Traditional cinema hogs the limelight at the Venice film festival but there’s an array of wilder delights just behind the main site. Hang a right past the PalaBiennale theatre and a boat whisks you across to the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the small island home of the event’s Venice Immersive section. It’s a two-minute ride but it feels like light years away.
Venice’s self-styled “Immersion Island” is dedicated to showcasing emergent technologies – and by definition emergent storytelling. There are 28 XR (extended reality) productions in the main competition, together with 24 “world gallery” tours hosted by VRChat, and these run the gamut from interactive movies through 360-degree videos to the sort of imposing standalone installations you’d otherwise find in a modish art gallery. The medium is nascent and even the language around it is still bedding down. The works on the schedule aren’t quite films or games or art displays, although most will contain elements from all three disciplines. “We like to call them experiences,” says the woman on the desk with a shrug.
Just as it’s impossible to cover every film on the programme, so it’s a hopeless task keeping tabs on all of these exhibits. But over a period of several days I find myself bouncing back and forth to the island, dipping in and out of its small curtained pods and being fitted with headsets in order to sample the wares.
Each trip is a crap-shoot; you have no idea what you’ll get. But Marcio Sal’s Finally Me turns out to be a jubilant, lovable animation about a Brazilian lost soul who’s liberated by music, while Juanita Onzaga’s Floating With Spirits is a whispered paean to the nature gods sustained by seductive visuals, variously sitting the user in misty woodlands and mountain villages before lifting us out to the cosmos to ogle the stardust. My favourite work from the opening days, though, remains Craig Quintero’s exotic Over the Rainbow, a lush – and vaguely Lynchian – 360-degree masque in which the characters draw in so close and engage you so intently that the effect is faintly disconcerting.
I was also partial to Felix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphael’s ingenious The Seven Ravens, produced as part of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller franchise, which adopts a mixed-media approach by combining an Magic Leap headset with an actual physical book. The story itself is basic – a children’s fairytale – and this appears to be a hallmark of these early years of AR. Most narratives are primitive; some are lacking in nuance. And no doubt there is a logical reason for this. The technology is still so complex, so outlandish, that the simplest stories seem to be the ones that work best.
Occasionally, yes, navigating this medium can be awkward. I get hopelessly stuck in Alexis Moroz and Balthazar Auxietre’s interactive Another Fisherman’s Tale, stranded on the beach, swinging my hand controls in a fury as the salty sea-dog narrator intones the same line (“there was no point lying around like driftwood”) again and again. In the cinema, at least, we remain safely in the dark. On the island we’re exposed, cocooned inside our headsets, lost in the virtual world. We’re turning in blind circles behind a thin lacy drape, with no way of knowing whether our antics have drawn a crowd.
It is this sense of unfamiliarity – fear of the unknown; the horror of looking stupid – which prevents some Venice regulars from making a trip to the island, much as their great-grandparents might once have turned up their noses at the cinematograph. But those that risk the crossing usually tend to come back. New experiences can be scary. They are an exploration in the dark, or a dive from the high board. But, as is the case with most leaps of faith, the more times you try it, the more natural it becomes.
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