We’re standing in the burned out shell of a living room. The picture frames on the walls are charred, with the family photos inside destroyed. I can’t really make out who or what used to be in these pictures, it’s just too hard. There’s also a large wooden credenza behind me and a yellow arm chair next to me, both damaged by fire.
Everything smells like smoke.
Also in the room, I see a slide projector and a large table with four square slots cut into it. Each slot is marked with a symbol: a heart, a hand, an ear, and a brain. The four squares cut into the table glow softly in the darkness.
I notice the projector has a message for us. I read it aloud to my companions.
It tells us to find four special objects, which are placed somewhere in this room. We explore the room by flashlight, looking for them. It takes us a moment to find them all: a retro-looking walkie-talkie, a rotary phone, a film camera with no lens, and a cassette tape still in its plastic case.
They’ve all been marked by flames.
I gingerly place the cassette onto one of the slots on the table. The glowing square changes color and the 35mm slide projector suddenly shudders to life. A gentle, ambient soundtrack begins to play.
A few moments later, a short film appears. We listen to the voices of two men, talking, over a photo slideshow.
And they’re talking about a fire.
In 1983, Lance Weiler’s family van mysteriously burst into flames on vacation. Eleven months later, his family home would burn to the ground. That suspicious fire somehow burned on two floors at the same time: both upstairs and downstairs. Lance began to suspect that his enigmatic father, Douglas Weiler, a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer, might have been involved in the two mysterious blazes from his childhood. And in the months leading up to his father’s death from stage 4 colon cancer, Lance began to ask questions — lots of questions — and recorded his in-depth conversations with his father, as they discussed topics previously never spoken about. These interview recordings have become the basis of the immersive experience Where There’s Smoke, in addition to an interactive set and the thousands of 35mm slides that Lance discovered after his father passed. (His late father was a key collaborator on the project up until his death last year, but never got a chance to see the final product.)
What exactly is Where There’s Smoke? It’s hard to describe. Imagine an escape room where there’s no “escape” or, really, any puzzles to solve. Imagine an immersive theatre experience without any actors, but with real-life people who feel as if they’re actually there, even if you only hear their voices. And imagine a documentary podcast like Serial, but one you can step inside of, one where you can visit that world in the flesh. This odd intersection is where you’ll find the powerful, compelling Where There’s Smoke. After showcasing a work-in-progress at Sheffield Doc Fest and the Future of Storytelling in 2018, Where There’s Smoke is having its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival as part of the 2019 Immersive program. But there are no VR headsets or high-tech wearables here; all the technology is invisible, magical. And the participants of Where There’s Smoke travel to find the experience off-site, occupying an unused 1,400 square foot storefront on Canal Street thanks to Wallplay’s OnCanal arts initiative.
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During the Where There’s Smoke experience, players examine artifacts left by Lance’s father after he died. They also meditate on what special object they might save during a house fire (assuming their pets and family were safe), with the restriction that this object can’t be digital. This thought exercise serves to not only bring the participants into Lance’s world but also to bring the participants closer to gether. One of my group members said she would save a scrapbook full of memories. Another shared a story about a necklace she received from her great-grandmother as a small child before moving to the United States from Ukraine; her great-grandmother died the following year. It’s a bit strange and surreal to share stories of your most prized possessions with complete strangers, to be so vulnerable with people you don’t necessarily know. But it makes total sense, once you realize the significance of the walkie-talkie, the rotary phone, the camera, and the cassette tape. These four objects happen to be the real-life artifacts that survived the fire during Lance’s youth. And now they’re a part of our experience.
The core of the experience works like this: attendees unlock fragments of non-linear narrative through placing different combinations of the walkie-talkie, the rotary phone, the camera, and the cassette tape on the light table. The fragments they discover are short movie clips; they might be about Lance and his father, or his father’s obsession with fire, or his father’s battle with cancer, or other topics. But it is not possible to go through the experience and see all the possible fragments. And that’s not the point; each foursome generates their own experience in Where There’s Smoke. Some groups may not even trigger the chapters related to the potential arson. They might view only the fragments related to cancer or about other family members. Some groups may walk away with completely differing interpretations of what really happened, based upon the clips they were exposed to and the order they saw them in.
Lance Weiler has been working in the immersive space for many years now, well before the term was trendy, as the driving force behind projects like Frankenstein AI, Sherlock Homes and the Internet of Things, Body/Mind/Change, and more. In Where There’s Smoke, he’s created his most personal, haunting piece yet: a touching piece about a complicated man with complicated relationships, created in the months before his death. Much like the smell of smoke lingers on after a fire is extinguished, Where There’s Smoke clings to the memory in the same way. It refuses to be forgotten. The piece draws attendees into reflecting on their own experiences with loss, memory, and grief, through interacting with objects that survived a fire. And they must consider the artifacts in their own lives, and what memories are imbued in those objects, as well as what it would feel like if those objects were lost in a fire. It’s one of the most tactile and embodied experiences at this year’s Tribeca Virtual Arcade, and dare I say, one of the best ones as well.
So: did Lance’s father burn down their house? Did he set their van on fire? Lance knows there are no easy answers here; in fact, many of the participants’ questions about the mystery of these fires will go unanswered, just as Lance’s own questions have gone unanswered. Where There’s Smoke is full of loose ends. There’s no way to see all of the material in the piece, just as there’s no way to fully know another person in totality. We’ll never know if Lance’s dad set those fires. Just as a lot of people will never know the full truth about their own parents.
As Lance says, “All families have secrets. Skeletons in the closet. Things left unsaid.”
Where There’s Smoke proves there is, indeed, a strange sort of beauty in that.
Where There’s Smoke runs April 26 — May 4 as part of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Immersive Program. Tickets are sold out.
A tour is expected to happen in 2019 — 2020, as the installation goes to galleries, museums, hospitals, and conferences around the world.
Find out more about Where There’s Smoke on this week’s NoPro podcast.
View all of our Tribeca Immersive 2019 coverage.
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