Image: Nyarri Nyarri Morgan watches VR.
For a moment in January 2016, the single most concentrated conversation about the future of the world occurred in a purpose built convention centre in one small Swiss city. The World Economic Forum in Davos brings together 2,500 political and economic leaders to meet informally and sometimes discuss the consequences of their decisions.
With them were over forty artists, defined as cultural leaders by the WEF cultural program. Yo Yo Ma, Bono and Kevin Spacey were together with actress Michelle Yeoh, Beijing screenwriter Joan Xu, Cebyu artist Francis Sollano, Boston architect Neri Oxman and Sydney artist and professor Sarah Kenderline.
Among them was Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, an artist and Indigenous leader from the Pilbara Desert. He was there to remind the world’s decision makers of the most terrible reality of all – the experience of an atomic bomb.
He is also the storyteller in a new artwork at the forefront of a communication technology which has barely begun. His vision has been captured in 360 degrees as a virtual experience, displayed through headsets which most audiences have never used before.
The key to this story is Lynette Wallworth, a film and new media artist whose work extends from traditional screens to mobile phones, planetariums and now virtual reality. As a Trustee of the Forum’s Global Challenge Initiative for Economic Growth and Social Inclusion, she was asked to present a work as part of the Installations and Interactive Projects strand of the Forum. She had already presented at Davos, but here she was invited to create a brand new work.
‘I’m hugely heartened by the fact that they see the power of art in that space,’ she explains, ‘because it’s not about conversations about statistics and information – it’s coming from a position of how you feel about something and how you think about something. And wouldn’t you want to know what something feels like if you have to make a decision about it? So it’s a very powerful thing that they requested a work to be developed for that audience.’
Lynette Wallworth works with producer Nicole Newnham from the US. They met when she was mentored by Wallworth at an Exploratorium in San Francisco, and bonded over conferences and major arts events. Wallworth told Newnham a story about Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, who had been born into the Martu community which had never been touched by white people and lived as their ancestors did for millennia. When he was a child he saw a great explosion and a black cloud which rained ash. Later he met white people for the first time, who carried the family away from their lands.
Nyarri is now an Elder and an artist, whose work has been shown around the world. Aided by his wife Ngalangka Nola Taylor, who is a painter and cultural advisor, he agreed to tell his story for the Davos work. Curtis Taylor, his grandson and a young Martu filmmaker, was a narrator and writer.
The WEF commission brought prestige, but no production finance. Wallworth accepted the inaugural Sundance /Jaunt VR residency program, for which Jaunt provided equipment and post production work. Newnham found the cash budget between the Skoll, MacArthur and Ford Foundations, the Fledgling Fund, the Adelaide Film Festival Production Fund and the Australia Council.
Then they went to the Parnngurr Community of Western Australia, to be enveloped into the world of their collaborators and storytellers. The rig, with its sixteen cameras mounted in a cluster like a dandelion, is disconcerting for linear filmmakers. There is simply no escape as this entire human community, building by building, dogs and fires and cars and shadows and stones, horizon to horizon is captured at the same time.
It could be a kind of tourist experience, like most current VR work. Nicole Newnham sees the project as ‘a meditation on the ethics of ethnographic and documentary filmmaking.’ VR can be ‘a creepy voyeuristic ghost in somebody’s world and it can be a colonial adventure to go over and put this camera down among people and extract something and bring it back.’
Wearing our headsets, we enter the community as guests, flying above cars, to settle before Nyarri, who welcomes the visitors into his land. This ritual reflects the traditional forms of greeting and he is very much in control.
He is completely compelling as he tells his story, as his direct dealings with us provide a jolt of surprise. Even the dogs are hypnotic as they wander randomly around, checking out the new machines.
‘I think the film is beautifully sincere and transparent,’ says Newnham. ‘The entire enterprise is truly to take care of this country, make you feel something of what Nyere feels for his country and understand and relate the story to you.
‘The camera was not taking selective frames. Nyarri was able to know what was being filmed. He could see the 16 cameras and he would say the camera has 16 eyes. He was completely aware every single moment of the filming of what that camera was showing and that is really different to documentary.’
We, of course, know where he is going. He is telling the story of Maralinga, when his country was used as a test site for a series of full-scale nuclear explosions. That experience is recreated with special effects laid over the landscape, based on footage of the mushroom cloud. We watch it rumble forwards, vast as hell, sinister as the end of the world. Roar up and over and behind us, as the ash rains down from above, and we think, ‘Now I know something of what it was like.’
Back in the US, with Jaunt, they had to knit the images from the cameras together into a seamless experience and create a coherent narrative. Lynette Wallworth had been warned not to move the camera, to avoid close-ups, and to ease between scenes. All these rules she happily ignored, so the camera flies and swoops, we intercut past and present, and move from the still meditation of a sunrise to Nyarri and Ngalangka Nola Taylor staring into the camera.
But the editing experience was pretty strange. ‘Our mind understands film and film language and we know that we seeing the thing and we’re not in it,’ says Wallworth. It’s a story that is coming to us through moving image and we know it is separate from us and we register that. With VR you are actually inside the film, inside the world of the work. Your sense and memory of it is not as something you watch, it is something you are present for and how you recall it is something different.’ Oddly, it tended to become less compelling each time she watched it.
They were wrestling with new frontiers in VR. Collisions is probably the first time a major piece of special effects has been built for narrative rather than gaming reasons. They took the project to the Skywalker Ranch and built the first Dolby Atmos sound track in which the audience is truly and completely immersed.
For the launch at Davos in Switzerland, they gathered 75 people together in a room, each with a separate headset but sharing the same experience. ‘Everyone sat and watched completely synchronised together,’ said Newnham, ’and they took off their headsets at the same time.’ They discovered Nyarri on stage before them in person, with Ngalangka and Curtis, along with Michael Oreskes who runs National Public Radio News in the US. That must have been a shock in its own right.
Collisions was also available in a smaller installation throughout the conference, as an integral part of the cultural discussion, mostly connected to a strand called ‘Protecting Cultural Heritage at a time of catastrophic destruction’.
The Collisions group left Davos to go to Sundance immediately afterwards, where the project was exhibited to 200 people simultaneously. An immersive technology which is inherently about connection, presented in a way which is totally separate and literally dis-embodied, became collective.
Since then, Wallworth and Newnham have been travelling continuously with the project, funded as part of the budget. In May it was shown at the Climate Action Summit in the US, when 700 world leaders met to consider practical action. It has trundled around festivals, launched as a gallery experience in Adelaide, and was shown at the Comprehensive Test Ban Organisation in Vienna last month. ‘It was delivered to the exact people who were thinking about whether or not they’re going to ratify their signatures on the Test Ban Treaty’, says Newnham. ‘That is why we were able to get support from all these different [funding] organisations.
‘Because the enterprise is not really to just inform people with a documentary about an issue which has been edited with a filmmaker’s personal belief. Here is an experience of a story that can challenge the way you make ethical decisions about how you think of the extractive industry that you run. It can really shift the way that you think about sustainability. That is really exciting to people who have been trying for a long time to figure out how you change the hearts and minds of the people who run the world.’
Lynette Wallworth has been working in new technologies for twenty years, and she is wary of the hype. But, she says, ‘I do believe it is different. I think it’s got the capacity to take us to a place which is impactful and transformative about how we feel, and that’s what I am interested in pursuing.
‘I love it because you can make it close to the campfire experience in the flickering light when storytelling was immersive and your mind was captivated.
‘I can only tell you that I’ve watched this work now from Davos to the extremely informed cinematic audience at Sundance, to Tribeca, to the Museum of modern Art, to the Climate Action Summit and I seen the same response and it’s an emotional connection. Because I do believe it’s the power of art and it’s very affirming to me.’
One of the 75 people who experienced the first moments of Collisions, along with the King of Belgium and the President of Argentina was Mathias Cormann, the flinty Minister of Finance in the Australian government.
His Facebook page for 22 January 2016 contains this statement: ‘Virtual Reality an amazing way to watch a movie. It was like being in the middle of the Western Desert of Western Australia. Great privilege meeting the Morgan family at our Australian night in Davos last night.’
There are four photographs on the site. Unlike most of the material, there is no politics here. It is there because he wanted to say it. Here he is with Lynette Wallworth.
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