NewImages Festival – 2023 Selection

NewImages Festival – 6 th edition
April 5 – 9 2023 at Forum des images

For its 6 th edition from April 5 to 9 2023, NewImages Festival will present the best of virtual creation through a selection of works that celebrate immersion in all its diversity.
NewImages Festival represents the main event of NewImages Hub, which aims to support digital creation and immersive art all year round.

Forum des images’ festival sheds light on the quality of digital creation which relentlessly explores all formats. While virtual reality is at the forefront of the program, the event also gives ride of place to digital art, VR video games, 360° films, augmented reality and hybrid shows.
The works featured always tend further towards the exploration of different devices. This selection makes way for new territories – geographical, narrative and metaphorical – of XR creation.

On one hand, the festival is aimed at the general public, and those curious to preview the best of immersive art.
This year, 13 works are presented in the context of the XR Competition, and create space to concretely experience current societal issues such as ecology, parenthood, identity and collective history.
Quebec is in the limelight through a rich out competition focus of 20 works, alongside a delegation of Canadian creators and industry professionals.
On the other hand, the festival is also tailored to industry professionals. Hence, 44 projects were selected for the XR Development Market (coproduction market) and 105 artworks for the XR Art Fair (distribution market unique in Europe).

In parallel, the Industry Days will take place during 3 days of conferences, talks and workshops with speakers from around the world, and from all fields.
With these two markets and meetings, NewImages Festival establishes itself as a contact point for major actors of the XR industry.

XR Competition: a firmly impactful selection

Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality: XR Competition offers an exceptional sample of the diversity of genres and formats seized by immersive creation to be explored in uniquely new ways

13 international immersive works will be presented in the context of the official competition, including 7 French premieres and 3 world premieres!
While the selection represents the diversity of existing formats (VR, 360° films, AR, video games…) it also sheds light on works that are remarkably able to push back the boundaries of devices used and to renew imaginations.

Between past, present, and future, this selection placed under the sign of time travel depicts immersion in all of its diversity and its innovations. All works offer new narrations that invite us to rethink our societies from a political angle by revising individual pasts, such as that of an SS ancestor (His Name Is My Name) or collective memories, through the destiny of Taiwanese prisoners (The Man Who Couldn’t Leave).Whether utopian or dystopian (From the Main Square), these works allow us to imagine our future civilization between ecological (Plastisapiens) and ontological stakes (IVF-X: Posthuman Parenting in Hybrid Reality).

Some works seem to show new ways of living in the present moment, by making us adopt active or meditative positioning.
Midnight Story or even Rock Paper Scissors offer narrations whose stories depend on our body movements and manage to make us appreciate differently scenes of the everyday in order to find grace and poetry.

The playful dimension is nonetheless not left out of this selection, with the games Eggscape, Ascender or Increment proposing colorful universes with captivating mythologies!

The 13 selected artworks will be competing to win the Grand Prize, the Best VR Work Prize, the Prize of Interactivity and the Impact Prize.

The awards ceremony will take place at Hôtel de Ville, on Friday the 7th of April at 7:30pm, in closing of the Industry Days. It will take place in the presence of a jury made up of Kent Bye (influencer and XR/AI journalist), Astrid Kahmke (director of the European Creator’s Lab) and
Marie Lou Papazian (president and CEO of TUMO Armenia) as well as an artist whose name will be revealed soon.

List of XR Competition works:

Out of Competition Focus on Quebec

A pioneer region in the field of digital creation, Quebec is in the limelight this year with a focus on 20 immersive artworks out of competition, organized in partnership with the Society for Arts and Technological, the Quebec Ministry of Culture and the General Delegation of Culture in Paris

The themes touched upon in this selection are diverse but share an urgent relevancy: ecology with Bubble, mental health with Manic VR, or even sex education with the didactic work Clit-me.
At the heart of this program, 7 artworks in 360° can be discovered under the HUBBLO society dome, put together for the occasion in the Nelson Mandela gardens above the Forum des images.

NewImages Festival is happy to welcome 8 XR personalities from Quebec: Jenny Thibault and Gwendal Creurer (Technological Arts Society), Myriam Achard (Phi Centre), Nicolas S. Roy (Dpt.), Guillaume Aniorté (International Quartier des Spectacles), Louis-Richard Tremblay (National Film Board of Canada), Pascal Pelletier (HUBBLO) and Denys Lavigne (OASIS Immersion).
They will intervene in the context of several Industry Days conferences and will participate to the XR Market as Decision Makers. The aim is to put forward Quebec expertise in the XR field and to create lasting collaborations with the international ecosystem of NewImages Festival.

List of XR Out of Competition works:

NewImages Hub In the framework of NewImages Hub, three artists were able to participate in residencies in Quito, Rome and Taiwan. NewImages Festival’s 2023 edition is the occasion to preview the fruit of their labor.
Under the HUBBLO NewImages dome, the 360° movie To Make You Dream by Alice Lepetit will be projected, immersing us in the dream worlds of the Sapara amazonian community.
It will be followed by Mono no Aware by Boris Labbé, a VR movie developed around Japanese art and literature history references that unfolds as a grand fresco.

In the context of the Industry Days, the three authors will come back for a common conference on their creative processes and the ways in which a NewImages Hub residency takes place.

XR Development Market and the XR Art Fair: 2 complementary markets

The XR Development Market is the yearly meeting point where future masterpieces of immersive art come alive and find their funding model.
For the 5 th consecutive year, it links artists and independent producers looking for funding and sponsors with the industry’s leaders, and the cultural actors committed to these singular works.

This year, the market will present a selection of 44 immersive projects from all around the world.
It will gather several production companies such as Novelab, Novaya, Tchikiboum (France) Samsa Film (Luxembourg), and Reynard Films (Germany). International companies are well represented as well with GiiÖii Studio (Korea) and POKE POKE CREATIVE (Taïwan) from Asia, as well as Lightly Seasoned Productions (USA) and Imán Transmedia (Ecuador) for the Americas, and finally Oceania with Distil Immersive (Australia).

The 2023 selection reveals several trends: the integration of video games mechanics within storytelling, for a greater interactivity; a taste for history and memories; as well as our relation to space and architecture.
Finally, a number of works embody intimate stories, lesser seen realities, or the issues of minorities.

List of projects selected for the XR Development Market :

List of the Decision Makers attending NewImages Festival:

The XR Art Fair, a unique market in Europe that is entirely dedicated to distribution, offers a selection of 105 immersive and interactive works for its 2 nd edition.
Its aim is to encourage the spread of these works through an international network of distribution companies, museums and cultural centers…
At the heart of this section, a number of companies are among the most innovative in the field such as Diversion Cinema, Astrea, and Unframed, key actors of the European market, let alone the worldwide market.
The Kaohsiung Film Archive (Taïwan) will present a selection of its catalogue, as will the Canadian society HUBBLO, specialized in dome projections.
Over twenty companies are represented and over half of them are French, which shows the role of the XR Market as a gateway to international distribution.
List of companies taking part in the XR Art Fair :

The Industry Days: opening up the XR sector
From Wednesday the 5th to Friday the 7th of April, the festival unfolds its Industry Days with three days entirely dedicated to professionals, students and talents of the entire world.
The sector’s international actors will gather around dozens of conferences and workshops. The program puts forward the will to open up the XR sector through eclectic meetings and explore innovation for Culture via immersive arts.
Artists (Victorine van Alphen, Aya Ben Ron, Emilie Rinna, etc.), producers (NFB), institutions (Le Cube, ARTPOINT, etc.), video games officials (Games For Change Europe, INNERSPACE VR, Fast Travel Games, etc.) as well as live shows will take on the latest trends and current issues of the sector.
Amongst the topics up for debate: diversity and inclusion within XR, the social and environmental impact of immersive technologies, collaboration between different actors of the sector.
The conferences and workshops will blend technique and artistry in order to best encourage the production and promotion of immersive creation for cultural industries!

^{ABOUT NEWIMAGES FESTIVAL}

As an international event dedicated to digital and immersive creation, the objective of NewImages Festival is to promote professional meetings between and with different industries and artistic disciplines, to create a space for discussion to develop new ideas and collaborations, to support works in the process of production and distribution to ensure their visibility.

Every year for 3 days, the Industry Days are dedicated to professionals, students, and talents from all over the world to discover the best of immersive creation through a series of conferences, keynotes, workshops and a competition and focus sections! NewImages Festival is a key event for XR industry players with its coproduction market, the XR Development Market and its distribution market, the XR Art Fair. The festival’s artistic program is also opened to non-professionals for 2 days at the end of the festival.

Hosted by the Forum des images (a cultural institution subsidized by Paris City Hall), NewImages Festival was born in January 2018, when the Paris Virtual Film Festival (created in June 2016) and l Love Transmédia (launched in 2011) merged into a single entity.

NewImages Festival is produced and organized by Forum des Images, a cultural institution dedicated to cinema and digital creation, supported by the City of Paris.
Website: https://newimagesfestival.com/en/