#1452: Immersive Documentary about Chinese Censorship “All I Know About Teacher Li” Tops Venice Immersive Audience Favorites Survey

Voices of VR

I interviewed All I Know About Teacher Li director Zhuzmo at Venice Immersive 2024. Due to the sensitivities of the topic of Chinese censorship, then the director Zhuzmo has requested that he remain anonymous. I did an interview face to face with them in Venice, got a transcript, and then fed the text back into a text-to-speech AI at Eleven Labs in order to mask his voice. See more context in the rough transcript below. All I Know About Teacher Li also happened to top the unofficial Venice Immersive 2024 Survey results that I did in collaboration with XR Must for both the Top 5 as well as for the Audience Favorites. I found last year's survey results to be really useful in organizing the order of discussing pieces in our critic's roundtable, but also helping to understand the audience's reaction to the selection. Last year there were 50 respondents, and this year there were 82 respondents who on average saw 21.9 experiences each. Here's a list of the Most Seen experiences from Venice Immersive 2024, which is sort of a proxy for popularity and buzz, but also throughput. The next result is the audience favorites (no limit), which is calculated by how many people listed it as a favorite relative to how many saw it. This tends to have the most robust overview of the entire selection, and is also an interesting calibration process to see what you personally liked vs what might have been favored by the zeitgeist. Finally the top 5 ranking usually is a proxy for seeing which projects might have been in the running for a jury prize, but there was a lot more variance this year, which was reflected in the range of projects that people were predicting to be a prize winner. The top prize from the jury was awarded to Ito Meikyu, which was ranked 10th by the audience. The second place from the jury went to Oto's Planet, which was ranked 5th. And then the third place from the jury went to Impulse: Playing with Reality, which was ranked 2nd. I find it increasingly difficult to predict what will resonate with the jury as even the audience favorites can vary widely from my own personal favorites. Again what resonates with you may not resonate with others, and there are so many other qualities and nuances of each project that can’t be reduced down to numbers. Nonetheless, I found last year’s survey results to be quite an interesting cross section and sometimes confirms an intuition and many other times can be surprising. Either way, it’s additional data to help make sense of the selection and the industry. Here's my top 10 that I published after finishing watching all of the pieces on Wednesday, August 28th. I about watched 1/3 of the pieces ahead of the festival, 1/3 on the press preview, and the remaining 1/3 on the press & industry day and the first day bookings are available. Also, the essence of each project can't be reduced down to numbers, which is a big motivation that I have to record over 30 hours of coverage for Venice Immersive 2024 over the course of 5 days in order to unpack more of the design process, experiential design tradeoffs, and some of my own embodied experiences and impressions. #1416: Preview of Venice Immersive 2024 Innovations in Immersive Storytelling & Art Installations with Curators #1417: Kicking Off Venice Immersive Converge with Translating "Riven" Classic Point-and-Click Adventure to Open World VR Puzzler #1418: Award-Winning Animators Experiment with Sandbox Social VR "Garden Alchemy" Research Project #1419: Creating a Four-Sided Pepper's Ghost Pyramid Illusion with "Telos I" Dance Piece #1420: Experimental Documentary "Mammary Mountain" Captures Oral Histories of Breast Cancer Journeys #1421: Interactive Mixed Reality Doc on ADHD "Impulse: Playing With Reality" Takes Home Immersive Achievement Prize at Venice Immersive 2024 #1422: A Simple Silence Wraps Up Craig Quintero's Trilogy Exploring Spatial Transformations & Immersive Encounters