Insights from six Sundance New Frontier artists featured on the “Brown Girls and the New Frontier” panel
As part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) joined six creators with projects in the New Frontier program to discuss process and practice in the realm of emerging media and immersive technologies. BGDM is a community of women and non-binary people of color working in the documentary film industry who are committed to sharing resources and cutting through oppressive industry structures. Their “Brown Girls and the New Frontier” panel highlighted each project’s lead artist (all members of BGDM), accompanied by another member of their team and moderated by VR filmmaker and worldbuilder Paisley Smith. Collaboration and related questions of accessibility and the tools we use to create and tell stories were the central focus of the talk. How can we develop deep, worthwhile connections with creative team members, especially during a pandemic that feels so isolating? Identity inevitably informs the work we create, but what of the tools that have been created for us? How should we think about democratization when designing experiences in new media?
Of the three projects featured on the panel, all of them construct expansive worlds that challenge conventional histories and hegemonic perspectives. The Changing Same: Episode One (Michèle Stephenson and Yasmin Elayat) is an immersive, magical realist pilgrimage through the evolution of racial violence in the U.S. via a tethered VR headset. Prison X (Violeta Ayala and Maria Corvera Vargas) is an immersive, interactive VR Andean mythological play that weaves magical realism into the rarely depicted reality of Bolivia’s San Sebastian prison. Beyond the Breakdown (Grace Lee and Lauren Lee McCarthy), on the other hand, is a world-building browser performance wherein Sundance festivalgoers engage with an AI and human collaborative team to imagine alternative narratives for our near-future reality. The hope is that by articulating these dreams, shaping them with and for community, that idealized world can be reverse engineered. On this hope, all six panelists agreed.
From left to
right, stills from: Beyond the Breakdown, of Serenity, the project’s AI, guiding
human participants through discussing what each group’s collective notions of care and home should
look like in 2050; Prison X, through which viewers encounter devils, saints, old
ladies, corrupt prison guards, and even a Western filmmaker, all with different, nuanced
relationships to the San Sebastian prison and its history; The Changing Same: Episode
One, which inverts time and space through history alongside people who have suffered
slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration, ultimately landing participants in an Afro-futurist
tomorrow that is “attentive and accountable to the violences of the past.”Below are four key takeaways, edited for length and clarity, that illuminate guiding principles for collaboration and the creation of meaningful new media work in today’s volatile and uncertain world.
Invest in the practice, understand your team:
Yasmin: The collaboration was the innovation. This project is very groundbreaking in many ways, but I would say the process was the real innovation.
Michèle: Yasmin implemented a process of artist talks, where each collaborator took time to talk about why they were involved in [The Changing Same] and speak to where they’re coming from, the work that they do, and what they bring to the process. Innovating in the process is part of investing in the practice. If we are open to it and trusting, and we have an ear to it, we create something much greater than the sum of our parts. With the energy that comes together, it’s not 2+2=4, it’s 2+2=5 and beyond. The more self aware we are of what baggage we bring, and understand what those dynamics mean, we can channel it in a way where we create something that’s very beautiful, lasting. Others will see themselves too because it’s the human condition.
Violeta: As a director, I had to find the strengths of every person. Our key team is 8, but our bigger team is more than 20 people all over the world. It was difficult, but then I realized I was asking for oranges from an apple tree. I realized I needed to be clear about what I want and clear about what my team is capable of giving me. It is very important to understand that nobody is an expert in virtual reality, that we are discovering this language and making history. Do a lot of research, read a lot. Be open about being held responsible and saying, “well, this won’t work, but maybe this will work better, why don’t we try this together.” It then really becomes a co-creative process. You can’t do this by yourself.
The tools we use are not neutral:
Yasmin: I identify myself as an immersive media artist, a hybrid. I studied computer science and went to art school. My career has been at the intersection of technology and storytelling ever since. I grew up in Silicon Valley, left it once I was an adult, and have never been back because I was not recognizing a space for myself as a higher technologist artist in that kind of culture. I came to New York and worked in Egypt. Scatter is a company built by artists; my two co-founders, James George and Alexander Porter, are also artists. We make productions not just because we are creators, but so we can learn what tools people may need, how to make it more accessible. I see myself as having a responsibility as a woman of color and as a founder of a tech company. It’s our responsibility to make sure that our tool is available across the world. That’s the only way to build a company that is really thinking about the design and who it’s for. It very much has to do with where you come from.
Lauren: I got into toolmaking being an artist using open source tools and wanting to give back. It was difficult to get involved. These spaces are primarily white and male, with a very specific subset working on the tools. I thought, why? A tool is not neutral. It’s embedded with all the beliefs and biases of the people that made it. As I was building p5, I thought about who was involved. What is the experience like if you not only want to be a user of the tool but maybe be a contributor to it? How do we take down those barriers to access on both sides, and what are those barriers? There are just so many when it comes to media art or new media because access to the internet is immediately a barrier. Whether it’s an art project or toolmaking, there are these related themes that I think about: how we connect with people online, how that experience is different for everyone, and what tools we can build that can start to destabilize some of those problematic relationships.
Violeta: We have to understand that we are fighting against the standardization of story, the standardization of technology. We are facing a techno-authoritarian future, as my friend [and Immerse editor] Abby Sun says, so we have to bond together to fight this. For instance, you can rig in Mixamo. Mixamo is like the Google translator for rigging and animation, but all of the bodies are male bodies, white male bodies. Rilda [one of Prison X’s 3D illustrators] said, our bodies are only 6 heads, but white people’s bodies are 7 heads. We have to fight even harder to create our own characters because we can not even build in what was created before. Invention is a necessity. If we didn’t, we were going to have to put an Indigenous woman in the body of a white man. Don’t expect the technology to know everything. The only thing I know is that I am discovering everything as I go.
The real world should inform the work:
Grace: We were bonded in the process of making Beyond the Breakdown. We’re in the middle of the pandemic, stuck, noticing what’s happening to the world around us. Many people have experienced this during COVID, asking “what is really important to me?” It’s these human connections. I always come back to that when thinking about this project, how we built it and how we wanted people to connect even when separated by these Zoom boxes. It was great timing with Sundance, but it was all coursing within us, this desire to make these connections with the stuff that really matters to us.
Violeta: I met Maria in Berlin, then we caught up again in Bolivia, when we were in the middle of a revolution. We were outside my house, trying to work with the protesting. It seemed like the world would end at the time. It was the end of 2019 with the election in Bolivia. We had a very intense period where we were pretty much locked up in our house. We didn’t know who was fighting who, what was happening, and we didn’t know what to do. What was more important, to make this project or to really join what was happening in the street? That was me, Maria, and Rilda, and Dan. That created a very strong bond.
Michèle: For us, there were a couple of things that were specifically important to acknowledge, as those who have suffered from the racial caste system. One is not just the violence that occurs or has occurred over the last 400 years across the Americas around white supremacy but also Black joy and resilience. We acknowledge our ancestors and we acknowledge the past, not just to accept the future but to reimagine our present. All of that is in this experience. And so the timing, when you think about it, ironically, couldn’t be better. The pandemic, if anything, made us more creative.
The uprisings, the spectacle lynching of George Floyd, which is at the crux of the story that we tell but in a way that centers the Black experience, also fueled this storytelling for all of us: Yasmin, Joe [Brewster], and our creative designer Rad Mora. When this happened, this became our healing and we became even more entrenched. We would meet minimally once a month before, physically, and then virtuality forced us to meet even more often. We also met to process the uprisings in what we were doing. There was a lot of communication in Google chats about our own healing, understanding, and handling our fear. As 2020 shows, uprising gets into fashion. How do we take advantage of that and make sure that the unapologetic position that we have held for the last four years has an opportunity to be birthed? Less compromise is needed until the doors close again, as history has shown us in cyclical ways over hundreds of years.
Don’t neglect legacy:
Violeta: It’s all about educating ourselves, understanding, reading, learning, trying, figuring this pipeline, and also being generous enough to share this pipeline with everyone else. Indigenous people in Bolivia, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní, and in all the Americas will be able to create our own stories with our own characters, with budgets that we’d never even dreamed of. This is a time when we have to get inside, share our process, and bond with each other. We are still going up the mountain for our brothers and sisters who will come after us. In Quechua, we don’t believe we go to Heaven. We go back to the Earth and we become a seed and from that seed, a new tree will come. I’m a fool, and as a fool I want to say that we all can do this, for the next generation to come.
Michèle: In the same way that we’re creating seeds for others, BIPOC women before us have been here at the forefront of this technology. This is not new. It’s not just in virtual reality, it’s in other immersive spaces. From Jackie Jones’ very first summit in Jackson, Mississippi, back in the 2000s, thinking about ways for the Black community to maximize access but also reimagine and create, to Kamal Sinclair, to Shari Frilot, to Nonny de la Peña. We stand on that road. There is a legacy in the creative process thinking about democratization, but we as creators can’t do it all either. Audience development and access to the technology has to happen. As technology becomes cheaper down the road, we have to think about how we keep the legacy going.
Maria: When you see Prison X and every artist that took part of it, you can see so much love and passion that went into the project. I’m happy my nieces can see Quilla [one of the characters], can somehow recognize themselves in it, instead of having this blond figure from Frozen that doesn’t have anything to do with us and doesn’t speak to us. It’s just an imposition of this person “every girl” is supposed to want to be. I see the need for creating our own characters, our own costumes. The work needs a part of us in it, and this is what I see in all of the characters, in the music, and in this whole world that we have created.
Grace Lee is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has directed the Peabody Award–winning American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, Janeane from Des Moines, and the Asian Americans series on PBS.
Lauren Lee McCarthy is a visual artist, co-director of the Processing Foundation, and the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code.
Michèle Stephenson is a Brooklyn-based media maker, author and artist who pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots to tell complex intimate stories by, for, and about, communities of color. She co-founded the multiple award-winning media production company, Rada Film Group.
Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-winning immersive director, Scatter co-founder, and 2020 USA fellow. She is the co-creator of 18DaysInEgypt: A Participatory Documentary Project and director of Zero Days VR.
Violeta Ayala is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, artist, and technologist. She is the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2006, she founded United Notions Film.
Maria Corvera Vargas is a Bolivian-born pioneer in ethical fashion. The founder of independent label C\V in Berlin, she produces collections with leftover fabrics or Fair Trade wool from Bolivia.
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