November 22-25 saw the 3rd edition of NUMIX LAB (France, Germany, Luxembourg), the French-speaking event dedicated to immersion and digital creation.
This article looks back at the first stage: Metz. The 100-strong delegation at NUMIX LAB took part in the 1st edition of the Rencontres Internationales de la Culture, de la Connaissance et de l’Immersif (RICCI) organized by the Région Grand Est and NUMIX LAB. For 2 days at Bliiida (a third-party venue dedicated to creative industries), the delegation shared and discovered a local ecosystem that is particularly active in implementing ambitious cultural and innovative projects in the fields of immersive events, digital enhancement of remembrance tourism and augmented entertainment.
1. IMMERSIVE EVENTS – A PANEL DEDICATED TO THE CHALLENGES AND CONTRIBUTIONS OF VIDEO MAPPING AND DIGITAL INSTALLATIONS IN PUBLIC SPACES.
The panel featured exchanges between Jérémie Bellot (AV Extended and co-organizers of Constellations), Guillaume Aniorté (Quartier des spectacles international in Montreal), Emmanuel Angeli (Brussel Major Events) and Damien Lugnier (in charge, notably, of the Regalia mapping show in Reims). They discussed how immersive events can help attract a diversity of audiences to their areas of activity.
Jérémie Bellot, artistic curator of the festival and artistic director of AV Extended, opened the discussions with a first look back at Constellations, the international digital arts festival (June to September). The festival celebrated its 6th edition in 2022, hosting 20 artistic works in 16 venues. During its 73 days of programming, the festival attracted almost a million visitors.
Jérémie Bellot then highlighted another digital art center project: the Château de Beaugency. Since 2021, this cultural art center has been hosting a number of immersive formats: temporary immersive exhibitions (e.g. Van Gogh La tête dans les étoiles), in situ digital works and installations (e.g. Rêves Chromatiques), sound and light shows on the facades… Almost all the rooms in this site, which has been classified as a historical monument since 1926, are dedicated to digital art in all its forms. Beaugency is also an experimental project for the Strasbourg-based agency to determine whether this model can be reproduced in other heritage sites.
Following the example of Constellations, other communities in the Région Grand Est have also developed sound and light shows to bring tourists and residents together around the local heritage. Such is the case of Reims with Régalia. Damien Lugnier, a member of Reims City Council’s Culture Department and Deputy Director of the Reims Museums, presented this immersive multimedia show projected onto the facades of Notre-Dame de Reims Cathedral and Saint-Rémi Basilica (accessible free of charge every weekend in December). On this occasion, he reminded the audience that this mapping enables the city to “highlight all the heritage protected by the UNESCO classifications for which it is responsible”. It took four years (2015-2019) to frame and design the project with Canadian creative studio Moment Factory. Two-thirds of the budget enabled the city to acquire the necessary equipment. These initial costs will be amortized over ten years, i.e., two five-year operating cycles.
Setting up artistic and interactive installations can help revitalize and enliven an area by attracting new audiences. This is the case of the Quartier des spectacles strategy developed a few years ago in Montreal. Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles now welcomes an average of over 2 million visitors a year to an area of 1 km2. This level of attendance is the result of a rich annual program (some forty events a year) and numerous partnerships between the various structures and institutions that own, manage or provide the site. On the strength of this experience, the Quartier des spectacles has developed a subsidiary to produce and distribute artistic installations dedicated to public spaces: QDSinternational.
A captivating way of “bringing art into the public space”, in the words of Emmanuel Angeli, artistic and strategic manager at Brussel Major Event (see the exciting Plaisirs d’hivers project, which attracted three million spectators).
Lighting creations are created in response to a variety of challenges, from enhancing the value of a heritage building, to restoring an urban district, to developing tourism in a given region. These are all challenges that require the creation of a genuine creative industry. This industry also contributes to the enhancement of a region’s heritage and memory.
2. PANEL – MEMORY AND IMMERSIVE HERITAGE: TECHNOLOGIES TO BRING MEMORY HERITAGE (BACK) TO LIFE?
Digital technology fosters a diversity of narrative models to bring to life the heritage or memories that need to be preserved. It can help to promote them more widely, to reconstruct them literally or to present them in a way that encourages exchange, sharing and interactivity. The aim of this panel was to demonstrate the singularity, originality and diversity of the possibilities that can be envisaged at the crossroads of digital innovation and memorial heritage.
Immersive technologies are particularly well-suited to portraying a vanished reality by “developing a narrative and less scientific axis”, as Julien Becker from Skill Lab shared with us, who considers that “storytelling is what a producer can bring to a historic site”. This Luxembourg-based creative studio presented its Champ de Bataille project, a stereoscopic virtual reality film that follows a Great War soldier telephone operator into the horror of the trenches. To raise the funds needed for the film’s graphical success (digital modeling, live capture, etc.), the studio joined forces with Film Fund Luxembourg and France TV LAB via a co-production.
These co-production approaches are often boosted by incentive schemes developed by local authorities. This is the approach taken by Ministère des Armées ‘s Department of Memory, Culture and Archives, which launched a call for projects for Innovative Digital Services for Remembrance Tourism. Alexandra Derveaux, Head of the Remembrance Tourism division, recalled that the call for projects has enabled 23 inspiring projects to be rewarded since 2016. These were the cases of Sur la ligne de front en Meurthe et Moselle, an application that offers a digital trail unfolding across the Meurthe-et-Moselle department to better show the diversitý of landscapes and forms taken by the stigmata of this frontline territory, or Rivelsaltes VR, an in situ and wandering experience reconstructing the camp’s past, a witness to the major conflicts of the 20th century (Spanish War, Second World War, wars of decolonization).
Memory and technology can also be deployed through more global, participative and collective approaches. This is the case, for example, with the project led by Frédérique Neau-Dufour, historian and project manager for the European Capital of Culture Esch 2022, for the Région Grand Est. She intends to “create a 2.0 war memorial to transmit the very diverse testimonies of the 36,000 Alsatian victims of the Second World War”. An online database will be set up in 2021 in situ in a place open to the public, using digital mediation (projections, touch-screen tablet). University networks will also be mobilized to help design collective remembrance projects.
In Tunisia, and more broadly in Africa, schools and universities are also being used to reappropriate a common memory. Mohamed Zoghlami spoke along these lines when presenting the Netinfo school dedicated to 3D digital creation (20,000 students from 15 different African countries have attended since it opened). Using cutting-edge technologies, the school’s students are regularly invited to develop projects that make the most of the plural memories of the continent’s 54 states and its particularly numerous physical traces (over 36,000 archaeological sites in Tunisia). This rich heritage is regularly the subject of ambitious digital productions (for example, the modeling of 300 Tunisian costumes in a virtual gallery, the modeling of objects from the Carthaginian era monetized in NFT, a project to create a virtual museum of African music and instruments in the metaverse, etc.).
The wide range of immersive technologies discussed in this panel demonstrates the diversity of approaches that can be envisaged to help develop participative, reappropriative and re-enactment approaches to memory. Other creative and artistic approaches are at work in the performing arts.
3. PANEL – SPECTACLE AUGMENTE – TOWARDS NEW ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PRACTICES?
Live performance is characterized by the unique combination of three elements: mediation by artists, spectators and a work that evolves with each performance. Technological immersion has been contributing to this specificity since the 50s, questioning and enhancing artistic expression. The contribution of technology can be both sensory and artistic. It can also transform the spectator into a real actor. Audrey Pacart, producer at Very Story and moderator of this panel, sees augmented shows as total spectacles.
Several audacious projects presented during the conference illustrated the diversity and richness of the use of technology in live performance. For example, Thomas Payette, co-founder of studio mirari, presented the choreographic piece Touch, which was shown in one of Lighthouse Immersive ‘s digital arts centers for three months. This choreographic piece uses laser remote sensing technology to scan a 3D space and generate images produced in real time, interacting with two dancers and their audience.
This cutting-edge technology echoes that used in Mandala, a brief moment in time by production studio Digital Rise and presented by François Klein. In this free-roaming virtual reality experience, viewers are invited to enter an ancient Buddhist temple to create a mandala through their movement. An artistic and technological feat made possible by the real-time motion capture of an actor.
Augmented reality, virtual reality and video mapping undeniably contribute to the sensory enrichment of a theatrical performance. This is the approach taken by brothers Stéphane and Nicolas Blies(Luxembourg-based studio A-Bahn), who are currently developing the Ceci est mon cœur experience. “Immersive media came to us as a way of exploring the question of sensoriality and the exploration of our own bodies,” they shared at the RICCI. This immersive work, co-produced by Lucid Realities and PHI, will sensitively develop the appropriation of one’s own body. A poem animated and staged in an immersive space using mapping and connected garments diffusing sound and light, designed to totally immerse spectators for around 40 minutes.
“Technology allowed us to create a dialogue between the actors and the audience,” said Catherine Elsen, actress and producer/actress at PitchBlack Collective, about The Assembly. This immersive sound ritual uses virtual reality, dance, interactive light beams and numerous speakers. This interactive dramaturgy offers spectators a ritual triggered by their movements to create an original musical composition. A holographic mediator, embodied by an actor, then appears to aesthetically represent the sounds produced. A striking example of spectators (from 60 to 120) integrated into the artistic composition with the dancers and artists present.
Producing such projects comes at a cost. While Ceci est mon cœur, with an initial investment of 1.4 million euros, is a co-production aimed at international distribution, other panel members presented alternative financing channels. François Klein, for example, spoke of the value of international co-productions in seeking public funding from different countries. Rationalization of technological resources would then make it possible to balance the ticket price and the running time to ensure an efficient rate of return. For Catherine Elsen, the multidisciplinarity inherent in augmented shows is an asset. It enables them to reach a wide range of markets (heritage, audiovisual, live performance, etc.), on condition that the work is exploited in a country already acculturated to immersion. The last model presented was that of Eric Joris of Crew Brussel, whose participation in subsidized technological and artistic research projects enables his artistic collective to create immersive experiences.
All these exciting projects discussed on the morning of November 23 illustrate the many benefits of immersion in live performance. Enough to fuel the Wagnerian fantasy of a total work via new technologies.
After the first two days in Metz, NUMIX LAB participants crossed the border to discover the German immersive and creative ecosystem. We’ll be reporting on this journey in a second article.
Many thanks to all our partners for making this third edition possible: Gouvernement du Québec et de la Ville de Montréal, Film Fund Luxembourg, Esch 2022 – European Capital of Culture, K8 Institut für strategische Ästhetik, Région Grand EstGrand E-Nov+, l’Agence d’Innovation et de Prospection Internationale du Grand Est, City of Metz, Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), Quotidien de l’Art and Ocim.
