Sundance, virtually

Belated correction to something below here!

Well, hello. It’s Sundance! I was supposed to be in Utah this week, but they had to pivot to an(other) all-virtual year, and thus, here I am on my couch. The upside is you (in the US) can watch Sundance movies at home by buying a ticket — plenty still available, though they tend to sell out — and watching the film on your TV or your computer or your tablet or whatever.

I have a thread of recommendations here, and I’ve already seen around 35 of the films (which will at least double by the end of next week, when the festival ends), so more to come.

As part of Sundance and also a larger focus for my year, I’ve been diving into the virtual reality and more cutting-edge digital art offerings at the festival, mostly in the New Frontiers section. That means I had to schlep uptown late this week to pick up some big VR headsets that belong to my company to hang onto and use for the week. Certain artworks are available only with the headsets; I just watched three of them, all very immersive and interesting, some more effective than others. More on that soon at Vox.

To my immense surprise, one of my favorites thus far is a documentary filmed entirely within VR called We Met in Virtual Reality. It’s available if you buy a ticket from Sundance for 24 hours today (Sunday)!

But in the meantime it has gotten me thinking about what makes “VR art” different from just watching a movie on a big screen. Of course, like most people, this isn’t my first brush with VR. I’ve been to the Whitney Biennial, after all. And years ago the New York Times sent out little cardboard things viewer things that you could stick your phone into, download an app, and experience some of their stories and reporting in virtual reality. (Even more years ago, I, you know, went to EPCOT.)

One part that occurred to me today while I was watching a fully-immersive documentary-type thing about the day those alerts went off in Hawaii, saying that a ballistic missile was incoming, was that in a movie (or in front of your TV), the artificial barrier is still there. You know what you’re watching isn’t real, but you also feel like there’s a safety buffer. In VR, when you can crank your head around and discover something’s coming up behind you, or look down, like physically down, and see a fire burning beneath your feet, some of that barrier melts away.

That said: To the early viewers of film, that wasn’t true. Famously, people screamed when they first saw The Great Train Robbery, expecting the engine barreling headfirst at them on screen to burst through the theater. Over time we’ve gotten used to it. I’m wondering what kind of time that might take in virtual reality for most people (especially given the pretty janky technology at a high price point).

Nothing more to say on that, but I hope you’ll take part in the festival if you have a spare $20, an internet connection, and a couple free hours. It’s rare for a festival of this magnitude and reputation to be so accessible to the general public; it would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Been writing

• I have been writing, but none of it came out this week! A weird quirk of January, when most of the movies also aren’t worth watching. But do keep an eye out for a couple of Sundance-related things over the next week.

Been reading and watching

• Aside from the aforementioned 35 or so movies, I haven’t seen much. I’ve been reading a lot on the Frankfurt School thinkers, who I haven’t studied in a few years, in preparation for a putting together a new lecture in my Postmodern World class, slated for the end of next month. I don’t typically have to write new lectures anymore because I’ve been teaching so long, but I’ve been wanting to shoehorn the critical theory guys into the syllabus somewhere, and it seemed more important to do so this year than it has in a long time. So, lots of Walter Benjamin, at the moment.

Odds and ends

• I bought one of these recently and it’s no exaggeration to say it changed my life. For $20!