Anouschka
In this animated mixed reality game, your smartphone transports you to Bijlmermeer, the most diverse district in the Netherlands. Here you help Anouschka, a Black teenager, to uncover her family history.
DocLab Exhibition: Phenomenal Friction
Description
Technology, from the most recent gadgets to the earliest chopping tools, has always promised us a world where efficiency and convenience reign supreme. But what do we lose when things get too “smooth and seamless”? What are the hidden costs of a reality ruled by efficient algorithms, easy transactions and automated echo chambers? Who wins in this game? And what would we gain if, instead, we allow more space for friction, interaction, complexity and resistance to the status quo? This year, IDFA DocLab explores friction in all its forms.
With the exhibition program Phenomenal Friction, IDFA’s section for interactive and immersive non-fiction explores friction in all its forms. From November 10 – 19, Phenomenal Friction presents 30+ new documentary artworks, games and virtual experiences by artists (and their machines) from across the globe. From messy and radical encounters with artificial intelligence to physical performances and close encounters inside immersive worlds.
Join us on a journey where friction is part of life - from the physical to the digital, the emotional and the philosophical. Besides the main exhibition in De Brakke Grond, we have a range of projects showcased in Arti et Amicitiae, (a 5 minute walk from De Brakke Grond) including the immersive dance performance One Two, the physical VR experience Traversing the Mist, and an overview of virtual reality projects in the IDFA DocLab VR Gallery. At Eye Filmmuseum the VR installation Shadowtime is presented.
Composition
Borderline Visible
Led by an audio track and tracing your own finger along the pages of a book of photos and text fragments, you set off on a journey from Lausanne to Izmir with two artist friends. Gradually the trip turns into a moving and troubled psychogeography.
Close
Juitamai dance expresses the unheard stories of Japanese women without words. It is both liberating and regulated, an accusation and at the same time a game of seduction. This VR experience pushes these contradictions to the extreme—and beyond.
Cyberfeminism Index Installation
Feminists have been giving shape to cyberspace since the early days of the internet. In this indispensable index enriched with augmented reality, you can browse through their expressions of online tech activism and new media art.
Despelote
An interactive, atmospheric and playful football game about city dwellers in Ecuador. Through the carefree eyes of eight-year-old Julián, everything—life at home, at school and on the city squares—revolves around the love of football.
Emperor
Monochrome animations inspired by pencil drawings put you inside the brain of a person with aphasia. In this interactive VR, you experience the role of a father who has lost his speech, and the story of his daughter who is trying to communicate with him.
Going Back Home: Mother VR
Chilean women in prison have limited contact with their family and children. This VR experience shows how a handful of women behind bars get a brief opportunity to stand beside their children in virtual reality.
Offset: Boiler Room
Offset: Boiler Room, a call-center-like installation developed by artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, offers a critical look at existing carbon compensation schemes and engages participants in direct action.
PHANTOM
Black humor may be the best weapon against the slippery emotions you experience if you’re struggling with mental health problems or addiction. This interactive experience tries to provide insight into these complex issues using AR.
Redemption
In this immersive installation, creator Mariana Luiza critiques Brazil’s racial whitening ideology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, offering a poetic, counter-colonial reading of the painting Ham’s Redemption.
The School, a World
This interactive web documentary transports you to Chlebiotki, a village in Poland. You see how much has changed, and why the school is empty. Eight residents talk about their lives, their dreams. Look around and let them win your heart.
Squeeker: The Mouse Coach
Run with Squeeker—a running program, app, and interactive installation. Running with your mouse coach earns you scroll distance on social media and treats for your coach. Match your mouse coach’s daily half-marathon, one paw at a time!
Turbulence: Jamais Vu
In this mixed reality work, you experience with a VR headset what it is like when reality suddenly seems new and different. How does this feeling of disorientation and alienation affect your image of your environment, of the material world, of yourself?
The Vivid Unknown
What happens when you feed an AI system the groundbreaking 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi? This interactive installation, shaped by the past and the actions of visitors, is a reflection on the consequences of AI in the near future.
Yugo: the non-game
Making social contact is an important motive for many gamers. In this “non-game,” you experience the same connections without having to actually play. Calmly drive through a twilit landscape while voice-chatting with fellow players logged in elsewhere.
IDFA DocLab: Phenomenal Friction
With this year's theme Phenomenal Friction, DocLab explores friction in all its forms. The exhibition program invites audiences to look beyond technological efficiency and convenience, to explore the resistance that can propel creativity forward and the conflict that reveals life's complexities.
