Virtual Futures: A Manifesto for Immersive Experiences

In her research conducted during a fellowship on immersion with the South West Creative Technology Network, Julia Scott-Stevenson explores: How can immersive media create shared experiences that imagine pathways towards a preferred future? This piece was originally published in Immerse: creative discussion of emerging nonfiction storytelling on March 8, 2019. Climate armageddon, the rise of the far right, the arrival …

This is the story of the space between people…

Julia Scott-Stevenson writes about her experience of The Collider, the latest immersive work from creative duo Anagram — in its inaugural showing at IDFA DocLab in November 2018. A fellow participant and I are directed through two separate doors to begin the experience independently, accompanied by a narrator’s voice through headphones. I enter a tiny room, and the narrator describes the machine …

Video: Mediated Interactions: VR & AI Art (i-Docs 2018)

This panel from i-Docs 2018 brings together three different artists creating work across virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Nadav Assor explores his showcase installation Titchener’s Cage and current claims around empathy in “Embodiment and fragmentation in Titchener’s Cage and related projects”. In “The Job Vacancy: Echoborg Project: Staging a Chatbot Documentary”, Rik Lander presents an overview of his interactive theatrical …

Alternate Realities at Sheffield Doc/Fest

i-Docs research fellow Julia Scott-Stevenson gives a rundown of her visit to the Alternate Realities showcase at Sheffield Doc/Fest, with additional comments from Mandy Rose and Juliet Lennox. I’m handed a VR headset which feels disconcertingly wet when I place it against my face. At first I think perhaps the attendant has been slightly overzealous with cleaning it between users, …

Video: At the Intersection of Technology, Art, Science & the Future (i-Docs 2018)

i-Docs was thrilled to host two arts media practitioners at the recent Symposium in March, in a double bill keynote: ‘At the Intersection of Technology, Art, Science & the Future’. Robin McNicholas, from award-winning creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast, has directed myriad VR experiences and installations, and took the i-Docs audience on a journey through some of these works and …

Light into VR darkness – an in-depth interview with Arnaud Colinart

When directors Peter Middleton and James Spinney were working on their documentary Notes on Blindness, their attention was on finding a filming style that could convey the deepest emotions sensed in John Hull’s voice – a professor of religious education at Birmingham University that went blind in 1983 and spent much of a decade recording his journal on tape as …

It’s Not You, it’s Me – The Fly-on-the-Wall Documentary and Virtual Reality

By Katy Morrison – Producer at VRTOV .  We talk a lot about Virtual Reality. What to make, how to make it, why we should be making this thing instead of that other thing. And yet while the promise of VR  —  be anywhere! Come face-to-face with anything or anyone!  —  is expansive, the conversation is not. Aside from the constant …