Still: Oryza Healing Ground - Tamara Shogaolu

“Knowing it would be the opening film is a beautiful thing that also coincides with DocLab turning 18 this year,” curator Caspar Sonnen enthuses about the choice of Piotr Winiewicz’s About A Hero that launched IDFA just as the festival’s interactive and immersive stand comes of age.

This feature project (which uses AI to make a film in the vein of Werner Herzog) originated in DocLab several years ago. It’s a hybrid movie whose fictional part was generated by an Artificial Intelligence programme trained on data from Herzog’s movies and interviews. 

At DocLab itself, the desire is still (just as it was in 2007) to push boundaries, to explore VR and AI, and to examine and define ideas of documentary in their most radical form.

“At 18, we can see it is still a very volatile and elusive space, an immersive space,” Sonnen suggests. 

As ever, many Dutch artists and projects are represented in IDFA DocLab activities:

• Drift, a massive (750 minutes) work by Nienke Huitenga, Hay Kranen and Lieven Heeremans, is a podcast/sound experiment with an octopus as narrator that looks at the Netherlands 500 years in the future. 
• Future Botanica from Marcel van Brakel and Hazal Ertürkan is an augmented reality app, exploring the overlaps between nature and technology. Virtual ecosystems are planted within existing physical nature whereby participants superimpose digital designs on existing landscapes. By making your imaginings visible, you can safely explore ideas, expectations, fears and desires regarding the future of the natural environment.
• Tamara Shogaolu’s Oryza: Healing Ground, a sculptural immersive work including AI and AR, follows the trail of Black history to unearth a variety of nearly forgotten stories. The result is a multifaceted picture of Black land stewardship that is currently undergoing a revival in the “Black to the Land” movement—despite the systematic undermining of African American farmers by the US Department of Agriculture.
• In ROAMance by Stanislaw Liguzinski and Ibrahim Quraishi, the participant embarks on an adventure with an unknown fellow user, meeting each other virtually in a strange landscape. Both can see each other’s avatar and use the controllers to modify each other’s appearance—changing everything from their clothing to the length of their limbs and the colour of their eyes.  Together they follow the cues through a constantly shifting, dreamlike environment where part of the challenge is to keep finding each other. 
• Ancestors by Steye Hallema peers six generations into the future. In this interactive experience we embark on a thrilling, collective journey six generations into the future. Using a smartphone and AI, connections are created between us and others in the room. Together we’ll explore the challenges of tomorrow, discovering how collaboration is key to shaping a better world.
• Lebanese-Palestinian-Dutch visual artist Alaa Al Minawi’s work in progress The Liminal imagines an increasingly large community of dissatisfied citizens that live in a perennial no-man’s land of non-engagement – all within a wall. 
• You Can Sing Me on My Way by Seán Hannan is a 3D installation, inspired by Rene Magritte and Gaelic music, that breathes new life into the traditional sean-nós songs which date back to a time when the written word did not yet exist and news was passed on through music.
• In Drinking Brecht: An Automated Laboratory Performance, Sister Sylvester explores the politics and potential of this scientific theatre in relation to contemporary microbiology, through a hat stolen from the costume collection of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. Sylvester traces the possible wearers of the hat using forensic and archival methods, and the audience learns about the first-ever biohacker experiment, creating a documentary in a drink.
• Meanwhile, in Me, a Depiction, Lisa Schamlé is draped as a living part of her own performance/installation on a mirrored object. In the mirror, Schamlé looks not only at herself, but also back at you, seeking contact with her audience in order to involve it actively in the process taking place.

This year will see DocLab’s launch of a new research strand with the HVA (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) led by Jan Choi and exploring (as Sonnen explains) “the psychological phenomenon on “awe” and how that is “manifest within immersive art forms.”

Sonnen credits the most adventurous artists in the fields of VR and AI with “bringing us completely new art forms that have been influencing not just new media but film as well - look at our opening film!”

Another new initiative this year is the DocLab Playrooms. “We are inviting different artists within the field, some of the most pioneering ones, to present new works and to test new technologies live on the ground. These are open, walk-in events that celebrate the playfulness of this field, the inventiveness of this field, and the actual meeting of audiences and artists to critically examine these new forms of storytelling and new forms of technology.”

Just before this year’s IDFA began, festival director Orwa Nyrabia announced he will be standing down from his post next summer. Responding to the news, Sonnen pays warm tribute to the IDFA boss and his role in supporting DocLab.

“Orwa and me knew each other when he was a producer. We met two or three years before he became artistic director of IDFA,” he says. “He was one of those people from the film world that usually on the Wednesday, when the Forum was dying down, would come to the DocLab exhibition. He would really come and soak up what was happening outside of the film world in documentary art and new media. That was out of personal interest…he has been a great champion and a great bridge builder.”