International Center for Cultural Studies

【ACS Institute 2023 -Day 5- 8/14- Activity Report】Round Table: Re-Sitting the Cinema

2023-11-14

PRESENTING XR: REENACTING REALITY, RECONNECTING SOCIETY

Reported by Aubrey Kandelila Fanani

MA Student, IACS-NYCU

XR (extended reality), a term to refer to Virtual reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), has attracted artists to engage with it, not only game developers but also filmmakers, activists, film programmers, and journalists. This 360-degree video allows users to experience haptic sensations and give the presence sensation when they get into the simulation world. To produce and present XR to the public is not something easy. One of the issues is technical challenges. On Day 5 (August 14, 2023) ACS Institute 2023 Summer School, the Round Table: Re-Sitting the Cinema brought the film festival programmers, independent filmmakers, and scholars to discuss XR as a documentary and how it gives accessibility to the audience via community-based collaboration. Tammy Ko, artist-researcher and Associate Professor at Hanyang University, South Korea, Aram Siu Wai Collier, film festival programmer from Canada, Fransiska Pihadi, Minikino Program director from Indonesia, Kyungmook Kim, filmmaker from South Korea, and Sujie Kim, a visual ethnographer from South Korea, shared their thoughts, experiences and research findings about the VR production and screening.

Tammy Ko started the discussion with how XR, an emerging technology, has many impacts on the game and film industry. There are a lot of studies and mapping on how XR attracts people to use it and has changed the filmmaker workflow. Indeed, VR is aesthetically and technically different from 2D film. For the animator, for instance, there are transitions when making the animation to virtual reality. The round table intends to bring conversations across professions as case studies to produce and present the XR more inclusive to the public. The conversation is necessary as a reference from each experience because, in some way, XR has disrupted how traditional films operate, but most importantly, the round table is expected to answer the challenge of how XR could be more accessible and understand different kinds of XR, what is artistic VR or what is social VR.

Aram, a head of programming for the Reel Asian Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, shared how the film festival presents the XR as an emerging technology to the young generation, especially Asian-Canadian artists, to present diaspora cinema to tell their own stories. Reel Asian Film Festival is a non-profit community-based organization. Reel Asian began in 1997 to follow several Asian-American film festivals that spread in several areas in the US. The idea of the festival is to give alternative stories about the Asian diaspora in Canada or the Asian-Canadian community because of so much historical misrepresentation about colored people who lived in America and Canada or were erased in video presence. Aram stated that the diaspora and the Asian-Canadian community could represent themselves and achieve narrative sovereignty through the festival. To push the narrative further, the festival not only screened the film in the festival, but the Reel Asian also has several programs that are based on literacy and education projects. The education and literacy initiative provides the knowledge and skills for young artists to explore opportunities in media art. They will learn how to make a film, screen it, produce it, direct it, make a film program, and even act. Collaborates with several organizations, such as XR developer studios, and universities, Reel Asian also provides XR training to the artists. The artist will learn to use the tool and how to exhibit XR to the audience.

In 2019 the Toronto Reel Asian Festival publicly displayed an East of the Rockies AR game. The player will follow the life of a 17-year-old girl named Yuki who had been sent to Canada’s Japanese internment camps. The game is based on Joy Kogawa (author, poet, and former internee at one of the Japanese Canadian internment camps) experience during her lifetime in camp. Aram said the AR game could bridge the intergeneration about the forgotten history of Japanese Canadian community life during the Second World War II.

Kyungmook Kim has engaged with documentary film, feature film, and media art to visualize the precarity of margin society in Korea, such as the story about underground sex workers in the Grace Period (2015), and the claustrophobic drama Stateless Thing (2011). Kim also shared his VR works to reenact his eighteen months of life in prison when he objected to the mandatory to join military service in Korea. When detained, Kim spent three months in the Seoul Detention Center, then he was transferred to the Tongyeong Detention Center. At this moment, he was completely lonely. He was detained alone and isolated from his visitors because he came out as a queer. The reenactment is expressed in VR installation, 5.25 Squared Meters (2021). The size is the same as the actual solitary confinement cell. In the 5.25-meter square room, the viewer will use a VR tool to be present in the same room as Kim did in detention. The viewer could join his activity in that confinement where he spent every minute alone and repeat the same routine: waking up, exercising, eating, until sleeping. The appearance of the prisoner in this VR installation is not like a human figure but more like a ghost with a transparent silhouette. The viewer also could hear Kim's voice when reading a letter. The ghost figure indicates his memory that is still left in that space. Even without confinement installation, the viewer could feel the state of being imprisoned, but for Kim, the actual 5.25-meter square room also isolated the viewer from the outside world. The people who are outside the room cannot see and feel what the person in the room does. Kim wrote in the artist’s note for his installation, “I chose VR as a medium to summon the space that had lost its physical entity in the present. Because the time in solitary confinement became a state of non-existence, it became a virtual space to me. In addition, because one experiences VR alone, it was the most suitable medium for revealing the environment of solitary confinement”[1].

Fransiska Prihadi from Minikino, also shared how this community-based festival serves the inclusive service to reach the audience to experience the XR. The Minikino is a short film festival organization based in Bali, Indonesia. Minikino began in 2002 and now the institution has many programs, from film screening, discussion, training, artist residency, and many more. Minikino believes the short film has a wide impact on portraying social issues and could reach more groups. In March 2023, they collaborated with the Indonesian Sign Language Center to introduce sign language to the public, so people could understand how to communicate to the deaf group. In that program, Minikino also screens the film @ITSDEKRAAA which has been equipped with subtitles to make the film more accessible to deaf people. Minikino also exhibited VR films in Bali. Instead of bringing the VR film to the festival, Minikino presented the VR film to villagers in Pedawa Village. Minikino screened “Replacement” by Jonathan Hagard to Pedawa people, one of the oldest indigenous villages in Bali. The film is about a fictional village on Java Island, where the neighborhood changes rapidly. This VR came up from 13 years of Hagard observation live in Indonesia. When the film was screened in Pedawa, Minikono also had a discussion with the community. “This is the first time they have watched a VR film, and they are amazed by it. Of course, in two days, not many people could experience the VR film, only 34 people. But after that, we discussed the film. The villagers thought that they should be really careful about their neighborhood. Otherwise, everything would change, and they could lose everything”.[2]

On that occasion, Aloysius Yapp, an Assistant Professor for the Game Study Department at the Faculty of Creative Industries at Tunku Abdul Rahman University, Malaysia, shared how XR could help preserve the intangible heritage of the Iban community in Malaysia. For Yapp, even XR technology has limitations, such as the VR film not reaching a massive audience, but still, this technology has room to prevail over the story of the margin community. In his team project, they focus on heritage and cultural preservation of Iban culture. The Iban community lives in the longhouse, which could accommodate tens of families in one house. But today, not many Iban people live in the longhouse. For Yapp, the VR could reconstruct what the real Iban community looks like. Yapp stated that the Iban heritage will continue to be understood by the younger generation through VR. He also said VR is also more flexible than film. To screen a film in public, the films should face many regulations, including censorship, but the VR regulation is still loose. This could be a chance for the filmmaker to voice the unvoiced story about marginalized people.

Notes:

[1] Kyungmook Kim, “5.25m² (2022),” KyungMook Kim (blog), June 15, 2022, https://kyungmook.com/5-25m%c2%b2-2022/.

[2] Fransiska Prihadi. “Roundtable: Re-Sitting Cinema: VR filming/ Screening Demonstration Workshop”, ACS Institute Summer School 2023, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, August 12, 2023.