Exciting part of the documentary festival IDFA is always DocLab, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year. It is exciting because it is an inspiring and often surprising sanctuary with filmmakers and artists tackling reality through media, virtual or otherwise, and unusual techniques.
This year's theme is 'Liminal Reality'. Not because it would be something entirely new, but precisely because it has actually been DocLab's territory from the beginning. Nonetheless, I still ask DocLab founder and programmer Caspar Sonnen what exactly this term means.
Frontier
Liminal indicates a transitional phase, he explains. The undefined area where between an old situation and a new one, anything is still possible. You are on the threshold. To stay in architectural terms: the entrance hall of a building can be called a liminal place. Another example is the beach, that wonderful area between city and sea where people come to play naturally, as it were.
At DocLab, for example, it could be the transition from film to the internet, from image to immersion, from human to artificial intelligence or from watching to experiencing. Thus, here we are always on the threshold of something else that film can be, according to the catalogue's introduction. New media, is a commonly used umbrella term, although that term is already starting to get a bit worn out.
It started in 2007 with an initial exploration. Back then, IDFA presented a modest online programme alongside its traditional screenings, showing how filmmakers were also using the internet. And sample artist Eboman provided a real remix of docu footage. That successful pilot was then christened DocLab, and fanned out in every conceivable direction. Web docs, virtual reality, performances and physical installations, whether interactive or not. Often in the liminal area between spectator and participant. Plus a conference that this year turned into a series of imaginative live events. Competitions are for Immersive Non-Fiction and Digital Storytelling.
Change
You can also see trends and shifts in those 15 years. Virtual Reality only really emerged around 2014, before that it existed only as regularly flipped hype. By contrast, data visualisations, creative representations that bring dry data from databases to life, seem to have gone out of fashion again. From DocLab's early days, for instance, I remember the project We Feel Fine by media artist Jonathan Harris. Who had an algorithm scour the global net, looking for emotion words from chats on social media. He visualised those emotions on a screen full of colourful dancing dots. So you could watch the emotional pulse of the world live.
But with my suspicion that data visualisation has gone away, Sonnen still disagrees. Data visualisations are still there, but they are used by traditional media. Artists prefer to work with things where much is still open. The liminal area.
Something that has also changed in these past 15 years is the internet itself. From the sanctuary it was in the beginning, it has become a place that no longer invites you to be open and vulnerable. A shame, thinks Sonnen.
Future
Whereupon, inevitably almost after the recent fuss surrounding Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg's Meta presentation, the word 'metaverse' also comes up. Suddenly hot, but actually a long-standing science fiction term. Think of films like The Matrix. Metaverse, the virtual world in which, in the form of avatars, we will soon be able to wander, according to some seers. A new internet that you can not only look at, but actually enter. Sonnen is curious whether I envisage that. I note that I am somewhat sceptical. We've also had film for over a hundred years, and we still don't live in a movie. To which Sonnen laughingly suggests that maybe the metaverse has already begun, given how much time many of us spend on our smartphones. Well, are we perhaps already catching a glimpse of that wonderful new world in DocLab? I'll leave the judgement to you for a moment. By the way, it would tie in nicely with one of this year's IDFA focus programmes: The Future Tense. In any case, go and experience it.
Tips
Finally, does Sonnen have any tips? For the record, he first mentions Symbiosis, a special hybrid between Virtual Reality and physical experience, complete with scent. In this VR experience, participants enter with physical attachments into a world where humanity has given way to an amalgamation of new life forms.
Other tips include Water & Coltan, a VR film that shows how humanity is predatory of the earth and itself. The Museum of Austerity is a mixed-reality installation showing the consequences of Britain's austerity policies. What happens when social safety nets fall away. Goliath is an interactive game that puts you inside the mind of someone with schizophrenia. A far too short list, of course. But surely a good start.
Good to know
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