A New Era

Dan Neafus
IMERSA
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IMMERSIVE MATTERS
A NEW ERA

Welcome to a new era, our post-pandemic new normal. Many of us are experiencing the effects of the profound change that has occurred over a remarkably short time. Zoom meetings with colleagues and virtual doctor visits are now a part of life. AI is ubiquitous and I stay in touch with my children through three different messaging applications. I try my best to keep up with all of these new options to connect and communicate and collaborate. 

The IMERSA team is keenly aware of these societal shifts and our organization is also adapting to a new era. How do we stay connected with our constituency? Are our actions meaningful? Are our efforts effective? Are we doing things to help others in the community?

In the last issue, Michael Daut’s insightful Planetarian article, Returning to Humanity: A Personal Perspective, expressed our innate need to connect and find companionship. We find ourselves, in the span of three years, having gone from being frequent flyers to frequent Zoomers and not only connecting with close friends, but with others that we might never have reached without this technology.

We are looking forward to welcoming IPS to our special IMERSA Day event on July 20, 2024. Where better to hold this demonstration than at the home of the Fulldome Festival: the Zeiss-Planetarium Jena? Here, attendees will immerse themselves (no pun intended) in the world of fulldome and enjoy some truly exceptional dome experiences.

In this new era, we reached out to the planetarium and giant screen community to further our mission and develop events that raise the profile of outstanding fulldome programming.
The IMERSA team celebrated fulldome film festival collaboration during our virtual IMERSA Day on April 21st, 2023. Nearly 100 fulldome fans joined the conversation, along with festival representatives from the Best of Earth Fulldome Awards, who shared their passion, processes, and perspectives from various festivals around the globe.

IMERSA Day was not only a celebration of fulldome but a celebration of the unique and evolutionary collaboration between five independent fulldome festivals. This was not just an expression of festival procedures, nor was it focused on “winners and losers.” The speakers celebrated connections with each other in spite of language barriers, culture barriers, and geographical distances. They found a way to bridge these gaps and to embrace the joy we all share under the dome screen. Be sure to check out the full discussion here; https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Xan_El4JMTQ.
The event was co-hosted by Michael Daut and Michaela French (above) who posed provocative questions sent in by the virtual audience.

Festival representatives shared important observations about their events and the common responsibility to run fair and transparent competitions. The following text excerpts from the Zoom recording reveal the incredible enthusiasm voiced by the festival representatives and demonstrates their inspiring dedication to the fulldome community.

Michaela French:
I love that, collectively, there is a kind of shared vision, I guess. But each festival has its own identity as well, and that kind of makes it exciting, I guess, especially for those of us in the community that can attend the different festivals. You’re seeing different kinds of work and you know each one has its own kind of, I don’t know, feel and quality to it.

Warik Lawrance, represented the Dome Under Festival.
The Dome Under Film Festival is a celebration of the fulldome format and aims to promote the medium to a wider audience that includes planetarium professionals, filmmakers, and the public. Given the relatively small planetarium community in Australia, this is not an industry event; instead, it is very much a public facing festival.

Alicia Sometimes

Being on the Best of Earth judging panel was wonderful. There were so many of us with our different time zones talking together and really reflecting on what was sometimes emotional, sometimes sort of very visceral. It was such a great experience to talk about things that were quite meaningful and fresh. I remember in 2021 an incredible standout work, a student work, an audio-visual poetic moment that just came together in, you know, narrative storytelling. Just that evocative sense of displacement as well. That’s the incredible thing about the dome, as you know, just to [be] completely surrounded by not only the visuals but the sound and cocooned and in a new environment and just that sort of liminal experience [It] was just so incredible. Then to be able to watch a snippet from Berlin or Africa, you know, or South America, it’s just, just amazing that all these little communities are creating beautiful work.

Micky Remann represented FullDome Festival-Jena, and shared that his festival’s primary focus is exploring immersive media, electronic arts, science, business, and fun!
We are five festivals from three continents with no money and no bureaucracy, but up the creators that have done that.’ We definitely love storytelling here in Los Angeles, the heart of Hollywood, and we’re really focused on that. We’ll probably focus more on music as well and live experiences as that space really heats up.

Fulldome UK Representative Phil Mayer shared:
Our festival was
we have ambition and the intention to make sure that when we combined our energies, we make a contribution towards getting more people exposed, or as we say, “immersed” into fulldome media.
This is not an elite club; we just found each other through recognition and friendship. We don’t want to say, “we are the elite, we are the best, we are the most excellent ones.” No, we just sort of take this preposterous claim to say that we moderate the best content into award-worthy status.

Michaela French addressed Ryan Moore
Ryan, you’ve introduced yourself as the new kid on the block and I think you know part of that is learning from the established festivals and how they achieved what they’ve achieved over the years. But, also, that there are opportunities for Best of Earth to kind of take new approaches and kind of expand the way that we’re working as a community, so it’s really nice to hear that perspective.

Dome Fest West Festival representative Ryan Moore replied:
Trying to find the “best” is a little grandiose; we should probably use the word ‘excellence.’ We’re trying to find excellence because “best” is subjective. By seeking excellence, we can all come together and say, ‘here is something worth seeing and sharing and let’s prop
inspired by visiting the immersive Cinema Symposium in 2007 which happened in Plymouth, UK. That was very much an industry event, but it was an epiphany for me because I saw a fulldome plug-in for After Effects. That meant we could all make fulldome! That is, it is not in an ivory tower anymore and I think that’s probably our common theme.
It’s about access to domes. It’s about providing a platform to allow artists to use these amazing immersive spaces that almost went slightly undetected outside of a specific science education community for many years. Of course, it’s the digitization of domes that was the transformation. Once you were no longer using an opto-mechanical specific star projector and you’re using a digital video projector, well, those pixels can be anything you like. We’re not, definitely not, anti-science, we’re not anti-astronomy by any means, but we come from a sort of ‘how can we enable visual artists to expand their practice into fulldome immersive environments.’

Michaela:
I do think as a community it’s also really important that we start to kind of make it easy for organizations to access the content and I think if you’re a science museum and you’re thinking about doing a Friday night public show with more cultural content there’s currently nowhere really to go to find that content.

There actually are these precedents, and I think one thing that we’ve talked about a lot in fulldome creative network is actually starting to collect data on that, to show, that it is financially viable and that it is a kind of actual numbers audience, numbers and people in seats and there is actually value in it. So, I think providing that evidence is also potentially supporting science museums to show to their management teams that it actually is a possible and productive and useful thing.

Very often, the individuals running the planetariums will be up for it but the management system more broadly in the museums are like, ‘we don’t understand how that actually ticks our boxes.’ How do we start to communicate that and provide that research?

Phil:
The impetus for starting FulldomeUK was actually fulldome artists saying, ‘where is our platform? If I create a film, where can it be seen?’ And really, the festival was a response to that. But it’s just a small part; we need to be thinking about how people can be seeing things every week of the year, in planetariums all over the world.

What’s fascinating, however, is that we are beginning to see the emergence of purpose-built performance-art dome venues where we’re not trying to necessarily shoehorn into a planetarium. The venues themselves are built for arts and I think that’s a fascinating development.
The challenge of having a ‘best live performance event’ award is difficult because each festival generally might have one or two per day or something, so it’s a bit hard to say who won and who didn’t. Often, the performances are so unique and diverse it’s kind of a bit impossible to
compare and say which one was better.

FulldomeUK Rep Janjire Najera added:
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had the ability to be able to present selected live performances in one space and do this at the Best of Earth Awards in the future? I guess we need a massive sponsor, right?

CULTVR, Society for Arts and Technology and Market Hall, might be the only three places currently that don’t have any seat restriction and they give access to artists to tour and present their work. It’s clear that all the festivals have an intention to work together and continue exploring ways of not only supporting artists and the community, but bringing in this live performance element and expanding everything that we do.

I think that’s why this community is so beautiful, because we really share everything that we learn, and we learn from each other, and I think that’s quite unique.

Maurod Bennacer, representing the SAT Festival:
We are a festival that is built upon being an art center dedicated to creation for artists, so we do have the dome available all year long. Dome films are only one component of what artists can do when they explore the dome. This is a good way to help artists try the medium, in maybe a short film format, and have the opportunity to experiment.

Having a dome dedicated to arts, for now 11 years, the local audience is getting pretty used to it. It’s really about creating a space for collective immersion where artists and the audience can meet.
The performance aspect of a festival also brings the artists and the humans who actually are behind the creation to the audience. Obviously, you can do that with film as well.
I’ll say Best of Earth is kind of an effort that is somehow desynchronized from the reality of the festivals themselves in a way; there is also a celebration of the culture.

The possibility not only to have access to the content but also to have access to the artists and the people that are actually involved, that’s a very important aspect for us.

Co-host Michael Daut concluded:
I think that the important thing to remember in this whole thing is the awards are great, but the most important thing is visibility to an audience and getting more people to see this work and to experience what is possible in this space. To build the kind of excitement that will contribute towards budgets ultimately in the future so that more people will be able to consume this content in a way that isn’t really super possible now.

There’s a lot of this artistic stuff, quite honestly, that I’ve only seen at festivals. I’ve almost never seen it played in a local planetarium. So, I’m hoping that, through this process, that visibility will create an audience demand that they’ll even go to these theaters and say - ‘hey, why can’t I see this one thing?’ or, ‘can you do these types of events at this space?’ - and let a grassroots movement build up to help transform these things.

Thanks so much to Michael, Michaela, and all the festival representatives for sharing their time and insights with us all. Be sure to watch the original event video on YouTube here, https://www. imersa.org/item/celebrating-fulldome.

Congratulations to Carolyn Collins Petersen, IMERSA Director Emeritus
Carolyn Collins Petersen has worked tirelessly to support the vision of IMERSA for over a decade. She gladly took on the unenviable role of editor for 33 quarterly Immersive Matters articles for the Planetarian journal. She consistently strove to maintain a high bar of quality, making sure that our articles were interesting, relevant, and submitted on time. She also helped select topics for the IMERSA Summits and helped shape these into the finished sessions, often serving as session producer. She helped plan the flow of the schedules, contacted speakers, coordinated technical requirements for sessions, hosted and moderated sessions, and presented many of her own sessions. She was never afraid to get her hands dirty with the hard work of keeping IMERSA, the organization and the Summits we produced, innovative and running smoothly.

Carolyn’s frank and assertive demeanor is one of the best collaborative assets to any endeavor. As technologies keep emerging, making us revisit and explore the nature and structure of immersion, the way we communicate with each other also advances thanks to people like Carolyn, both direct and open and always willing to try new shoes and walk the walk.

Carolyn’s influence and contribution to IMERSA is immeasurable. On behalf of the Board and myself, we are phenomenally grateful for your service and honored to have you continue to work with us as a board member emeritus.

Sound Experience Survey: Fulldome and Planetariums
An important reminder from the IPS Immersive Sound Committee:
To accelerate the flow of ideas and advance our field, we need the voices of all those in the planetarium and fulldome communities to be heard. For these reasons, establishing current audio literacy and standards are vital to the mission and success of the International Planetarium Society, IMERSA, and to all communities that use sound.

The IPS Immersive Sound Committee, in collaboration with IMERSA, is conducting a sound experience survey to help the fulldome and planetarium communities grow better awareness of the current state of audio production workflow, presentation, and distribution in domes.
With these surveys, we hope to better understand peoples’ sonic, creative experience within the fulldome and planetarium communities to guide new initiatives within the International Planetarium Society (IPS), IMERSA, and beyond.
We will use the answers of the survey to build a state of the industry report that we hope will help guide future conversations and developments.
Survey link: https://www. ips-planetarium.org/news/632118/ IPS-Sound-Survey.htm
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Links to resources mentioned in this article:
CULTVR: https://www.cultvr.cymru/ DOWN UNDER FULLDOME FESTIVAL:
https://museumsvictoria.com.au/media­releases/experience-fulldome-film-immersion­at-melbourne-planetarium-this-summer/
DOME FEST WEST:
https://www.domefestwest.com/
Fulldome Festival, Jena:
https://fulldome-festival.de/info
FULLDOME UK:
https://www.fulldome.org.uk/
IMERSA Day video:
https://www.imersa.org/item/celebrating­fulldome
Market Hall immersive dome: https:// realideas.org/our-spaces/market-hall/
SAT – SOCIETY FOR ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY: https://sat.qc.ca/en
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