Calling Flanders-based Game studios

Petervan is seeking a Flanders-based Game Studio willing to join him as a producer in applying for one of the 12 spots for the 9th edition of the Venice Biennale College Cinema – Immersive program (BCC-I).

With Petervan as Director and the studio as Producer, we would like to submit a proposal for a new kind of immersive experience, some have called a “Performance Lecture”, a blend between on-stage performance, content delivery, and VR immersive worldbuilding.

The winner gets 75,000 EUR and The deadline for submission is 6 Nov 2024. There are two mandatory workshops on-site in Venice in Jan and March 2025. The Biennale is in Sep 2025.

The Biennale College Cinema program will cover the cost of board and lodging for 2 people (the director and the producer) but does not cover travel expenses.

For more details, please check out the BCC-I presentation page, call page, and FAQ page.

The performance

The New New Babylon performance is one of Petervan’s broader Artistic Research project “New New Babylon” deliverables.

For the BCC-I, we aim for an on-stage experience of 30 minutes. The current design of the performance is divided into six chapters—Awakening, Stepping, Flying, Gliding, Folding, and Vertigo. Each chapter explores different facets of the New New Babylon concept, blending art and interaction. Audience members are invited to actively participate, engaging with interactive elements that promote a sense of community and shared creativity. The performance integrates rich soundscapes, video projections, visual art, poetry, masks, VR, AI conversations, and stage props to create a multisensory journey.

This is an artistic performance: the whole feel of the performance is poetic, soft, very human, dreamy, and Magritte surreal. NOT SiFi, dystopian, non-aggressive, non-spectacular. Rather Eutopian.

What do we have?

The performance is at the concept stage.

By the end of October 2024, the following assets will be available to support our response to the call (Petervan effort and personal investment):

• A detailed script for the performance,
• An MVP video reel ready by 1 Nov 2024, integrating the Unity VR experiences and API infrastructure below,
• Five Unity V1 packages, each designed for distinct VR spaces in the performance, include specific controller actions that control both on-stage and in-VR lighting, and different camera angles. These packages are tailored to support the various acts of the performance. We are targeting Quest2 and Quest3 headsets. These Unity packages are developed by NUMENA, a renowned interdisciplinary creative studio from Germany, specializing in award-winning spatial design and programming. NUMENA was one of the finalists of the previous edition of BCC-I and was invited to the 2024 Venice Biennale Venice Production Bridge as part of the Gap Financing Market activities,
• An API-supported LLM infrastructure enables live conversations with AI Agents: the ambition is to interrogate some historical New Babylon research resources live, on-stage. Developed by Thomas McLeish, Adjunct Lecturer – Berkeley Master of Design, and master creator of the 2018 replica of the Colloquy of Mobiles.

Update: here is an extract from ACT4 of Petervan’s New New Babylon Performance.

We can build upon these deliverables in our joint response to the BCC-I call. We don’t have to start from scratch, there will be some basic building blocks.

Call to action

Interested games studios are invited to contact Petervan by the end of day 4 Oct 2024: +32 479 98 32 50 and p.vanderauwera@gmail.com