RETURN OF PRODIGAL FANTASY/2
- Marina Drozdova
- Sep 13, 2023
- 2 min read

Venice cinema biennale – the notes…
Note that real pandemonium was happening this year on Immersive Island. Yes, the festival provides a whole island for VR experiments - a boat goes there every five to ten minutes, and several dozen tents of sorts await you there, in which they offer you “magic hats” - and the world around you starts jumping and dancing. However, you should not think that the program contains only comic scenes - far from it. VR films in the Biennale programs cover historical and political topics, wars and other humanitarian tragedies in different periods of human history. Of course, philosophical essays are also greatly appreciated - such as “Songs for a Passerby” (Celine Daemen - Venice Immersive Grand Prize).
Songs for a Passerby is a meditative quest that allows you to step outside reality for a moment and look at yourself. As a puppeteer of your own body you will be entering a poetic space where the melancholy question arises: is this me passing by moments, or is it rather the moments passing by me?

The author tells us: By placing spectators outside themselves and showing them the contours of their own “self” through capture with live 3D cameras, I aim to create an experience that touches on a familiar sense of melancholy, wherein we are no longer at one with the world, but in some ways are opposite to it. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “This is what fate means: to be opposite, and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever.”
In Songs for a Passerby I have attempted to create an experience that investigates the connection between the physical and the metaphysical world. You are both a body that is moving through space and a mind that is looking at it. While the unavoidable passing of time makes itself manifest to you, all past moments will remain present, entering into a simultaneous existence. You are both in the world and simultaneously outside it.
But the main queues were still for Wallace and Gromit: The Grand Getaway. This is some kind of crazily pleasant miracle - to find yourself in the universe of Wallace and Gromit. Once in their virtual kitchen, try to cook breakfast for them (instead of a knife, you always end up with a saw), help them put things in a suitcase - they are embarking on a space travel (all their trousers and books fly away around the room), etc. And then a flying radio starts flirting with you, a spoon full of jam is chasing you...
A proposal was received from accredited participants to make an option to film a viewer struggling with VR gizmos in VR space: from the outside, these are also quite the Marx brothers and sisters in action.

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