Still: The Great Orator - Daniël Ernst

Daniel Ernst is one of the pioneering figures in VR and immersive work in the Netherlands. He has been telling stories using VR since 2012 and was a games designer before that. He is at the Venice Festival this week with his latest “diorama” project, The Great Orator*, partly inspired by his memories of Dutch TV mediums who may have been charlatans, but who once commanded huge audiences.

“Dioramas are these places where time stands still like a mosquito caught in amber,” Ernst explains.

“If you are in a museum and you visit an exhibit of a dinosaur drowning in a tar pit, a month from now that dinosaur is still drowning…I create these virtual reality dioramas where time doesn’t pass. I use interaction not to tell a story - but to make you experience a story.”

Ernst first began thinking about The Great Orator in 2018. Back then, artists were experimenting with GPT models and achieving some startling results. “It felt a bit more innocent than it does now.”

The project won the 4DR Studios Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam where it was presented in Darkroom, the WIP section of co-production market CineMart. Ernst is also a former Golden Calf winner for his interactive VR opera, Die Fernweh Oper.

In The Great Orator, a former TV medium generates an “infinite amount of stories.” She guides participants through her own ever-shifting memories.

“I was always fascinated with TV mediums and how they would leverage technology to get their message out,” Ernst says. In “real” life, these mediums often saw their careers collapse in scandal. In The Great Orator, the narrator died at the height of her fame and now lives on as an AI entity, feeding off but also moulding the memories of her followers. She can comment on current affairs and, at times, seems like an all-knowing newscaster. 

“Reality doesn’t seem to be a fixed thing anymore,” Ernst observes of how the ‘Orator’ interprets the world. She has been programmed with a Large Language Model (LLM), an AI system fed on huge amounts of data which is used to then generate human language.

“We tried to do it as ethically as possible,” Ernst states. He also worked with Dutch poet Thomas Möhlmann on the project. “Some texts are fixed. Those are ones needed as a through line for the experience but then, if you point at an object that doesn’t have a text made by Thomas or you point at it a second time, then the memory shifts. You get a new one!”

Ernst produced as well as directed the project. Early in its development, in 2019, he set up a collaboration with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), working closely with AI engineer Niels Egberts who updated all the systems and made them usable in production, instead of just as an experiment.

“Technology back then was not as advanced as it is now. There was nothing we could adopt off the shelf,” he explains why he needed such high-level assistance.

Ernst describes Venice Immersive as “the summit” for VR work, and is relishing the chance to show his project to his peers. Nonetheless, The Great Orator isn’t just something viewers can see at festivals or museums. “I wanted to do one experience that people could also download at home after the festival season finishes,” he reflects.

That is why you will be able to access the project on Steam, the hugely popular gaming platform. 

Some within the VR and immersive community are heavily critical of the way companies like Meta focus far more on gaming than on artistic narrative work. Ernst understands these concerns. “VR needs a broad selection or projects, not just shooters [games] where you kill things,” he suggests.

The Great Orator isn’t a linear story and nor is it a game - but contains some of the best elements of both forms. Ernst draws both on the artistic ambitions of cinema and on the technological and collaborative strengths of the gaming community.

“The Great Orator is a medium because she mediates between the real world and hers. And you are somewhere in-between,” Ernst signs off.