http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/storytelling-in-the-virtual-age-at-fost-fest.html 2016-09-30 18:53:31 Storytelling in the Virtual Age at FoST Fest The first Future of StoryTelling Festival will offer participants virtual reality, immersive theater and other interactive experiences. === A cavernous, six-story space on Fifth Avenue and 109th Street will soon be temporarily transformed into a phantasmagoria of virtual reality, augmented reality, olfactory experiments, immersive theater and numerous mind-bending tricks. At the Future of StoryTelling Festival, or “We are creating a unique story world,” said Charles Melcher, the festival’s founder. “Our tag line is ‘All the world’s a stage, come be a player,’ and this is the ultimate expression of that sentiment.” FoST Fest, which will take place for the first time from Oct. 7 to 9 at FoST Summit, a TED-type conference for a hipper, new-media crowd, whisks about 500 “thought leaders” from industries including technology, advertising, music and media on a private ferry to Staten Island. There, at the “I love hearing the perspective of these many types of storytellers,” said Jeffrey Seller, the Broadway producer of hits like “Rent” and “Hamilton,” who has been a FoST Summit participant and will lead a seminar this year. “I remember hearing Every year, before the FoST Summit begins, organizers create “Everyone has already seen the film, so now we have an hour for a very high-level participatory seminar,” he added. “It is very different from sitting in a large, dark auditorium and listening passively to a lecture.” The FoST Summit also offers workshops, like a mime class given by members of Cirque du Soleil or a lesson on drone photography, as well as performances from groups like Lin Manuel Miranda’s improvised hip-hop musical comedy troupe, The FoST Summit also creates its own sort of metanarrative. Last year it was based on the The squad searched for the apparition and, as parting gifts, FoST Summit organizers distributed books that featured the participants inside sepia-tone antique-style photographs of the premises. “The books were tailored to their individual stories, with the concept that their ancestors had been brought to Snug Harbor long ago and knew the Woman in White, and their presence there had brought about her return,” Mr. Melcher said. Like many converts, Mr. Melcher, 52, began proselytizing about new media after reaching a crisis point. Until 2009, he had been a more-or-less traditional book publisher with a penchant for pushing the envelope, creating works like “The Pop-Up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns” and “Aqua Erotica,” But Mr. Melcher’s fortunes changed with the Great Recession. “The year 2009 was pivotal for me,” he said. “I went through a lot of soul searching and faced the possibility of having to shut my company down.” For guidance, Mr. Melcher turned to — what else? — books. In particular, Nicholas Carr’s “ “At the time, the book industry was enraptured with Nicholas Carr, but I figured that if Socrates could be so wrong, then maybe Nicholas Carr is wrong too,” Mr. Melcher said. “Maybe each was so formed by the culture they grew up in that they could only see the loss and not the gains that were coming.” In was in that moment, Mr. Melcher recalled, that he decided to stop mourning the questionable fate of book publishing. “I walked into my office and told my staff we are no longer in the book business,” he said. “We are now in the storytelling business.” With this new direction, Mr. Melcher’s first move was to help create an app for “ The success gave Mr. Melcher entree into a new echelon of technology leaders. “I had the chance to talk to all these different people, and everyone was discussing how to use technology as a publishing vehicle,” he said, “but I realized that none of these people were speaking to each other.” He decided to bring these disparate industries together, creating the first FoST Summit in 2012. His company, As for FoST Fest, the new public festival, Mr. Melcher decided to pursue it after seeing the success of FoST Fest is much larger, with more than 70 hands-on exhibits, as well as panel discussions and satellite events like performances from Punchdrunk’s immersive theater piece, The festival will close on Oct. 9 with a free community day for families that will take place outside the event space. The culmination will be a free concert by the rock band Mae (an acronym for Multisensory Aesthetic Experience), which will play music synced to a virtual reality video, viewable through Google cardboard devices. The performance “grew out of a collaboration with people we met through the FoST community,” said Jacob Marshall, the band’s drummer and a board member of FoST. The video, which can be “It merges indie rock and classical music and virtual reality and animation, something we could never have achieved by ourselves,” Mr. Marshall said. “It is art for the whole body. So what does music feel like, or taste like, or smell like? That’s what we hope to get across.”