Ahorse!
Wendy Gutman
2018
20 min
This richly cinematic fulldome piece presents an alternative history of human imagination, focused on our depiction of the horse from the beginning of time to a virtual future.
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.
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Anouschka
Tamara Shogaolu
2023
30 min
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.
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Borderline Visible (collective experience)
Ant Hampton
2023
77 min
A truly miraculous feat of non-linear storytelling, this is your chance to experience Borderline Visible collectively in an intimate theater setting, fueled with music by Oren Ambarchi and Perila.
Borderline Visible
Ant Hampton
2023
78 min
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.
Buried in the Rock
Shehani Fernando
2023
12 min
Descend into a cave with speleologists Pam and Tim Fogg. As the darkness surrounds you like a velvet blanket, they talk about unusual rocks, the dangers of their profession and the thrill of total seclusion.
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Close
Hana Umeda
2023
18 min
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
Mindy Seu
2023
5 min
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.
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Dance Permit (Denied)
Claudix Vanesix
2023
10 min
Certain traditional dances in Peru are performed only by men. In this 360 VR performance, female-born, non-binary trans person Claudix Vanesix connects this dance with their birthplace, religion and a critique of the patriarchy.
Despelote
Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena
2024
25 min
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.
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Emperor
Marion Burger, Ilan Cohen
2023
40 min
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.
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Floating with Spirits
Juanita Onzaga
2023
30 min
In this cinematic virtual reality experience set in Mexico, two young Mazatecs tell stories passed down by their grandmother, who was a shaman. Their imaginations bring to life their ancestral world, where natural spirits share their knowledge.
Fresh Memories: The Look
Ondrej Moravec, Volodymyr Kolbasa
2023
10 min
Inspired by Marina Abramović’s performance “The Artist Is Present,” this VR experience places you face-to-face with residents of the devastated Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, as they stare at you in silence, amid the ruins of their homes or workplaces.
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Going Back Home: Mother VR
Catalina Alarcón
2023
20 min
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.
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Koyaanisqatsi
Godfrey Reggio
1982
86 min
This classic, groundbreaking visual essay about people, nature and technology is awe-inspiring and hypnotic in both image and sound. Nature is vast. Humans build, drive, travel, work, swarm and struggle until they can go no further.
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Lateral
Charlie Shackleton
2023
11 min
Non-fiction filmmaker Charlie Shackleton experiments with a way of creating visual depth in tracking shots without using 3D film techniques. In this VR lecture he reveals this unsuspected and exciting new layer in the medium of film.
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Natalie’s Trifecta
Natalie Paneng
2023
30 min
In this VR experience, South African multi-disciplinary artist Natalie Paneng invites you into the three worlds that make up her artistic practice: a virtual gallery, her studio and the playful dream world that fuels her work.
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Offset: Boiler Room
Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain
2023
8 min
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.
One Two
Christian Bakalov
2023
50 min
Audience participants in this immersive dance performance are plunged into the life cycle of humans as social animals. Take part in a primeval ritual involving nothing more than music, rhythmic breathing and a little smoke.
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PHANTOM
Aluta Null
2021
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.
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Redemption
Mariana Luiza
2023
20 min
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.
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The School, a World
Iga Łapińska
2023
45 min
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
Jiabao Li
2023
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!
Shadowtime
Sister Sylvester, Deniz Tortum
2023
18 min
A VR journey takes you from the first virtual object to the latest AI creations, posing the question: Is VR an escape from real-world problems like the climate crisis, or can it teach us to live simultaneously in two apparently incompatible shadowtimes?
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(this conversation is) Off the Record
Nirit Peled
2023
50 min
In these interactive lectures, Nirit Peled simulates the inner workings of crime prevention algorithms, and their effect on people’s lives. Imagination and thorough research yield a question: Is it possible to capture an individual in data?
Texada
Josephine Anderson, Claire Sanford
2023
17 min
“How big is time?” In and around the quarries on the Canadian island of Texada, this virtual reality documentary juxtaposes two dimensions of time: the human and the geological.
Traversing the Mist
Tung-Yen CHOU
2023
30 min
Step into the body of a young Taiwanese man and wander the red-lit corridors of a surreal gay sauna populated by naked men with identical faces. An erotic labyrinth in spacious animated VR.
Tuning Room
Michael Bucuzzo
2023
50 min
Are our lives so completely defined by film and television that media define our reality, making humanity in fact superfluous? This is the question Michael Bucuzzo poses in his performative lecture encompassing three experimental films.
Turbulence: Jamais Vu
Ben Joseph Andrews, Emma Roberts
2023
10 min
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?
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The Vivid Unknown
John Fitzgerald
2023
10 min
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.
Voice in My Head
Kyle McDonald, Lauren Lee McCarthy
2023
60 min
An interactive installation in which ChatGPT becomes a voice in your head to influence your social reality. The chatbot listens in on your conversations and responds. And if you’re at a loss, it offers plenty of knowledge for you to draw on.
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William Quail’s Pyramid
Piotr Winiewicz, Constant Dullaart
2023
35 min
A soundtrack, suggestive visuals, a conversation and a lot of inconsistency—this installation evokes a type of technological aphasia, stimulating our brain to ascribe emotional value to an AI speaking in tongues.
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Yugo: the non-game
Petrit Hoxha
2022
20 min
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.