XR Festival NewImages provides a public face to the protean industry

From April 5 to 9 at the Forum des Images in Paris, the NewImages Festival reflects this year a young media on the move, an ecosystem looking back and forward to reinvent itself for the here and now.

"We don't want to be limited by someone else's vision", said festival director Michele Ziegler Variety. “We don't want tomorrow's metaverse to dictate what art and culture is today. We want to shake things up."

From VR games and documentaries to mixed media installations and AR works for social media, the 13 projects in competition for the NewImages top prize collectively charts the wider currents remaking a protean industry - while this slightly smaller selection from previous years reflects a young festival itself in flux.

"It's a year of transition," says Ziegler, who organized his first edition as as festival director with an eye toward embracing radically different forms of digital creation. “By collaborating with others in the wider digital art community, we can facilitate the distribution of virtual reality. If we ungroup the different digital creation groups, we will be able to better support the public in order to bring them towards VR."

Indeed, this year's competition features a number of very different proposals that include 360 ​​cinema like a weighty docudrama "The Man Who Couldn't Leave" and the casually cuddly "Kidnapped in Vostok," alongside immersive multi-user experiences like "IVF-X: Posthuman Parenting in Hybrid Reality" and the augmented reality doc "His Name Is My Name", which was produced for and distributed on Instagram.

'Increment' Mark Pil Games

Making its world premiere, hour-long "Increment" experience promises a series of slow builds "eerie, colorful, responsive environments," all painstakingly put together by designer Mark Pil in single-player author-game crafting combat. project and went its own way," says Ziegler.

Rather than competing with other festivals for world premieres - this year only three titles hold this accolade - Ziegler and the team have instead curated a sort of festival of acclaimed XR play festivals while embracing NewImages' unique and advantageous perch in Paris's Les Halles complex - a shopping and transportation hub that sees one of the busiest pedestrian traffic in all of Europe.

With young, omnivorous audiences almost guaranteed – and a hard-hitting full selection offered for free - NewImages has been ab...