Running April 5 – 9 at Paris’ Forum des Images, this year’s NewImages Festival reflects a young medium ever on the move, an ecosystem looking backwards and ahead in order to reimagine itself for the here-and-now.
“We don’t want to be limited by someone else’s vision,” festival director Michele Ziegler tells PvNew. “We don’t want the metaverse of tomorrow to dictate what is art and culture today. We want to stir things up.”
Encompassing VR games and documentaries to mixed media installations and AR works for social media, the 13 projects competing for the NewImages top prize collectively trace the wider currents remaking a protean industry – while this slightly smaller selection compared with previous years reflects a young festival itself undergoing some change.
“This is a transitional year,” says Ziegler, who curated her first edition as festival director with an eye toward embracing radically different forms of digital creation. “By collaborating with other players in the broader digital art medium we can make distribution of VR more easy. If we de-cluster the different digital creation groups we can better accompany the audiences in order to bring them to VR.”
Indeed, this year’s competition features a number of wildly different proposition that include 360 cinema like weighty docudrama “The Man Who Couldn’t Leave” and the jaunty caper “Kidnapped in Vostok,” alongside the multiuser immersive experiences like “IVF-X: Posthuman Parenting in Hybrid Reality” and the Augmented Reality doc “His Name Is My Name,” which was produced for and distributed on Instagram.
Making its world premiere, the hour-long experience “Increment” promises a series of slow-building “weird, colorful, reactive environments,” all painstakingly assembled by designer Mark Pil in a one-man bout of auteurist game craftsmanship. “It’s a very good example of a passionate person who just worked on their project and followed their own path,” says Ziegler.
Rather than competing with other festival for world premieres – this year, only three titles holds that distinction – Ziegler and team have instead curated a sort of festival of festivals of acclaimed XR pieces while embracing NewImages’ unique and advantageous perch in Paris’ Les Halles complex – a commercial and transportation hub that sees some of the busiest foot traffic in all of Europe.
With a young and omnivorous public all but guaranteed – and full, heavy-hitting selection offered up free-of-charge – NewImages has been able to position itself as a bridging event that links world acclaimed artistic pieces with a steady stream of non-industry spectators, a showcase that connects what’s already been /confirm/ied. Going forward, the festival will reify that particular identity.
“We’re trying to be the interface,” says Ziegler. “To bring one community in contact with another in order to innovate together. Because we want make this culture accessible to everyone.”
