Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals

Executive Summary of Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals based on research for IDFA DocLab in 2021/22.

This is a slightly altered version of the executive summary for our report, Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals. You can find the full report here.

Reality is becoming a stereo-reality. Just as with sounds you can make a difference between somber tones and clear tones, so there will be a concrete, actual reality and a virtual reality. From now on, humankind will have to act in two worlds at once. This opens up extraordinary possibilities, but at the same time we face the test of a tearing-up of being, with awkward consequences. We can rejoice in these new opportunities if and only if we also are conscious of their dangers. Paul Virilio, 1995

Media Theorist Paul Virilio said these prescient words in 1995 in a reaction to the massive changes in telecommunication technologies with the advent of the internet, globalization and the transition to an “informational mode of production.” Over the years, we have only seen a deepening of these merging realities as we contend with social and synthetic media, cell phones, technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, game engines and advances in artificial intelligence, data capture and geo located technologies. This convergence went into overdrive during the pandemic lockdown, but we emerged with a much greater awareness of the opportunities, dangers and technological capacity to live in a “stereo reality.” Today, post-pandemic, Virilio’s words take on new urgency and relevance. The recognized term we now use for this state of being is hybrid. In 2021, several publications declared “hybrid” a word of the year.

In this context, we began research in late 2021 on hybrid festivals and how they hold space for communities in “stereo reality,” to use Virilio’s term. Our research is part of the IDFA DocLab’s Immersive Network Research and Development Program of which MIT Open Documentary Lab is a partner. Each year we choose a research question based on trends in the field and test it with IDFA DocLab’s showcase. The festival becomes our “living lab.” This past year we wanted to explore how curators create meaningful connections between online and in-person festival goers, the artists and the work.

The core business of a festival is not only to premiere work but to serve as a meeting ground for those involved in all phases of the life of a project. Media makers, funders, producers, distributors, critics and audiences spend a few intense days together interacting with the work and each other. Ideas are sparked, relationships born or deepened and collaborations emerge. The magic of a festival is as much the community gathering as it is the project premieres.

But many argue that in-person festivals are exclusive. Geographical, financial and physical barriers keep people away. They leave a huge carbon footprint. During the pandemic, in-person practices and rituals were disrupted as festivals adapted to the lockdown and mounted virtual or hybrid programs and platforms. We saw opportunities to make festivals more inclusive, interactive, imaginative, collaborative and climate-friendly — a glimpse of what the future could hold. But also a warning. If not done well, festivals run the risk of creating an inferior digital experience that furthers inequality rather than reduces it, and, furthermore, depletes already scarce festival programming resources. Programming hybrid festivals require festival programmers to challenge their assumptions and practices and radically reimagine the festival of the future. It also requires resources.

We live in a stereo reality with all its possibilities and dangers. And so we ask how can festivals reimagine themselves to take advantage and fit into our hybrid world?

We produced a report, Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals, which is a preliminary look at the question of curating hybrid festivals through a small pool of interviews with, first, a case study based on 7 interviews with the IDFA DocLab curatorial team of curators, technologists, designers, artists and some additional affiliates. We then broaden our research and the report to include interviews with 14 other immersive media and film curators and curatorial teams.

Our intention with this report is first to understand the IDFA DocLab curatorial team’s approach and insights and, second, to create a snapshot of how festival curators and their teams are thinking about hybrid festival goers in 2022.

We asked the following questions:

How do you define hybridity in the context of a festival?

How do you create meaningful connections between festival-goers in a virtual space? in a hybrid space?

What doesn’t work in hybrid spaces?

How can we imagine connecting hybrid communities in the future?

We found that, at this present moment, there are significant barriers to synchronous hybrid festivals including the time, money, experience and technology required to make it happen. Curators and their teams observed that fully virtual festivals work but if people are in-person at a festival they generally do not want to join online unless there is a specific event. Virtual audiences will go online to experience the work but don’t stay around to connect with each other or the in-person audiences if the festival is in-person. There are of course exceptions included in this report. But we also found that if people thought more broadly about hybridity, there are many more ways to curate hybrid festivals. In our interviews, people talked about different types of hybridity such as asynchronous online and in-person festival goers, multiple platforms, and hybrid projects or events within festivals. An expanded definition of a hybrid festival makes it more feasible. And finally, one of the key challenges people identified is how to make an enticing virtual space that gives more agency to online festival goers and that attracts in-person festival goers.

Our interviewees had many ideas about how to curate a hybrid festival that they shared with us. What follows is a summary of their ideas on how to meaningfully connect hybrid festival goers.

1.Take a broad view of hybridity — explore asynchronicity, event and project based hybridity

2. Identify and translate values from the in-person festival to the online festival and question tradition

3. Design across platforms — taking into account the affordances of each platform

4. Ensure agency, freedom to explore and a sense of ownership of the virtual festival spaces

5. Imagine and allow for what is impossible in-person to be possible online.

6. Collaborate and facilitate co-creation, worldbuilding and shared experiences within festivals and across festivals

7. Add money, time, and staff to the curations of both online and in-person experiences.

More research is required as curators continue to experiment with hybrid festivals. We don’t suggest discarding the in-person festival, but rather we wonder how they can be expanded. How can festival programming teams translate the values and roles of a festival into a hybrid environment? How can festivals be more inclusive and climate sensitive while keeping the magic of an in-person festival? How can we reimagine festivals in hybrid spaces that create meaningful connections between in-person and virtual communities, the artists and the work — that adapt to our stereo reality?

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Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and Dot Connector Studio, and receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Gotham Film & Media Institute is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing emerging nonfiction projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.