1 the Road
Watch for a small fee: “Automatic writing” will never mean the same thing again, now that artificial intelligence has written the book 1 the Road—using a car as its pen.
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IDFA DocLab R&D projects
Works included in the IDFA DocLab R&D Program
Works included in the IDFA DocLab R&D Program
24h Sunset/Sunrise v2
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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#Alleman
Fifty years after Alleman, theater director Bert Hana leads us through the streets of the Netherlands, digitally captured through Google Street View.
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{The And}
An interactive documentary in which the viewer can navigate through 30 couples discussing the big themes of love and relationships.
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Algorithmic Perfumery
Based on the visitor's personal data, an algorithm compiles a unique fragrance that is generated on site.
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All Kinds of Limbo, XR Broadcast
An intimate musical journey using immersive techniques to celebrate live performance, drawing inspiration from the Caribbean influence on British music through genres such as reggae, grime, and calypso.
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Artificial: Room One
A one-on-one performance pairing you with an artificial intelligence for a conversation about what it is to be human, in a genuine attempt to understand the relationship between man and machine. On-site reservation required.
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Ayahuasca – The Shamanic Exhibition
This exhibition features different elements to learn about the spiritual ceremony as it’s conducted by Shipibo shamans, with the interactive VR installation Ayahuasca – A Kosmik Journey as centerpiece, giving each individual their own personal immersive experience.
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Barcode.tv
A cinematic story machine that tells you who you are, based on the material possessions you hold dear.
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Bear 71 VR
A seminal piece in the history of interactive documentary, reimagined and re-released as a VR piece for the 10-year anniversary of IDFA DocLab.
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Bob
Was Bob really the love of 84-year-old Elisa’s life, or is he the product of a faulty memory?
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BotStory: The Futurist Cookbook
Become a co-writer of The Futurist Cookbook. A chatbot will match you with a mystery chef to write a collaborative futurist recipe.
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Brainstream
In this interactive animation, you give a stranger a virtual brain massage. This intimate act evokes a stream of emotions and memories, and offers an original glimpse into the workings of the brain.
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The Butterfly Effect
In this multi-sensory installation, we make intimate acquaintance with a 4.5-billion-year-old rock fragment that traveled the universe before landing on Earth as a meteorite. Scientific data is translated into a sensorial experience.
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The Collider: Chapter One
Enter The Collider. A machine built to decipher the mysteries of human relationships. On-site reservation required.
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The Cycle Club: A 10-Day Hormone Safari
A taboo-breaking, ten-day crash course on the monthly hormone cycle and the biology behind it. In a Telegram “hormone safari,” the hosts dive into this wonderful world, talking to people about their experiences, and including input from gynecologists.
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Common Ground
Once Europe’s largest housing project, the Aylesbury Estate in London is being demolished. This interactive portrait explores the consequences of gentrification and offers background facts, using 360-degree video and 3-D environments. On-site reservation required.
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Dancing with Dead Animals
Maarten Isaäk de Heer has “re-animated” all the animals that died in his direct environment over the course of six months. He situates them in a pseudo-paradisical celebration of life that walks the line between tableau vivant and danse macabre.
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Diagnosia
In China, internet gaming is described as “electronic heroin” and many parents of suspected internet addicts send them to re-education camps. One of them was the director of this VR experience that places you at the center of his haunting experiences.
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Die with Me
A chat room app for smartphone users with less than 5% battery life on their phone, on their way to offline peace.
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A Dinner with Frankenstein AI
An intimate dinner experience that delves deeply into the tensions between human and machine.
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Disarmed
An interactive and playful VR experience about the fascinating relationship between our body and games. The visitors’ own arms and hands become part of a virtual sculpture of limbs that’s constantly changing shape.
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Eat | Tech | Kitchen
A rudimentary chatbot breathes new life into La cucina futurista (Futurist Cooking) (1932) by translating dreams of the future into new recipes and table rituals. On-site reservation required.
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Eclipse
Alless and Lena can’t see each other—only the trails they leave. But these two radically different entities get to know one another by following and analyzing these traces. A live VR performance that gives a radical new meaning to diversity.
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Emotional Arcade
This interactive installation invites you to compete in "emotional competitions" using modified EEG headsets, biometric sensors and carnivalesque props.
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Exhausting a Crowd
This addictive tableau vivant of a packed Piccadilly Circus allows observers to attach a limitless number of comment “tags” to the people in the crowd.
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Farewell Tour
A radical attempt to make a climate-neutral theater play. De Warme Winkel theater collective embarks on an ascetic tour of the Netherlands by bicycle. And of course the thermostat in the auditorium will be set to freezing, so keep your coat on.
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Goliath: Playing with Reality
This VR depicts the disorienting experience of schizophrenia, and how Goliath finds his footing in the virtual world of online multiplayer gaming. The voiceover by Tilda Swinton reminds us that every reality is a mental construct.
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HIGHRISE/Out My Window
Behind identical windows in concrete gray apartment buildings, an array of different lives is lurking. Thirteen 360-degree shots reveal apartments and their residents in 13 cities around the world.
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Kristine Is Not Well
In this interactive VR simulation you try to stay a step ahead of censorship on a fictitious online platform, with critical posts about the sudden disappearance of influencer Kristine. Based on real anti-censorship techniques used by online activists.
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I Am Not Home Video
A virtual experience of forgotten answering machine messages and a very special videotape that director and found footage fanatic Bert Hana picked up in a second-hand store. On-site reservation required.
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In Event of Moon Disaster
By inviting you into an alternative history about the moon landing, this immersive installation asks us all to consider how deepfake technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.
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I’ve Always Been Jealous of Other People’s Families
This machine learning installation questions the mental state of the intelligent machines we create. On-site reservation required.
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The Island of the Colorblind
Catch a glimpse of a world where flames light up in black and white, trees have turned pink and a rainbow holds a thousand shades of grey.
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Lagos at Large
A poetic tribute to Nigeria’s largest city, told in short segments as we plot a course through the imaginary and material space of Lagos, made pressing and real in VR. On show in DocLab: Exhibition (free on-site reservation required) and as part of the DocLab VR-Cinema (regular ticket sales).
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Lauren
Lauren McCarthy attempts to win back control from technology by making herself into a human smart home system.
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The Leaked Recipes Cookbook
Author Demetria Glace presents a series of intimate events based on The Leaked Recipes Cookbook, a cookbook of recipes she fished out from the massive data leaks in recent years.
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Leaked Recipes
Recipes that have been crowdsourced from leaked emails are served up, along with the story of their origin and a discussion about internet privacy. On-site reservation required.
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Look Inside
A hyper-realistic audio tour that lets you roam around someone’s real house. You’re on your own but guided by a voice coming through a pair of headphones, inviting you to look around. Does this adventure make you feel curious or repelled?
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Meat Puppet Arcade
The 3-D scanner as a portal to the virtual space. Play with true-to-life replicas of the artist’s body.
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Messages to a Post Human Earth
An interactive, multi-sensory journey through a beautiful garden. You and your travel partner embark on an evocative audio journey featuring augmented reality (AR) to reimagine your relationship with the natural world. You can only buy a combi-ticket. One ticket is valid for two people.
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Missing Pictures: Birds of Prey
Award-winning director Abel Ferrara talks about his never-completed film project from 1980, Birds of Prey. Like the VR user, he is surrounded by that film’s vision of a dystopian New York, where a revolutionary uprising leads to urban warfare.
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Moments of Innovation - When Documentary and Technology Converge
Explore some of the recent highlights of digital documentary storytelling, and the many historical moments of innovation that preceeded them. Installation developed with MIT Open Documentary Lab, marking IDFA DocLab's fifth anniversary.
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Motto
An interactive novella intertwining ancient storytelling traditions with the contemporary language of the internet. It’s a story that is told via thousands of ultrashort video fragments made by anonymous users all over the world—including you.
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Nerd_Funk
Through an archive of online media curated by the online persona nerd_funk, this VR experience in two chapters attempts to get a grip on our omnipresent digital culture and its influence on our physical lives. On-site reservation required.
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Orbit Diapason
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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Oxygen Debt
Hit the gym for a philosophical spinning class that sets your heart racing, led by a tireless fitness instructor. Can you accept that we can never fully control our bodies?
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[Posthuman Wombs]
Why is the stereotypical image of pregnancy a glowingly blissful young woman? Take a trip into this interactive womb and you’ll see a world where the concept of pregnancy goes beyond the cliché, freed from the constraints of gender and age.
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Reflector
This autonomous AI engine arranges and edits film in continuous real time, opening new doors to new and innovative ways of filmmaking.
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A Rest Guide for a Tired Nigerian Artist
What happens if we shift the focus from artwork to the people whose work is making art? In a series of illustrated guidebooks, Nigerian artists explain how they find peace in a troubled world.
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Robots in Residence
Could robots, besides building cars and bombing people in foreign countries, also make documentaries? Hoping to answer that question, a group of tiny robots is roaming the Expanding Documentary Exhibition space, looking for people to talk to.
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Rozsypne
When flight MH17 was shot down over the Ukranian war zone in 2014, the remote village of Rozsypne briefly made international news. This poetic roomscale VR experience offers a fragmented window into daily life in this faraway reality. On-site reservation required.
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Seven Digital Deadly Sins
A moral update on the Internet era on the basis of the seven deadly sins, presented as an interactive website with videos, posts and polls.
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The Social Sorting Experiment
Through mindless online swiping and scrolling, we’re all ranked, categorized and profiled. But what happens under the shiny hood of your phone? On-site reservation required.
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The Space Between Us
An exploration of the often concealed spaces between human and machine, privacy and surveillance, the self and the other, the observer and the observed or our real bodies and digital representations, to be experienced as an interactive installation.
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A Symphony of Noise VR
In this VR experience, every sound is potential music, visualized as waves, shapes and colors. The user adds new sounds to the audio palette and becomes the co-author of an innovative symphony. On-site reservation required.
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Sylvia
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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Testing Times
A personal but utterly familiar audio experience about the effects of the global pandemic on family life. How did Victoria Mapplebeck and her teenage son get through the pandemic and lockdown, at home and outdoors?
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Through the Wardrobe
In this augmented reality installation, the topical discussion on gender roles has been translated into an everyday decision: what to wear? In the intimate setting of a bedroom, four people talk frankly about their self-expression and clothing choices. On-site reservation required.
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TM
This experience is an interactive, personal experiment that will determine whether you can become a member of the secretive organization TM. A series of questions and assignments push the participant’s moral boundaries.
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Street Ghosts
The artist Paolo Cirio prints life-sized pictures of people found on Google’s Street View, and posts them at the exact spot where they were taken.
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This American Life
Live in the cinema, Ira Glass presents a one-time showcase of the best of 12 years of his popular radio documentary series.
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Welcome to Pine Point
A multimedia portrait of the memories of the disappeared Canadian mining settlement of Pine Point, which existed from 1964 to 1988.
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With These Hands
This VR installation shares challenging, complex and under-discussed stories of sexual assault and recovery. It explores the role of listening in the recovery of both survivors and those responsible for sexual harm.
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W/O/R/K
Experience the power of a cog in a beautiful machine in this extraordinary collective experience.
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