Reality.House Magazine - The Future Issue - 001

ISSUE 001

WOULD YOU BUY VIRTUAL ARTWORK?

LATIN AMERICA’S BOOMING XR INDUSTRY

EMERGING REALITIES WITH LCF’S MATTHEW DRINKWATER

SNAPCHAT AND THE WORLD OF AR WITH WILL SCOUGAL

SHY STUDIOS THE INTERSECTION OF ARTISTIC EXPLORATION

DOV - THE FUTURE OF RETAIL

HERVISIONS WITH ZAIBA JABBAR

ON OCULUS WITH IAN PONS JEWELL

KEISHA HOWARD SUGAR GAMERS AND BUILDING A SOLAR PUNK FUTURE

MAHALIA 2.0

NO FILTER DIGI-GXL

ON MEETING THE ENEMY WITH KARIM BEN KHELIFA

SPOTLIGHT SERIES

ARTICLE

10 - 12

ARTICLE

14 - 17

ARTICLE

18 - 12

INTERVIEW

22 - 24

INTERVIEW

26 - 37

INTERVIEW

38 - 43

INTERVIEW

44 - 47

FEATURE

48 - 55

FEATURE

56 - 65

FEATURE

66 - 79

FEATURE

82 - 95

FEATURE

96 - 103

SPOTLIGHT

104 - 120

EDITOR IN CHIEF Alex Semenzato

ART

PR

EDITORIAL

LEAD DESIGNER Tino Maragkianos

PUBLICIST Rosanna Connolly

DIRECTOR OF CONTENT Olivier Geraghty

DESIGNER Min Kim

BUSINESS & LEGAL AFFAIRS

MANAGING EDITOR Kola Bello

DESIGN INTERN Lilian Qu

SENIOR/COPY EDITOR Laura Muldoon

DESIGNER Lacey Liang

SENIOR WRITER Jade Ang Jackman

CREATIVE SERVICES

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Sandra Kolodzej

CREATIVE STUDIO O.G Studios

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Ony Nwanokwu

EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR (CCO) Olivier Geraghty

WRITERS Jade Ang Jackman Laura Muldoon

INTEGRATED CREATIVE PRODUCER Kola Bello

SPECIAL THANKS TO Mutant Board, Lorenaa Hydeman, DOV, Chris Jones, Mahalia, Wired PR, Adidas, Talenthouse, Post Liang,Park Communications, Peter Appleton, Snap Inc, Lens Studio, DIGI-GXL, Shy Studios, Keisha Howard, Karim Ben Khalifa, Carlos Cartagena, Ian Pons Jewell, Hervisions, Fashion Innovation Agency, Matthew Drinkwater, Will Scougal, Def Jam Recordings, Jacqueline Eyewe, Tabitha Swanson

CREATIVE STRATEGIST Kayode Thomas

Reality.House 7-12 Noel Street, Waverley House Soho, London, W1F 8GQ editor@realityhouse.co Reality.House is published three times a year Subscription Inquiries: editor@reality.house For all partnership/advertising inquiries: partner@realityhouse.co Copyright 2021 “Reality.house” is a registered trademark of the Talenthouse Creative Network.

All rights reserved Printed in United Kingdom

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Clare McKeeve CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Olivia Mellett DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Lisa Marie Paul

A few words from the editor...

There is a new wave of creativity happening right now, that threatens to crash over our heads if we don’t move quickly to ride it. What we have seen in movies is now a reality and as ever, there is an unrelenting pressure to, surprise, excite and be different. It’s out of these circumstances that REALITY.HOUSE was created; to enable and empower our global creative community across the Talenthouse network to reach the next level.

Our mission at REALITY.HOUSE is to become the biggest source of inspiration in the mixed reality world. We want to champion the creators thinking outside the box, those thinking in a whole different box! And assist brands in producing cutting-edge creative experiences, that take consumers into a new dimension.

Driving culture and creativity forward at scale.

This magazine is a curated celebration of a community producing incredible art, graphics, music, ads, and things that don’t even have a name yet. They’re pushing the boundaries of what is creatively and technically possible. The last 12 months have super-sized creativity as we’ve been forced to look at new ways to interact, engage, experience, and explore the world around us.

When creating this first issue, we discovered an industry that is quite fragmented.

There are so many stories to be told from different pockets around the world.

Currently with a heavy focus on the “tech and specs”, we were determined to align mixed reality with popular culture and develop a platform that speaks to everyone in this space.

I am so excited to welcome you to the launch issue of REALITY.HOUSE, with three different collectible covers starring DIGI-GXL, singer Mahalia, and DOV. The creators who you’ll find within its pages are setting the tone for the future of creativity and we are lucky enough to hear about their process, inspirations, and what the trends in mixed reality could mean for brands and consumers.

We explore what developments are being made to move forward with the intervention of virtual reality, predicting both paradisiacal and provocative possibilities across multiple industries and culture at large. We gain an industry perspective from Snapchat’s Will Scougal, hear how the fashion industry has adapted from Matthew Drinkwater, no punches are pulled as the DIGI-GXL give their opinions on the changes they want to see in this new 3D world, and of course, NFTs will be mentioned at some point.

Want more? Follow us on insta @Reality.House.XR and subscribe to our newsletter and let us know what you think of the magazine. What do you like and what is missing? Let us know and we’ll see what we can deliver in our forthcoming issues.

Thank you, Alex Semenzato

TITLE TYPOGRAPHY BY LACEY LIANG

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TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

Before February 25, the question: would you buy a virtual artwork? Sounded like the myth of the Emperor’s new clothes. As the tale goes, a rather vain ruler was duped into buying the latest fashionable garments.

But, as his courtiers stood before him, it appeared that he was actually wearing nothing at all. Not wanting to appear ignorant to the latest trends, his citizens nodded in awe despite not understanding what they were meant to be seeing. Now, this is the point I find myself at. But instead of invisible clothes, it is the world of virtual art and houses that needs demystifying. In the wake of Christie’s first sale of standalone virtual work, a lot of people were asking the same question as me - what is an NFT? NFT stands for non-fungible token. If you are like me, that title might not do much for clarity nor begin to decipher how they are being sold, in some cases, for millions. Fungible means that it can be traded. For example, you can trade bitcoin for another. But, if something is non-fungible, it means that it is one of a kind and cannot be swapped for the same thing.

around six thousand dollars. Five months ago, his pieces - Crypto Is Bullshit and Crossroad - sold for $66,600. In December, he sold another single piece for $777,777.77 entitled The Complete MF Collection. For the one lucky owner, this even included a sample of hair from the man himself.

Swords and lilac hues span across futuristic deserts in the world of Grimes, here you are more likely to encounter a hairless baby rather than a piece of the artist’s mane. However, what unites the pair is that both have a large fan base which is inextricably linked to their rapid success in the world of NFTs. In other words, both creators already have an extremely large audience which in the digital era somewhat determines their value. So, how is this different from the traditional art world?

In regards to the art market, you can consider an NFT like a signature that confirms the work’s provenance.

While NFTs have been around since 2015, they have seen a sharp rise in their popularity culminating in the sale of a piece by Beeple, at a Christie’s auction, for $69 million in February this year. This astounding price tag meant the piece, named ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’, was the third most expensive work to be sold by a living artist following Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Almost overnight, Mike Winklemann - Beeple’s real name - shook the art world. But how did he get there?

As the adage goes, it takes years to become an overnight success. Given that Winklemann has two million followers on Instagram, he already had a gauge of his audience. Accrued through sharing a daily digital dosage of often crass and colorful comedic comments on contemporary society, Beeple realized that his audience might also be interested in purchasing his pieces. Before the astounding Christie’s auction, he had sold a limited drop on an NFT marketplace called Nifty Gateway. There, he sold an edition of a hundred priced at one dollar each. Unlike the traditional art market, creators receive financial remuneration when the pieces re-sell. Purportedly, those works have risen in value to

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Speaking to emerging artist Stephy Fung, she recounts that the crypto artspace has been ‘challenging’ from a financial perspective. She explains, ‘There was a constant battle of trying to disconnect my creative value from how much my works are being sold for.

Not to also mention the constant comparison from seeing all the figures of what other artists are selling for’. While she acknowledges that it is beneficial to have another source of revenue, she is also drawn to the community aspect. “The NFT community is very lovely and is all about community. I’ve talked to so many different artists and collectors that I wouldn’t have had the chance to before”. For Fung, it is this element of accessibility that distinguishes the crypto from the current art market. “Whereas the art industry has a very big hierarchy and gatekeeping issue, NFTs negate most of that because it is decentralized”, Fung says. “It’s also creating a space that makes people take digital art more seriously. However, we have to fight to make sure NFTs don’t become just a replicant of the art industry where marginalized voices aren’t as heard”.

In 2019, Frieze showed its first augmented reality artwork by South Korean artist Koo Jeong A. Presented

by Acute Art, the piece, density, went on to be exhibited around the world. Rather than be downloadable, viewers could experience the works by scanning a QR code. Slightly more rudimentary, Miami Basel collaborated with Linda Cheung who also used AR to place murals across the walls during the art fair. In the summer of 2020, KAWS collaborated with Acute Art who are real innovators within the art and AR field - to create a free new work that could be experienced by users around the world. From the examples outlined above, it is clear that the established art world has embraced virtual works and that there is not a clear delineation between the two.

However, in these cases discussed, artists were using virtual offerings to make their work more accessible and would not be described as an NFT. To put it differently, there might be editions that are sold and owned by collectors but augmented pieces allow for them to be experienced by more people for a lower or no cost.

founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency platform Tron, for over sixty million dollars?

Aside from the artist being able to generate revenue from re-sales, exclusivity still permeates the higher echelons of the virtual art market. In the case of Mike Winklemann, it appears that he has side-stepped working with a commercial gallery and engaged directly with his extremely large Instagram audience. Although, as the New Yorker reported, it seems that he is being courted by several. Rather than being a disruptive force, it seems to replicate and function alongside the traditional art world.

However, there is an unexpected cost incurred from buying a virtual artwork and it is an environmental one. In a piece published last December, Memo Akten revealed the unreasonable cost of CryptoArt. For example, one NFT creates 211kg of CO2 emissions which is the same as driving a car for 600 miles which seems a high price to pay. The way the blockchain is monitored by miners was explained in a piece for the Face by writer and curator Ashleigh Kane. For NFTs to be proven as an original, the owner has to have a token which is a form of digital evidence. This is kept track of through a process referred to as mining. However, the system that verifies transactions is through a network of advanced computers which needs a lot of energy. Almost inherent in this form of digital art ownership, there is a hidden cost.

Until a more environmentally sustainable solution is found, those touting NFTs as a way to right wrongs of an elitist art world might need to think twice. Having said this, the desire to support some of your favorite digital artists financially especially amidst a pandemic is an important one as NFTs, and crypto-art, allow emerging artists to monetize their platforms. Time will tell whether the established art world absorbs Beeple setting the tone for the relationship between the markets going forward.

Whereas, the physical work will be owned by a series or one wealthy collector. But, is that so different to Mike Winklemann selling a single NFT to Justin Sun, the

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TEXT BY OSCAR CARTAGENA

Back in the 16th century, people from all over the world (but mostly western Europe) came to Latin America in search of El Dorado - a mythical empire filled with gold, emeralds and riches. Many came, many failed to find it and around the 19th Century the legend was dismissed and in time it became a metaphor for any place where wealth could be rapidly acquired. Is Latin America’s growing XR industry, like El Dorado, a new secret just waiting to be found?

“We’re barely scratching the surface of a new media industry revolution”. With this quote Chilecreativo’s manager, Felipe Mujica captured the feeling about Chile and its potential within the XR industry back in 2019. A mostly-unknown area for many companies, professionals and politicians, it has been gaining ground and interest in the region has been growing rapidly. In part due to COVID-19’s curfews and quarantines, which have worked as effective catalysts for the industry, but also because the professional force behind it has not only been growing, it’s been getting organized. And with the development of these organized, legal, collaborative spaces, opportunities are rising in countries where historically there’s been little progress regarding XRdriven innovations.

Latin America has always been a “late bloomer” regarding tech innovation, mostly because historically foreign investment has been more focused on exploiting local (mostly mineral) resources and conversely, local investment is focused on investing in foreign markets.

Now, even though things are rapidly changing, this has been hard for local entrepreneurs and there’s a huge gap between small companies and really large ones. In a way, I guess you could say that starting a disruptive tech company in Latin America is like starting a company in the “valley of death” stage and just roaming around for far longer than you should.

One of the biggest flaws in Chile is the lack of research and development (R&D) investment. According to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data, the Chilean investment

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in R&D is roughly 0.3% of our GDP, way under the OECD’s average which is 2.5%. This leaves us, alongside Colombia and Mexico at the bottom of the R&D list, which is an interesting fact, considering that these three countries are the top three for XR development in the region.

In the Latin American XR industry, we can infer that a fraction of the problem is the commercial elements.

With many stakeholders not understanding its potential to boost ROI or how to gain commercial leverage by creating experiences that create long-lasting brand engagement, it’s difficult for projects to move past the Proof of Concept phase and continue onto reallife implementation and production on behalf of clients/companies. The causes? Many. High acquisition expenses, hardware maintenance and mostly because there is no real grasp on the benefits of integrating these technologies in different industries. On top of all that, we have close-to-zero access to head-mounted displays (HMDs), due to lack of hardware support in the region.

Latin America’s ‘mobile-first’ XR industry In Chile the amount of 3G+4G internet connections is 101.4 connections per 100 habitants. Of these 19.8 million connections, a whopping 94.3% are through a smartphone (according to SUBTEL data) and 5G’s imminent arrival makes Chile and Latin America an unexplored market to many international (hardware and software) companies that are not yet operating in the region.

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As mentioned earlier, there’s little-to-no availability of HMD hardware to work with in the region. This is a huge problem for the development of high-quality experiences in the industry, making the “company gap” a bigger problem than it should be. There aren’t that many medium to large organizations that have available hardware to work on, so most of our industry is focused on working with mobile experiences, which are great and in some cases, very powerful - but the potential for working with real specialized hardware still eludes most of us. This is especially true when it comes to testing in the real world with real users that aren’t based in other countries and other realities that are far away from our own experience.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are many companies and individuals in Latin America working with HMDs and creating awesome award-winning content, but we could be doing a lot more if we had more established access to this hardware. Because that content is created with a foreign market in mind, I believe that our creative potential is diminished because we keep trying to “blend into” the international XR space, instead of focusing on our own.

With that being said, with the global pandemic also came a huge boost in our industry. Governments have been pushed to look at the digital industries as communication and entertainment channels and eventually, XR technologies will be a part of that. Also, a couple of European festivals like Stereopsia and Laval have taken an interest in the region and our community, bringing their expertise from many years of creating immersive industry events; something that will come in handy once the pandemic is over.

With the rise of the pandemic, virtual events and meetings have been a big boost for cross-country communication and collaboration. The magic of the internet at its best. With this growing number of events and webinars, many countries in the region have found allies in other countries, collaborating and creating spaces and interactions between technology and creativity, looking after the community of creators with a broad perspective that includes filmmakers, visual artists, interactive experience creators and technologists, among others.

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So, what’s going on over there?

From what I’ve gathered in the past few years, the countries that are leading the forefront of our XR revolution are Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile; with other minor (but no less important) players in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Perú and Ecuador.

I’m sure there’s a lot more activity that I’m not aware of going on in the region, but I’ll have a go and mention a few possibly unknown companies/creators from our region to keep an eye out for: PleIQ Smart Toys (CL) / https://pleiq.com Award-winning EduTech start-up focused on delivering educational toys and apps that use screens responsibly.

This company created by Venezuelans and initially backed by Wayra, made its way to Start-up Chile (Chilean government’s global entrepreneurship program) and has become a solid player in the augmented reality education field, locally and abroad.

Invade Lab (CL) / https://invadelab.cl Local award-winning interactive studio focused on immersive experiences, intersecting between technology, marketing and education. It develops various types of projects, ranging from advergames to educational AR. Fleischmann Lab (CL) / https://www.flmlab.cl/web Fleischmann is a Chilean company with over 80 years of existence but a few years ago it decided to establish an immersive computer vision lab and its results have been astonishing. It currently develops computer vision + AI solutions for enterprise, interactive augmented reality BIM modeling and Digital Twin solutions among other industrial applications.

Link Room (PE) / https://linkroom.us US-backed Peruvian start-up focused on virtual spaces, offices and showrooms. It features great UX and high-quality in-house made 3D modeling for its virtual spaces.

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GOOPY AR (DR) / https://goopy.io This company from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, unlike most companies, develops its webAR technology, with an online web studio included. Its mission is to make AR content simple, scalable and flexible.

Neon Caron (MX) / https://neoncaron.com Neon Caron is a Mexican visual artist who’s been working with augmented art (art + augmented reality) since 2013. His unique style and mobile app have taken his art to thousands of viewers around the globe.

Waygroup (COL) / https://www.waygroupsa.com This company in Colombia develops different virtual reality training experiences, like giving CPR, automotive security, fire training and dealing with confined spaces.

They’ve successfully trained the Colombian National Police on different simulators and have taken virtual training and experiences a long way in the Colombian tech space.

Some final thoughts Our Latin XR market is an exotic flower on the verge of blossoming. More people should be looking and thinking about blue-ocean strategies to implement in the region while helping the community grow with solid foundations. The global HMD market eventually will be saturated and international tech hardware brands will have to spend a lot of money to be competitive in their own countries.

Another option would be establishing a headquarters somewhere in Latin America like Chile or Colombia, an action that could be less expensive and full of opportunities to exploit. Those who do so at the right time will have a solid foothold in the region for years to come, as long as they are willing to collaborate and build together with the locals.

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Matthew Drinkwater is a world-renowned expert in emerging technologies and their application to the creative industries. A specialist in immersive technologies (XR / MR /AR / VR), he and his team are building pathways for a truly digitized world. Named as a ‘fashion-tech trailblazer’ by Drapers and ‘pioneer and a visionary’ by Wired, Matthew has delivered groundbreaking experiences and a stunning range of projects that have captured the imagination of both the fashion and technology industries.

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TEXT BY MATTHEW DRINKWATER

It was late February 2020 and I was in Los Angeles delivering what would be my last in-person talk at a conference before the pandemic took over our lives.

My session was centered around virtual production, products, and catwalks. Now whilst there has always been a fascination with the work that the team and I deliver, there is sometimes skepticism around emerging technologies and, for sure, there were definitely raised eyebrows in the audience. Fast forward by just a couple of weeks though, to March 2020 and as stores were shuttered and fashion shows canceled, the need for virtual experiences moved from the realms of future thinking to business-critical. It was time to demonstrate how catwalks, retail, e-commerce, and perhaps, most importantly of all, creativity could be enhanced by immersive technologies.

Virtual Catwalks The first round of fashion weeks following lockdown offered a fairly predictable take on showcasing. “Virtual” shows were simply video content uploaded to YouTube or Twitch that were both flat in the way they were delivered and in how they were experienced.

That so few brands had explored the true potential of virtual in the early part of the pandemic is what inspired us to create The Fabric of Reality, a fully immersive fashion show, launched within the Museum of Other Realities (MOR) in collaboration with RYOT, Verizon Media’s storytelling production house, and Kaleidoscope.

The experience was the first of its kind; a virtual reality fashion exhibition aimed at taking audiences on a journey to explore the story and narrative behind the designers’ collections. It was a landmark project that saw emerging designers paired with XR artists to create immersive story worlds and sculptures. Charli Cohen was paired with animation illustrator Anand Duncan and John Orion Young (aka JOY); recent LCF graduate Damara Inglês – a ‘fashion media practitioner and curator of digital’ with VR artist Stuart Campbell (or Sutu); and Sabinna Rachimova with VR developer and artist Vladimir Ilic (or VRHuman).

The result was a visceral journey into the identity of the designers and their collections, that covered topics like

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mental health, traditional craft, and biotechnological visions of the future. The show was watched in VR in real-time by 150 visitors and over 100,000 watched the live-streamed experience.

The Fabric of Reality was a resounding response to the claim that digital experiences can never replicate the excitement of a physical event. The heart-pumping adrenaline when flying through the virtual experience the designers had created easily matched that of the very best front-row experience. Immersive technologies offer designers and creatives the opportunity to place us directly inside their story, dramatically changing how we can experience a narrative. This is not about replacing physical shows, it is about an entirely new era of experiences and a shift from story-telling to storyliving.

It’s that shift that led us at London College of Fashion to explore alternatives to showcasing using machine learning. My team collaborated with a group of extraordinary students (Mary Thrift, Greta Gandossi, Ashwini Deshpande, and Tirosh Yellin) to create an entirely new catwalk from archive video footage. We used OpenPose to extract skeletal data from old LCF shows and then a pipeline of Blender, CLO3D, and Unity to create digital garments and a new virtual environment. Style Transfer was applied to add extra detail to the digital clothes and in the space of a few months, a group of students who had no previous experience in artificial intelligence or machine learning had put the final touches to a catwalk that demonstrated the potential for human and AI system collaboration.

The combination of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies will be fundamental to the future projects that we create. The skill-sets required to build them will be key for future creatives.

Retail and e-commerce The dramatic shutdown of stores across the globe brought into sharp focus the need for new revenue streams in the retail industry. Moving beyond purely physical products and looking at how digital assets could be monetized or made more meaningful for consumers must be part of every retailer’s future

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strategy. The pandemic exposed how 2D the current e-commerce landscape is and how much it lacks in engagement and excitement.

Creation of 3D assets used to be challenging but the ability to create digital doubles of people, product and places has become so much easier. It’s even possible to get a photorealistic version of a human being through a smartphone scan. Click-through and conversion rates on 3D content are so dramatically higher than 2D that it seems mind-boggling why there hasn’t been wider adoption.

The digital human stylist project that we launched in Summer 2020 became an exemplar of where immersive technologies could take retail in the near future.

Powered by Microsoft AI, IoT, and natural language processing, the digital human can understand what’s in your wardrobe, what’s in your calendar, where you’re going, allowing personal recommendations that are visually and verbally communicated back to the user within your own home. It can be interacted with via a mixed reality headset such as the Hololens 2, a tablet device, or mobile phone. The stylist is customized to a user’s body and style preferences, with outfit recommendations based on pre-scanned 3D garments stored in a user’s digital wardrobe. This allows for more creative and appropriate day-to-day styling choices, as well as streamlining decision-making around new

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purchases leading to what we hope will be more sustainable consumption.

Beyond holograms in your living room, the concept of a far more immersive e-commerce journey was one that we wanted to explore in our collaborative project with Pangaia and AnamXR. Irene-Marie Seeling (an LCF alumni) and Matt Pril are the brilliant founders behind AnamXR who transported us all to Antarctica with minimal carbon footprint, exploring the story and sustainability credentials behind the collection, including materials research and brand ethos.

The project demonstrated a world-first web-based platform, using game engine technology to scale virtual commerce, making it accessible on any smart device.

It was the first of what will surely become an expected way to navigate the web in the future.

Creativity The last 12 months have demonstrated what was obvious to many of us who work in XR – it is clear now that whatever can be digitized will be digitized. A permanent digital layer to the physical world is getting closer. We are entering a new era of creative expression and digital exploration. A new generation of design talent will lead us into the metaverse.

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IMAGES BY THE FABRIC OF REALITY - RYOT STUDIOS/VERIZON MEDIA/FASHION INNOVATION AGENCY

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SNAPCHAT AND THE WORLD OF AR WITH WILL SCOUGAL REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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INTERVIEW BY ALEX SEMENZATO

Will Scougal, Global Director, Creative Strategy at Snap Inc. In 2015 Will joined Snapchat to build and lead the creative strategy team outside North America. Prior to Snapchat, Will was Head of Brand Strategy at Twitter where he created award-winning work at the forefront of data-led and real-time marketing. Since joining Snapchat, Will has helped establish the platform’s global presence and his team has helped brands pioneer new and innovative ways to drive business results by building campaigns with augmented reality and vertical video at their heart. With over 200m people using AR on Snapchat every day, Will believes that augmented reality is the most exciting driver of culture to come along since film, and that the camera is a place where people choose to spend time with brands.

Why is AR important? And why is it exciting for Snap Inc. as a camera company?

We call ourselves a camera company because we open to the camera, it sits at the heart of the Snapchat experience. We also believe that the camera, and more specifically AR, represents the next major shift in computer technology.

the world around them. For example, discovering and trialing a new product such as makeup, or a new pair of shoes in AR, and then going through to make a purchase.

What makes the creator ecosystem of Lens Studio?

We believe that the success of AR is dependent on a vibrant, diverse creator community and continue to make every effort to democratize both the creation and distribution of AR. As we develop new technology and templates, we release them on our free Lens Studio software, so anyone can use them. Since launching Lens Studio, we’ve seen over a million Lenses created by the community, and over one trillion views of those Lenses.

One of the things I love about the Lens Studio is that it’s building a community of AR creators, we’re able to learn iteratively and continue innovating around camera technology.

Why are localization and new audiences in key emerging markets such as India important?

AR is accessed and used by Snapchatters all over the world. We see really strong engagement in countries such as India, where we have been running Lens Studio workshops in partnerships with high schools and universities in major cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chandigarh for over a year now. We also have hosted a number of hackathons in partnership with community organizations.

Over 75% of our 265 million daily users are using AR on a daily basis to add a rich, useful, entertaining creative layer to their world. It represents a huge opportunity for brands, creators, and consumers.

In one of our hackathons, we found over 70% of participants said they had no prior AR and 3D design skills. We especially see a lot of creativity and passion around cultural moments, for example, last year alongside our global community of creators, we launched a variety of AR experiences for Diwali that were viewed over 430 million times.

What is the future of AR?

Any insight on the future of LiDAR and Snapchat?

We’re currently seeing huge growth in utility focussed AR. We’ve very much moved on from the time when it was solely used for self-expression and seeing it play an incredibly important part in the way people discover

As software and hardware improve the experiences we’re able to build and deliver, AR will become even more immersive, beautifully crafted, and useful.

LiDAR enables us to recognize and interact with more

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of what’s around us. We can recognize depth and layers and objects and add more intricate AR layers and experiences to them. Gucci has been one of the first brands to use LiDAR tech to bring to life their partnership with Northface.

How can creators stand out? What are some of the top Lenses for play?

First and foremost it depends on understanding who you are trying to stand out to. A particular audience, or a more broad spectrum. Lenses get traction for lots of different reasons. It can be because they’re well crafted, fun, useful, innovative or because it really resonates with a particular community. At the heart of large-scale Lens adoption is the simple idea that people use AR to express themselves and communicate with friends. AR experiences that help people do that tend to stand out.

However, because Lenses are also highly targetable it can also depend on the audience you’re creating for and the relevancy to that audience, for example with gaming, fashion, or beauty AR. How have brands adopted AR? AR helps brands achieve a great deal, from brand building to driving sales. It is certainly a scaled and fullfunnel format that can have traditional digital targeting and distribution tactics and strategies applied to it, but in my opinion, the experience it delivers is much deeper.

Firstly, AR is a high attention and high intent format.

You take considered steps to launch AR and it is a sight, sound, and touch experience when it launches.

AR also helps brands make emotional connections as brands are being welcomed into a person’s world at the moment the person wants the experience. It is the very definition of targeting the right person, in the right moment. AR on Snapchat also brings incredible scale, in particular, if you’re looking to deliver a message to the supposedly hard-to-reach Gen Z cohort. We have a strong proven track record of impacting top-funnel brand metrics and bottom-funnel sales and from 2021 onwards, every marketer should be asking themselves

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what their AR strategy is.

Can you share any insight or stats relating to how impressive AR is for marketing results?

We have an incredibly engaged and scaled AR audience on Snapchat who are willing to spend time with brands in AR and act on those experiences. Our research shows that adding AR to a video campaign extends the reach of a campaign among our audience by 41% and drives a 67% lift in action intent. AR that enables shopping sees a 2.4x lift in purchase intent.

Are there any challenges to adoption?

The reality is that AR is the new reality. Shoppers of today and tomorrow are using AR in vast numbers as part of their daily digital experience. AR doesn’t have to be expensive. It is straightforward to build. It can be targeted and measured. It can be applied to any number of full-funnel objectives.

What are you curious about? Excited for in the future?

In my opinion, AR is the most exciting new format to come along since film. Indeed it’s more than just a format, it’s a driver of digital culture and conversation that sits at the heart of everyday digital life.

The ongoing developments in wearable, shoppable AR and the fascinating work going on within the NFT space are incredibly exciting. In particular though, AR is primarily well crafted, thoughtful advertising that people choose to spend time with. It is authentic and it’s experienced on the terms of the audience it targets and I think that that is something all of the industry can get excited about.

INTERVIEW

SHY STUDIOS & THE INTERSECTION OF ARTISTIC EXPLORATION & BESPOKE DESIGN

IMAGES BY SHY STUDIOS

TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

Could you share a bit about who you are at SHY studios and how you formed?

We’re Misha Shyukin and Hannes Hummel, 3D artists from Cologne, Germany. We opened the studio in the middle of the first covid-19 lockdown in 2020 to accommodate

in between client work. We had prepared a large board with flower photographs, which served as a starting point for our CGI plants. We were fascinated by the way natural patterns work and how it is possible to recreate them with relatively simple rules in 3D.

managed to animate air. How was sculpting or creating what feels like invisible space?

For the facemasks, we used physical simulations, which is really fun and frustrating at the same time since you don’t have complete control over the movement of your objects.

“We were fascinated by the way natural patterns work and how it is possible to recreate them with relatively simple rules in 3D.” larger commercial projects and try to influence the type of commercial work we’re getting asked to do with our self-initiated projects.

What Skills do you think a motion designer needs to stand out?

One of the most exciting things on your site is the process page.

In this day and age, everyone seems keen to present a picture perfect view of their portfolio online. Why did you show your experimentation too?

I love how textured your work is. What are some of the real life textures that have influenced your practice?

Those are the parts of projects I’m always excited to see in other people’s work, so I thought there might be somebody else who enjoys that kind of stuff. Also, we usually go through dozens of iterations on commercial projects, which otherwise would stay unseen.

Artificial Bloom is such a striking project Could you tell us a bit about this return to nature?

Artificial Bloom was created over the duration of around two months, whenever we had a couple of days

INTERVIEW

Being nice to work with is essential.

It’s a little bit like throwing a real mask in the air and hoping that it moves nicely while flying and then repeating that a lot.

A significant influence is synthetic materials. I like the aesthetics of bubble wrap foil, foam packaging, etc. And using those in unusual situations, playing with their physical properties.

How did the pandemic affect your studio?

We were quite lucky and almost unaffected by the pandemic. Since we don’t have any local clients, not much changed. We were pretty used to Zoom calls and Slack chats before that.

With your face masks, I was super excited by how you almost

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ARTIFICIAL BLOOM

BUBBLEWRAP EXPLORATIONS

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“FOR THE FACEMASKS, WE USED PHYSICAL SIMULATIONS, WHICH ARE REALLY FUN AND FRUSTRATING AT THE SAME TIME SINCE YOU DON’T HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL OVER THE MOVEMENT OF YOUR OBJECTS.” REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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INTERVIEW

The Future of Retail Could you share a bit about who you are at DOV and how it formed?

We are a London-based visualization and XR studio which formed after visualizing a set of Christmas displays for Burberry and Harrods in virtual reality six years ago.

We’d all been in the retail design industry for a number of years before this and thought it was going to change the way design was carried out, no more costly prototypes, with the design vision understood before anything was cut or painted. We knew that by showing designs in a virtual environment we could save an untold amount of waste, both from a design and materials perspective, and found that it could speed up the design process by moving from the slow overnight visualization of old to the real-time and interactive visualization we offer now.

From that work we’ve managed to branch out into putting together mixed reality experiences using the same technology and are developing concepts for purely digital retail stores that are rapidly adaptable for which we were finalists in the Retail Futures 2020 competition.

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DOV has been developing AR and VR experiences specifically in fashion, music, and wellness. It has the added ability to use data and technology to enhance the user experience, can you tell us more about this?

We’ve watched the landscape of retail change dramatically over the last ten years. What was cutting edge five years ago looks old now. We found that just adding AR or ‘technology’ to an old idea doesn’t make it new and doesn’t solve the core problems retailers face. Retail stores look extremely static in what is an ever increasingly dynamic world. For people used to daily, hourly, minute-by-minute digital updates, retail stores just can’t renew fast enough to match the current trends. While the top-end brands can afford to make and remake the software for great experiences, we want to make a reusable toolset that allows up-andcoming and other brands to be able to make these great experiences too. Over the last few years of our work in retail experiences, broadcast sports, and aged care, we’re started putting together the key tools for this.

At the core of it is the advances in real-time digital visualization which allows showing amazing visuals that

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CGI ARTIST: DOV (CHRIS JONES)

are truly immersive rather than just being to look at and maybe take a selfie with. The immersiveness is powered by recent advances in AI technology that allow us to use multiple cameras to track the pose of participants accurately so they can either actively engage with or be a part of creating the experience. This is combined with the increased ubiquity and quality of the LED screens to make massive and customizable displays out of. And for us ideally, this is all carried out without having to tear down the displays and throw them away every season change, so there is a real path to sustainability while being a better experience for everyone.

What are your favorite projects that you have worked on to date and why?

As with everyone who works in the industry it’s always great to work on big projects with big budgets, which we’ve been fortunate to do with a number of the big fashion and retail brands. But some of the best ones have been smaller ones that have changed how we think about the future and have seemed like people have had the most fun with. We did a quick project for Puma and ASOS that we put together in about a month for an AR footwear painting experience, working some late

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nights to make custom spray cans full of electronics and putting together the visual elements. It was one of the first times we’d done an AR experience for lots of people to use, and it was amazing to see the response, people really engaged with it and enjoyed the experience in a really social manner. That gave us a real look into how we feel the future of XR will go, it doesn’t have to be overly complex or incredibly technical. Things people intrinsically understand and can enjoy together have the greatest impact, especially when the whole engagement time tends to have to be short. From that, we started thinking a lot more about simplifying and getting people to enjoy things rather than being the most intricate or technically boundary-pushing.

We recently did a piece for a fashion brand mixing real people into virtual environments and have spent a lot of the time during the pandemic talking with people about how to continue productions and make work with these new constraints. While it’s still in its early days, as can be seen from some of the work that’s already been made, this mixing of real and virtual is going to go further and we’re excited for a full metaverse reality for sure.

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What trends in retail design are you excited about?

What makes a meaningful or engaging retail experience?

We are still a bit undecided if we are excited about it yet, but the biggest trend has really been the speed of change. From having displays and stores change a few times a year not that many years ago, things are now changing at a rapid pace, with new launches being expected nearly every month. With that has come some great experimentation opportunities and the ability to feel like things were limited to you and special. Unfortunately, with that has come a lot more disposability, a lot of material consumed quickly and thrown away, which is still a big part of retail and particularly fashion retail. A lot of brands have lost the more conceptual ideas and just try and get something that someone might put on Instagram.

To us, a really engaging retail experience is a bit more holistic and fits both with the brand’s identity but also the world at large. There is a lot of lip service paid to things people really care about, but sometimes it does feel like some brand actions and expressions can move above this and show it to a wider audience, not just for the cachet but in a real effort to make things better. We are hoping to see more of this moving forward, as the conversation moves away from just being that of the simple seller and buyer.

VR is a visceral experience, how do you see it revolutionizing the design process and the retail design experience of the future?

We’ve been really impressed by VR for more than the last five years; however, I think that has been primarily as a technical experience. As technical people, we thought it was going to be the future of design from when we first had a development kit, but in reality, while it has its place in the process it is likely to stay a secondary tool for quite some time. While the experience is very immersive, it’s almost too much and it can make a lot of people feel too apart, which in a collaborative design environment can be quite counterproductive.

Some of these problems are solved with some of the newer AR tools, which also tend to be more intuitive,

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but there are still some great technical challenges in that field to overcome, but we think that is where a lot of the future lays. At least until we are doing designs for the metaverse at least.

Immersive technologies can be an efficient tool for pushing innovation in retail. What current innovation do you see happening?

Some of the most interesting immersive work happening in retail now is in the online space, with the possibility of reaching a much larger audience driving a lot of efforts, as well as some great tools to produce for the main platforms easily. Unfortunately, in discussions with a lot of people, we’ve found that the numbers don’t stack up unless you are lucky to get the right exposure or start trending. We think when things return to being open again there is going to be a big demand for offline experiences. We are really looking forward to seeing what new things people have come up with.

A lot of the innovation that isn’t seen is now happening on the data side too, with a lot better understanding of how people are buying and behaving online but also in stores too. We think this is going to start moving into a hyper-personalization element, with the feeling of being understood akin to being at a bespoke tailor giving the customer recommendations that actually match an REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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understanding of them rather than simple heuristics.

We think if done right, this will be the next big change in retail.

In what direction do you see retail immersive experiences going in?

The retail landscape is really going to be shaken up over the next couple of years, with big changes coming both from cultural and demographic changes as well as the continued march of online retail. We think this is going to lead to a lot less focus on retail shops as a selling space and a move to them being used primarily as an experience space. Hopefully, there will be a move back to some more creativity in stores because of this, with the recent homogenization of retail design turning back a bit as people bring back more fun and variation to the spaces they do still have.

There is a huge untapped market in catering for the older generation when it comes to immersive retail experiences, which will need a vastly different engagement strategy. Adjusting what works for the younger generations won’t do, so there will be a lot of experimentation into finding out what brings in the older generations and how to make them enjoy the retail experience beyond just a consumption perspective.

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UNREAL ENGINE DEMO SUPER RESOLUTION

Playful and slick, the digital daydreams of Zaiba Jabbar have translated into innovations on and off-screen. Under the banner of HERVISIONS, a femme focussed curational agency, she curated the first-ever face filter exhibition held in an art institute in Europe at the Tate Modern in 2019, as well as working with clients such as Google Arts & Culture, i-D x Chanel, Adidas, the British Film Institute and more. Always thinking ahead, Jabbar’s initiative to promote fresh perspectives working at the intersection of art, culture, and technology was one of the first I had the pleasure of experiencing as well as seeing her in action at Miami Basel in 2019. Since the pandemic, she has noticed how more people are beginning to speak “her language” in regards to digital discourse. Here, we chat over how apps have become extensions to our limbs and the multi-presence pace at which we live.

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TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

RH: What is your name and how would you describe your practice?

ZJ: My name is Zaiba Jabbar and I’m an awardwinning director/moving image artist, commissioner, independent curator, and the founder of HERVISIONS. I have over a decade of experience working at the intersection of art, technology, and culture and my platform amplifies marginalized groups of people working within that digital space.

RH: What is HERVISIONS and why did you start it?

ZJ: HERVISIONS actually began on a rooftop in Downtown LA. I was really fascinated by all of the short-form moving images and animation and digital art that I was experiencing online and through social media. At the time, a lot of the work I was experiencing was by women and non-binary artists. It was really about creating a space to share the work that I was experiencing in solitude through my phone and bringing that from small screens to the big screen. Essentially, going from URL to IRL! As a director, I always loved experimenting with new formats and had an interest in post-production and how technology can enhance our storytelling. However, I didn’t fully realize what a white male-dominated industry this was, and bringing new voices into this space would become an important part of HERVISIONS’ mission.

RH: I actually remember HERVISIONS from around 2016/2017. What cultural shifts in regards to technology have you seen since then?

ZJ: Covid, and the pandemic, have accelerated our understanding or awareness of the language that pertains to the digital realm. You know, AR, VR, extended reality - everyone is now starting to speak in these terms. Now, people are speaking my language!

In a way, I was really well equipped to deal with this pandemic world. My work was in high demand; online was the only way that we could experience art because the IRL experiences weren’t happening. So, I felt quite lucky because it fitted with the work I was already curating. The multi-faceted way we experience digital art is almost inbuilt into our smart devices; we have apps that are extensions of our own limbs. Now, our way of life is one of multi-presences. Another big shift that I have noticed is how augmented reality has become much more accessible as well as online exhibition hubs expanding to integrate more remote collaborations.

RH: What is one of the achievements that you are most proud of in regards to HERVISIONS? ZJ: Haa, that is a really difficult question because I feel that whenever you ask a creative what they are most proud of it is always their current project. When you finish the next thing, that is what you are most proud of. While working in film, I think I felt that I had hit a glass ceiling in what can be quite a rigid, white and male industry. My practice is very experimental and I’m interested in speculative ideas and hybrid formats.

When I received my residency at LUX Moving Image, it allowed for a time of research and development because I was awarded a Developing your Creative Practice grant by the Arts Council. It gave me some time to step back and indulge in a slower mode of research and development. Another project with LUX that I am also really proud of was our project “Out of Touch”. Almost a year ago now, we curated a project that hinged on the questions - In the absence of physical connections how can screen-based dialogues remediate the lack of touching? How do we stay in touch when we are out of touch? How can we navigate the unwanted touch of the State through the autonomy of touching in new ways? When can we touch? How do we desire to touch? This was a critical reflection on our radical shift to

the digital space as a primary site for cultural production and consumption during the COVID-19 lockdown. Last year, I worked on a residency with Arebyte entitled “The Art of No Likes”. Throughout this online investigation, I offered up an analysis of the economy of likes across various communication formats. To add to this, it was quite crazy to have it described by the Art Newspaper as one of the best Virtual & Augmented Art shows of the last 12 months. Myself and Valerie Amend curated a show called “Disembodied Behaviours”, presented by bitforms gallery in New York and online on the New Art City platform. It was defined as a highlight and example of “how complex conversations can be productively delivered in the digital sphere” which was pretty special. We worked with artists Vitória Cribb, Julie Béna, Kumbirai Makumbe, LaJuné McMillian and Alicia Mersy.

RH: What does the future of technology have in store.

ZJ: I’m fascinated by this glove developed by researchers at MIT that encourages lucid dreaming by hacking your dreams. This merger of dream-states and meditative processes is really interesting because this goes beyond the typical visualization that a lot of ambitious people have. With this hack, we could influence our dreams and it could be really exciting. I’m also interested to see how technology might be able to integrate with psychedelics in order to better serve our mental health. Additionally, I’m excited by how technology can allow us to populate new spaces and create them as well as how people exist within these ever-changing digital environments.

With my own curatorial practice, that is a theme I like to explore and stems from trying to create fresh formats to experience the digital in ‘real-life’. Looking back, this interest in liminal spaces has been influenced by my own identity as a mixed-race woman of color; I always felt like I was existing in flux and between experiences. That sense of experiencing several world truths, or realities, at once prompted me to transcend those preconceived

systems and I’m excited to see how technology can disrupt those structures further.

RH: Tell us about some creators in your network that you’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with ZJ: A project I adored working on, and I am really proud of, was with Damara Ingles and Gabriel Massan for Snapchat’s Spectacles which is a sort of hands-free camera. I’m a big fan of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice which has a cool gamer aesthetic and focuses on recording the lives of the Black trans people. We are working on an upcoming online commission together for “Control the Virus” a co-curated year-long episodic show with Dateagle Art alongside 11 amazing artists that include Molly Soda, Pinar Yoldas, Natalia Stuyk, Sofia Crespo, Kumbirai Makumbe, Taína Cruz, Corie McGowan, Crosslucid, Débora Silva, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Maria Mahfooz and Sybil Montet with newly commissioned works debuting on the website each month as of April 2021.

For the Tate’s recent exhibition of Turner’s works, we created a filter. The piece, entitled “Uncaptured”, was created by artists Lajune McMillan and Aaron Jablonski in response to the questions “what does it mean to be seen”, “how are you seen in the world” and “how can we challenge being seen?” which they felt reflected Turner’s practice. At the start of the year, I started working on an exhibition with Creative Coding Utrecht. It was going to be IRL too but, as you can imagine, it ended up being fully online. For this, we’ve organised a Sex Tech Hackathon which was a virtual event exploring the future sex with the help of Touchy Feely Technology who doesn’t need DIY pleasure tools right now? So, if you are interested in hearing about future sex, check us out as we will be running events in April and May… come to explore how technology has impacted sexuality and human behavior with us!

ON OCULUS WITH IAN PONS JEWELL

TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

What do Jack Daniels, melting humans, a yogurt boy, and Oculus have in common? Rather than a line from a Hunter S Thompson novel, it is the maverick mind of Ian Pons Jewell that brings these seemingly disparate elements together.

Like most filmmakers Ian Pons Jewell came up in the world of music videos, his distinctive style bringing mind-bending collaborations with artists such as Nao, Pa olo Nutini, Sevdaliza, and brands such as Nike, Audi, and Argos. Refusing to be defined by genre, the thing that seemingly unites his work is an ability to look at a project with an innovative and almost augmented outlook. Combine this with his regular use of visual effects, it was no surprise to see that the latest commercial spot for Oculus was directed by Ian. Curious about the process behind creating such a cutting-edge advert, we wanted to catch up with the man himself.

RH: Hey Ian! Thanks for chatting to us - you’ve got a really distinct style… but, before we get into that, I wanted to ask how did you get into directing in the first place?

IPJ: I can pin it down to one of my friends, “Moley” (Timur Karamola).

Basically, I didn’t know what I was going to study - I did a bit of acting at school as well as photography and media studies. We made a fake commercial in a Media Studies class and that was the first time I’d ever done something with video. I wasn’t a kid that was making films when they were growing up or anything like that. But, I loved watching films.

I was actually considering doing a degree in German or advertising.

You know, degrees weren’t £10,000 then so I thought I might as well do one. Luckily, my friend Moley said he was going to do film production and I just couldn’t believe you could go and do that. Honestly, I just didn’t know you could go and make films for three years and get a degree out of it - it seemed too good to be true.

So, I applied and I got in off that fake ad and a tape of me acting as Rick Mayall in the Young Ones. Going to

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university to study film production was the way that I discovered filmmaking properly and it was a proper lightbulb moment. It was amazing - I knew that this was what I was going to kill myself doing for the rest of my life!

RH: Looking at your work, I feel like there is a surrealist tendency that runs through it. How did you realize that you wanted to bring more visual effects into your filmmaking practice?

IPJ: In terms of image-making, a painter or an illustrator will draw freely from their mind. In film, you are often creating work that you can feasibly make due to budgetary constraints or access to visual effects. If visual effects were cheaper or more accessible, they’d probably be used slightly more.

Because they are not, filmmakers, especially at the beginning of their careers, have to be really smart about what is actually achievable and learn to work with what they’ve got. Then, that starts affecting the creative mind. Whilst it is important that you are working to what you can actually do, it also constrains it

a bit. Even with my first works, I was doing whatever I could with After Effects. My editor, Gaia Borretti, did the After Effects on my first music video and then I collaborated with Morgan Beringer - I was always desperate to adapt the image. As your budgets improve, the world of what’s possible in VFX grows. Now, I try to view it as any other element in the filmmaking process, rather than think of it as an alien thing that you’re adding. Sometimes it’s invisible. But I love the potential of augmenting and changing. Thinking back, I just think it is something that I’ve always been drawn to. Now, I’m lucky enough that I’ve got access to a high level of visual effects because at the start of your career directors don’t have that unless they are really lucky. VFX companies often really support directors though if they’re going to be eventually going into commercials.

RH: Knowing your innovative style, it made a lot of sense that you’d work with a mediumdefining company like Oculus.

Could you share with us how that project came about and how did creating an advert from a first-

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person perspective shift your directorial approach?

IPJ: Oculus was an amazing opportunity to make a killer point of view film. In regards to everything I’d previously seen, I’d found it all quite limiting. I kept wondering to myself why are we still strapping cameras to people’s heads? Surely, there is another way to shoot point of view as opposed to taking a camera apart and strapping it to someone’s chest or head? Cinema seems to have an ingrained understanding that point of view is handheld too. In other words, someone looks up and we use a handheld camera to look up and down. But, that isn’t how we look… We’ve got the most advanced gimbal mechanism in our eyes. Even if you’re bobbing around, your sight remains clinically straight. So, it is really the most advanced gimbal or Steadicam that you can find.

Therefore, it became about making the piece as close to the real point of view as possible. Plus, when you use virtual reality, it is a step further from “real” human perspective; you’re moving nodally but your head is free. Essentially, this is a dolly and track - you’ve got a fluid head but your movement is straight and you are locked on a track. Once I realized this, I made this the center of the piece.

RH: How did this realization shape your creative process?

IPJ: I got thinking about how I could practically achieve this point of view perspective. As I looked at point of view work and imagined the film playing out, I realized that it is literally a pair of arms in front of a camera. Rarely would there be legs or a body. So, I thought I’ll just

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cast two people - one plays the left arm and the other the right and the camera is on a dolly and track moving around. I wanted dancers or people who had a sense of timing, to play the left and right hand. (Laughs) Then, I thought to challenge my amazing casting director, Kharmel Chochrane, even further to cast twins because they’ll then have identical hands and they’ll be super comfortable with each other. It was a bit of a gamble as I told everyone that it’d work before testing it. But, it did and it looked really good with the help of our choreographer Charlie Mayhew.

RH: We briefly touched upon imagination earlier. Now that you are aware of the different technologies or ways that you can use technology to augment our realities - how has this enhanced the way you think as a filmmaker?

IPJ: Well, I wrote this short story back in 2010 and I’m quickly trying to make it because it is all to do with augmented reality. Now, the tech has gone further than the idea I wrote. With some of the ideas I had, it wouldn’t have been possible but, now, reality has gone further.

The crazy thing with technology is that it goes faster than our ideas of the future and we’re almost playing catch up. With making music videos, it is a really pure process. I’ll listen to the music and see the video.

Synesthesia. With the video for James Massiah, I could see people walking around in this extreme heat, sweating, but rolling like they were coming up on pills. Then I added the melting scene at the end. So, access to visual effects or technology means that I’ve got the best chance of making the video look like how I

see it play out in my head whereas before I’d be having to adapt the purer visual to various constraints.

With virtual reality, I’m really excited about the future but it’s also super dystopian. Bit of a duality.

RH: Did directing for Oculus and using their latest technology increase that excitement or make you more nervous about the future of visual storytelling?

IPJ: I think that we will start to get people who fully just live in that world. When I was playing it, I was looking at my hands and I was completely connected to these digital representations. They’ll be an explosion of people living in virtual worlds - for sure. There will be really cool things with that and there will also be total disassociation.

I remember watching Avatar in 3D - three hours of that at the IMAX. I came out depressed and low because I had watched this rich visual world for three hours.

Then, I walked back to where I lived in Elephant and Castle and felt super depressed. It was weird. This impossibly rich 3D, colorful world, then the cold reality after, was like a sort of come down. Then, I looked online and I saw that people were writing about having post Avatar depression lol. Once you have the normalization of VR - where you don’t get nauseous - and you have full-body suits and creating your own avatars - you’ll get people who want to unplug from reality… whatever that is.

RH: Like a reverse Matrix?

IPJ: For sure, a voluntary reverse Matrix.

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A few words from Charlie Mayhew on making moves with Oculus and Ian Pons Jewell RH: Hey, thanks for joining us today! Please introduce yourself and what you do?

CM: Hi! My name is Charlie Mayhew and I am a movement choreographer.

RH: I know you’ve worked with Ian quite a bit - how did that collaboration come about and how did you find movement directing for a first-person perspective piece that mimics virtual reality?

CM: I first met Ian at the callbacks for Michelob “Call from Nature” in Chile. The producer Meghan Moore brought the collaboration together.

I’d just finished working on the role for Cheetah on Wonder Woman 2.

below. It was a big challenge and required a different approach to how I normally work. Thankfully Ian is a brilliant and meticulous planner and the storyboards, animatics and behind the scenes of the animatics gave me the best base possible to build on. With Oculus, a lot of research went into each game to reenact the virtual reality experience but through film. [In the Oculus advert by Ian, there are several game worlds that the video leads us through]. With characters in the games, the options for the trajectory of action and interaction are vast. In this case, there were strong boundaries in place on each individual character’s movements to allow for a good representation of each game’s style and unique world.

It was the perfect synchronicity we ended up turning humans into animals running on all fours across Santiago City and desert. Ian’s work is exciting, from imagination to execution and I couldn’t have wished for a better introduction into the commercial world!

A POV piece is the holy grail of projects for me. I’m all about details, and POV provides another opportunity for interaction and exchange to/from camera. I was absolutely blown away by the Oculus VR which is how I spent the majority of my quarantine in Kyev!

I was fascinated by how easy it was to view all 360 degrees, above and

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“ONCE YOU HAVE THE NORMALIZATION OF VR - WHERE YOU DON’T GET NAUSEOUS - AND YOU HAVE FULL-BODY SUITS AND CREATING YOUR OWN AVATARS - YOU’LL GET PEOPLE WHO WANT TO UNPLUG FROM REALITY. WHATEVER THAT IS.”

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BTS PHOTOGRAPHER: ARTEM NADYOZHIN

CGI ARTIST: DOV (CHRIS JONES) TITLE TYPOGRAPHY: LACEY LIANG

SUGAR GAMERS AND BUILDING A SOLAR-PUNK FUTURE REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

Despite being separated by a screen, Keisha Howard’s energy is kinetic.

For all her softness of tone when she speaks, it is disruptive. “When we are immersed in dystopian narratives, we end up thinking that that’s the way things are going to be even though it’s fiction,” she explains. “Even though dystopian narratives are warnings for a future we could have, I think that being bombarded with that specific messaging can lead to us accepting that this is the form that our future has to take”.

Instead of this apocalyptic perspective, Howard subscribes to a more hopeful Solarpunk outlook. This is a genre of speculative fiction that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving significant contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability such as climate change and pollution. But, as you might be asking, what exactly does this have to do with gaming or augmented realities?

Well, in some ways, everything. As Keisha says, “if I design my games through this Solarpunk lens, we can potentially inspire a new generation of individuals to reframe how they think about their future with just a creative restructuring.” However, it isn’t just through her creations that Howard has decided that things don’t have to look a certain way.

Dissatisfaction with the make-up of online gaming communities led her to found her own, Sugar Gamers. Naturally, this drive to create and innovate makes Howard the ideal voice to hear from when discussing fantasy, technology, and the future.

RH: For those who don’t know you, could you introduce yourself and your work?

KH: My name is Keisha Howard. I am an entrepreneur, a game enthusiast, and a futurist. And, I guess, a Solar Punker!

RH: How did you get into gaming?

KH: Interestingly, I actually didn’t know I was going to like gaming! I wasn’t really into it. But, my oldest brother got his first Gameboy when I was 10 or so. That was my

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introduction to digital gaming which graduated to Super Nintendo and us playing games such as Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, and Mario. Then, I kind of fell in love with it. It allowed me to bond with my older brother. After that, it built a competitive spirit within me because I either wanted to beat the game or him!

RH: How did this transform into something that you wanted to build a profession or community around?

KH: I never thought it was going to be a career for me because I never saw any women or people of color

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represented in the gaming industry. This prevented me from seeing it as a viable career option. Nobody ever told me directly that I couldn’t - the lack of representation suggested that I couldn’t. Until the recession of 2008 / 2009, I was working in the luxury real estate industry.

During that housing crisis, everything that I worked for in real estate disintegrated. Throughout my whole life, I’ve always used game mechanics as a structure to stay motivated and to keep creative. When I had to transition jobs during the recession, I started wondering what it would mean to have a video game community and what it would mean to work in the video game industry. If it weren’t for the housing crisis, I might have never created Sugar Gamers or investigated jobs in the gaming industry.

RH: On the topic of Sugar Gamers, how did you come up with the name and why did you feel the need to create it?

KH: I never saw any women. I didn’t really see people of color. They weren’t making games or being represented in games in powerful ways. After a series of different circumstances, I could not find an organization to immerse myself in. I had criteria: Number one, it has to

they can introduce you to a new game or concept. We don’t have to connect over what’s popular, or where we compete. We can connect in a way that is warmer and is inviting to a multitude of gamers. That’s what I wanted.

So, I created it. I thought I’d find a few people but there were actually a lot of us looking for the same thing. Ha, the name, it was my Twitter handle. It combines two of my favorite things which are sugar and gaming!

RH: What I love about your journey is that you saw something lacking and you created it. We’re gonna jump to a big question but if you are envisioning the future of technology - what does that hold?

KH: *Laughs* That is a huge question. Currently, technology is already very powerful. Look at the things that are being created; we have AI that essentially can predict all of our behaviors based on our location, our socio-economic status, or gender, and then send us the news that we want to watch and put us in bubbles that make us comfortable. Elon Musk has a neural link, which is going to connect in your brain to your electronic devices. We are in the Sci-Fi future that people predicted; we have so many different technological

“I never thought it was going to be a career for me because I never saw any women or people of color represented in the gaming industry.” have women. Number two, it has to have people of color.

Number three, we have to meet in real life. At the time, online gameplay was incredibly toxic. I started Sugar Gamers before GamerGate, before MeToo, and before Black Lives Matter. There wasn’t a general understanding of intersectionality and how various issues impacted people. I wanted to meet in real life so we could build connections and socialize in a non-competitive fashion.

There wasn’t anything like that, it was all about being the best at HAL! Sometimes, it’s just nice to connect with individuals that have similar interests and connect with people that might not necessarily be competitive but

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advances. We can create solar energy that can power whole countries, we’re creating rockets to fuel a potential tourism industry where people are just in orbit. These things exist right now. Instead, I would like to see technology democratized. In this future, we don’t just have Elon Musks, the Bill Gates-es, the Jeff Bezos-es and the Richard Bransons. I want to see different types of people from different lived experiences being able to innovate and solve the problems that they are best positioned to rectify. As technology changes the fabric of how human beings engage with one another, there is a responsibility in it. We are moving so quickly towards

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this future of technological advancement and there are people being left behind. There are huge skill gaps happening especially between demographics of people who are already marginalized or disenfranchized in some way. How do we make sure that everyone gets a fair shot understanding where we’re all going and being responsible for one another? That is probably a bit utopic but that is the future of technology I want to contribute to.

RH: Beautiful, I’m glad you brought up access to knowledge - that is so important. Linked to that, where would you suggest people begin if they think they might want to make games themselves? What process did you undertake to create your first one?

KH: You know, the University of YouTube is a go-to! Before you say I don’t have any of the resources to make, you absolutely do. Go to the University of YouTube and make a lot of inquiries and really find out what kind of game you want to create. Do you want to create a game by yourself? Do you want to be a part of a team? Figure out what exactly you want to do because the video game industry is expansive, there are many options! To say you want to be in gaming, it isn’t enough. You need to invest in yourself.

It is like going to college because the hardware associated with developing games can be somewhat expensive. I have a gaming PC - it’s about a $2,000 purchase and that’s a mid-range, if not a lower range, device. After you do that, you’ll find that many gaming companies have game engines and offer free learning. You don’t necessarily have to go to class, you just have to be interested enough to invest in yourself. The free tools already exist but you have to be self-motivated enough to find them and use them. Games are expensive and there are many, many, many, innumerable ways to be in the gaming industry.

It’s not just about coding; you could be a dancer or a martial artist and do motion capture, be a voice actor, be someone who designs the clothes for the characters.

RH: Could you elaborate more on the creation of your first game?

KH: I never really thought I would make games. It is something I’m still learning. But, really, it was about networking, and finding people who make games, talking

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to them about their process, and like finding out what that particular experience was. By having an organization, like Sugar Gamers, we found a lot of individuals with different skill sets but with a mutual interest in the gaming industry. After a while, we just came together and started making our own games. It wasn’t a project of financial gain but of passion. We wanted to see what we could do with our collective skills. If you want to make a game by yourself, it is absolutely possible. But, it usually takes a lot of different types of people and it takes a lot of time.

Sugar Gamers allowed us to meet people. When you’re focused on inclusive communities and you’re open to meeting people different from yourself, you get to learn so much because you can only really live life through the lens of your own lived experience. Regardless of how open we are, there are just some things that we’re not going to know unless someone else with that lived experience teaches us and shares with us their perspectives. It makes having an inclusive team really powerful and coming together to create anything has been a wonderful experience.

RH: I loved that Sugar Gamers also has a section for articles, it really captures the spirit of a community hub. Do you have a favorite piece on there?

KH: In a way, we’re not a typical gaming organization because we don’t talk about the most popular games.

Sometimes, we do but most of the time we just talk about our experiences in this space. One of my favorite articles is by one of my closest friends and discusses her going through a serious bout of depression. She was dangerously depressed and gaming allowed her to have another space to be in besides the space where she was reminded of all her pain and hurt because she could contribute her time to playing games with me. In the article, she details how it made her feel like she was contributing to something that was important. It wasn’t about her life or anybody’s life, but just being able to play a game and being able to have a win and play with her friends.

Of course, it isn’t everything. In combination with therapy and taking the time to heal, gaming helped. The second thing is just our ability to talk about emerging technology.

Whenever writers talk about CGI and how gaming is

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where the idea of virtual humans versus digital humans and virtual influencers came about. Whereas now, they model for different brands, like Louis Vuitton. You can create these people, these digital humans and I’m really curious as to how it will impact our culture in the future.

For instance, we’ve never really solved the problem of having unrealistic expectations for body types or racial

fiction. Foundationally, of course. The same things happen in games! Solarpunk as a speculative fiction genre is something that’s super compelling. We’re so used to seeing things that are a little bit more dystopian in nature. When we’re thinking about sci-fi, and sci-fi entertainment, I think we are so immersed in dystopian narratives that we just think that is the way things have

“Solarpunk as a speculative fiction genre is something that’s super compelling. We’re so used to seeing things that are a little bit more dystopian in nature.” inclusion and diversity. But, now, you can just make a digital human that will never age, never get pregnant and do whatever the company needs them to do. You could change this person’s race with a click of a button and who controls that? There is a lot of power in influencing different groups of people, and not necessarily having done the work of diversity and inclusion.

RH: In one of your TED Talks, you speak about Solarpunk. Could you share with us what that means to you and how it relates to gaming?

KH: I look at video games as an artistic medium. It goes beyond entertainment; they create environments and characters that have stories. There is so much creativity and imagination that goes into video games, and they’re inspiring, right? When we look at art and speculative fiction, and movies, those mediums inspire us. An example of this is Star Trek. Even though it came out in the 60s, it was inspiring in that you see all these races together, working together, and they’re discovering things together. All these gadgets and this technology that just existed in our imagination. They inspired some individuals to design their first cell phone and how that would look.

to be even though it’s fiction. Even though dystopian narratives are warnings for a future we could have, I think that being bombarded with that specific messaging can lead to us accepting that this is the form that our future has to take. Solarpunk re-imagines a new framework to think about the future.

You still have the scientific advancements. For example, the cool technology and the elements that make watching a sci-fi movie awesome and fun. But instead of us destroying the world, or destroying each other, or accepting that corporations are going to take over, Solarpunk asks what another way might look like. While this doesn’t mean utopia is a foregone conclusion, I do think speculative fiction, and especially Solarpunk, might reframe the way that we start thinking about solving problems that we are having. Instead of having to move out to Mars because the world is no longer going to be inhabitable, Solarpunk says why don’t we take care of the earth? In gaming and fantasy genres, we can inspire people to start solving problems even before we have the tools to do so. We can inspire a new generation of individuals to reframe how they think about their future with just a creative restructuring.

The devices that we use to communicate - holograms - are concepts that are born usually first in science

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CGI ARTIST - VITÓRIA CRIBB CGI FABRIC ARTIST - CAROLINE DUSSUEL CREATIVE PRODUCTION - MUTANTBOARD CREATIVE DIRECTION - OLIVIER GERAGHTY REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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DRESS AND UNDERWEAR BY DI PETSA SHOES BY TABITHA RINGWOOD

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TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

When it comes to performers there is an oft-touted phrase - “they’ve just got it”. While it doesn’t really tell you much, it refers to an ethereal quality that somehow pre-determines their successes. Mentally, it conjures a glistening golden aura that enhances their being in a gentle yet authentic way convincing you further of their ability. Sure, it is intangible but sometimes you feel it and that’s what happened when chatting to Mahalia.

Despite being nominated for a Grammy, the confidence that 23-year-old Mahalia Burkmur exudes is a subtle one. Whether that might be because music is intertwined with her spirit - she wrote her first song aged 8 - or because, as she tells me, her new album signifies the arrival of “Mahalia 2.0” where “I know what I want now. I’m in a place where I know what I want from love, from life, from friends - from everything”. While such assurance might be surprising off the back of a pandemic-induced year of turbulence, it begins to make sense when Mahalia beautifully asserts “the future just holds music”.

In a time when we expect so much from our young artists, Mahalia’s pure passion is refreshing. With an almost intrinsic focus and knowledge of her purpose, it is exciting to wonder where her smooth British R’n’B infusion will take her next.

RH: Thank you for joining us today! Before we get into the future, I want to dial back and ask how did it feel being nominated for a Grammy?

MB: God, it was crazy! I remember finding out, I was just sitting in my flat. It was quite weird because I didn’t know how that stuff works! I’d assumed that the nominees would find out before. But, they don’t!

You find out when the world finds out. I’d been getting loads of congratulations messages. I was dead confused because I was looking at my phone going what are you all congratulating me on?! Then, I went online and I saw I had been tagged in a bunch of posts and then I saw it! It was wild. Trying to describe a feeling like that, it is quite strange because I didn’t think I would feel that so early on in my career. However, I have been working in music for about 10 years now!

But, it is a huge milestone. I called all my family and I did one of those WhatsApp group calls. It was quite funny saying it to them and watching everyone scream at the same time. As everyone was making all this noise, it was weirdly silent because everyone was making sounds at the same time. It just merged into one! I could just see my mum, my dad and all my brothers just screaming into the camera! It was something that I immediately

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thought in my head - wow, I’m going to be able to tell my kids one day that I was nominated for a Grammy.

Even if it never happens again, it was such an incredible moment.

RH: That really is such an incredible achievement especially as last year was so tough on musicians and live performers. How did you connect with your audience in the absence of shows?

MB: As a musician, I would say that my whole background is in live music. When I first started, my mum and dad took me to open mics or busking. They wanted to make sure that I was practiced on stage and feeling able to connect with an audience. When lockdown hit, it was really strange. It was like having the floor taken from underneath you. I had to re-learn quite a lot of things. For example, I am really not that savvy with social media! Even though I am part of Gen-Z, social media was never really one of my favorite things. But, I think it’s been quite beautiful to be able to still connect with fans. I did my first Instagram live little show. For me, that was super awkward but by the end of it super lovely. It’s kind of amazing that we can do that; we can just click a button and anybody who wants to join can join. We did this kind of live but pre-recorded version

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of an EP that I put out last year which went out onto YouTube. I loved that because it was basically doing a gig from home. Without all of the live shows and not being able to get out on the road, I think that that kind of stuff was really important for us to still feel connected.

I watched quite a few artists’ lives, on Instagram and other platforms, and I was actually quite astonished at how amazing some of them came out. I think they are a really great way to just bring people together. Shows aren’t always the most accessible - some people can’t go to them for various reasons and, now in the pandemic, it is really great to still have some way to come together.

RH: Your answer almost perfectly leads onto my next question… Post-pandemic, if that ever happens, do you think musicians will be more conscious about using digital channels to connect with their fans?

You are welcome to speak from your own experience rather than in general!

MB: I think it will change a lot of artists’ perspectives - it has definitely changed mine. To be honest, I believe it’ll make us more creative. Before, I’d never had thought to get on IG Live. I’d do my promo, post it and do live shows. Whereas, the lesson that I’ve learned this time is that we are really lucky as artists now to have everything we need in our hands. Having a phone, you can reach out to people and be in front of people in a way that you could never do before and I think that is quite exciting!

It has shown me that not everything has to be across seas. You don’t have to pay all this money to fly you out, and your band, to shoot small videos somewhere like America or Australia. It has made me think in a more savvy way in regards to what I do and how I do it.

RH: Let’s chat about your latest video for Jealous with Rico Nasty. It has a really 90’s tech vibe to it - it is Belly meets Blade! Can you tell me about the track and the concept for the video?

MB: For starters, the song had one meaning when I wrote it, and as it came to fruition the meaning began to shift, and I felt that it had a million different meanings.

When I was writing Jealous, I was frustrated. I’m sort of tying it in with tech… I wrote Jealous during the first lockdown. Through lockdown, we were all kind of reconnecting with people. I had spent two or three years touring the world. As I am a real homebody, I can get

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really homesick when I go away - I love my friends and my family. The way I tend to deal with that is by totally switching off and shifting my mindset. That has always been my coping mechanism! I always click pause on my life in London. After three weeks or three months, I come back and want to hit play. And, maybe, that hasn’t worked for my friends. When we locked down, I was here and it was weird because I was able to do things - like go for walks - that I hadn’t been around for or I hadn’t been able to do. It’d been that way for about two years. I was really building back relationships and like working quite hard to gain those friendships back and learn about my friends again through having time to connect. All of that being done through Zoom, and FaceTime, and Instagram, and social media and all that kind of stuff. For the first few months, it was really fun.

I suppose when I started getting busy again, going to the studio and making music - I began to have quite weird or unexpected moments with friends. We were having these awkward conversations where they would say quite negative things about what I do or the type of person I am. It was really getting to me! I’ve always been somebody where I blame myself for other people’s actions towards me. In other words, if someone is just being a bitch, I’ll think what did I do? I’ll always internalize it.

I was sitting with my two friends - Cadenza and Miraa May - and I was thinking about that word: jealous. It reminded me of when I was younger and if someone was mean to me at school, my mum would always say ‘don’t worry baby, they are just jealous’. It used to make me feel uncomfortable because I didn’t like the idea of saying someone wanted something that I had. However, I’ve got more comfortable with that because we all do it. You know, I’ll look at someone’s Rolls Royce on Instagram and feel like I want that! Jealousy is such an odd emotion. But, it can be used positively or negatively.

When I was writing the song, it was important to me to keep it playful and fun - that is where it came from. It was about me saying I’m not going to let your opinions get to me like that. I’m just going to believe in who I am, not internalize it and get on with life whilst thriving!

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RH: And the video? The dancing and the blue hues are amazing!

MB: The video! That was a whole different thing, I really wanted to capture that empowerment. I really wanted to capture that feeling of me just thriving with my people and just being ourselves. Now, I think the video could be taken in so many ways. In regards to jealousy, there’s this guy who has this big house and this nice car and all these digital and technological things going on! But, me and my girls, we are jealous of that so we just roll in and mess it up! Or, maybe there is a guy who is jealous of us or me. On the technological side, that was really brought out by the director, Melody. After I came to her with the idea for the video, she showed me Belly and I loved it.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen that film - I knew Hype Williams and his work but Belly slipped by me which was weird. Or, maybe, not that weird. It did come out the year I was born! (Laughs). The technology was taking something, like Belly from the 90s, and bringing it into 2021 - I love that Rico [Nasty] is everywhere on the TV screens. It feels like we brought two worlds together!

RH: Back onto the music, what does the future hold for you? I’ve heard a rumor that there might be another album in the works…

MB: Yeah, kind of! Another thing that lockdown has taught me is to let go of pressure. Last year, I was freaking out! I was like God, I need to write another album! Now that we have a lockdown, surely I should be inspired! I was putting pressure on myself. But, it took me about six or seven months to kind of get into it. At the end of last year, I started writing again. So, the future holds music! I feel like there’s so much kind of happening; I’m writing a lot and I’m definitely in a new space.

There is also talk of a new album although when that’s going to come I have no idea right now. But, I know it’s there and it’s forming. It has been so bonkers trying to make work in this climate. Not only trying to get inspired by looking out the window, it has been hard to get everybody in one room because getting everyone in one room means everyone has to do a COVID test, and blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, it has been quite crazy but this year is the year of music and growth - I’m finding who Mahalia 2.0 is which is really exciting.

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RH: Do you know what Mahalia 2.0 sounds like?

MB: Oh God! Sound-wise, it feels like a step up from where I’ve been. It still is very me; a fusion of the British R’n’B thing. On a lyrical level, my first album Love and Compromise was very much working out love and understanding relationships while working out what I wanted and what I would compromise for. Whereas this album, it feels like I am past that. Instead, I am in a place where I know what I want from love, from life, from friends, and from everything. Jealous is a great intro to that - I feel really sure of myself.

RH: That is a really beautiful place to be, to feel at home with yourself. Is there any advice that you’d give to other young women that future Mahalia knows now but you wish you’d know when you were younger?

MB: I wish I’d have known that everybody’s going through the same shit. When we’re young, we don’t understand that. We wake up and we have these feelings and emotions or queries about life and what it means to be a woman. But, we feel alone in that.

Speaking personally, I have had moments of feeling like nobody would ever know what I was going through.

Over this past year, I’ve been able to hear more of the women in my life’s stories like my mum’s or my aunty’s, or my best friend’s. It made me realize how strong women are and I wish I’d known that when I was younger (laughs) younger than I am now! I have a great mum and so many incredible women in my life and some other women don’t have that. So, yeah, I always want to remind young women of how strong they are and how incredible they are. Right now, it is such an amazing time to be a woman. To be honest, the older I get the more fantastic I think we are. I’ve been through some things this year that have affected me as a woman. Things I never thought I’d go through so early and it’s made me look at myself and go, holy shit! You’re a woman, and you’re amazing I think being proud of that is really important.

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CGI - DIGI-GXL MARTINA PONZONI TABITHA SWANSON CAROLINE BARRUECO HARRIET DAVEY ADIELLA BACHSHE ALISON MURRAY STACIE ANT VERONIKA OSIPOVA DANIELA KROL LILI ÉVA BARTHA CREATIVE DIRECTION - OLIVIER GERAGHTY

We couldn’t even think about putting a magazine together without including the womxn who are pushing this scene way out of its comfort zone, in a good way - DIGI-GXL A global collective of womxn, intersex, trans folk, and non-binary people - specializing in digital design, 3D, and XR, they’ve answered some of our questions around cyberfeminism, the power of a collective, and the changes they want to see happen in the 3D world.

What changes do you want to see in the 3D / virtual sphere?

What I personally want to see is more inclusiveness and more accessibility to education and tutorials regarding 3D. I feel like everybody should have the same chance to learn something, regardless of whether or not the person can afford it. That’s why once I’ve gained and polished a certain skill I am proud of, I would be happy to give it away for free on a platform. I do understand we as creators need to make money but more than that we need to give back to the communities who helped us push our dreams further.

We shouldn’t ignore people who ask us what technique or programs we use just because we fear that person could get further than us. Some people will abuse kindness but more than that other people will be thankful that they can pursue a skill they want to learn which will help them in the future. Nothing feels more devastating than not being able to pursue education because of money. @sgicreator The biggest change I wish for is that brands and clients will understand that 3D design is not just playing around with some software and making something “cool”.

It’s actually a really complex work that requires so many different skills, but 3D artists are still incredibly underpaid and undervalued. One of the good things about DIGI-GXL for example is the fact that we can talk to each other and decide as a large community about industry standards, so we can make sure our work is not undervalued. @future.creators.club

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When creating a digital world, what are some of your creative processes?

As a novice digital artist, the main thing in my creation process is experimenting and growing my capabilities.

Before, I dabbled in taking images from my head as an initial impulse and starting to implement them in the digital space without clear expectations. The idea transforms along the way and takes unexpected turns for me. This is pure freestyle without rules and restrictions, I love this freedom.

Nevertheless, now I’m increasingly trying to pay attention to the idea embedded in a project. It becomes more and more interesting to limit myself in tools, thereby strengthening the message. A hand-drawn pencil sketch helps me to capture the idea and form the most important foundations. But even in this kind of regulated process, there is freedom to experiment materials, angles of a camera, lights. Even when I have a concrete idea, I’m always interested in using the “what will happen if” method. What if I do it a different way, like this? What if I move it? Or look at it from a different angle? Could I try another texture here? Even if I go back to the original version, I will know that it is not the best by chance. @un.realvision What trends in the AR world are you excited about?

As the technology moves forward, I’m excited to see a world where our shopping and fashion experiences are fully AR. I feel like the e-commerce world is taking big steps in this direction, using 3D garments and AR try-on platforms, but there’s so much more potential to the AR technology in this field. I believe someday we’ll be able to really “dress” ourselves in virtual clothes and accessories in real-time, and express ourselves in many ways that aren’t possible IRL. @future.creators.club What is your biggest source of inspiration?

Inspiration is all around us and can surprise us at any time. A “ta-dah” moment! However, where do I actively search for inspiration? Communities can bring a wealth of inspiration, such as DIGI-GXL. You get to see other artists’ work from around the world, share interests, discuss important topics, and support each other.

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During lockdown, online communities have flourished, and are more of an important support network and inspiration than ever before. I like to also find inspiration with a purpose, e.g. sustainability, equality, responsibility. News, current events, podcasts, and conversations can fuel this inspiration. If inspiration has purpose, I believe your work can then become an inspiration to others for a long time to come! @alimurrayson

As artist in residence at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, I created Beyond Vision, a VR experience looking at digital self-expression and identity through embodied presence and creative interactions.

It uses parametric runtime bridges, interactive machine learning, body and hand tracking, and runtime physics simulations. I love experimenting with new tools in tech, and really look at how I can ‘hack’ them to be able to push beyond what is currently possible. @lilievabartha

I have some pretty crazy dreams. The more I seem to draw from them for my work, the more intense they appear. At some point, I’m not sure anymore if the dreams fuel the work most or the work fuels the dreams. Occasionally in my dreams, I work out the solution to a software problem I’ve been wrestling with; coming up with multiple ways to solve it. My most dynamic thoughts often come to me just as I am about to drift off to sleep. I’m always so adamant with myself that I don’t need to write them down and I’ll remember them in the morning. I never do. Maybe some thoughts are too powerful for the world and are best forgotten ;) @harriet.blend

What do you see cyberfeminism meaning in the future?

For me, the biggest inspiration is nature and all its millennia of natural selection. No creative process is more beautiful and inspiring than the evolution of species through natural selection. And one key learning I got by observing it, is that the mistake is the only tool of evolution. And still, we humans, avoid mistakes all the time. I think this is dumb of us. @ccaarroollliinnee What are your favorite projects you’ve worked on and why?

FanGirl x DIGI-GXL LFW 20 (pro bono work to support Black-owned businesses in times of physical restrictions): Digitizing super cool outfits, creating amazingly diverse and colorful digital personas was so inspiring. The project pushed beyond gender, race, and bodily bias, and had a huge impact on how I look at identity and the ‘self’ in digital. Digital Denmark - a team of volunteers together with my digital studio helped four sustainable fashion SMEs to increase their visibility through digital fashion campaigns. Such a rewarding project, the voices of these incredible designers need to be heard through all means possible.

Cyberfeminism is the ultimate future. One of the main reasons I wanted to work in 3D as a medium is because you have so much power over your identity in the digital space. I think that the internet, AR, VR, and 3D give users a whole new set of tools for self-expression.

Digital art also has a very strong support community around it and is arguably more accessible than a lot of other art mediums. There is so much free software out there, free tutorials, and forums catering to supporting people of all backgrounds on their learning journey. As we gain more diverse digital creators, cyberfeminism, as a movement, will encourage a natural disassociation of “tech bros” from the innovative technological world. @whosthereplease I think for the future we will need something else, maybe animism, or queer ecology, we need an intersectional fight that takes into consideration other species and the planet as a whole, not only humans. And I believe that FlLINTs, BPoC and the humans from the global south will take the front of this fight because we know what oppression feels like. @ccaarroollliinnee What trends in the AR world are you most excited about?

While I’m thrilled about the art-related aspects of AR, I’m equally as excited about the potential it has to impact the medical and fashion industries. A few years ago when I was working at a large e-commerce platform in the tech department, I was briefly helping with a project that was using AR to try to reduce sizing issues by doing virtual measurements and fittings.

Not only would techniques like this allow people to see what it would look like before they buy it, but it would also reduce returns due to sizing, which is currently the largest reason for returns, and the waste associated with that is enormous. In the medical field, I think having AR (and XR in general) open up the potential to practice complex surgeries before operations, etc. is truly worldchanging. @tabithaswanson_ What are the benefits of being in a creative collective?

The exchange of experiences is empowering.

In our society, organizations and other hierarchical systems enforce taboos around specific subjects with the intent of carrying out power dynamics. Open conversations about pay rates are not that common, for instance. But within a creative collective, we create safe spaces where we can talk about money and exchange (bad) experiences with employers and more.

It has been proven that one of the reasons for the pay gap is that women settle for lower salaries, but once we know what our peers are earning, it makes it easier to recognize a low rate salary and to dispute for a better one. Information is power. @ccaarroollliinnee

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MEETING THE ENEMY

WITH KARIM BEN KHELIFA

TEXT BY JADE ANG JACKMAN

Powerful yet sensitively constructed, combatants from several global conflicts stand before you offering up their perspectives. If being in a room of virtual fighters is not intriguing enough, the conceptual framework that provoked Karim Ben Khelifa to create The Enemy has the potential to set your mind alight.

After covering warfare for 17 years, the Belgian-Tunisian innovator began to challenge the form. Rather than keep moving amongst ever-changing frontlines, his mind lingered on a larger question - one that cuts to the heart of documentary reportage and photojournalism.

He found himself wondering as to the purpose of publishing images of war, suffering or pain. In other words, what was the point if they did not instigate an attitude shift or bring about peace?

Indeed, this theoretical foundation pertains to all of us when we scroll aimlessly or become overwhelmed by imagery of police brutality or stories of sexual harassment online in the wake of MeToo. In some ways, Ben Khelifa’s question, back in 2014, has inadvertently become one of our times. However, once you’ve had such a thought, what do you do with it?

At first, Ben Khelifa did what he knew and conceived the project as a photo exhibit. Not a fan of forcing a narrative, he toyed with elements of choice in the show’s structure. While on a fellowship at MIT Open Documentary Lab in 2013-

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2015, he realized he wanted to transform the piece into a virtual reality experience which received further development until 2017. Rather than focus on one conflict, Ben Khelifa wanted to create something more universal that allowed us to humanize ‘the other’. Not only was this an ambitious dialogue, nothing of this scale had been created within the medium of virtual reality. The Enemy would be the first time an installation blended VR with 3D construction in order to amplify an unheard story from the locus of the action.

Standing there, you are faced with The Enemy. You can look him in the eyes and engage with him directly. Here, Ben Khelifa steps back allowing each to represent himself. As they dissolve, the true resonance of Ben Khelifa’s words emerges: “The enemy is always invisible.

When he becomes visible, he ceases to be the enemy”.

Naturally, the project did not go unnoticed with TIME calling the piece “a fully engrossing experience” and the New York Times writing on the project’s “deeply affecting” nature. In The Enemy’s mobile form, the piece has been downloaded by 10,138 users in 118 countries. And, since then, Ben Khelifa has become somewhat of a forerunner of this exciting new media space that fuses forms and, ultimately, allows us to renegotiate our relationship to journalism and storytelling.

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RH: Before embarking on your journey with VR, you were a photojournalist. How do you describe yourself?

KBK: I’m a storyteller.

RH: I just touched on your background as a photographer who was well known for covering conflicts around the world. Why did you decide to start off doing that in the first place?

KBK: I don’t really know why I went and started covering wars; I think I was inquisitive. In a personal way, I thought it was a way to prove yourself to the world. I didn’t have much education at all because I was kicked out of school relatively young! Not too young because I feel like I spent too much time there, ha. At 20, I went backpacking alone to Nepal and took a camera.

Before that, I think my curiosity had a lot to do with a program called No Comment on the TV channel Euronews.

There was a slot that played for two minutes before the features; the only thing you see is what the cameraman filmed. I was fascinated because there was no voiceover telling me what to think. Intrigued, I began to wonder what I didn’t see.

Those were the kind of thoughts that led me to buy a plane ticket to Albania. The war in Kosovo was looming; lots of young people from the UK and Switzerland had gone out there and I wanted to understand what they were doing.

Alongside them, I crossed the border and found myself at the heart of the action. Really, I wasn’t photographing because you spend

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your time running and trying not to get shot (or step on a landmine)…

Initially, it wasn’t productive. It was terrifying. But, I did some good work there.

RH: How did this transform into being your career for 15 years?

KBK: From there, you just moved from one conflict to another. I spent a year and a half in the Balkans.

Afterward, I went to Israel and Palestine, where the Second Intifada was starting. But, of course, to make a career, you need to be known by some magazines and newspapers!

Right after September 11, I called Katy Ryan, who is the Director of Photography at the New York Times Magazine. At that time, I was in New York and she had given me a 15-minute appointment. In those days, we still had portfolios. I get there on time, I get in the office, introduce myself, and put the portfolio on the table. As I knew she’d be extremely busy, I didn’t try to sell myself. Instead, I said “I don’t need to speak about my photographs as you are better placed to see if they suit the magazine but I hope you have a good day” and I left.

My phone rang 15 minutes later when I was walking down the street.

She told me that she liked the work and that they had an assignment coming up to go to Guantanamo and asked whether I would want to do it? After working for the New York Times, all the others follow.

Vanity Fair. Newsweek magazine.

But, at some point, perhaps after 10 or 11 years of doing this, I realized I had reached the best audience.

I was where I wanted to be. But, it

wasn’t how I had imagined. In other words, I didn’t feel that my work was powerful enough. I started to become cynical and felt like I was being used as a very expensive war illustrator, not a correspondent.

When those magazines use your photographs, they put them on a double-page. A title says everything about the picture, and the words might express more than what you’d intended to communicate through it.

I realized I was probably entrenching stereotypes rather than challenging them with my photography. But, I didn’t know how to do anything else.

RH: So, how did you end up moving into virtual reality?

KBK: Luck came my way; I was invited to Harvard University. For someone who’d never been to university, it was quite scary to start at such an exclusive place. But, that fits with my life mantra of “you are somewhere you should not be.”

Not by force rather my trajectory is shifting. After meeting some people at MIT who really appreciated my work as a photojournalist, I was invited! But, the Media Lab explained that they didn’t really do anything in that genre. Instead, they had other ways of storytelling.

Rather than tell me what to do, they were offering their new technologies which led to a collaboration.

This took place over two years and saw me become their artist in residence and a visiting artist for two more. Then, I started developing The Enemy. Looking back, I consider it an attempt to question the photographic medium.

As a photojournalism project, I was struggling to finance it and

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invested myself. This exhibition covered Israel, Palestine, and the conflict in Kashmir and was the first iteration of The Enemy. In the install, I decided the show should have a border with two portraits looking at each other. Looking back, I was asking my audience to interact and make a choice in regards to who they wanted to listen to first.

At this point, I didn’t know what virtual reality was. I discovered it in my first year. A small company called

After that, I thought, what about the guys in my photographs. Could they actually be in a room altogether?

What if they talk to me directly, meet the audience, and not need a storyteller? What if we understand part of who they are through their body language? I thought it would be an exciting experiment for journalism to see if that would be possible. At that point, I had walked away from the VR presentation. But, I turned back and spoke to some engineers. They said it would be

“In The Enemy, there is no moral judgment. It doesn’t say who’s right and who’s wrong; the audience is left to their own interpretation.”

Oculus came to show the demo of their new hardware. When they put me in their headsets, I was on the side of a mountain but sitting at MIT. I’d look down and see a mountain fall away below me. I don’t know if you’ve got vertigo, but you feel it inside and it is a very incredible feeling. Luckily, I kept my critical mind and said how’s that possible?!

I’m sitting at MIT! As you can tell from this account, I really had no idea what virtual reality was. I had not really understood its power. So, I was a bit shaken. I’m the guy who struggles with technology! As soon as I need to do an update, I’m lost.

I’m not a gamer, and I’ve never had a Playstation!

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possible - the technology was still very new at the time - but it had never been done before. And, it might be very expensive!

RH: To this date, I think The Enemy is still such an ambitious and unique work. What were people’s reactions when you first showed it?

KBK: After we had built the prototype, it was really efficient. As a matter of fact, we even presented the prototype publicly at Tribeca.

While at the festival, the New York Times asked if they could acquire the piece. Midway, I had to stop them and explain that it wasn’t

completed which they couldn’t believe! For me, it wasn’t just the one example of Israel and Palestine.

I wanted, and it became, broader than that. Essentially, The Enemy considers the way that war begins through dehumanization. Often, this is done by storytelling and misinformation. These narratives prevent people seeing the other’s humanity. To solve a conflict, we need to see people’s humanity.

RH: Despite the fantastic quality of your images, you seemed to grow dissatisfied with the impact of your work and how it was impacting your audience. What have been people’s emotional responses to The Enemy and how did you feel about them?

KBK: That the project is pretty incredible and there are two key reasons why. Firstly, I never really met my ‘audience’ as a photojournalist. By the time the magazine published the images, I’d be somewhere else in the world. It’d be rare for me to see people looking at the photograph. With The Enemy, they were right there. Of course, I wasn’t behind people the whole time! But, I did get to see some people’s reactions and they were highly emotional. Not so tragic that you start crying; I don’t want to do that! However, the project generated a sense of moral ambiguity. There are two killers looking at each other and looking at you whilst being extremely human! That is unsettling.

And, to some extent, a surprise.

I think that is what journalism is supposed to do; it’s supposed to inform you of a different perspective. In The Enemy, there is no moral judgment. It doesn’t

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“With virtual reality, it is not solely for “empathy”. You can do both. You can create rifts or hatred. If something has powerful potential, it does so in both ways. It is the people behind it who decide the fate of the medium”

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say who’s right and who’s wrong; the audience is left to their own interpretation. Often, this resulted in them recognizing they have more similarities than differences which puzzled audiences as much as it puzzled me when I found out.

That response was overwhelming for me; I was really, really, really happy. But, the target demographic in my mind had been the next generation of fighters. I feel like we could have been more successful in

it is a testament to the power of immersion and video. When the project came out, virtual reality was only just starting to be seen and experienced. However, The Enemy was so much more advanced than that. It was on a different level. You could walk and walk for 50 minutes; you could navigate space and get closer to fighters. Whereas most of the VR at that point, you weren’t in a room and you’d be sitting or standing with limited movement.

calls. While we prepared as much as we could, we also needed luck and very good contacts on the ground. To aid this process, we rehearsed filming someone very quickly in an interview setting in Paris. So, the team was completely conscious of our roles. But, as nothing went wrong, it was also luck! But, of course, Paris is not the same as Gaza. While I was there, I was working from a five-star hotel with my team. In order to be conspicuous, I asked the armed

“the project generated a sense of moral ambiguity. There are two killers looking at each other and looking at you whilst being extremely human! That is unsettling” establishing connections with them.

We should have brought this to the Congo; we should have brought this to El Salvador also into Palestine.

But, we went to Israel, and people’s responses were potent. Despite the years of bloodshed, they’d end up in front of Palestinian fighters and change their stance. They’d walk out understanding that this person is like me; he’s protecting his family.

The second exciting response was to learn how people were categorizing the virtual reality experience of The Enemy. Rather than talk about it as a project, participants discussed their interactions with the fighters as meetings. From this feedback, it appeared that the project had taken the form of real-life encounters in their memory despite the use of CGI. I still think about that and

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RH: I’m keen to hear about the set-ups because there must be practical challenges to bringing virtual reality to a hostile environment.

KBK: Being a photojournalist is quite a solitary profession, I was alone unless I was collaborating with a writer. Evidently, this scenario was very different as I was bringing a whole team to a potentially hostile environment where things can turn sketchy very quickly. This placed a lot of responsibility upon me. After years in the field, you instinctually engage with your surroundings.

You need to be quick and rapidly respond without a hint of panic.

However, I needed to translate this to my team so they felt safe and comfortable with my judgment

groups to arrive in civilian attire and change in the suite’s bathroom.

However, one group didn’t. As you can imagine, this created a buzz in the lobby. But, ultimately, you need to deal with those things as they happen and make sure nobody gets hurt. Comparatively, the Congo was more complex. Not only was there an electricity problem, but we also had to find safe houses for the guerrilla fighters. Afterward, they needed to be able to leave swiftly to go back where they were fighting in the bush. In a different way, Salvador was surgical. Not only are the gangs there extremely violent and known for killing in the blink of an eye, but we were also carrying $60,000 of material. That could be enough for a quick temptation.

Within such a context, we needed

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to be super fast and planned an exit strategy in case we needed a really quick one.

RH: I’ve seen that you’ve asked the fighters the same set of questions - could you share what those are?

KBK: When I did all those interviews, the series of questions I asked were as follows; who’s your enemy?

Why did you kill him? Do you have nightmares? What are they? How do you see yourself in 20 years’ time?

What is violence to you? What is peace to you? After they responded to those, I gave them all one final direction. Namely, you are not going to speak to me nor answer another question. Instead, I would like you to directly talk to your enemy. I would like you to tell him, in your opinion, what is necessary to achieve peace.

At the end of the day, these men were the foot soldiers. They were not devising or thinking up the war, they were doing the war on the ground. So, in the final stage of the experience, you almost become the enemy, your combatant is directly telling you something and you are further drawn into the project.

RH: From my research, I’ve seen people refer to virtual reality as an “empathy machine.” What is your view on that? Maybe, in regards to war or violence, we’ve become too desensitized to photographs?

KBK: In regards to photography, we could say that we are desensitized or too accustomed to the medium.

With virtual reality, it is not solely for “empathy”. You can do both. You can create rifts or hatred. If something has powerful potential, it does so in

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both ways. It is the people behind it who decide the fate of the medium.

RH: For your new journalistic project, you are using augmented reality. It’d be great to hear more about that and why you decided that AR was the best medium for it.

KBK: The project’s name is Seven Grams and it was inspired by my time in the Congolese mines. Whilst there out there, I met someone whose experiences encapsulated the story of forced mining and labor.

After creating The Enemy, I was well aware of the shortcomings of using augmented reality to ‘meet someone. I started to think very differently about what the medium offered. For example, we can make things happen in front of you and you can go around them. As I was not trying to make something preachy or advocate for banning mobile phones, I wanted to capture an element of fun and discovery within the process. For instance, I ask you to tap your phone twice and the phone breaks. The various pieces lie around you. Guided by the touch of your finger, you can learn about the four core components of your phone – the motherboard, the battery, the vibrator and the screen.

Here, you will learn the purpose of gold or tungsten and so on. So, the entry point to “Seven Grams” is a journey of discovery.

Once you’ve discovered the seven grams of minerals in your device, we go further into the inside story of the phone. Your phone is not unique - there are 1.2 billion smartphones produced this year. You need tonnes of those minerals and there is one place in the world that has a lot of

them combined with cheap labor the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now, the history that led the country to this point is fraught but vital to explain. Through an animated map, we recount how the Portuguese pillaged the land for slaves and the Belgians for ivory.

Further on, these highly defined CGI and augmented reality sequences are swapped for a charcoal stop motion animation.

The film’s narrative centers around a heartbreaking story that conveys the human cost of the unregulated trade of rare earth minerals bound to electronics production. it is the experience of one boy and we move through his life from the ages of 12 to 18. Despite being both a child soldier and a forced miner, he is still considered one of the lucky ones as he was able to escape and survive.

Now, you understand this horrible human sacrifice, we need to channel those thoughts into how we can put pressure on corporations to trace where their minerals come from creating a positive and informed impact from viewing the project.

After this point, we start explaining the steps to reduce this supply chain. For instance, we can recycle the phones, demand transparency from our manufacturers, and join forces with organizations doing similar work. This information will be hosted on a website where you can fact-check and see where our information is derived from.

Not only does the ability to check sources feel more important than ever to journalism, but we also need to use our work, and creativity, to point to solutions as well as draw attention to global problems.

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“Not only does the ability to check sources feel more important than ever to journalism, but we also need to use our work, and creativity, to point to solutions as well as draw attention to global problems”

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JAE YEON KIM

CLARA LUZIAN

CARLA BATLEY

DAMARA INGLES

OKSANA ZMOROVYCH SOPHIE KATIRAI

VERONICA FLINT LACEY LIANG

Our spotlight series this issue focuses on the best emerging talent in the 3D and augmented reality sphere today. Listen to what inspires and excites these leaders in creativity selected as Snapchat Official Lens Creators and from our Ello art community.

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SPOTLIGHT

Jae Yeon Kim is a visual artist who explores movement in artificially created objects.

She envisions endless possibilities in anthropological observation. She explores human behavior and emotions extracted from real-world inspiration. It is altered and transformed totally to enrich characters with a mishmash of its traits. Her universe constantly expands in a permanent state of flux, as virtual and reality blend to generate something new.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

My full name is Jae Yeon Kim and I originally came from South Korea, Seoul. I used to live and study design at Goldsmiths University in London from 2015 to 2019. My work originally started as traditional twodimensional illustration. However, I felt that I wanted to create something more tactile and vibrant than still and flat images. That is so much more achievable in a

three-dimensional world. There are no limitations on materials, texture, colour, and even virtual effects like glaring, distorting or bumping, etc. It gives me unlimited options for creating visuals. Furthermore, applying animation on static, fixed objects has been a big interest of mine too.

What drew you to design and what do you enjoy about it?

As far back as I can remember, I was a kid who loved to play with Lego rather than pretty dolls. I remember I enjoyed being creative and building new forms and shapes without restrictions. That tendency constantly drew my interest to draw and make some new things.

I love to build new concepts and characters as imagined in a non-existent world. To envision this, I collect ideas from the real-world by observing things such as behavior, traits, and appearance. Then, I randomly mix and match or transplant those collected references to endow freedom or drag my mind to reach unexpected results. For example, some people walk super fast, but others are sluggish in the real world. However, I can

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

It sounds quite bizarre but I do love analyzing human behavior and emotion by focusing on specific details.

For instance, people have a different style of movement.

Also, I am greatly influenced by my memories of playing tons of video games, watching cartoons, listening to random foreign music from my parent’s playlists, etc.

In all those media, there were always characters with their own stories. They always filled me with questions, like: “Where are they from? Why do they look like that?

Who are their friends and family? Who created all these?” They remained as intriguing thoughts and were amplified with childhood imagination. Until now this curiosity has shaped my aspirations which enables me to contemplate my own creation and narratives.

What is your number one influence?

I would say sound might be my number one influence so far. Sound is not created by me, however, this media does give me a magnificent influence and guides my creative direction. For example as I hesitated when deciding which motion will be applied to my ‘Alter Egos’ animation. I was so stuck on it. But, soon as I listened to some electronic tracks from a few techno artists, it helped me to determine its movement. Sound arouses my intuition and keeps me following my instinct.

I imagine how an object will interact and express emotions. Music is my ultimate guideline.

easily switch those traits in the virtual 3D world. I like this kind of practice.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

There is still a lack of examples to represent or advocate for non-binary identities in the industry. As you can see, a set of my artworks explore gender fluidity and the body. I wanted to reflect on current society which has been radically transformed in the last decade. I try to expand the range of audiences as much as possible to consider this issue universally. I hope my work can be accessed by the young and the elderly. I experiment to try to find out the right balance between profoundness and cuteness to catch attention instantly to embrace a broad range of viewers.

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SPOTLIGHT

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

I’m Clara Luzian (a.k.a Renderfruit) a digital artist using several techniques from 3D to hand-drawn animation.

What drew you to digital art and what do you enjoy about it?

I studied graphic design at university a long time ago, and at some point, I started seeing things like graphics and typography on the screen literally moving, like an optical illusion. That’s when I decided to go and animate them. I really enjoy mixing up elements and techniques with total freedom, that’s the way my mind works. When I learned to embrace that chaos I started enjoying it much more.

gather in community. So when you find a place where your voice is actually heard, you really become aware of that privilege, so I want to include more people in the same situation.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

From my own mix of anxiety, meditation, verbalization, many hours of silence, rising endorphins through exercise, rituals with rocks in the full moon, astrology in general, experiences with other humans and other animal beings, contemplation of nature, traveling to big cities, memories, mantras, rage, house decor, drawing.

What is your number one influence?

The universe.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

It feels good! Through our space in human social history, being always put aside and denied, we tend to naturally REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

My name is Oksana Zmorovych, I am a graphic designer, digital artist, and musician based in Kyiv, Ukraine.

What drew you to augmented reality and what do you enjoy about it?

I’ve always been fascinated by different kinds of visual practices, and while I enjoy doing design for living, I always try to leave some space for personal projects (mostly artsy experimentations). A few years ago I started exploring 3D modeling; I think it’s totally magical the way you can combine realistic imagery in a surreal manner, the way you can work with materials, lighting, colors, etc. As a kid, I loved sculpting in clay, so I also implemented this passion in my 3D work.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

I guess I was raised in a liberal family with very few prejudices, in a family where free spirit and will were glorified. I’ve been hanging out mostly with male peers since my childhood, and in most cases, I never felt underestimated or discriminated against. Although,

being definitely a feminist, I believe there is still a lot to do for true equality, justice, respect, mutual understanding, and productive cooperation between all genders in absolutely all fields.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

I draw my inspiration from everywhere. It can come from a trip, small talk with a stranger, a film, a book, daydreaming, or even an existential crisis. Honestly, life is fantastic; it’s hard not to get excited by most of its moments. Oh, and I get really inspired by music, can’t imagine my life without it.

What is your number one influence?

I don’t think I have my number one influence. I’m surrounded by a lot of great personas, of all kinds of professions and life stories. I am definitely influenced by some of my favorite film directors like David Lynch, Guy Maddin, writers like Virginia Woolf, Stanislaw Lem, or composers Alexander Scriabin and Boris Lyatoshinsky, artists - William Blake, pre-Raphaelites, surrealists and many more. However, I’m willing to find my own unique way.

Veronica Flint is an award-winning director and virtual filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. Her background includes interactive media, virtual production, and augmented reality projects. Some of her well-known projects have been showcased at a variety of top festivals including Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca. Branded XR works include Oculus Studios, AMD, Google, IMAX, and Nickelodeon. She has worked in the space previously as an animator, creative technologist, and lead developer.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

My name is Veronica Flint and I am a virtual and augmented reality designer, developer, and artist. I run my own studio as a creative director.

What drew you to digital art and what do you enjoy about it?

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

I mean, I feel like half the AR developers in the world are women nowadays so I don’t think it will be so maledominated after a while.

What is your number one influence?

My number one in terms of subject matter amongst many influences would be worldbuilding. Gathering components within the world that grow and expand over time. I read books, research, and do general exploration related to many projects that I’m doing.

If I’m trying to sit, brainstorm and take notes, I usually like looking at visual imagery, videos, films, or documentaries, go to the library, museums, or just a walk/hike somewhere. I just got a new camera to do some macro and landscape photography. I love learning, if I’m not learning something every day then I move on.

As far as influencers, I look up to so many folks that it’s hard to name any as my number one. Game designers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs are really the folks that I truly admire.

There is so much potential for AR to change and improve our day-to-day lives, just like how the smartphone and its applications did. Interactive media and entertainment expand this AR technology more than ever and I’m excited about bringing in more imaginative experiences to the AR world.

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SPOTLIGHT

Carla Batley is a 3D visual artist based in the UK. Her work draws from a range of inspirations: architecture, interior design, fashion, photography, and film-making.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

It means a lot to me, being a woman in a relatively maledominated field. It means that I can bring a different perspective to the industry and hopefully inspire other women/non-binary people to start creating their own work!

My name is Carla Batley and I am a 3D visual artist.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

What drew you to design and what do you enjoy about it?

I draw my inspiration from a huge range of things. I love to take inspiration from mainly architecture and traditional abstract art. I also love to take inspiration from photography and film-making.

I first became interested in 3D art when I was studying Fashion Art Direction at Manchester School of Art, I came across some interesting work on Instagram in 2017 and noticed the hashtag ‘#cinema4d’ was included. At the time, the software was free for art and design students so I downloaded and started my journey learning MAXON’s Cinema 4D software! I mainly enjoy the thrill and satisfaction I get from creating something from nothing. The knowledge that my works have started from a completely empty scene is great.

What is your number one influence?

My number one influence to carry on creating comes from my love of learning and seeing my work evolve.

I enjoy looking back on my past creations and seeing how much I have improved or how much my style has changed.

Damara Inglês is a designer of extended reality experiences and virtual fashion.

Born in Luanda, Angola, grew up in Lisboa, Portugal, and graduated in London. As such, the notions of diversity, inclusivity, and nomadic thought are crucial to her work process. Recently Damara has collaborated with HERVISIONS and Snapchat’s Spectacles on KAZUMBI, an augmented reality project that explores the expression of body, cultural identity, and digital transhumanism.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

Heya, my name is Damara Inglês, which refers to the ancient people of Damaraland in Namibia. I am a designer of extended-reality experience and virtual fashion.

What drew you to augmented reality and what do you enjoy about it?

I was born in Angola and grew up in Portugal, whenever I traveled back to Luanda I’d be amazed by how diverse the sense of style was there, almost as if everyone just REALITY.HOUSE ISSUE 001

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wore what they wanted and there were no mega-trends or narratives englobing the general sense of identity.

As I grew up I also realized that this happens because, as a post-war country that is being rebuilt, Angola does not yet have a dynamic textile industry that would allow for the affordable and sustainable production of massproduced garments. Being from a recently post-war country, most people in Luanda would wear “fardos” - second-hand clothes and donations from “developed” countries. The locals joke that “fardos” is the clothing of the dead, someone might have died wearing it. I always found this way of interacting with fashion more sustainable, authentic, and meaningful than walking into an H&M store and taking a bit from whichever mega-trend. I also found that this process of fashion was based on the exchange of different spaces, timelines, and life experiences.

I decided to wear “fardos” as my own interpretation of the Angolan fashion heritage and as a badge of honor.

I am a collector of pre-loved inanimate objects and of their memories and all past lives they carry. My first augmented reality project is “Vintage Ghost”, that explores the different ghosts that inhabit our vintage fashion goods, and what they might have in common: https://www.damaraingles.com/fashion-technology/

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wonderful tech collectives/Institutions like HERVISIONS, DIGI_GXL, and the Immersive Kind communities. I found that in tech, like in any industry, it all comes down to finding our people.

Digital skills are important when tackling big issues because digital is an ever-growing medium of interaction, through which information travels faster - as agents of change, the goal is to take power by surprise.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

I draw inspiration from the several realities in which I am immersed: the reality that I am a Woman, the reality that I am an African Woman in a world that alienates us. The reality that I am a digital citizen and therefore an equal builder to this parallel reality. I draw inspiration from fashion, art, philosophy, and inner-concepts, my internet culture, my millennial generation, and everyday utopias.

I draw inspiration when I see the last leaf fall from a naked tree or a plastic bag dancing to the rhythm of the wind. I draw inspiration from the depth of my roots to the naivety of serendipity. Above it all, I take inspiration from the one and only true curator: Nature

vintage-ghost I use augmented Reality as a tool to blend objects and aura, experience and memory, mysticism, and technology.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

It means being a voice of change and of empowerment to other non-binary or womxn voices within the same field. “Only 17% of the UK tech workforce are women and 8% of senior leaders (in general) are from a minority background.”

How can we, as humans, teach machines a language of equality and inclusion that we still don’t quite understand as a species? As digital technologies become crucial parts of our lives and interactions, it is imperative that minorities are empowered and encouraged to follow tech-related career paths, to ensure that historical ethnic and gender segregations that continue to alienate us in the material world are not transpired into digital realities. The main barrier I faced was the fear that tech-focused skills would be too difficult to retain. The lack of representation does not stop me from chasing my dreams, but it is always important to feel that you are included in an environment. In that sense, I have been very lucky, from the support of my University in terms of technical workshops and learning support, to

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Sophie Katirai is a businesswoman, beauty influencer, and AR makeup artist/filter creator. She launched her award-winning website Sophie’s Closet SOPHIESCLOSET. COM, an online jewelry boutique, after completing her Master’s degree in 2008.

Sophie is a modern day polymath. Her atypical combination of passions, skills, and knowledge was influenced by her family: her mother a gemologist and lawyer and her father an avid antique collector, researcher, author and inventor.

Today Sophie is one of the leading beauty inuencers in the UAE and has gained international recognition with both celebrities and brands. Sophie has created augmented reality filters for Kylie Cosmetics, Universal Pictures, NARS Cosmetics, and Iconic London to name a few. Her AR lters have amassed over 100 billion impressions are shared daily by celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Bella Hadid, Billie Eilish and many more. Sophie is also a mother of two daughters for whom she strives to be a good role model. Whether it’s glittering jewels or alluring beauty looks, Sophie’s passion for all things “rare and pretty” paints a perfect picture.

daily thanking me for making a person feel beautiful or comfortable in front of the camera. Before filters, I used to spend hours in front of a mirror doing my makeup and of course, I still do that when I have to physically go somewhere. But I love that I can now pick one of my filters and change my look to share a story online and also share those filters with others.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

I felt very intimidated when I joined the AR community in discussions and when asking questions. I noticed that makeup and beauty filters were not taken seriously by some creators especially those who were able to write complex code. But I’m lucky because I already had a large female following on social media so when I started publishing my AR beauty filters I received a lot of love and shares which helped me grow and get recognition as an AR artist.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Everywhere. I am inspired when I’m not really thinking about it. It can be from a photograph, a painting, a movie. I also love to incorporate new makeup and beauty products that I receive from brands into my filters so for example if there is a new lipstick shade or blush that I love I will recreate it for my next filter.

What is your number one influence?

My kids! I love creating character filters that my kids love and enjoy using. Some of my favorite and most challenging filters were inspired by cartoon characters like Snow White, Princess Peach, and Cindy Lou.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

I’m Sophie Katirai, an AR filter creator, makeup artist, and beauty influencer. My background is unique because although I have a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, I got my masters in business and spent 12 years as a fashion and beauty entrepreneur before I started my AR journey in 2019.

What drew you to augmented reality and what do you enjoy about it?

Curiosity and a desire to learn a new and challenging art form. I was always so intrigued by Snapchat filters and how they enhanced and changed our facial features.

When I found out that Spark AR was open to creators I immediately downloaded and started learning it full time. What I enjoy the most is seeing people feel good about themselves when using my filters. I get messages

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Post.liang is a UK based designer and 3D artist, her work invites you to her dark ambient while futurlistic aesthetics, and explores the possibilities of 3D in typographic design. She has been working with musicans and fashion designers to visualize their brand. and has also designed the typography on the cover and throughout much of this magazine.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your practice?

Hi everyone, my name is Lacey but I work as Post.liang.

I don’t consider myself a designer as I’m constantly evolving and changing. I like to work on all sorts of projects, as well as exploring through different mediums, but my passion lies in 3D and typography.

What drew you to typography and 3D work?

When I was a child, my grandfather taught me Chinese calligraphy, I guess that’s when the seed was planted.

During my design master’s course, I started to work on typography and instantly fell in love with it. In fact, I enjoy combining traditional western type design constructs with Chinese calligraphy, as you can probably see in my typographic work. I’ve been working with Illustrator and After Effects since I was in university until I realized that an extra dimension would push my boundaries, so I taught myself how to use 3D software on YouTube and never stopped improving ever since!

What has been your favorite project to date and why?

The answer will always be the newest project. I am currently working on a virtual dressing room for a newly established brand. The experience of working on an e-commerce platform that is forward-thinking, innovative, and playful is truly a blessing.

What does it mean to be a woman or a non-binary creator in a relatively male-dominated field?

It requires a lot to overcome anxiety and self-doubt, facing challenges when you haven’t met the stereotypedriven expectations. I feel it’s important to be confident and bold, keep making progress in your career and support other female or non-binary artists.

Where do you draw your inspiration from?

The internet, very recently I’ve been obsessed with NFTs and there are so many amazing 3D artworks to be discovered.

What future trends in the digital world are you excited about?

There are so many… The digital world definitely will shape consumer behavior, from crypto art to virtual products there are so many possibilities to explore.

I suppose the XR industry will play a key part in accessibility, sustainability, and social impact. I’m quite excited to see how it will become an interactive medium in digital fashion and 3D commerce.

What is your number one influence?

Baugasm! His 365-day challenge inspired me a lot. I admire his punctuality and persistent practice. I suppose many artists never take a day off in terms of creation.

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