Delicious VR, accessible gaming, the alchemy and chemistry of good design, a conference for creative technologists, and the lyrical work of an incredible Australian artist.
Here’s our next installment that shines a spotlight on people, collectives, and organizations doing wonderful things.
Marshmallow Laser Feast
Marshmallow Laser Feast is a London-based collective making gorgeous interactive installations.The group is headed up by Barney Steel, Ersin Han Ersin, and Robin McNicholas, with producer extraordinaire Nell Whitley making sure the trains run on time. MLF has been particularly busy of late. We Live In an Ocean of Air is currently on view at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Nest, an installation made in collaboration with composer Erland Cooper and consisting of beams of light that create ever-evolving natural forms in the night sky driven by 3-dimensional sonic murmurations, was recently shown in London’s Waltham Forest. Sweet Dreams, a Willy Wonka-esque VR piece involving squishy creatures and magical foods, just premiered in New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival. Welcome to Luscious Delicious Land!
Erin Hawley
Erin Hawley is the creator, writer, and editor of The Geeky Gimp, which focuses on disability in comics, games, and TV shows. Her reflections on how to make games more accessible are super relevant to all of us making interactive work: “Society often frames accessibility as something abled people do to make the world easier to navigate for disabled folks, whether it’s an ambulatory contractor building a ramp at a restaurant, or a hearing employee putting captions on their organization’s videos. But the reality is that disabled people are also making their spaces and creations accessible to other disabled individuals. This is powerful because we know best the importance of having true inclusivity for community spaces, both online, and off.” Follow her on Twitter.
Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli is MoMA’s Senior Curator of Architecture & Design + Director of R&D. Her Twitter handle is CuriousOctopus, which is fitting considering her wide-ranging interests and enthusiasms. “I organize a lot of public programs, and their success is really about alchemy and chemistry. We invite people that seem to come from many diverse backgrounds, and then realize they are all talking about the same thing — that’s what I love.” Her TED talk on acquiring Pac-Man for MoMA is a wonderful watch.
Eyeo
Eyeo is a yearly gathering for the creative technology community that too many of us in the interactive/immersive storytelling space don’t know about. The Eyeo Festival brings together a rich intersection of people doing fascinating things with technology: artists, data designers, creative coders, AI explorers, storytellers, researchers, technology, and platform developers. The next edition of Eyeo is in June 2019 but tickets are always rather hard to get hold of. Luckily, Eyeo has an incredible video archive available online so you can dive in right now! Below are just two of the talks from Eyeo in 2018 — Hyphen-Labs and Matt Adams from Blast Theory.
Lynette Wallworth
Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist and filmmaker. Recently she has made two critically acclaimed VR pieces: Collisions and Awavena. Lynette has an incredible body of work to her name, with years of powerful installations behind her, but it was her first VR piece, the moving and beautifully made Collisions, that made her known in the immersive storytelling space. “Collisions travelled as no other work of mine has managed to do. Its impact astonished and uplifted me. I felt my years of work, often undertaken in a vacuum, had fitted me exactly for this very moment and this technology.” Awavena is her most recent piece and you can learn more about how it was made in this video.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.