Quills Fest 2022

Annual Event Features XR Commissions and is an Industry-first Partnership Between VAST VR Platform and OSF’s O! Digital Stage
 
Tickets Available Beginning October 20 at quillsfest.osfashland.org

Tony Award-winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) announces the second edition of Quills Fest, an artist-centric space that invites the public—in person and virtually—to experience Extended Reality (XR) commissioned projects that boldly explore interactivity and immersive storytelling. First launched in 2021, Quills Fest was envisioned by Artistic Director Nataki Garrett as the cornerstone event of OSF’s new Innovation & Strategy Team led by Scarlett Kim.

“As a destination theatre that serves a national and global audience, OSF is the only theatre organization focused on producing a festival as ambitious as Quills Fest.” said Garrett. “This unique exploration of the intersection between the creativity of XR technology and the luminous storytelling of live theatre is where we will discover a singular immersive experience. We are creating accessibility to our work beyond the limitations of the physical stage and offering theatre artists an opportunity to engage audiences through a new, boundless form of storytelling. I am excited to introduce OSF’s Immersive Festival to the world.”

Quills Fest brings to life Garrett’s vision for OSF as an innovative hub for multi-modal and mixed-discipline storytelling—with an expanded OSF platform that traverses live and digital spaces, and empowers artists to engage with audiences through transformative experiences.

“Quills Fest is a playground for both artists and audiences,” said Kim. “It is a process-oriented festival that invites theatre and performance artists to bring their uniquely powerful perspectives on liveness into the XR world. With Quills Fest, OSF boldly proposes that at the heart of innovation is iteration, and we are grateful to prototype the future of storytelling with our brilliant community of artists and audiences.”


WHO
For Quills Fest 2022, OSF brings together a kaleidoscopic mix of global artists and creative technologists. This year’s Festival launches the bespoke Quills Fest Virtual Reality World featuring a playful, interactive, and physics-defying version of OSF’s iconic Allen Elizabethan Theatre—helmed by OSF’s Creative Technologists in Residence, Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski. In an industry-first partnership, the Quills Fest VR World is hosted on VAST, a social multiverse platform by Taiwan-based Sandman Studios. VAST recently served as the VR platform for SXSW. The VR World features avatar design by Selly Raby Kane, a renowned Sengalese fashion designer and artist pioneering Africa’s booming art and design movement, and original music by Justin Hicks, a groundbreaking multidisciplinary artist, composer, and vocalist.

This year’s festival features an abundance of new, original work by multi-hyphenate and genre-breaking artists, including legendary artist and filmmaker Nao Bustamante (BLOOM, in partnership with the Park Avenue Armory), trailblazing VR experience makers Mengtai Zhang and Lemon Guo (Diagnosia, Loom), and visionary performance artist Daniel Alexander Jones (ATEN, The Hanged Man). Innovative matches of creative technologists and artists abound, such as artist, designer and anthropologist Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde with scholar and writer Nehal El-Hadi, in partnership with New York Live Arts (Haboob: The Sublime Nature of Sudanese Sandstorms). 

The complete lineup detailing the full slate of OSF commissioned projects and other iconic XR projects being presented at Quills Fest is attached and can also be found on osfashland.org/quillsfest.

WHAT
“You can think of Quills Fest as a constellation of ‘studio visits’ where you will intimately engage with the artist’s process and access their art at various stages of creation,” says Kim. “Grounded in holistic artist support, Quills Fest is an expansive container for OSF to nurture the most adventurous artists working today.” 

Quills Fest 2022 features exhibitions of world-premiere Virtual Reality (VR), juxtaposing seminal works in the field with early stage experiments. These art experiences will be accompanied by conversations that invite the audience into the behind-the-scenes of XR production, elevating the most innovative voices in art and immersive technology.

The New York City in-person pop-up offers an opportunity for in-person engagement with the Quills Fest VR World and the featured projects, as well as a slate of special social events and workshops. Events include the IRL & URL Jam Session on Nov. 4, 7-9 pm ET, a Hands-on Workshop: Intro to XR for Theatremakers with Michaela Holland on Nov. 5, 6-8 pm ET; and a special NFT Party marking the launch of OSF’s first NFT collection drop, in partnership with Lauren Ruffin and Mark Sabb, artistic thought leaders in the Web3 space, from 8-10 pm ET, all at NYU Tandon @ The Yard - 299 Sands St, Brooklyn, NY 11205. 

WHERE/HOW
Audiences can experience Quills Fest in three ways: through their web browser, with a VR headset (tethered and untethered), or at the in-person VR pop-up hosted at NYU Tandon @ The Yard - 299 Sands St, Brooklyn, NY 11205. All in-person events will be held at this location, with the exception of the Playtest of Herstory in the House Immersive Audio Experience, which will take place at Merchant’s House Museum, 29 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003. 


WHEN
November 4-5, 2022

Tickets for access during the Festival ($10) are available beginning October 20 at quillsfest.osfashland.org. The digital programming of the festival will also be available through the end of November 2022 via web browser or through a VR headset on quillsfest.osfashland.org.

Get the in-person timed pass to experience all of this year’s lineup at the festival location at NYU Tandon @ The Yard located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City. Select this pass to see all available time slots during Nov 4–5, 2022 festival weekend! This pass includes the Festival Weekend Virtual Pass and will be automatically added on upon check out.

FEATURED PROJECTS INCLUDE:

Quills Fest 2022 presents the following project pairings—a work-in-progress presentation of an early-stage XR commission and a prior work by the artist—inviting audiences into the artist’s journey in immersive storytelling.

Daniel Alexander Jones
The Hanged Man
The Hanged Man is a microsite featuring a video exploration, directed by Nicholas Savignano, of the first song from Daniel Alexander Jones and Josh Quat’s forthcoming album ALTAR NO. 12: AQUARIUS. The song explores a person’s crisis of belief and a revelatory, mystical encounter.

ATEN
www.aten.life is a transdisciplinary exploration of the Solar System rooted in performance artist Daniel Alexander Jones’s longstanding practice of altar building. Led by Jones’s performance “altar-ego” Jomama Jones, ATEN takes the form of a digital archive including music, videos, text, conversations, and provocations/invitations for visitors to engage the ideas raised and extend them.

Mengtai Zhang & Lemon Guo
LOOM
LOOM is a VR opera that ruminates on the emotional and political charge of polyphony and ethnic identities. The project grew out of the artists’ time recording soundscapes, filming, and studying with elder song masters in the villages of the Kam people, an ethnic minority group in the southwest of China with a rich orally transmitted polyphonic singing tradition that has undergone drastic displacement and reconstruction in recent decades.

Diagnosia
Exploring the potential of VR as a tool for transplanting secondhand memories, Diagnosia aims to connect the audience to social issues via a sensorial immersion and embodiment in the memories of people who experienced them firsthand. Diagnosia portrays Mengtai’s memories of being incarcerated in a military-operated Internet addiction camp in Beijing in 2007, where Internet addiction and other youth issues were treated, with sometimes violent means, as a severe mental disorder.


The following commissions are partnerships that showcase early-stage experiments of long-term projects:

BLOOM
Nao Bustamante, Artist | In Partnership with Park Avenue Armory
Nao Bustamante prototypes a new vision for feminist autonomy in her project BLOOM, an ongoing cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of the vaginal speculum and its use in the history of the pelvic examination. This Quills Fest presentation is an excerpt from an experimental VR documentation of a live performance that took place at the Park Avenue Armory in September 2022, which will constitute a part of a Mixed Reality roller coaster experience currently in development.

Haboob: The Sublime Nature of Sudanese Sandstorms
Nehal El-Hadi & Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde, Artists | In partnership with New York Live Arts
A Sudanese girl’s experience of a haboob, or sandstorm, in Khartoum leaves a profound and lingering memory. This Quills Fest presentation is a first iteration of a VR experience that combines haptic interactions with sand with virtual experiences of the haboob.

Herstory in the House
Donya K. Washington, Jocelyn Kuritsky, and Cecil Baldwin, with Florencia Lozano and Jane Shaw, Artists.
Presented in partnership with The Tank, The Merchant’s House Museum, The Muse Project, and A Simple Herstory, LLC.

A dead, would-be President seeps into our consciousness in an audio exploration through New York City’s only fully intact 19th-century family home, the Merchant’s House. The playtest, presented as part of Quills Fest 2022, invites participants into an in-progress installation event that entails a journey (a pseudo “walking tour”) that begins on the streets of NYC and wends through The Merchant’s House, in conjunction with audio from Season 1 (about Victoria Woodhull), of the podcast series A Simple Herstory, a deviant exploration of the 100-plus women who have run for President of the United States.


Quills Fest 2022 presents the next iteration of two Quills Fest 2021 XR projects, now incorporating elements of live choreography harnessed through Motion Capture, produced in partnership with the NYU Tandon @ The Yard.

Anakwad
Created by XR Coven (Ty Defoe, Dov Heichemer & alpha_rats)
Experience a futuristic Anishinaabe ritual created from an indigiqueer perspective. Anakwad creates intentional energy of healing and connection derived from song and dance, acknowledging loss and transformation as part of our interspecies experience, and encourages healing through reconnecting to the earth and one’s nature.

Ordinary Gesture
Created by Raja Feather Kelly, Illya Szilak, Cyril Tsiboulski & Christoph Mateka
Ordinary Gesture is a Virtual Reality Theatrical experience that intersects theatre, meditation, and movement. Ordinary Gesture seeks to surrealize the experience of empathy by situating the player in five scenes that expand from their body to space-time (the universe) and back again.

Other works presented in Quills Fest 2022 include: The Cymbeline Project, written by William Shakespeare, conceived by Nataki Garrett and created by Scarlett Kim for O! Digital Stage; Iago: The Green Eyed Monster - Musical AR Experience App by Mary Chieffo and Josh Nelson Youssef; Queerskins: Ark, created by Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski in collaboration with Brandon Powers; and On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) by Archer’s Mark and Atlas V. Quills Fest 2022 also marks the launch of the OSF NFT Project—OSF’s first NFT collection release and foray into the Web3 space—curated and produced in partnership with Lauren Ruffin and Mark Sabb.


Quills Fest Events (all times in ET)
*Please go to quillsfest.osfashland.org for up-to-date schedule and details on events.

Friday, Nov. 4

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