Long before Mark Zuckerberg presented himself to shareholders last fall as an avatar and declared Facebook's new investment in the virtual reality industry known as the Metaverse, Sundance was everywhere . The festival's forward-looking New Frontier section has been curating immersive and interactive works for 16 years, allowing artists working in virtual reality and other new technologies to incubate their craft as the industry gradually began to lend to it. attention.

Today, with billions of dollars invested in online interactive media and Zuckerberg's Facebook reboot as Meta, the festival can take credit for showcasing the innovation that drove at the moment. The pitch of the metaverse — a loosely defined network of digital environments where people can work, socialize and create online — has the potential to employ many tech-savvy creatives into Sundance's orbit. But some of the stalwarts of this community aren't exactly thrilled about it.

“Until we find ways to extend the access by cost and opportunity in this space, the metaverse is not meta – it's a monoverse,” said Lynette Wallworth, the Australian filmmaker and artist who has been working in virtual reality since Sundance cast her for his first VR residency six years ago. "I am disinterested in a world where there is a monopoly on perception, what we understand to be our world, what we understand to be human experience, and what we understand to be our reality."

Conversations about the metaverse and its implications resonate through Sundance this year, even rocking the mainstream aspect of the festival. “We Met in Virtual Reality”, a documentary in competition, was shot by first director Joe Hunting exclusively in VRchat, one of the most important social platforms in virtual reality. Hunting has recorded hundreds of hours of material in VRchat over the past two years, and the result is a staggering window into the complex socialization that takes place in the headset. The film follows a wide range of individuals interacting as colorful avatars in local digital worlds, where they find a greater sense of belonging and camaraderie than anywhere else. Those unfamiliar with VRchat might mistake the images for animation, but everything was captured in real time.

I met Hunting before this year's Sundance in the same setting where his film is set: he invited me into his private VRchat world, where our avatars stood in the middle of a beautiful yellow field- green, surrounded by distant mountains and blue skies. . "The biggest limitation of virtual reality is the awareness of what the experience is like," Hunting said, as his virtual cameras hovered nearby. “I think that will change as this platform becomes more accessible in a more community-driven context.”

While working on the project, Hunting found his own professional base in virtual reality as a virtual event photographer. “A lot of my knowledge comes from making actual films that I transferred into this space,” he said, noting that there was a significant learning curve in finding his subjects. "They're all in Discord servers and the third-party software underworld," he said.

Using a remarkable naturalistic camera style that often veers into film, Hunting tracks everything from dance teachers to sign language educators to show up close the complexity of the virtual society he experienced. Its main characters, a couple who go by the usernames Dust Bunny and Toaster, fell in love with VRchat during the pandemic, even though travel restrictions prevented them from going online IRL. Their harrowing story stands in stark contrast to the clichés about a metaverse dominated by trolls and teenagers.

Between the two, Toaster's arc is particularly notable as he started his VRchat life "on the quiet", before overcoming his social anxiety and finding love entirely in a metaverse setting. “They both spoke so well about their relationship,” Hunting said. “Virtual reality affects people's social lives in very profound ways.”

Like Wallworth, however, Hunting was skeptical of Meta's big moves. When we spoke, I was sitting behind the glasses of my Quest 2, the user-friendly headset that is gradually becoming Meta's flagship project (Facebook bought Quest for $1 billion 10 years ago; two new editions of the headset are expected later this year). The Hunt, however, used a wired headset from another company. "What frustrates me with Meta is that a lot of their campaigning is speculative," Hunting said. “We actually have so many things to draw on to understand what this experience is like. I think Meta will be the Facebook of virtual reality, and that's okay. I don't think I'll spend a lot of time there. We want to have creative freedom. We want to be ourselves and be in worlds of our own creation.

However, just as Sundance catapulted emerging filmmakers into studio careers, the festival has become a talent pool for the metaverse. The most striking example is Chris Milk, the virtual reality creator who has presented 13 projects at New Frontier over the years and participated in festival labs. In October 2021, Meta announced the acquisition of Milk's VR production company, Within, in a deal estimated to be worth over $400 million. The company, which Milk co-founded with Aaron Koblin in 2014, developed the popular VR workout app Supernatural – which engages users in immersive core workouts, stretching and meditation while surrounding them in natural splendor. . (As a subscriber, I can attest to the cardio intensity of boxing workouts.)

This financial windfall is a far cry from the island world of museum installations and festivals that Milk found with his earlier work, including music videos and VR documentaries. In a recent phone interview, he explained his unlikely trajectory. "I see Supernatural as a total extension of everything we did in New Frontier," he said. “When you go to art school like I did, you are taught this module of thinking, that great art – film and installation – is the ultimate level of artistic achievement and the highest level. higher to create something meaningful for others. … If you continue like this, what is the ultimate version of meaning? It is actually changing or transforming someone's life in a positive way. This is the ultimate service you can render to the world as a creator.

Milk connected the early days of New Frontier to a popular Sundance myth. “Once VR took off at New Frontier, it was like how Fox Searchlight would go to Sundance and buy a bunch of movies,” he said, adding that his own original iteration of Within, a virtual reality distribution application called Vrse, allowed him to focus on acquisitions as well. (Searchlight actually created its own VR project, a spinoff of Reese Witherspoon's film "Wild," at New Frontier in 2015.) "It's become a lot of different things over the years," Milk said, “both a place to meet souls and to find projects that we could bring to a wider audience.

Nevertheless, Milk said his island experiences at the festival made it clear he needed to change his approach to the medium. “We were always a bit frustrated with how people were apparently having these transformative experiences at Sundance, but they didn't go home and continued to watch this type of content on a regular basis,” he said. “If our goal is to bring meaning to people's lives and provide them with transformative experiences, you can actually do that much more powerfully through a product than an art installation.”

Milk encouraged others to consider his path. “I think the world needs more artists who build products for people,” he said. "It's both about convincing artists that they can do it and convincing investors to support these kind of founders." (Within was backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in a number of virtual reality entities.)

New Frontier programmer Shari Frilot can take a lot of the credit for seeding the metaverse, whether she likes it or not. Companies from Intel to Google scouted festival talent, and Milk credits her for her early progress, though Frilot insisted that kind of result wasn't her goal as a curator. "I've seen a lot of works and technology bought by companies," she said. “Sometimes it makes me sad. I've definitely seen filmmakers make their first feature, and then they climb and get chewed up in the studio system, and you see the same thing happen with the New Frontier visions that create these miraculous innovations in storytelling. This turns them into beasts of burden.

Frilot used to advise companies on talent to watch ahead of the festival, but begged once they started asking to sign NDAs. "We're talking about big brands working with experimental artists," Frilot said. "These companies pick them up, and then they become the work of the company."

For Wallworth, who joined the Sundance board two years ago, the corporatization of the metaverse exists in opposition to the potential of the medium. "What Shari was trying to do was bring artists together so that we could pursue a trajectory that might not exist otherwise," she said. "It's an ongoing problem in this field, the diversity of people actually developing and experimenting with technology. That's why I'm so attached to Sundance when it comes to what they support.

His work includes Emmy-winning “Awavena,” which was produced in collaboration with the Yaganawa people of the Brazilian Amazon. This year, the festival honors her theatrical experience “How to live…”, in which she revisits her upbringing in a radical Christian community. These aesthetic and cultural efforts are a far cry from any Silicon Valley agenda. "We don't know where the technology is going to take us," Wallworth said. "That's what happens when you're really on the cutting edge. This is all just a tool. What gets interesting is when these tools can be transformed into a different way of seeing the world.

But sometimes the old-fashioned approach works better. As the virtual edition of Sundance 2022 took off, Hunting traveled to Park City with his “We Met in Virtual Reality” subjects to hang out in the ski town despite the cancellation of the physical festival. They left their helmets at home. "It's quite ironic," he said. "We couldn't resist the fact that we were going to be together."

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