London Film Festival Expanded Opens
A quick look at sure bets from BFI LFF Expanded’s XR lineup
BFI LFF Expanded returns to 26 Leake St and Southbank this year, featuring a total of 20 projects from 17 countries. It’s an exciting lineup that embraces a wide range of the immersive arts including interactive virtual reality (VR), 360 films, augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and live immersive performance.
Some of the projects we have our eye on include work that’s brand new to us like Guy Maddin’s Haunted Hotel — an AR experience that uses archival materials from Maddin’s personal collection to take audiences on a surreal journey exploring the layers of human nature; and those we’ve had the chance to catch before like DARKFIELD’s INTRAVENE, which we talked about on the podcast in June.
The exhibition is open to the public from 5–16 October 2022. Tickets range from £15.00-£20.00 and are available to purchase HERE.
In addition, a selection of immersive works from LFF Expanded is also available on Oculus TV around the world, from 5 to 23 October.
What follows are a few of the selections that we’re think people will be talking about all festival long.
ALL UNSAVED PROGRESS WILL BE LOST
Acclaimed French visual artist Mélanie Courtinat’s striking work deals with the terrifying events that have led to the evacuation of a whole town in an undisclosed country. The narrator relays her story, set against the backdrop of a gradually changing landscape whose abstract visual references keep the territory anonymous. An urgent and unidentified threat permeates the experience, allowing the viewer to meditate on and project their own fears through the work.
Lead artist: Mélanie Courtinat
Project Time: 10min
Location: 26 LEAKE STREET
The work invites audiences to bear witness to landscapes in flux. We observe alterations caused by human-centred industry and the immense forces of nature; destruction, extraction, habitation, construction, harvests, growth, and erosion. Created from thousands of daily 3D time-lapse scans of British landscapes, the work observes change on a scale impossible to see with the lens of traditional cameras. Three-dimensional stories unfold within the hypnotic imagery. Audio shifts through the space. Spring breaks, summer sun shines dappled through the leaves as they turn amber and fall a second later. In a quaint English garden a pumpkin grows. A thousand tonnes of steel is crushed. Sand ebbs and flows while a cliff retreats. 268 cows are milked. 519 pints are drunk.
Lead Artist: Matthew Shaw, William Trossell, ScanLAB Projects
Project Time: 20 Minutes
Location: 26 LEAKE STREET
Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
“HAUNTED HOTEL — A Melodrama in Augmented Reality” is an immersive exhibition unravelling across eight three-dimensional collages. True to his avant-garde style, Guy Maddin delicately enfolds his audience in surreal paper worlds, exploring the hidden layers of human nature. Embracing an eclectic selection of clippings from his personal archive, Maddin’s Hotel hosts familiar pop culture figures alongside ecstatic 60s nudists and frightened film noir actors. Find out what’s stirring behind closed doors via virtual peep holes and leaf through rooms filled with longing, hysteria and madness, all set to an intricate soundscape by acclaimed composer Magnus Fiennes.
Lead Artist: Guy Maddin
Project Time: 20min
Project Location: BFI Southbank
Intravene uses binaural 360-degree sound to plunge listeners into the heart of an urgent issue. This project is the result of a groundbreaking partnership between Darkfield, Brenda Longfellow and Crackdown — immersive and documentary artists and those working on the frontline of the drugs crisis. The voices within Intravene are taken from interviews by Crackdown, amplifying the testimonies of drug users, telling the story of the Vancouver drug crisis from the perspective of those most severely impacted by it. After its audio-only premiere at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, Darkfield presents the world premiere of the fully immersive version.
Lead Artist: Darkfield, Crackdown, Brenda Longfellow
Project Time: 30 Minutes
Location: NATIONAL THEATRE, THEATRE SQUARE
Debate about reproductive rights is often heated. But behind every family planning decision there is a human story. Using volumetric capture technology and creative design, this film lets you see the complex journey behind one woman’s Choice. In this unique VR documentary, viewers will meet Kristen, a young Native American woman from Texas who dreams of raising a family but instead finds herself facing a painful system that forces women into dehumanizing situations just to survive. The Choice blends techniques from traditional documentary storytelling, personal conversation, and animation, using VR to redefine how we tell the stories and how the audience experiences them and connects with the subject on a deep, emotional level. The experience invites the audience to enter this space with their own identity. When the experience finishes, they can return to their everyday reality. But this conversation stays with them long after they have finished watching. The next step is to translate that drive into action. The recent leak of the SCOTUS draft, outlining the reversal of 50 years of women’s rights in the USA, shows the incredible importance of stories like Kristen’s and what is at stake.
Lead Artist: Joanne Popinska
Project Time: 25 Minutes
Location: 26 LEAKE STREET
Walzer is a virtual reality experience with several stories circling women’s rights and the first wave of feminism during the late 19th and early 20th century. As you travel through a virtual photographic landscape, a waltz is your guide. When you move around, the waltz morphs into a variety of moods. It never leaves your side. Multiple different instruments invite you into multiple different atmospheres. Voices whisper, sing, yell, narrate stories, songs and poems in eight different languages.
They want you to know about far away places, your own past and emotions that may feel familiar. Even though they might address you in a language you don’t understand, you could be enlightened by other visitors. Inside this virtual world the user’s knowledge, background and behaviour determines the experience. Afterwards you have to discuss with others to determine what you have just experienced.
This VR was built with thousands of unknown personal photographs found on flea markets, online marketplaces and private collections. Personal history that was hiding in boxes and albums. Most pictures were made by anonymous photographers or, as most of them from the 19th century, in local photo studios. During the process of collecting and digital restoration, intriguing stories emerged. Narratives developed when we connected pictures with other pictures and combined them with music, words, sounds and 3D technology.
Lead Artist: Frieda Gustavs, Leo Erken
Project Time: 10 Minutes
Location: 26 LEAKE STREET
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium website, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Discord.