April 15, 2024

2022 list of 50+ Immersive Things that mix storytelling, performance, play, design & code

2022 list of 50+ Immersive Things that mix storytelling, performance, play, design & code

A location-based AR concert featuring Gorillaz is happening via a phone app.

The following list was compiled by storytellers from around the globe. Special thanks to everyone who took the time to share the immersive things that stood out in 2022.

ANYTHING MISSING? Please feel free to share anything that we may have missed.

The following is in no particular order

Theater of the Mind — David Byrne & Mala Gaonkar

“Fake grass, funerals, drunk goggles and virtual reality headsets are a few of the things theater-goers can expect to see when they step into David Byrne’s new immersive production.

Best known as the frontman of the Talking Heads, Byrne debuted Theater of the Mind this week at Denver’s Center for the Performing Arts’ Off Center. During the 75-minute play, which he co-created with writer Mala Gaonkar, audiences embark on a journey through seven rooms inside a 15,000-square-foot industrial space. Each room represents a stage of Byrne’s life.” — Smithsonian Magazine

Read More

Project Site

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me — Taylor McCue

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is presented as a semi-autobiographical recount of the author’s experience as a trans woman in the sex trade. While it doesn’t pull any punches, it’s not a pornographic game. At the same time, it goes out of its way to show what happened in a way that’s free of judgment and blame. It presents itself as a perspective on these particular traumatic events.” — Destructoid

Read More

Project site

Speed of Dark — Particle Ink

“Would you believe that there’s a dimension that exists halfway between our 3D world and the 2D world inhabited by illustrated and animated characters?

After a run through Particle Ink: Speed of Dark, you will.

The story of Speed of Dark is archetypal enough: a creator and his wife, grieving over a loss, find their world turned upside down after he finds a magical book and uses a spell to try and fix things. It doesn’t go as planned, and soon the forces he’s unleashed take over their home. It takes a group effort, between the human characters, the audience, a puppet, and the animated figures known as Lumens to bring balance back between the forces of light and darkness both without and within.” — No Proscenium

Read More

Project site

The Burnt City — Punchdrunk

“t is immediately clear that Punchdrunk’s new immersive show is a massive endeavour. It resembles a gallery of antiquities on arrival: there are snaking queues, phased entrances for crowd control and a row of ancient vases, libation bowls and headdresses in glass displays.

The promenade show, a modern enactment of life in the ancient fallen city of Troy, is arranged across three Grade II-listed buildings, which comprise the company’s new home, and 54 performers portray 28 characters.

We are instructed to don beaked masks before entering a cavernous maze of rooms, corridors and floors. Walking whichever way we choose, we come across performers who dance in what seem like ritualistic ways; others cry, writhe, or hold their heads in their hands, all playing Trojans mourning their losses, it seems.” — The Guardian

Read More

Project site

Skinny Ape — Gorillaz & Google

A location-based AR concert featuring Gorillaz is happening via a phone app.

“The concert uses a new location-based Google AR tool announced at the company’s developer conference earlier this year, which leans on Google Maps data and GPS coordinates to overlay persistent AR into the real world. The actual location-based experience is meant to blend parts of the actual landscape into the performance, in what sounds a bit like a real-life version of Travis Scott’s Fortnite performance a few years back.” — CNET

Read More

Project details

Unlearning Language — Lauren McCarthy & Kyle McDonald

“What does language mean to us? As AI generated text proliferates and we are constantly detected and archived, can we imagine a future beyond persistent monitoring? Unlearning Language is an interactive installation and performance that uses machine learning to provoke us to find new understandings of language, undetectable to algorithms.” — Lauren McCarthy site

Project site

Headspace — Keunwook Kim & Hyundai

“This project 〈headspace〉 is a wearable device that moves or operates in response to information read by vision sensors. Audiences can visit virtual stores where they can see displayed head space devices in the form of headgear and experience them and watch their promotional videos at the exhibition. This project began with questions about tools. We use a lot of tools to maintain our lives. Conversely, life is changed by these tools. Some people passively approach tools to avoid having them define their lives while others actively use tools for convenience in life, while others find new relationships through various approaches and uses of tools. Presently, the tool is no longer a passive object, but a subject of expression. Therefore, 〈headspace〉 asks questions about the present as well as the life to come, which coexist through various devices and machines. How do we express and communicate our emotions and thoughts? How are the objects and tools around us coordinating with us? And how do we accept and understand this? What potential can we uncover?” — project site

Read More

Gerda: A Flame in Winter — Don’t Nod

“At the start of Gerda: A Flame In Winter, you’ll lose friendship points with your dad because you’re annoyed that he’s joined the Nazi Party. Gamifying war is bizarre at the best of times, but Gerda throws you into the deep end, and this makes for an uncomfortable start to a game that will get much darker than this.

There’s nothing offensive with what’s taking place, but it’s hard to see such a conversation played out so casually, let alone turned into a game for our consumption. Too many conflicts already have been. Perhaps we’re all numb to the countless depictions of war in first-person shooters, and how many action games have us shoot at brown people as a white protagonist invading their country, but approaching war through the calmness of an RPG is a tonal dissonance in and of itself.” — The Gamer

Read More

Project Site

Bottom of the Ocean

“A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacled rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semifinished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now, in a town that doesn’t lack for weird. How odd is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, OK, fake baby octopuses) in its communal bathroom.

“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, following “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a newish company, called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater.” — New York Times

Read More

Project site

Kindred — Bambou Kenneth, Electric Skies

“After the success of GLIMPSE, the British studio Electric Skies continues its exploration of human and sensitive stories with KINDRED — a directorial debut in the form of a personal narrative, closer to a documentary. Meeting with its director, Bambou Kenneth.” — XRMust

Read More

Project site

Okawari — Landia Egal, Amaury La Burthe

“Four users are invited to sit at one of the tables in the Okawari restaurant (both physical and virtual) to discover a wide variety of dishes, sides and drinks from the Japanese izakaya gastronomy. The purpose of the experience stems directly from the interactions of the users during their meal. Each experience will be totally unique and will depend on the participants’ choices. Telling you more would influence the raison d’être of the experience… but we can’t wait to hear your reactions!” — Venice Film Festival site

Read More

Immortality — Sam Barlow

Immortality is where Barlow’s pioneering experiments (here supported by numerous collaborators) find their ideal form. This is an irresistible plunge into a Hollywood mystery, in which you browse through reels of footage from three unreleased films made between 1969 and 1999 that all star the apparently unageing model turned actor Marissa Marcel. This Monroe-like starlet, at once wildly flirtatious and ineffably sad, has disappeared. Can you discover how and why, using only the clues found in and around her work?” — The Guardian

Read More

Project site

This is Not a Ceremony — Ahnahktsipiitaa

“Niitsitapi artist Ahnahktsipiitaa (Colin Van Loon) immerses audiences in an exercise of oral storytelling in This Is Not a Ceremony. This virtual reality work from the NFB invites audiences to witness a healing process and observe firsthand the lives affected by colonialism. Viewed through a headset, The Is Not a Ceremony lets a user plant their feet in a fire as a spirit buffalo gallops around the arena. A dark night sky shines with the stars as the flames of the campfire flicker at one’s feet. Intricate visuals, particularly the dazzling dimensions of the spirit buffalo, offer an immediate hook. However, as the project yields to sobering images, This Is Not a Ceremony lets reality sink in.” — POV Magazine

Read More

Project site

Return at Night — Yiwen Hsu, NTUA Experimental Game Lab

“Return at Night” is a student graduation project made at National Taiwan University of Arts Department of Multimedia Animation Arts, with a team of one student. “Return at Night” is a virtual reality horror game, the content of the game is the fear of women returning home alone at night.” — creator Yiwen Hsu’s description of the game

Student project no site

You’re Only Human. Don’t Let That Stop You From Advancing Your Career. — The Pudding

“Our online selves are not always our real selves, especially when work is involved. Whether we’re selecting the right headshot for LinkedIn or attempting to sound clever to peers on Twitter, everything that’s already confusing and shifty about internet identity is buttoned up in a suit that doesn’t quite fit. And the worst part is that as you attempt to score that next job, the recruiter you’re trying to impress might just be an automated piece of software, using an algorithm to sort your awkward suit-self onto a spreadsheet.

But what if there were a way to fight back — at LinkedIn culture, at recruiting bots, at the pressure to be a so-called thought leader? That’s the vision of Deepwork by a publication called The Pudding. It’s a satirical but also functional website that offers working AI tools that will do anything from write a CV to generate a headshot to populate your Twitter feed with witticisms.” — Fast Company

Read More

Project site

Plastisapiens — Miri Chekhanovich & Édith Jorisch with DPT

“Take a deep breath in. Out. In. Out. Now relax and contemplate a world where plastic is completely integrated with the environment. Plastisapiens is a meditative virtual reality experience that allows us to consider this world with curiosity, playfulness and even a sense of wonder. Rooted in modern scientific research, the narrative slowly gives way to a strangely beautiful and ironic speculative work of eco-fiction, a journey through time, evolution and imagined futures. By interacting with organisms around us, then watching as our virtual, organic selves merge with plastic, the experience creates a safe space to empathize with a material that binds us all. As we are gently guided through an awe-inspiring universe of hybrid bodies, we are ultimately left to ponder how the interchanging relationship between humans and the environment transforms our identity, right down to our DNA.” — NFB

Read More

Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration — Aconite

“Let’s part the veil. The Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration is the setting, and title, of a … thing, created by game company Aconite, helmed by Nadya Lev and Star St.Germain.

I say “thing” because it’s not clear how best to describe what the pair have made. Calling it a video game summons up all the wrong impressions, but it’s hardly an experience or a toy, either. A larp (live-action roleplay) might be closer if it was live action, but it’s not: BMA is played in a Discord channel, the gamer-focused chat app standing in for the Bureau’s internal slack. St.Germain calls it a “Discord game”, which works well enough.” — Kopjes Kattenoppas

Read More

Project site

Privacy Techtonics — Candice Jacobs with Dr. Phillipa Williams & Dr. Lipika Kamra

An immersive exhibition exploring the powerful relationship between data, technology and people to make us think more about how we live in an increasingly digital world. Artists whose work will be showcased at the exhibition include Ben Grosser, Forensic Architecture, James Bridle, Joey Holder, Libby Heaney, Tara Kelton and Yuri Pattison.

  • ‘Digital Violence’: A film by Turner Prize nominees Forensic Architecture sharing the stories of human rights activists whose privacy has been invaded, narrated by famous whistleblower Edward Snowden
  • ‘Platform Sweet Talk’: An image series by Ben Grosser that reveals how the structure of social media notifications influences our behaviour, using our data against us to maximise engagement
  • ‘1014’: A video tour by Yuri Pattison showing Room 1014 in Hong Kong’s Mira hotel, where Edward Snowden was staying after leaving the US in 2013 when the Guardian revealed his identity
  • ‘Black Box’: A photo series commissioned by Tara Kelton based on interviews with Uber drivers in Bangalore about how they perceive the company, highlighting gaps between the lived reality of Uber’s Indian employees and the white western figures they feel represent the company

Project site

Back to Earth — Karrabing Film Collective, Dineo Seshee Bopape and Katy’taya Catitu Tayassu

Back to Earth reminds us of the fragility of the earth immediately beneath our feet, and the planet we depend on. Part of an ongoing project that began at Serpentine in 2019, the exhibition invites artistic responses to the climate emergency, bringing together different kinds of research, materials and approaches from around the planet to offer insights into artists’ concerns, ideas and hopes for the future.

Calls to action and timely messages designed by artists are displayed around the perimeter of the gallery, while spaces for quiet reflection can be found in the central brick rooms. Tabita Rezaire /Amakaba & Yussef Agbo-Ola/Olaniyi Studio have designed an enveloping space of healing, full of medicinal herbs, while Brian Eno’s new sound and light installation reminds us of our ability to respond emotionally and sympathetically to a constantly evolving environment. Processes recording massive human intervention, both to the surface of the planet and to its atmosphere, can be found in Carolina Caycedo’s wallpaper, which follows dammed waterways in South and North America, while Giles Round’s toy-like models are inspired by some of the many satellites that orbit above us, constantly monitoring climate and ecological events.This exhibition also engages our senses, through the work of smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas and via the Climavore menu developed by Cooking Sections in the Magazine café. The information provided by Superflux and Studio Ghazaal Vojdani in the gallery shop, which accompanies a selection of books and products, is intended to aid in better consumer choices. The Back to Earth exhibition also stretches outwards to Kensington Gardens, with a garden designed for pollinators by an Artificial Intelligence algorithm developed by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and to a satellite exhibition of artist posters at 180 Strand. Various off–site spaces around London are hosting live programmes during the summer. — Frank Rose

New York Times article by Frank Rose

Project site

Maquette — Lisa Jamhoury

Maquette is a live interactive performance leveraging motion capture technology, avatars, and dance in an exploration of the parallel histories of averaging and idealism in art and society. As an audience watches the live performance, the performers’ movements drive avatars in a projected virtual world creating a genre-bending story that unfolds in both physical and virtual space.

The 16-minute prototype of Maquette was developed for and exhibited at the Xtensions show at ONX Studio with support from the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator and the Onassis Foundation. The evening length performance of Maquette is currently under development with the MAXmachina incubator for the MAXlive 2023–24 festival in New York.” — Lisa Jamhoury

Project site

demonumentaRA — Giselle Beiguelman & Luís Felipe Abbud

“demonumentaRA is an original and free application, with audioguides, to access 3D models of 22 monuments in the city. The focus of the project is the monuments created for the celebrations of 1922 , including the reverberations of the Week of Modern Art and the Centenary of Independence in later decades, such as 1954 , year of the IV Centenary of the City of São Paulo, and in 1972 , controversial dates from the sesquicentennial of Independence, promoted by the military dictatorship under the government of Emilio Garrastazu Médici.

The application is the result of a teaching, research and extension project , fully developed at FAUUSP , involving undergraduate and graduate students, from the Architecture and Design courses, with the participation of other units such as the IME (Institute of Mathematics and Statistics ) and the Paulista Museum of USP.” — Project site

Project site

The Visions of Octavia Butler — The New York Times Lynell George & Ainslee Alem Robson

visual by Ainslee Alem Robson

“The project was built by a team of nearly a dozen artists, designers, editors and writers over nine months. It provides 3-D views of sites like the Los Angeles Central Library, where Ms. Butler spent much of her early years as an aspiring writer; the inside of a 1970s-era municipal bus similar to the one she would have daydreamed on during rides in her hometown, Pasadena, Calif.; and even views of the surface of Mars captured by the Perseverance Rover at the landing site that was named after her in 2021 in honor of her contributions to science fiction.” — The New York Times

Read More

Project site

Augmented Shadow: Chasing Stars — Joon Y Moon

In 2022 Joon Y Moon released a new installment of his Augmented Shadow project.

“The not-to-be-missed piece of the programme is Augmented Shadow: Chasing Stars In Shadow, directed by visual artist and engineer Moon Joon Yong.

Set up in an spacious tent outside the Korea Manhwa Museum, the piece uses Augmented Reality (AR) tech but seems like Virtual Reality (VR) in the sense that the viewer can be fully surrounded by the images and have an interactive experience inside the piece.

A viewer will take a real lantern into the space, joining in the movement of the animation, free to explore what’s going on inside. When one of the shadow characters waves at them, the user is meant to point their lantern at them. The character will then “grab” a ball of light coming from the lantern and plant it in the ground or hang it on a wall to open new images that grow and flow around the installation to music.” — ScreenDaily

Read More

Project site

Emerging Radiance: Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue — Michelle Kumata

“Walking through the doors of the Bellevue Arts Museum, visitors find themselves facing a vibrant and powerful exhibition.

“Emerging Radiance: Honoring the Nikkei Farmers of Bellevue” is Michelle Kumata’s latest work. It opened Feb. 3. In collaboration with Creative Director Tani Ikeda, Kumata created a farmhouse mural that explores the history of more than 60 Japanese-American families living in Bellevue who were forcibly displaced from their homes and placed into internment camps during World War II.

Commissioned by Meta Open Arts, “Emerging Radiance” presents the stories of these farmers.” — SeattlesChild

Read more

Project site

Doodles Activations— Doodles, DeepLocal

“Within the Doodles ecosystem live humans, cats, pickles, apes, sentient flames, skeletons, aliens, and more. The visually appealing color palette and community-driven DAO have most likely contributed to Doodles NFTs magnanimous success.

The Doodles NFT has become one of the most well-known and admired NFT projects in existence in just a few short months. The collection of lively and vibrant line-drawn characters has practically taken over the internet and is one of the most well-liked and successful PFP (profile-picture) collections.” — The Crypto Times

Read More

Project site

Sutuverse — Sutu

“With Sony, Google, and deadmau5 collabs on his CV, Sutu is now taking his own project to a new level with NFTs. The Webby-awarded visual artist speaks to Randy Ginsburg about his plans to build the next big web3 IP set through AR and gaming.

There are thousands of artists and NFT founders, but few have the resume, talent, and creativity of Sutu. A naturally curious, Webby-award-winning artist and entrepreneur, Sutu has spent over fifteen years exploring his love for sci-fi and emerging technology through a combination of interactive design, animation, and storytelling.” — Culture3

Read More

Project site

Salt — Fabian Stelzer

“A tech entrepreneur Fabian Stelzer is creating an entire movie using generative AI art models, deepfake programs, and artificial voices created by AI.

German tech entrepreneur Fabian Stelzer who has a background in neuroscience but has never worked on a film production before is working on creating an entire movie using generative AI art models as well as artificial voices created by AI.

The film is called SALT, and it is a 70s-style sci-fi movie that is being published on Twitter in short clips that Stelzer calls “story seeds.” The project is built entirely with AI-generated art with Stelzer creating the visuals using publicly available programs like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 and making the feeling of motion through video editing and several deepfake programs.” — 80LV

Read More

Project site

House of Dreams — Dmitry Alekseev

“Ireland-based assistant manager and tech enthusiast Dmitry Alekseev took the AI world by surprise with his new horror-thriller film “House of Dreams“, which he made solely with Midjourney. All characters, locations and voices are AI-generated. You can watch the trailer here.

“For the last month, I have been travelling 145 hours across the expanses of AI, writing the script, creating characters. I played like an actor during the animation and voice acting of all the characters. And I especially enjoy editing possibilities of reshooting and shooting scenes,” Alekseev mentioned on his youtube channel.” —Analytics India Magazine

Read More

Project site

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats — Darren Emerson & East City Films

“The exhibition invites “audiences to go in search of an illegal rave, one night in Coventry in 1989. From poster-strewn bedrooms to pirate radio stations, police headquarters to secret warehouses, you’ll step-into the shoes of rave culture pioneers as you go in search of the party.”

In Pursuit Of Repetitive Beats is “in an immersive exhibition and explorable virtual world set in Coventry. Combining Acid House tracks with interactivity and multi-sensory simulation, it brings to life the stories of the promoters, police officers, and rave-goers, whose rivalries and relationships drove a revolution in music and society.” — NME

Read More

Project site

Weird Sensations Feel Good- The Design Museum & ArkDes

“The nooks and crannies of this curious world are explored at the Design Museum in its new ASMR show: Weird Sensation Feels Good: The World of ASMR. The title refers to a 2009 online thread that started to unpick the trend. Making the digital manifest IRL is notoriously tricky and this show, which doubles the size of the pioneering original held in Stockholm at the national architecture and design museum ArkDes, relies heavily on headphones and screens.

These depict everything from Bjork taking the back off her TV to describe the miniature cityscape of transistors and circuit boards inside, to an animation of a wide rug being dragged and squeezed down a narrow corridor before disappearing around a corner. Pressure and release. Many of these are displayed in a central ‘arena’ where you can lounge on 0.9km of sausage shaped cushions and bliss out.” — Evening Standard

Read more

Project site

Dreammachine — Collective Act & Jennifer Cook

“The pulsing soundtrack starts to get louder as you lie back with eyes closed and the space blackens, which you perceive through your eyelids. Then it begins and I see a great cloud of warm purple expand in front of me, a magenta mist blooming in the void. The speed or brightness of the flashing white lights changes (I assume) and I am dazzled by a sky of bright orange — a marmalade sky. But it is not so much a sky as a wall of colour, electric and dazzling. And inside me.

I say “I” because everybody will have a different experience. Maybe you will see real places, old faces, heaven and hell. In my case it was all deliriously abstract except for one moment when there seemed to be a face at the end of a tunnel of light, but I couldn’t recognise who it might be. At maximum intensity of sound and light, complex crystalline structures like bright white beehives or molecular lattices formed out of nowhere, an architecture of pure light.” — The Guardian

Read More

Project site

Radio Ghost — ZU-UK

It starts with the rhythm of 80s pop: a shiny soundtrack of energised hits to match the consumerist glitz around us. We are in a Glasgow shopping centre — the location kept secret so as not to upset the high priests of this temple of Mammon — where we have arrived in teams of three and been given headphones. The cheery beat of drivetime radio sets our pace as we trot past boutiques and toy shops, listening to a reassuring voice pointing out the sleek surfaces, the permanent brightness and the lack of clocks in this materialist casino.” — The Guardian

Read More

Project site

Coachellaverse — Meta Spark

“This year, Coachella took its first steps towards creating its very own metaverse. Referred to by event organizers as the Coachellaverse, this incredible digital experience allows fans from all around the world to interact with the festival in a brand new way using a combination of immersive technologies. This virtual platform features everything from AR technology and video games to NFTs and an interactive online community where you can connect with attendees, both on-site and at home, as well as with artists, creators, and other surprise guests.” — VR Scout

Read More

Project site

Channels — Yo Yo Lin

Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary artist working with animation, dance, and performance. Her works often incorporate all three mediums to explore the bodily experiences of living with chronic illness and to establish possibilities for self-knowledge through a collaborative practice.

In July, Lin held a multisensory performance, channels, as a 2020 Open Call recipient at The Shed, the new — and large — cultural institution and venue in Hudson Yards. She taught at NYU Tisch ITP/IMA as the 2021 Red Burns Fellow and was recently awarded a 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship. Her work has been featured in NOWNESS, Art in America, and Surface magazine. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in Sunset Park in Brooklyn.” — Testudo

Read More

Project site

The Heart — Kendrick Lamar

“With Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5” video, the most accomplished rapper of his era crashes almost literally headfirst into one of the most controversial technologies to emerge in recent years. In the clip, his face uncannily transforms into the faces of various famous — or infamous — Black men: O.J. Simpson, Will Smith, Jussie Smollett, Kobe Bryant, Kanye West, and Nipsey Hussle. These are deepfakes, that is, almost-realistic videos (or photos, or audio snippets) that are fabricated using artificial intelligence. While the prospect of fake videos that seem legit has plenty of disturbing implications, it’s also a perfect tool for an artist who has long delighted in employing a range of voices in his work and destabilizing listeners’ concepts of identity.” — Pitchfork

Read More

A Forest for the Trees — Glenn Kaino

source Los Angeles Times

“This wilderness is part of Kaino’s “A Forest for the Trees,” an immersive new show he created and directed inside a 28,000-square-foot Boyle Heights warehouse. The ticketed experience, which speaks to Indigenous practices around land stewardship, ecological interconnectedness and preservation of the environment, leads visitors on an hourlong journey through an actual forest with 87 redwood trees. Most are tree remnants ethically sourced from a Northern California forest and repositioned inside the space, while others are cast replicas. The forest also includes handmade sculptures, animatronic robots, original music and glimmering installations that alternately employ mirrors, light, water and shadows to create a range of visual trickery.” — Los Angeles Times

Read More

Project site

One The Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) —

On the Morning You Wake uses innovative documentary storytelling and virtual production techniques to viscerally recreate the lived experiences of people who, for 38 minutes, had to react and make impossible decisions in the face of nuclear violence.” — project site

Project site

Feist Multitudes

“When Feist takes to the stage for four shows over two nights at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium this week, some burning questions may be raised. Like: Where is the stage, exactly? This experimental, very intimate. limited-run tour — which, like a forthcoming album, is titled “Multitudes” — has the smallish crowd sitting in a circle around her in a space that (seating charts confirm) is clearly not the main, massive, fixed-seat auditorium of the Shrine. Beyond that lie spoilers, which patrons may or may not already be clued into from handfuls of previous gigs Feist has done in the run-up to coming to Los Angeles.” — Variety

Read More

Project site

Particular Matter(s) — Tomás Saraceno

“The Shed has gone all out for the multitasking Tomás Saraceno — a visionary Argentine artist and environmentalist celebrity who ranks among the world’s greatest spider-whisperers — by giving him the run of three of its four public spaces, or about 28,000 square feet. And Saraceno seems to have returned the favor, mounting a revelatory if high-minded survey of his work in makeshift galleries, as well as two inspiring installations elsewhere in the building. The totality is titled “Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s).”” — The New York Times

Read More

Project site

We tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral — Vox & The Pudding

“It’s no secret that TikTok is a virality machine. Songs get turned into sounds that can be used in any video, and if they gain enough traction they can catapult a musician into the pop culture stratosphere. But we wanted to know exactly what happens between a song going viral and an artist becoming a bonafide success. So in the fall of 2021, we partnered with data analysis website The Pudding figure it out.

Along the way, we discovered that using data to concretely answer this question is quite a challenge. Our process included creating dozens of custom data sets, careful fact-checking, and conversations with both hit songwriters and music industry executives to match data with real experiences.

After seven months of spreadsheets, data deep-dives, and interviews, we were able to follow the numbers to track what happens to artists after they go viral — and how the music industry has shapeshifted around TikTok. It turns out the app is completely revolutionizing the way record labels work, and giving artists more leverage than ever.” Vox

Project site

We Are Mello— Jason Zada, mssng peces, Coca-Cola

“To coincide with the global flavor’s IRL launch, Coca-Cola launched an immersive Twitch takeover, giving fans the opportunity to take part in an epic Marshmello-themed livestream gaming adventure. The experience also gave fans exclusive access to metamerch designed by Zepeto.

Fans could scan a special QR code to gain access to the Coca-Cola Creations hub, where they could generate a unique piece of digital art as they listened to Marshmello’s new track, “Numb.” — mssng peces

Case Study Video

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) —

“Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) is, at its mysterious core, conceived in part out of ghost traces. Earlier this year, Sorey premiered the deep, deliberative piece at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. That version — a co-commission of the Park Avenue Armory, the presenting organization DACAMERA and the ecumenical chapel itself, for its 50th anniversary — emphasized Sorey’s affinities not only with the dark, brooding Mark Rothko paintings on permanent installation in the space but also with the modernist composer Morton Feldman, who wrote a piece for its opening. But where Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, now considered a landmark, takes about 25 minutes in performance, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) ran twice that long in Houston.” — NPR

Read More

Project details

Exotopia Launch — Scott Kildall

Exotopia is an experimental storytelling experience, which invites you to join imaginary voyages to study alien life on real exoplanets in our galaxy, using real scientific data from the SETI Institute to imagine where extraterrestrial life could actually exist.

Each voyage is crafted by a guest science fiction writer, and includes multiple storylines for a constellation of characters. You may be a starship pilot, a science officer, or even a stowaway. Over the course of 30 days, you will get a daily update to your character’s story. Your character may achieve greatness, spark a mutiny, or die in space.

Key moments in your story get illustrated by NFTs, created by a featured artist. These include visual renderings of your original ticket, plot twists, and your completed story. These unique artworks are yours to keep, exchange, or sell on the NFT marketplace.” — Gray Area

Read More

Project site

Ü & EYEYE — Lykke Li

“This project is kind of like a maze,” Swedish singer Lykke Li said during a recent phone interview from Los Angeles. “The deeper you step into it, the more work there is.”

Last spring, Li released her fifth album, “Eyeye,” as an audiovisual project accompanied by a series of video loops directed by Theo Lindquist. The music itself was made in an intimate fashion, coming together in her living room with minimal recording gear, and Li had already spent a significant amount of time working on the album and the video component before considering how it would be presented live.

“It took a long time to understand what the live version was,” Li said. The answer turned out to be downtown Los Angeles’ The Broad, where Li and her band will play on Sept. 1 for the sold out opening night of “Ü & Eyeye,” a multi-sensory, immersive experience based on the album that Li made with Lindquist and a team of forward-minded artists and technicians. The exhibition continues through Sept. 4.” — Los Angeles Daily News

Read More

Project site

Skits & Giggles — Kiira Benzing, Alyssa Landry, Double Eye

Skits & Giggles is a rollicking mix of sketches and musical numbers that pushes the limits of live VR performance in Horizon Worlds. Building on the social connectivity and embodiment inherent in this new platform, participants come together with their friends for a real-time synchronous immersive experience. As members of our VIP studio audience, they are encouraged to express themselves in this highly interactive, playful and often absurd show, where no two performances are ever exactly the same.

Project site

Song of Ambassadors — K Allado-McDowell

““Song of the Ambassadors,” which was presented to the public at Tully on Tuesday evening, was created by K Allado-McDowell, who leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence initiative at Google, with the A.I. program GPT-3; the composer Derrick Skye, who integrates electronics and non-Western motifs into his work; and the data artist Refik Anadol, who contributed A.I.-generated visualizations. There were three singers — “ambassadors” to the sun, space and life — as well as a percussionist, a violinist and a flute player. Thake, sitting silently to one side of the stage with a simple, inexpensive EEG monitor on her head, was the “brainist,” feeding brain waves into Anadol’s A.I. algorithm to generate the otherworldly patterns.” — The New York Times

Read More

Project site

Evolver — Marshmallow Laser Feast, Edward R. Pressman and Terrence Malick

Cate Blanchett (“Carol”) and Terrence Malick (“The Tree of Life”) have reteamed on “Evolver,” a VR free-roaming, music-filled interactive and transcendental experience which is world premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Produced by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (“We Live in an Ocean of Air”) in the U.K., Atlas V (“Spheres”) in France and Pressman Film (“The Crow”) in the U.S., “Evolver” is a pioneering experience taking audiences inside the landscape of the body, following the flow of oxygen through a branching ecosystem, to a single ‘breathing’ cell. Directed by Marshmallow Laser Feast, the experience has been conceived to be replicated and sized up in festivals and museums around the world with the aim to host up to 100 people at the same.” — Variety

Read More

Project site

McEnroe vs. McEnroe — ESPN

“Premiering on ESPN+, Michelob Ultra, in collaboration with tech and production company Unit 9, presents “McEnroe vs. McEnroe,” the world’s first tennis match to feature a real person versus a virtual player — both being a version of the entertaining, confrontational tennis player, John McEnroe. In the match, the real McEnroe will face off against his ultimate opponent — his younger self. In this case, a virtual player powered by A.I.” — Techcrunch

Read More

Project site

Emerson — Jason Zada

“If you think the scariest thing about TikTok is how it makes anyone older than 30 feel culturally ignorant, you’re in for a treat. The platform has its first horror movie under the tag @lostgirl_emerson, and it seems to have it all: horrifying noises, creepy dolls, and, of course, a goth girl dancing around her living room, unaware that a mysterious figure is reflected in her TV screen.

“The main character, Emerson, posts videos for a period of 10 days, documenting something she at first perceives to be supernatural, only to discover it’s something even more sinister,” director Jason Zada, who made the project with writer Nate Atkins, said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “It’s part of a larger storyworld that we] developed for a feature film that is in pre-production, titled Janus.” That movie is produced by Steven Schneider of Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Split fame and will begin filming in February. The project also has an [Instagram and an Etsy shop where you can buy the aforementioned creepy dolls — if you dare.” — Yahoo

Read More

Wormageddon: Rick and Morty — XD Agency

“If you would prefer not to wait a full two weeks until the season six premiere of Rick and Morty, you don’t have to — it turns out a new episode, the much-teased “Wormageddon,” has come out today! It’s just not an episode you can watch, exactly.

Bizarrely, but also exactly on-brand for Rick and Morty, it turns out “Wormageddon” is a series of 14 pop-up art installations that have been erected around the world — including every continent other than Antarctica — that will somehow tell a story that will bridge the gap between the destruction of the Citadel at the end of season five and the season six premiere.” — Gizmodo

Read More

Project site

Bonus

Have been tracking this one for a long time and it finally has a release date!

More details

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5
Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Block quote

Ordered list

  1. Item 1
  2. Item 2
  3. Item 3

Unordered list

  • Item A
  • Item B
  • Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

Superscript

Subscript