Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Kepala Thank you. Hello and welcome to the third day of the Expanded Animation Symposium. Thank you for coming. I have the pleasure to introduce the next panel to you, the expanded and hybrid panel. We have three upcoming talks, and I will introduce the first speaker, Frank Gessner. He is professor at the Film University Babelsberg, Konrad Wolf. He is a free artist and professor in Berlin and Babelsberg working. He is also working with the production company, At Berlin Produktion on his current project which he will talk about today. Please introduce and welcome Frank Gessner. Yes, good morning with bloody eyes. Last night I had a great experience. First I saw really the great, great Laurie Anderson concert. Afterwards, next to the Sky Chapel, we had also a really great party. really great party. And to women, she chokes me and shows me the Linzer nightlife. It's really great. And it's really a good tip for you. There's a very good techno club. It's called Solaris. And it's really like the 90s in Berlin. And for this, with a little help of my avatar today, I want to present you a spherical video essay draft. So. draft. So, viel vergnügen. I'm not a filmmaker. For me, film is the extension of language. I begin with poetry, then visual art, and finally cinema which brings together several different elements of art. Which to say, writing, poetry, the object, visual arts, and the image, film. The difficult thing, The difficult thing, of course, is the harmony between these elements. Frankly, after Marcel Bruthez, Project Pour Un Film 1948. A small mechanical dummy representing Monsieur Test reads the French news magazine. At times the camera is immobile, merely recording the side-to-side movement of the character's head as it supposedly reads, and at others it follows that movement, thereby offering a rhythmic view of the room occupied by Monsieur Test. This film was processed and edited in Paris under the title Mouvement, which Brotas changed to Monsieur Test. which brought us change to Monsieur Test. Five more seconds. Four more seconds. Three more seconds. Two. One. Now. Begin. Starting from Berlin in Babelsberg. The world famous historical film location of the movies like Metropolis or Women in the Moon and with Potsdam as creative city of film recently included in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. A comprehensive artistic, technological and scientific network of actors is to be established in which the global is on an equal footing with the global. A. Skyping in time. A space odyssey. From the analog masterclass, Globe Playhouse, Corona has grown up the digital project, Globe Playhouse, Corona has grown up the digital project Globe Playhouse Space Lab with the idea to make process-related artistic research as well as knowledge available as an open source for everyone on a website of the same name in a curated and designed framework. And in the future, the Globe Playhouse Space Lab will orbit the TEST-ELAB project, which will be realized, hopefully, also on the real surface of the Earth. TEST-ELAB is a bigger designed Globe Playhouse that generates with its guests together something like an expanded animation festival, combining the local, the global and the transcultural media aspects in a worldwide network of actors in unity of theory and practice. Together we want to build a synthetic generated planetary system. The now initiated TEST eLab and Guests project is aimed at filmmakers, performers, musicians, dancers, poets, artists, designers, technicians, academics, students, companies and other individuals who are interested in the interface between art, design, science, nature, technology and creativity. Together we fashion the Circus Container Colosseum into a contemporary equivalent of a cathedral or a cross-media riff on the idea of the collective Gesamtkunstwerk. The multi-perspectivity of the test elab requires that the actors with their different experiences and competences, artistic languages and nationalities work together in an interdisciplinary way. The container Colosseum Circus is planned like a memorial temple. On the right the entrance hall, in the middle the panoramic center and on the left the video lounge. The large 360 degree panorama immerse the viewer in a dark collective spacious bathroom. The panorama, a heterotopia par excellence, serves as a stage for testing conceptual intentions and media ideas. The notion of a total panorama to design a shaped world model is a secret utopia. It seems from the universality and flexibility of this medium as a sublime temptation or delusions of grandeur emerge. This expanded animation center generates the interface for a hybrid interactive museum where the user becomes part of the work and who is both a museum and more than a museum and where the reality replaces representation. Because all the world is a playground, the Shakespearean Teatro Mundi is a narrative for the spherical 360-degree format. But as a sphere, it is also a medial geometric metaphor for a visionary universal space of thought and action that connects us all on the planet Earth as a global community. On the first post-pandemic masterclass of the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolff, people from five continents across all time zones worked together in a virtual production space. For this prototypical virtual masterclass, the Agenda 2030 was a guiding theme and we developed a VR symposium with international guests. As a guest of honor, we invited an important exponent of deconstructivism, Professor Wolf D. Pricks, the co-founder of the avant-garde architecture studio Coop Himmelblau, Coop Himmelbau. At the crossroads of theory and practice, international experts were commissioned to produce 24 video essays. The subsequent one-week We Are Playchamp workshop was supervised by 14 international mentors as well as a technical technical artistic team. The reference for our VR space lab was a MIR project, which in Russian means peace or world. For years it was the only permanent outpost of humanity in space. As an artist, astro, cosmonaut I would say maybe it wasn't the cosmic city yet, but at least it was a flying house in orbit. But now, only empty data on the Internet. The Space Odyssey serves here as a metaphor for a better sustainable world without poverty, hunger, repression and racism, as understood by representatives of Afrofuturism, like one of our guests, the well-known filmmaker Jean-Pierre Beccolo from Cameroon, who present themselves as offspring of distant planets and as space and time travelers. Because from a bird's eye view all the beauty of the natural architecture becomes visible, but also the problems of our earth, our only real house. As a leitmotif of the Globe Playhouse Space Lab we think of the collection of the 17 global UN goals, which are to be a blueprint for a better and more sustainable future for all. The Masterclass supported pioneering concept art and the development of installation art for hybrid, augmented, mixed, virtual and 360-degree projects in the field of artistic research combining the aesthetic, the formal, the natural and the social design. No games without rules, starting point of our VR experience as audiovisual base module, the Villa Rotonda. Andrea Palladio designed and built some world-renowned villas in Veneto around the middle of the 16th century. But his fame was also based on the four books of architecture, which were written as a result of his own building activity and his reflection on fundamental architectural issues. Mathematics enables the exact determination of musical intervals. Sounds and the proportions derived from them are attributed a creative musical power to which Palladio refers in his architecture. In addition he related the harmonious relationships not only to the single room but also to the interconnections between the rooms in the entire building. Even in ancient times people argued that music and architecture were relatives. In his lecture Philosophy of Art Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling described architecture as frozen music, in opinion that a beautiful building is in fact nothing other than music perceived with the eye, a simultaneous concert of harmonies and harmonic connections conceived not in time but in spatial sequence. Sorry, let's make a break here. Because of my bloody night I took an old video and I want to show you for the last minutes the new one. So I have it and we make a break and we'll continue. Did you find this place? I think Villa Palladio would be a good turning point. Thank you. The space odyssey serves here as a metaphor for a better sustainable world without poverty, hunger, repression, and racism, as understood by representatives of Afrofuturism, like one of our guests, the well-known filmmaker Jean-Pierre Beccolo from Cameroon, who present themselves as offspring of distant planets and as space and time travelers. Because from a bird's eye view all the beauty of the natural architecture becomes visible, but also the problems of our Earth, our only real house. As a leitmotif of the Globe Playhouse Space Lab we think of the collection of the 17 global UN goals, which are to be a blueprint for a better and more sustainable future for all. The Masterclass supported pioneering concept art and the development of installation art for hybrid, augmented, mixed, virtual and 360-degree projects in the field of artistic research combining the aesthetic, the formal, the natural and the social design. No games without rules. Starting point of our VR experience as audiovisual base module the Villa Rotonda. Andrea Palladio designed and built some world-renowned villas in Veneto around the middle of the 16th century. But his fame was also based on the four books of architecture, which were written as a result of his own building activity and his reflections on fundamental architectural issues. Mathematics enables the exact determination of musical intervals. Sound and the proportions derived from them are attributed a creative mystical power to which Palladio refers in his architecture. In addition, he related the harmonious relationship not only to the single room, but also to the interconnections between the rooms and the entire building. Even in ancient times, people argued that music and architecture were relatives. In his lecture Philosophy of Art, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling described architecture as frozen music, in the opinion that a beautiful building is in fact nothing other than music perceived with the eye, a simultaneous concert of harmonies and harmonic connections conceived not in time but in spatial sequence. In his Maximes and Reflections Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called architecture a silent art of sound. Finally the Globe Playhouse Space Lab exhibitions were opened in the digitally reconstructed Villa Palladio, freely based on Pier Paolo Pasolini's scenario, the Earth seen from the Moon, and thus recalls on virtual rehearsal stage the planetary perspective of suprematism. In a sense of creative thinking and contrasts, the Villa Rotonda is an aesthetic counter-model to the additive and open construction of the MIR flyer. exhibit with each other as avatars in specifically generated 3D environment from a remote location in collective common spaces of a self-designed metaverse. As a first test exhibition for everybody, Frank Gessner designed a moon hotel orbited by the MIR on the earth Trabant. As avatars, we can also walk inside and see some digital sculpture drafts. In the center of the rotunda the complete program. Missing links from 2015. Counterclockwise in rooms behind selfie as Sputnik Octopus, selfie as Tiger and Dragon, selfie as Yes or Nobody, selfie as Real Case Study, and clockwise around the Rotunda Center, the mixed media sequential art project Berlin Open Studio from 2012-13. Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. Paul Valéry, Pieces sur la Conquête de l'Ubiquité, Paris Prefaced by Walter Benjamin. In the essay The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator, Ewin Panofsky presented an early interface between classical art history and film and pointed out the clear structure of the villa of the Palladian style. of the Palladian style. Nemesine, Nymzni, Nymzni, Greek, comma pronounced, Nmosin, is the goddess of memory in Greek mythology. The term Nemesine is derived from the same source as the word mnemonic, that being the Greek word mnm, which means remembrance, memory. which means remembrance, memory. The basis for all new art that is to come will be the cinema, wrote Jan Goll in 1920. And undeniably, film is the guiding medium of the 20th century, just as the World Wide Web will be pour le 21ème siècle. cosmos of over-determined meanings. In this sense, the filmmaker's game with the documentary film genre becomes more of an ironic analysis of the documentary's latent tendencies to monumentalize. Marker's approach is more like a kind of evolutionolution que de la sublimité lofty, comme le plier du papier origami japonais ou de nouveaux processus photo numériques, tels que le zapping, le windowing, le linking et le morphing. L'étymologie est déceptive dans ce cas, les données ne sont jamais données, elles sont produites et manipulées. L'archivage, comme la technologie dont il opère, est maintenant confronté avec des processus de fictionalisation et de transcience. Il fait des problèmes structurels qui déterminent face structural problems that undermine any overall concept and erode it from the inside. Data, like media, are dying by the year, by the month, by the day. We can already trace a long history of dead media. Method of this work, literary montage. I have nothing to say, only to show. I will not steal anything of value, I will not appropriate any witty formulations. But the rags, the rubbish, I don't want to inventory them, but let them come into their own in the only possible way. Use them. Валтер Бенямин, Пассаженверк A spherical hypertext Я могу только надеяться, что они будут прочитаны по методу взаимной обратимости, по методу сферической формы, в ожидании, что мы научимся писать книги, как вращающиеся шары. Сейчас у нас только книги, как мыльные пузыри. Особенно по искусству. Сергей Михайлович Изенштейн The first, Eisenstein's request, consists in the fact that the bundle of these essays should by no means be viewed and received one after the other. I wish that they could all be perceived at the same time, because after all they represent a series of sectors which, oriented towards different areas, are arranged around a general determining point of view. On the other hand, I wanted to create the possibility in purely spatial terms that each contribution could be directly related to another, that one would merge into the other, that they mutually appeal to one another. One complements the other. Such synchronicity and mutual penetration of the essays could be taken into account in a book in the form of a sphere, where all sectors of the sphere are present at once, and no matter how far they are from one another, a direct transition from one to the other is always possible via the center of the sphere. But alas, books are not written as bullets. We dreamed of a living media network inside out of the web. The symposium Globe Playhouse Space Lab gave rise to the artistic and scientific hypertextual textbook experiment Expanded Animation Worlds, a Spherical Book in Progress, Thousand and One Plateaus. Inspired by Eisenstein's spherical book fragments and the idea of the spherical shape of time, we are currently curating a book of spheres with a round of 2 x 48 equals 96 articles in 8 sequences with 12 articles each. 96 articles are successively expanded and linked to each other, first within the sphere and increasingly into the worldwide actors' network. The Artistic Research Interface project is an attempt to link to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gattaris a new way of reading with multiple rhizome-like references. Dancing thought must always go beyond the system and strive to where it cannot be caught. Jean-Luc Nancy. This paved the way for a theory and practice that can address the relationship between space and freedom in art, science and society. Thinking in cinematic roles. Narrating in eight sequences. This model was developed or discovered and theorized by Frank Daniel at the American Film Institute. Two sequences in the first act, four in the second, two again in the third. The sequence consists of preparation, event with crisis, and finally the aftermath. It consists of a three-act structure. First act, 24 articles in two sequences. Articles in two sequences. Second act, 48 articles in four sequences. Third act, 24 articles in two sequences. Today, I would like to briefly introduce the first 48 sequences, which means 24 articles of the first act and the first half of the second act, up to the so-called midpoint. and guests expanded animation worlds and anima techne with footnotes memory spaces the body as a medium of individual collective and cultural memory back to the future the power to use an image paradise lost and regained on the virtual archaeology of an ideal garden projection between air and ground Warburg's thought space of sensibility. About Eisenstein's spherical book. Spherical media studies. From the idea to the medium. Essay film, theory, artistic research. Zirkus Wansky and perceptions and effects of Andrei Tarkovsky's apocryphal masterpiece Stalker in East and West Germany Looking for Diego Velázquez in Eisenstein Viva Photo Film Photo Painting Film Bubble Vision Aesthetics of Isolation and Consume Manifesto Tableau Vivant Living Images and Attitudes in Photography, Film and Video and Painting Tutorial The Interest in Interest Making Stop-Motion animation a tool for social engagement. Feeling the film. Haptic vision and the embodiment of images. Hybrid heritage. Don't take Hitler personal. Experimental film society statement. 19 personal thoughts on cinema. Unplugged animation. Kurzschwitters Merzbau in Hannover. Human learning x machine learning. The Lockdown Diaries. Exploring Zoom in a virtual media theater. 24 Rooms. A brief story of trial and error. And motion design. Dynamic type. Bridging scene. Second act. Plot point one. Sequence three. Lived space. From Assisi after Padua, Atelier Berlin Manifesto. A prolonged journey, Knausgat, Munch and Godard. And Beckett, Giacometti and Naumann, inside a surface. And the multiple life of Fernando Pessoa. And l'objet Ambigu in Philosophy and Art and Heaven, Hell and the Space Between Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Dante's Divine Comedy The Werner Nekes Collection Spatial Extension of Canvas, Screen and Image Objects Heiner Müller Archive and speech on Müller's death media as sculpture, aqua planning expanded illusions, cinematic concepts of immersion fictive philosophy this war tears my head apart circus, science and technology and between popular and experimental theater on the marionette theatre from modern and postmodern point of view Gestalt and anatomy The artistic path Digital stage With being with Notes on Jean-Luc Nancy And Excerpt Sexistence And Preface The agony of Eros And Excerpt, Hardcore and Excerpt, Original Kama Sutra Virtual Reality or the Endo-Access to Electronics and Lyrics, Hotel Morphelia Orchestra On the Composition of Imageries, From Analog to Digital and Back Again Nomiki Shouza's Kabuki Stage Machinery On the composition of imageries, from analog to digital, and back again. Nomiki Shouza's Kabuki stage machinery. And Ukiyo-e, the dawn of the floating world. And Shunga, erotic art in Japan. The art of anomalies, subversive examination of animation software. From the globe to the movie drone. Concepts of vision and perspective. A nicanism and musical theater. And immersive opera. Have a nice VR day. Spherical color synesthesia. Ending. Sequence four. Midpoint. Starting. Next level. Point. Starting. Next level. The past, present and future are, as we know, only linked to the process of succession because of their appearance is cosmic time. In our spiritual reality, however, this succession does not exist. Which has a more real reality than the well-known clock, which basically shows nothing other than that there is no present in the strict sense. Time bends into a spherical shape. From this idea, I developed my pluralistic composition technique, which takes into account the complexity of our reality. Bernd Alois Zimmermann, The Craft of the Composer, 1968 What we need, today, is not the Gesamtkunstwerk, next to which life flows separately, but the self-building synthesis of all life moments to the all-encompassing total work, life, that removes any isolation. Lawsloh Maholi Nagy A Spherical Hypertext What is Mr. Test? What is Mr. Test? Monsieur Test is an artificial character invented by Paul Valéry, who first appeared in his novel Fragment, An Evening with Monsieur Test published in 1896. This fragment, together with three other fragments was published in 1926 as an experimental essay-like, five-part prose cycle. You will be shown now an excerpt from the artist's video KCEQ Monsieur Test by Paul Yedderbeck, Frank Gessner von 2011. Au revoir. Diese Frage ist ganz eigentlich seine Seele. Sie wandelt euch in Monsieur Test. Denn er ist nichts anderes als der Dämon der Möglichkeit selbst. Der Gedanke an die Gesamtheit dessen, was er kann, beherrscht ihn. Er beobachtet sich, er manövriert. Er will sich nicht manövrieren lassen. Er kennt nur zwei Werte, zwei Kategorien. Es sind jene des auf seine Akte beschränkten Bewusstseins, das Mögliche und das Unmögliche. In diesem seltsamen Gehirn, das der Philosophie wenig Kredit einräumt, für das die Sprache immer fort unter Anklage steht, gibt es kaum einen Gedanken, der nicht vom Gefühl begleitet wäre. dass er nur vorläufig sei, besteht kaum etwas anderes als die Erwartung und die Ausführung klar bestimmter Operationen. Sein starkes und kurzes Leben verausgabt sich in der Überwachung des Mechanismus, durch den die Beziehungen zwischen dem Bekannten und dem Unbekannten eingerichtet und geregelt werden. Ja, es findet seine dunklen und transzendenten Kräfte daran, hartnäckig die Eigenheiten eines isolierten Systems zu erdichten, in dem das Unendliche nicht vorkommt. The station is located on the north side of the station. Nettopp I'm sorry. When a work of art finds its condition in lies or deception, is it then still a work of art? I do not have the answer. Marcel Bruthiers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you very much for your talk. Please come forward for a quick Q&A. While our next speaker can also set up their setup. I know it's a little bit hard stuff, Sunday morning, so much sources and references. If you have any questions please raise your hand and we will get a microphone to you. Otherwise I would ask you to maybe comment a little bit more in person. Yes, of course, as you saw, it's a very complex project. I'm working on it since, let's say the starting point was in the middle of the 90s. So I try to find an interface between analog and digital media. So I'm an artist, so I start with drawing, painting, sculpturing, things like this. And around 2000 I started to make this kind of experimental material to find a relationship, a deeper relationship to the digital world. And of course, let's say with one leg we are standing in the real world and with our play leg in the digital world. And of course, I think this is our existence. And this cross-media system, so it's the idea of my work to combine a lot of different medias, a lot of different, sometimes very complex theories and to find a translation to the audiovisual. And this project, the spherical book, another team is working on the reconstruction of Eisenstein's working flat. And this would be an international research station also in the internet. And I get this idea because it's really a great idea of early hypertextual work. And I took this idea and tried to find a very specific way to put new content inside who is interesting for everybody. And we are working on, also for the master class, with really five continents. And also the book, let's say it's something like a fragmented world in the sense of Walter Benjamin, to find a possibility, a very specific network, but in a worldwide network so it's we try to put it together these ideas and the research of the book I did the last let's say one one and a half year and of course it's complex and it becomes bigger it could be too big for one person so we will we will create a team and and we will see how we can publish it because the best form would be the internet but of course I I like very much books I don't know how it could be a book, a ball, a spherical book. But we try our best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your talk. I now want to introduce our next speaker, Franziska Bruckner. She is head of the research group Media Creation at St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences. She's lead of the project's Immersive Media Lab, VR in Motion, AniVision, and Climate Media Frames. And she's also a recurring speaker at the Expanded Animation Symposium. So thank you for coming again. Welcome. okay thank you so much for having me again after eight years so last time it was 2014 many things happened between that and i'm very happy to present a new research project which started recently and the first outcome of that well the framing of this talk will be a famous quote of Norman McLaren it says what happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame in the realm of animation, scholarly ship. This is something which is very well known, but I will explain it for you a little bit later for those who don't know the quote. This was an inspiration, and this is also the contextualization of this talk. But I will present, as I said before, the project We Are in Motion motion which is in collaborative art based research process and we just finished the first part of the project which is called experimention one the project we are in motion investigates how characteristics of analog stop-motion animation and data sets of motion capturing can be adapted as expanded animation and cinema concept in the current art discourse. Through experimental combination with virtual reality, the projects implores the potential beyond filmic boundaries and creates hybrid artistic tools as well as workflows in order to artistically discover, advance, and build innovative prospects. So what we tried is something maybe a little bit like a stupid idea, bring some analog stop motion into VR, which VR is not made for analog stop motion, but we wanted to see what comes out if we combine those techniques in an artistic way. The project is an art-based research project at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, where I'm also working in collaboration with artist studio Lichterloh. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund, the Art-Based Research Programme, PIEC. We just started. The project started in January 2022. Overall, the project consists of four experiments called Experimotions. And so what we are doing is we are inviting artists. The first one was Max Hadler. Then Friedrich Kirchner is also here, which is very exciting. Anna Vasov and Paul Wenninger, who are artists in the realm of animation. And in some in motion days, which are some workshops, those artists are invited to collaborate with us and create new artistic rooms. In the first In Motion Days or X-PREMOTION 1, we combined cutout animation and VR. Cutout animation is of course very flat, so you have a flat surface, you photograph it and then you bring it into a 3D space, which is very exciting, because what do you do with flat images in a 3D space? To get back to Norman McLaren, the whole quote is, animation is not the art of drawings that move, but the art of movements that are drawn. Then what happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame, and animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between the frames. As you can see, Norman McLaren, this is two films, Pas de Deux from 1968 and Synchromy from 1971, is working with very, very different animation techniques. So he was always inventing new things, trying out things. So you could say he was also an art-based researcher in that way. Normally, it is interpreted like this. McLaren draws movements such that it takes consistency not on the frame itself, but across frames. Thus movement is felt not in a pose, but in its experimental taking form across time and space. So it's not important what is on the frame, but how it develops the movement, the drawings over time. The interval is never neutral. It holds in abeyance the traces of movement passing and prepares movement coming. For We Are in Motion, this was a really great source for interpretation, too. So we didn't take it like literally, we just like, okay, what could the in-between, the in-between of frames be for us? So VR in motion is interested in those moments between each frame as the interstices are not only certain time periods between the next recorded frames, but also include transitions between real and virtual spheres that are manifold in different hybrid feedback loops between stop motion and motion capturing in VR. So what we wanted to do is create stop motion, bring it into VR, then go back, change it, like a back and forth between the actual world and the virtual world. Our question was, how can this in-between be located in the transition from real to virtual space? What forms of interaction will be possible? As I said, it's also like a great source for interpretation, so I asked my colleagues during the InMotion Days, which took place two months ago in July 22, what the interpretation of the in-between would be. So, for example, Christoph Schmidt from Lichterloh, he said, I interpret it as it's not so important what comes out of the process or where you started, but this whole in-between process is more important. If I put this quote on the project We Are in Motion, the process is where we develop, set up the programming and keep trying things. We have defined the basic of the idea or the concept, but while developing all this software we came up with many things and went different ways together with Sune and Max, who are our invited artists, which who gave much input. And that's the exciting thing, this actual process. This is also aligned with art-based research. It's not necessary that there has to be an outcome, a artistic product in this case. But the process is the key. And then the thing is, how do you document the process? So the form determines also what what is documented in terms of content so we tried out many things we kept logs we filmed we did interviews we did recordings and prescribes of discussions because we found out like in sometimes in these discussions some decisions were made, some concepts were discussed, which were, in hindsight, very interesting. We did some screen grabs and so on. So it's not only documenting what is done is for us interesting, but also why a certain decision was made is important for us. Also for art and artistic research, not only the knowledge or one form of knowledge applies, the know-how from different disciplines can lead to innovative findings and inspiring insights. So the expertise from art and science is often interdisciplinary, which only one person can rarely embody in particular the valor of collective artistic research lies in the fact that in critical questions the rules of both the arts and the sciences apply so this is our team this is also first glimpse in the in motion days. As you can see, we set up in the studio in Ephesan-Pölten, where the stop motion table was directly next to our VR setting so we could go back and forth and back and forth. Many people participated in the projects. I just want to highlight Mateusz Osinski, for example, who is a professor there and kind of invented this project together with me. Then Studio Lichtelo, which are art-based or artistic artists, basically, who do their own projects but also work with other artists. And then our invited artist, Max Hattler, who is a well-known animation filmmaker, and Sune Petersen. What also was happening is we had some problems of finding the same language, as we had the technicians who really have their own language, and then me as an animation scholar who have some other references and maybe know a little bit more about animation history. Then Max who is an artist but also knows a little bit about animation history or also is in this room. So sometimes it was really difficult to find a common ground. So it was very good to have Sune Petersen with us, who is working with Max for a very long time, and who kind of knew the artistic language of Max and also the technical language. So it was like a back and forth of scholar, developer, artist. We met online for a couple of times, because Max is based in Hong Kong. And in hindsight, it would have been better to meet in person a little bit sooner because if someone hasn't worked with VR before, it's difficult to envision what stop motion would look like in VR. to envision what stop motion would look like in VR. Also it's important from which point of view is the person speaking, as I said. The aesthetics is practiced, the contextualization is needed. And for me, especially the development process is important. What is actually mylimit question? So this in-between, this is an ongoing question, so it's not like finally answered, but it will be, hopefully, in two and a half years. So as I said before, I ask my colleagues, what is your interpretation? And Clemens Gürtler from Lichterluhe said, from a mathematical point of view, it makes sense that i define the opposite to show what i want to say there is no thin without defining thick at the same time this translates the things that i show the frames but also defines everything i don't show so this indirect definition of the space between is precisely these frames for me what is the space between the frames in our project? I can say yet. So let's look at the frames. Max Hattler did, like 10 years ago, a work. It's called Shift. And he will show you a short okay there should be some sound So it's a very abstract film with abstract sound, very formalistic. And we together with Max decided, okay, or Max offered this to us, okay, this could be like the basis of our stop motion animation. How do I go back? OK. As you can see, this is the making of the film from 2012. The lighting is very specific. So normally, you just have a lighting from above for cutout animation, which is like a very even lighting. But Max decided on this very specific lighting where the edges have this glowing effect. And this is something we tried to include too. So as you can see, we built a small green screen stop motion stand with also the lighting. And we didn't know if it would work. We tried out several setups for the stop motion stand with also the lighting and we didn't know if it would work we tried out several setups for the stop motion stand but it turned out it would work very nicely the history of the objects max broad is also very interesting it's borrowed from a collection of nick roricht who was a design professor at udk it's similar objects, but also the same objects he used in the film 10 years ago. So it was really a nice starting point to translate this film into VR. I also had a discussion with Max during the In Motion days. What about his animation? And he said, the point is that the movement of the single frame is not decisive. When I do sequences, of course, I'm obsessed that it's precise, but ultimately, it doesn't matter because it already fits in the movement. This was when we were talking about McLaren's quote. And I said, but in VR, you don't have single frame anymore, you have a composition of many frames. And he said, maybe you'd still have to go back to the single image. In stop motion, for example, I'm messing a little bit up because it fits in the movement. Still, it also gets something like a human element in there because it's not perfect in VR. And in VR, there are all these calculated movements. You have A and B there, and the rest is quasi-calculated. And that is why it's always precise. You could say that stop motion, even there is somehow mangled and maybe come out completely different in the end. This human element of imperfection is still in there. And this imperfection is something we really liked and embraced in this project, too. we really liked and embraced in this project too. So I show you some loops, how he did the animation. It's like traditional step motion. We used the software Dragonframe, which is like the industry standard right now. And Max said for the selection of the object, he likes geometrically reduced formal language of squares, spheres, and circles, and related forms that come from product design and furniture. So he misuses the objects. You can't say, what is it for anymore? What was interesting that Max was very drawn in his work to the frame. He likes the frame because it gives him stability. He really had to rethink the frame. For example, a normal filmic frame would be 16 to 9, and then the second day we said, no, we need a square because it's easier for the computers to process this. So you're, yeah, so he had to rethink of that. Then what about the frame rate? Normal frame rate of sub-motion is 12 frames at least per second. And we really wanted to have this movement of sub-motion. It shouldn't be too smooth. But how to combine it with the frame rate of VR, which is 90 frames per second at least. So this is something we were thinking about. Then also, the loops got simpler in time. So this is a loop, an early one. You can see this is the green screen, and this is the keyed version. And you can see this is like a very complex sequence. So he really transferred in the first days the ideas from the film. And he said in the second day, yesterday I made somewhat more complicated arrangement in one shot as I did with shift for example. But then after some reflection yesterday, evening and today, the test with the new material have already become clear that it makes sense to make short little loops from very simple elements. If you have somewhat more complex sequence and you put it in the VR room, then you have advanced, and that's OK. But you always have the problem that you have the feeling of the frame. If you duplicate it, it looks like a copy. If you duplicate something very simple, it doesn't have such a copy character. So you can see this is like a later version. At the end, we also experimented with some, I also brought in some other materials Max didn't think of because we had enough loops. So also like stones and flowers and wools, like these haptic materials, they are very interesting, although they are photos because they bring a quality into the VR which is not normally seen then we have also how do we bring sound into the VR and that's why we invited Sune Petersen and what he did he was working with optical sound So we had had many ideas how to import the sound, but then he came up with this optical sound. And he told me, I sampled the pixels along a line and played it back as a waveform. It means the brightness value. So this is a translating the image into sound by reading that line of pixels and using it as a waveform. If you look at the video, you can see a little line in the middle of the heart. And he can modify it. And he said, yeah, well you could do it automatically, but then the result would not be so good. So we relayed it back, although it could be done automatically, is good. So we relate it back, although it could be done automatically, we relate it back to the manual input. And he was referring to optical sound, which is kind of similar. And this is something also Norman McLaren was experimenting. He wasn't inventing it, but he was experimenting with it. So it is when on celluloid films, you have the soundtrack next to the film, and you can also paint on the film and then make a sound of it. Then going to the prototyping, which was also like an in-between ongoing thing. And Matthias Husinski said, what we did is Frankenstein-esque piece of software, because we have Unity, which is kind of the main player system. But we had this as a conveyor belt and animation stream that runs on the crystallized sphere that would come from the different software. I was doing this in VVVV because I could more quickly get to the results that we need. In the end, we needed rapid prototyping as an approach that can quickly got us to the point. So the team wanted to find out which tools and software were suited best for the use cases. They were looking into different softwares, Unity, TouchDesigner, Unreal Engine, and 4V. So they were looking which affordances were needed, which were supported natively, or did we have to buy some assets for the program, or did we have to program it ourselves. And I think it was like a, yeah, it took some resources, but it was really, for us, really important to find, like, the best tool or the best tools, because this is not only for one expert motion, but it will also go on for the next ones. And the thing is that at the beginning we thought we needed different things than we actually needed at the end. But some things were available to know right up front, like the networking, the activity, and the compatibility between the programs. So for example, the first prototypes, we decided to use Unity and TouchDesigner and build two prototypes. The idea was to really do the sub-motion animation out from the VR. We had VR headsets with three see-through modes. You could do the sub- motion directly from the VR. But then later in the process, we decided against it because also the animation artist, Max, did not feel comfortable. And also the quality is not so good. We also experimented with two headsets, the Vario XR3, which has hand tracking and is like a very, very good VR headset, which also where you can really see the haptic qualities of the motion. And then the Oculus Quest, which we are referring again now because you can bring it with us. So if you're interested in the outcomes, I also brought Oculus Quest with me and you can see the results. Yes, we used the Mixed Reality Toolkit, MRTK, for hand tracking, because for us it was also important that you not only import the motion animation, but you can also play with it, so it should be playful. but you can also play with it. So it should be playful. And then how do you bring it into the virtual reality? Well, classically in VR, everything is super smooth, and of course, stop motion, just everything is not perfect. But now we have a mixed culture because of our head movements. They're still smooth. But the stop motion videos still have their look. Then the question is how the videos are placed and what else happens to them. So yes, we were thinking about, okay, there is the 12 frames per second movies, sequences we import into the VR, and okay, should they move in the VR? Should it also be 12 frames or should it be more? But what we didn't think is, well, the head movements, they cannot be done in 12 frames or should it be more? But what we didn't think is, well, the head movements, they cannot be done in 12 frames per second because everyone would get sick. So there's always this difference between the stop motion movement and the real movement. onto the real movement. And then, like the in-between, Matthias was saying, the fact that Max is very abstract in his visual ideas and doesn't make classic stop motion makes the whole thing grateful, because we can play with the partial distortion effects, where you don't know what the result will be when you turn the gear wheel. On the one hand, we have this abstract level. But on the other hand, we have this very concrete animation clips which spatially populate this virtual space. So for him, this in-between is the interplay between abstract and concrete, like the abstract stop motion elements, but then also the concrete clips. We were talking a lot in our discussions how could we place the stop-motion animation, which is cut out and very flat into the sphere. So we came up with multi-spheres, spherical multi-planes. We were thinking how could these stop-motion animations... how could these sub-motion animations, how could we, how could we, how could these flat animations work in this 3D space? And we were thinking of, yeah, well, the animations have to face the view all the time. And then we came out, OK, it doesn't have to be like that. We had, like in the background, we had this animated conveyor belt, which is like moving all these motion loops in wonder in many directions, and you can distort it. We were thinking about, okay, what is this world we are in now? Is it like satellites going through the center of the VR? Or is it more like the old version of the Earth thinking, like the flat Earth, and then things are moving around? These were things we were talking about a lot. And then it's also, in between could also be like the flickering images. So, Suni was talking about the stroboscopic effects you have between the frames generated. He said, without it, it would be a different experience. So being able to add spaces between images as Flickr sounds a little bit jazz thing, they say. For instance, I love working with the video feedback and they also talk to Max how we could do it in this context. We might be able to do it, but circular video feedback will probably be weird. By creating a halfway chaotic system and then having some parameters and the opportunity for it to die out is very interesting. So we created this kind of crystal fears. But they were not fears, but they would be like crystals. They should expand and move in the VR space. We had this random UV shifting. And as we didn't have the motion background at the beginning, we were using something Max and Sune were working before. It's called a video performance tool, the Hedlerizer. So this is like an early prototype. You can see in the background it's like this crystal sphere still working with the visuals of the Hetler riser. In the foreground you can see our first tryouts with the stop-motion loops. What we also did at the beginning is we did a live keying, but it turned out that it didn't have a good quality, so you could still see the frame. So what we did is, yeah, we keyed it by hand and then imported the sequencer into the VR. So this is the second version. You can also already see the usability. If you import the motion sequences into the VR, you can freely select in the VR sphere. You can duplicate it. You can switch them. You can really place them freely in the room. And we also were very interested because then we said, OK, we can also tilt it a little bit so you can build like 3D objects of these flat images so they don't have to face you all the time. And in the background, we dialed down the crystal sphere a little bit and this is like just a stop-motion animation of a wool coat I did a few years ago. What we were also experimenting is that we prearranged in VVVV the stop motion animations, so we had this set up and then you could go into the VR and then place them freely. place them freely. So this is how it sounds with sound. This is a version Christoph Schmidt from Lichterloh made. He was just working with one looper, but of course you can bring different loops in if you want to. And what was interesting, we had some visitors also during the In Motion days, and in the last day we also had an animation scholar, Eliska Detska, from Prague, who was in the city. And she really instantly started to play with it. And it was very nice, because it doesn't take you long to get into the manual, how to use the VR. And then people start playing and building their own worlds with the stop motion elements we built. Yeah, well, that's how far we came. Yeah, so what is the space between the frames in our project? We're not finished, I can't say yet, but yeah, we will find out in the next two and a half years thank you thank you very much for your interesting talk maybe we can move a little bit to the side so the next speaker can set up now is the chance for you to ask questions about this project. Just raise your hand and we will get a microphone to you. Yeah? Hello. Thank you very much for the talk. And I was wondering to what extent are you interested in moving a historical sense of stop motion innovation that was very much informed by the materiality of the time into a new materiality? into a new materiality or to what extent are you interested in finding something like a similar process that is born out of a new materiality do you understand what I'm saying like I feel like Norman McLaren is very much like you know it's frame there's like stop-motion animation in the very mechanical structure of the apparatus that he's working with. And now you work with a, let's say, different apparatus in a different world with different context. Are you trying to see what happens if you if you put something from an old, older world in there, or are you interested in applying a similar process of deconstructing the apparatus and seeing what's what's happening i think i think right now we're at the stage where we just bring in like the old elements of stop motion because as i said before max was very drawn to the frame uh and for us it was like this is like the starting point. I don't know what will happen when we work with you. I think there will be much more deconstruction. We are happy with the stage we are right now, because we have this interactivity. We are kind of freed from the old frame, because you can stage it in the sphere. We are not done in that sense because there are some usability things missing. So you can't group stuff. Also, when you import something, the timing is always the same. So there are some technical issues we are working right now so to get more free in that sense. I mean, the next step will also be to incorporate motion capturing in the system so then maybe you can also take the stop motion and do more like a puppeteering thing in that we haven't figured that out. So I can't answer it now, I think we're a starting point but I have the feeling that the further we go along with the project, the more we deconstruct also these mechanics. Another question over there? So you were talking about imperfection, which is really beautiful in stop motion, on film, etc. Did you already get reactions of people who are maybe a little bit outside of the project? You know, like whoever, how this sort of imperfection works in a VR space yes because I could imagine you know and I know some of the films of Max they're quite often rather fast and and and things like this how long you think it's possible for for the audience to stay in these sort of rooms? I think it depends. I mean, if you look at it as a VR project, where you just watch what someone else has arranged, I can say maybe like five minutes, it would be interesting and then not. Right now, rather family and friends were seeing it, like this also version where you could really play. But as I said before, we had Eliska Dieczka here from Prague, who is an animation scholar who is not familiar with VR. And she stayed there really for a long time. So it's like first time half an hour, and then I want to go back. So I think what's really cool is this playful thing, how you can arrange the stuff. And she said she felt really comfortable. She's more drawn to old-fashioned animation. And she said, this is the first time in VR I really feel comfortable because of this imperfection and because of this feeling you have of the stop motion. And it's a little bit a shame that you can't show in the screen grabs like this haptic effect. We were really surprised that although these are flat photos of objects, it doesn't really feel flat in the VR and you can really see the structure. And this is something I have not seen yet in other VR projects. I mean there are stop motion projects who are also working with the VR but this is more like puppets moving and stuff and this is like this abstract forms which still have this haptic effect, this is something which I have not seen before and this is something we can build on. Another question? Yeah, we got two questions on our livestream, the first one. Is VR later in the project also meant as the media to watch the animation or is it mainly used as a tool to animate? No, it's meant to be watched in VR. Okay. Yes. All right. And the second question, interface-wise. Yes. Are you thinking about useful constraints like angel splits, grid snaps, or simple mathematical functions like add, subtract, multiply, or division of space or time? Yes, we are thinking about it. We really wanted to do that, but we couldn't do that in time. We have our Unity experts who will work still on this prototype, and we hope that we can incorporate it. So what we did right now is that we were working in other programs and did it outside of the VR because we really also wanted to have those features, but we couldn't do that in time for the last in motion days. So thank you for all of your questions. And a reminder that you brought the Oculus Quest with you. And later you can also try and have a look yourself. Thank you again for your talk. Thank you again for your talk. Thank you. I would like to now introduce the last speaker of this expanded and hybrid panel, Eva Fischer, welcome. Eva Fischer is an independent curator, cultural manager and lecturer in the field of experimental media, audiovisual and immersive art. She is also the artistic director of the media art festival SAIWA, Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art, that she initiated in 2021. She's talking about digital festival making. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. So I'm going to try to set up my slides. Doesn't work. Maybe we try another adapter. Thank you. Does it work? Here we go. All right. So, yes. I will talk about digital festival making. I've been realizing festivals since 2007. My first festival format was Soundframe, an audiovisual program that existed for 10 years until 2016. After that I moved to the Diagonale in Graz where I was head of production and initiated a focus program on virtual and extended reality. I was then also part of the XR Vienna meetup team and in 2020 in the midst of the first lockdown together with an amazing team of people we wrote an application for the new media art festival of vienna so what does it mean to create a festival what is the core of a festival i guess that all of us have sort of an understanding of what a festival means for us personally right like of course during us electronica festival already when we wrote the application in May 2020, our main question was whether you can create that festival feeling online in the virtual space. I believe that a festival in its very core is a place where a lot of energy accumulates. People flock from all possible directions to experience together, to broaden their horizons, to immerse themselves, to network, to let go. A festival is a metaphor for our social life, for our good life. It's a microcosm where society is tested and discussed. And we wanted to know whether this accumulation of energy, this microcosm, can also evolve in a hybrid or even a virtual setting. Our concept won and we started to build SAIWA. SAIWA stands for Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art and is a real digital experiment. It's a child of the post-digital age. It is physical and virtual, analog and digital at the same time, and it has a physical Viennese fan base on the one hand and a very international virtual community and online audience on the other hand. Its first edition took place for nine days in february 2021 during a lockdown under the title social distancing virtual bonding we wanted to explore how current technologies enable us to remain connected to each other on a virtual level in times of physical distancing or like even build new international networks and communities and for this purpose in 2021 we particularly claimed space in the virtual at the core of the festival where the virtual exhibition and the mozilla hub spaces where we did not only show digital and virtual artworks but also realized live events such as live DJ sets that you could watch on our festival stage in Mozilla Hubs or a collaboration with the Austrian radio broadcaster FM4 where we did a virtual radio show together also using Mozilla Hubs and Twitch as our tools. Here you see the virtual space that our colleague Maximilian Prag built for us. My co-curator Martina Menegon and me showed 20 artworks by international artists, like the audiovisual artist and AI expert Memo Acton, game and media artist Cassie McQuater, artist and AI expert, Mimo Acton, game and media artist, Cassie McQuater, AI and robot specialist, Emanuel Golob, media artist and curator, Brooklyn Bakati, the game artist and professor of the new experimental game cultures department at Angewandte, who some of you might have seen yesterday, Margarete Jahrmann, her colleague, media artist Thomas Wagensommerer, or media artist and black trans activist Daniel Bradford Shirley. And we used Mozilla Hubs as our social web VR tool for social encounters. Martina Menigon and Enrico Zago created several Mozilla Hub spaces for very different purposes, like ones that had a festival stage where we could broadcast live events via Twitch and you could watch performances together with your friends in the social web VR space. So we spend a lot of time in Mozilla Hubs. For our team communication and for the communication with our audience, we used and we're still using and loving discord what you see here all of our team communication happens there and we have several channels for different topics and tasks and we did an experiment in 2021 we wanted to be our mozilla hub spaces to be safe spaces since we had had some Zoom bombings before and did not want any trolls to join the festival program. So we created a code of conduct at first place that declared our house rules, like not acting ableist, sexist, or racist, for example, and we made everyone confirm those rules via Discord before they would be allowed to enter our Mozilla Hub spaces. Well, yeah, sounds a bit complicated. And now, from today's point of view, I also have to admit that this was a little bit over the top. It made a lot of people actually not find the Mozilla hub spaces so it was very exclusive and mostly people who would understand how Discord works and how Mozilla hubs would be able to use our spaces could actually really get access so we did not do that any longer after the festival, but it made us think about what it means to host a public online space. For all of our streamings, we used and we still use Twitch. Here you see one of our curators, Tonika Hunter, who presents a full conference program via Twitch. She showed many different formats, like the collaborative music project, Geschichten aus dem Wiener, with Hartmut and Soja, who you see here, that deals with age, or the Between Surviving workshop by Mojo and Naoka. And yeah, coming back to Mozilla Hubs, together with Christian Davidek, we produced a special audiovisual live edition of his show Davideks and broadcasted the show on several platforms like the FM4 and the cyber website as a stream, our Twitch account where you could interact also, and all of our Mozilla Hubs festival stages where you could meet with friends and watch the show. Christian invited the singer Lou Azriel and the performance duo Maros Kino to perform live at the studio. And so we had several stages that were streamed from the studio to Twitch and Mozilla Hubs. Here you see our Twitch account where the show was streamed. Our partners Bildwerk had programmed a generative visual live show that was projected in the studio and would show live visuals on the one hand and the Twitch chat in front of Christian on the other hand so that he could also interact with the audience. In the chat, people could use keywords to manipulate the color or the pace of the visuals in the studio or create other effects like strobo effect. People really had a lot of fun in the chat and also online listening to the show was really interesting and fun. So that was a huge success that made us realize this show again and again. I also show you some pictures from 2022. Our colleague Angie Paul produced another hybrid radio show together with David Dix and then also Dalia Ahmed's Late Night Lemonade. In that joint show, we did a live voguing performance with Diviani's Kiki House of Dive, who you see here in the studio. And we had interviews with Ina Holub and Faris Kuchika-Seng and a live set by Rumi van Bayres, who were also in the festival program. who were also in the festival program. What we also did was invite several artists to create their own spaces with the help of our team, like the violonist and performer Matteo Heitzmann. He created a Mozilla Hub space together with our team, which was based on his live performance, Those We Lost. Inspired by the south african photographer gideon mendel's photo book the ward matteo heitzman in this artwork addresses the survival strategies of the lgbtiq plus community facing the aids crisis in the late in the 1980s and 90s in this performative solo concert, Matteo Heitzmann wants to pay tribute to the dead. He integrates old video and audio footage from those days into new compositions and creates a contemporary view or voice for the struggle for dignity in times of crisis. He also talks about the fact that in times of a global pandemic, stigmatization of groups and ethnicities is a sad truth. One-sided reporting and cheap propaganda are feeding hate, exclusion, and biases, or biased opinions about so-called others, a phenomenon that repeats itself throughout human history. So a very emotional artwork, and I really, really liked the way of how it was presented in the Mozilla Hub space. You could walk from one video statement to the other and see parts of Matteo's performance in other videos. And yeah, I have to say it really felt like an exhibition. And at the same time, you got a very nice impression of Matteo's musical live performance. What you see here is a space by Efoa Chavez-Essando and Wilhelm Scherrüber, it's called React, and asks the question how I can participate in changing today's society into a less racist or even an anti-racist environment. This hub space is an attempt to simulate and reconstruct some chosen daily racist situations that have been experienced by EFWA and others. They are demonstrated on several parts in the space in a rather abstract way and serve to reenact and to illustrate the situation. So the space is meant as a tool, a tool for visualizing and mostly discussing certain situations. So the visitors of the space become part of an event and should be confronted with what happens and how they would feel and react in a very situation. For example, here, where do I stand is a staircase. I think some of you might know this system. It questions, for example, when the police check me, can I be sure that my skin color is not the reason for it? Or I feel welcome and normal in the usual areas of public life. So it's an instrument to visualize where we stand. And in the Mozilla Hub space, the two artists made visible that Efua, as a black woman in Austria, the two artists made visible that EFWA, as a black woman in Austria, will stay at the bottom of the stairs, since she cannot answer one single question with a yes. And Wilhelm, on the other hand, as a white man in Austria, can go all the way up. So the space is actually still being used, which is quite nice. It's used for workshops that EFWA hosts at the Angewandte in Vienna. And also, that brought us to the idea to actually collect all of the Mozilla Hub spaces that were created in the course of the two festival editions. And we actually called it our little metaverse already in 2021. And here you find all the Mozilla Hub spaces that were created. So if you're interested, check it out. You find it on the Soundframe website, soundframe.at. And yeah, what was important for us is that it's a public place where people can really find the spaces. They can use it for their own purposes at any time in any place of the world. they can use it for their own purposes at any time in any place of the world. So, yeah, to come back to the festival formats, another hybrid format that we realized in 21 was an audiovisual program at the Virtual Production Studio in Vienna that is run by Media Apparat. We invited three artists, Keke, Craig Ignatz, and Eli Preiss. And the live visuals for the show were created by Maximilian Prag. And we filmed three live sessions within the LED environment and streamed the final videos via Twitch then. The visuals by Maximilian were generated in real time partly via the Unreal Engine and partly via Resolume. And another really nice hybrid live format that we had in the festival program was a collaboration with the Dutch media art festival Impact. Arion is also here. Everyone was welcome to join us in Zoom, wear their most crazy digital or real masks, and party with us. Using the virtual background options of Zoom, mask option of Snap Camera, for example, or whatever else one can think of, people were invited to create the most creative or crazy spectacle. The highlight of the ball was the virtual background battle for the best costume and the most exceptional background and masks performance. There was an emcee for the whole night and a lot of thought was put into the moderation and dramaturgy of the event. Also the full show would be followed by a really nice music selection that made everyone dance behind their screens and I can just say it was really it was hilarious. It was a very good thing to have. You could definitely see that everyone was having super much fun and that was very special when we think back that this was in one of the first lockdowns yeah and then after all we needed a break so we wanted everyone to leave their screens for a bit get some fresh air and be back IRL in real life. So we had a so-called wellness day. On that day, our full festival website went offline and showed only an art piece instead. Katrin Spieth's Era 404. Sorry, I'm currently not available. I am dreaming. The artwork was created with the help of an ai which created calls for action based on the youtube trend of the self-care routine where influencers give personal tips on how to experience the lockdown life more consciously and mindfully and so we wanted to talk about self-care and about the need for some AFK, some away from keyboard experiences in a time of constant accessibility. Well, nevertheless, we obviously loved to be online. And after nine days, we had reached over 7000 people from 80 countries in the world, which made us really, really happy. Yeah, this year in 2022, we were back in the physical space, which was also great. We did not know until one month before the festival if and how we would be able to realize it. But in the end, we were lucky and could even do events until midnight. So under the title Embodied Structures, we talked about the body. During nine days we showed a hybrid program of art exhibitions, talks, lectures, workshops, film screenings and performances at Belvedere 21 in Vienna, the Stadtkino Wien and the Volkstheater, and online, of course. We looked at the body as a political field between the analog and the digital and discussed which learned and internalized structures we can and must unlearn. We discussed that in a conference and hosted talks and panels like talking about boundaries that you see here that was curated by the fabulous collective D Arts in Vienna. You see Asma Ayad, Persson Peri Baumgartinger, Eva Egermann, Sherry Avraham, and Jamila Granditz here. Or we had a live lecture performance by Asma Ayad and Ines Mahmoud from Salam Euda in Ich die intellektuelle Putzfrau, that you could translate with Me, the intellectual cleaning lady. The two artists and activists performed a manifesto and spread their message to the nation as they called it. and spread their message to the nation as they called it. Again, we streamed everything via our Twitch channel where people could interact and you could watch the stream on the landing page for our festival website as well. We showed a movie program that was curated by Maria Milovanovic who is also here, both at the Stadtkino in Vienna and via our Twitch channel as well. Already in our first festival edition, this had been a highly successful format and we all felt like watching the movies together. Yeah, and we realized an exhibition at Belvedere 21 and yeah, it was fantastic to be back in the real space or the physical space again. But Martina Mennegon, my co-curator and me, also talked a lot about how to include our international audience that we did not want to lose, of course. So we picked several artworks that were also existing online, like Keikiken's Wisdoms for Love 3.0 that you see on that projection here. Kaiken are a collaborative practice co-founded by artists Tania Cruz, Hannah Omori and Isabel Ramos in 2015. in 2015. Wisdoms for Love 3.0 is an online decision-making game in which players can collect non-fungible tokens, NFTs. It allows you to meet your friends in this virtual land and take on new virtual identities. You will find it online, wisdomforlove.com, I think. Players must work their way through a labyrinth of metaphorical decisions. The decision-making points are filled with symbolic imagery and sounds. And as the players progress through the game, they collect so-called wisdom tokens, digital artworks of the objects inside the game. digital artworks of the objects inside the game. Each wisdom token comes with a moral contract which allows you to freely download the digital artwork but obliges you to protect it and cherish it instead of treating it as a mere financial asset. By exploring the game, you start asking yourself what it means to possess something. Online, the game can be played by multiple users. In the exhibition, you could play it as a single player, but the game would start where the player before you would have left it. So again, it was a collective effort to collect the NFTs, both online and in the exhibition. You could download the NFTs. In the exhibition, you got a QR code to take them with you. And as soon as you downloaded the NFTs, no matter if you had collected only a few or all of them, your history would be deleted and the game would start from the beginning. We showed game-related works, audiovisual generative pieces, sculptures, short movies, such as Made to Measure by Krupplau Kohn, that you might know from us, Elektronika Festival last year. For our hybrid festival format, we like the film not only as part of our exhibition, but also because it exists as an interactive online version. Made to Measure is an experiment that asks you, or asks if you can reconstruct the person based solely on their digital data trail. Grupp Laocoon worked together with several scientists. Studies from renowned universities had shown that over the last few years, a fraction of a person's online data is enough to identify their interests, tendencies, and even intimate personality traits like fears, weaknesses, or add addictions and predict their behavior. Quite often this is explained with the power of algorithms, as Kruplakun says, and they want to show that even without the supposed magical powers of artificial intelligence, we can still create intimate conclusions from the digital trails we all draw on the web. So they wanted to find out whether we could create the digital doppelganger who in the end might know even more about the person than the person itself. In the exhibition we showed a short version as a video loop. In the online version you can interact and guess along which person could be behind the record. So, yeah, what is digital festival making? We believe that every audience needs something different. And this is an exciting thing for us when it comes to festival making. We want to understand the different needs in a virtual, a physical or a hybrid setting. And so we tried out many different formats to learn more about communication, about moderation and presentation. Yeah, we are happy to serve both local, often very private and exclusive sessions, as you see here with Angie Pohl and Asma Ayad, who had invited some guests for a discussion, and on the other hand, an international, more anonymous audience. Here you see one of our several experts tours within the cyber exhibition. Our hosts were Jamila Granditz, who you see here, Laura Welzenbach, who some of you might know from the Ars Electronica team, the Dutch researcher Marijn Bril, and Clementina Milenova, who produced the full tours program. We want to create safe spaces and discuss topics on very personal and intimate levels, connect people with each other, and create new collaborations. And we want to reach out to a big audience. We want as many people as possible to see the artworks that we love and we want to share the thoughts of great thinkers and artists. During the past two years, we found out that it is possible for us to create the festival feeling online.r and social web vr helps a lot when it comes to being in the same space together with others but having a hybrid form at least for me is the best you can merge the best of two worlds but it needs a very deep understanding also of what the different tools and levels can help to achieve. So in that sense, I'm looking forward to seeing you all at the next year's Cyber Festival. It's going to happen in February 23 again. Check out cyber.at. And yeah, thanks for having me again. And I believe that now is time for some questions maybe. Thank you. Thank you so much for your talk. I would like to touch upon what you were mentioning about the audience and how different an audience, a physical festival audience is. They come to the festival, they are already on the location and you cannot easily lose them. They will most likely stay there. So I would like to ask you maybe about, does also the audience have to adapt in a way and yeah, how it changes their behavior yeah right yeah it's a huge difference I believe it's also what you see here again it's so good to be back to such a big festival also like as electronic and to just meet people on the streets and kind of like yeah just go from one to the next and flow around the city. As an online audience, we had the feeling and we saw that ourselves, when actually also being the audience of our own festival, kind of, that it's very hard to build that communicative structure. So moderation would really be the main thing for us. And we really tried out many different tools, many different formats. As I said, somewhere in the end, maybe a bit over the top, but that was also good learning for us, like the Discord channels. You know, on the one hand, it's always the question if you also overwhelm people, if you use too many different tools. On the other hand, each tool creates a certain... Yeah, can achieve something, let's say. And also each different tool requires a different kind of skill set, which sometimes people don't even have maybe yet discovered themselves. So very, very challenging, for sure. I also wanted to ask about your experience with Twitch or live streaming. Also, especially about watching something together or experiencing together on Twitch. For example, gaming streams are very popular to experience together. Maybe you can talk about the advantages about that. Yeah, so I would come back to the film program that Maria curated. That was really brilliant. We had a very good time. There were, in 2021, two film formats, I think both of them one hour or so. And I don't know if you remember how the chat worked, but people got really enthusiastic. And I think that's what's different to a cinema situation, because in the cinema still you are silent, you are passive kind of. You have the huge screen that is made for this very purpose. But then, yeah, being in the chat with others brought a very different understanding of what it means to watch movies together, I think. So that was fun. That's so interesting because, of course, in the last two years, many animation festivals had the challenges how to move to the digital space. And it's great that there's positive experiences in that too, watching together. Are there any questions in the audience? Hi Eva, thank you for your very interesting talk. I was wondering, could you elaborate how you brought the art project into the VR space? So did you give the artists space to create it themselves so did you help them like it's also like on the technical level not always easy absolutely and again the challenge to have so many different formats and so many different programs that yeah have to come to one very platform. We did use Unity to create our virtual exhibition. And we gave actually everyone the freedom to adapt to it. Either they could send us sculptures that we would bring into the virtual space, or they could also send us their movies, kind of. And we created some kind of a preview screen where you could then go to the very movie on Vimeo or somewhere else. So we really wanted it to be as open as possible to also host the art. It was 20 artworks, 20 very different artworks, to host the artworks in their very natural habitat, as I could say. So yeah, not having the need to adapt every single artwork to our platform. But yes, Maximilian Prag and Martina Menigon and Enrico Zago helped all the artists. And some of the spaces were really created together with our team. Another question over there. Yeah, and thank you very much for the super interesting talk. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on the fact that you had a very tight-knit Discord community for your first iteration and how that might have been really important to generate a core that was very strong and then could extend the invitation to the more open forms so this is just like a working theory that we have for a lot of online theater stuff that we're doing but we've noticed that it was really important to have like a very strong core of people that are coming because you invite them before you open things up. So if you could elaborate on that process of opening up and how, because you talked about the negative side of being so closed. But yeah, maybe if you could talk more about that. Thank you so much. Absolutely. You got a very important point and I totally agree. And we tried that also we called it our cyber ambassadors group so there were several communities that we work together with like for example the arts as I already said or um or several others and we would invite them to build their community space within our space and host it. So there were also programs running on Discord or certain links to parts of the Cyber Festival program. And so, yeah, that was really important for us to have Discord and have a program also there. important for us to have this core and have a program also there we we thought a lot about how to use the different tools and the different programs and how we could also show art there not only use it as community tools or but yeah really creating content also on every single platform on twitch on discord instagram on our website and that helped because of course communities bring a lot of people and we could never have done that our own in the first year of the festival it's great to work together with communities anyways thanks for your question another question so as far as I understood in 2021, you used a lot of Mozilla Hubs. In 2022, not so much anymore, right? What is the reason? Would it have been too much or is it too unstable? Because to my mind, it's an interesting tool to keep an international audience. Yeah, I totally agree. That's why we built the Soundframe Metaverse that I showed you, where all of our Mozilla hubs were still there and we could use them at any time. That was really our thought. We did not create any new spaces because it's also a pragmatic decision, of course. We only have one festival budget and we wanted to be in the physical space. We wanted to be at Belvedere 21. And so we couldn't have afforded to create another virtual exhibition space. But it was important for us to base on what we had created before. based on what we had created before. No. Of course, Mozilla Hubs had its pros and cons. But in the first year, we really loved it. It was a lot of experiment, of course, going on also for us. And I mean, maybe that's also what you're implying a little bit Mozilla Hubs is is an exclusive tool in the end you need a proper laptop with a stable internet connection you need to you know have the skills have a little bit of literacy to actually use it. And yeah, so we also thought a lot about how to be a bit more inclusive in the second year and have several options for several parts of our audience. The ones that were, you know, that love Mozilla Hubs could go there. The other ones would join us in the physical space. So that was the thought. Thank you. Another question in the back. Yeah, I think it connects a little bit to what you just said. But if you go and organize virtual events, how do you make sure that also people that maybe have not so good internet connections, not so good computers, can also access? Or how do you balance because you would maybe compromise a lot to do that and then lose on the other end some beautiful aesthetic opportunities that you might have? So could you tell a bit about balancing these two aims maybe? Yeah, that's also a very good point thank you so what we did is as I already said we used several platforms to create content and always tried to interlink the platform so if we had a virtual online event going on we would always stream it also in Twitch. And the Twitch stream was not only in Twitch, but also on our website. So you wouldn't even need a Twitch account, but you could just go to cyva.at and see on the landing page what is going on live. So yeah, we had the feeling that this worked quite well. But yes, I think that's really the main thing, to rely on platforms and media that is already used by many people and just try to give a glimpse of what is happening in the virtual. Yeah, just try to give an glimpse of what is happening in the virtual. Another way would be to organize ways of interactions that don't require a camera or a microphone even, like where people could draw together, write together in spaces, which I assume require lower bandwidth. So, I mean, the options you gave still require higher bandwidth, and not in every country you might have that. But if there's any thoughts that you have on that, I would be curious to know. Yeah. Let me see. Let me see. I think... Yeah, we did not have any events where people could draw together. I guess that maybe you did something like that? Also struggling? Absolutely, no. Yeah, as I said, I think, yeah, for example, Instagram was really one of the platforms thatuba curated a program for our Instagram feed where he would show international pieces and invited artists to create something for the platform. And there was discussion going on. So that is maybe one thing. But in terms of tools, we had many tools in mind. But so far, we didn't use any others. But it's a very good point. And that's what I like about the hybrid format still, that the physical space, obviously, is a very accessible space in the end. So thank you for all of your questions. Thank you so much for the talk and Q&A. And we are all looking forward to the different formats of next year's festival. Great. Thank you very much. So we are having a short break, and we'll be continuing at 2 PM. Thank you. Thank you.