There were a number of projects exploring social dynamics within immersive pieces, including the special jury prize winner for the XR competition PROOF AS IF PROOF WERE NEEDED. This was a projection-based video project that featured video feeds from four different rooms in a home where a couple is searching for different objects. There are five audience members who are walking between rooms represented by a top-down blueprint of the home, and there's a computer vision system that's detecting where the most people are located and then showing the feed from that room. There are six speakers providing an ongoing Foley-based spatial audio narrative of sounds coming from different locations giving the audience a clue as to where they should investigate to puzzle together the cryptic narrative. The core mechanics felt SLEEP NO MORE-inspired where you move between different rooms to see different threads of a multi-threaded story, and you use your body to edit the experience. But instead of a single POV, it's abstracted into a collective social experiment where you have to collaborate with four other people in order to vote on what room video feed to watch. In the end, there's a lot of the story that remained a complete mystery to me until I had the symbolic dream logic decoded in my interview with co-director Ting Tong Chang and Blast Theory representative Anne Rupert. Here's the jury statement about this piece, "Spoiler Alert! The Special Jury Award Winner made us feel lost, frustrated and disconnected from each other. What started as a slow burn, turned into an unexpected connection and dance between space, story, technology and human behavior."
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Music: Fatality
