THE DREAM VEHICLE: XR CINEMA
Foundation of a new art form
For more than 100 years cinema have been one of the greatest art forms in the world. Waves have come and gone, masters have tried their best to perfect the craft, amazing experiences have transcended its audience creating unforgettable memories. But one thing have never changed; the romanticism of cinema that it is something on a flat silver screen at one end of the room.
XR CINEMA is a reaction to the slimy, retrospective romanticism of cinema, which is counter productive to the invention of new cinematic realms. Cinema is desperately crying for help to develop as an art form. We must come to its aid and take the art form to a new level.
Cinema is in its core the art of creating dreams. From the very banal and mainstream dreams to the strange and avant-garde dreams. From breathtakingly, beautiful dreams to stomach quenching, ugly, horrific dreams. Dreams can contain anything and is only limited by the dreamer.
Dreams are defined by the feeling of being inside the dream; living the dream. The dream is something that happens to you, right now, and with a feeling of control or loss of control. Dreams are the closest thing to reality without being real. Dreams are the truest manifestation of imagination.
Dreams are trying to tell us something. Sometimes it’s very clear, sometimes we must work hard to discover the message of the dream. What we want to distill from the dream, bring forth, is entirely up to each one of us.
Once dreams was our only inspiration, now it’s the least of inspirations. We’ve forgotten how to listen and be absorbed by a strange universe, of which we are not familiar. We falsely think we must understand everything at once. We mustn’t. In order for cinema to once again crawl into our souls, change the very structure of our atoms, to revitalise, and to push us forward, we must learn from the nature of dreams. We must let the dream become the vehicle of which we go to the strangest of emotional states.
One important warning, dreams cannot become the end destination, only the vehicle.
We are at the beginning of a technological earthquake. Anything is possible, there’s no technical boundaries and that of course in itself makes it impossible. To help dreamers create, rules must be set, boundaries must be drawn.
For any work to be considered a XR Cinema format, it must follow the following Rules of Transportation:
1) The work must be written and/or designed for XRC, we accept no ‘add-ons’ to other formats.
2) The ‘story’ must have a designed course of experience with minimum one end.
3) The course of experience must have a preparation room, an experience room, and a reflection room.
4) Total duration of the course of experience is minimum one hour; if less it’s a daydream, and it can’t be taken into consideration.
5) The ‘story’ must be conscious about the audience in one way or another.
6) At least one live element is needed, be it in performance or digital.
7) At least one collective element is needed during the course of experience.
8) Audience must experience free will at least one time during the course of experience.
9) The ‘action’ must take place within a physical space of at least 100 m2.
10) At least 75% is prerecorded or -programmed.
Johan Knattrup Jensen, Copenhagen, January 2019
