Perinatal Dreaming. Understanding Country, by Marianne Wobcke / Big Anxiety Research Centre, Volker Kuchelmeister, Lucia Barrera
The Alternate Realities programme at this year’s just-concluded Sheffield DocFest is pared back, featuring a VR competition, an exhibition and summit in collaboration with the International Documentary Association (IDA). I spoke with Artistic Director Raul Niño Zambrano and co-curators Abby Sun and Keisha Knight about the vision and thoughts behind this year’s immersive experience and its spirit of collaboration.
Raul Niño Zambrano – With Alternate Realities, it has always been a thing asking how do we define it and what do we want? For us, it’s important to see it as an extension. Just as we do for films, we are not looking for one specific type or style. Our responsibility is to show the whole spectrum. We pick up what we think is really worth highlighting. And I think that’s happening also in the XR field, their possibilities are endless. You see how an installation starts as virtual reality, but then becomes an installation, or the other way around. We’re looking at the intersection of art, technology and documentary, and trying to give a message – What are all these pieces saying all together?
For this year’s Alternate Realities programme, you are collaborating with IDA and the programme is co-curated by Keisha Knight and Abby Sun.
Raul – Yes, everything started because of Experimental Realities, a workshop they did in the USA asking a group of emerging artists about the future of immersive. When we talked, we thought it resonated a lot and was a good match.
One of the big questions was how do we see immersive media in the future? What does immersive really mean? Of course it has to do with technology and media, but what happened when we tried to distance a bit from that, we found that you come more to embodiment and to the senses and to haptic. I also felt that that was resonating with our film program; our tagline this year is Reflections on Realities.
originally published on XR Must