In search of real - IDFA DocLab 2025 is done with the internet

IDFA DocLab, the programme for all digital, immersive and related art forms, this year's theme is ‘Off the Internet!’ (The exclamation mark is mine). That sounds like a challenging battle cry, and at the same time it feels a little strange. After all, isn't the internet an obvious ally of that wonder garden of digital art that DocLab is?

‘Off the Internet’ is a response to the paradox of our times, underlined Caspar Sonnen (IDFA's head of New Media) at the IDFA press conference. “Today we are connected 24/7 by digital technology, and yet we are more than ever thrown back on ourselves, lonely and worried. Do social and digital media make us stuck in a perpetual present? Where are past and future, where are ourselves and others, where is physical reality beyond our screens?”

In the beginning, the internet was a promise that was going to connect everyone in the world, now it is a manipulation tool in the hands of Big Tech. Sonnen makes a comparison with our food. Once we just cooked our own, then fast food came along as a very welcome new invention that also ends up causing very big problems.

DocLab

Looking back, of course, I also see that since 2007 year the development of the DocLab programme runs parallel to the growth of the internet and what takes place on it. Perhaps that is precisely why DocLab is the place to critically question how we can still get to an experience of reality through these new media.

Actually, this is something you could always do at DocLab, which is very broad in scope. This year's programme does not look very different from other years either, although Sonnen notes that the Off the Internet theme was something the programmers did keep in mind. Personally, at least, I see it as a new set of glasses through which to look at this year's offering.

Letters on the internet

IDFA invites us to let go of our daily screens and immerse ourselves in new, also physical experiences and possibilities of connection at DocLab. I get that that still sounds a bit abstract, so let's search for a few illustrative examples.

First of all, there are installations and presentations that explicitly include the Internet as their subject. I was immediately very impressed by Life Needs Internet 2010-2025, a project by Jeroen van Loon. For fifteen years, he collected handwritten letters from people all over the world writing to him about what the internet means to them. From schoolchildren to elderly people who once had to get very used to this new communication.

From more than 1400 letters, he made a selection that you can browse through immediately upon entering De Brakke Grond. You keep looking and reading and looking and reading - fortunately there are legibly printed and translated trancriptions. Here, the digital world has again become very tangible, physical and handwritten. Impressive.

Be a lesbian

A regular feature of DocLab, of course, are all kinds of VR installations, which are indeed completely unrelated to the internet. They can, however, raise the question of whether such immersion in such a virtual world is a real experience. Like, for instance, the Lesbian Simulator by Iris van der Meule. It is a kind of VR game, in which after putting on the VR glasses, you create your own lesbian avatar, merrily dance along in raves but also get ugly cocks thrown at you when people in the tram see you walking hand-in-hand with your girlfriend. So if you are not a lesbian yourself, you can still get some of that lesbian experience. But because an emphatically cartoonish form with lots of gaudy dolls was chosen, it all felt a bit fleeting to me. But it is funny and inviting, and of course you can make a lot clear with humour.

Explosive

Fierce and poignant though The Exploding Girl VR by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, selected for the Cannes festival earlier this year. It is an immersive experience of Candice, a young woman who feels like she explodes several times every day. Which you also literally see, in a cloud of limbs and splattering blood. ‘What does my body want to tell me,’ she wonders desperately. However surreal at times, you may certainly see this as the almost tangible depiction of an immersion in one's depression, fears and loneliness.

Another step further into the harsh reality around us then goes the VR documentary Under the Same Sky By Khalil Ashawi and Hadeel Arja. On one side the sea, on the other the enemy. Armed with a 360-degree camera that captures images all around, Palestinian journalist Sami treks through the Gaza strip. As a viewer, you are caught all around capturing this raw reality, while Sami speaks to people still searching for their belongings among the rubble. I have yet to see this VR myself, but it is accompanied by warnings of violent images of death and human suffering.

Bomb shells

Considerably more stylised is the way In 36,000 Ways makes that other war, the one in Ukraine, tangible. In this installation by Karim Ben Khelifa, I step into a small room, put on headphones, grab the sharp-edged object lying there, and as I hear a heartbeat (not my own, if I have been paying attention) I look around and see that I am standing in the middle of a cloud of shards. Real splinters of a fragmentation bomb, including that sharp shard I hold in my hand. A wonderfully understated experience that evokes a moment of reflection.

All this is just a fraction of what can be discovered in the DocLab Exhibition, the VR Gallery, the Interactive Cinema and other performances.

Theatre from a box

Even then Handle With Care by the always highly inventive Belgian company Ontroerend Goed. A performance without actors. The audience creates it themselves based on what they find in that mysterious box on stage. I didn't have a chance to experience it myself yet, but am very curious. ‘Ten times better than the best game,’ an IDFA staff member who did get to taste it already confides in me. So I wanted to give this as a final tip, but oops, everything is already sold out I see now. But who knows, it might not stop at DocLab.

Appreciate this Article!!!

Culture Press is independent. You make that possible with a donation to the author of this article. We will transfer your donation for 100% to the author!