Why IDFA DocLab 2025 is exploring the dark side of online technology

In its 19th edition, IDFA’s DocLab is taking a different and unusual tack. The theme of the programme that champions radical new immersive and interactive work is “logging off”. Much of the work grapples with the paradox that the internet has ensnared rather than liberated users.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, a lot of us were excited about the potential of what the internet could do and we now have a polarised society dominated by mental health issues triggered by phone addictions, isolation and anxiety,” says Caspar Sonnen, founder of Doc Lab and head of New Media at IDFA, of the dark side of online technology.

He cites new DocLab works such as Nathalie Lawhead’s interactive essay on techno-capitalism individualism in the age of the dead internet or Jeroen van Loon’s Life Needs Internet, for which the artist has spent 15 years collecting handwritten letters on how people globally interact with the internet on a daily basis.

“Reading those letters and seeing how somebody was talking about the internet in 2011 versus now is really an intense experience,” says Sonnen. “It makes you think what the fuck have we been doing as we ran toward this debilitating, convenience culture of having everything, everywhere on demand, right now, right here. We’ve kind of got stuck in a perpetual present and lost track of our past and our future.”

Shocks in store

As ever, some of the more offbeat work in DocLab may startle traditional IDFA attendees. For example, Anna Fries’ interactive installation Artificial Sex (Ep. 1 & 2), subverts familiar concepts regarding AI and online pornography. The artist has dived into what Sonnen calls the “tech bro” communities of “straight boys and men trying to create porn using AI”.

“What Fries discovered was because of the rudimentary nature of AI, a lot of this porn was very glitchy and, as a result, it began to become quite post-human queer porn unintentionally,” he says. “Genitals would morph into each other; you’d have buttocks, nipples and penises that would appear and disappear, and the result was quite intriguing and surprisingly queer and non-normative for Fries as an artist.”

Over time, these glitches will be ironed out and the result will be what Sonnen calls “quite boring violent, depressing, traditional porn,” but, for now, Fries has been able to turn the work inside out.

Further work in DocLab this year directly addresses issues, including the tragedy in Palestine and the Ukrainian war. For example, Khalil Ashawi’s Under The Same Sky gives audiences an immersive 360° experience of the Israeli occupation in Gaza while Karim Ben Khelifa’s installation In 36,000 Ways confronts visitors with a piece of shrapnel taken from the frontline in Ukraine.

This year also sees the launch of the DocLab Industry Track, through which the event is trying to strengthen connections with the mainstream film industry by fostering “collaboration and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange” between independent artists, creative technologists and cultural institutions.

Growing audience

The perennial question asked about virtual reality (VR) and immersive work is whether there is yet a viable business model for it.

“My knee-jerk answer, having been asked this question for 19 years, is to ask what the business model of artistic documentary is at the moment,” Sonnen argues. “It’s not a way to deflect the question or be cute.” Rather, he is simply noting that the economics of “more traditional media” are themselves in huge flux.

Besides, Sonnen adds, there are now examples of VR and immersive work reaching audiences beyond those who come to events like DocLab.

“For a very long time, festivals were de facto the physical distribution network because only festivals had the flexibility to work with these open, undefined formats.”

That, he says, is changing. Sonnen cites “the increasing number of venues opening up for immersive art”. These include the Nxt Museum in Amsterdam and the Dutch art house cinemas involved in pioneering VR distribution platform Nu: Reality, overseen by Babette Wijntjes, where works are experienced by 30 or so audience members together, wearing individual headsets but tuned into the same sound feed.

Meanwhile, more and more DocLab projects supported early on through the DocLab Forum are going on to be programmed at future IDFA editions or at other major festivals. Examples include 2025 selections Jan Rothuizen’s Tracing Colombia, a previous Forum pitch, and Handle With Care by Flemish theatre company Ontroerend Goed and Alexander Devriendt, which came out of last year’s Playrooms initiative, while Steye Hallema’s Ancestors, produced by the Smartphone Orchestra, is a premiere in DocLab, having also been presented in Venice Immersive in September.

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