Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

FLY ANGEL SOUL recounts the story of Sebastian, a young gay physician estranged from his Missouri Catholic family who dies of AIDS in Mali, having lived a peripatetic life searching for acceptance and a place to call home. Drawing on our experience as interactive VR storytellers (Queerskins: A Love Story, Queerskins: ARK, QuillsFest VR world), we created a bold cinematic language made possible only through virtual production. This language forefronts gestural camerawork, multiple perspectives, and elements of dance film, theater, and video games. Using Unity game engine and Cinemachine tools and the directors’ descriptions, lead engineer Elliott Mitchell created three types of “embodied” virtual cameras: a fly, an angel, and a human/soul, each of which sees and moves through the responsive virtual mis-en-scene differently. Although our film privileges the human space-time perspective, it allows the audience to experience alternative, computer-mediated ways of perceiving the same story. All three cameras function as the “players,” both in the video game and theatrical sense. The cameras’ real-time “performance” is documented as footage edited to create the final film. Both the fly and the angel cams are purely virtual. The “soul” cam path, however, was based on the real-time experience of creative technologist, dancer, and artist Clemence Debaig who was asked to move through the virtual set with the mindset of certain characters e.g. Sebastian’s estranged but loving mother, his cold and distant father, and as herself, a “neutral” observer. Debaig's decisions regarding how she moved through the environments and interacted with the virtual sets determined what was captured in real-time as 2D film footage by the “soul cam” programmed to follow her path and speed. In agreement with Vivian Sobchack’s description of the film camera as perceiving “subject,” we propose that our soul cam acts like a virtual cinematic avatar, allowing viewers to actively participate in the narrative as it navigates the responsive mis-en-scene. mbracing the visual language of spatial computing and video game, the film is constructed as a journey. There is little plot. In place of action, Sebastian’s acceptance of himself as a gay man and a Christian evolves. To allow Sebastian's interior state to manifest outwardly in a way that could be “lived" by film viewers, the story is revealed and experienced by movement through dream-like architecture and landscapes created in collaboration with fine artist Paolo Barlascini.

llya Szilak is an independent scholar, writer and new media artist. In her art practice, she uses open source media and collaborations forged via the Internet to create multimedia narrative installations online. Shaped by her experience as a physician, her artistic practice explores mortality, embodiment, identity, and belief in a media inundated by an increasingly virtual world. Cyril Tsiboulski is her interactive designer/ collaborator. Her first work Reconstructing Mayakovsky was included in the second Electronic Literature Collection and has been taught both as an example of innovative narrative game and literature at the university level. Her second work Queerskins was included in the third Electronic Literature Collection. She is currently working on Atomic Vacation, a post-apocalyptic narrative journey through virtual landscapes. She writes frequently in the popular press on new media art and electronic literature. Please join her September 10th from 1-6 PM at The Kitchen in NYC for the event she is curating: Electronic Literature: We Have Always Been Digital. This afternoon of interactive presentations showcases a range of dynamic forms from bots and games to interactive online works, and offers audience members the chance to engage with works and authors after the performances.