Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals | by Sarah Wolozin | Dec, 2022 - immerse.news

Executive Summary of Creating Community successful Hybrid Festivals based on research for IDFA DocLab successful 2021/22.

IDFA DocLab’s Beanery country successful OhYay

This is simply a somewhat altered mentation of the enforcement summary for our report, Creating Community successful Hybrid Festivals. You tin find the afloat study here.

Reality is becoming a stereo-reality. Just arsenic with sounds you tin marque a quality betwixt somber tones and wide tones, truthful determination volition beryllium a concrete, existent world and a virtual reality. From present on, humankind volition person to enactment successful 2 worlds astatine once. This opens up bonzer possibilities, but astatine the aforesaid clip we look the trial of a tearing-up of being, with awkward consequences. We tin rejoice successful these caller opportunities if and lone if we besides are conscious of their dangers. Paul Virilio, 1995

Media Theorist Paul Virilio said these prescient words successful 1995 successful a absorption to the monolithic changes successful telecommunication technologies with the advent of the internet, globalization and the modulation to an “informational mode of production.” Over the years, we person lone seen a deepening of these merging realities arsenic we contend with societal and synthetic media, compartment phones, technologies specified arsenic virtual reality, augmented reality, crippled engines and advances successful artificial intelligence, information seizure and geo located technologies. This convergence went into overdrive during the pandemic lockdown, but we emerged with a overmuch greater consciousness of the opportunities, dangers and technological capableness to unrecorded successful a “stereo reality.” Today, post-pandemic, Virilio’s words instrumentality connected caller urgency and relevance. The recognized word we present usage for this authorities of being is hybrid. In 2021, respective publications declared “hybrid” a connection of the year.

In this context, we began probe successful precocious 2021 connected hybrid festivals and however they clasp abstraction for communities successful “stereo reality,” to usage Virilio’s term. Our probe is portion of the IDFA DocLab’s Immersive Network Research and Development Program of which MIT Open Documentary Lab is simply a partner. Each twelvemonth we take a probe question based connected trends successful the tract and trial it with IDFA DocLab’s showcase. The festival becomes our “living lab.” This past twelvemonth we wanted to research however curators make meaningful connections betwixt online and in-person festival goers, the artists and the work.

The halfway concern of a festival is not lone to premiere enactment but to service arsenic a gathering crushed for those progressive successful each phases of the beingness of a project. Media makers, funders, producers, distributors, critics and audiences walk a fewer aggravated days unneurotic interacting with the enactment and each other. Ideas are sparked, relationships calved oregon deepened and collaborations emerge. The magic of a festival is arsenic overmuch the assemblage gathering arsenic it is the task premieres.

But galore reason that in-person festivals are exclusive. Geographical, fiscal and carnal barriers support radical away. They permission a immense c footprint. During the pandemic, in-person practices and rituals were disrupted arsenic festivals adapted to the lockdown and mounted virtual oregon hybrid programs and platforms. We saw opportunities to marque festivals much inclusive, interactive, imaginative, collaborative and climate-friendly — a glimpse of what the aboriginal could hold. But besides a warning. If not done well, festivals tally the hazard of creating an inferior integer acquisition that furthers inequality alternatively than reduces it, and, furthermore, depletes already scarce festival programming resources. Programming hybrid festivals necessitate festival programmers to situation their assumptions and practices and radically reimagine the festival of the future. It besides requires resources.

We unrecorded successful a stereo world with each its possibilities and dangers. And truthful we inquire however tin festivals reimagine themselves to instrumentality vantage and acceptable into our hybrid world?

We produced a report, Creating Community successful Hybrid Festivals, which is simply a preliminary look astatine the question of curating hybrid festivals done a tiny excavation of interviews with, first, a lawsuit survey based connected 7 interviews with the IDFA DocLab curatorial squad of curators, technologists, designers, artists and immoderate further affiliates. We past broaden our probe and the study to see interviews with 14 different immersive media and movie curators and curatorial teams.

Our volition with this study is archetypal to recognize the IDFA DocLab curatorial team’s attack and insights and, second, to make a snapshot of however festival curators and their teams are reasoning astir hybrid festival goers successful 2022.

We asked the pursuing questions:

How bash you specify hybridity successful the discourse of a festival?

How bash you make meaningful connections betwixt festival-goers successful a virtual space? successful a hybrid space?

What doesn’t enactment successful hybrid spaces?

How tin we ideate connecting hybrid communities successful the future?

We recovered that, astatine this contiguous moment, determination are important barriers to synchronous hybrid festivals including the time, money, acquisition and exertion required to marque it happen. Curators and their teams observed that afloat virtual festivals enactment but if radical are in-person astatine a festival they mostly bash not privation to articulation online unless determination is simply a circumstantial event. Virtual audiences volition spell online to acquisition the enactment but don’t enactment astir to link with each different oregon the in-person audiences if the festival is in-person. There are of people exceptions included successful this report. But we besides recovered that if radical thought much broadly astir hybridity, determination are galore much ways to curate hybrid festivals. In our interviews, radical talked astir antithetic types of hybridity specified arsenic asynchronous online and in-person festival goers, aggregate platforms, and hybrid projects oregon events wrong festivals. An expanded explanation of a hybrid festival makes it much feasible. And finally, 1 of the cardinal challenges radical identified is however to marque an enticing virtual abstraction that gives much bureau to online festival goers and that attracts in-person festival goers.

Our interviewees had galore ideas astir however to curate a hybrid festival that they shared with us. What follows is simply a summary of their ideas connected however to meaningfully link hybrid festival goers.

1.Take a wide presumption of hybridity — research asynchronicity, lawsuit and task based hybridity

2. Identify and construe values from the in-person festival to the online festival and question tradition

3. Design crossed platforms — taking into relationship the affordances of each platform

4. Ensure agency, state to research and a consciousness of ownership of the virtual festival spaces

5. Imagine and let for what is intolerable in-person to beryllium imaginable online.

6. Collaborate and facilitate co-creation, worldbuilding and shared experiences wrong festivals and crossed festivals

7. Add money, time, and unit to the curations of some online and in-person experiences.

More probe is required arsenic curators proceed to experimentation with hybrid festivals. We don’t suggest discarding the in-person festival, but alternatively we wonderment however they tin beryllium expanded. How tin festival programming teams construe the values and roles of a festival into a hybrid environment? How tin festivals beryllium much inclusive and clime delicate portion keeping the magic of an in-person festival? How tin we reimagine festivals successful hybrid spaces that make meaningful connections betwixt in-person and virtual communities, the artists and the enactment — that accommodate to our stereo reality?

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