29 May OpenDocLab Fellow Sandra Rodriguez Wins Prestigious Ars Electronica Award

Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Winners

Manic VR, a virtual reality documentary on mental illness and bipolar disorder produced and co-directed by MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow and CMSW Lecturer Sandra Rodriguez and directed by Kalina Bertin, has won the prestigious Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award for Best Computer Animation!

The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s most time-honored media arts competition. Winners are awarded the coveted Golden Nica statuette, prize money ranging up to € 10,000 per category and an opportunity to showcase their talents at the famed Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. This is the first time the prestigious Golden Nica has been awarded to a VR Documentary experience, which demonstrates the power of emergent tools in exploring new forms of nonfiction storytelling.

ManicVR introduces users to the complex world of bipolar disorder. The experience features the voices of Felicia and François Bertin, two siblings struggling with mental illness who have used their younger sister Kalina Bertin’s voicemail as their personal diary for over 3 years. Their remarkable audio commentary guides the user on a journey to decipher the cycling whirlwind of mania, psychosis, and depression. Through room-scale, real-time interaction and 3D worlds, the user discovers the destabilizing effects of bipolarity, including the heightening of senses and the untamed imagination that accompanies this complex condition. By giving the viewers insight into the real lived experiences of manic depression, this immersive experience aims to raise awareness and build empathy around the lived conditions of Felicia and François and their experience of bipolar disorder.

Image stills (Manic VR 2018)

The Ars Electronica Jury Statement for the Award reads, “Mental illness is too often a shameful and misunderstood topic that people do not want to talk about in public. It can be hard to understand if you have not personally experienced it. Although we were not without cynicism for the cliché of VR as an empathy machine, as several jury members had personal knowledge of friends or family with a bipolar disorder, we found it moving to be taken through the experiences of the filmmaker’s brother and sister and to hear them talk about it through first-hand accounts left as messages on her voicemail. Scenarios such as being trapped in a small room and then flying through the ceiling to touch the stars served as a metaphor for the rush of mania after a depressive episode. Above all, we applauded the creative team’s work ambition to use expanded animation technology to seek understanding for a debilitating condition.”

Aside from her work as a creative director and producer of interactive and immersive content, Sandra Rodriguez teaches MIT’s Hacking XR class (CMS.339/839 – Introduction to VR and Immersive Media Production) and curates the popular HackingXR Speaker Series, which invites a diversity of artists, producers and big names in the VR world, to share their experience and successes in using emergent tools to explore new story format. The class was first offered in 2017, in partnership with the Oculus NextGen program and the MIT Open Documentary Lab. The class became the first official credited class on VR and immersive media production taught at MIT.

“For me, the only way that emergent media can thrive, is by ensuring there is a healthy diversity in the stories that are created, produced, and distributed,” says Sandra Rodriguez.

Sandra Rodriguez, photo by ODL Fellow Danny Goldfield

“This means facilitating access and new forms of expression to students, researchers and people like Felicia and François that have a voice and unique perspective on the layers of our lived realities. This means technical challenges to overcome, but it also means co-creating and collaborating with different skills and voices. We really wanted to work closely with the siblings, get their perspective on the love and support they have for each other, and the impact of this complex disorder on their everyday life and relationship.”

Opening the conversation to research applications, Rodriguez and her team also collaborated with psychiatrists and scientists from the Douglas Mental Health Institute in Montreal, the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. Some of their findings were shared in a public event hosted by the MIT Open Documentary Lab on the Arts and Science of VR.

Join us in congratulating Sandra for this incredible win and her work on this important project!