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For more than a decade, the Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program has been exploring the cutting edge of digital storytelling, from installation works to the birth of virtual reality.

The recent explosion of VR has meant Sundance programmers can now do what they couldn't do a few years ago: Say "no" more often.

"There's so much VR stuff coming in now that [our job has] become curatorial, and not just 'what is cool and what's new and we're going to show you it all,' " said festival director John Cooper.

New Frontier's slate features 20 VR and Augmented Reality experiences, and 11 installations, housed in three venues in Park City.

• The Claim Jumper building, at 573 Main St., will house seven immersive installations and two video works.

• The new VR Palace, on Swede Alley (where last year's tent-sized installation "The Treachery of Sanctuary" stood), will feature 15 VR experiences in a ticketed setting, so people can plan their time better.

• The VR Bar, open evenings in the space where the Music Cafe resides at 751 Main St., will have a line-up of mobile VR, as well as space to have a drink.

Three of the VR works are part of the festival's "New Climate" initiative, calling attention to environmental issues of melting icecaps, trees in the rainforest and vanishing coral reefs.

Poring through all the VR submissions nearly warped the senses of Sundance's programmers. "There was a few days where I watched a lot of VR, and I had a hard time driving home," Cooper said.

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival runs Jan. 19-29 in Park City, and at venues in Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort in Provo Canyon.

Here are the titles in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program, featuring live performances, installations and virtual-reality works. (All titles from the United States, unless otherwise noted.)

Films and performance:

"18 Black Girls/Boys Aged 1-18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines: $S in an edition of $97 Quadrillion" • A pair of performances by artist Terence Nance ("An Oversimplification of Her Beauty," SFF '12) , who Googles the phrases "one-year-old black boy" and "one-year-old black girl," ascending to the age 18, and letting Google's "popular searches" algorithm dictate what follows.

"Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?" • In this multimedia performance, documentarian Travis Wilkerson ("Who Killed Cock Robin?," SFF '05) shakes his own family tree, for a Southern Gothic murder mystery involving a forgotten killing by his white great-grandfather of a black man in Alabama.

"World Without End (No Reported Incidents)" • (U.S./U.K.) Filmmaker Jem Cohen films observations of the English town of Southend-on-Sea, finding both the mundane (birds, tides, streets) and the offbeat, including sensational Indian curries, a universe of hats, and hidden proto-punk music.

Installations:

A selection of single-channel works by the collective A Normal Working Day • (Switzerland) The artist collective A Normal Working Day — installation artist Zimoun and the dancer/choreographer team Delgado Fuchs (Marco Delgado and Nadine Fuchs) — create hypnotic projections, formed from the dancers' bodies, into "visual rabbit holes."

"Full Turn" • (Switzerland) Artist Benjamin Muzzin tries to bring a third dimension from the usual flat-screen frame, rotating two back-to-back tablets to form a unique animated 3-D sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees.

"Heartcorps: Riders of the Storyboard" • The New York artist known as Dandypunk creates the story of Particle, a two-dimensional light being, by having viewers walk through the pages of a giant, immersive comic book. The installation combines hand-drawn illustrations brought to life with projection-mapping technology, while Cirque du Soleil performers interact with animated characters. Collaborators Darin Basile and Jo Cattell also worked on the project.

"Heroes" • Artist Melissa Painter works with L.A.'s Helios Dance Theater for a story set in a silent-movie palace where the story comes off the screen, puts the viewer into his/her body and issuing a challenge to touch the experience.

"Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine" • You and a friend can explore a holographic brain, using the Meta 2 Augmented Reality Headset, in artist Daniella Segal's imaginative look at our brain's evolution in the use of tools from stone axes to super-computers.

"NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism" • A three-part examination of the roles black women play in technology, society and culture — using fashion, cosmetics and the economy of beauty as entry points to explore issues of privacy, transparency, identity and perception. Created by artists: Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal and Nitzan Bartov.

"Pleasant Places" • (U.K.) The artist Quayola, inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's Provence landscapes, creates a series of digital paintings — employing raw digital visualization, image manipulation and augmented reality — to reframe concepts of representation and perception.

"Synesthesia Suit: Rez Infinite and Crystal Vibes" • (Japan) Play the Playstation 4/PS VR game "Rez Infinite" in full multi-sensory mode, with a vibrating suit and VR goggles, to fully experience the candy-colored psychedelic Crystal Vibes universe. Developed by artists Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Ayahiko Sato and Kouta Minamizawa.

Virtual/Augmented Reality:

"Asteroids!" • Ride with aliens Mac and Cheez, and show them what really matters, in this work developed by Baobab's VR animation unit, led by "Madagascar" director Eric Darnell.

"Chasing Coral: The VR Experience" • In a work paired with his new film (playing in the U.S. Documentary competition), director Jeff Orlowski follows scuba diver and researcher Zackary Rago as he documents a 2016 coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef's Lizard Island. (Part of the festival's "New Climate" initiative.)

"Chocolate" • Artist Tyler Hurd sets Giraffage's song "Chocolate" into a VR music video, in a world of cute chrome kittens and a tribe dancing just for the viewer, their robot god.

"Dear Angelica" • Oculus' latest VR film, created by Saschka Unseld (with collaborators Angela Petrella, Wesley Allsbrook, Maxwell Planck and Ryan Thomas) stars Geena Davis and Mae Whitman in a tale about remembering lost loved ones.

"Hue" • A young man has lost the ability to see color, in this immersive interactive film by artist Nicole McDonald (with collaborator KC Austin), in which the participants' actions help reawaken the main character's sense of wonder and imagination.

"Life of Us" • Pioneering video artist Chris Milk (who created the tent-housed triptych "The Treachery of Sanctuary," SFF '16) works with digital media artist Aaron Koblin and musician Pharrell Williams for a "shared VR journey [that] tells the complete story of the evolution of life on Earth." Key collaborators are Megan Ellison, McKenzie Stubbert and Jona Dinges.

"Melting Ice" • Park City-based filmmaker Danfung Dennis ("In the Presence of Animals," SFF '16) takes viewers to see the consequences of climate change on Greenland's ice sheet — going under collapsing glaciers, next to raging rivers of ice melt, and seeing rising sea levels. (Part of the festival's "New Climate" initiative.)

"Mindshow" • Artists Gil Baron, Jonnie Ross and Adam Levin invite people to make VR cartoons with their body and voice, step into characters and act out the parts, and share the results in VR and on social media.

"Miyubi" • (Canada) Animators Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël (with collaborator Owen Burke) tell the VR story of a Japanese toy robot, given to a child in a fractured American family in 1982. Jeff Goldblum, P.J. Byrne and Emily Bergl lead the cast.

"Orbital Vanitas" • (Australia) Artist Shaun Gladwell and the VR collective Badfaith create a surreal sci-fi mystery that places viewers in Earth's orbit with an enigmatic form floating toward them.

"Out of Exile: Daniel's Story" • "Immersive journalist" Nonny de la Peña ("Hunger in Los Angeles," SFF '12; "Kiya," SFF '16) re-creates the case of Daniel Ashley Pierce, who in August 2014 was accosted by his family and kicked out of the house because they didn't approve of his sexuality. Pierce's recordings from that encounter are used in the work, which shines light on the struggles of LGBTQ youth.

"The Sky Is a Gap" • Multimedia artist Rachel Rossin uses a positionally tracked headset to depict a volcano-like explosion, inspired by Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point," in which the viewer can move time and space.

"Through You" • VR pioneer Saschka Unseld and filmmaker/dancer Lily Baldwin collaborate on this story of "love born, lived, lost, burned and seemingly gone forever — only to be found again." The cast features Joanna Kotze, Amari Cheatom and Marni Thomas Wood.

"Tree" • Artists Milica Zec and Winslow Porter ("Giant," SFF '16), with collaborators Aleksandar Protic and Jacob Kudsk Steensen, create a virtual experience where the participant becomes a tree in the rainforest — with one's body as the trunk and one's arms as branches, experiencing the tree's growth from seedling to full form. (Part of the festival's "New Climate" initiative.)

"What If" • This VR drama starts with a conflicted Christian man (Zachary Booth), experiencing self-loathing after a same-sex hookup, carrying out a mass shooting — then asks what would have happened if events had unfolded differently, and his partner (Mitchell Winter) had convinced him to face himself. Directed by Rosemarie Troche, with collaborator Bruce Allan.

"Zero Days VR"• The media studio Scatter expands on the work it did for Alex Gibney's documentary "Zero Days," to explore the secret mission of U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives to sabotage an Iranian nuclear facility. The VR experience, created by Yasmin Elayat and Elie Zananiri (with collaborators Mei-Ling Wong, Alexander Porter and James George, who all did animation for Gibney's movie), tells the story through the perspective of Stuxnet, a complex cyber weapon, and an NSA informant (played by actor Joanne Tucker).

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How to Sundance

Details on the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

When • Jan. 19-29

Where • Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort in Provo Canyon.

Passes and ticket packages • On sale now at sundance.org/festivals. Some are sold out, but many are still available.

Individual tickets • On sale to Utah residents, Jan. 11-13, then available to everyone. Tickets are $25 for the first half of the festival in Park City (Jan. 19-24), $20 for Salt Lake City screenings and for the second half in Park City (Jan. 25-29).

Information • sundance.org/festivals