Our usual VR flâneur Yoana Pavlova on the first edition of Virtuality Paris, with photos and impressions.
It is an early morning, and I am walking on the streets of Paris. To get on foot from the center of the city to the North-East edge of the map, one needs to pass through Stalingrad. A token of French's inclination towards the Left in all its forms, and exhibiting the best from Belle Époque's architecture and engineering, today the square is saturated with the remains of human lives whirled by oversea news and hashtag activism. Now the place looks haunted by a rather Middle-Age narrative, where misery and suffering are put on silent display as the only way to provoke a meaningful reaction. I look down and hasten my pace.
Ten minutes more and I stand in front of 104. A XIX-century building once constructed for the city's undertakers, it was revamped as a territory for arts and youth culture, but also as a meeting point between Paris and the suburbs, between people from various religions and social spheres, and, last but not least – as the flagpole of gentrification in the 19th district. Where hundreds of horses and coffins were accommodated back in the past, nowadays adolescents come to perform on the concrete floor, single or in a small group, usually with headphones, everyone listening to their own stuff and dancing as if nobody is watching. Yet people queuing in front of 104 in this chilly morning do not seem to know anything about that, they probably come here for the first time.
We are all here for the first time, in a way, in some sort of Heraclitus moment when VR pins yet another Parisian topos. After Forum des Images and Gaîté Lyrique, the virtual reality appropriates one more key location, this time not for a festival but for a slightly different type of happening – a salon (or exposition, to put in Belle Époque terms). Virtuality's press conference starts with some delay, and for the next three days it is the only event to be late, everything else is perfectly scheduled and organized, which is unprecedented on French soil. Key words I note down during this first presentation: ecosystem, democratization, VR is not a gadget, VR is not a medium like any other, Eldorado, emotion > empathy, business + science. One fact sticks in my mind: 6000 medicine students at Paris Descartes use immersive technologies to study the human body. As series of classic dissection paintings rolls in my mind, I cannot help but wonder how would these millennials feel about the actual physicality, will be the body just an interface for them? As a matter of fact, has the body ever been anything more than an interface?
The game is on, as Sherlock would phrase it, and so are many VR headsets when I walk out of the press conference room to mingle with the crowd. Truth to be told, VR news in 2016 felt like we have been reading the same intro over and over again, not to mention the endless panels with poker faces. At Virtuality ideas interact on a whole different level, maybe because of its openly PR strategy. Brands from Coca-Cola and L'Oréal to Action Against Hunger have come to seduce and to be receptive, too. Festivalization of the creativity groomed by the TED culture vis-à-vis traditional amuse-bouches at the expo stands. Another medieval motif appears everywhere I look around, though – for every person in VR, there is someone very close by to help with the gear, with practical instructions, sometimes even with emotional support, as if stepping into virtual reality is a knight's battle for which heavy, shiny armor is needed.
Nevertheless, I am here not to test VR but to attend the talks. The variety of topics and experts is exciting. Still, psychiatrists preaching about THE MATRIX and social-media gurus swearing by BLACK MIRROR can make the The Merovingian chuckle with his favorite French accent. More appealing are the marketing experts who do not show any signs of overwhelmingness – VR is a cost-effective version of live communication and personal experience, that's all. Imagine salons for luxury goods and services in just five-ten years where physical reality will be advertised as high-end product. The perfect fantasy to juggle in one's mind before meeting Jan Kounen.
Now, even if you have not followed the latest development around VR, the fact that Jan Kounen is one of the first filmmakers in France to adopt this technology is not unexpected at all. His work has always been preoccupied with altered states of consciousness, and I believe this immersive, almost transcendental aspect of the VR medium is precisely what attracted him here in the first place. The room for his talk is packed, so I slide in discretely and find a place very close to the podium, close enough to recognize the contour of Africa on his t-shirt. As usually, his thought flow is mesmerizing, very difficult to relay, but one reflection stays with me – our emotional and existential experience in VR can be so deep, as if tackling memories of real-life facts. VR as a memory, a notion worth exploring.
Next on my must list is Michel Reilhac – one of the European pioneers in the field of VR creation and curation. Under the title “Design of the presence” hides a quite conceptual exposé on the storytelling and audiovisual decisions related to the protagonist in VR. If games offer traditionally first-person and third-person POV, VR is more nuanced. Addressing several basic questions, such as whether the user has a body inside the gameplay, whether this body can be seen and sensed, and whether the user can interact with the environment, provides nine different cases, or types of script. Michel Reilhac's elaborate scheme makes me muse on the place of the VR critic in this framework. Plenty of film journalists and critics still cannot imagine not having the distance between the screen and their eyes, because this distance yields their “objective” evaluation. Plunging into such a subjective experience that is VR terrifies them. Maybe VR critics of the future will have one more God-like superposition, or they will be the shrinks looking at screens while someone on the couch is in.
More talks follow, but there are only two I would like to touch upon. As of the beginning of 2017, two cinemas in Paris showcase VR: MK2 and La Géode. When I got in touch with both of these companies some weeks ago, as I was preparing for a feature on VR for another outlet, MK2's PRs did not reply back, whereas La Géode welcomed me very warmly. What the latter offer at the moment, can be best described with the French word parcours – the visitor follows a narrative route between three stations, or levels. First is the 360° testing, then the VR gaming, last comes the interactive salon. This transition is physical but also psychological, and it is no surprise that when La Géode's manager took the stage at Virtuality, he spoke about live spectacle much more than about cinema. MK2's Elisha Karmitz, on the other hand, had not prepared any stats, not even slides for his presentation – being Q&A-ed by a journalist in front of the audience, he was not able to formulate a clear vision of the path VR might take, except for the fact that it is an entertainment in its own merits, and MK2 intends to cash in.
How about my prognosis? Were the above Middle-Age references for nothing, or we are supposed to go through a new Renaissance after all? The problem with VR is that many see it as the end of our civilizaton the way it is, as the last sluice before some dystopian narrative inundates us. An event like Virtuality, however, encourages another vision. The VR-as-a-memory hypothesis makes me think of ARRIVAL (2016), and of the possibility of achieving the ultimate syncretic language to describe human experience in a universal manner. All we need is some patience and a clear mind, as well as a bright future to return to.