Following up on the RIGA IFF GOES VR hackathon in September 2019, Žanis Lipke Memorial continued working with the winning team of students (Ieva Vīksne, Līga Vēliņa, Kaspars Lēvalds, Lauris Taube) on developing the Lipke Bunker VR prototype. A story about the secret kept by a 8 years old boy Zigis, the son of the towering figure among rescuers of Jews under the Nazi occupation in Latvia, Žanis Lipke and his wife Johanna.

In November 2020, the first iteration of the Lipke Bunker VR was presented to a select group of young adults and XR experts. The positive feedback we received spurned us on to keep developing this project. We reached out to the Minneapolis (U.S.) based Creative Technologist at Fallon Worldwide, Cory McLeod and gauged his interest in consulting on the development of this project.

In May 2021, Fallon decided to partner with the Lipke Museum on a pro bono basis to develop the second iteration of the Lipke Bunker VR by the end of this year. A team of new media artists from Latvia, a Lipke Museum researcher and a team from Fallon have been working on the development of a presentational prototype. The intent of this prototype is to employ it as a proof-of-concept like object in a pitch to VR content development stakeholders and Holocaust education institutions. The 2021 RIGA IFF has opened up an opportunity to present our work-in-progress to industry leaders in the space where this project had its origin.
In the first sprint of the project, we focused on developing the core story of the bunker space in Kipsala as seen from Zigis’ perspective. The current development of the project augment the scope of perspectives to include the stories of those people whom Lipke helped evade the Holocaust. This augmentation of multiple perspectives and stories is intended to create a non-linear interactive experience, which captures the scale of the effect Lipke efforts during the Holocaust. We are currently developing the story of a family from Berlin, Hanna and Sofia Stern. The Sterns were deported from Berlin to Riga in 1942 and were able to escape from the Kaiserwald Concentration Camp in one of Lipke’s most challenging rescue operations.

ILIOS: a VR meditation on the Coronavirus pandemic is a talk on the creation and distribution of a VR piece, conceived during the global shutdown, when Johnson was stuck in North America, for three months. The resulting piece, created remotely, was a meditation and conversation intended to discuss the meaning of COVID-19 in the artists’ personal lives.

From filmmaking to immersive VR: How the desire to let sensuality and physical impact took me from the linear ELSEWHERE hybrid documentary to vertical / immersive storytelling.

What are the unique aspects of immersive storytelling that makes it possible to use it as a tool to connect with nature and myth in a different way?