Sundance Institute executives announced on December 5 that the festival will feature new work from artist Doug Aitken as well as Klip Collective’s external projections on the Egyptian Theatre.

An expanded New Frontier will showcase installations, performance, transmedia and panel discussion section. Most of the installations will be housed at a new, 5,000-square-foot location at the Gateway in Park City adjacent to Main Street.

Doug Aitken’s The Source (Evolving) will occur at a nearby location along Main Street.

“As human and machine, biological and media experiences blur and hybridise, the distinctions between them are also becoming irrelevant,” said curator of the exhibition and Sundance Film Festival senior programmer Shari Frilot.

“The digital and the organic integrally constitute a new primordial pool. What does creativity and storytelling look like if we revel in this new way of being?”

“This year’s expanded New Frontier allows artists to continue pushing the boundaries in telling their stories,” said Sundance Institute president and founder Robert Redford. “In addition, this expanded work helps us mark the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival.”

Premieres and Documentary Premieres will be announced on December 9 and the Sundance shorts will be unveiled on December 10.

The festival takes place January 16-26 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

All synopses provided by Sundance.

The Source (Evolving), US premiere
Director: Doug AitkenThe Source (Evolving) is a series of filmed conversations about creativity in the 21st Century in which Aitken conducts short candid conversations with groundbreaking pioneers in different artistic disciplines.

The piece creates a fast and rhythmic kaleidoscope of dialogues with the creative individuals who are shaping modern culture. The conversations are grounded by two questions: where does the creative idea start, and what is the journey to the finished creation?

The Source (Evolving) is filmed on location in unique and diverse destinations throughout the world and premiered at the Tate Liverpool last year.

The Source (Evolving) will be housed in the Pavilion, a new 2,000-square-feet, stand-alone, circular structure to be custom-built by the festival in a location adjacent to Park City’s Main Street.

The architecture was created in collaboration with David Adjaye. Six-channel video projections of The Source (Evolving) span the entire width of the structure’s interior and are also visible from the outside, wrapping the structure’s exterior.

For the festival, Aitken will develop an accompanying interactive website for The Source (Evolving). The website will connect audiences not attending the festival with the work and serve as a living archive that Aitken will continue to populate with interviews in the years to come. Currently, the interviewees include William Eggleston, Ryan Trecartin, Thomas Demand, Richard Phillips, Lucky Dragons, Paolo Soleri, Jack Pierson, James Murphy, Stephen Shore, Jacques Herzog, Philippe Parreno, Liz Diller, Jack White, Mike Kelley, Devendra Banhart, Beck, David Adjaye, Tilda Swinton, Alice Waters, Aaron Koblin, Liz Glynn, Theaster Gates, and James Turrell.

The Source (Evolving) examines the entire process of creation, not just the finished result, and speaking directly with the creators whose work has the ability to steer culture in a significant way, The Source (Evolving) takes viewers on a fast-moving road trip through the modern landscape of creativity,” said Aitken.

Aitken’s work was last featured at the Sundance Film Festival in the 2008 edition of New Frontier, where he presented a special single-channel version of Sleepwalkers, his MoMA installation that transformed an entire block of Manhattan into an expansive cinematic experience as he covered the museum’s exteriors walls with projections.

The US premiere of The Source (Evolving) at the Festival is made possible by a contribution from The Maurice Marciano Family Foundation.

Exterior projections, Egyptian Theatre
Klip Collective
A showcase of the Festival’s 30-year legacy will be told through a pre-roll trailer showing 3D-mapped projections of clips from iconic festival films on the façade of Park City’s Egyptian Theatre. Featured film clips include Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Little Miss Sunshine and Beasts Of The Southern Wild.

For its third year as a participant at the Festival, Klip Collective will premiere its new 3D video-mapped narrative, What’s He Projecting In There, an independent-style salute to the history of cinema on the exterior of the Egyptian Theatre as part of the festival’s New Frontier exhibition.

Clouds
Artists: James George, Jonathan Minard
Assembled from code and stunning 3-D-scanned conversations, Clouds is a cutting-edge interactive documentary that features the emerging generation of artists and hackers who are creating tools for poetic and socially engaged experiments in technology.

Digital Diaspora Family Reunion

Artist: Thomas Allen Harris
The transmedia companion to the feature documentary, Through A Lens DarklyDigital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) re-imagines the social network the the building of One World-One Family Album, a database of family photographs. Audiences are invited to upload images to Instagram at #DDFRtv, or bring them to New Frontier to participate in a special LIVE event.

EVE: Valkyrie
Artists: CCP Games
In one of the most anticipated video-game releases of 2014, award-winning Icelandic independent-game developer CCP Games presents EVE: Valkyrie – a virtual-reality experience like no other. In this special preview, audiences can put on an Oculus Rift headset, take a seat inside the cockpit of a spaceship, and enter a 360-degree-surround dogfight against enemy invaders.

I Love Your Work
Artist: Jonathan Harris
I Love Your Work is a beautifully designed interactive documentary by Jonathan Harris about the private lives of nine women who make lesbian porn. It consists of more than two thousand 10-second video clips, taken at five-minute intervals over 10 consecutive days – around six hours of footage.
Cast: Dylan Ryan, Jincey Lumpkin, Ela Darling, Ryan Keely.

I Want You To Want Me
Artists: Jonathan Harris, Sep Kamvar
An alluring work of data visualisation, this interactive instalation explores the world of online dating. A giant touch screen displays a sky filled with balloons containing silhouettes, each one representing a real person’s dating profile. Viewers can touch the balloons to learn personal information about the person inside and rearrange them to view things like top turn-ons, most popular first dates, and people’s biggest desires.

The Measure Of All Things
Artists: Sam Green, yMusic
The Measure Of All Things is a live documentary featuring a series of portraits of record-holding people, places, and things. Inspired loosely by the Guinness Book Of Records, Academy Award-nominated film-maker Sam Green and yMusic create a poem about fate, time, and the contours of the human experience.

Mesocosm
Artist: Marina Zurkow
Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) and Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK) are two parts of a series of animated landscapes that change over time in response to software-driven data inputs. Individual hand-drawn animated elements are dynamically choreographed according to algorithms that dictate constraints in real time: one day takes 24 minutes to elapse; a year takes 144 hours.

My 52 Tuesdays
Artists: Sophie Hyde, Sam Haren, Dan Koerner
Picture an interactive photo booth where you get more than just your printed picture. It’s a year-long, participatory project accessed via smartphones with a series of questions designed to ‘’tune in” to your life. Like its companion film, 52 Tuesdays, this work explores themes of desire, responsibility, and transformation. How much are you willing to share?
Cast: Tilda Cobham-Hervey.

Not Eye
Artist: Lauren Moffatt
Not Eye is an immersive, 3-D stereoscopic experience that invites you to meet a woman who can no longer take the constant violation of being looked at and spied on every day of her life by the devices that populate the modern landscape. She is so tormented that she decides to take action, creating a helmet designed not only to defend herself but also to strike back.
Cast: Danièle Hennebelle, Julien Bucci.

Reifying Desire Anthology
Artist: Jacolby Satterwhite
Comprised of live performance, custom-made wallpaper, and six CGI-animated and rotoscoped videos, Reifying Desire Anthology is a fantasy hyperlink that transcends brick and mortar, as well as electronic and biological realms, to source a universe where sexuality runs hungry and wild through the psycho-bioelectric matrix seeking transformation and liberation.
Cast: Jacolby Satterwhite, Antonio Biaggi.

Sound + Vision
Artists: Chris Milk, Beck
When Beck reimagined David Bowie’s 1977 single Sound And Vision, Chris Milk set out to recreate its experience – literally its sound and vision – for both the live concert and its recording. He captured the performance using newly patented technologies like full spherical video and 360-degree binaural audio. This is the first live-action VR film designed for the Oculus Rift.
Cast: Beck.

Street
Artist: James Nares
Street employs a high-speed Phantom Flex HD camera to slow down the densely busy streets of New York City and create this mesmerising video installation. Hot dog vendors, children on scooters, lovers, fighters, pigeons, bike riders, traffic cops, even a flicked cigarette butt sailing onto the curb – all acquire an ethereal dimension enhanced by cofounder of Sonic Youth Thurston Moore’s evocative, acoustic 12-string guitar soundtrack.

This World Made Itself; Myth And Infrastructure; Dreams Of Lucid Living
Artist: Miwa Matreyek
In a body of work that spans six years, Miwa Matreyek will present three of her multimedia solo live performance pieces featuring projected animation and her body, traversing oceanscapes, cityscapes, and dreamscapes.
Cast: Miwa Matreyek

NEW FRONTIER FILMS

The Better Angels (US)
Director: AJ Edwards
Set in the harsh wilderness of Indiana, this is the story of Abraham Lincoln’s youth. It tells of the hardships that shaped him, the tragedy that marked him forever, and the two women who guided him to immortality.
Cast: Jason Clarke, Diane Kruger, Brit Marling, Wes Bentley.

The Girl from Nagasaki (Germany-US-Japan-Italy)
Director: Michel Comte
This 3D feature film production of the classic Puccini opera Madame Butterfly is directed by world-renowned photographer Michel Comte. It’s a modern-day tale that starts with the young madame emerging from the ashes of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki.
Cast: Christopher Lee, Sasha Alexander, Michael Wincott, Michael Nyqvist, Robert Evans, Polina Semionova.
International premiere

HITRECORD ON TV (US)
Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
HITRECORD ON TV is a new kind of variety show with host Joseph Gordon-Levitt directing a global online community of artists as they create short films, music, animation, and more. Anybody with an internet connection is invited to contribute, and each episode focuses on a different theme.

Living Stars (Argentina)
Directors: Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat
Argentinians open their homes to the public and perform dance numbers they normally only do alone, in front of a mirror. The directors portray them in their houses, with improvised sets, revealing a collection of urban curiosities.

Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People (US)
Director: Thomas Allen Harris
Through A Lens Darkly is an epic film that moves poetically between the present and the past through the work of contemporary photographers and artists. Their pictures and stories seek to reconcile legacies of pride and shame while giving a voice to images long suppressed, forgotten, or hidden from sight.