Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Installations
Biodigital Theatre
All Kinds of Limbo
The National Theatre of Great Britain’s communal musical journey reflecting the influence of West Indian culture on the UK’s music scene across the genres of reggae, grime, classical, and calypso. Immersive technologies, the ceremony of live performance, and the craft of theatrical staging bring audiences into a VR performance space.
Anti-Gone
In a post-climate-change world, environmental catastrophe has become normalized. Cities are sunken, yet the vestiges of late-capitalist culture live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. Spyda and Lynxa are a couple navigating this world, gliding frictionlessly from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs.
Atomu
Go inside the cyclical center of a Kikuyu tribal myth from Kenya, where man may become woman and woman may become man. Through virtual reality, dance, and music, a sacred space is created to explore many versions of yourself.
BLKNWS
Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.
Kahlil Joseph’s mesmerizing news-creation machine is a soulful and rousing intervention into the current epidemic news addiction powered by the “news-industrial complex.” Rejuvenating what news can be, BLKNWS combines appropriated news and social media with originally produced anchored segments to create a continuously updated broadcast that is as much a news service as it is a portal to an elevated state of awareness. “A fugitive newscast,” BLKNWS is only accessible at specific terrestrial sites.
Ongoing broadcast installations can be seen at Filmmaker Lodge and the Festival Co-op.
New Frontier In The Wild
All the world’s a stage! Find these works woven into the digital landscape of the Festival campus.
Dance Trail
A dance piece in augmented reality enabling users to invite virtual dancers into our world. Site-specific and mobile, the app allows audiences to see dance sequences outdoors and indoors during the Festival. Users can place dancers anywhere in the world and share snapshots and videos.
Details on how to experience this exhibition will be announced soon.
Guisado on Sunset
Missed-connection regret at that one late-night spot—the kind you keep playing back in your head but not quite ever remembering right, until it starts to look like something else.
Details on how to experience this exhibition will be announced soon.
Spaced Out
An underwater VR experience transports you aboard a voyage from the Earth to the moon, as well as within, led by the audio conversations of the Apollo 11 mission. Using special underwater VR goggles and a snorkel, the experience becomes a space simulation immersing all of the senses.
Open to credential holders Sat. 1/25–Thu. 1/30, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. at Festival Headquarters (Sheraton Park City, 1895 Sidewinder Dr.)
Bring your swimsuit; towels available on-site.
VR Cinema Program 1
The Box at The Ray
1768 Park Ave., Park City
Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.
Azibuye—The Occupation
When Masello and Evan, two homeless black artists/activists, break into an abandoned mansion in an affluent part of Johannesburg, they proclaim their occupation to be an artistic and political act in defiance of inequalities in land ownership in South Africa.
Bembé
Bembé is a Cuban tradition that encompasses elements of both Christianity and the African Yoruba, where the souls of dead slaves come to Earth and family, friends, and neighbors take part in a celebration lasting up to seven days.
After the Fallout
In March 2011, an earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The devastating consequences filled the communities in Fukushima with fear of the intangible and split Japan in a distinct before and after.
VR Free
Exploring the nature of incarceration spaces by portraying slices of life inside a prison in Turin, Italy. The film also captures the reactions of several inmates during brief encounters with immersive videos of life outside of prison.
CATEGORY New Frontier Exhibitions
RUN TIME 50 min
VR Cinema Program 2
About
The Box at The Ray
1768 Park Ave., Park City
Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.
Flowers & a Switchblade
An everyday scene—a real-life conversation in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—collaged together from hundreds of videos to form a fractured, hyperstimulating, 360-degree cubist world.
tx-reverse 360°
What is behind the cinema screen? What if the auditorium dissolves and with it the familiar laws of cinema itself? As reality and cinema collide, viewers are drawn into a vortex where the familiar order of space and time seems to be suspended.
Go
Searching for stability in his life, Peter Thaler sets out on a hike in the Swiss mountains from which he will never return. An unprecedented symbiosis of literature and virtual reality, telling a story of everyday and final farewells and opening the door to eternity a tiny crack.
Hominidae
Against a landscape of X-ray imagery and wild anatomical reimagination, a mother and her children struggle for survival. This experience follows an “arachnid hominid,” an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, from the birth of her children to her premature death in the teeth of her prey.
CATEGORY New Frontier Exhibitions
RUN TIME 46 min
PERSUASION MACHINES
Artists Karim Amer and Güvenç Özel use a virtual smart living room, and an HTC VIVE headset, to allow the user to visually confront the invisible process of data collection and question the nature of the digital machines that are supposed to be making our lives better.
