Category Archives: xr

Is getting stood up in the virtual world better or worse than in real life?

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Is getting stood up in the virtual world better or worse than in real life?

Or if your date or encounter just doesn’t deliver what you had hoped from the other person? Could you still enjoy the experience even if it wasn’t magical?

As the XR pendulum swings back from cold technology to the infiltration of the human connection, it grapples with the difficulty of the user experience no longer just dependent on the maker’s talent, but also – gasp – on the investment of other people. At this year’s Venice Immersive, the programme is ripe with pieces that call for connection, whether verbally or physically, and as people chatted in the courtyard about what they’d seen and what they’d liked, it was common to hear “it depends on who you’re with…”.

I experienced this firsthand for Fanny Fortage’s HEARTBEAT, a potentially very intimate piece where two people exchange heartbeats and stare at each other. I had a feeling about my 20:20 time slot, that the other ticket holder would be a few spritz’ in and forget to come, cancel or share their ticket. (Because I seem to have that luck. The same thing happened to me for ROAMance at IDFA’s DocLab, when my partner – utterly necessary for the piece – was a no show. Getting stood up in XR still feels pretty crappy, even though it’s likely not personal.)

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originally published on XR Must

One big family: Onassis and the intersection of culture, technology and art

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The Onassis Foundation has a big mission: to be a catalyst and embrace constant innovation and creative disruptions that will lead to a better society. And while this is a tall mission for any cultural organization, for the past 50 years, Onassis has formed a constellation of programmes and initiatives to nurture, inspire and challenge thinkers and makers to work and experiment in every art sector. And this investment in people and artists has also paid off in the new media industry – nearly every immersive festival or programme these days has at least one piece emerging from Onassis’ orbit.

Alongside Onassis Stegi, the dynamic space for cultural creativity, the foundation’s stream dedicated towards technology began in 2017 with the opening of the Digital Innovation department. To map the work of Onassis is less like a family tree and more like a bush, with one branch growing into or around another. But several things unite all the strands – the desire to experiment at the intersection of art and technology, and the priority of feeding into and building an ecosystem that serves the artist from idea to exhibition; an integrated space to learn, make and grow.

Within the cosmos of the digital and innovation work are several programmes and spaces based in Athens, Greece and New York, USA, serving both Greek and international artists. “We are interested in artists’ ideas, not their ID,” explains Panagiotakou. The ONX summer school, which just wrapped, brings together creative professionals, students and businesses to explore technology, culture and worldbuilding. Onassis Ready art space, which plans to open in Fall 2025, will serve as a factory of ideas, the home of Onassis ONX and AIR, as well as a performance and exhibition space.

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originally published on XR Must

“You Can Cheat on Reality”: Emeline Courcier on Her Immersive Artwork ‘Burn From Absence’

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For her immersive artwork Burn From Absence, artist Emeline Courcier creates an archive where there was none. Using artificial intelligence, she recreates a family album, visualizing and verifying a history that has been hidden, documenting it from her perspective. In the four-channel installation, digitally created images illustrate an audio track layering her family members’ memories of life in Laos, the ‘Vietnam’ war, and new beginnings in France. She produced it during an immersive residency at the Phi Centre in Montreal, which is also serving as the work’s distributor.

While AI usually mines and perpetuates the dominant narrative, Courcier completely upends that, building an archive that is a reckoning and a reclaiming and, despite its AI-creation, very real. After its premiere at IDFA last November, where it won the DocLab Special Mention for Digital Storytelling, Documentary spoke to Courcier about truth, archives, and working with deeply personal material.

Did you always intend to use AI to recreate these memories?

 I think using AI is really the core of the project, but how I treated it really evolved during the process.

In 2023, I had heard about AI, but never used it before. I was opposed to it at first, as a lot of artists were—but I was kind of curious at the same time, because what I like is the fact that you can cheat on reality. 

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originally published on Documentary

“I Will Become My Own Institution”: Alaa Minawi Discusses His Immersive Installation ‘The Liminal’

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Alaa Minawi’s The Liminal gives an alternative definition of “immersive” from the typical technological, digital one. In his practice, the Palestinian-Lebanese-Dutch interdisciplinary artist explores the possibilities of merging installation and performance art. The Liminal—the first part of his speculative series about Arabfuturism—is a 3.5-meter wall with 24 speakers placed inside, programmed to take the audience on a listening journey.

What seems like a simple white wall is actually a repository of stories of people excluded from traditional power structures, who in turn claim their own spaces and communities “inside the wall.” The piece calls guests to actively listen and bear witness as they move along the wall following the voices, drawing their own physical performance. 

The piece premiered as a work-in-progress at IDFA’s DocLab last year, where it won a Special Jury Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. In an expanded version, which premiered at Spring Performing Arts Festival Utrecht in May 2025, Manawi shifted the documentary stories to fictionalized expressions of reality. Those four stories are written by him and Lebanese writer Raafat Majzoub, three of which are inspired by the original interviews. The last expands on a text previously written by Ibrahim Ibrahim Nehm. Of this exhibit, Minawi said, “I wanted to talk about what has happened, directly, about the genocide and our Arab reality. It was very difficult to find the language, until eventually, I felt that poetic, philosophical language is the best way to deal with what is happening.”

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originally published on Documentary

A look into Alternate Realities: Sheffield Docfest 2024

Perinatal Dreaming. Understanding Country, by Marianne Wobcke / Big Anxiety Research Centre, Volker Kuchelmeister, Lucia Barrera

The Alternate Realities programme at this year’s just-concluded Sheffield DocFest is pared back, featuring a VR competition, an exhibition and summit in collaboration with the International Documentary Association (IDA). I spoke with Artistic Director Raul Niño Zambrano and co-curators Abby Sun and Keisha Knight about the vision and thoughts behind this year’s immersive experience and its spirit of collaboration.

Raul Niño Zambrano – With Alternate Realities, it has always been a thing asking how do we define it and what do we want? For us, it’s important to see it as an extension. Just as we do for films, we are not looking for one specific type or style. Our responsibility is to show the whole spectrum. We pick up what we think is really worth highlighting. And I think that’s happening also in the XR field, their possibilities are endless. You see how an installation starts as virtual reality, but then becomes an installation, or the other way around. We’re looking at the intersection of art, technology and documentary, and trying to give a message – What are all these pieces saying all together?

For this year’s Alternate Realities programme, you are collaborating with IDA and the programme is co-curated by Keisha Knight and Abby Sun.

Raul – Yes, everything started because of Experimental Realities, a workshop they did in the USA asking a group of emerging artists about the future of immersive. When we talked, we thought it resonated a lot and was a good match.

One of the big questions was how do we see immersive media in the future? What does immersive really mean? Of course it has to do with technology and media, but what happened when we tried to distance a bit from that, we found that you come more to embodiment and to the senses and to haptic. I also felt that that was resonating with our film program; our tagline this year is Reflections on Realities.

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originally published on XR Must

Back from IDFA DocLab: 30 pieces of Phenomenal Friction

Phenomenal friction. When the New Media team at IDFA came up with this title, they knew it would reflect a recognition of tensions around the world, but the team had no idea that it would land in the midst of a war and public outcries that stirred up the festival, leading to several filmmakers – including immersive makers – pulling their work from showcase.

Phenomenal friction, as described by Caspar Sonnen, head of New Media, reflects a landscape where emerging technologies are changing how we see the world around us, but also one where we are still encountering and challenging each other’s identities and mindsets in the physical space.

This year’s DocLab and immersive exhibition brought together over 30 pieces from the most diverse set of artists and makers thus far, allowing the audience to encounter worlds not just different from their own, but also created by those living in the other worlds.

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originally published on XR Must

In the midst of advanced old-school technologies, old-school tech interactives can still pack a punch

An AI-generated trans drag show, a dystopian game about digital “security” and an almost pornographic immersive VR piece about gay saunas in Taiwan. These were some of the pieces at the recent CPH:DOX interactive program, where vulnerability and marginalized narratives emerged as a theme.

There were experiments with the latest technologies, like using Minecraft to catalog and release invisible archives from behind the walls of authoritative regimes. But three of the narrative pieces that had the most power to channel vulnerability and bring the viewer in a “dialogue” with other voices were actually the pieces leaning more old-school in their technologies.

HE FUCKED THE GIRL OUT OF ME, Blacktransarchive.com/WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT and AS MINE EXACTLY were three pieces that use older technologies and in-the-room interactivity to engage on one-on-one levels.

Old can be just as good…

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originally published on XR Must