Artist interview: Steye Hallema, director of Ancestors, Creative Director and Founder of The Smartphone Orchestra
Ancestors synopsis:
Ancestors is a smartphone-guided group experience that travels six generations into the future, where players explore how today’s choices shape tomorrow’s world. Players take selfies with their smartphones and an AI system generates ‘children’, and then ‘grandchildren’ and so on. Players are guided through a range of activities that enable connection with others in unexpected ways to discover possible futures and face big questions around climate, technology, and society.
Format: Interactive event, smartphone, presenter-led
Selected festivals and events: IDFA DocLab, SXSW, Venice Immersive, CineKid, GIFF…
Project evolution:
Hallema and The Smartphone Orchestra have extensive experience developing collective experiences mediated through audience smartphones, for instance with earlier project The Social Sorting Experiment. Hallema was working with Finnish artist, Hanna Haaslahti, who was using AI to create images merging different faces. He realised that these merges could again be merged to create ‘children’, and realised the potential of then turning it into a Smartphone Orchestra piece.
Hallema took the project to the Venice gap financing market specifically for the purpose of discussing distribution, and letting key people know about the project. The project then premiered at IDFA DocLab, and was quickly picked up by a number of other festivals such as SXSW.
Distribution and exhibition: challenges and rewards
A key characteristic of Smartphone Orchestra projects is having a low threshold for audience members (Hallema calls them ‘players’) to join, just by following a link on their own smartphones.
“Talking about distribution, everyone brings their own ‘headset’, it’s really wonderful. And we’re also very used to working with this device [the smartphone] as well, you know? In the end, it’s the most logical device to choose to do interactive storytelling with.”
Hallema’s strategy of getting it in front of curators at Venice and identifying key festivals was very successful; he says every booking led to roughly two other bookings. They had a clear idea of where they wanted it to go, but note of course that the trajectory is never guaranteed. They received some arts body funding, and promised the funder that they would deliver 30 shows across two years. By the end of one year they had run the show 90 times – Hallema observes that this is both an incredible measure of success but also partly about being strategic about what is promised to funding bodies.
Hallema observes that they’ve had some difficulty finding funding through funds tagged as ‘innovation’, because people often see innovation as purely technology. He says, “I would make a statement that real innovation is the right implementation of the technology. And that’s obviously also the work that [the XR] scene does, you know, trying to find meaningful ways of telling a story using this technology.”
The Smartphone Orchestra also looks outside of the festival arena and are finding some success working with commercial clients to show their work. Hallema says, “We’re slowly building a little bit of a business model by playing art pieces at company events, conferences, outside of the digital art world, which I really like, because I think it’s great to find our own audience. We might be one of the few that actually make this work.” He finds a real appetite for interesting work in this area, but does note that this strategy doesn’t deliver quite the level of income that many people expect. They have also developed new versions of Ancestors – a children’s version for CineKid, and a French version for Geneva International Film Festival.
Looking outwards even further, they have obtained some funding to develop the underlying system into something that others can use to make work. “So more people will make pieces, and then we can also distribute these, because we have slowly built up this network of festivals, clients, conferences, theaters that love what we do, and we can sell these pieces in that network. So I hope to become some sort of publisher of group experiences that can sustain a small team of wonderful people to create stuff that brings people together.”
Strategic insights and reflections:
Hallema says that while there is of course an innovative technological system underlying Ancestors and other Smartphone Orchestra project, the greater innovation and development is in the dramaturgy, the pacing and the overall design of how to bring people together in such an interactive project. He notes that personalisation of a project is one of the main challenges of immersive work; a challenge he relishes: “This is what I do. My niche is, I create experiences in which the person that undergoes the experience plays the main part.” Hallema has also taken this challenge into VR, with The Imaginary Friend and another upcoming project in development.
Business sustainability in general in the XR field is a hard nut to crack, particularly given the need for continuity and maintenance of the technology. Hallema is somewhat exasperated with state-based arts funding for what he says is a lack of recognition of this need for sustainability, and says this conversation is important in first identifying what parameters are needed and what the field is trying to achieve. Marketing is also a clear gap in the field that needs attention. Hallema doesn’t want to be too sober about it all though – pointing out that a bit of naivete is useful in artists, so they just dive in and try things out.