There is a six-month exhibition titled “Other Worlds Are Possible” featuring a retrospective of a dozen different immersive storytelling pieces that will shown at the Le Pavillion in Nemur, Belgium from March 22 to September 21, 2025. The exhibition was curated by independent immersive curator Ana Brzezińska, and will also feature other AR pieces, screen-based work, but also an exhibit detailing a brief history and evolution of immersive art and immersive storytelling from different design disciplines. I had a chance to catch up with Brzezińska to get a bit more context on her design intention for this exhibition, to talk about the current state of immersive art and storytelling, as well as her current focus on brining this work to traditional cultural institutions that are reaching out to mainstream audiences.
Here’s a list of different immersive storytelling pieces that will be featured over the next sixth months (with links to my Voices of VR podcast interviews with the creators).
- NOTES ON BLINDNESS (2016)
- SPHERES (2017)
- BATTLESCAR (2018)
- GLOOMY EYES (2019)
- TRAVELING WHILE BLACK (2019)
- THE HANGMAN AT HOME (2020)
- GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY (2021)
- PLANET CITY (2022)
- PLASTISAPIENS (2022)
- EVOLVER (2022)
- FROM THE MAIN SQUARE (2022)
- ALL THAT REMAINS (2022)
- OVER THE RAINBOW (2023)
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be speaking to independent immersive curator Anna Brzezinska, who is just opening up a brand new exhibition called Other Worlds Are Possible. It's running for six months from March 22nd, 2025, up until September 21st. And she's featuring about a dozen different immersive storytelling projects in different sections. So like six at a time, she's going to be swapping out. But it's kind of like this retrospective look at the evolution of immersive art, immersive storytelling. She's doing a takeover of the entire space of this place called the Pavilion in Numura, Belgium. And it's going to be featuring some different augmented reality art, screen-based art, and an exhibition space that goes into the evolution and history of immersive art from these different strands, but also the opportunity to see different immersive storytelling projects as this is geared towards the general public for six months to put immersive storytelling on equal footing from other cultural exhibitions. And so kind of unique exhibition that's going to be running there for six months. And so I just wanted to sit down with Anna to get a little bit more context for how this came about and some of the design intention that she had as she was putting all this together. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Anna happened on Thursday, February 27th, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:43.450] Ana Brzezińska: My name is Anna Brzezinska. I am an immersive curator. I've been in the interactive and immersive space for over 10 years now. I used to co-run a virtual reality startup called Kaleidoscope with company founder Rene Penel. And then from that moment on, I was involved in... producing, co-curating, and designing multiple virtual mixed and augmented reality events. We've been also very, very active during the COVID pandemic, where we designed over 15 virtual reality exhibitions and events for the community. And we were working with really, really cool partners, major festivals. including Tribeca, that I joined after COVID ended as their immersive curator. And I was in that role for three years. I curated three editions of Tribeca Immersive in New York City. Last year, we had a very special, very special, I would say reimagined edition of Tribeca Immersive. We commissioned six new works for a show that was guest hosted at Mercer Labs, a new immersive venue in Lower Manhattan. And some of these works are really, really successful. They travel. But I think the biggest lesson was that we managed to get over 50,000 people to see it in a period of seven weeks. And I think the very positive result of that exhibition was a proof for me that independent creators from our community have a really great future ahead of them in almost any format, any scale, and any medium that we would call immersed. And so currently I'm an independent curator and I work with various organizations across the world. I'm originally based in Europe. I live in France. So my most recent exhibition that I'll tell you a little bit more about today is opening in March in Belgium in a town called Namur, which is also the host for a very beautiful and I think very much loved digital festival called Kik Festival.
[00:03:54.244] Kent Bye: Right. And so maybe before we start to dive into that program, I'd love to get a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:04:01.389] Ana Brzezińska: So I'm originally trained as a theater director, but I also studied at the Warsaw University in Poland, a very exciting interdisciplinary faculty where I was studying art history, philosophy, history, history of theater. So I have quite a classical background, and I was also a maker. I then was working for over a decade for big television broadcasters. I worked for the Warner Brothers Discovery Group as a director and as a producer. I've written, directed, and produced over... let's say a dozen shows and series that led me to the documentary film world, which was really fascinating time period in my life where I was more focused on working with independent documentary creators. And as you know, documentary creators and the documentary field was the early adopters of a lot of the interactive projects that later become what are current digital art community is. And through that path, I actually started connecting with the interactive and immersive creators who were welcomed by the documentary community at festivals like IDFA, for instance. And that's in a way how I discovered that industry that was long before people were actually doing virtual reality works. But it was a great multidisciplinary community. And some of these people are still, you know, close friends and we still work together.
[00:05:33.008] Kent Bye: I'm a huge documentary fan, and so it's a great pleasure to be able to watch all these different amazing stories and interactive and immersive stories and documentary and to see kind of the frontiers of how documentary is continuing to be an experimental proving ground for how to tell these stories in a new immersive way. And so as we look at the program that you're curated, Other Worlds Are Possible, I see that you've taken like a selection from like 2016 to 2023 and kind of hit some of the best of from that time period of what we've seen on the immersive storytelling film festival circuit. But maybe before we start to dive into the program that you've curated, I'd love to hear a little bit more context for how this specific show came about.
[00:06:21.314] Ana Brzezińska: Well, I think there are many ways to tell you about how this show came about. I want to tell you first about the people behind it and the space that actually is hosting the show. And then I want to tell you about something that I am particularly excited about in the program that... It's not really highlighted in the press release the way I would maybe want you to learn about it because it's a huge historical part that is fundamentally based on research I've made in the past year. So that's something that we will discuss separately. But I want to say that Namur is a small town in Belgium. It's not a capital city. It's not Brussels. It's a very beautiful town with a lot of various cultural offerings. And at the heart of the cultural events that are connected with what we do, there's the festival that is directed by Marie Duchatel. And she's an artistic director of the festival called Kick. The festival called Kick is happening, obviously, once a year. But it has a year-round presence through various programs and formats that Marie and her team developed in the past decade. And it's really something that is unique, you know, in the landscape of festivals, because I went to Nanomere last year to see the festival for the first time, and it really animates the whole town. It's really something that attracts people from the entire town, from the region, from other cities. It's really crowded. It's real people. It's not an industry event. I really cannot emphasize this enough. They are very successful with young audiences. They also have a very strong embedded young audience because they have a number of universities and art schools and all these people are highly interested in what Cake and Marie are presenting every year. So it's a really audience-first event that is very much loved by the local community and is made for that community. And I think this is really the foundation of what we wanted to build together. And one of the benefits of the fact that Marie has built such a successful and robust structure that is present across the city throughout the whole year, and there's plenty of training programs, STEM programs for girls and kids. It's very family-friendly, and there's a lot of Evangelization, not only in XR specifically, but also in various ways in which people use innovation and technology to connect with culture, social issues, science. It's very holistic in its approach. And they opened just, I would say, probably four years ago. So right when COVID hit, a permanent space that is called The Pavilion. And it's a very, very special venue because it lives... atop of a mountain. So it oversees the entire valley around. It's very beautiful. There's a huge green park around it. And the pavilion is actually a repurposed expo pavilion that Belgium presented 10 years earlier. And then it was brought back to Namur, and it was turned into an arts center. So currently, it presents various exhibitions throughout the whole season, a lot of which are available for free. And it's a building that I would say the exhibition surface is around a thousand square meters. It has a beautiful central glass dome through which you can see the natural landscape outside. There are four exhibition spaces made of wood that are attached to that glass dome. So it makes it look a little bit like a spaceship with like four engines. And then you have this very, very long part that is leading to the main dome, which allows for a more linear exhibition design. And there's also a very interesting space in the basement that we're also using because... What technically happened is that Marie and her team offered me to curate for the entire building. So what we're doing is we're taking over the whole pavilion and we're going to exhibit in the pavilion for six months. We're going to have a change in program just before the summer break, because this is when also there's a natural change in the audience. So like some people go on holiday, but you have more tourists come into town. You have students ending the academic year. So, you know, it's a slightly different vibe. There are different people coming in. It's beautiful outside because it's summer. So we have a program for the spring time period, which opens now in March and runs until June. And then from June until September, we have chapter number two. And then I would say literally the moment when we close the show and we wrap the run, the Kick Festival opens in early October. So in a way, we really have a very, very long presence, but also it's kind of like a runway for the next edition of the festival. I'm saying all this because we've had so many conversations about various festivals trying to figure out how they can have a meaningful year-round presence or year round programming or having a venue or partnering with a venue. And I wanna say that sometimes great ideas and great examples are in places where you wouldn't really expect them to grow. And I think Marie has really built something very unique in Namur. And I would really encourage everyone to go and take a look because I haven't seen such a system implemented anywhere else. And I can only hope that, you know, her and her team trusting me to create a show that's going to be there for six months will eventually become a success.
[00:12:18.140] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I know sometimes on social media channels, they'll have a takeover where someone will post on someone's channel for a while. So it sounds like you're doing like a six-month takeover of the entire pavilion and that you have a number of different VR experiences that are listed. And I can imagine that there's going to be a number of headsets for each of these. But when you talk about taking over the entire pavilion, I'm imagining that you're probably also going to have other ways of having video installations. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on how you're approaching this holistically in terms of trying to not only have installations and other ways that you can jump into the VR experiences, but how are you filling out all of the rest of the space?
[00:12:59.461] Ana Brzezińska: Yeah, I would say that I was trying to follow the design and the character of the building. It's a very particular space and it kind of organically makes you think about different parts of that building being used for different purposes. So you have this first part, I would say that whole long hallway, which is really immense, you know, and internally we call it La Ferme. It's not really an obvious exhibition space because it's just a very long, white, rectangular space with glass windows and the ceiling. But it's kind of like leading you to the main dome, which also, because it's transparent, it also has a very particular architecture. And only in those spaces that are adjacent to the dome, which are blacked out, you can actually present works that require a little bit of darkness or more... I would say, quiet surroundings. So you're right that we decided to introduce a structure where in this whole entry area, which is really, really massive, we would have something that we call the historical introduction to what is immersive art? Where did it come from? What are the origins and the roots of the contemporary immersive art? slash experiential landscape. And that is really a huge topic for me. I think it's something that I haven't seen done before. I don't think that this was something that we ever tried to tackle in a way that is Coming from a subjective lens, like in my case, I'm not a scholar. It's not an academic theory. It's really an attempt to shine a light on where I think we can seek for some of the bloodlines that kind of really feed into the stream of the immersive culture of today. So that's one part. And this is all based on archives. It's all based on printed materials. It's very beautifully designed because we have an extraordinary creative director who generously agreed to work with us, Pierre-Christophe Gemme, who also is an artist coming from our community. And so he is not just a creative director. He's not just a set designer. He's someone who is part of our family who makes beautiful works like Taguna that you must have heard of. It's a beautiful speculative work. futuristic project that is revolving around dreaming and ancestral wisdom. And it has a very specific, very beautiful and sharp visual language. And I wanted Pierre Christophe's touch in how we approach visually the presentation of who we are as an industry and where we came from as a group of people who are inspired by various art disciplines. So that part is based, as I mentioned, on archives. So, you know, screen-based works, a lot of print. It's divided into four thematic chapters that are covering the history of visual arts before 1989, which is the launch of the World Wide Web, the history of film, the history of theater from Richard Wagner until today, and then the history of digital art. from the moment where the World Wide Web was launched in 1989. And that introductory part also includes artists, directors and thinkers from the early waves or early days of virtual reality as an artistic and narrative medium. So I'm including, unfortunately, just on screen, on flat screen and not in a headset, archival works, you know, Jenny Halzer, Char Davis, Tamiko Field, Monica Fleischman, you know, those really extraordinary artists who were experimenting with VR in the early 90s. And then we have, of course, the crucial contribution from Nani de la Peña, who is represented also in that very final part from Chris Milk. I'm also bringing back the experience that I'm sure you remember that is called Tanandi, which was made for the first Magic Leap headset. And I think... In this particular genre, I'm still considering it one of the most successful works done. And I could not not mention Colored Noir, the augmented reality HoloLens experience. That was one of the projects that I presented at Tribeca, but I think this is really a historical milestone for this community in terms of the quality, the excellence, and the impact of the work. So this, I would say, wall of fame is leading us to the dome where we have contemporary virtual reality and augmented reality artists and studios. And we present some of the works in augmented reality. We also have screen-based installations, as you mentioned. And then downstairs in the basement, we have our virtual reality selection that is presenting six works per chapter. And so we're showing six works in chapter one and six works in chapter two. But upstairs we have, and I'm so sad that you will not see it firsthand because this glass dome is very, very high. I would say it's probably 20 meters high. And because you can see through these glass windows, it has a direct connection with the natural landscape around it. And I was always dreaming to present that work, but I had never found a space for it. And finally I did. And so we're presenting in the very center of the dome, the sculpture of Nancy Baker Cahill called Arpus. And it's really a monumental, gigantic human silhouette. It's not entirely human because... It's actually that kind of golem that is made out of various elements. You know, it incorporates natural elements, flowers, plants, but also bits of plastic. And, you know, a lot of the synthetic materials that we are incorporating consciously or unconsciously there's a little bit of sparkle and movement and in a way for me that that sculpture is is showing a lot of how peculiar and multi-dimensional our existence is nowadays how much we're still connected with the beauty and the magic of the natural world, but also how contaminated we are as species through the things that we've developed ourselves. And so this sculpture lives as an augmented reality installation in the heart of that glass dome. And there are four exhibition rooms that are surrounding it. We're bringing one of my favorite screen-based video works from Marshmallow Laser Feast called The Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest. The work was presented in the Barbican Center during one of their very successful group exhibitions. So again, it's a huge screen-based installation of a tree that is moving in an almost meditative rhythm. It's so highly immersive that people tend to spend long moments in front of it. We have a double installation where we're bringing Liam Young's Planet City both as a film in the screening room where we have a screen and a couple of benches in one half of the space and in the other room we have the virtual reality scene. experience that was inspired by the original Planet City story. We also present a very beautiful and I think not very well-known Belgian artwork that is called Atlas. It's made by a Belgian artist, Jan Delval, and it's actually a physical installation made of wood. It's this very playful, very beautiful piece. kind of origami-like installation that is presenting different types of buildings and urban structures. And through a HoloLens device or for a tablet, you can actually make it come to life. So it's a very playful and a very delicate, very subtle take on how to see different facets of reality. It's very popular with kids and it doesn't come as a surprise. So these works are surrounding Nancy's sculpture. There's also a little fun part because there's a space where there will be a cafe, a little bar for our audience members who tend to spend long hours in the pavilion. And in the bar, there's going to be a hidden Easter egg, which is the augmented reality series called Fortune by Atlas 5, which was originally written by Brett Gaylor, which is an AR filter-based mini documentary series about money. So when you're going to be having your coffee or your drink in the bar, you will be able also to consume this beautiful example of micro storytelling that the team has developed for Snapchat and for, unfortunately, non-existing Instagram lenses, but you can still appreciate the work for Snapchat.
[00:22:35.938] Kent Bye: Well, that sounds very amazing. We haven't even gotten to all the VR pieces that you're going to be covering, which we'll dive into. But that sounds like a great introduction of all the other historical context and other experiences. Before we dive into the VR experiences, I did want to have one quick follow on, which is that that historical overview, it sounds like that could be a book. I'm just curious if there's any overlap between what you've been studying and some of what you may be exhibiting here in this exhibition.
[00:23:05.509] Ana Brzezińska: Yes, I think that, you know, I'm still trying to figure out, you know, how to approach it in a way that makes sense from a timing perspective. I think that this is the kind of work that feels quite urgent. I obviously would love it to be part of a book if that's something that is written in stars for me. I'm not sure if that will happen, but that's definitely something I would love to be able to consider. I think what we will do at the moment is that I've been also presenting bits and pieces of that research at various events where I'm invited to speak. And I presented it at the Royal Academy in London just a month ago. And it seems like it was quite successful with many audience members. I'm going to speak about it in Madrid and Barcelona this year. So there seems to be interest in that particular topic. And I think from a very pragmatic point of view, that kind of research makes sense, not only because it's interesting for us, because we're just passionate about it, But it allows for a better way to communicate with people who are not necessarily convinced that what we do is of value. There's still a huge majority of legacy organizations, art leaders, decision makers in the more traditional part of the market. who are associating immersive with things that we probably would not be proud of. And it's nobody's mistake. I think it's just a matter of the fact that we still haven't developed a consistent language. We have issues with our methodology on how we analyze, communicate, and document the work. And so for me, working on the history of immersive art, trying to find the right language to describe it, trying to find the right way to discuss the works and explain these works and the meaning of these works to people who are not part of our community, trying to find an anchor in the past. you know, through things that are familiar to people from other disciplines, to things that they appreciate and find trustworthy. I think it all allows us for a much more successful conversation about things that we can achieve together. And that is my primary goal. So I was considering, you know, switching to a more academic work. And now I'm revisiting my plans because everything I do is practice based. And I think what is important is that as a curator, I feel an obligation to constantly practice. do my own research and to educate myself and try to see how I can improve the way you know what I have to offer and to whom I'm talking so I don't speak all the time to all the same people and in a way you know that research just fortunately became useful in the context of an exhibition that was primarily designed for people who are not industry members, as I already mentioned. You know, this exhibition is designed for people who live in Namur, who live in Brussels, who live in Belgium, who come to visit, who have absolutely no idea about anything that we know very well by now, because we were just watching these works for so many years. So if I want to put myself in the place of someone who's coming to see virtual reality storytelling for the first time, I want to give them some sort of a runway so that they can make an informed opinion about you know, how do you even position and contextualize this kind of work, right? And we'll see if it works. I think having heard some of the people from outside of our community who historically were not really excited about immersive at all, reacting positively to these kinds of propositions, I think it makes sense to continue on trying to delve into that a little bit deeper.
[00:27:15.007] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, it sounds amazing. I don't currently have any plans right now to travel to Belgium or Brussels or Namur, but if I happen to be in Europe and can drop in, it would be great to be able to hop in and check out the exhibition part because a lot of the VR experiences folks can watch on their own because a lot of them have released, but to see the full context of how the story of immersive storytelling in the historical context and all these other parts and how it is building up and just the exhibition space sounds amazing as well. So hopefully I'll be able to have a chance to check it out, but I currently have no plans, but that may change. Most of my international travel is based upon when people want to bring me over for this or that for a speech or whatever.
[00:28:00.766] Ana Brzezińska: So that may, if you're, if maybe can, maybe when you're in Cannes, you could, it's not far. I mean, it's the neighboring country, so maybe you could come.
[00:28:10.919] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I wanted to talk through the different experiences. I have had a chance to see each of these experiences on the festival circuit, and I have memories of when I first saw them. And I've also recorded interviews with each of these different projects as well. But you're going all the way back to 2016 and Notes on Blindness and I don't know if you want to go chronologically through these or if you want to say how you're curating them thematically, how they're laid out, but I'll leave it up to you. But I'd love to go through each of these different projects because I think this is a really great retrospective that is showing some of the highlights from the power of immersive storytelling and the highlights from many of the different projects that I've seen over the years from Sundance to Tribeca, Venice Immersive, and South by Southwest. This list is a really great recap and retrospective of what's been happening in this field. So I'll pass it over to you to discuss around the selection of different immersive storytelling experiences that you've curated.
[00:29:08.487] Ana Brzezińska: We indeed have 12 works in the selection. If we count the VR portion of Planet City, which is presented upstairs, we would have more than 12. But I think that I want to try to make it really brief because if I start talking about each of these works, we're never going to end this episode. But as you mentioned, we're going as far as to 2016. I think for many of us, Notes on Blindness is still really one of the formative experiences. If I'm not mistaken, I've seen some data in one of the French industry reports that it's still the most distributed work from the French portfolio. So it's the work that is still top of the list when it comes to the popularity of French VR works. I hope this is not an outdated information, but I think even if this is something that was published last year, it's still a really impressive result. considering, you know, how many works have been published since and how successful some of these works were. There is a strong presence here of works that were produced or co-produced by Atlas V. But I think, you know, what is really important is when you also when you break down these 12 works in these two chapters, it's a program where I was trying to balance Two things. One is obviously the kind of excellence and design and writing and execution that we're looking for in virtual reality narrative storytelling and the way this is something that can be presented to a wide audience. without the fear of creating an experience that is potentially disturbing, that is painful, that might actually create in the fact where someone who's doing it for the first time might feel reluctance coming back. And I really feel this is something that, you know, when we're dealing with a public that is unexperienced and that is very young and vulnerable, it's something to be taken under consideration with a lot of seriousness. And therefore, you know, a lot of the works that are in my maybe top 20 or top 20 that I do believe had a tremendous impact on how we think about storytelling in either a virtual reality or 360 environment are not on that list. because it would be for a different show. I want to make it super clear. It's not a canon. It's not the best of, and it's not top 12 of Eno. It's a program that is selected with the audience in mind, and I hope it will work for them. And I hope that the balance between the seriousness and depth and the commitment to impact-driven storytelling is balanced here with excellent dramaturgy, excellent script writing, terrific execution, mainly on the animation side, because most of these works are made by people who work with animation principally. We have obviously a lot of documentary works. We have Traveling White Black, which is, if I'm not mistaken, our only 360 documentary video work. I still believe this is really one of the best works that were made in that medium. I personally think this is my favorite work by Felix and Paul. Might not be a very obvious or popular choice, but this is the work I appreciate most from their portfolio. But I think what connects all these experiences, regardless how you categorize them, is that they kind of like follow the path of the title of this exhibition. They're trying to really bring you to an entirely different reality and an entirely different universe. And they're using artists and creative means to do so. That might mean many, many different things. But for me, what was really important is to make sure that This show is something that is my attempt to explain to people who've never been part of our worlds to explain to them what brought us here in the first place why have we fallen in love with this medium what kind of opportunities we have seen in this new storytelling tool but also what kind of opportunities we've seen and what kind of stories we want to share with whom we want to build them And how we want to share them. And to be very frank and without going too much into detail, I'm not sure if I still believe in that dream for many reasons. It's a very difficult moment for many of us. The world is really falling apart as we speak. And a lot of what's happening in our industry is also quite grim. But I wanted to give myself the luxury of having the opportunity to introduce new people to our community to remind myself of why I believed in that dream before. And the whole historical part that I hope we will be able to translate into some sort of a PDF that I will be able to send you in secret. It's also about that, you know, it's people who are innovating in different disciplines. because it was their reaction and counter-reaction to various changes that were happening around them that were somehow triggered by technological acceleration and by the way that technological acceleration was changing the world around them. So, you know, when you think about making a connection between Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk going through what happened in the theater when artists like Bertolt Brecht decided to take down the fourth wall to be more engaged, to enhance participation. When you think about Living Theater, the Worcester Group, a lot of the movements that we're trying to, in various ways, experiment in how can we create a more engaging, inclusive, participatory, lucid experience of being together. you know, it kind of leads us to a place where suddenly we're looking at the opening of the sphere. This is the real Gesamtkunstwerk. Isn't that a total work of art? But in a way, you know, in a way, it's a triumph of the technology and the means and the creative tools that we are all fascinated with. But in a way, isn't it also too much, you know? And especially when things outside are... you know, not really as optimistic as when you go in. So, you know, all these conversations are something that, you know, I want us to be mindful of as we kind of like continue our journey on building this, this industry and this community and saying like, why are we doing this? Like, are we serving the right purpose? Are we building the right alternative? Are we contributing to something that maybe we don't really necessarily believe anymore? Yeah. For me, this show is a little bit about that and the selection of the works is, I hope, showing the vastness, the complexity, the wisdom, and the beauty of artists working in this field.
[00:36:46.058] Kent Bye: Hmm. Beautiful. Yeah. And is it okay if I go through and give my quick pitch for each of these projects? Sure.
[00:36:54.185] Ana Brzezińska: Go ahead.
[00:36:55.706] Kent Bye: Okay. All right. So, yeah, this is a – I'm going to go through and attempt to give a little bit of a quick synopsis of each of these different projects because I have memories of seeing them on the festival circuit, kind of the world premieres of each of these. So we'll start with Nose and Blindness 2016. It's the first time I went to Sundance, and it's a really amazing project that's looking at tape recordings of someone who was slowly losing their vision and ways that you can use virtual reality technologies to kind of poetically imagine the point cloud disillusion of your vision. And it's really the classic of documentary storytelling, and it won a Peabody Award as well. Spheres I saw in 2017 at Sundance, you're traveling into space and you have this really poetic descriptions of what it feels like to kind of fly into a black hole and see this spaghettification of matter. Really beautiful, poetic piece. Battlescar and Gloomy Eyes are both like animation pieces and Battlescar is fast paced editing. A lot of ways of developing the grammar of editing, camera movements, scale. There's lots of kind of experimentation of how you actually tell stories within virtual reality. And Gloomy Eyes is another animation piece that I think is focusing on these small characters that you're seeing this kind of love story that's developing, but also just a lot of really innovative ways that they're moving the camera around and more of this tabletop scale that we've seen a lot within the context of animation pieces. Traveling All Black, I saw at Sundance in 2019, which was probably one of the most powerful 360 videos I've ever seen where you understand what it means to be Black African-American in the United States and the ways that your travel is restricted in a variety of different ways. and goes through historical up until the current day, and just a lot of really innovative 360 video techniques from Felix Ball and the director of Roger Ross Williams. The Hanging Man at Home was a winner at Venice of 2020. This was when you start to go into the pandemic era, watching all these different experiences. So I saw this in my home, but a really amazing animation piece that is totalitarian context, but has these moments where you're kind of going around this room and into these different spaces, but you have these animated characters who at some point kind of look at you and you feel like you're implicated of kind of invading their privacy. And just a really beautifully told story of the hangman at home. Goliath playing with reality from Antigone group that premiered at Tribeca 2021 and then had the full experience in Venice of 21, actually won Venice that year. And this is the beginning of the playing with reality series from Goliath where it's looking at schizophrenia, but different ways you can use the virtual reality medium to explore the first person experience of some of these mental health conditions. Planet City VR, I saw at Tribeca 2022, which was the first year that you were starting to curate all the different projects there. And this is a great speculative feature project that is looking at what if you put all humanity within the context of one city that's 10 billion people large and the size of the state of Texas. The idea is that you would have the rest of the earth go back to seed and that you could maybe address different climate issues. But it's more of a thought experiment for architects to think about. If you were to have this type of architecture, then what kind of solutions would you need to build from an architectural perspective? as a speculative design exercise, but then as you go through that context that's completely contrived and probably impossible, can you apply some of those different design insights into the world today that can actually be distributed out? So it's a really beautiful example of speculative futurism that I like to point to. Plastic Sapiens was a really kind of surrealistic way of going into a speculative future, a feminist feature that is looking at the impact of microplastics on our body and the ways that it changes your embodiment. So this is a piece that's really exploring that thematically, that story, but also playing with different levels of embodiment for how they tell that story. Evolver was one of my favorite pieces from that year at Tribeca 2022 Marshmallow Laser Feast, a social VR experience where you're able to walk through the body of someone. And it's basically like your microscopic size, but able to walk through the blood flows of a person. And I think a theme that's really explored here is the way that you're kind of dissolving the boundaries between what is us and what is the world around us and trying to put forward this idea of how we're really much more interconnected than we may realize from the outset. And then we moved to Venice of 2022 with From the Main Square, which came up in the runner up of that year. It's a really beautiful animated piece that was like a grad school project, but then ended up being a really sophisticated way of interactive, immersive storytelling in the sense that it's gaze directed. So the story is unfolding of this city that has this two polarized factions that are fighting up against each other. And it's just a... prescient story of this day and age right now, but also just a really beautifully told story for animation and pushing for the grammar of immersive storytelling. And then we have two pieces from Craig Quintero, All the Remains, that was at Venice of 2022, and then Over the Rainbow, which is at Tribeca 2023, that are kind of this trilogy that Craig Quintero was doing that he's got this really interesting theater of one type of projects where he was able to translate those into like 360 videos that were able to have these associative links that put you into this kind of weird altered state of consciousness that are unlike anything else I've seen in VR. It's like a really interesting intersection of this one-on-one encounter that he's created and just surrealistic associative links and pushing forward how he could be taken to another place. So yeah.
[00:42:35.066] Ana Brzezińska: It's so well designed that I almost forgot that it was a 360. I just realized when you were describing it, that it is a 360 and my brain just wouldn't associate it with a 360.
[00:42:46.414] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's unlike any other 360. Usually you think of 360 as, you know, grounding you deeper into reality, but this is a type of 360 that puts you into like a completely theatrical, surrealistic place that is one of those pieces that are impossible to kind of predict where it's going to go next. And I think that's the point where they're trying to pervert your expectations and that once you get your expectations perverted enough, it just puts you into this kind of altered state of consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's my recap of the selection. And so for anyone that's listening, some of these are available for folks that are in the XR industry to check out. But yeah, if you want to go see the full context within the installation and everything else, then we'll hopefully help isolate down for what people can check out. So I don't know if you have any other comments around any of those pieces.
[00:43:33.743] Ana Brzezińska: I think this is really terrific. And I love the kind of, you know, short pitch you gave for each of these works. But I want to say that, you know, it's so impressive that, you know, the way I think about these works is so radically different. And I'm kind of like, obviously always coming back more from a place of aesthetics or the dramaturgy of these works. I mean, it's usually secondary for me how it's made, which is quite extraordinary because this is what usually you start with when you start kind of like breaking down the way the experience works. And I was wondering, you know, do you see a pattern in how these works are put together? Do you see any kind of immediate direction to like the type of storytelling that you would think would dominate in that show from your point of view?
[00:44:20.933] Kent Bye: Well, when I look at it, I have my experiential design framework where I'm looking at the quality, context, character, and story. So I'm looking at the different qualities of presence. I'm looking at the different contextual domains that are being explored, the exploration of character. And then the sort of mechanics of how the story are told, like from the main square, is very innovative in terms of the... way that the story is unfolding that is, it's not nonlinear, but it is interactive in the sense that it's gaze detected. So it unfolds and changes each time you would watch it. But I'd say for each of these pieces, they're each contributing to the grammar of immersive storytelling in their unique ways. And that the way that they're playing with the different qualities of presence and, you know, like, for example, Class of Sapiens is probably the one that has the strongest dimension of embodiment. in this selection that we have here. Most of the other ones that we have in this specific selection are mostly that you're like an omniscient ghost that's watching it and that you're not necessarily a character. Although like traveling while black, you are at some points like sitting at the table with other people. So you have this kind of implied character, but you're not being addressed as a character. In the Hangman at Home, you actually are addressed as a presence. So you're not just omniscient, but you do have a presence. And so the way that I would go through the selection would be like, OK, what are the innovations of embodiment? What are the innovations of interactivity or agency? None of these projects are necessarily taking in user input or agency. So this is mostly like a cinematic VR tradition rather than sort of interactive tradition. So not much of active presence within the selection. And then the emotional presence are the ways that it's driving my own emotions. And so, you know, some of the pieces that were deeply emotionally moving for me were like the traveling on black spheres was very emotional notes on blindness. Evolver had a really emotional reaction just because of it felt like the way that they had the onboarding and offboarding and the whole experience. It just felt like a... kind of a transcendent spiritual experience for me. And then the other dimension is kind of the mental and social presence. I'd say that probably the all that remains in Over the Rainbow is probably getting into that the most because that is around expectations and plausibility and You know, also like plant city VR is kind of getting near the speculative feature aspect and plastic sapiens also that kind of speculative feature. So it's like more of these ideas and concepts that's being explored or your expectations for what you expect or what's possible. And that. That kind of expectation dimension of experience is the ones that All That Remains and Over the Rainbow are really diving into. And each of them are telling different stories in really powerful and strong ways. And so it's also a great example to see how each of these pieces are able to dive into a specific topic and use the immersive medium to explore that topic in a new way.
[00:47:14.500] Ana Brzezińska: That's great. I mean, I think there's obviously so many, there are so many titles that I would love to put on that list and I would love to extend that program. And, you know, there are various formats that are challenging to exhibit when you have limited resources and limited space, but also when you're presenting for so long and you cannot really run it as if you were running it for just a couple of days. There were works that, you know, I've been thinking a lot. And there's also, you know, I think about this exhibition almost as a first step for the pavilion because they've never worked with virtual reality before. They've never done an exhibition on this particular medium or, you know, the kind of creativity that arouses around it. And I think that this is really an onboarding experience for the local public. I think there's so much more to discover, you know, in free roaming, VR, in spatial audio, in a lot of performance-based works. And we obviously can probably, you know, both think about many brilliant titles that should be presented if we were considering this a canon. But that's why I'm saying, like, it's definitely not one... And I think it's really a show that I would like people to be able to use as an opportunity to, you know, just look at reality differently and see that storytelling that they haven't seen in any other medium was silently growing next door. And here it is. It's just manifesting itself and, you know, hopefully inspiring a new generation of people to jump on that train and, you know, carry on.
[00:49:00.420] Kent Bye: Yeah, and we're coming up on these 10-year anniversary markers. And so this is kind of like going nine years back from 2016. But yeah, it's like as I was going through each of these different qualities of presence, when I think about this, I would be like, oh, when I think around the strongest sense of embodiment or environmental design. or even like the most kind of interactive or agency, the one that is really focusing on that dimension. But this is really from like the more cinematic tradition and storytelling tradition and like receiving really powerfully told stories. And so this is a great selection in that sense. And also, you know, all the different constraints that you're talking around in terms of if you were to do a six month exhibition and not have things that are like, you know, super long, but also are accessible and throughput issues and all these different considerations that you would have to think about in terms of a public exhibition. Yeah, well, this is a really exciting, this opening up here on like March 22nd. And so it's going to be going up until October. And so, yeah, it's really great to see that this is happening at a location there outside of Brussels there in Belgium. And so, yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, then I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality, spatial computing and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:50:14.926] Ana Brzezińska: So my most recent passion is to think about immersive storytelling as a methodology and not a meme. And that is also something that is part of that research that we've been discussing all day today. I'm thinking that it's really a matter of approach to how you design storytelling, exhibitions, how you think about an artwork. It's really more in your approach, the tools, the methods, the way you think about bringing people in, the way you think about people connecting through the work or within the work. rather than using a particular set of digital technologies, right? So if you would ask me today if I think immersive is headset-based, I would say no. But I'm still primarily interested in immersive that is using technology in a way that changes the way we look at physical reality and changes the way we interact with it. So I'm still much less interested in various forms of immersive storytelling that are technology-free, for instance. And in that way, you think about it as a methodology. I think the future of immersive is quite promising because if you think about it almost as a layer that you can put on top of various existing methodologies and see how they interact together and how they change things, rather than a very rigid, separate universe that has to have its own mediums and norms and standards. And then all these fights between commercial immersive, independent immersive, headset-based immersive, location-based immersive. I think a lot of the debates and sometimes a lot about misunderstandings that we see with how people use that word or sometimes overuse it is because we just are not specific enough. And we're not also embracing the fact that immersive can mean many things, but whenever you say that you're making an immersive work, you have to be very specific. What do you mean by that? And what kind of methodologies you deploy? And I think that that kind of mixed genealogy of immersive is where all these differences are coming from. Because, you know, creators or people who are coming up with ideas for various uses of immersive today, they also come from different backgrounds. Some people would come from video games, some from film, some from theater, some from sound design. And so each of these people already come with some sort of embedded set of behaviors and interpretations and definitions and kind of like inner workflows. And that's how, you know, there are misunderstandings and people just talk about different things using the same words and then they're not always aligned. So if we think about immersive as a methodology, the future for various branches of this huge tree is probably, again, bright and promising. For me, the most exciting part today, which might change in a year time or maybe sooner or maybe it will not change, is to see how we can bring this knowledge to legacy organizations and to people who are the custodians of traditional culture. And I'm interested in that for two reasons. One, this is where I originally come from and I miss that world, but I don't want to give up on Immersive because I love that world as well. So I would like to bring the best of Immersive to my original world or my original worlds. And I also am deeply worried as a person who loves culture and art history and who finds huge value in maintaining the kind of level of cultural awareness that I was raised with through the next couple of years or decades. And I would like to be able to perhaps contribute in a positive way to how legacy organizations and the custodians of traditional art struggle with protecting and defending what they were offered to do and what they were given to protect. And I think that some of the tools and some of the methodologies that we've developed in our industry can be very, very helpful in that process. And this is the future that I'm most excited about today.
[00:54:50.476] Kent Bye: Beautiful. And is there any final thoughts or anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:54:57.881] Ana Brzezińska: I want to say that I would like Americans to be happy, free, and courageous people again. I think that's the only thing that counts today.
[00:55:09.881] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah, definitely feeling that and all the things that are happening as we watch this slow motion train wreck happening of the dismantling of democracy here in the United States. It's really quite sad. And yeah, definitely take that to heart to find the little pockets of agency that each of us have, whether it's out in the wide world or even internal things that people need to do to thrive. find their own pockets of solace and ways that they can resist and contribute to having a more just and free world altogether. So everyone has their part to play. And I'm in that same conversation of trying to find my own part. I still find a lot of hope and optimism in these immersive technologies. And so it's great to be able to at least focus on some of these little pockets of optimism that I see with the type of work that you're doing. And I just really appreciate you taking the time to join me today to unpack all the things that you're doing in your next phase of your career as an independent curator and just really excited to see what you've been able to create there in this pavilion, but also just to hear some of your thoughts because you're such a deep thinker when it comes to contextualizing all that's happening here in this moment in time of the evolution of immersive art. So thanks again for joining me here today on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:56:29.532] Ana Brzezińska: Thank you, Kent.
[00:56:31.283] Kent Bye: So that was Anna Brzezinska. She's formerly a curator of tobacco immersive as well as kaleidoscope VR. And now she is curating this six-month exhibition that is taking place in Nimer, Belgium called Other Worlds Are Possible. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, a lot of the different coverage that I've done has been at what you would probably consider more of these XR industry events, at these film festivals and different conferences. And this is a very unique six-month exhibition that's happening in a cultural institution that isn't necessarily where a lot of the normal types of immersive art and immersive storytelling projects are being exhibited. And so this is a new and exciting trend to see that Anna, as an independent curator now, is starting to put together these different shows at these different cultural institutions. Yeah. So it looks like that when you buy tickets that you can choose one or two, what are going to eventually be 12 different immersive storytelling projects that are going to be shown over the course of the six month kind of broken up into different sections. And so also there seems to be like an entire takeover of this space where there's going to be other types of exhibitions that are digging into a little bit more of the history and evolution of immersive art, immersive storytelling as a medium from these different strands of influence. So very much looking forward to seeing different documentation of some of the different stuff that she's put together as part of this exhibition, as well as, yeah, just to see how immersive art, immersive storytelling can be used to take over an entire existing cultural institution. So as of right now, I don't have any plans to make it over to Belgium. But if I do end up in Europe and can pop by, then I'd love to drop by and just check it out just to see how everything is put together. As she was describing it more and more, it just made me want to make a special trip. But yeah, like I said, at this moment, I don't have any current plans to make it over. And yeah, I just also got back from South by Southwest where I did around 25 different interviews with immersive artists, immersive storytellers, and over 20 hours with the coverage, which I'm currently in the process of editing and hopefully we'll get out sometime early next week. But yeah. Yeah, this is just an interesting kind of retrospective look at some of the pieces that have been released over the past decade or so. And a number of them are available, including Goliath playing with reality, Traveling While Black, Gloomy Eyes, Battlescar, Spheres, and Notes on Blindness. So it was interesting to hear how Anna was resistant to saying that this was somehow a representative canon of immersive stories. And she really had to take into consideration if you were doing an exhibition for six months. Some of the different projects that are out there may require more logistics when it comes to, say, social VR experiences or ones that have a lot of agency. There may be different constraints when you are trying to exhibit something for six months. So she was emphasizing how this was a kind of a really great introduction for folks who, you know, maybe their first time seeing some of these different projects. There's also lots of different projects that you may require a little bit higher threshold of, say, local moding through these immersive spaces. So like. immersive theater projects within VRChat, as an example, where even today with the Ferryman Collective showing at South by Southwest, there's folks who have been in the XR industry for over a decade who still experience different levels of motion sickness as they're locomoting through these different spaces. And so A lot of these different types of projects don't require too much moving around or locomotion or using of the immersive technologies to the point where people might get stuck because they don't know how to like move around or navigate or whatnot. So because these are more from that cinematic tradition, a lot of them are not necessarily like even embodied. You're kind of omnisciently watching something. So these are a great selection for people who are just kind of getting into immersive art and immersive storytelling. So again, the name of this exhibition is Other Worlds Are Possible. It's taking place in Nemours, Belgium from March 22nd, 2025 up until September 21st, 2025. So that's all I have for today. And I just want to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
