TED Talks Daily - What’s next for immersive storytelling? | Mark Grimmer

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

"New possibilities for storytelling are emerging faster than at any other time in history," says film producer Mark Grimmer. With an immersive approach to art exhibitions, he shares several multidisciplinary projects — including a kaleidoscopic exhibit of David Bowie's world-changing career and a luminous, interactive show that brings visitors inside the paintings of David Hockney — and shows what's possible when ideas collide.

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I met today's speaker, production designer Mark Grimmer, in line for coffee or something like it at TED 2024 in Vancouver. He was so understated and humble that I had no idea he's the man behind ambitious art and multimedia experiences

like a David Bowie retrospective and an immersive David Hockney exhibit. In his talk, he goes behind the scenes on these productions and shares all the things he didn't share when we met in line at the TED conference. After the break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home.

As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting

for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. And now, our TED Talk of the day. A few years before his death in 2016, our small and, at the time, slightly scrappy design studio was charged with taking the world-changing body of work created by David Bowie and turning it into a museum exhibition

that would speak to newcomers and diehard fans alike. We'd never designed an exhibition before. We'd made stage shows, we'd worked in live music, we'd made films. But lacking any direct experience, we wondered what might happen if we took those genres that we did know and mashed them together into a single, immersive audience experience in a museum.

What might happen if forms and ideas were allowed to collide? Well, today, we are living in the age of immersion. But what does that really mean? Well, technological advances have always led to new forms of storytelling. Think about the amphitheater or the printing press or celluloid or the internet. But now, new possibilities for storytelling are emerging faster than at any other time in history.

And as they do, they provoke us as storytellers to experiment with new kinds of narrative experience, experiences that touch all the senses, that play with dramatic scale or heightened intimacy to help audiences feel more. Now, many of these experiences are supercharged by technology, but the very best of them aren't defined by it. The power of the story,

rather than the novelty of the hardware, remains the key. Throughout his career, David Bowie resisted calls to stick to one genre, or even one art form. He was the very embodiment of the collision of ideas. So in thinking about how to tell his story, it seemed fitting to look at his work through a kaleidoscopic lens,

constantly shifting, fractured, but always luminous. The first thing we did was to abandon any sense of a traditional linear narrative, and instead we collaged together a whirlwind of objects, costume, props, music and image to create a form that felt true to Bowie's magpie-like mentality, that celebrated the collision of ideas. Now, the exhibition was a kind of promenade through a cubist portrait of the artist, leading to a finale of live performance that we hoped might somehow capture some of that intangible magic

that truly great performers can cast on their audiences. Now, we couldn't literally recreate a Bowie gig, and we didn't really want to either. So instead, we set out to conjure the energy and emotion of one. Oh, no, love, you're not alone, Bowie sang in this, his last-ever performance as Ziggy Stardust. And 40 years later, for a few brief moments,

we weren't alone. It felt like he'd returned to Earth. Just turn on with me and you're not alone Just turn on with me and you're not alone Just give me your hand, cause you're wonderful From a star man of one kind to star men of another, in 2019, we were asked to help mark the 50th anniversary of one of humankind's greatest achievements, the Apollo 11 moon landings. But what format might allow us to evoke the scale

and the spectacle of the Apollo 11 mission, but also to immerse audiences in the barely believable story of the 400,000 women and men who'd helped put humans on the moon? And how, at a time of real division and pain, how might we bring people together in much the same way that the crowds had gathered to watch the rocket launch back in that red-hot summer of 1969? It had to be big.

It had to be audacious, bordering on the impossible, as the mission itself was. In conversation with our colleagues at the Smithsonian Museum, an outrageous idea emerged. The Washington Monument, the world's tallest obelisk, which stands at the foot of the mall in D.C., is, it turns out, almost the exact height of the Saturn V rocket. An act of Congress was required for the project to go ahead.

And permission from the White House didn't arrive until the day before rehearsals were due to start. But against all the odds, over two sweltering nights, 500,000 people gathered to watch as 100,000 tons of marble appeared to blast off into the night sky, captivated not only by the spectacle, but also by the story

of how, through the collision of science, technology, curiosity and courage, humankind had achieved the impossible, sending three men a quarter of a million miles to the moon and bringing them safely home again. Ten, nine, ignition sequence five, six, five, four, three, two, one. The collision of ideas behind shows like David Bowie Is and Go for the Moon allowed us to tell other people's stories in novel ways. But what might happen if one created a new kind of hybrid storytelling experience that had at its heart a true collaboration with a living, working artist? Might that kind of collision lead to a

new art form. And now, back to the episode. Well, the artist we dreamed of working with was David Hockney. So in 2019, I wrote him an email, and within a few weeks, we were together in this farmhouse in Normandy. And for a few days, we chatted. And he smoked. Boy, did he smoke. You know someone's a keen smoker

when they've got at least two cigarettes on the go at any one time. Sitting in his studio, we spent several hours leafing through the sumo-sized book of his paintings, and as we did, David talked about his work with the undimmed pride of a child showing their parents a crayon drawing. And he agreed that maybe there was something in this new form we were discussing, part exhibition, part theatre show, part documentary,

that might lead him to something interesting, something new. In 2020, in February, just before the pandemic lockdown, David joined us in a freezing cold warehouse on the outskirts of East London to look at some of his work projected at scale. And he was thrilled by the size, but also by the color, the brightness, the vivid hues. And as we flashed through a selection of his work projected 50 feet tall on the bare brick walls, David talked about his process, about the decisions he'd made in composing the paintings,

about how hard it is to make memorable pictures. And that was when the idea for the show emerged. What if we could recreate this moment? David Hockney, sitting next to you, talking in his warm, mischievous Yorkshire lilt about a life of making art, as his work unfolds before your eyes. When I arrived here, I couldn't drive at all.

And within a week, I'd got a driving license, I'd bought a car, I'd got a studio. I thought, oh, this is the place for me. The only voice that you hear in the hour-long immersive show is David's. But that might be David speaking in 1968 about the quality of the light in Los Angeles, or David in 2007 talking about the challenge of painting his giant Yorkshire landscapes. The young David in conversation with his older self. You're invited to listen,

as well as to watch, as images appear all around you. We worked closely with David for almost three years, during which time he came to think of the show as a work of art in its own right, by him. It was a Hockney. Together, we'd found an approach that allowed him to reach new audiences, to share his process in new ways and to give people unparalleled access to his creative process.

In the show, 30 projectors and a cutting-edge sound system fill the space with image and sound, and hundreds of David's paintings, drawings, sketches, operatic set designs and photographic works are woven together with voiceover, music and sound design to create a guided tour led by the artist himself through six decades spent looking closely at the world and enjoying every moment of it.

Oh, wow. I've painted for 60 years now. I'm still painting. And I'm still enjoying it enormously. Yes. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. So what does the future of immersive entertainment look like? Is it VR?

AR? XR? AI? The truth is that none of us know. But those technologies that might otherwise threaten to isolate us can actually be harnessed to bring us together, and not just as audience members, but also as creators.

Because making immersive work calls for a richly multidisciplinary approach, one that creates the conditions necessary for the collision of ideas to take place, an approach in which architects and animators, directors and designers, writers and technologists are brought together as if in a kind of cultural large hadron collider, a machine in which multiple disciplines can be accelerated towards one another in the hope that the resulting collision might release something new, something energetic,

something that has the power to change the direction of the bodies involved. Thank you. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like

the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. That was Mark Grimmer at TED 2024. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.

I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? Today, TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.