GROUND CONTROL

GROUND

CONTROL

an immersive exhibition by

Visual Narratives Laboratory

Join us at our finissage

for a serene retreat amidst the festival's hustle

DATE: 07.09 START: 18:00

SPUMA - SPACE FOR THE ARTS

FONDAMENTA S. BIAGIO, 800/R, 30133 VENEZIA

NEAREST VAPORETTO STOP - PALANCA

OPENING HOURS: 01.09 - 07.09 11:00 - 19:00

ADMISSION FREE, NO PRIOR REGISTRATION REQUIRED

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Visual Narrative Laboratory is a media lab founded in 2019 as a space for experimentation in the field of contemporary audiovisual culture at the Lodz Film School. At its core, it was primarily driven by a search for artistic means appropriate to new media forms, a flexible approach to production processes, trust in creators and an orientation towards research—thanks to which we not only produce a lot of new content, but also subject it to detailed analysis by a team of researchers and scientists.


The works we are presenting in this exhibition are the result of almost five years of our activity. Through open calls, we reached out to a diverse group of creators - from poets and filmmakers to dancers, set designers, and various other artists from the realms of theatre and visual arts of any kind. They were encouraged to submit projects on themes that were important to them and to explore the best forms to articulate their sentiments. The collaborative spirit among participants, marked by the sharing of knowledge, perspectives, and innovative ideas between people with different artistic backgrounds and sensibilities, has been pivotal. It's this synergy and collective reflection that has sculpted the works and birthed methods to engage with media whose conventions are still in the process of shaping.


We hope that the works presented in the exhibition, along with the forthcoming publications of accompanying research and reflections, will contribute, to some extent, to defining these conventions. This collection underscores an ongoing dialogue about the essence, tools, themes, emotional resonance, and alignment of media properties in today’s audiovisual culture.


Experiences presented at 'Ground Control' are testimony to the courage to imagine new horizons: they leave the ground but do not lose touch with it. ‘Ground Control’ is an invitation to explore unknown spaces and find dazzling vistas beyond the default viewpoints.

But the exhibition's title also takes on a somewhat ironic dimension when juxtaposed with the works on display: for it turns out that control, especially ground control, is not only something longed for rather than experienced, but might be an unchaseable or even an unwanted dream.


Perhaps value only appears when we allow ourselves to let it go.

At the end of the day, in most cases, control turns out to be illusory anyway.

WORKS

All Interactive VR Cinematic VR Video Essays Webdocs
What does it feel like to lose control? Are you angry, frustrated, scared or just helpless? How long can you stay in this uncomfortable position? CONTROL NEGATIVE is an exercise in loss. Using VR, the author Monika Masłoń tries to put you in an emotional state where you will start questioning the illusory conviction of being fully in control of your own life. The unreal world of the experience—a negative version of the real world—is a training space where you can better understand yourself and your emotions. The experience gradually moves from physical activity to contemplation.

Control Negative

directed by

Monika Masłoń

Interactive experience

25 min.
Dead City is a VR-based, interactive, operatic experience that combines features of cinematic narrative, game mechanics and opera. The plot and libretto refer to Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1920 work of the same title. In the work from a century ago, the action took place in Bruges, while the contemporary Dead City is set in pandemic stricken Warsaw. Empty, depressing and nostalgic. </p> <p>Paul, the main character, tries to say goodbye to his recently deceased wife by visiting the places most important for their love. We see the couple's house, their favourite cinema, bars and parks. Finally, we visit the place where they said goodbye, the dark depths of the Vistula river, where Paul dissolves and transforms into morphing, black space. This is accompanied by the voice of his beloved Maria, bidding him farewell with the words: “Everything is a memory, nothing dies because there is nothing, be still, be still, nothing dies because there is nothing and everything is.</p>

Dead City

directed by

Krzysztof Grudziński

Interactive experience

45 min.
Deep Dive is an intimate virtual reality fiction experience in which we accompany a young woman in the grieving process. The protagonist faces the most painful loss of her life, wandering on a wild riverbank where fears and hopes mix with reality. The theme and the way the story is told create the experience of a psychological fairy tale maintained in an atmosphere of magical realism.

Deep Dive

directed by

Miłosz Hermanowicz

Cinematic VR

17 min.
Wojciech Puś has been making Endless - a sensual combination of image, light and sound that creates a poetic essay-dream about identities in process - since 2016. The work has taken diverse forms, from cinematic fiction to cinematic performances and open situations. Its basis is an informal community of performers from Chile, France, Mexico, Poland and Ukraine, with different social backgrounds, gender identities, nationalities and migration status.

Endless

directed by

Wojciech Puś

Cinematic VR

16 min.
Multiverse is an interactive VR installation based on the concept of a multi-layered world. The experience begins in the space of a post-Soviet housing estate, from where we wander through dark crystalline corridors, vast luminous gardens and rubble that levitates around us. The thematic layer refers to the phenomena of nostalgic remembrance of the past, the unfettered joy of childhood imagination and destruction, with ambivalent reflections on human nature prone to destruction. </p><p> We are accompanied on our meditative journey by a mysterious object which, held physically in our hands, also has a virtual representation linking the two worlds. It not only tells us the stories of the spaces visited, but also supports the reflections, analyses and perceptual experiments of the immersive VR medium.</p>

Multiverse

directed by

Robert Mleczko & Radomir Majewski

Interactive experience

45 min.
Nightsss is a virtual erotic poem directed by Weronika Lewandowska and Sandra Frydrysiak. The script of the 7-minute experimental animation was based on a spoken word poem by Lewandowska, where she employs onomatopoeia, using sounds characteristic for to the Polish language to create soundscapes that break language barriers. Premiered at the Sundance Festival, and presented at almost 20 international festivals and events.

Nightsss

directed by

Weronika Lewandowska & Sandra Frydrysiak

Interactive experience

7 min.
Pilot 9/11 presents the events of 11 September 2001 from the unique perspective of military aviators who followed the hijacked passenger planes to prevent the tragedy. The assessment from their point of view sheds new light on absolutely familiar images. The cramped cockpit of the plane contrasting with the boundless expanse of New York is a perfect environment for VR recreation. Although we are almost in the centre of events, we remain locked in the cockpit, like powerless observers. </p><p> How do you remain fully focused and decisive while seeing desperate pleas for rescue, and watching - without being able to help - the horror of scenes taking place just a few hundred meters away? Yet what happened at the World Trade Centre is not, despite appearances, the main focus. Pilot 9/11 is a twenty-minute story about coming out of trauma - wider, national trauma and the subjective, personal kind.</p>

Pilot 9/11

directed by

Norman Leto

Interactive experience

20 min.
How does a mentally ill person feel? How do they perceive the world? Perhaps a division between people who are healthy and mentally ill doesn’t exist at all? For the makers the creation of film and photographic image has been accompanied by an attempt to understand and be open to the world of those with long term mental health issues. </p><p> Self, by definition, is strongly felt and will be sunk into the viewer’s memory of the immersion experience. The stories presented are memories from different stages of the healing process of former patients, and their real-life silhouettes will be set into a minimalistic 3D environment. The project addresses an extremely delicate topic, which is why we have created it from the beginning with participation of people dealing with mental health on a daily basis.</p>

Self

directed by

Patryk Jordanowicz & Tadeusz Chudy

Cinematic VR

16 min.
SSAD VR has artistic and research characteristics which take up the theme of exposing the dead whole in virtual environments. Using the proposed simulation, the viewer is able to overcome his or her fear of confronting a dead body and experience a liminal situation in a safe environment within a laboratory process. </p><p> The experience is inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The figure of Eurydice, with her singing, leads the viewer through the successive spaces and themes contained in the experience. Its recipient, like the mythological Orpheus, swims with the current of the Vistula River traversing the land of the dead.</p>

Simple Songs About Death

directed by

Marta Wieczorek & Maciej Czuchryta

Interactive experience

15 min.
VR offers the promise of being inside, striving to create a sense of being there, the ability to enter someone's life and even simulate being someone else. But how much can we really see through someone else's eyes, and above all, how much are we really willing to see and feel? In the Wish You Were Here experience, we meet Aneta, who is 36 years old and diagnosed with breast cancer. From the window of her house she can see a walnut orchard, which is slowly turning into a new housing estate of blocks of flats. The experience is a classic documentary, but thanks to VR technology the frame is expanded so that we see behind-the-scenes making of the film, it becomes an anti-documentary and breaks the 'canonical' rules of VR.

Wish You Were Here

directed by

Michał Stankiewicz

Cinematic VR

24 min.

Work in Progress
“The Cave” is an interactive adaptation of a classical Platonic metaphor, preserving the meaning of the original but setting it in a new context. The essence of the image of the cave is the disruption of the obvious—what is known and universally respected turns out to be false. Although Plato places the story of the cave in the context of his own ontology, the metaphor itself is universal. Breaking out of what is familiar and safe is equally precipitous no matter what cave is our prison. It can be the Matrix, Paradisia, the Truman Show, an ideological, religious or political system. </p><p> The cave can also be the “inside“ of a VR headset, although this can be treated as a metaphor within another metaphor. The contemporary reading of the cave metaphor also generates doubts: what if the cave has no boundaries? If, like a matrioshka doll, it is placed inside another cave and that one in yet another, and so on without end? Or does such gnoseological wandering have the shape of a loop? The creators transfer the philosophical text into VR and present an experience which requires not only mental, but also physical effort, in order to emphasize the experiential nature of philosophy. </p>

Cave

directed by

Jowita Guja & Adam Żądło

Interactive experience

25 min.

Work in Progress
Two siblings and filmmakers look through old tapes they filmed during their shared four weeks of vacation with their father each year. What do they see? Exotic landscapes and a new language. What do they not see? Their father’s emigration, the divorce, habitual family dynamics, arguments. From the present, the filmmakers look back and negotiate storytelling with memory.  </p><p> Music and geology become two anchors through which memory and storytelling are attempted, and in turn, cinematically constructed. Through gestural filmmaking, music becomes a type of short-term affective memory, while geology allows us to read the long-term, long-lasting fossils of our memory through encoding, inscription and mark-making. </p><p> A short conversation between a brother and sister, wondering who they were and who they are. </p>

A short Conversation Between a Brother and a Sister

directed by

Temra Pavlović & Stefan Pavlović

Video Essay

27 min.
An extraordinary found footage documentary inspired by Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. A trance-like, personal story about loss, mourning & memory. The film consists of excerpts from 70 films produced by the Educational Film Studio in Lodz in the 1960s and the first radio adaptations of Solaris. Lem begins writing Solaris the same year that Resnais' „Hiroshima Mon Amour” is released - says Kuba Mikurda - Like Resnais' film, I find Solaris a fascinating study of post-traumatic memory - repressed memories that pave their way into consciousness and demand to be expressed.

Solaris Mon Amour

directed by

Kuba Mikurda

Video Essay

40 min.
The Implementation of the new security law in 2020 marked a major historical shift for the people of Hong Kong. This 2-year process brought on the reality which was not expected to have materialized until 2046. This harsh, unexpected acceleration fueled feelings of anxiety and distress. The fear of prosecution mixed with the impulse for self-censorship, the desire to leave wrestled with a sense of loss. “Room 404” is an essayistic response to the documentary “Room 525” shot by the same artists during the art residency in Hong Kong back in 2019 while the social unrest was growing. The film marks the transition from documentary to essay, from the real space of room 525, to the reality marked by the most common error of the digital age 404: File Not Found. The desire to express the objective truth of the situation, which drove the makers experiencing the calamity as it unravelled, gives way to doubt that permeates the situation, which emerges in the post-calamity state.

Room 404

directed by

Elysa Wendi & Lee Wai Shing

Video Essay

30 min.
In 1948 on the Gardno lake near Szela village 21 girl scouts drowned. It was supposed to be a dream day. The girls wanted to see the sea. That morning they went to church, sleep-deprived - the previous night they had sat for a long time by the bonfire, busy discussing an old legend about princess Wanda who drowned in the rapid currents of Vistula river. Two adult chaperones and two men got into two boats with them. Nobody knows what really happened - was it an unfortunate accident, a murder or a collective suicide of teenagers? The essay is a fictional version of this event. Did the girls turn into seals and swim to the sea, to another future? </p>

Wanda

directed by

Anna Baumgart

Video Essay

21 min.
Non duality refers to the educational film genre, in rhythmic and associative montages of meaning, tackles the theme of the belief in the separateness of the Self that lies at the foundation of Western culture and the divisive naturalizing function of language itself. The film juxtaposes archival footage from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź and a documentary and personal record of a conversation with Halina Pytlasinska, a British psychologist and therapist who works with the collective unconscious using the social dreaming matrix method. </p>

Non Duality

directed by

Tomasz Węgorzewski

Video Essay

25 min.
Overgrowth is an interactive story about the village of Mikołajów, which no longer exists. It remains only in the memories of its former inhabitants. As we listen to them, we are transported to a place filled with neighborly chatter, interrupted by the sounds of heavy machinery. The construction of the Osiek Sulphur Mine prompted an evacuation, scattering those who lived there around the world. And yet, this place will always be home to them. By sharing these stories, we aim to give Mikołajów a new life, to save it from oblivion — and to encourage young people to discover their local histories. </p>

Overgrowth

directed by

Tarta Collective

(Angelika Gad, Kinga Bożkiewicz,

Iga Filimowska, Jakub Ciosiński,

Sebastian Duran, Adam Grygierzec)

Webdoc

30 min.
AMZN is a multi-media, multi-threaded project, the core of which is a series of photographs of the company's warehouses. It is surrounded by a narrative of workers' struggles contained in collected union leaflets, stories of mutual solidarity in the age of growing automation, attempts to recreate oppressive work procedures and finally, a glimpse of the customer experience. </p><p> Amzn.vnlab.org is thus a kind of interactive warehouse containing not only artworks but also articles, excerpts or quotations, becoming both a separate whole and a supplement to exhibitions in art galleries. </p>

AMZN

directed by

Tytus Szabelski

Webdoc

endless
Makeshift is a documentary project about Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the recent war and the processes of rewriting history after the truce. The project focuses on documenting sites where crimes were committed against civilians, through the prism of their reintegration as public places. All the work resulted from the author’s research based on UN and ICTY court documents. So far, it has been presented in the form of three solo exhibitions, several group exhibitions, awarded in competitions and published. The author of Makeshift is Paweł Starzec – a photographer, sociologist, documentary filmmaker. He is primarily interested in correlations between space and its context, and in perceiving broader processes through their consequences and peripheries. </p>

Makeshift

directed by

Paweł Starzec

Webdoc

15 min.
New Spirit is a work of docufiction—the imagined, virtual site of an abandoned utopian settlement, which, through nonlinear exploration, is discovered to be haunted by artifacts, images, and stories from the 19th-century United States. Fascinated by its idealism and disaster, Polish artist Laura Pawela for years researched, visited the sites of, and responded to such social movements in her work. New Spirit fragments, layers, and riffs on Pawela’s own and period archives to encompass, invoke, and even transcend the ideas, values, and spirit of this chapter of history—envisioned as a place where all who dreamed of a better life would have truly been welcome, even if it, too, likely would have ended in misfortune. Utopian in itself, the project ultimately invites us to consider our world today, and how we want to live together in it. </p>

New Spirit

directed by

Laura Pawela

Webdoc

endless

VISUAL NARRATIVES LABORATORY

LEARN MORE AT THE vnLab WEBSITE

EXHIBITION CREDITS

CONCEPT BY: Jacek Nagłowski & Anna Szylar

LEAD PRODUCER: Anna Szylar

PRODUCERS: Katarzyna Boratyn, Ewa Mielczarek/altomare studio

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Jacek Nagłowski

TECHNICAL PRODUCER: Marcin Marczyk

LEGAL SERVICES: Monika Żelazowska, Monika Gromotowicz

PUBLIC PROCUREMENT LAW: Maria Kowalska-Bieniek, Karolina Misztal

ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT: Magdalena Wołowska

SET DESIGN CONSULTANT: Michał Ziętek

GRAPHIC DESIGNER: Michał Dąbrowski

SOCIAL MEDIA SPECIALIST: Ewa Drygalska

VISUAL NARRATIVES LABORATORY: Krzysztof Franek, Krzysztof Pijarski

LODZ FILM SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION: Igor Duniewski, Magdalena Kowalska, Roman Sawka, Małgorzata Wybrańczyk

FINANCED BY the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the Rozwój Sektorów Kreatywnych Programme

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