A UFO abduction case, cricket in a moonlit yard and a journey through Indigenous Australian song and dance are some of the immersive virtual reality experiences to be had at this year’s Adelaide Film Festival – and there’s plenty more. Whether you’ve strapped on a VR headset in the past or you’re new to the technology, we promise you’ll enjoy the following.
Once you find a VR experience you want to see, make sure to check which package(s) it screens in, as some experiences feature in multiple packages. Have fun!
Clockwise from top left: Carriberrie, Summation of Force VR, Songbird, Your Spiritual Temple Sucks
Borderline
Abraham, a young Israeli soldier, Jewish from Ethiopian origins, is guarding the borderline along with a fellow rookie. When Abraham is left alone for a few minutes, he faces an impossible dilemma. Based on true events, Borderline tells a short VR story, allowing its audience to experience the hero’s uncertainty in the middle of the desert.
11 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Carriberrie
David Gulpilil introduces this stunning virtual reality journey across Australia in a joyous celebration of Indigenous song and dance – the “first language” of his people. A 360° live-action VR documentary, Carriberrie encompasses the traditional and contemporary, past and present, as it joins Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and modern technology in groundbreaking ways. From the Central Desert to the northern rainforests, from ceremonial creation dances to bush-punk bands, director Dominic Allen has crafted a remarkable experience and affecting journey rich in cultural significance, every bit as soaring as the viewing experience itself.
11 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Creating the Spectacle in 360: Flying Free, Fledgling Flights
Gain an immersive experience of flight training and visual research flights with Sue Austin and Instructor Rob Keene as Sue undergoes the rigorous process that will ultimately lead to the next iteration of the durational artwork ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ – a wheelchair that flies free.
12 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Dinner Party
Dinner Party is a 3D virtual reality experience based on the true story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple who in 1961 reported the first nationally known UFO abduction. It’s the pilot episode for The Incident, an anthology series that takes viewers on an immersive and intimate journey through true-life supernatural events. When the Hills were not able to remember and reconcile the details of an inexplicable event, they sought hypnosis. At a dinner party they played their recorded hypnoses to their friends, where viewers experience the separate and radically different accounts of the Hills’ abduction.
11 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Kobold
Kobold is a new kind of horror experience that blurs the line between cinema and VR gaming. Step into the shoes of an urban explorer investigating the mysterious case of a missing boy. Pick up your flashlight and discover the secrets of an abandoned villa in the middle of a dark forest. Immerse yourself in true, cinematic realism, explore an interactive universe, pick up clues and dare to venture deeper into a mystical world where your actions can have grave consequences. With its intensely realistic visuals captured with photogrammetry, free movement and intuitive interactions, Kobold is a unique room scale VR experience that will entice and terrify…
11 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Mind At War
Scott never wanted to join the military. He had a full life planned out: marrying his high school girlfriend, building a family, and exploring the beautiful mountains of Utah and the rest of America. Two weeks before his wedding, he lost his job and the World Trade Centers fell. Unemployed and desperate for work, he signed up for the military. Eighteen months later he was off to Iraq. Ill-equipped and emotionally unstable, the war exposed him to layers of trauma and he quickly became a victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His return to the US was without support, thrusting him further into despair and then homelessness. Against all odds, Scott finds peace in the most unexpected place.
12 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Parragirls Past, Present: unlocking memories of institutional ‘care’
‘Parragirls Past, Present’ is a deeply moving immersive encounter with former residents’ visions of Parramatta Girls Home, a punitive Australian child welfare institution closed in 1974. This collaboration with media artists and Parragirls rewrites the history of the Girls Home, where children were subjected to unwarranted punishment and abuse, as documented in the Royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. This work was created over a year and half as Parragirls returned to the Girls Home in Western Sydney. The experience gives emphatic voice to their empowerment and vision to reclaim the institution’s abandoned history. Parragirls bear witness to their traumatic experiences so that such crimes might never happen again. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, Parragirls’ living memories unlock inexplicable realms of institutional ‘care’ as well as hopes for a different future.
On 22 October 2018, at the conclusion of the festival, the Prime Minister will deliver a national apology to victims of institutional child sexual abuse.
12 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Rooms
Rooms will let you immerse into five intimate room realities. Having an anthropological view on the presented world, the narration follows the rooms’ archaic processes and watches the rooms’ dramatized physical development. The rooms are defined as a socially important construct rather than just space framed by walls. What fundamental functions do rooms have for mankind? Is it possible to disobey or question our culture’s rules? What happens to a room, when civilisation has left its space? The idea was to make the room a protagonist. Working with a frameless medium, we focused on creating a suspenseful “room dramaturgy”. The viewer’s interactive task is to find his own point of interest in the portrayed rooms. The spectator is responsible for deciding how explicitly he wants to experience the documental processes.
11 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Clockwise from top left: Kobold, The Whale, Creating the Spectacle in 360: Flying Free, Fledgling Flights, Rooms
Running 62: The Arrival VR
Zibeon Fielding is on the edge of achieving his dream, completing an ultra-marathon through the central desert where he lives. Waking with him on the morning of the run we see the determination it will take him to make the distance. Scored by the soulful beats of Electric Fields we follow Zibeon as he makes the final sprint to reach his community. Regardless of whether he makes the distance there is going to be one hell of a party waiting for him.
16 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Songbird
You are retracing the steps of world renowned ornithologist Dr Jim Jacobi, one of the last known people to ever see the ʻōʻō bird. You will hear the true story of his extraordinary meeting with the fabled ʻōʻō. Jim’s past experience and your present begin to merge as you first hear and then see the ʻōʻō, culminating in a final close encounter with the legendary ʻōʻō himself. Songbird has been created with a fully spatialised soundscape of recordings of extinct birds – sonic fossils – combined with authentic sounds from the Kauai’an wet forest. The ʻōʻō recording in the piece was recorded in 1976. The ʻōʻō was declared extinct in 1987. The ʻōʻō is not alone; over half of the Kauai’s original 13 native forest birds have disappeared.
11 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
Summation of Force VR
In a moonlit backyard a mythical game of cricket is being played between two boys. Over the course of the game we contemplate the physics, motion, pitfalls and beauty of this idiosyncratic sport. Created by Trent Park and Narelle Autio in collaboration with Matthew Bate, The Summation of Force VR is a virtual reinterpretation of their moving image work, placing you inside it. Dark, surreal and exquisitely beautiful, this virtual reality artwork uses cricket as a metaphor for life itself.
12 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
The Real Thing
Have you ever been to Paris? It is a nice city located near Shanghai, but there are very few foreign tourists there, only couples coming to have their wedding photos taken! Paris, London, Venice… three cities of which you can find a copy in China. The Real Thing is a documentary that takes us to these bizarre environments and plays with our surroundings by distorting reality, but also focuses on the people who actually live there – Chinese people living in small flats, but with a view on the Eiffel Tower. The Real Thing is a 360° documentary directed by Benoît Felici and realized in coproduction with Artline Films and Arte. It makes a pair with a 52’ TV documentary about the very principle of architectural copies.
12 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
The Unknown Patient
The pilot episode is the beginning of the true story of how The Unknown Patient was found. We meet Diana (Lily Sullivan), a nurse at Callan Park Mental Asylum, who’s recently released the unknown patient’s image to the newspaper in the hope that someone will come forward and identity him. But despite Diana’s best efforts to connect with him, his sudden flashbacks into abstract memories of traumatic events come into sharp focus and blur what is real and what is past. In interactive VR, through discovery and exploration of the patient’s memories and real-life events, the audience is invited to piece together the identity of The Unknown Patient. In doing so, viscerally experience the impact that war had on the psyche of soldiers who made it home and the hope that this story gave to a nation in mourning.
11 – 20 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
The Whale
As the moon shines through a mysterious and radiant sky into the ocean, a ghost whale appears with so many stories hidden behind its eyes.
11 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
The Waiting Room
She is Osca, an organic being, born of this earth. Belonging to Earth, she exists comfortably within her natural world… unlike the newcomers. Osca is flummoxed by the complexity of these human beings, by their ingenuity and resourcefulness, but also by their rapaciousness and destructiveness. The clues she finds offer no explanations to her. The Waiting Room is a tribute to time; elusive, ethereal, abstract yet perpetually exacting. It speaks to the time in between the before and the after: the time before we, the real aliens on planet Earth, arrived; and the time after, once we are done colonising and have gone. What are the realities that we must transcend to avoid arriving at the inevitable? The Waiting Room is a pioneering work, one that redefines the boundaries of VR by dispensing with conventional VR headsets. When we step into the gallery at Samstag wearing our active eyeglasses, we enter another world and become eyewitnesses to the modern fable.
14 September – 30 November at Samstag Museum. Find out more.
Your Spiritual Temple Sucks
Mr. Chang arrives at his “Spiritual Temple,” a place that represents one’s destiny. To solve his marital crisis and financial problems, he summons his guardian – The Thunder God. They attempt to tidy his life, which turns out to be a big mistake… with hilarious consequences.
12 – 21 October at the Jumpgate VR Lounge. Tickets.
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