By Travis Johnson
Helping push the boundaries is Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which recently endowed the Mordant Family VR Commission to fund artists moving into the VR space. We spoke to ACMI CEO Katrina Sedgwick about this bold step into a new universe.
The first of two major Virtual Reality initiatives coming from ACMI, The Mordant Family VR Commission is a three year project designed to get visual artists to experiment in the VR field by offering an annual endowment of $80,000 for the development and creation of a new work in the medium. Applications are now open.
What has led to ACMI’s recent drive towards funding more Virtual Reality projects?
I think what’s super exciting about VR – I mean, it’s been around for a long time – is that just at the moment there is a range of technologies that are rolling out across different platforms and different companies that are making it more accessible. It’s now an affordable technology, it’s one that people can experiment with, it’s becoming accessible to the consumer in terms of being able to view it and engage with it. So, it’s a platform which is now a part of the day to day conversation. It’s still got minimal reach, it’s still very new, but it has an affordability and an accessibility to it now that it didn’t have before – and a quality. You’re able to create something that has a visual strength and an aural strength to it that previously wasn’t there.
We’re really interested in it as a space, and you’ll see from the kind of commissioning that we’ve been doing over the past year and from the new fund that we’ve just announced that we’re particularly interested in supporting artists moving into that space who are coming from different fields. Particularly Screen Queensland and Screen NSW have a lot of initiatives around filmmakers and VR, but we’re interested in supporting people moving into that area who you may not think of immediately – people working in theatre, people working in dance, and in this new commissioning program, people working in visual arts. I think a visual artist who works in a gallery space, or a theatre maker who works in a live performance environment, are quite often thinking in 360 ways, and so that’s really interesting when you’re transferring into virtual reality, because it’s quite a different way of telling a story. You’re using a camera, but your lens is all around you. You edit completely differently, you film completely differently, you engage with the audience completely differently. It’s going to be really exciting to see how people from across different art forms approach virtual reality and who really begins to crack it as a new space and a way to tell stories in entirely new ways.
With film and other screen arts, the formal and genre boundaries are extremely well defined. That’s not the case with Virtual Reality at this point – it’s very much the Wild West.
Totally. So it’s quite exhilarating as an audience member – the act of putting on those goggles and being in this new world, that immersive quality of it is quite exciting. The novelty of that will probably wear off fairly soon and then we’re gonna need to be in a space where people are using that experience to tell stories in powerful ways. Getting practitioners in there from a range of different disciplines to really experiment and push those boundaries, to really test the limits and explore and experiment and discover what are those new things that you can do… I think it’s very unlikely that we’re gonna see it as a space where you’re going to be exploring linear narrative. It’s not what it’s about – it’s about a different kind of experience.
Is that because it doesn’t restrict your point of view the way cinema does? Cinema is very much about directing your gaze.
Yes. So as an artist or as a filmmaker, you are inviting your audience into something that’s quite different. Your relationship to your audience is quite different. You’re creating an environment for them to be immersed in and for them to discover themselves at their own time, at their own pace. The normal way how we engage with linear narrative, it’s hard to see how that will be applicable – so what else can it do? And we’re really excited about helping practitioners explore that.
Do you think there are techniques waiting to be born that we can’t even imagine right now? Much like editing was impossible to imagine before the advent of film, that there are things waiting for us in the future that we can’t even get a handle on now, because the medium is so new, because practitioners are still defining the rules?
Absolutely. That’s guaranteed to be the case. How an artist approaches virtual reality now – it’s going to be completely different in five years. We need to support people to get in there and try stuff and really take risks. What I think is important as a director of an institution like ACMI is being able to find a way to subsidise artists so they’re not working in a commercial environment, so they’re working in a creative space, that is overtly saying: Experiment. Take risks. Let’s see what happens. I hope that’s a very liberating environment for them. This is not about having something that is going to sell to 15 broadcasters.
To that end, we haven’t imposed any restrictions on how the audience might engage with the work. We just presented Collisions, a really beautiful virtual reality documentary that Lynette Wallworth created – she was commissioned through Sundance New Frontiers. It was in one of our galleries for three months – we had over 8000 people engage with that work. It’s been seen around the country, but I think this is the longest, most continuous exhibition of the work that’s happened to date. What’s really fabulous about presenting the artwork at ACMI was that we created a room. We created an environment that you walked into that created a kind of sense and feeling of the world you were about to be immersed in, and then you sat down and put your goggles on, you engaged with the documentary storytelling, and when you came out you were still in that kind of space. We’re finding that that appears to be a valuable element of VR – you’re not just sitting at a desk, sticking something on. It’s good to go into an environment, and then go into your virtual environment – it really adds a kind of specialness to the experience, and really enhances and extends it.
Do you think that kind of gallery scenario is the future of VR exhibition?
There’s a theatrical project in development, and a component of it will require the audience to engage with a Virtual Reality environment at one point, so Virtual Reality will be enhancing another experience. That’s quite interesting, and that may be something that expands into a cinematic space as well. What’s really interesting is how other changing technologies will affect it – Augmented Reality is the other big thing, and of course what will happen with Hololens technology – that Microsoft technology where the hologram is playing out around you in your real space. That’s a whole other technology that is really interesting, that kind of digital enhancement. So it’s difficult to tell. Virtual reality is a tricky one because it is so immersive – you are separated from the world, you are entirely in a whole new audio-visual environment. What’s that mean in terms of exhibition? What’s that mean in terms of those shared cultural experiences that we engage in? I don’t know how it’s going play out, but it’s going to be really fascinating to watch.
We’ve had VR for about 25 years now, albeit in more primitive forms. Do you think the sudden explosion of interest is not just because of technological developments, but cultural ones as well? We’re all used to leading virtual lives online, computer gaming is hugely popular, we interact in the virtual space of social media every day…
I think it’s both. The technology has ramped up right across the board, but yes, the audience is ready to experiment – we’re ready to try it out. People are really, really hungry for it. Collisions, over the three months we had it, every half hour you could book in to see it, fifteen people were able to sit down at a time – every session was full for three months. People are just hungry for this kind of experience. I think you’re quite right – after having such an explosion of games and immersive worlds and MMOs, they’re ready. They’re savvy for virtual reality, and we see that in the rapid rise of domestic pick up of the technology. It’s quick!
Applications for the Mordant Family VR Commission are open until April 13. For more info, head to the ACMI site.
