Over the past year, virtual reality and other platforms for immersive storytelling have become the latest ‘in’ technologies everywhere from Silicon Valley to film festivals. With access to some of the latest technology, and unconstrained by the pressures of profits or bottom lines, the ITP community has been able to research, create and experiment with many of these tools. From these investigations has emerged a lot of useful insight about what works, what doesn’t, and some thoughts for going forward.
This panel discussion will include current ITP students, alumni and faculty who are using emerging technologies in service of new forms of storytelling. Covering everything from augmented reality to interactive documentary, virtual reality games to 360 video, panelists will shed light on working with these different forms and how they give rise to different kinds of stories. Current students will show their progress on thesis projects dedicated to exploring how to tell immersive stories.
The panel will be moderated by Gabe Barcia-Colombo (ITP Faculty), and feature Todd Bryant (ITP adjunct), Julia Irwin (ITP research fellow), and three currrent students (Nicholas Hubbard, Jamie Ruddy, and Shaun Axani). VR Projects will be set up on the ITP floor for guests to demo from David Gochfeld, Yurika Malase, Seth Kranzler, Rebecca Lieberman, and Nikolaj Petersen.
Bios:Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a mixed media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization and the act of leaving one's digital imprint for the next generation. His work takes the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large scale projections and vending machines that sell human DNA. His work plays upon this modern exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human portraits on video.
Todd Bryant: An award winning screenwriter, director and producer of narrative video work, Todd hails from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina where he spent the majority of his youth exploring and trying to get lost in the woods. A current resident of Brooklyn and a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in NYU he continues to employ those innate proclivities through creative coding and the construction of tangible interfaces for video art.
Julia Irwin is a virtual reality filmmaker and new media artist in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently a Research Fellow at NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where she researches emerging cinematic techniques for virtual reality filmmaking and documentary. She has taught workshops internationally on documentary filmmaking for VR and will be adjunct faculty at ITP in the fall, co-teaching a class called
Alt Docs: Inventing New Formats for Non-Fiction Storytelling. Her graduate school thesis was an interactive VR documentary about scars and the stories of their origin, which she completed as an Artist in Residence at Specular Projects, a studio focused on experimental VR filmmaking.
Nicholas Hubbard makes art at the intersections of the found and the fabricated, the contemporary and the historical. This takes many forms including solo performance, interactive installations, 360º video, and virtual reality experiences. His work has become increasingly concerned with promoting the lessons of history to citizens of the present, and how this can be achieved through technology.
Jamie Ruddy is a story junkie. After graduating from NYU film school, she wrote a screenplay for Universal Studios and directed short films, commercials and a feature length documentary. She has returned to NYU for the masters program at ITP where her focus is on interactive storytelling. Recent projects include:
Light as a Feather (VR film) and
Close Encounters of the Radio Kind (AI).
Shaun Axani is a creative technologist and storyteller based in New York and Toronto. With a film and music background, Shaun came to ITP to explore interactive storytelling, but his work has spanned most facets of the diverse program, from physical to digital. He's made toys for children with disabilities, laser cut fungus for fridge magnets, tracked data related to cultural appropriation on social media, and created an interactive music making device based on the beat users are walking at. His thesis project, Quinn, was just featured at the Tribeca Interactive Playground.
