Bear71 Project Reminds Us, We're Not the Only Ones Being Tracked Online
The Sundance Film Festival is known for avante garde, immersive film experiences, bringing together celebrities, artists and film craftsmen to this year’s Park City, Utah venue for ten days of networking, reviewing, critiquing and awarding excellence in cinema. A non-profit organization, Sundace seeks to highlight cinematic projects free of corporate influence.
This year, Sundance has embraced the web’s immersive nature in story telling, adding New Frontier, an interactive art center with a variety of projects Festival attendees and the greater online public can participate in.
One of the works on display at New Frontier is Bear 71, an online interactive documentary “recording the intersection of humans, nature and technology,” according to Bear 71’s recent press release. Created by artists Jeremy Mendes and LeAnne Allison, Bear 71 has an accompanying website introducing participants to a bear’s unique experience, as it seeks to exist near the continuing encroachment of “civilization.”
The storyline follows a bear that is caught in a forested area, tranquilized and captured by rangers, tagged and named Bear 71, then released for continued, life-long tracking by forest rangers and researchers.
According to Mendes and Allison, the Bear 71 project seeks to push its participants to question “how we see the world through the lens of technology,” with the hopes that their story will “blur the line between the wild world and the wired one.”
Bears such as Bear 71 are introduced as “refugees,” removed from their natural habitats, the prairie areas, and chased into the foothills as we have marked out areas desirable for summer homes or campgrounds. Because bears rely so heavily on their incredible sense of smell to survive, our people-based deodorants, colognes, campfires, insect sprays, garbage and cooked meals often wreak havoc for a bear.
From being hit by a car to getting shot by a spooked camper, the only way bears have been able to survive, according to Bear 71’s introductory video, is through one relatively new rule of existence: “Don’t do what comes naturally.”
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati