Inside the new immersive culture: the spectator at the centre of the images

Visionary spaces are still being designed. After seeing the Heaven's Gate installation in London, U2 invited him to collaborate on the show held for 25 nights in a row to inaugurate the Sphere in Las Vegas: a gigantic 15,000-seat dome with a curved LED screen covering its entire surface area for 15,000 square metres at a resolution of 16K (the highest in the world). Also monstrous is the video work he projected: King Size inspired by Elvis Presley as a symbol of the lost American dream. To realise it, Brambilla trained an AI to process over 12,000 samples of footage from the rock'n'roll king's concerts and films. "It was amazing. I've never seen anything of that size, it's a hyperspectacular facility. Where even the term immersive takes on a whole new meaning. It's not often that you see 15,000 people with their mouths wide open in amazement, in times when nobody is amazed by anything anymore. More are being planned, in London and Dubai. Maybe this will get people to leave their computers and mobile phones behind. And finally get out of the house.

"IF A FILM INVOLVES US, IT IS BECAUSE OF WHAT IT SAYS, NOT HOW IT SAYS IT"

In another corner of the world, there are those who bring audiences into an ancient building to see the future. The Burano Artificial Intelligence Film Festival (Baiff), is more than pioneering, born in 2023 when cinema made with the aid of AI hardly existed. This year in October there will be the fourth edition. The poetic detail is that all this is not happening in some hyper-technological megalopolis, but among the colourful little houses on the small island of Burano. "We arrived here, escaping from the overtourism of Venice," says Giovanni Balletta, founder of the festival with his partner, Hanna Rudak, a Belarusian filmmaker. "And here we learned of a romantic story that inspired us, that of Bepi Suà. His house has the most colourful façade of all. Bepi was for years the maintainer of the local cinemas, here there were no less than four out of not even 4,000 inhabitants! When the last cinema closed, he would drop a white sheet in front of the house and project cartoons for the children of Burano'. The idea of doing a festival of short films made with AI was a leap in the dark. "We wondered, who knows if anyone will show up. Within a week of launching the site we had received 34 shorts; by the end of the registration period it had grown to 254 from 122 countries around the world." The Baiff's look at creativity and artificial intelligence immediately attracted 'other crazy people like us who are curious about what will come out, such as Andrea Seno, a former Inter Milan footballer who is now president of the Baiff, the deputy is Marco Nardin; Giovanni Selvatico, Piergiorgio Baroldi and Giacinto Fiore, who gave us our first big national showcase at the AI Week in Milan, have also joined'. You can see all the selected shorts on the website, but the festival is in presence, hosted in Venice by the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. "And it is totally immersive," adds Balletta. "The spectator can dive into marathons of shorts, meet all the filmmakers and creators who are also in the audience, participate in popular meetings with scholars such as the philosopher Nicola Donti. Perhaps one day not far off, we will be able to ask an AI app 'I would like to watch a horror film with Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt in a cottage on Mars' and the film will be created directly in front of us in real time. But one of the most interesting things we have observed in recent years is the evolution of the film crew, which now consists of creators, directors, prompt engineers, and experts in the various technological tools. Every time a technological innovation has been introduced in cinema, professional roles have not been lost, new ones have been created. The AI follows our directions: it takes a real cinematographer to tell it what kind of shot you want, with what light, what lens, etc. It takes skills. But above all, you have to have something to tell. If a film engages us, it is not because of how it was made, but because of what it is telling us'.

Un momento di “Aura Invalides”, show realizzato nel 2023 dalla canadese Moment Factory a Les Invalides a Parigi. (©MOMENT FACTORY)

"EMOTION WORKS AS A CULTURAL COLLANT"

Immersiveness is participation? Giorgio Gaber will forgive us for the quotation, but it captures well the idea around which the work of the Canadian Moment Factory moves, which since 2001 has been realising multidisciplinary entertainment projects for clients such as Madonna, Billie Eilish, Sony, Microsoft, Disney, and most recently Real Madrid. "Our teams combine video, sound, lighting, special effects, interactivity and architecture to engage the audience," explains Catherine Turp, who started out as a vee-jay and is now the studio's director of creation. "The mission since we started has always been to combine creativity and technology. And our vision is really to spark connections by creating experiences in the physical world that allow people to connect". Immersivity, Turp explains, is just one of the elements they use. An element that amplifies certain experiences, but the central point is really the experience. Indeed, the emotional experience 'because we see emotion as a real cultural glue'.

Show realizzato da Moment Factory, “Phish” allo Sphere di LasVegas nel 2024. (©MOMENT FACTORY)

Ever since Moment Factory was formed 25 years ago, 'we have been looking for new forms of multimedia entertainment. Now, I would rather say that we are looking for new forms of human experiences. We call them new digital bonfires, because people gathered around the fire thousands of years ago to share stories, to have these collective experiences'. One of the most evocative projects is Arbora Lumina, an illuminated night trail in the forest on a thousand-year-old estate, the Domaine d'Harcourt in Normandy. "Curiosity Cove in Singapore, on the other hand, is a multi-sensory experience where the wonders of nature come to life in a supernatural world, and each element responds to the touch and movement of children. Among the public's most popular projects is Mirror Mirror: a room filled with fog and colours and incredibly immersive sound. To surprise, to excite is essential. But the most important thing for us is to start from a human-centred approach, to understand the audience and create this immersive context where people can feel part of something bigger than themselves'.