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Story

Caldera 360: the gamified, genre-bending digital arts festival

by Alexandra Havas

Sydney NSW

10th Sep 2021

Producer Laurence Rosier Staines has empowered users to create their own online arts and culture adventure.

If you’re living in NSW, Victoria or the ACT, you are probably seriously over the extended lockdown and dying for an art and culture fix. The fully immersive Caldera 360 offers an online space where your cravings for creativity can be fully satiated. We interviewed Creative Director and Producer of Caldera 360, Laurence Rosier Staines, on what this part digital art festival part interactive VR experience is all about.

What is Caldera 360?

It depends on the angle from which you approach it. Audiences (users?) have been describing it as a boutique digital festival, or an online art exhibition, or an interactive VR experience. The most banal but accurate description is that it's a little site that contains 20 minutes of specially-commissioned artworks and performances scattered around a lava-lamp-type map, and in the artworks you can 'look around' with your phones or laptops as if you're in the middle of them – artworks constructed for the experience of a single imaginary person in five real places. The performers and artists are all from Sydney and Melbourne, and they were all filmed either during or just after the last round of citywide or statewide lockdowns. But it's not a 'festival' at all, in the sense that it can just be visited at any time – like Wikipedia.

What inspired you to create Caldera 360?

The first thing was that in 2018 I directed an arts-nightlife event called Caldera, a mini-festival of burlesque, experimental music, interactive art and fire at Eveleigh Works, one of the biggest blacksmithing workshops in the southern hemisphere. It was a loud, dark immersive show but with no rational arc to it, just a visceral one – involving steam hammers, siren singers, electric anvils, dancers in green smoke, improvised percussion, ghost electronics and blast furnaces. Audiences were led around the space implicitly by light and sound, and, frankly, it was incredibly cool.

After a year on other projects, we were gearing up to run a new, scaled-up version of Caldera in 2020 when suddenly there was all this artistic energy that had nowhere to go. So part of it was wanting to do an online version of Caldera: creating a 'space' where people explore and things happen somewhat organically, a website populated by surreal art and performances that felt similarly special.

The other part was from the emotions caused by the world suddenly changing – careers at least temporarily lost, isolation being the norm, screens becoming the only reliable way to connect with anything or anyone. We wanted to lean into the idea of art from isolation instead of away from it and make a document of the state of things that wasn't just pure realism. A lot of the art around seems to be wish-fulfilment – either escapism that had nothing to do with the state of affairs for everybody, or simply pretending in a forced-smile way that live events aren't in hibernation when they are; monologues read into webcams, or Instagram live shows stripped of audience interaction, applause or laughter. I wanted to try actually treating the isolation and the digital as a medium, instead of just a facsimile of an IRL experience that can't happen.

What are some of your favourite immersive art experiences available as part of the online festival?

I love them all. Some are expressions of what the artists were already working on, extensions of current efforts and obsessions into this different realm – like the work by Marcus Whale, Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran, which was a revamp of the opening track from Marcus' latest solo album, vampiric song cycle The Hunger – while others were entire unique creations that include silhouettes of memory, harps, stripteases and ecological tombs. They all feature some sense of yearning, loss, transience or raging against the void. I think it comes out as a more honest document of the psychic mood at the moment by acknowledging those things instead of pretending they aren't there.

What is unique about Caldera 360?

The way it combines the internet now with the way it used to be. Something I always loved about Web 1.0 was the exploratory aspect – anything felt possible before the internet was owned by like four companies, where everything has a goal of being hyperlinked and situating itself into massive, pre-existing infrastructure. I wanted Caldera 360 to not do that at all. Martin Baker's web design totally got what we were going for, and the combination of his reactive map and Clemence Williams' sound design and composition is one of my favourite things about it, giving each little location its own feel and flavour. Also the way it balances a choose-your-own-adventure style with a strange sense of actual progression, small though it is. But probably the clearest unique thing is that none of the artists, including me, had ever done anything like this before, and I think that can absolutely be felt in it.

Why do you think it’s important for people to have access to arts and culture online during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially now while there are extended lockdowns across much of the country?

Without it, it's just very hard to stay sane. I haven't seen any figures for the uptake of streaming services, or the number of hours of television watched, but we can imagine the orders of magnitude involved. For people in Sydney and Melbourne especially it's been a vital balm to see that their artistic communities are still active, doing new and profound things even in massively constrained circumstances. It's a way to see what other people around you are feeling and thinking without getting stuck in the quicksand of doomscrolling.

How can having online spaces where art and culture is celebrated maintain a sense of community during a period of physical isolation and when many artists are struggling with not having work?

It is a challenge to create the idea of connection and community where there just isn't any for the time being, and I think any attempt will end up coming face to face with that; but though isolation can be shocking and deadening, it can also be special in its own way. The pandemic has made people realise how much they took things for granted that were just dependably available before, from human interaction to live music to museums and galleries. The fact that this realisation hasn't been accompanied by a significant boost in top-down material support for artists, in literally their most desperate moment, is one of many ongoing catastrophes.

What do you see as the future of Caldera 360?

What was to be the next set of (parenthetically amazing) Caldera 360 artworks has been stalled by the shifting sands of the pandemic. Some artists have gone overseas and some proposed locations are no longer available. So the partial answer is 'watch this space' while we regroup – but I'm not ruling out the possibility of it becoming an international thing should the pieces line up. I would love it to feature immersive artists in Nairobi or dancers from São Paulo diving into a medium that is at the very least full of possibility. It may also expand into a more game-like direction, which is so far only hinted at.

Some major tech companies seem to think that VR is the future but haven't provided much to suggest it beyond unimaginative corporate chicanery, which is simply insane considering what was possible 30 years ago but still hasn't been built upon in any positive way. Whatever the extent, projects like Caldera 360 could be points on a road that a lot of people seem to think we're going down. It's so important to remember that this kind of digital arts thing, properly explored, doesn't HAVE to just mirror our dystopian present, or prepare us for an even more dystopian future. Instead of cushioning us from diminished possibilities, it might even be able to add some.

Caldera 360º 2021 artworks and performances include:

“Supernature” by Zelia Rose

“Fantasy” by Tanzer (feat. Samantha Ramirez)

“Exit” by OneJessa

“Black Butterfly” by Meng-Yu Yan

“Cowboy Song” by Marcus Whale, Athena Thebus & Chloe Corkran

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