Sundance embraces VR

Festival unveils ‘New Frontier’ section

LOS ANGELES, Dec 2, (RTRS): Yesterday, the Sundance Film Festival announced its feature competition categories. Today, the festival unveils its New Frontier section — which showcases the tech-enabled storytelling of tomorrow.

The boundary-pushing New Frontier category, which celebrated a decade of outside-the-box projects from the likes of James Franco and Joseph GordonLevitt earlier this year, is often overlooked by attendees focused on independent cinema, and yet frequently contains the festival’s most innovative fare. This year’s slate consists of the North American premiere of “Museum Hours”; director Jem Cohen’s latest format-challenging documentary, “World Without End (No Reported Incidents)”; a pair of live multimediaenhanced performances (including one from “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” director and Sundance veteran Terence Nance); 20 virtual-reality experiences; and 11 immersive installations — with additional projects still to come.

Three of the projects belong to Sundance’s “The New Climate” program — a thread of programming that calls attention to environmental issues and climate change. The full lineup: Films and Performance: The three projects in this section are all American-made, unless otherwise noted.

18 Black Girls/Boys Ages 1-18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines: $X in an Edition of $97 Quadrillion (Director and writer: Terence Nance) — In this pair of performances, the artist Googles the phrase “one-year-old black boy” and “one-year-old black girl,” ascending in age to 18, allowing Google’s “popular searches” algorithm to populate what words will follow.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Director: Travis Wilkerson) — This documentary murder mystery about the artist’s own family is a Southern Gothic torn apart and reassembled. Journeying straight into the black heart of a family and country, this multimedia performance explores a forgotten killing by the artist’s great-grandfather — a white Southern racist — of a black man in lower Alabama.

World Without End (No Reported Incidents) (USUK/ Director: Jem Cohen) — Close observations around Southend-on-Sea, a small English town along the Thames estuary, reveal not only everyday streets, everyday birds, unflagging tides, mud and sky, but also prize-winning Indian curries, an encyclopedic universe of hats and a nearly lost world of proto-punk music.

Installations: The eight projects in this section are from the US, unless otherwise noted.

A selection of single-channel works by the collective A Normal Working Day Switzerland — A Normal Working Day is an artist collective consisting of the installation artist Zimoun and the choreographers and dancers Delgado Fuchs (Marco Delgado, Nadine Fuchs). Formed from the bodies of the two performers, these splendidly hypnotic projections are visual rabbit holes that shimmer with a presence that is larger than the sum of their parts.

Full Turn (Switzerland / Artist: Benjamin Muzzin) — This installation explores the notion of the third dimension with the desire to get out of the usual frame of a flat screen. The rotation of two tablets creates a three-dimensional, animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees, unlike any other type of display.

Heartcorps: Riders of the Storyboard (Artist: dandypunk, Key Collaborators: Darin Basile, Jo Cattell) — Follow the story of Particle, a two-dimensional light being, as you walk through the pages of a giant, immersive comic book. Hand-drawn illustrations come to life around you using projection-mapping technology, while high-level Cirque du Soleil performers interact with animated characters in this “digital light poem.” Cast: Ekenah Claudin, Elon Hoglund, Youssef El Toufali, Jenni Gamas.

Heroes (Artist: Melissa Painter, Key Collaborators: Tim Dillon, Thomas Wester, Jason Schugardt, Laura Gorenstein Miller) — The setting: An extravagant movie palace where silent films were shown. One dance — fiercely athletic and romantic — invites you inside. The story comes off the screen, putting you into your body and challenging you to move, navigate heroic shifts in perspective and scale and reach out to touch the experience. Cast: Helios Dance Theater, Stephanie Maxim, Chris Stanley, Melissa Sandvig.

Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine (Artist: Daniella Segal) — From stone ax to supercomputer, our brain’s evolution has been guided by our tools, evolving it into the most complicated object in the known universe. Explore a holographic brain with a friend on the Meta 2 Augmented Reality Headset, and rebuild your relationship to the Natural Machine.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (Artists: Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal, Nitzan Bartov) — A three-part exploration of black women and the roles they play in technology, society, and culture — including speculative products, immersive experiences, and neurocognitive impact research. Using fashion, cosmetics, and the economy of beauty as entry points, the project illuminates issues of privacy, transparency, identity, and perception.

Pleasant Places (UK/Artist: Quayola) — A return to, and a modern elaboration upon, Vincent van Gogh’s Provence landscapes, this series of digital paintings interrogates and reframes concepts of representation and perception through image manipulation and augmented reality. Using bucolic and contemplative images, juxtaposed with raw data visualization, this project suggests alternate modes of visual synthesis.

Synesthesia Suit: Rez Infinite and Crystal Vibes (Japan/Artists: Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Ayahiko Sato, Kouta Minamizawa) — Experience a multisensory climax with pounding beats and stringed instruments in acclaimed PlayStation 4/PS VR game Rez Infinite, or feel vibrations of candy-colored psychedelic sound rippling through the Crystal Vibes universe. Audiovisual and vibrotactile textures combine to push the frontiers of technology-mediated sensory experience.

Virtual/Augmented Reality: The 16 projects in this section are from the US, unless otherwise noted.