Phlay: New Interactive Experience for Apulia Film House
Two Phlay Interactive Site based experience into the AFC exhibition area.
A few years have passed since then, yet we are now very far from the times when the greatest distinction in our daily experience was that between real life and digital virtuality. The IRL (In Real Life) dimension and the one that Luciano Floridi has defined “Onlife”, tend more and more to penetrate a single dimension, where the on-location experience of the individuals becomes interconnected with their own reference networks, thanks to a different model of shareability of what we can define a new dynamic idea of the “immersive” digital experience.
In this sense, phlay continues to move on and experiment with playful-participatory dimensions in the cultural sphere, that redefines the idea of “participation” and “personalization” of a museum experience.
An unprecedented opportunity was recently provided by an initiative of the Apulia Film Commission (AFC), the film body of the Puglia region, at the new cinema and audiovisual house Apulia Film House , where it has experimented a new way of integrating real experiences and digital experiences through the Phlay Interactive video platform . Two “Totems” powered with Phlay’s technology ( with the support of Cyberneid) have been installed on the location: imagine something very similar in design to the Game Arcades of the 80s. There the visitor-user is allowed to explore images and have fun by creating new and personal contents, remixing “live”, in real-time, film scenes from the AFC visual archive.
The result of this experience carried out through the haptic, acoustic and visual immersive dimensions, by acting with the fingers on the viewing screen in real-time, is a unique version of a “themed metafilm”, with which the user reinterprets the images that flow on the screen, remixing them through the rhythm of the music of his choice, giving life to an engaging visual-sound story using different storylines. The two Totems, in fact, contained two different guidelines, to experiment through a musical soundtrack.
APULIA KISSES
The first experience, “Apulia Kisses” , features a “kiss story” in the movies. It is a sort of role-playing game: the user can act as the character of the projectionist Alfredo, played by Philippe Noiret in Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Oscar-winning masterpiece, and create a postmodern homage to cinema. The performer elaborates a sequence of kisses, remixing them in real-time with his own personal taste, taking inspiration from the music he has chosen to “play” the images of the films in his reinterpretation.
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SCENE TO EXPLORE
The second experience, “Scenes to explore”, even gives the possibility of combining the different cinematographic genres of movies, through the four lines of drama, love, comedy and action, passing from one to another with always new connections and visual links. Again, the chosen music was the emotional envelope of the remix: a guideline for the rhythm of the editing game in real-time.
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Once the video has been made, the user has the opportunity to share his “unique piece” by photographing the QR Code with his smartphone, which allows him to share it immediately with friends and family through any social platform of his choice. In turn, those who share the experience “remotely” have the opportunity to make their own version of the video, by remixing it via their smartphone on the rich platform of phlay online. In this way, the “on location” experience and the online one merge in real-time, and the user-performer has the opportunity to share his IRL dimension immediately with his own network of contacts while maintaining the creative spontaneity ensured by the emotions of the moment lived by the user-visitor.
Antonio Parente (AFC General Manager), explains: “The initiative is part of the new promotion perspective that the Apulia Film Commission is pursuing, which sees cinema more and more as a solid and fundamental landing point, but which also develops into new potentials and new experiences that can represent cinema’s natural evolution, adhering to the tastes of the new generations who want to be increasingly involved in the creative process and experimenting with new technological tools capable of generating an immersive involvement in the museum and exhibition experience. Among the tools of the new idea of immersion, phlay seemed to us the one that most allows a coherent transition between the archive material we have collected over the years and a new dimension of use “.
According to Mario Amura, Phlay CEO, the added value of the interactive and immersive experience provided by Phlay is the involvement of the performer-user through the “fourth dimension”: that of time, which in fact represents the main dimension of cinema, what unifies it with real experience. “The great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovskij spoke of cinema as a device that allowed us to“ sculpt time”. It is not just a question of immortalizing the moment, but of playing with the perceptual dimension by re-creating the time of vision by oneself, thanks to music. Compared to the cinema, Phlay allows you to add a new variable in the definition of the time of the visual project in which the user is “immersed”. Remixing cinema by playing with the time inside the single shot, but also with the time and rhythm of the montage through a further time, that is created by the rhythm-guide of the music, is the heritage of the cinema with which the performer engages. But a fourth temporal dimension is added to these first three (internal time, external time and musical time): the sense of individual time, that of the performer, who can redefine the general rhythm of vision through his own personal contribution of taste and sensitivity in real-time “.
If it is true that through this interactive-immersive experience the raw material of the game, as Amura claims, becomes that of time, in a broader sense we can say that it is also a small important step towards a futuristic reformulation of the spaces of the museum experience. The one configured by phlay is, in fact, a hybrid model that allows to integrate the idea of sharing in a dynamic and participatory way, not just offering the visitor the possibility of “posting” their own video but allowing the recipients of the experience carried out live to respond immediately, making the museum experience their own, through a new reworking of the video. It is a small, germinal “teleportation”: the possibility that opens up to involve different people beyond the actual distance in the same game, in real-time. In other words, to extend not only the museum’s space to virtuality but the very experience of the players in a viral, relational, engaging dimension, where emotions and creativity can become the fertile ground for a different promotional method.
