This year’s CPH:DOX has 17 immersive projects on display, a record number. Casting his eye over the VR selection, CPH:LAB’s Head of Studies Mark Atkin notes an intriguing trend.
“Lots of artists are using the 1’s and 0’s of digital, which is inherently binary and logical, to explore messiness and humanity beyond binary definitions…lots of these artists are making games. And even if they are not making games, they are using games engines, the tools used to create games, in order to make immersive works. This means we have lots of work in the exhibition form artists who are neuro-diverse, non-binary, Black, gay, Trans.”
Atkins believes that a generation of artists has grown up with gaming who find it “completely normal” to use gaming tools in their work.
“These artists are all using the tools from which the metaverse is going to be made,” Atkin notes. “I am really conscious that creativity precedes innovation. It is through the experiments of artists such as these that we learn what these tools are really good at. It is their pioneering efforts that willed what will become the metaverse.”
One question Atkin that leaves “dangling” though, is what future these artists might have if it is left to the like of Mark Zuckerberg and the Chinese government to control the form the metaverse takes. Will there still be space for marginal voices?
“This is what I am exploring in the exhibition this year,” Atkin says. “Who is building the metaverse? Will there be a place for artists?”
The internet may not have evolved in the way that artists and progressives hoped but Atkin believes there is still the opportunity to ensure the metaverse turns out differently.
Should a public service or community-service based approach be pursued? These are discussions which are happening now.
Atkin and his team don’t have any direct relationship with Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms. He praises the Meta Quest 2, the current iteration of the Meta headset, as being “extremely good” and reasonably priced. However, he also notes that “these things aren’t evenly distributed at all. If you’re in the global south, it’s not cheap at all. It’s not distributed. You’d have to import and you would pay more than if you were buying it in the west…so we’re losing out a lot of voices there.”
The selection in the exhibition includes familiar names from the more traditional world of film. For example, the festival has the European premiere of The Tell Tale Rooms directed by Eden Kötting and her father, Andrew Kötting. The latter is one of the UK’s best known experimental filmmakers, known for movies like Gallivant (1996) and This Filthy Earth (2001). In their new work, he and his daughter use VR to recreate the farmhouse in which they’ve lived for many years.
“He [Andrew] was looking for a way to work with Eden and they found this was the perfect vehicle because it is bringing together both their skills. He is coming from an audiovisual background and she is more making gallery-style art work. It’s inside the immersive world you can actually bring these things together,” Atkin suggests.
Some of the other work being displayed in the exhibition, for example Australian artist Lauren Moffatt’s Local Binaries, was developed within the CPH:LAB which Atkin also runs.
“It really is wonderful. It uses augmented reality through a tablet…you’re able to navigate this landscape,” Atkin enthuses about Moffatt’s work in which the mental states of nine women are represented through body mapping.
A work which viewers might find harrowing is Yvette Granata’s I Took A Lethal Dose Of Herbs, a VR doc looking at an anonymous woman’s horrific experiences with a failed self-administered abortion.
“VR is very good at allowing you to have an experience of other people’s mental states,” Atkin says of this work. “It’s good at embodiment. You actually embody this character.”
Rising artist Danielle-Brathwaite Shirley will be in town presenting Black Trans Archive/video game, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT.
Another work, Taylor McCue’s He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me, deals with sex work and trauma. Meanwhile, Jake Elwes’ The Zizi Show is a deep fake cabaret show which Atkin describes as “incredibly informative but also really fun and exuberant.”
The Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the location at which the INTER:ACTIVE exhibition is being held, is the festival’s main hub. This is where visitors will be picking up their accreditations.
“Having the interactive exhibition there means it is in the festival headquarters. It has not been sidelined into any other venues. It’s not being hidden away anywhere. It is really being foregrounded,” Atkin says of the place that immersive work holds at the heart of CPH:DOX.
Visitors paying for a ticket will have 90 minutes to sample the exhibits. They may not be able to see everything but the longest piece is half an hour and most are far shorter.
Questions remain about the distribution as well as the funding of VR work. “Personally, I don’t think cinemas are necessarily the way to go,” Atkin suggests. “Maybe they’re ‘a’ solution but to me it’s looking at the future through the rear view mirror.” He believes, though, that “there is definitely an increasing demand for immersive work and that this might be served best by “mixed use arts spaces.”
Atkin strongly disagrees with the notion that the immersive world is a solitary one and that viewers end up isolated, watching content on their headsets. “I’ve always seen it as absolutely social. Those spaces where work is shown, people are going there together. They’re hanging around and they’re watching people doing it and they’re talking to them afterwards.”
VR, the curator also adds, “crosses over all the artistic disciplines” in a way that other forms of storytelling don’t.
March 20th sees the INTER:ACTIVE Symposium which Atkin will curate, and through which leading artists and filmmakers featured in the exhibition will discuss such matters as social bias in AI and the relationship between physical and digital worlds.
