Bear 71 drops you into Banff National Park as a data point. You're looking down at a dark, gridded wilderness where highways cut like scars and surveillance nodes pulse with quiet menace. A grizzly bear, tagged and tracked by Parks Canada, moves through this landscape while her voice narrates in clipped, dry sentences. The tension between the raw and the measured is immediate. It feels like watching something that should be free get logged.
The WebGL environment renders the park as a kind of living dashboard: topography abstracted into geometry, animal paths traced in real time, human infrastructure glowing with an almost bureaucratic indifference. The team at Jam3, working with the National Film Board of Canada, built something that holds documentary intent and spatial immersion in the same hand without dropping either. The bear's territory isn't described, it's navigated. You can move through it, pull back, zoom in, watch the data accumulate. The interface makes the argument that surveillance doesn't just observe, it reshapes what it touches.
This one's worth sitting with. Visit the experience, turn the sound on, and don't rush. The NFB has a long history of pushing interactive documentary into uncomfortable places, and Jam3's technical execution is on point: no gratuitous effects, just geometry and light doing exactly what the story needs.
