[This CBC story describes a creative and boundary-extending use of virtual reality and presence in a theater experience designed by Chris Salter, the Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts. See the original story for four more pictures. The Montreal shows have unfortunately ended but you can find out more about Animate on the MUTEK website. –Matthew]
[Image: An audience in the Italian city of Paestum watches a performance of the VR-enhanced play Animate by director Chris Salter. Credit: Megan Williams/CBC]
Canadian play on climate change brings digital and physical worlds crashing together
VR experience Animate is based on a Newfoundland short story
By Megan Williams,·CBC News
August 20, 2023 (updated August 23, 2023)
In an abandoned tobacco warehouse on the edge of the ancient Italian town of Paestum, south of Naples, a dozen or so spectators sit on upturned logs on what looks like a typical Canadian campsite.
There, under a sloping tarp, two actors read from a story.
It’s about a young woman and man, both lonely and defeated, sometime in a near future with climate change creeping in from all sides. The pair find themselves awkwardly set up on a blind date to go to the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, a Mars-like landscape that dates back 450 million years.
It’s the opening scene of the play Animate, directed by Chris Salter, an artist and former professor in the faculty of fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal, and showing at this year’s Campania Theatre Festival, a yearly event by the Fondazione Compania dei Festival with shows in historic venues in and around Naples.
What begins as the simplest of analog theatre — the intimate act of reading in front of a small, live crowd — abruptly changes gears, thrusting the audience into an immersive virtual reality experience that progressively blurs the lines between the physical and digital worlds.
Audience members are handed a head-mounted display, or VR glasses, and earphones. Grasping a rope led by an actor, they are guided through the warehouse. As seen through the goggles, it has been transformed into a grainy, black-and-white version of the warehouse, but littered with rocks. (Any attempt to kick them betrays the fact they’re actually mirages.)
At the same time, fellow audience members disappear from sight. The viewer ends up feeling disconnected and disoriented, and it’s only the stream-of-consciousness musings of the characters, Laurie and Daniel, that provide a human presence.
“I wanted to explore the tension between the real world and the increasingly digital world through the lens of climate change, where people are increasingly distant from their actual physical environment and living more in digital spaces,” said Salter. “So the idea was to crash these things together to create an interesting tension.”
Between worlds
At one point in the journey, you suddenly find yourself standing at the centre of a full-colour, 3D virtual version of the Tablelands, with ochre-hued rocks and streaks of green vegetation in a fjord-like landscape spilling out in every direction you turn or stumble toward. The piece works up to a thrilling crescendo, a chaotic final scene that involves a startling interaction with flying rocks, along with real-life sounds and sensations outside it.
Salter, now the director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts, has a background in cutting-edge multimedia art installations as well as theatre, and has for years produced large works that explore sensory perception. With this latest project, he wanted to extend the reach of that.
“I was interested in climate transformation, and Canada is obviously ground zero for it,” said Salter.
“It’s no longer an abstract thing with graphs. It’s physically real, in your body. So I wanted to create a work where you physically experience this, where there’s nowhere to go, as opposed to a didactic story about climate that so many artworks are these days.”
Based on a cli-fi tale
But to do so, he said he needed a compelling narrative to make it more than just a showcase of cool stuff you can do with VR.
He found that in “Animate,” a short story by Newfoundlander Kate Story that’s part of the collection CLI-FI: Canadian Tales of Climate Change, published by Exile Editions.
“A lot of people associate science fiction with dystopia, but this is not a dystopic story,” said Story, who now lives in Peterborough, Ont., and whose novel Urchin was a finalist for a 2022 Governor General’s Award literary prize.
“I wanted to write about two broken people and how as humans we are not as separated from the planet as we tend to experience. And how, in a sense, ‘the end of the world’ for them is ecstatic, as they get folded into this Earth.”
Story, who saw the play last summer when it premiered at the Kunstfest Weimar in Germany, says the technology Salter and his team use is not a frill, but a transformative amplification of the themes she explores in her story.
“They have done something really clever and delightful with the awkwardness of putting the goggles on,” she said. “It becomes this feeling of initiation that’s very playful.”
The augmented or mixed-reality technology Salter uses has become familiar to many, with the recent announcement of Apple’s Vision Pro visor, where the computer screen disappears and apps seem to just hover in the middle of a room.
Salter isn’t interested in getting rid of screens, but in exploring how far he can go in seeing how the physical world can be computationally shaped. He cites what’s known in VR parlance as “the plausibility illusion” — where people act as if something’s real, while knowing it’s not — and its similarity to the suspension of belief that’s necessary in theatre.
“These technologies that we’re using aren’t meant for these giant spaces,” Salter said of the old tobacco warehouse. “They’re meant for a living room, one metre of walking around. So we’re pushing them to the extreme, spatially and temporally.”
‘Trying to push boundaries’
German theatre festival director Rolf Hemke says unlike a lot of VR applications, like video games or the Apple headset, Salter is seeking new expressions of VR for the sake of experiment alone.
“He’s scientifically trying to push boundaries and go into commercially less attractive angles of these technological developments,” he said.
Salter says he sees Animate as a metaphor for the living environment, which humans are in and destroying, and which is now seeking revenge. Yet he bristles at the notion that artists should somehow provide lessons or solutions for climate change.
“Everyone expects the arts to save the world now,” he said. “But arts exist in the imaginary, in what is possible.”
While an artwork can trigger a reaction, the larger paradigm shift that might take place in someone’s understanding of an issue like climate change requires time.
Ironically, this production of Animate is partly funded by a grant from PRISME-ART, Fonds du Recherche du Quebec, Nature and Technologies, Society and Culture for artists to represent scientific data to the public. Salter says when they applied for the grant, they told the agency they would be doing the exact opposite — providing an experiential awareness of climate change, not showing data.
“Art is useless,” he said. “It’s useless in the sense that its function is not to solve the problems of the world, but to change the way you perceive the world, emotionally, affectively, collectively — ways you cannot see in the newspaper.”
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Animate will show in Montreal at the International Festival of Electronic Music and the Digital Arts, or MUTEK, from August 22 to 27, with five shows a day.