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1 2 Making A New Reality A toolkit for inclusive media futures By Kamal Sinclair and Jessica Clark Editor: Carrie McLaren Research: Katie Donnelly August 2020 Produced with support from: About This publication is based on the Making a New Reality research project authored by Kamal Sinclair with support from Ford Foundation JustFilms and supplemental support from Sundance Institute. The original research was published in 2017–2018 at makinganewreality.org. This project would not have been possible without the foundational work of Shari Frilot, the visionary behind the New Frontier Program at Sundance Institute. Since 2007, she curated thousands of innovative artists and storytellers and provided transformational support as they foraged new pathways to making meaning through the arts. Copyright: August 2020 CC BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial You are free to: Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material. Kamal and Jessica extend many thanks to: Carrie McLaren, for tenacious editing through the many phases of this project, and her research and writing support on topics related to DEI and AI. Lope Gutiérrez-Ruiz and the team at In-House International for beautiful designs. Sundance Institute and the New Frontier program’s extended community. The Guild of Future Architects, The Radical Imagination Project Media Team, and The Office of Sharon Chang (aka Dream Office of Imaginary Friends). Jae Hermann for proofreading. Those who worked on the previous version of the report: Associate Editors: Cara Mertes and Lisa Osborne Emerging Media Researchers: Lisa Osborne and Paisley Smith And special thanks to: Elizabeth Alexander, Margaret Morton, Michelle Satter, Keri Putnam, Jenny Toomey, Chi-Hui Yang, Tabitha Jackson, Ruthie Doyle, Andrew Catauro, Barbara Powell, Lynette Wallworth, Opeyemi Olukemi, Nico Daswani, Alex McDowell, Adam Huttler, Moira Griffin, Nicole Newnham-Malarkey, Jess Engel, Danielle Oexmann, Robert Sinclair, Sharon Chang, and all interviewees. The Making a New Reality series was serialized on Immerse.news, which Jessica edits. Many thanks to Ingrid Kopp and Sarah Wolozin of Immerse for their editorial input on the series. Making A New Reality A toolkit for inclusive media futures Ta b l e of Contents 6 8 Foreword I Now is the time for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media II Making a New Reality 26 Section 1: This is Our Chance to Reimagine Reality 28 Introduction 30 The Zeitgeist of Emerging Media 32 Breaking Boundaries, Making Connections 34 Defining Our Terms 38 Section 2: Critical Issues to Address 40 The High Stakes of Limited Inclusion 42 Challenging Bias 60 Rethinking Institutions 68 Larger Structural and Political Issues 84 Section 3: A Toolkit for Change 86 Personal Solutions 98 Institutional Change 118 Systemic Change 154 Appendices 156 Categories of Emerging Media 162 List of Interviewees 7 FOREWORD Making A New Reality Foreword: Now is the time for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media From late 2017 through mid-2018, Kamal Sinclair mapped the landscape for emerging media with her research on Making A New Reality (makinganewreality.org). In this foreword, Cara Mertes of the Ford Foundation, which funded this project, points out that advances in immersive narrative are reshaping the landscape of storytelling. Immersive media can bring people closer together across faith, race, class, gender, ability, and caste — or it can divide us. Mertes urges other funders to join Ford in supporting social justice initiatives for emerging media. 8 i Foreword By Cara Mertes, Project Director, Moving Image Strategies, International Programs, Ford Foundation “Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system. Emerging media cannot risk limited inclusion and suffer the same pitfalls of traditional media. The stakes are too high…” This is just one of the compelling insights noted by Kamal Sinclair, a leading emerging media expert. When I first commissioned her research for the influentialMaking a New Reality study, she was directing Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Lab Programs. Now, she’s the executive director of the Guild of Future Architects, an ambitious community of people incubating collaborations that prototype bold ideas about the future from an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Published from late 2017 through mid-2018, Making A New Reality (makinganewreality.org) mapped the landscape for emerging media, including immersive media such as virtual reality, augmented reality, 360 degree storytelling, hyper-reality, and more. With lead pieces on Immerse and supporting articles at makinganewreality.org, it also looked at the impact of artificial intel- ligence, ambient data, wired environments, and biomedia in the storytelling landscape. It is an unparalleled resource, culled from more than 100 interviews and research across the field. Sinclair addressed current debates in emerging media against a backdrop of changing business models, creative experimentation and millions of dollars of investment in both content creators and tech platforms such as Oculus and Magic Leap. She then offered recommendations for the interventions social justice philanthropy and other donors/investors can consider as tech-enabled creative and immersive storytelling catapults toward becoming the dominant story experience for Generation Z and beyond. Story and narrative are the code for humanity’s operating system. Emerging media cannot risk limited inclusion and suffer the same pitfalls of traditional media. The stakes are too high. Now Is the Time for Social Justice Philanthropy 10 Foreword to Engage with Emerging Media Making A New Reality is one of several exploratory initiatives I funded while directing Ford Foundation’s JustFilms, in order to build a foundation for emerging media practices. While JustFilms primarily supports creative nonfiction storytellers and the organizations and networks that enable their work, I thought it valuable as part of the portfolio to put a limited portion of the avail- able funding towards incubating related work that could potentially strengthen the overall impact of Ford Foundation’s moving image strategies. Mapping the emerging media landscape through a justice lens was one such effort. From 2017–2019, funding focused on three integrated components: • Research into and analysis of new forms in emerging media, their econo- mies, structures and blindspots, and recommendations for interventions by social justice philanthropy; • Access to experimentation for artists of color and socially engaged artists to develop new frameworks, languages, and agendas for the present and future of digital storytelling, and • Content funding for immersive story experiments rooted in and/or co-created by community members adversely impacted by inequality. Why is now the right moment for social justice philanthropy to engage with emerging media? The field is young, access for creators is extremely limited, and adoption rates for audiences are projected to soar, making immersive media highly influential in reinforcing narratives that undergird political and social realities. Emerging media is a site of convergence for all expressive forms, including film, journalism, and the broader arts, as well as being a potentially useful approach for Ford’s full suite of social justice strategies. Foreword 11 Now Is the Time for Social Justice Philanthropy to Engage with Emerging Media Immersive media in its infancy The advances in designing immersive narrative experiences are swiftly reshaping the landscape of storytelling at a level and pace unseen since the invention of the moving image. More than 120 years ago, cinematic technology emerged and developed into a remarkably intimate yet crowd-based narrative experience through the projection of images and sound on a large screen. This appealed to the imagination and emotions of viewers in ways that had not been achieved before. Cinema did not replace the previously dominant story technology, the book, but moving-image storytelling became ascendent in the 20th century. The screens have changed over time, as has the preeminence of the theatrical experience in favor of individual viewing on smaller screens. But the grammar of moving image storytelling has largely been codified. With the evolution of the digital age comes a new frontier of immersive expres- sion, already proving potent in ways that humans haven’t experienced before, according to research at Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab. And the development of its language, aesthetics and politics is still forming. It is early days now for immersive media. Though it is a moving image storytelling approach, emerging media can be seen as a related but distinct field of practice where cinema, journalism, sculpture, performance, visual arts, radio, music, and theater all can provide inspiration, and coding is the new architecture. The experience of VR or AR is still clunky, inelegant and messy — all hallmarks of its emergent status — but the field is evolving quickly, and the short-form experiences being created today are experiments searching for the theory and practice that will inform future generations of experience. One of the differences between film and immersive media is that film is external to the body, and the other seeks to trick the mind into thinking it is an internal- ized experience, more like a memory than a stimulus. Immersive media aims to transport your mind

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