereal, translucent nature of augmented reality ‘holograms’, reminding me that these people are not here to tell me their stories in person. Their digital traces, and the stories told about them are what now remain, and we owe it to them to give our full attention.
Quick side note to acknowledge the excellent ‘on- and off-boarding’ by the Museum of Austerity team. They took time to make sure each participant had read the printed information on the wall which ranged from content warnings to access requirements, and made sure that I was really ready and in the right frame of mind to engage with this challenging experience. There was a quiet, decompression space off to one side, made available after the event for anyone who needed to take a minute, or wanted to talk about their experiences. Despite the busy festival context, nothing felt rushed or too much to ask. I cannot commend the team highly enough for this. It makes all the difference.
Things I didn’t manage to see:
Only Expansion by Duncan Speakman — I have experienced this before. It is phenomenal, and thoroughly deserving of the LFF Immersive Art and XR Award that is has now won. If you ever get the chance to try this for yourself, I highly recommend that you go for it.
Container by Meghna Singh and Simon Wood
Eternal Return by ScanLAB Projects, Lundahl and Seitl
Fauna by Adrien M & Claire B x Brest Brest Brest
Laika by Asif Kapadia and Nick Abadzis
A Life in Pieces: The Diary and Letters of Stanley Hayami by Nonny de la Peña and Sharon Yamato
Liminal Lands by Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Noah’s Raft by Joel Kachi Benson and Tal Michael Haring
Samsara by Hsin-Chien Huang — I am gutted not to have got to this one, it sounds amazing. So…if anyone wants to send me a copy…?!)
Virtually There by Leon Oldstrong — it didn’t win the Immersive Art and XR award but the judges said “We would like to add a special mention to a piece that made us cry, and needs to be seen around the country.”
