Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Join us at the first Digital Works Conference in Leeds, UK on the 24th-25th April 2024.
Digital Works Podcast
Episode 044 - Samantha King (VIVE Arts) on the conditions required for good work to happen, the financial and operational realities of creating immersive experiences, and how artistic and technology teams can work together
A great conversation about immersive experiences with VIVE Arts' Head of Programme, Samantha King.
We talked about a LOT including: the conditions required for new ways of thinking and working to take root; the importance of sharing knowledge and collaboration; the operational and financial realities of creating immersive work.
We returned to a long-running topic, namely how useful the word 'digital' actually is. Sam pointed to the importance of leadership buy-in (or at least an active curiosity about what might be possible). We looked at the importance of having people who are able to interpret between traditional cultural practitioners and technologists (something that I've discussed on previous podcast episodes with Annette Mees, and Eva Liparova)
And, helpfully, Sam cited a number of specific institutions and projects that might be useful reference points as inspiration.
Related links:
- VIVE Arts website
- VIVE Arts and Musée d'Orsay collaboration
- Digital Works Podcast Episode 023 with Annette Mees about creating an opera in hyper-reality
- Digital Works Podcast Episode 018 with Eva Liparova about working with remote creative teams, and the translation required between creative technologists and traditional cultural practitioners
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode number 44, we have a conversation with Sam King. Sam is head of program at Five Arts and we talked about a lot, including the importance of sharing knowledge and collaboration, the operational and financial realities of creating immersive work. We return to a long-running topic, namely how useful the word digital actually is. Sam pointed to the importance of leadership buy-in when creating this type of work, or at least an active curiosity about what might be possible. We discussed the importance of having people who are able to interpret between traditional cultural practitioners and technologists and, helpfully, sam cited a number of specific institutions and projects that may be useful as a source of inspiration.
Speaker 1:Also want to say if you're listening to this before April, the 24th 2024, that Sam will be joining us at the Digital Works conference in Leeds in April, in a session with Annette Meese, the Roundhouse's head of broadcast and digital, derek Richards, marshmello Laser, feast founder Robin McNicolas and Icelandic musician and artist Egel Sabiansson, and they will be discussing the creative potential of digital. Anyway, here's mine and Sam's conversation. Enjoy. So hi, sam, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Pleasure to be here mostly to take part.
Speaker 1:As I always start with, I'm interested to hear about your career. We were just chatting before I hit record and you said it's a bit twisty-turny, which I think all the best careers are. So what is the Sam King story?
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I'll start right at the beginning. I went to university in Bristol, I went to UE and I ended up staying in Bristol for about nine years, as lots of people do. It's a great place, full of energy and creativity and a great place to start things. I think as well. I studied English there but while I was there I guess there was, you know, amazing music scenes. We go to lots of gigs and kind of really I guess, embracing kind of arts and culture for the first time properly. I have my first job there in publishing actually.
Speaker 2:So I was part of an academic publisher which still exists, called Intellect. The founder sadly died. His name was Masoud Yazdani and I reference him because I think he was an amazing entrepreneur, iranian entrepreneur, who set up this publishing company and I guess it was sort of my first encounter with risk and innovation, because he was a professor of digital media at UE and his academic field was AI. But at that time in like 1986, no one was interested. He just like couldn't publish anything anywhere because none of the journals felt there was a readership for it obviously very different now. So he sort of started the press as a way to accommodate academics who are publishing in these really niche areas but really kind of risky areas, really cutting edge. So I found that very inspiring. And then, alongside that, I set up a film and arts festival with a friend of mine, tara Sachdeva. She's still actually running the company. It's called Compass Presents and it's based at the pervasive media studio in Bristol at the Watershed.
Speaker 2:God, I don't remember when exactly it was, but it was back in 2006, and we ran that for four years. It was really looking at kind of cross arts, so across film, international film. We had this sort of idea of an axis to basically look at the lens of international film and arts culture. But it really evolved into incorporating lots of different art forms, including circus and v-jaying and sort of immersive arts and installations. But we were also really interested in the communities who were in Bristol as well. So we did endless fundraisers for this festival. It started at the Arnolfini and then it was at the Watershed, but we also presented it at the community centres like the Cumber Centre. But yeah, we were looking at kind of the Nigerian community, Jamaican, somalian, and so we did like a lot of different fundraisers around those sort of themes and bringing those communities into the programming. Anyway. So that was all going alongside intellect.
Speaker 2:So then I ended up moving to America, had a bit of a weird detour in Wilmington in North Carolina, where Dawson's Creek is filmed, and it's a beautiful place but I couldn't drive. I was like sort of stuck there. I was in the university and I was setting up the international office for intellect, so that was an interesting six months. And then I moved to New York and I started working at Museum of the Moving Image, which is an amazing institution based in Queens and it's had a long commitment to New Media, moving image in all its forms, so it's great repertory cinema. But also was the first museum to collect video games, computer games, so it has a number of games in its collection. It was the first North American museum to have a sort of digital curator who ended up being the executive director for a long period of time. He was there 15 years I think. He's just left and it was really radical.
Speaker 2:You know it's sort of we were doing very, you know, different kinds of exhibitions. I remember my first day I was asked to research Screen Goo. It's like, okay, I've got to see what I'm getting myself into. So it's very experimental. We did an exhibition and was a survey of Jody's work, the net artists. We did a number of different video game exhibitions. So I was really sort of working on the sort of exhibition management producing music videos. We did an exhibition from the Smithsonian on Jim Henson.
Speaker 2:So I was there for four years and then moved back to the UK and moved to the V&A so that was obviously a completely different scale but I was really glad to have started in that quite more experimental context I guess, and obviously the V&A. I was in the exhibitions department, national Museum, you know the exhibitions and loans at that time was 40 people. It was absolutely huge and really like learning how to present exhibitions to a really high standard, working with amazing teams of curators and designers, conservators, technicians and working at scale. I think the V&A, you know, has, as always, had incredible experiential exhibitions. So that design process, thinking about the way that the objects and the way the narrative and the sort of storytelling ideas is presented and experienced, is, you know, super important of course, and I worked on a number of the contemporary shows. So I worked for a long time on video games so as the senior producer on that, with the curator, marie Foulston and the co-curator, kristin Voulcing, and that was looking at, you know, really video games as a design medium in its own rights and really the radical changes in the process of making games as a result of changing the distribution practice and access to tools to create, and we'll probably talk about that a lot more when we continue our conversation, but that was really influential. I also, yeah, worked on Future Starts here and on Cars and on Alice in Wonderland.
Speaker 2:I was there for four years and towards the end of that time I became really interested in the sort of development process for exhibitions, like how they were put together and how that could potentially be innovated, and I spent some time working with the wonderful Carti Price and Everlip Rover looking at what they were doing in the digital team and sort of agile processes and more iterative approaches to making and the design process. And we started a kind of little cross-functional, sort of cross-organizational working group looking at how to potentially innovate, you know, the exhibition design process. So that really then I guess was a big leap for me into wanting to get more into that process of R&D and looking at how technology was underpinning those exhibitions and how they were being made and the kind of infrastructure I guess, around it as well as, yeah, new ways of working and also thinking about risk, thinking quite carefully about you know, not only how risk can be, you know a really creative process, but also you know who's owning that risk within these institutions, how it's reflected in the infrastructure and sort of the systems and the ways that work is commissioned and the way that work is kind of conceived and presented. So I sort of then came across a job at Royal Opera House working with Annette Mays amazing Annette Mays who's done a podcast on digital works before and for anyone who hasn't listened to it, it's well worth it, worth a listen. And, yeah, so really working co-running this new innovation program there called Audience Labs, which was looking to bring together artists and immersive technology to create these new kinds of forms of opera and ballet and really thinking about how to open up those art forms in new directions and working with new kinds of partners. So we were working closely with the sort of the opera company and the ballet company, but of course the work was very, very different to the productions that would be presented on the main stage and the process of making those works, because it's, you know, a very sort of entrenched pipeline, as it were, and so opening that up to these new forms. So, yeah, I think, looking at that, that really led to me thinking of, you know, really getting involved in the process of R&D and iteration and artistic experimentation and seeing technology as an amazing space for that kind of play and sort of wandering and free thinking. Yeah, I guess it was very interdisciplinary. We worked with lots of different partners.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, then I went off on maternity leave and actually Audience Labs ended up being closed as a program at the Royal Opera House, and then, after coming out of maternity leave, I've took up, take on a new job, which is my current role now.
Speaker 2:So I'm the head of program at Vive Arts, and so Vive Arts is the art and culture program under HTC.
Speaker 2:So HTC is a major Taiwanese but global technology corporation that makes virtual reality hardware. So just to kind of, I guess, explain how that program came about back in 2017, when HTC started to make virtual reality hardware, it was making smartphones as well thinking about what artists could do and what that would mean for artistic practice and for cultural institutions to create these new forms of culture, but also how artists really can push the boundaries of the technology and really use those technologies in really interesting ways, unexpected ways. So in some ways, the role now is quite similar to what I was doing at the Royal Opera House in that, you know, it's really about supporting artists and cultural institutions to make new kinds of experiences using that technology and working with I could talk more about this later but working with lots of different kinds of institutions, different kinds of artists, and that program has been going for quite a long time now, for like six years, and I've been there for about a year, and I think that brings us up to date.
Speaker 1:Wonderful.
Speaker 1:Thanks, sam, and there's a whole bunch of things that you touched on there that I really want to dig into in more detail.
Speaker 1:But perhaps if we start at the end, as it were, you know the work that you did within there at the Royal Opera House and now that you're doing, I suppose maybe on not the other side of the fence, another side of the table at HTC, focused on, you know, artistic innovation, focused on creating new types of cultural experience, obviously is an area that I'm very interested in.
Speaker 1:These conversations have often touched on and looked at, and I'm particularly interested in the conditions that are required for this type of work to be possible and whether there are commonalities or shared attributes with the organizations or the teams or maybe even the art forms where this type of work most happily and productively sort of takes root. I suppose because it feels, like you know, there are institutions like the V&A and the Royal Opera House and other sort of large national and internationally focused organizations that have, to varying degrees, played in this space and so maybe have a sense of what the answer to this question might be, but there are far more organizations who have perhaps never meaningfully exercised with this sort of work, they don't really have a tangible sense of what this work involves and the conditions that are required for this work to be possible. So maybe, if that's where we start, that is perhaps most practically useful to the largest number of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's also something that I'm very keen to do, which is also just to open up that sharing of knowledge. It's a big part of the program because, of course, we've worked with lots and lots of different institutions across the world and so there are those commonalities that emerge around some sort of best practice, but I think it's also, I guess, the conditions within culture or the cultural institutions. I would say that some comes down to qualities as well, as sort of needing to have an openness, a kind of curiosity and capacity to experiment. I mean, I think digital means lots of different things, and you've spoken about this. You know express this frustration a little bit with the way that so much is loaded onto digital. So I think it also helps to just maybe clarify here I'm speaking very particularly about, I guess, using digital technologies to make work or make experiences, and I think to do that you need to sort of vary or to deviate from those kind of more sort of traditional pipelines and formats. I think within an institution you really need support from the top. You really need the leadership to be at least curious and engaged and behind the ideas, and then I think you also really need someone driving it someone or a team driving that and the capacity to be able to act as a real conduit and bridge between lots of different departments and be able to sort of convey and express those ideas and how those ideas get off the ground.
Speaker 2:There's a multiplicity of roots in. I think one of the big opportunities in this space is that sense of R&D and how you can do quite light touch sort of experiments to be able to communicate that message and methodology. I think that is really important. That's one learning I've heard around needing to be able to show work, to be able to tell the story about why it's important. And, of course, I think within over the last five, 10 years we're starting to see a lot of legacy cases and a build up of case studies that can be used by the sector to point towards that. I mean a big part of it is also funding, so being able to have it's expensive, working in digital production and particularly kind of immersive experiences. There's a lot to take on there. So I do think that's where kind of go back to Vive Arts. There's a value there in being able to support through the learnings and the sort of thinking about the experience, design and pairing with studios, but also the investment in the work and the kind of commissioning, and I think one of the with the joys about it there's also the sense of interdisciplinarity. There's so many things, that kind of the benefits that come from working in this way, really kind of that.
Speaker 2:Going back to what I was talking about with Carti and the V&A, that idea of kind of cross-organizational working, I think you really for these kinds of innovation projects, people learn how to work in new ways together and I think that then through that process of kind of osmosis, then expands out way beyond that particular project, but it's sort of inherently collaborative and I think that you know you need people to be able to have some level of buy-in in order to have that successful collaboration and also just to reach a sort of shared vision around it.
Speaker 2:I think the other condition that is really super important is time, time and space, which again is really hard to create space for this sort of work, because I think it takes time to sort of understand how people work and to learn new forms of practice, to be able to experiment, and I think we live in systems or we work in systems, where there are always sort of pressures and demands on. You know what the outcomes are going to be, what's the qualification of it, the quantification of it, the validation, and so that kind of experimentation is quite hard to sometimes pin down. You don't know where you're necessarily headed at the beginning of the process. So you know. I think if there can be a recognition that there needs to be that kind of time and space around those sorts of projects, and working with partners also who understand the tools and are able to share those insights is really really helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you touched on a few things there that were true through the pandemic. Actually, you know, not because people chose it to be so, but that was the state that everyone was forced in. You know the idea of having to form working relationships and teams with people that you wouldn't normally work with because you know everyone else is on furlough and or you were having to do something totally new that you hadn't had to try and deliver before. You know NT at home is an example of that. When I spoke to Nicholas at the National Theatre he said we were like a startup. You know we had to pull together a team from across the organization people that never normally work together to work on this new project. And actually the sort of trickle down and halo effect of that project has benefited so many other things at the National Theatre because of the ways of working that were trialled on that project.
Speaker 1:I'm intrigued as well. You know you said you need leadership buy in which obviously, given all the other things you said, it seems obvious now you know the need for time and money and partnerships. Obviously you're going to need leadership involvement to a greater or lesser extent for that to happen. But also, so many leaders in the sector are not digitally engaged. They are very familiar with the sort of traditional artistic development process the traditional forms of their art form or their sort of practice might exist in.
Speaker 1:And so, therefore, I think sort of live examples of other people that are doing good work are always helpful to be able to point towards. Are there any specific projects or particular institutions that you would, if not point to, then sort of gesture in the general direction of the people could be taking inspiration from, or sort of seeing how they're approaching things to get some tangible examples of what the outcomes of this type of work could be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think there's definitely the institutions who've been working in this space for a really long time and there are many not ready to exclude anyone. But if I just pointed to you know ACME in Melbourne you had Seb Chan on the digital works before. I think they've shown this. You know really incredible commitment to like the Museum, the Moving Image in New York as well sort of moving images, all its forms and showcasing this kind of work there and very excited about their upcoming show on Marshmallow laser feast bringing together, you know, a whole collection of their works for the first time, which will be amazing. But I think you know places like PHY is a real leader in the space in Montreal PHY Center. So you've got PHY Studio who are behind. You know big location based experience with Felix and Paul like Infinite. So this is a location based experience just to define what it is which is co-produced between PHY Studio and Felix and Paul, where you have a collective experience of going in in a VR headset but you go and have a shared social experience of being on the International Space Station. So it's a sort of virtual rendering of the International Space Station where you can see the other people in space as sort of avatars, and then you can experience these 360 videos that were captured on the International Space Station of what it was like for the astronauts up there and it's a really, I think, quite an amazing model. You know, the throughput alone is quite incredible. It makes it viable for institutions or spaces to present this kind of work. They're getting, you know, 140 people at one time going through, whereas I think one of the big problems with immersive work has been, you know, such low levels of throughput but institutions just aren't able to feasibly present the work. So I would also point to Musée Dorsay. I think is really interesting. We've just collaborated with them, partnered with them, on their recent Van Gogh in Arviss Oise show, which is a major survey of the artist's works that were developed and produced in the last few months of his life in this village north of Paris. It was an amazingly prolific period of his life and you know the exhibition is amazing. I really recommend going to see it.
Speaker 2:But what we've did was also co-produce a VR experience which is adjacent to that exhibition, with lucid realities and TSVP and Oise and Vive Arts, and it takes the palette that Van Gogh had used during that period of time and there's a high resolution scan made of the palette and in the VR experience you step into that palette. You kind of. That acts as the virtual landscape for you to then experience some of the works that he produced during that period of time and it's quite a subjective sort of storytelling. The voiceover is by Marguerite Gachet and he is the daughter of Dr Gachet, one of his friends and where he was staying and he painted this famous picture of Marguerite and using the hand tracking. So it's a VR experience stuff, but with hand tracking you kind of have this level of interactivity with the works. I think. Then, after you have that VR experience, you go into the exhibition and you see the actual physical palette. You see, you know the objects and the artworks and it's absolutely magical.
Speaker 2:But I think you know around that they've also done a number of digital innovation projects and that positioning we're on that show and positioning that then within the institution, you know they've been putting quite a lot of commitment in terms of the floor space for the VR experience and some of the other works. They have an AI experience too and I think that level of contextualization, which is so important, it's the reason why I really believe that you know it's so important for cultural institutions to present this kind of work rather than it being in a separate space. You know, and I think there's a lot of talk already about the more entertainment projection map, immersive shows, and Van Gogh has definitely come up before within that. I think one of the big things that defines what makes the differences is that sense of contextualization, the curator or rigor, and the fact that you know it's set within not only the exhibition but also the impressionist galleries and the collections of Orsay.
Speaker 2:And next year they have a show by Missive which will actually take up one of the temporary exhibition spaces there, a big temporary exhibition space. Looking at it's a kind of immersive expedition. So again, similar to Infinite, where you've got people in headsets going through collectively in groups and you experience, I think, what is the first impressionist exhibition back in the mid 1800s. But I think that level of sustained commitment to engaging with different technologies and building an audience around that work is super important. So you feel like it's not tokenistic, you know. I think that they're really demonstrating a sense of leadership and integrating it and extending their existing exhibitions practice. So, yeah, I think that's been an interesting model.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you said a couple of things there that feel important to reiterate, maybe, firstly, that these things shouldn't be tokenistic, that actually there needs to be a reason for you taking an approach to creating this type of experience and actually for museums and galleries, the value that they have is around context and is around being able to link it to, I suppose, the more traditional in person experience and using these immersive experiences to really add value, to heighten and to improve. Improve is maybe the wrong word, but to add another layer onto the sort of traditional gallery experience, would that be fair comment, or is that me Clutching in straws?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no. I think that's my interest in this work. You know it feels very multi-layered and I think, within that sense of how you bring audiences into the storytelling and the ideas using those kinds of technologies and just using the way that, the kind of how it is so multi-layered and multi-sensory, I think you know it's got an amazing capacity for enhancing, you know, that existing practice. You know, I remember when we were working on video games, we had a lot big dialogue around how we were going to present games in the institution and you know, games are inherently interactive, of course, but actually within video games, the decision was made that we, you know, in at least in the first gallery space, which was really looking at showcasing, you know, the diversity and richness of video games as a design medium and showing different projects and designers within that, really focusing on the process behind the development, many of them weren't playable. There was actually only one game that was playable, which was Tale of Tales, the Graveyard. It was a very short game as well, beautiful, poetic game, but there was, you know, a big dialogue as well about that sense of, you know, interactivity versus spectatorship, and I don't think spectatorship has to be passive at all. I think that's also what I'm quite interested in with immersive work. I think we're starting to see different forms of interactivity within that, but I think it's also about you know how it's designed.
Speaker 2:At the moment, when people talk about developing immersive productions, there's a lot of discussion about the arc as you go, onboarding as it were, and onboarding primarily has been around sort of technical facilitation, so like here's a headset, this is how you put it on, this is what you know is going to happen, rather than, I guess, connecting it more to the sort of narrative and the sort of curatorial positioning perhaps of that experience and then the offboarding or like the decompression space and then the core of the experience being the immersive part. But I'm really interested to see how that is going to evolve. Actually, and I think you know, mixed reality is one technology that I think will really be interesting in helping to do that and also, for cultural institutions, creates huge opportunity in how that work is positioned in the building and how it can connect with the building more and connect with the physical exhibition.
Speaker 2:Vr can be quite a daunting experience for visitors sometimes because they aren't familiar with the technology, the hardware Also. There's so many things. You know, where's my bag, where's my code, are people looking at me and you know. I think that also is very, very important for institutions presenting this work, to make sure it doesn't feel exploitative in any sense, to make sure that there is like a due diligence around how the visitors cared for and the sense of privacy. But again, I think with mixed reality you can see how that becomes a sort of layering of the audience journey and how you kind of were brought into that space. I feel like I haven't properly answered your question at all. I've got off on a tangent.
Speaker 1:I think you did answer my question actually, and your tangent was very interesting. You know, both you and I we are interested in this sort of stuff. We think it's important, we think it's interesting, exciting, etc. However, there are undoubtedly challenges for institutions trying to meaningfully engage in this work.
Speaker 1:You know you've just touched on one there. You know the development of new technology, buying this stuff is expensive. You know it requires real estate often to do the sort of in person technology enabled stuff. You know through put and the sort of finances around this are often difficult. It requires a different approach to artistic development. It requires different sort of artistic partnerships. Where is your sense of the greatest areas of challenge for the sector?
Speaker 1:as this becomes, you know, more prevalent elsewhere. These types of experiences are things that more people are engaging with, whether or not cultural organizations are the ones authoring them.
Speaker 2:I feel, coming having come from a career sort of, in the culture sector and in, you know, in different institutions, being exposed to the way that the programs are planned and scheduled. You know, the exhibitions and opera, I mean, my God, takes even longer, like you're looking at three to five year planning cycle, if not more, and there is just a total lack of alignment, I think, with kind of immersive production. So I think I sit in both camps, of course. So I'm going into sort of film festivals, which often have XR strands, which you know a big space for the community to come together to share ideas, to share work, present work, to have conversations about distribution, which is a major issue in the sort of immersive sector, and also a lot of the conversations there about the opportunity around presenting this kind of work in the culture sector. But it feels very far apart from the dialogue that's happening over in culture. I think there's just a kind of disconnect in terms of lack of awareness, but also, fundamentally, is those planning cycles, because you know a lot of producers of immersive work are operating on, you know, much shorter cycles than exhibitions are being planned. So I think it's just a sort of yeah, as I say, a kind of lack of alignment there. I think, having, you know, worked in institutions and seeing the way that budgets are signed off for certain spaces or way that the procurement is structured and the way that tenders are structured and you know I'm a producer, so I feel like I'm really fascinated by that stuff because I think that's also where the hardest thing to change in some ways it's like the bones of the institution, about how things are set up and the focus being very much on, you know, the gallery space or the stage and projects that exist outside of those spaces and more liminal spaces. They're just harder to get signed off for or to get budget signed off for or to move forward. And, yeah, I do think that is where there's a big opportunity about harnessing some of those spaces.
Speaker 2:I think particularly for theatre, you know, and this is where I also feel in some ways on the immersive side. That's where I think the most interesting work is kind of coming from, is sort of like on the performance and choreography and, you know, dance side of things. But I think you know, you can look at, for example, a cultural institution that may have, you know, or a performing arts venue which has several rehearsal rooms, which in the evening of course the main focus is on the stage and that's the main business model. You know, ticketing, getting bums on seats. But those other spaces could be used for these different forms of production because they're not object based, you know, they don't have the same kind of set requirements necessarily. So I think there's, you know there's opportunity there. But I think there's another big challenge, I think, in just in terms of not only awareness but also lack of sort of standardised formats. There's a lot of discussion at the moment around trying to build out, you know, more of a kind of touring network of institutions that you know where work can travel, work can co-produce, but also just sort of understanding of the business model, the terms but also the format for presentation. You know, I think at the moment the way that public subsidy works is very in the UK is very project focused and it's not necessarily around kind of optimisation, scaling, and so I think that's a challenge because you've got this investment into projects but then they kind of it doesn't go beyond that.
Speaker 2:You know, also in this role, because Vive Arts is a, you know, by the way, I just wanted to give a bit more colour to that you know, vive Arts is a team. We're very small. There's only nine people in the company, so it's a subsidiary of HTC and it's sort of incorporated in the UK and my executive director, selina Yeh, based in Taipei with a couple of other team members. I'm in London with three other team members and then got head of global partnerships in New York, someone in Shanghai, so we're sort of very global.
Speaker 2:We work obviously with, you know, lots of different institutions all over the world and artists all over the world and observing the way that network and that really spans lots of different sectors and lots of different kinds of entities, you start to see these different models and I think particularly in the immersive sector. You know France and Canada and Taiwan. They're all very, very strong sectors because they get a lot of investment into sort of business and industry versus project funding. But actually one of the conversations that has come about is also that the UK has developed a reputation about supporting R&D, you know, which doesn't, I think, necessarily happen in other countries. I think one of the challenges in the UK is that a lot of R&D funding is going into research institutions and we need it to go more into artists and cultural institutions as well.
Speaker 1:You know, I think fascinating to hear about trying to bring some network benefits to be able to talk this work and standardizing elements of it, and it feels like another aspect of that is how this work is described to and understood by audiences. You know, it feels like again, we saw a lot of this in the pandemic, when lots of organizations were doing digital things for the first time and they just didn't have the vocabulary to be able to sell it in a way that you know meant anything to a normal person. And how well do you think producers of immersive experiences are solving that problem at the moment? Because I think there is. There is absolutely a highly engaged core audience for this type of experience for whom you don't need to do much selling to.
Speaker 1:But beyond that, you know, I always pull my mom out as an example of this. You know she is a very engaged traditional cultural attender. You know, I went to see current rising the immersive opera at the Royal Opera House and I had a great time and I said, mum, you should go and see this and she was like oh, I don't know. Vr headset what does it involve? It was exactly what you said. You know people going to be looking at me where to put my bag. How long is it, is it going to be? How heavy, said you know what is, what is it actually involved? And you know I found it difficult to talking sort of normal descriptive terms to her about it. Is that a problem that people are successfully solving? Because it does feel like something that it would be helpful if they were good examples to reach for.
Speaker 2:I mean, I definitely think Emissive is a good example and actually their latest immersive expedition is in Westfield in Stratford At least I hope it will. They have described Eternal Notre Dame, which has been presented in its on view in Paris, and it's been in Lyon and we've worked with Emissive to bring it to Shanghai. It's an experience that they describe, as you know, it's immersive and it's a kind of experience to share with friends and family around Notre Dame. They don't say in the kind of marketing around it it's virtual reality and I think that isn't duplicitous in any way. It's just that, as you say, there's a lack of familiarity and VR is quite old now, you know it's been around for a while. But it's also like focusing on the right thing. Right, it's focusing on what is the content about, what are the ideas about, and it should start from there anyway and the technology. In some ways, you know we're getting to a better point, I think, where you're seeing that those kinds of head-mounted devices are far less cumbersome and free-roaming and you know you're looking at more kind of all in one, or at least you know you're using again like I feel I'm capable of doing this, where I start to go into the lingo and always make sure that I'm kind of explaining what I'm talking about. But what I mean all in one, I'm talking about content that's just in the headset, so you don't need to have a PC streaming the content or connected to a PC in order to play it. Of course, there are still a lot of experiences that are PC VR, so where the content is coming from a PC to the headset, but because of streaming technology or from 5G, that makes it feasible to do it without it being wide. So I think it's also just a sense of people feeling more at ease around or the technology, but sort of receding into the background. I mean, I think it's also just a sort of familiarity with it. I think a lot of people are familiar with the term immersive, and that's also a loaded term, isn't it as well? So it's just how this work is being presented and I think there's a lot to be shared there in terms of knowledge around case studies for audience engagement and audience development, around the best practice in that regard and also going back to current rising.
Speaker 2:We worked very hard on ensuring that there was as much information about the experience up front, but also knowing that a lot of people don't read about when they came in. We were very, very deliberate about that experience design. While the audience was brought through and into the experience and greeted at the entrance by the hosts, that they were felt made at ease, that we kind of deliberately separated out the contextualization around the storytelling and that you were going to be experiencing a visual poem. From the technology facilitation, the kind of putting on the headsets and making sure people felt comfortable, that was done not only through the kind of facilitation in the scripts but it was also physically located. So you went through, you went down into the theatre, onto the stage, into a sort of exhibition space to read about the text and then you went to a different space to have the kitten up, as it were, to put on all of the hardware and then going through into the beginning of the experience. So I think that kind of just allowing space around that journey, I think we're moving away very quickly from that idea of just you know, there's a headset in the corner of the room and that's the experience. You know.
Speaker 2:I think ultimately a lot of people know that that isn't acceptable or, you know, fundamentally going to serve audiences in the best way, and so I think there's, you know, greater literacy around that, and I think, again, that's where cultural institutions have enormous power, because there's sites of, you know, critical reflection and context and rigor, sites for kind of us to come together, and so there's so much that they already have an understanding of in terms of visitor experience and how you come into an exhibition or how you come into the theatre, the magic of the candles being lit.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm quite interested in what those new rituals are around this kind of work and how that also can extend out to not necessarily being about when you first come into the building, but it could be that that experience is layered so that it starts in your home or it starts in different kinds of touch points. I think one of the other really fascinating aspects of this kind of work work that is developed in game engines is that capacity to iterate. You know we don't have to look at work any more as a sort of fixed form. It can evolve to different kinds of audience, different kinds of contexts, different formats, having a lot of conversations around projects where we're thinking about that sort of multi-modal, sort of adaptive content strategy, as it were, and I think that's really beneficial from both an artistic perspective and from a sort of producer's perspective as well, the business perspective. So I think that will be really exciting to see how that starts to play out more.
Speaker 1:Yeah and I think I'm tremendously excited by the potential for digital technologies to, I suppose, widen the scope of the audience experience, you know, and stretching it out beyond just a specific time in a specific place, because, as you said, someone's experience could start many hours or days before that in their own home through digital touchpoint. That would then ultimately enhance and again add a layer to potentially improve their traditional experience at the heart of all that. But there are these interesting layers of sort of digital activation that could happen around that and that really feels like the area of potential growth for cultural organizations. You know, it's not I don't think it's a case of either, or it's actually it's a case of layering some of these things on top of what you already do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and I think that will continue to evolve as we do start to see that kind of I hate to say it, but the metaverse, the sort of idea of the next generation of the internet, the sort of more connected spaces and what that means for cultural experiences and for artwork as well. You know, I really find the way that Yin Cheng, the artist Yin Cheng, reflects on the idea of art as an evolving organism. You know that it can be more akin to like software patches, that it doesn't have to stand still, that it can change and adapt. He had an amazing installation at Pilacouris Gallery in London fairly recently Life After Bob the Chalice Dully, which was a real-time film playing in the gallery space and then accompanying another video installation. But with the film or the real-time video he reflected on when he's reading his daughter, I think, a bedtime story and how she would kind of keep interrupting him and he would sort of explain certain things about the story. And he reflected that on sort of artwork and thinking about how it would be interesting for visitors or audiences to be able to kind of have a world-watching mode where they could stop the narrative and sort of zoom in and explore in a bit more detail about one particular character and so you can do that in that artwork, you know, in that installation.
Speaker 2:I thought that was really kind of interesting formats, you know, for thinking about storytelling and thinking about narrative. I think there's a lot. You know, of course, artists, the way they're using these kinds of technologies is fascinating, fascinating area, and that's something that we're doing a lot with artwork commissioning but also thinking about you know, where those works can be presented and I think you know it's much more fluid. Now. I went to see the Seven Deaths, maria Callis, the other night at the English National Opera with Marina Bramovich, you know, who is just the master of like presence and that idea of kind of you know, hold your nerve, arts and endurance. But what was really interesting about that, I thought, was it was just a complete art crowd, you know, and very different to the usual sort of opera crowd and, of course, you know, very, very important for the ear now to be exploring those kind of different audiences coming in to the space.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah, and you touched on something there that maybe this is what we'll end with, and you know the work of Vive Arts. I'm interested in sort of focusing on that a little bit. How does Vive Arts work? Are you a commissioner of work? Are you part of sort of coalitions that get put together around projects? Are you taking, I know, applications from people? What is that sort of model of working like?
Speaker 2:We work in very different ways.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think you know, one of the things that we've been doing across the last six years, as I said, is sort of supporting Cultural institution, and I can't experiment with the technology for cultural institutions.
Speaker 2:That tends to be An experience that is located within or adjacent to a big temporary exhibition. So there's an existing exhibitions of the first. One of the first projects was with the tape modern on the medigliani survey. That was with Hillary who's also been on digital works. You bring together a great community here. And then we've also work with the V&A actually on the exhibition. So there was An experience which was built by preloaded and with the V&A on very playful idea of like being Alice into performing these little kind of mini games and really kind of leaning into that capacity of a massive to be able to play with scale. And again, I think with that show you know how interesting to have the VR experience position, to sort of virtual experience adjacent to all of the incredible tenial drawings and those objects. And then this year we worked with or say so usually, as I say kind of supporting the development of an experience that's connected with the exhibition. And last year we work with the trianale in Milan, honor and experience, which was exploring the 99 year history of the international exhibition and really bringing to life these kind of iconic moments and exhibitions, but also bring to life the archives, and I think that's also, you know, a huge potential to museums are icebergs, you know there's these, you know huge collections and huge archives and how to communicate that kind of documentation and narrative in an imaginative way, and I think that's also where the next technology can really bring it to life.
Speaker 2:So there's that. There's sort of the partnership, cultural institutions, partnerships, and then there's I mentioned, the kind of artwork commission. So really how artists use a massive technology is part of their practice, extension of their practice. We partner with the venice biannale or a puzzle To kind of commission those works and present them, because of course we don't have a physical venue and we're really kind of leveraging that kind of cultural know how but also the technology stack of htc. So across the hardware there's also the sort of distribution side of things and the platforms. Those strands also include more like creative r&d, I would say, which is something I really feel quite passionate about bringing into the program.
Speaker 2:So we just recently collaborated on an amazing project which was a co-production between Leonardo, the trans media network and gray area, who are cultural incubator based in san francisco On a project which is looking at accessibility in the metaverse and a massive technologies. So it brought together a group of disabled creatives To experiment with different kinds of experiences and immersive technologies to look at not just the access frictions identified from hardware perspective or software, but also out of those access frictions the kind of creative access opportunities that were improvised or kind of collectively realized by the cohort. So we commissioned a couple of artwork prototypes that were presented at gray area festival. So I think you know An interest in how to support that sort of research and development. That could be a discrete project like that or making sure that there's a discrete phase that's built into Into the artwork production for the artist so that they have that space to experiment and, you know, kind of dedicated time to iterate and explore. We don't have any engineers in house. We always work with external studios, partly because you know feel like that's a good investment in the ecosystem, but also Whoever the is the rights of skill set or has the right experience to fit that particular projects.
Speaker 2:So, as I say, we sort of now a chemo tively over six years. What was it of? Sixty different institutions, many different contemporary artists from domineque is always forced Dalbert all and to last year we work with which sang and next year we working with Libby. He need the quantum scientist and visual artist. And actually, going back to which sang, it goes a little bit back to what we were talking about that I do have sort of iteration.
Speaker 2:We supported who's work to be presented of Wales, which is part of her ongoing research project reimagining moby dick, and she created the work of Wales which was exploring that text through a sort of non human, non linear perspective, the perspective of the whale, and creating these Credibles of psychedelic environments. And everything was running through unity in the game engine that was presented as a sixteen meter video installation in this fourteen century shipping yard in the arsenal at Venice been only it's a six hour film, I mean absolutely beautiful, so you kind of see this reflection in the water, really site specific. And then we supported who and she worked with studio albion to iterate as a VR experience which was then fifteen minutes presented up. Also I think it's coming from the creative idea at the centre and then how that work and then evolve in these different ways and Be quite responsive to those different context amazing.
Speaker 1:Such a fascinating range of work. Thanks so much for your time today, sam. It's been such a week to talk for hours. It's such a great conversation. Really appreciate you taking the time thanks so much, really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, the digital dot works. You can also find us on linkedin. Now that twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is vienna, beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to mark cotton, his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.
