Jongsma + O’Neill winnen ‘Highly Commended in Best Use of Digital International’ bij de Museums + Heritage Awards – een kort interview
‘In the end, I think everyone benefited from this creator-led approach’
Kel O’Neill en Eline Jongsma wonnen eerder al met hun werk ‘Roofkunst – 10 verhalen’ voor het Mauritshuis een 2024 XR History Award van de Körber-Stiftung in Duitsland. Nu was het bal in Londen. Wat is volgens hun zintuigen de belangrijkste ontwikkeling op het gebied van IX en wat hopen zij dat CIIIC bijdraagt aan het veld en de community?
‘We’re artists, producers, designers, directors, writers and, yes, business people’
Amerikaan Kel O’Neill en Eline Jongsma vormen samen Jongsma + O’Neill, ‘an art and filmmaking duo who use documentary storytelling and emerging technology to explore history’s impact on today’s society’.
De tentoonstelling Roofkunst – 10 verhalen [Loot-10 stories in het Engels] liep van 2023 tot dit jaar, eerst in het Mauritshuis in Den Haag en later bij het Humboldt Forum in Berlijn, en verwelkomde in totaal tussen de 80.000 en 90.000 bezoekers. Voor het animatiegedeelte won Jure Brglez namens het project afgelopen week ook nog ‘a Merit at the One Club For Creativity’s ADC Annuals’ in New York, een van de grotere communicatieprijzen ter wereld.
What’s Loot-10 stories about? What did it trigger in you?
‘Loot-10 stories is our latest immersive exhibition—a big, sprawling ‘total artwork’ that uses virtual reality experiences, documentary films and installation design to make the current issue of looted art in museums tangible for a young and diverse audience (bekijk de trailer hier, red.).’
Why is IX -as a means- (so) important?
(Or: what’s the key to success for IX to flourish?)
‘Creating and directing immersive experiences is about sculpting memory. You create an environment that can spark a shift inside the visitor, and that shift continues to work its way through people’s minds and the bodies after they leave the space, transforming them over time. The more all-encompassing the experience, the more distinct the memory, and the more powerful the impact.
In Loot, visitors are made to experience several layers of immersion. Entering the exhibition, their senses are overwhelmed by the single color that dominates the space—a purple/pink shade called ‘Digital Lavender’ that our brilliant collaborators at Trapped in Suburbia introduced us to. Under even lighting conditions, the color barely holds shadows, so it gives you the feeling of being out of the physical world and inside a digital render. Immediately, there’s this bones-deep understanding that you’re between two worlds, and ‘unstuck in time’.
The VR experiences add another layer to this. In each of the three VRs, you’re given a front row seat to the theft of a different object. In one experience, you go back to 1806, stand on the top of the Brandenburger Tor and watch as Napoleon’s troops enter Berlin to pull down the Quadriga statue and bring it back to Paris. So putting on the headset kicks you out of the weird lavender room inside the museum and sends you back into a past that’s vivid and uncanny. Once the experience ends, you’re back in the museum, face-to-face with the last remaining horse’s head from the Quadriga. But you still feel connected to the scene from the object’s history that you just experienced. It’s been printed on your memory. This leads to questions about what makes any object a ‘museum object’, and may even prompt you to question what a museum is in the first place.
Our hope is that some part of the 80.000 or 90,000 people who experienced Loot in Den Haag and Berlin still have these questions rattling around inside of them, long after the exhibition has closed.’
How did you come up with the idea, or how did you win the account?
‘Loot came together very quickly. It was during the pandemic, and we’d just moved our studio to the Netherlands from LA. We were fascinated by the digitization efforts that were underway at various Dutch museums during lockdown, and curious about the ways in which digital scans could impact and change the power and aura of controversial objects. So we set a meeting with Martine Gosselink from the Mauritshuis to discuss what we’d been thinking about, and over the course of our talk she revealed that she was thinking about green lighting a show about looted art, but wasn’t sure how to approach it. We immediately saw the connection and jumped in with both feet.
As we made Loot, part of our job became explaining how an exhibition could benefit from a strong authorial voice. Films have directors and books have writers, but there is not yet a real position, or name for a position, for the authors of an IX exhibition (and no, ‘curator’ doesn’t cut it). Because many museums at that time were so scared of the subject matter, many of the museum-sector people we worked with were more than happy to back away from the exhibition and let us take the lead—and the blame in case critics and audiences didn’t like it. So there was a sort of perfect storm there that allowed us to get our very specific vision out into the world.
In the end, I think everyone benefited from this creator-led approach. We got a big canvas, a nice budget, and the opportunity to grapple with the kind of interesting and difficult subject matter that we love. The museums got a show that dealt with sexy, zeitgeisty subject matter, and also got to use us as a sort of human shield against potential criticism. Everyone took a risk, and everyone got a reward.’
What developments in the field do you see that you think are important to strengthen and why? Or: in your opinion, what is the most important development in the IX field (as part of the creative industry)?
‘CIIIC has the opportunity to strengthen the sector by directly supporting ambitious projects with experienced IX creators. Loot’s international success shows that audiences are looking for, and will pay to see, big immersive experiences that actually advance conversations around pressing issues. CIIIC can help shepherd more of these projects into existence in a number of ways, from direct investment and slate funding (funding more than one project) to matchmaking between creators and the partners who need them—in our case, that means forging partnerships with museums looking to expand their audiences.’
What would you like to add to CIIIC/the Dutch IX industry & community?
‘Eline and I strongly believe that the perceived lack of distribution and revenue models for IX projects are creators’ problems, so we need to solve them ourselves. Researchers are employed by universities, and museum staff are on payroll. Creators are the ones who only get paid through active participation in projects. With that kind of skin in the game, it’s high time to step up, take joyful responsibility, and connect IX work with audiences. There is no hard line between disciplines for IX creators: we’re artists, producers, designers, directors, writers and, yes, business people.
We interviewed Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, a few weeks ago, and it’s been really interesting to see how he identifies himself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. To him, the Talking Heads wasn’t just a band, it was a small business. As he moved into other ventures like his record label and making large-scale artworks, he took those expansions as business decisions, with financial implications to be reckoned with, accounted for and embraced, all with the goal of long-term sustainability. It’s a wonderfully subversive idea in his case, like: “I’ve run the numbers and I need to sell this many units of socially critical music in order to ensure the expanded production of socially critical content to other platforms.”
Eline and I really identify with this mentality. We don’t stare ourselves blind on IX terminology or whether or not we fit into this funding system or that festival’s slate. We’re creating a new path with every project we make, and that’s part of the fun, too. Our company is a story-first studio that prioritizes audience engagement; we use new techniques and new technologies to tell stories in unexpected, conceptually sound ways. If we and our collaborators reach a big audience, that’s not just money in our pockets: it’s evidence that what we’re doing works.’
What will your next project be about?
‘Colors! We have a few projects in the pipeline, but the one I’d like to highlight here is called Color Story, which looks at differences in color perception across humanity, and explores the benefits of seeing the world through other people’s eyes. The distribution possibilities are really interesting, since we’re developing an AR experience, a feature documentary and an immersive exhibition where everything comes together. We’re just spinning up, and are ready to connect with partners that can strengthen the project and its reach. Get in touch if you want to be involved!’
‘Our hope is that some part of the 80.000 or 90,000 people who experienced Loot in Den Haag and Berlin still have these questions rattling around inside of them’
