The Stories We Will Tell: Interactive Media and Placemaking
It felt a little bit like a hip party happening 20 years in the future.
Ethereal music, evoking whalesong, came from the stage, where a man in a VR headset had a joystick in each hand and was steering…something, like a pilot in an invisible cockpit. Next to him, the big screen showed a model of a city, made of pinpricks of light in vast blackness, which spread out like stars before a speeding spaceship. This was, one supposed, a mirror of what the pilot was seeing in his headset. One could only speculate about what a group of people in the wings were seeing in their headsets, as they took tentative steps or rotated slowly in place, mouths slightly agape. Yet the crowd was at ease, finding seats and spotting familiar faces and clinking glasses of wine, because this wasn’t some kind of time warp — it was now, in San Francisco.
Reality check: there was a line for the headsets. VR’s relative immaturity means the state-of-the-art equipment is a limited resource (and for SFUFF, on loan from Oculus). And the setup process is a bit experimental — you’ve just gone through the looking glass, and the person with the information you need is still in the real world of the crowded theater. “Do you see the two movies? Watch out on your right! Ok. Now try…”
While I didn’t have a chance to try the headset on stage, the ones in the wings, it turned out, played 360-degree movies well worth the wait and the sometimes literal stumbles. ¡Viva La Evolución! by Fifer Garbesi drops you into DJ Joyvan Guevara’s home office. He’s talking to you, and it feels so real that you have to balance the curiosity that makes you want to stare at the equipment on his desk behind you, or his daughter playing in the corner, with the feeling (which you recognize as absurd but are unable to suppress) that it’s rude to look away from someone during a conversation. On a practical note, it’s important not to miss the subtitles, too. Though handled, like the rest of the film, with care and wit — in a playful font, they float next to the speaker and 180 degrees opposite — subtitles in VR seem to trouble the viewer’s experience even more than they might in a traditional film. It’s a challenge to maintain the thread of the conversation while exploring the streets of Cuba with Guevara, first hustling to keep up as he does errands, later riding in a sidecar next to his motorcycle.
When you reach your final destination, the club, you’re relieved just to be in one place for a while, with a 360 view of the center of the dance floor. At one point the power goes out, and someone says that’s how you know it’s a good party in Cuba. For an introvert, it might be the closest you get to really feeling comfortable at a rave — except that when you find yourself smiling and bobbing your head to the music, you remember those sleepwalkers in the VR headsets when you came in, and realize you’ve become one of them. But who cares? It’s the future.
Dropping into the next film (“watching” doesn’t quite capture it), I knew we weren’t in Havana anymore: overgrown train tracks, rusted factories, and for a guide, an elderly American. His kitchen had seen better decades, but peering around rewarded me with a shockingly large and detailed mural of a mountain landscape, which, like the unmade bed I saw at the DJ’s house in Cuba, gave me a sneaky thrill. Bethlehem 360, the story of the economic past and future of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, led into a casino where I scanned the craps tables before I turned and found the speaker, a young man who’d been brightly addressing my backside. Taking off the headset and blinking like a newborn, I felt that in order to appreciate these films fully, I needed to go back and watch them again — perhaps a few times — perhaps infinitely many times. But even then, would I have been able to grasp what the people in these films were trying to show me, what they really felt about the changes in their cities?
As we moved from the interactive into the staged portion of the evening, we were again engaged across multiple dimensions, as live performance mixed with recorded history.
It was immersion in a different sense: we didn’t feel like we were there, but rather we had someone telling or showing us what it was like to be there, how it had felt to them. In Remember Los Siete, Vero Majano interacted with footage of the place she grew up. She stood in front of a screen playing an uncut dolly shot of Mission street in the 60s. “I wanna archive this street in your memory,” Vero told us, to the sweet, melancholic backtrack of a Bossanova beat. “The brother’s strut…lovers getting to know each other.” Little kids slip out of parked cars to play with friends on the sidewalk, while older European immigrants chat in front of their shops next to young Latinos (Vero weaves in the story Los Siete, a group of wrongfully accused youth). She manages to convey the footage as a duality: objective history universally, and yet for her, a “quicksand of nostalgia.” The performance was an excerpt from a full-length piece with live orchestration, debuting at Brava Center for the arts in April.
Keith Wilson came onstage next to tell the story of the Tenderloin’s 841 Gangway, which closed in 2016; it had been the longest-operating gay bar in the country, with evidence that as far back as 1910, it was “gentlemen friendly.” Keith worked with historian Joey Plaster to build a virtual tour of the bar, which many of the audience members explored during the interactive portion of the evening. For Keith, the tour was just a small part of the work memorializing this place. In fact, the virtual tour’s constraints, and its inability to capture what the bar had meant to the community, seem to have led Keith to develop a live, multimedia performance.
Sharing personal anecdotes, historical archives, and the humor and joie de vivre of the clientele — like the members of the Church of Cannabis, who would gather at the bar in the middle of the day to drink special cocktails, be anointed with balloons, and watch The Price is Right — Keith probably came as close as anyone could to recreating the Gangway on stage. But the bar was a physical place, a home, and no stories can replace it. He finally told the audience to go out and make places to be together, and be sure to appreciate them while they last. “This is real-time architecture,” he said, gesturing to the room and the crowd (a running joke in the presentation was Keith’s argument with the Internet personified). By the end of the presentation, a line that had started as a double-entendre had become a kind of mantra: “Lie back; enjoy it.”
The final presentation, Real Refuge, felt even more deeply personal than the ones that had come before: it was part storytelling, and part therapeutic self-discovery, as a recovered addict relived her journey to sobriety in 360 video. Adam Osfield Snell, a volunteer from City Hope, took the stage with Heather, a City Hope resident, who wore a VR headset. We started off in Heather’s room, with the big screen projecting what Heather was seeing; to us, it was flat and distorted, but in her eyes, it was an immersive world. As she looked around slowly, her responses to Adam’s prompts (“What are you seeing now?”) seemed to come from very far away. Heather in the present was watching Heather from November getting ready in the morning — it was, she later conveyed, pretty weird.
Heather went through her daily life at City Hope and even reenacted the events that led her to be separated from her young daughter and enter rehab. When she finally took off the headset, she looked a bit overcome, and like she had overcome something (this wouldn’t seem too unusual, as VR is being explored as a treatment for PTSD). Her room, Heather told us, now looks different from how it did in the video; she gave her stuffed animal and framed photo to her daughter when they reunited recently after 3 years apart. Watching back, Heather said she realized “I definitely changed. Now…I’m myself.” Her relatives came onstage and everyone hugged.
Although the family reunion brought us to an emotional peak, the evening was not yet over.
A closing panel discussion gathered many of the filmmakers — Fifer, Vero, Keith, Adam, and Heather — along with Yang Liu, co-creator of that city of stars we saw earlier. Niki Selken, designer and creative development lead at Gray Area, moderated. The conversation focused on the future, and how technology will affect urban issues. Fifer said that “VR offers an opportunity to paint on top of what’s already there”; one could imagine crowdsourcing ideas for MUNI or Market Street through a “VR station” where people drag and drop elements of the landscape, and test out how a new concept actually feels. I was led to imagine how a contribution from a tech company in this space could revolutionize the way we source feedback for urban planning projects.
“When I think about the future of SF, I don’t see myself in it,” Vero said. Keith agreed: “It’s really intimidating and scary, this lack of embodiment, and lack of connection with other people.” Yang’s City of Sparkles project is one take on this problem, finding sentiments on Twitter and compiling them into a map of the city’s emotions and conversation, allowing someone to take a simulated walk through the connections that are happening digitally. But can immersive technology be used to solve problems that seem to have come out of our obsession with immersive technology?
The optimists would say yes: technology is giving us incredibly powerful new storytelling tools, and we’ve seen how storytelling can engage our humanity, frame urban issues, and inspire change. But what’s needed is more understanding and access. A live performance like Vero’s or Keith’s makes it clear you’re being told a story, from someone’s perspective, whereas 360 video makes you feel like you’re experiencing something real for yourself; you can forget the concealed hand, and bias, of the filmmaker. As Fifer said, “the best we can do is give communities the tools to do the archiving.”
Susie Smith, who co-curated and produced the event with Keith Wilson, said, “Initially, I was skeptical of VR, but I became curious about its possibilities as a uniquely spatial experience.” Indeed, all of the experiences that night were unique, crossing dimensions of time and space that no one had expected. They left even the skeptics among us curious, and full of possibilities.
This event took place on February 1, 2019, at SOMArts in San Francisco. For more information about SF Urban Film Fest, visit their website.
