most pursuits are paradoxical! meet Virtual Gap Year

client/s ✴︎ IAM Weekend 19

Virtual Gap Year is a collaboration with IAM exploring IAM Weekend 2019’s theme: The Quantumness of Archipelagos.

we collaborated with a global group of digital artists who ideated the weekend's key topics — Decolonising Learning, Decelerating Ecosystems, Debriefing Imagination, Reloading the Futures of the internet, Browsing the ethics of design, foresight and AI — in the form of islands.

this was the seed for the video's meta-narrative, and we built on this by subverting Gap Year culture, framing IAM Weekend as the ultimate destination for a truth-seeking sabbatical.

screened at IAM Weekend 19 (Barcelona), Google Arts + Culture (London) and Semi Permanent (Sydney).

creative direction, thinking, concept + script ✴︎ pitch studios x pitch portal
artists ✴︎ Lorna Pittaway, Smiskoackerman, Twomuch Studio, Polina Zinziver
sound design ✴︎ Jennifer Loveless 
video editor ✴︎ Marina Maekawa
creative production ✴︎ Nirmala Shome 

press
It’s Nice That, March 2019
LS:N Global, March 2019

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footnotes
we chose to use the idea of a ‘virtual gap year’ as a meta-narrative for the project, presenting IAM Weekend’s key themes through the lens of an island-hopping, sun-chasing sabbatical.

although gap years are often viewed (by those fortunate enough) as a tool to reimagine our individual futures, they originated in the 1960s as a way of fostering cultural understanding. We thought this was an interesting idea to play with.