Greg Dolgopolov
The last stop in Kaleidoscope’s VR Showcase World Tour took place in Melbourne at the atmospheric Meat Market last night to a sold out audience of super cool early adopters. It was here that the award winners were announced from hundreds of entries from around the globe, with around 40 presented as part of the touring showcase.
Before announcing the award winners, it is important to note a few things about VR. It is not cinema. It is an incredibly intense experience where 3 minutes feels like 30 minutes. It is highly engaging and defines the active viewer. Audiences were twisting and turning, raking their heads up to the ceiling and plunging downwards, reaching out seemingly blindly into the ether or jumping back in shock. It was as exciting watching the VR content as it was observing the viewers’ facial expressions and unrestrained movement masked by a variety of VR hardware from Oculus Rift to Gear VR and the HTC Vive.
“These projects make important contributions to the evolving language of cinematic virtual reality and prove that independent creators are the driving force behind this new artistic movement,” said Kaleidoscope co-founder René Pinnell. It is not cinema but it is definitely the new form of storytelling.
The notion that VR is only good for gaming or real estate walk-throughs was quickly quashed by the breadth of content on display at the Kaleidoscope event. While VR in many ways escapes genre, there were fine examples of documentary such as Reframe Iran (Joao Inada, USA, Gear VR) and the essay film Jet Lag (Pierre Friquet, India and France, gear VR) and even a punk musical piss-take Waves (Benjamin Dickinson, USA, Gear VR) where Reggie Watts messes with the audience in a dream-within-a-dream meta-ride with light sabres down a loopy rabbit hole.
The level of simplicity and artistic freedom fused with innovative, sophisticated storytelling was inspiring. Some of the more interesting works were marked by an elegant simplicity that highlighted their immersive power. The Grand Prize winner for Excellence in Cinematic Virtual Reality was Mike Tucker’s Tana Pura (USA, Gear VR) a beautiful, ambiguous but captivating musical moving light experience that was magical in its effect and engagement. With a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood it was like a mix of Fantasia and the magical Min Min lights of outback Australia. In 3 minutes it felt like a trip into some lovingly wacky world of colours that flow into shards and ribbons and stars…
Pierre Friquet’s Jet Lag was awarded the Kaleidoscope Award for best Live Action experience – this was an erotic, multi-located dance narrative across two continents with fascinating editing techniques and a musical score that united these spaces and took audiences on a fascinating journey of romantic liaisons that required active deciphering along with swiveling with the Gear VR headsets to get the most out of the experience.
Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s Notes on Blindness was awarded the Kaleidoscope Award for Best Experimental Experience. This was a simple, visually sparse but mesmerising interactive experience in real time 3D and binaural sound that explored the interior world and philosophical ruminations on blindness using actual taped audio diaries of writer and academic John Hull, who – after decades of steady deterioration – became totally blind in 1983.
There were so many other excellent pieces that totally redefined any limitations that could have been conceived about VR and exploded all preconceptions. Janicza Bravo’s Hard World for Small Things (USA, Gear VR) showed the incredible possibilities in cool, urban drama narratives by keeping the audience guessing what is going to happen next and from which corner and how through a live-action VR experience of a day in the life of a neighborhood corner community and their harassment by the police.
What is not surprising is the number of Australian creators working in this space and developing cool new storytelling content. Watch out for Start VR’s VR Noir that will run in Sydney during Vivid.
The presenter of this remarkable showcase event was Kaleidoscope, the largest community for virtual reality creators. Produced in association with WIRED this is the premiere event that showcases such a wide variety of work by independent artists around the world. The Kaleidoscope mission is to activate communities of artists to work, create, share and collaborate in the VR space.
“The movement is global, it’s growing faster than anyone thinks, and the most interesting work is being produced by independent artists,” claimed René Pinnell. As part of the forum at the event local VR producers shared their experiences and backgrounds and highlighted the low entry point to working in VR. Most did not come from a computing background but as artists and storytellers. This is the future of storytelling. Everyone must experience this…
This is all very thrilling to me! I attended the Austin Texas kaleidoscope event last year. I was blown away! Great article!
Fantastic. Looking forward to the unfolding of the future.