47 min.

Key to Time is an immersive, operatic film designed for immersive cinematic experiences. It tells a story about time, love and mutation faced with the challenges of scientific hubris, climate change and mass extinction.

Tanek is trapped in the future. He was sent there after an accident involving a time-travel machine prototype and his girlfriend’s strange glass hand. Floods and contamination have led to wars, and new war technologies threaten to destroy the world. Tanek’s only hope seems to be to travel back in time. He tries to travel through dreams, but his plans go awry and he arrives in a parallel universe where his doppelgänger is trying to use Anna’s powers for his own gain.

Filmed in 3D 360° cinema, Key to Time mixes past and future, taking spectators on a journey that explores concepts of time. It draws on 1920s silent cinema and virtual reality to address how historic choices echo in troubled landscapes of the present and future. The work explores contemporary theories of time, simultaneity, rhizomes, environmental catastrophe and quantum physics through visual and musical expressions of time-space models, technological time-devices and human conditions of time like longing, waiting and decay. The work features the performances of vocal artists Joanna Freszel, Emily Albrink, Katherine Calcamuggio, Chad Sloan and Jesse Donner and actors Natalia Kalita and Paweł Smagała. The work is written and directed by Roderick Coover and the soundtrack is created by Krzysztof Wolek.

The project is organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme accompanying the centenary of Poland regaining independence. Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2022.

6:30 min.

Step into the stillness of an abandoned school and enter GYMNASIA, a place where the ghostly ephemera of a lost childhood await you. Recall the particular sights and sounds of a child’s world through the echoes of ball games, school lessons and choir recitals. GYMNASIA reanimates the memories of those forgotten days. This project flawlessly blends 3D 360-degree video, stop-motion, miniatures and CGI, and pushes the art of puppet animation into uncharted territory.

Written and directed by: Clyde Henry Productions
Production: Felix & Paul Studios oraz National Film Board of Canada
Installation production: PHI.
Project presentation: Instytut Adama Mickiewicza oraz PHI

Interactive experience, ca. 10 min.

Aftermath VR is an immersive documentary project about Euromaidan revolution in Kyiv, Ukraine.

On a grey morning of February 20, 2014, government police forces opened live ammunition fire against protesters armed with bats and wooden shields. Fifty people died, and several days after, President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia.

We reconstruct the street where the bloodshed happened, as it is today, using photogrammetry and CGI. The viewers of the experience would have a possibility to repeat the path of the protesters that were reclaiming the street from the police forces.

The story is a chronicle of that day with a strong emphasis on archival footage. Memories of the people who were there would be captured as 360° video interviews recorded in places they were that tragic morning.

Aftermath VR was one of the recipients of the Journalism 360 Challenge Grant in 2017.

Interactive experience, ca. 10 min.

Tibetan Bar-do, or the in-between the two is an intermediate space, inter-space and gap. We’re examine the inner space of the individual who dies (performs an act of self-liberation) and has not yet entered a new form of existence. According to the six stages of the Bar-do cycle contained in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, We divided the virtual space into stages that cannot be explored autonomously – their character and purpose are based on a journey towards a specific direction. According to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, they are Kyenay bardo, Milam bardo, Samten bardo, Chikhai bardo, Chönyi bardo and Sidpa bardo. I identify the participant in their transmigration process with the supra-individual “mental body” (jid-kji lus), “mind” (sems) and “subtle consciousness” (rnam-shes p’ra-mo). After the experience finishes, the participant becomes a Delog –“daa-log is the deceased, who ‘returned from dead’ to tell what he had seen and lived on the other side… Delog is someone who has died and left the body, after some time to return and continue to live”. The only condition for participation in the experiment is not having any objects made of leather.

10 min.

In Shalenny’s VR work the viewer goes beyond the horizon on a compressed forty thousand kilometers journey around the world. A game of chance, the journey is the outcome of a line drawn from a bridge and further across the world, taking place in the dead of night, where fuzzy silhouettes of people tear along through desolated landscapes, fleeing into gray blizzards and shadowy forests. Based on watercolors by the artist, one setting replaces the other as the ghost like figures cross birch forests, oil fields, abandoned churches and oceans in the seemingly limitless universe.

Shalenny has long been fascinated by the idea of the bridge in his works and in this particular work he takes a bridge as the starting point for imagining a way of escaping the ongoing crisis in the land where he resides. Or as he expresses it: “The idea of escaping is unconscious, it sprouts and becomes a young tree. Every morning I go to the yard with an axe and hack it at the root, banishing the wrong thoughts. The next morning it grows above me twice, its rustling leaves talking to the wind, which have already been everywhere.”

Episode 1 and 2

20 min. and 20 min.

Space Explorers is a cinematic VR series about the new age of space exploration.Witness the lives of NASA astronauts as they navigate the trials and sacrifices of their training and missions. Explore the camaraderie of space programs around the world,and discover the latest advancements and plans for deep space exploration. SpaceExplorers: A New Dawn will shine a light on mankind’s most ambitious journey to understand our planet, our universe and our origins. Narrated by Brie Larson.

10 min.

The connections between particles in the Universe do not differ from the connections between us. Is it possible, however, that some of us are contaminated with the same elements that constituted past civilizations? In the end, as astronomers say, each of us carries a souvenir of cosmic catastrophes - supernova explosions. If so, is the fact that we are built of the same matter as the fiery nuclei of stars allows us to be called “children of stars” or is there something more needed? "Stellar Entangelment" (2019) is a VR project resulting from the merger of two galaxies - the art & science group Instytut B61 and the directing duo The Kissinger Twins (Katarzyna Kifert & Dawid Marcinkowski). The effect of the symbiotic cooperation of artists is a lot more than just a ten minutes long film dealing with the issue of cosmic quantum entanglement.
The project, based on the motifs of the immersive spectacle directed by Jan Świerkowski, tells the story of a mysterious scientific institute trying to secure the immortality of a civilization imprisoned on a doomed planet in a remote region of our Galaxy. However, its main focus is the search of the place of the Universe inside the Humans.

22 min.

On the Polish-Ukrainian borderland the rhythm of life is slow, but underneath the surface of things the density of it leads beyond understanding. Life and death do not mean the persistence and disappearance of biological processes here, they are impenetrable forces that constitute the reality.
This is where the Whisperer lives. She heals people using the power of words, gestures and images. Rough nature, religious ceremonies and pagan rituals are what you will encounter along the path to this state of mind.
Whispers had its World Premiere at 2019 Venice Film Festival.

19 min.

Traveling While Black is a cinematic VR experience that immerses the viewer in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans and the creation of safe spaces in our communities. Visit historic Ben's Chili Bowl and join patrons as they share and reflect on their experiences. Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, Traveling While Black highlights the urgent need to facilitate a dialogue about the challenges minority travelers still face today.