Catching Up With the Curators of Venice VR (Q&A)

This year’s Venice VR Expanded event is the most accessible major exhibition of VR festival content we’ve seen yet. The entire VR exhibition of the 77th Venice International Film Festival has put 44 works across multiple platforms — Viveport, Oculus, VR Chat — thanks to the work of the festival’s partner VRrOOm.

The collection is curated by Michel Reilhac and ​Liz Rosenthal​, whom we reached out to via the modern miracle that is email to get some insight into this year’s festival​, which has a range of work that runs the gamut from 360 video to live performances.

No Proscenium: We’re five years into Venice VR, and before we get into this year’s unusual circumstances, I wondered if you could tell us what you think is the most significant way the craft of VR evolved since the first edition?

Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac:

Major trends:

• Social VR: the main criticism that was made about VR was that it is something you do alone, that cuts you off from the world and from others. The pandemic has accelerated the trend towards communal experiences: working together, playing, training, competing, helping, coaching, creating… together. We are seeing this in the creative field through real time events or story worlds that can be experienced with many or few other people represented by their avatars. Improvised interactions become a creative genre. Fiction worlds where the borders between performers and spectators start to blur. An accelerator of this will be when Facebook launches Horizon, its VR platform where they are gearing up to soon migrate the new iteration of social interaction.

• Avatars: the direct consequence of social platforms activities in VR is the importance of avatars as representations of ourselves in the VR worlds. The goal of having digital twins as true doubles of ourselves inside the meta verse is coming closer in time, maybe 3 years from now. In the meantime, more and more care is given to designing personal avatar collections to navigate the VR worlds. Transportability of one and the same avatar from one world to the next is also becoming a goal for consistent virtual presence

• Interactivity: every year we have been witnessing how the interactive options are becoming more and more sophisticated. Agency is also made more fluid with the rise of untethered headsets (the Facebook’s Oculus Quest headset is a striking success). The ways we can interact with objects, other characters, environments and make things happen in VR is rapidly growing into a life like experience. Hand tracking (interactions without any hand-held devices) is also one of the fats growing ways of making immersive experiences more realistic.

• Creativity: more and more artists are starting to play with VR. More content are reaching bigger numbers of users. The language of immersive storytelling is structuring itself quickly. We are seeing a very wide range of experiential story worlds being invented and it feels like it is only the beginning

NP: For someone who has a headset, but hasn’t really been in a festival setting, what mindset should they bring?

LR & MR: You need to be very open-minded, ready to be surprised. It is normal to be intimidated at first because it sometimes may feel very tech. But the range of creative surprises is such that you can truly expect to feel like a child discovering new ways of relating to the world. From simple documentary approaches to highly involving live performances of avatars where you become the main character, you need to make yourself emotionally available to this new level of participatory experiences where you can decide how much you want to get involved

NP: So much of a festival is about those spontaneous connections, the unexpected avenues you find yourself exploring, how is that being translated into the virtual exposition? (Note: I’m looking for some insight into how the VR Chat side of things will work here.)

LR & MR: Beyond facilitating access to our Exhibition Hall for the complete selection of 44 projects, our Venice VR Expanded world, designed by VRrOOm inside VR Chat, will also feature The Garden where all accredited people will be able to meet and mingle through their avatars in real time. They will be able to gather around the social events of our program such as panels, talks, pitches, presentations and parties. The Garden will be made up of larger areas for group meetings, an amphitheater for presentations, but also private hidden spaces, some of them tucked away under water for private meetings. There will be meet and greet moments for people to casually connect, and there will be organized meetings for professional occasions. There will even be a bar with virtual Proseccos and spritzes…

NP: Finally, festivals around the world are adapting to remote viewing, what does this expanded audience mean for the creators of these works, and for the art form itself?

LR & MR: Creators had made plans for physical installations to be submitted to our selection process before the pandemic. Almost all of them have had to redesign these installations to transform into remote viewing experiences. In the process, a lot of them have realized that installations were extremely costly to tour and distribute. There is now a new creative focus on works that can be experienced remotely, without any physical interface, as it is proving to be much easier for them to reach a broader audience this way.

And as we said above, many creators are now exploring the potential of creative collective experiences inside social VR platforms.

Finally, many performance based works are now being done with performers located everywhere in the world, making work together without ever meeting in real life. From distant choreography between avatars to improvisational theater between remote performers and remote audiences, the explosion of physical constraints for creation and production has just begun.

Check out NoPro Podcast #262 for our audio interview with Liz Rosenthal, and keep an eye on the site for our festival diaries and reviews.

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.

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