Colloquium ENS Louis Lumière: forms, experiences and devices: audiovisual production in the face of “immersive” technologies

Dialogue on creation in virtual reality with Benoît Labourdette (filmmaker and producer, BL Prod) and Teddy Aymard (producer, Le bureau des curiosités), with a moment of practice so that the gesture nourishes the thought.

International colloquium organised by the RIRRA 21 of the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and the ENS Louis Lumière. 18 April 2019.

Video recordings by Rodolphe Olcèse.

Dedicated web page

Direct link to the web page

www.benoitlabourdette.com/_docs/projets/2019/2019_colloque_technos_immersives/

Program for the symposium

Symposium “Forms, experiences and devices: audiovisual production and immersive technologies”.

http://www.benoitlabourdette.com/_docs/projets/2019/2019_colloque_technos_immersives/

April 18, 2019

This international conference organized by RIRRA 21 of the University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 and the ENS Louis-Lumière proposes to question the audiovisual forms induced by so-called “immersive” technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality) and the reception modalities they imply. The aim will be to explore the various issues at stake - technical, aesthetic, ideological, theoretical, etc. - while also analysing the discourse produced on this subject.

https://www.ens-louis-lumiere.fr/colloque-formes-experiences-et-dispositifs-la-production-audiovisuelle-face-aux-technologies

UNIVERSITY OF MONTPELLIER

Roderick Coover (Temple University, Philadelphia)

Codes of the temporal imaginary: Conceptualizing time-space relationships in the VR/XR works Hearts And Minds, Key To Time and The Altering Shores

Giacomo Mercuriali (University of Milan)

Installation Art and the Rethoric of Immersion

Philippe Boisnard (artist, researcher at the Laboratoire d’études en Sciences des Arts, Aix-Marseille University)

The in-between of the Open. The ontological crack of immersivity

Christi Lidl (doctoral student at the ERG, University of Saint-Louis, Brussels)

SPACE(S) 360°/VR: Narrations and dedicated scenographic devices

Marc Ries (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main)

From the optical unconscious to the digital unconscious

Vincent Ciciliato (University of Saint Etienne, CERIEC)

Virtual worlds and musical writing: around the project Il Canto dei Suicidi

Mathieu Pradat (director and producer)

Immersive storytelling: The user’s vision versus the author’s intent

Round Table

Stakes of creation and production in virtual reality organized in partnership with Languedoc-Roussillon Cinéma

ENS LOUIS-LUMIÈRE

Panel

Techniques, aesthetics and experimentation with sound spaces in Virtual Reality works

Jean-Baptiste Lenglet (visual artist, researcher, co-founder of the Virtual Dream Center)

Virtual Dream Center 2.0: Audioguide. Integration of sound in virtual reality spaces

Lara Morciano (composer, pianist, researcher at IRCAM)

The ambiguity of the double

Élise Vandewalle (visual artist, researcher)

A sound work in virtual reality: immersion in Les Chasseurs d’ombres (The Shadow Chasers)

Momoko Seto (artist, director, researcher)

PLANET ∞ (2017)

Katharina Fuchs (doctoral student, researcher, University of Paris 8)

Constraint makes the work: sound in Virtual Reality between technical constraint and aesthetic impact.

Vincent Meyrueis and Jean-François Jégo (University of Paris 8, INREV)

Immersion and interaction, substrate for creation and narration

Anna Caterina Dalmasso (Université Saint-Louis, Brussels)

What about the frame? Formativity and performativity of the virtual experience

Jean-Jacques Gay (art critic, curator, researcher at CiTU-Paragraphe, University of Paris 8)

For a spectator-worker, at the centre of the work: receiving and creative postures of an ultra-contemporary spectator.

Dialogue on virtual reality creation with Benoît Labourdette (filmmaker and producer, Quidam) and Teddy Aymard (producer, Le bureau des curiosités)

The conference is organized by the RIRRA 21 of the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and the ENS Louis-Lumière in partnership with Montpellier Industries Culturelles et Créatives, Les Storygraphes, Languedoc-Roussillon Cinéma, with the support of the European Union (FEDER) and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH).

https://calenda.org/531606

Forms, experiences and devices: audiovisual production in the face of “immersive” technologies
Forms, experiences and systems: audiovisual production and immersive technologies

International symposium organized by RIRRA 21 of the University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 and ENS Louis-Lumière

International conference organised by RIRRA 21 by the ’Université Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 and ENS Louis-Lumière
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Published on Wednesday 02 January 2019 by Anastasia Giardinelli

Abstract

This conference proposes to question the audiovisual forms induced by so-called “immersive” technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality) and the reception modalities they imply. It will explore the various issues at stake - technical, aesthetic, ideological, theoretical..., while also analysing the discourse produced on this subject.

Announcment
Presentation

“A new art would be like a new organ of the senses. And it is a rare thing that these multiply”, wrote Béla Balazs about cinema in 1924. Almost a century later, this hypothesis remains relevant, while the devices of “eXtended reality” develop and modify in depth, via the processes of immersion and interaction they convoke, both the spectatorial postures and the representational forms.

These so-called “immersive” technologies have been the object of a real craze for several years, mainly generated by virtual reality. However, this phenomenon seems to be largely maintained by the players themselves and the media, particularly since the takeover of Oculus by Facebook in 2014, which has led to constant promotional operations by several manufacturers of increasingly high-performance video-headsets (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear, Playstation VR, Pico VR, etc.).

By soliciting multiple sensory channels, the vast majority of these devices aim to produce presence effects (Waterworth, Mantovani and Riva, 2010; Nanipierri, 2017), to “enhance” our senses, to blur the boundaries between space, both physical and simulated. The subtitle of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar-winning installation, Carne Y Arena (2017), is eloquent in this regard: “Virtually present, physically invisible”. If it applies in this case more directly to the narrative and thus to the characters represented - migrants trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States - it also reflects the dynamic of reception at work in these devices around the problem of presence-absence.

Because they engage, in different interactive modalities, the spectator’s body and psychic apparatus in the space of representation and in the act of narration, they tend to favour “performative experiences” (Ford Morie, 2007) in which the interfaces seem increasingly integrated, and therefore transparent (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Playing on both the regime of simulacra/simulation and the logic of incorporation-dissolution (body as interface and body in the image), they seek to reduce the gap between real space and illusionist space. This is why the aesthetic forms that unfold there are apprehended in terms of environment and immersion, suggesting not only an all-encompassing, if not absorbing, experience, but also a more immediate reception. What then remains of the image and the screen in these technological configurations? Doesn’t the image paradoxically become “an-iconic” (D’Aloia, 2018)? And does the screen, far from disappearing, not inform itself in “arch-screen” form (Carbone, 2018)? To define the particular nature of spectatorial involvement, wouldn’t the notion of “instantiation” at work in video games (Amato, 2014) be more operative than that of immersion?

We also note that the discourse accompanying “immersive” technologies highlights the radical novelty of the audiovisual forms they generate. However, various artists, particularly in the fields of experimental cinema, video art and digital arts, have been exploring for several decades now a large number of the aesthetic issues that arise today. It therefore seems important to consider these technologies over the long term, by re-inscribing them in the continuity of an extended history of techniques, practices and (audio)visual forms.

If these accompanying discourses most often invoke the rhetoric of overbidding (enriched experience, extended reality, augmented meaning...) to qualify the particular reception induced by virtual reality, augmented reality or mixed reality devices, we can nevertheless question the quality of the spectatorial experience. Do the new perceptive (and therefore cognitive and psychic) modalities that these technologies produce nevertheless determine rich, if not unprecedented, aesthetic (aesthetic) experiences? Beyond the empathic, the sensational, or the spectacular, is the multimodal involvement on which they are based (sensory-motor, cognitive, physiological, emotional) really meaningful? Do the forms they shape acquire greater expressive value? By proposing a space of representation a priori without a “frame”, do they make it possible to construct a point of view, to structure a gaze or, better still, to return to the eye its “wild state”, to quote the surrealist injunctions?

This conference proposes to question the audiovisual forms induced by so-called “immersive” technologies (virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality) and the reception modalities they imply. It will explore the various issues at stake - technical, aesthetic, ideological, theoretical..., while also analysing the discourse produced on this subject.

Four main lines of research are envisaged:

1) Historical perspective of “immersive” forms and media archaeology

The novelty of the forms and experience generated by “immersive” devices and the breakthrough innovation they would constitute are generally emphasized. Yet these devices seem to be part of a vast cultural and technological continuity. Is it necessary to go back to Daguerre’s Diorama and the Passages parisiens dear to Walter Benjamin? More surely, we can see as an ancestor of current technologies the Sensorama imagined by Morton Heilig in the 1950s, a prototype offering a cabin equipped with various multi-sensory activation devices (3D stereoscopic images, stereo sound, vibrating seat, aromas...). While recent technological advances in RV devices in particular and creative experimentation with the content on offer are clearly renewing the processes implemented to promote immersive experiences, experiments with synoptic view, immersion and interaction, immediacy, transparency - supposed or proven - with the images/represented have undoubtedly preceded the emergence of digital and connected screens.

2) Forms and processes of creation

What forms are emerging? What are the creative processes at work? How are they disrupting the traditional processes of filmmaking? Can we still talk about frame, editing, point of view, or should we call up new categories of analysis? What place does sound occupy in this “image space” (Güntzel, 2008)? How are narration and storytelling approached in this space? How do new spaces-time develop?

3) Modalities of reception and spectator involvement

Beyond the prescriptive dimension of the terms used to qualify these new forms and devices, it seems necessary to question the notion of immersion. Can it be specifically characterized? And correlatively can there be situations of non-immersion? What are the processes used to build a continuity between real and simulated space? How is the spectator’s body physically, sensorially and metaphorically engaged? If his gaze merges with the “perceiving instance” (Metz), how does he invest the image, in terms of the imaginary, and what are the effects of this from a cognitive point of view?

4) Valorization, diffusion and legitimization

The development of these technologies is inseparable from significant public and private investment. In recent years, we have witnessed the creation of specialized production companies, the implementation of numerous creative support systems (CNC, Beaumarchais-SACD...), and the investment of major audiovisual groups, such as Arte and France Télévisions, in the production and broadcasting of 360° and VR content. This valorisation process has culminated in recent years with the appearance of festivals dedicated to the diffusion of this type of creation (for example in France in 2016, the Paris Virtual Film Festival and the VR Arles Festival) and the appearance of specific programming in the most well-known and recognised international film festivals (IDFA and Sundance Film Festival in 2015, Cannes Film Festival and Mostra de Venise in 2016, Berlinale in 2018). It is important to question this dynamic of legitimisation and to put it into perspective, not only with the difficulties encountered by the players in this emerging market in terms of exploitation and consumerisation, but also with the recent trend towards the creation of dedicated entertainment venues, such as amusement parks (The Void, East Valley of Science and Fantasy, Illucity...).
Indicative bibliography

Amato Etienne-Armand, “Pour une théorie unificatrice du jeu vidéo : le modèle analytique de la co-instanciation” , Psychologie clinique, n°37, 2014.

Bolter Jay David and Grusin Walter, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999.

Carbone Mauro, “Des pouvoirs de l’archi-écran et de l’idéologie de la”transparence 2.0 ", in M. Carbone, J. Bodini, A. C. Dalmasso [dir.], Des pouvoirs des écrans, Paris, Mimésis, coll. Images, Médiums, 2018.

D’Aloia Adriano, “Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena”, Senses of Cinema, No. 87, June 2018.

Ford Morie Jacquelyn, Meaning and emplacement in expressive immersive virtual environments, Phd Thesis, College Dublin University, 2007.

Fuchs Phlippe, Les casques de réalité virtuelle et de jeux vidéo, Paris, Presses des Mines, 2016.

Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich,. Eloge de la présence. Ce qui échappe à la signification, Paris, Libella-Maren Sell, 2010.

Guelton Bernard (dir.), Les Figures de l’immersion, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014.

Günzel Stephan, “The Space-Image. Interactivité et spatialité des jeux informatiques”, Actes de la conférence sur la philosophie des jeux informatiques, Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe et Dieter Mersch (dir.), Potsdam, Presses Universitaires 2008.

Hayles Katherine, How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Nanniperi Olivier, Du réel au virtuel. Les paradoxes de la présence, Paris, Harmattan, Ouverture philosophique, 2017.

Noë Alva, Action in Perception, Cambridge, Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2006.

Waterworth J. A., Waterworth E. L., Mantovani F., & Riva G, “On feeling (the) present : An evolutionary account of the sense of presence in physical and electronically-mediated environments”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, n°17 (1-2), 2010.