Lance Weiler’s Where There’s Smoke is an immersive experience that he used to process his grief from losing his father, who was a volunteer firefighter and amateur photographer who would take pictures of fires and take Lance with him on these excursions. Weiler always wondered if his father had more involvement in any of these fires than merely observing and documenting them, and there was always some ambiguity in getting to the bottom of this question. As he says in his synopsis “Weiler unravels the secrets of his enigmatic father… and two devastating fires that struck the Weiler family in the early 1980s. In the final months of his battle with colon cancer, his father invites Lance to interview him, and these conversations reignite 30 years of wondering… were those fires more than tragic accidents?”

The previous episode featured an interview with Weiler during his world premiere of the piece at Tribeca Immersive in 2019, and he has had three other major iterations of the project since then. It showed at IDFA DocLab in 2020 during the pandemic as a virtual grieving ritual within a Miro board, and then translated into a physical installation in New Jersey, and just recently Weiler showed an interactive and generative cinematic version at Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow’s (PAM CUT) new Tomorrow Theater space in November 2023.

I had a chance to catch up Weiler just after his prototyping session at PAM CUT to catch up on how the piece has evolved over the past four and a half years of constant iteration.

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