ATLANTIC INSTITUTE | BEING HUMAN WHEN DIGITAL
PODCAST 03 | CREATIVE & ACTIVIST POTENTIAL OF VIRTUAL SPACE

TRANSCRIPT

MUSIC Intro sting – Rovador for AudioJungle, Fantasy Cinematic

F Sweeney: Hello and welcome to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.

Today, Alice Wroe, the Atlantic Institute’s Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead, joins me to discuss the creative and activist potential of virtual space.

You will also hear from Shari Frilot, Chief Curator of New Frontier at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, and Cedric Brown, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. They both took part in an Atlantic Fellows webinar on the topic earlier this year.

Now over to Alice for more about that webinar.

A Wroe: I am still aglow from that session.  We were joined by Shari Frilot, who’s the Chief Curator of Sundance New Frontiers, and by Cedric Brown, an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity.  These two creative thinkers just blew me away with their creative vision and their activist sensibilities.  

Shari and Cedric have both done exceptional things this year with virtual space.  Shari is the complete driving force behind Sundance’s entirely virtual offering, which was to critical acclaim.  Everybody couldn’t believe what Sundance pulled off.  And I think that’s mainly because Shari’s community – through New Frontiers – are creative technologists.  So, she was exactly well-placed to harness this creative potential and do an incredible virtual offering for Sundance.  

SF01: Sundance goes virtual

S Frilot: The festival experience is about serendipity. It's about being able to gather together and meet new people with lots and lots of people, hundreds of people. And we're a home to a creative community. We're a discovery festival.

What were we building on? And we thought about it, ‘OK, in Park City we were building the show in venues, and we had computers and screens and VR headsets. And we were putting them on people and the people had phones and computers, and it was all networked together through fibre optic cables, wifi and a network of satellites.

And I realized, if we were to replace homes with venues, we're doing the same thing.  We've always been designing for the biodigital continuum and we will continue to do that. The question would be, how would we do it? Certainly, it would be a website – webXR - so that a number of different kinds of works could be shown.  And where would we situate it? We decided, ‘Well, if the satellites are part of the biodigital continuum, well, we'll put it right next to the international space station and make it a parallel satellite.

A Wroe: And Cedric had co-created an exhibition - The Shape of Blackness – which was this wonderful virtual exhibition where he brought together artists from South Africa and from America to depict different experiences of blackness across their different locations. So, he had all of these people piling on to experience the exhibition remotely, feeling like they were at an exhibition opening.  And it was great to hear Cedric talking about how The Shape of Blackness came to be.

CB01: The Shape of Blackness

C Brown: The Shape of Blackness is a project that grew out of my Fellowship year supported by seed funding from AFRE.  And it was originally meant to promote a visual commentary on any element of contemporary blackness in these heady times that the artists wanted to convey.  And in doing so the show provided a certain kind of celebratory narrative that counters so much of the imagery about the African diaspora, that seems to make the popularly held news.

A Wroe: I always love hearing about how creative people find their way into the world of VR and so it was wonderful to hear about what brought Cedric into the augmented and virtual worlds.

CB02: Getting into AR and VR

C Brown: In 2018, I went to an installation that Laurie Anderson, the musician and writer, put on. And that was my first real immersive VR experience, where I went into a gallery and put these goggles on and had the controller thing, literally descended into this world that was constructed of words, black and white words. And you could fly around in this space. And it just gave me such a sense of physical freedom to be able to move in the space like that. It was fascinating to me that I just felt completely different, moved to a completely different way of being and being surrounded by a different world. And that sense stayed with me. And then I went on to experience other kinds of VR. And actually my cohort brother, Dylan Valley, showed me an early version of his VR work, and I think that probably also encouraged me on this pursuit to think about a space that could bring folks together over the miles or kilometers, over the distances and time zones, so that folks could have one experience and then be able to talk about it with other people in these venues that we wanted to create through the artist talks.

A Wroe: So, both of these two creative thinkers were able to gather community in virtual space in a way that has not been possible this year, due to COVID restrictions.  And I’m most interested in, what can we learn from these virtual spaces and carry with us – as lockdown eases in some parts of the world – what can we retain so that we can be meaningfully together when we’re apart?

It was so interesting when Shari was talking about these intimate moments where, as an avatar, she would witness other avatars hugging each other and coming together in kind of friendship.  Everybody’s just sat behind their computers, but there was something about that space that enabled people to feel like they were together, and to spend so much more time than they ordinarily would, in this shared virtual space, revelling in what they had experienced at Sundance.  So somehow, in that space, she was able to create community.

And she talked about the fact that people were saying that they would spend all evenings there, and that they couldn’t believe they were bumping into each other and the serendipity and chance encounters.  And this is all the stuff that we have been grieving this year, that we haven’t experienced, the kind of human connection. They were able to recreate it somehow in the Sundance Film Festival space.

F Sweeney: You’ve obviously experienced it.  Tell us what it was like being there – virtually, of course.

A Wroe: The Sundance Film Festival virtual space was incredible to be in. I loved going there.  So, I went way after the Festival had ended. I was alone with Shari, and she was walking me around as a kind of tour.  

So, you enter the virtual space and you’re this beautiful, joyous avatar that is genderless and your face is just glowing because it’s your video screen – this big round circle at the top of a very nondescript but quite joyous body.  And you can leap right into the air when you’re next to your other avatars.  And you look around you, and there is this beautiful tree in the centre and there’s all sorts of conversation bubbles.  So you can dash up to somebody and say, “Can I join your bubble?”  Or, “Do you want to talk to me?”  And then there they are with their beautiful face beaming as well.  So you’re really able to feel like you’re with others in-place.

But the thing that really struck me about the space was that it really felt like there was a past.  I felt like I had arrived in a space that hundreds of other people had been in, had connected in, had lived in. And I’ve never experienced that in a virtual space ever before, that I was part of a part of a history that I couldn’t see.

F Sweeney: A history you couldn’t see.  Do you know why you felt like that?

A Wroe: I have no idea why I felt like that and that’s kind of the magic of it.  You know when you’re at a music concert or a music festival long after the gig has ended, and you can really feel the wrappers on the floor and you can almost imagine the music that would have played.  That was the feeling I had in my digital body.  And I can’t put my finger on how. Maybe it’s about the hype of that space and about that I really felt physically present because of my avatar.  But there was some magic going on that Sundance pulled off and I can’t tell you how they did it.

F Sweeney: That also begs the question, do we become numb to that experience a little bit – a little overexposed?  Because phone calls are so part of daily life, whether they be on your smartphone or increasingly, rarely, a landline.  That first experience of wonder at the closeness of being with someone, being able to talk and converse with someone.

A Wroe: You’re so right.  With this technology and with that particular space, there is a real sense of wonder –

F Sweeney: Magic?

A Wroe: Yeah, there is a fizzy magic.  But I hope, in a way, it does become more common and I do hope that we become used to it, because I think that it is a new way to exist together.  And when Shari said that Sundance will continue to use that space, and that hopefully this is the beginning of their journey with this technology.  I think that was what was interesting about what both Cedric and Shari said: this is not the end now that lockdowns are lifting.  This is just the beginning, and how can we take this technology to our futures?

F Sweeney: And what kind of choices does this technology oblige us to make – or not to make, as the case may be?  What did Cedric and Shari have to say about that?

A Wroe: It was so interesting hearing both Shari and Cedric talk about the choice of avatars – or no avatars in Cedric’s case.  It left me feeling so inspired to think about how actually the bodies that we choose to represent ourselves in these spaces is completely political.  

One interesting difference between Cedric’s space and Shari’s was that, in The Shape of Blackness, there are no bodies.  You whoosh, disembodied through space.  It’s really interesting to think about, how do we feel when we’re liberated from our flesh and we’re experiencing art and we’re experiencing each other without physical form?

And interesting to compare to Shari’s, whereby you’re very much encased in this physicality and lit up by your own face on the avatar.  

SF02: on avatars

S Frilot: We worked so hard to meet you exactly where you were at. Your webcam represented exactly who you were, everything that you were.

A Wroe: It was so interesting at this point that the conversation naturally shifted back to the politics of these digital bodies and who we are represented as when we’re online. And Cedric raised such an important point that I hope our Fellowship can interrogate further.

CB03: on avatars

C Brown: One of the things I’m curious about, through The Shape of Blackness, whatever it might be in the future, if we ever develop the capacity to indeed have an avatar presence, to just make everybody black.  Because I think that that would be a really interesting exercise for folks who are not of direct African descent or folks who are not darker complected to come into a space where they are. What will that mean and what will the reflections end up looking like that come from them? So I know that's not directly addressing the phenomenon of race and racism in using a digital avatar that might be able to mitigate some of that racism, but I think that it could be a great learning tool.

A Wroe: Both The Shape of Blackness and Sundance’s virtual offering were linked to time: Sundance Film Festival has now ended; The Shape of Blackness had an exhibition run, it had a launch, and now it’s closed.  And I think that’s part of their charm, that they’re limited.  That you can’t just go to them whenever.  So often in this current climate where you can watch anything back and you can experience stuff at your own leisure, that sense of urgency and sense of place has kind of been lost.  So that might have been one of the factors into the success of both these spaces, that they’re so linked to time and occasion.

F Sweeney: All this enthusiasm, all this synergy and excitement about this emerging technology and yet there are very real and consistent concerns about data privacy, as there are with anything that we do when it comes to being online or on the internet.  Let me ask you about that.  It’s a concern that cannot be ignored and there are those who would say that, really, it’s up to us to educate ourselves.

A Wroe: Our big, big belief is that the power structures of the past and present are absolutely perpetuated into the future through technology.  So, in this series, and in our commitment to emerging technologies as a Fellowship, it is absolutely vital that we interrogate these ethical issues alongside being inspired by them.  

In the series, we’re running through the ethical issues as we’re becoming inspired by these thinkers – external and internal. And because it’s so important we are going to dedicate a whole podcast to exploring the ethical issues that have been raised and discussed as part of the series.  And so I’m delighted that we’ll be joined by Wilneida Negron, who’s a Senior Fellow for Racial Equity, who will guide us as we think about these ethical issues and think about our place in them.  

F Sweeney: As always, there was a community of Atlantic Fellows attending this session, and people who are interested in AR and VR, and interested in being part of the conversation and shaping the conversation about this emerging technology.  The enthusiasm of Shari and Cedric was somewhat infectious.  What kind of impact do you think it had on those who were attending?

A Wroe: Their enthusiasm was completely infectious.  I could almost feel the energy through the Zoom from them and then into the audience and into the chat box.  Shari’s a filmmaker and Cedric is a social impact leader.  Neither of them have traditional tech backgrounds.  And I think that was the real inspiration point: if we’re going to properly impact this area, if we, as a community, are going to become invested, are going to change it, shape it, use it, interdisciplinary engagement is the key. As a community, we are so diverse in terms of what we do in the world, and actually, we can come together to be part of this discourse.  

F Sweeney: This leads me nicely to what were the couple of takeaways, beyond that, for the Fellows?

A Wroe: The takeaway for the Fellows, I hope, is that virtual spaces can be exciting and that virtual spaces aren’t only a watered-down version of reality.  They don’t have to be the second-best thing; actually, they can be this whole other wonderful, delicious thing that’s different to reality but that can feed us in other ways.  So I would hope that Fellows are able to approach this space with the kind of energy and excitement, and try and harness the creative and the activist potential of virtual space and thinking about how we could gather our community virtually in different ways.  That’s the number one takeaway.

But the second – and equally as important – is around how we can interrogate, ethically, these spaces as well.  It’s not only about being inspired and about thinking, Shari’s work is great, Cedric’s work is great – we’re going to do work like them.  But actually, how can we also become a community that is critiquing this technology, that is pulling it and making it better, that is discussing it and really thinking about the impact that these spaces have on our sense of self and our relationships with each other.  And that we can become a community of people with our eyes wide open but our hearts very hopeful.

So, I think those are the two takeaways: to be inspired, to see ourselves in the conversation, but also to be that dissident voice of rupture as well, and to think about, how can we make this stuff better and make sure that it’s not harmful to ourselves and our communities?

F Sweeney: And that leads us on to the next session in this series that you’re facilitating, Alice.  Tell us what listeners can expect.

A Wroe: Next, we’re going to think about healthcare and AR and VR.  It’s a really interesting industry because AR/VR, emerging technologies, has really identified health as a fantastic business opportunity.  There have been so many more use cases within health than there have in other industries.  So rather than thinking always in the future, we can actually look at what has happened now and what happened a number of years ago to get us to this point in healthcare.

We’re going to be joined by Deepa Mann-Kler, an immersive health specialist - she does incredible work, particularly around thinking about the benefits of AR and VR for empathy training, and for therapeutic benefits - and also with Atlantic Fellow Jeremy Lim, who is going to hold her in conversation so we can really explore from a health perspective how our Fellows might engage with augmented and virtual realities.

F Sweeney: And that was Alice Wroe, Augmented and Virtual Realities Lead at the Atlantic Institute.  Please join us next time when we discuss the use of AR and VR in healthcare

You’ve been listening to Atlantic Fellows Conversations. I’m Fionnuala Sweeney.  To find out more, visit our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.

MUSIC Outro sting – Rovador for AudioJungle, Fantasy Cinematic

ENDS | Duration: 16’ 09  

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