With 10 selected titles, the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling celebrates how digital art is exploring the liminal space between tangibility and tactility. Selected projects include documentary stories in virtual spaces, augmented reality in public space, algorithmically-driven identity games, and an aging artificial life. Together, the selection invites users to travel from their homes to other virtual places in the space-time continuum. Part of the do {not} touch program.
IDFA DocLab is supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands, CLICKNL, Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Netherlands Film Fund, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, VIVE, VIVEPORT, and Special Friends+.
DocLab research collaboration partners are MIT Open Documentary Lab, Beeld en Geluid, ARTIS-Planetarium, CreativeXR, Diversion cinema, Het Nieuwe Instituut, POPKRAFT, The Immersive Storytelling Studio (National Theatre), and Tolhuistuin.
Selected for the Digital Storytelling competition
Two screens show a live sunrise and sunset taking place at the same time somewhere in the world, using images from unsecured surveillance cameras. A live soundscape underscores the beauty that is accidentally captured by surveillance.
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A thought-provoking, 360-degree view of an overgrown, dilapidated Johannesburg house squatted as a political and artistic statement by two Black artists. Will their attitude change when they find out who owns the house?
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This installation connects jazz musician Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist visions and the 1974 film Space Is the Place to the 2016 protests in France prompted by the death of Adama Traoré, following his heavy-handed arrest.
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Like an invisible spirit, the user of this VR glides through scientific, industrial, and cultural structures of the former Soviet Union, weathered monuments of a vanished utopia. A memento mori for every worldly power.
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This website and installation literally transforms the increasingly urgent discussions surrounding automated face analysis into a game. Can you fool the neural network as it searches for sunglasses, your smile, or your criminal disposition?
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In South America, thousands of victims of state terror, civil war, and gang violence have been exhumed in recent decades by forensic teams. This beautifully designed interactive web documentary guides you through their work.
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A performance in two parts that was started during lockdown, caught between hope and fear. In part one, Lauren Lee McCarthy chats online with people about an encounter they could have in the future. Part two is that encounter. Later.
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Scientific research conducted by NASA, an African cosmology that assumes the existence of extraterrestrial life, and mass bee die-offs heralding the apocalypse: these are the ingredients of a powerful appeal for human introspection and humility.
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Sylvia is a virtual influencer, a digitally created Instagram model. But unlike her “colleagues” who are deployed to promote major brands, she doesn’t possess eternal youth. On the contrary: Sylvia is ageing rapidly and will die during IDFA.
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You find yourself ducking bullets in this immersive documentary about life in one of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent favelas. Although it’s a brutal place, the neighborhood also has resilient residents who keep working for a better life.
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