It’s New, It’s Neat, It’s Nice, It’s the Next Big Thing at VIFF, and it’s the subject of today’s interview/announcement. Allow me to introduce Signals. An interactive gallery consisting of AR, AI, video games, and specially projected 3D movies. It’s the future of digital watching in the present. There’s a lot to see at this special exhibit.
Wait, I’m not done. If I had you at AR and/or video games, I can tell you a little bit about everything showcased here before I get into the interview, in which Loc Dao went into further detail about.
The Video games section features a couple of games that are going to be released soon, so it’s like getting a chance to test games out before they hit the markets. Although 1000Xexist does have a downloadable demo via Steam. How cool is that? There’s also a chance to chill on a couch and play Faye Farm which is new around these parts. The experience known as Echoes of Chinatown is like a VR experience, and a 3D projector which is about ancient memories of China and what it was once like. I don’t cry, but I learn. Then there’s the IM4 Lab, using a Tipi to project an experimental work of art. Kasey the director wanted to represent the future of elders and show navigating a fortress. I’ve heard of Tipi Tales but this is something else. For more cool plant life and vegetation there is AI that showed the growth of roots and even shapes you in with the roots, combined with a nearby garden that makes interesting music. Over at the AR lab, it starts off with pictures and artists acknowledgments of those who contributed artwork to such an elaborate exhibit. Beside the walls featuring artists is an AR simulator combined with an AI system that helps transform memories into new stories. After giving one bad memory, I can safely say that AI didn’t take my job of writing away from me, it gave me an idea for an autobiographical movie about one small shred of me. Behind the walls of the artists is Sync and Sink, a special system that takes brain wave data and measures it. I haven’t seen visuals like that since a doctor studied my brainwaves while I listened to experimental music. Right between those two is Kasey’s 3D work which features a series of different creature type things going about a walk cycle. Materials are made of rags, porcupine quills, a plant from the sea, beads, and even fur. Finally, there’s a deep crevice in the edge of that area with AR films from the Indigenous community in a small comfortable room. That’s enough of that, the next signal is Loc Dao’s informative chat with me. He had a lot to share and all the signals he gave off during this talk were positive.
HNMAG: Obviously, this is about AI and its advantages. Do you personally see AI as a good thing?
Loc Dao: I see AI as an enabling technology, like all technologies that have come before. I think it’s what we do with AI as humans that will determine if it’s a good or bad thing. The technology itself is fairly new and evolving and we’re all learning from it. There are many things saw e know that are currently discussed that are very concerning about the technology. We are very concerned with the issues raised around what happens to our privacy, what does identity mean, what are the challenges here. Having said that, we are also trying to find the good things and see where AI can help us and support us.
HNMAG: What went into planning and deciding the whole exhibit?
Loc Dao: Signals is really about celebrating BC’s tech talent, and it comes from our organization DigiBC and the Vancouver International Film Fest agreeing on a partnership. To really celebrate creative technology, in our membership we have studios that produce animation, work on visual effects for films, work in visual production, and also video game studios and VR and AR studios. We realize last year when we started planning this, the world doesn’t know how much content that they watch is actually produced here in BC. Whether it’s video games that we play, or film/tv series that we watch. Signals is really rooted in that and this year for example, we have 2 exclusive premieres of video games. One that just came out from a local studio called Phoenix Labs (Pay Farm), and then we have sneak peeks on 2 games from independent studios. One called Home Alone 3 by Blackbird Interactive and another one called One Thousand Times Resist by Sunset Visitor. Lots of supporting local studios and talent, then we also have a very strong indigenous program where one of our curators is Loretta Todd, the founder of the Indigenous Matriarchs Studio called IM4 Lab.
HNMAG: When it came to the selection process, how did you choose what got showcased?
Loc Dao: This year as we’re still growing, since it’s the first official version of Signals. We are still working with the community of storytellers and filmmakers and we have really opened up conversations with people that have been supportive of last year’s pilot. Then IM4 is involved in Indigenous filmmaking and technology. They just finished North America’s first Indigenous Virtual Production training over the summer. We’re actually going to be premiering some of the shorts that were made using today’s latest technology: Unreal Engine and LED walls. Then, we were also looking at what’s premiering and what’s coming out in BC. Then there is a small selection of international projects that look at issues that we wanted to raise. One of them looks at AI and how it’s been used to document the memories of an Alzheimer’s patient and it’s used to interact with how AI would imagine new memories from the patient. Another one looks at wearable technologies and paging your thoughts. It’s a fun game that you get to see each other’s thoughts in artistic representation and you try and match the thoughts in this gamified experience. We want to use this to really raise awareness and discussion around the privacy of your thoughts as technology is able to gage that further and further.
HNMAG: So it’s definitely a lot different compared to VIFF programs. Have you run similar programs before?
Loc Dao: I’ve been involved in producing content for programs similar to this. I used to work at the National Film Board of Canada and I co-founded the NFB Digital Studio that did interactive and immersive works. We used to have our projects at Sundance, Tribeca, and Infidel Lab. We would support the curators at those festivals and were good friends.
Loc began to explain how Sundance New Frontier’s Senior Programmer was coming to see Signals and talk about the future of festivals and new forms of storytelling that use technology in festivals. That was enough to excite me.
HNMAG: There are a lot of things being showcased. How does one decide which is best to observe?
Loc Dao: We give you a fair amount of information online to see what interests you first. But we also give you an hour and 45 minute experience when you’re there. It’s set up a lot like an art gallery where you can choose what you want to see and choose your own adventure. You’re always welcome to come back for another timeslot as well if there’s something you want to engage in. You won’t be able to see EVERYTHING in an hour 45, so if there’s anything you like, you can come back and watch all of the IM4 virtual production films that came out of there. Or you can come back and play one of the video games in our little arcade if you want to.
HNMAG: Which would you say is your personal favourite?
Loc Dao: We have a project called We Are Entanglement made by Haru Ji and Graham Wakefield. It’s originally from Korea, but is Canadian and their project reuses AI to understand and generate how AI sees the mycelium network in our forests and underground. We challenged them to add interactions to that when you go to the exhibit, it’ll be the first time where humans will be represented in this forest that’s being imagined. That’s very important because to counter that we have a real garden right beside it, and we have one of the Indigenous Matriarchs, Cease Wyss bringing in a native garden and we have a music installation that actually draws its sounds from the garden and we wanted to show that connection back to the land. As amazing as these are, we can’t forget the land and water that we came from.
HNMAG: Do you think this will inspire people to embrace AI?
Loc Dao: I hope that it will inform them to ask questions, to be able to think about. For people in the industry, it’s definitely about how can it help you, how can it help us, whether it’s in our science, data, and research. Even as we look at what happened with the forest fires this year, part of the reason we have Entanglement is because of the way it looks at forests and we’re posing the question maybe this can help us with our modelling around climate change and understanding of what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix things as well.
HNMAG: What else are you trying to teach people?
Loc Dao: I really want to just let them meet new artists through their work. We have so much, we have another project from Casey Koyczan from the Northern Dene. He has 3 projects in this exhibit, one of them’s a VR project, one is an experience welcoming people into the afterlife, that’s going to be projected as a hologram in a Teepee. Then he has these huge wall-size projections of people walking made out of antlers, porcupine quills, and beads. It’s really empowering beautiful work and we want to help amplify the work of these great artists.
HNMAG: Do you hope to do something like this next year?
Loc Dao: That is our goal, we are hoping to continue being able to celebrate our talent from BC to engage in international dialogue around technology and story. Also to put Vancouver globally on the map and more around these issues.
HNMAG: What are your hopes for exhibits and showcases to be like in the future?
Loc Dao: One of the things that we did from all these years of being at the film festivals, around 12-13 years was we endeavour to make the experiences as accessible to as many people at once. We don’t have a lot of VR headset projects for that reason, and we work with the artists in challenging them to create versions that multiple people can enjoy at once and we know the power of being in the cinema with a room of strangers and it’s trying to find that connection and how people connect and reconnect in these challenging times.
How cool does all that sound? If anything, this article is just full of signals telling you to check out Signals. It’s going on currently and will be here the whole week. Check it out while you can. Have fun, explore, learn lots of new stuff. More importantly, embrace AI. It hasn’t taken over yet.