DocLab explores Shared Realities

Celebrating its 20th edition, IDFA DocLab looks back on two decades of pioneering interactive and immersive documentary art, while decisively turning toward the next 20 years. What began as an experiment in 2007, has grown into a leading platform for the exploration of where digital art and critical reflection on technology meet.  

Presented under the theme Shared Realities, the anniversary program reflects on DocLab’s history and traces plans to resurface formative archival works, while venturing forward to ask: which realities do we want to experience together in the future? 

The theme echoes this year’s launch of a new, eponymous international consortium, Shared Realities, that brings together artists, researchers, academic partners, venues, and cultural organizations to investigate new ways of creating, presenting, and sustaining immersive art. IDFA DocLab returns with an exhibition in de Brakke Grond, ARTIS-Planetarium, Droog, and Tobacco Theatre, with a diverse lineup of interdisciplinary immersive art and anniversary highlights to be revealed in the coming weeks. The full IDFA DocLab selection will be announced in October. 

IDFA DocLab unveils the first projects for its 20th anniversary, including the two winners of the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant. The Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA DocLab have selected two winning projects, each will receive €10,000 to finalize and present the work at IDFA DocLab. Both participatory works turn systems that shape everyday life into experiences the audience can enter.  

In The Love Files, Sanne De Wilde and Samir Veen draw on immigration files containing intimate evidence of relationships, inviting audiences to become the judge of whether a couple’s love is “real”.  

All the Downtime by Ant Hampton, produced by Time Based Editions, is photobook guided by audio and a live performer, taking audiences into a hyper-automated warehouse where a power outage disrupts the systems designed to keep everything running, creating an unexpected opening for playfulness, humanity, and defiance. Read more about the projects here. 

The 20th anniversary program also includes new works developed through Shared Realities, including Tamara Shogaolu’s The Invisible Woman, a VR opera that recovers the story of Francisca de Angola, a 17th-century free Black woman in Amsterdam. It will be presented in the VR Gallery and as a collective experience in the Nationale Opera’s Boekmanzaal.  

POLYMORF presents Microbiome Restaurant, comprising Haute Cuisine for the Rectum and Plural Tastings, two sensory experiences exploring the human body as an ecosystem. 

ESHRAQ by Ali Eslami is a game inspired by 12th-century Persian Illuminationist philosophy, this ever-changing simulation lets you inhabit different bodies and move through worlds set in motion by spells.

Combining a single-player game with a shared installation and interactive film, Palimpsest by Guillaume Roux and Johan Delétang explores a world of overlapping stories.

The Archive Arcade, which restores landmark immersive works, including Thanatorama by Ana Maria de Jésus, the first project ever selected for IDFA DocLab, and many more. 

These projects are supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and CIIIC

Other projects are Orgasmagoria by Dries Verhoeven explores sexual pleasure in the digital age and will be screened at sex theatre Casa Rosso.