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Most machine

Where traditional film is apt to evoke emotion, Virtual Reality provides a unique space for co-experience – and is about to consolidate as a fascinating new medium. 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

 

In the previous issue of Ny Tid, we wrote about the hybrid film, which was one of two topics during this year's National Documentary Seminar at the Bergen International Film Festival. The second theme was – as the year before – Virtual Reality (VR). A field in very exciting development, where a lot has happened since the last time.

Virtual documentary. Last year, it was pointed out that VR technology has proven to be just as applicable in documentary as fiction, and this year too, virtual reality was viewed from a documentary perspective. (Anything else would have been strange at a documentary seminar.) Among other things, VR was presented as a kind of "empathy machine", with concrete examples of UN-produced VR experiences from a refugee camp in Jordan, bomb-hit Gaza and Liberia, respectively. of the Ebola outbreak.

One could possibly say that this concept points to a nuance difference between VR and the now more classic film medium – which some film theorists have described as a emotionalmachine (I think especially of Ed S. Tan's book Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Movie As An Emotion Machine (1996)). Where film as a narrative medium has proved very suitable for eliciting feelings in its audience, VR can provide a different and more direct co-experience, where with a great deal of interactivity, experience a created or recreated "reality". However, that does not mean that Virtual Reality will necessarily replace traditional film, precisely because film and VR offer different kinds of spectator experiences – each with its own opportunities and challenges.

Attraction Stadium. Technically, VR is starting to become very compelling (at least when everything is working properly), and probably this medium is about to establish its own narrative conventions. In this way, you can compare today's VR with the earliest part of film history, when you first showed the film for the attraction itself – before with DW Griffiths, among others. The Birth of a Nation (1915) was given a narrative film language that is still used in most films produced today.

However, it may be that VR is as closely related to the game media as it is to the movie, as some of the same issues mentioned above are well known to developers of particularly narrative computer games. Not least, this applies to the balancing act between giving the player a sense of freedom to explore a universe, and at the same time directing and limiting the action options in favor of storytelling. But it is also not given that VR should primarily be one narrative medium, as it seems so well grounded in experience.

The most fascinating experience was Notes on Blindness, which gives a sense of what it's like to be blind.

Some people claim that VR, unlike cinema, is one individually experience, where you sit or stand with VR glasses and headphones in front of eyes and ears. However, this is to say that one can easily imagine shared virtual experiences, the way players meet in Online Multiplayer Games – to compare again with games rather than movies.

Own experiences. Of the various VR experiences that were demonstrated at the open exhibition during the festival in Bergen, several were impressed – and partly pointed out possible ways for the medium to come. It should be admitted that some of them probably could have been made as traditional (short) films instead, but the result would have been fundamentally different in that case. And thus, they just showed that VR is not just movies shot with a 360-degree camera and experimentally made interactive, but a special kind of spectator experience.

Among the VR experiences one could try were 6X9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement, which gives an intense and unpleasant taste of what it feels like to sit on an isolation cell in an American prison. Another was invisible, which recreates the hopeless feeling of being detained indefinitely in anticipation of deportation, as is the reality for many immigrants in the United Kingdom. Both of these productions are good examples of how VR can be used to create awareness of specific political issues, by formally making people feel the situation on the body. Easter Rising: The Voice of A Rebel, which deals with the Easter rebellion in Ireland in 1916, shows, in turn, how to use VR for history teaching, performed in a captivating way and with some intriguing artistic approach.

Experience of blindness. The most fascinating VR experience was – paradoxically, given that this is a distinct visually medium – Notes on Blindness, which gives a sense of what it's like to be blind. After my insistence that VR should be considered something other than film, it might also be a bit ironic that this production was made as a supplement to a documentary (also titled Notes on Blindness).

Both the film and the VR experience are based on sound recordings by theology professor John Hull, who share their descriptions of and reflections on having lost sight. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the documentary, but like Virtual Reality Notes on Blindness a truly unique experience. It gives a very sensual feeling of experiencing the world without vision, where the sketchy contours you see in the VR room control and sharpen what you hear – with occasional breath-taking effect.

Notes on Blindness is a breathtaking and thought-provoking experience that, for the undersigned, truly revealed the potential of VR technology to share experiences and perhaps also tell stories in new ways so far. VR now proves to be a very exciting form of expression, which may not take over for today's audiovisual media, but can be a valuable supplement. At least in the first place.

Aleksander Huser
Aleksander Huser
Huser is a regular film critic in Ny Tid.

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