Caitlin Fisher
Immersive Storytelling Lab
York University
Caitlin Fisher directs both the Immersive Storytelling Lab @ Cinespace Studios and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto where she held the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture for over a decade. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab and a former Fulbright Research Chair, Fisher is the recipient of many international awards for digital storytelling including the Electronic Literature Award for Fiction and the Vinaròs Prize for her AR poetry. In addition to serving as ELO Vice President, she also serves on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC - the Humanities Arts Science Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. She is currently working on an AI Storytelling project funded through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and recently completed a SSHRC project exploring Surveillance, Humanistic Intelligence and phenomenological AR for next-generation headsets. She is also co-PI on a New Frontiers grant investigating “Immersive digital environments and indigenous knowledges: co-creation in virtual reality environments to advance artmaking, digital poetics and reconciliation.” She recently directed Fiery Sparks of Light, a volumetric XR project featuring iconic Canadian women poets (Atwood, Brossard, Tolmie, Lubrin). Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, 'Fiery Sparks of Light' is a CFC Media Lab and York University Immersive Storytelling Lab Co-Production in Partnership with Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.
Joseph Calibrates: the weird world of volumetric video (Video, 4:38)
Joseph Calibrates: the weird world of volumetric video
What does a depth camera ‘see’? This single-channel video piece consists of outtakes and documentation from a volumetric film shoot that took place at the Immersive Storytelling Lab at Cinespace Studios in 2021. While the shoot formally resulted in a finished volumetric XR work, the media generated during set up, breaks and while calibration ‘failed’ or was in process is deeply suggestive, poetic and weird. The stitched-together fragments offered here can be read as documentation, as anti-‘how-to’-video, and as meditation on a new form that, if you look deeply, may be more promising if understood as having much in common with early experimental animation traditions of the last century than the mimetic realism promised in this one. And what does volumetric encourage us to *do*? Dance, apparently.