The day before a film festival begins is usually spent getting reacquainted with the surroundings, collecting the credentials to attend the screenings, maybe catching up with friends while there’s still time to relax a bit. If you’re in Venice, that can also entail spending a few hours at the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the former hospital converted into an exhibition space, for the preview of Venice Immersive, the festival’s strand devoted to virtual and augmented reality.
Every year, this small island situated a literal stone’s throw from the Lido (the boat ride takes about a minute) turns into a hub for installations, experiences and worlds, most of them standalone, some set up with virtual guides via VR Chat. The latter includes one world whose name alone made it near impossible to resist: Flat Earth. Yes, it does exactly what it says on the tin: with the help of two other people, the user visits this world based on the ancient belief that has since become a contemporary conspiracy theory and source of endless memes.
Fittingly, director Niko Lang originally devised this world as a prank, sharing it on VR Chat on a specific day: April 1. An expansion has taken place in the interim, turning the joke into a satirical experience that builds on various theories posted online to imagine what exactly lies beyond the boundaries of this disc we supposedly live on. Perhaps not the ideal jumping-on point for VR novices (if one isn’t familiar with how to use the controllers, the experience is at risk of getting a bit repetitive as the user figures out how to navigate the seemingly limited space), but good fun nonetheless.
Speaking of worlds beyond our own, one of this year’s hot tickets is undoubtedly Asteroid, directed by Doug Liman. An immersive and interactive film, it was made for the upcoming launch of Google’s new Android XR platform, meaning we were told upfront the Venice version is still a demo, with some kinks to be ironed out as far as the interactive portion is concerned. The film itself, starring Ron Perlman and Hailee Steinfeld, is a 180 degrees space bound thriller, where a mission goes slightly awry and one of the characters is left for dead on the titular asteroid.
That character is DK Metcalf, a real NFL player who basically appears as “himself” for the purposes of this experience, which is bookended by two interactive segments: in the beginning, the user – having set up the system which allows the use of one’s hands in lieu of the traditional controller – gets to have a junket interview with Metcalf on the subject of his first foray into acting; the other sequence revolves around an analyst trying to figure out how to save the fictional character, who provides context clues via a distress call.
Both of those segments use AI to generate Metcalf’s end of the conversation, which is arguably the weakest part of this demo version as it follows a predetermined script without much wiggle room for improvisation on the user’s part. Per the team representing the project, that is the main issue they’re still working out so each experience will feel more personalized once Asteroid becomes available to the general public later this year. As for the film portion, it looks suitably spectacular, and may serve as a visual amuse-bouche of what Liman has in mind if he ever gets his outer space movie with Tom Cruise off the ground.
Far away worlds are also at the center of Jung Ah Suh’s Alien Perspective, a virtual museum tour that transforms into a spellbinding journey through the pictorial work of Carlo Rambaldi, the Oscar-winning special effects artist who worked on Alien and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial. An avid painter, he enjoyed depicting strange planets, which we get to explore courtesy of this experience co-written and produced by his granddaughter Cristina and devised to celebrate the centenary of his birth.
Filmmakers trying their hand at VR is also what led to one of the more harrowing – albeit immensely intriguing – viewing experiences on the Lazzaretto: the immersive version of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s short film The Exploding Girl. People already familiar with the original – first screened in Locarno last year – know what they can expect from this videogame-looking tale where a girl randomly explodes multiple times a day, made even more intense and disturbing by the fact we can now see the damage up close.
Also emotionally draining, albeit for different reasons, was Mirage, which the user gets to experience with a special haptic vest in addition to the usual headset and controllers. Based on co-director Naima Karim’s real experience with her daughter’s depression and anxiety, the eight-minute interactive film takes place in a metaphorical desert where the young protagonist must deal with rejection and mockery, but also the idea of accepting sincere help. A quietly effective meditation on empathy.
While VR is generally considered an individual endeavor as far as the viewer/user is concerned, some people working in the field are actively trying to bring a communal feeling, akin to the movie theater, to the field of immersive creations. Collective Body is a good example of this, as four people are placed in their own corners inside the experiential space, only to then interact as their movements gradually lead to a shared virtual environment.
Heartbeat has a simpler setup, requiring only two people, but it’s no less ingenious: the two users face each other, wearing watches that monitor their heartbeats. Speaking is forbidden, eye contact is mandatory. After a while, the headphones each user is wearing enables them to hear the other person’s heartbeat, and the aim of the experience is to see if the two rhythms will eventually become one, represented by circle-like drawings on the walls behind the two participants. In my case, the cardiac overlap occurred quite a few times over the course of the ten-minute experiment.
Finally, animator Rose Bond took the communal aspect to a whole new level with her installation 1968: based on still images of the chaos of May 1968, she had originally developed the material for a project that fell apart because of the pandemic, and from that original version she extracted the current sequence of events. The peculiarity of the experience is that the music is heard without headphones, as part of the project’s aim is to question the audience’s relationship with the soundscape.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story erroneously identified Cristina Rambaldi as the co-director of Alien Perspective. She actually co-wrote and produced the project.
