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Photo by Mikhail Mishin courtesy of Onassis ONX

#1569: Family of Storytellers Creates an AR Memorial of Black Poet Nikki Giovanni with Epic Organic Garden Installation

July 18, 2025by kentbye

I spoke with Michèle Stephenson, Joe Brewster, & idris brewster about There Goes Nikki at Tribeca Immersive 2025. See more context in the rough transcript below. (Photo by Mikhail Mishin courtesy of Onassis ONX)

Tribeca Immersive 2025 Selection

Onassis ONX Summer Showcase & Other Interviews

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.431] 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 spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So I'm going to be diving into my coverage from Tribeca Immersive, and then after that I'll be digging into some of my remote coverage from ConXR, and then covering some other things in and around New York City with the Onassis Onyx Summer Showcase, and then digging into Augmented World Expo coverage. And then finally, I'll be diving into my coverage from Rain Dance Immersive that was happening on mostly like VRChat and other social VR platforms. So Tribeca Immersive this year was kind of a new iteration. They had the Onassis Foundation with Onyx Studios as well as with Agog in collaboration with Tribeca that were curating this program that was really focused on social impact stories. But also the arrangement was that it was these museum-style installations. A lot of it was like very exquisite, lots of space, a really beautiful installation setup and kind of a mix between some immersive art and immersive storytelling. And so I spent a lot of time checking out each of these projects and then sitting down with the creators of the projects that I hadn't covered or seen yet. There's like three projects that I've covered previously. So if you go back into the interview that I did with Casey Baltus and Jazia Amoudi, then you'll be able to see like the full list of all different projects. And I'll link to all the different interviews that I've done as a part of my Tribeca Immersive coverage. I'm going to be starting off with a piece called There Goes Nikki, which was done by Michelle Stevenson and Joe Brewster, as well as their son, Aegis Brewster. They're all collaborating on this project. So really kind of a unique family in terms of their collaboration, their artists, and their telling stories together. They have different focus. I think Joe's really focused on the community building aspect and then talk a lot around more general process aspects with both Michelle and Aegis Brewster. But the story itself is about Nikki Giovanni, and she is a renowned black American poet who isn't afraid to speak truth to power. So there's actually a documentary that was called Going to Mars, Nikki Giovanni Project by Michelle and Joe that actually won the Sundance documentary competition a couple of years ago. And I previously covered the changing same with Michelle and Joe. And there's a lot of immersive techniques that they were using in collaboration with like Depakit and working with Yasmeen Elliott. So they actually talk a bit about in this conversation, how some of those immersive techniques were influencing the way that they tell stories across all these different media. They, have had a long association with Sherry Freelo and New Frontier, and they talk around their history of getting into XR and immersive, but also have been always thinking around how to create immersive interactive installations and how to build community around projects. And Idris has this amazing project that I've covered a couple of previous times. Back with this previous iteration of Movers and Shakers, I talked to Glenn Contave back at VRTO 2018, Then at Tribeca 2023, Ken Folczak was actually being shown there. I had a chance to sit down with Idris to just talk a bit about this project of monumentalizing different aspects of Black American culture. And so using augmented reality to start to fill in the gaps of other stories that need to be told that are very site specific. And so in this experience, you start to see Nikki Giovanni in a volumetric capture. She's talking around like the interrelatedness of Black life and death. And she since passed away. And so this is kind of like a virtual memorial for her and a little bit of a grief ritual, but also just kind of meditating on some of her thoughts and has some really beautiful moments where she kind of floats into the sky and disintegrates into a million different particle effects. But the installation part was also really quite incredible. It was essentially like an entire garden that they had created that was living. And so they actually had to come by and water it every other day. And this installation was there for like three weeks or so. And so really quite an awe-inspiring context where you're walking into this beautiful garden and then having this site-specific augmented reality experience. as well as some videos to bookend this experience. And the poem of the Black Eyed Peas is up on the wall that you can read as well, which is a lot of the different themes that are being explored throughout the context of this work. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Michelle, Joe, and Idris happened on Thursday, June 5th, 2025 at the Tribeca Immersive Festival in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:04:33.524] Michèle Stephenson: Hello, I am Michelle Stephenson, and I am co-creator of this immersive project at Tribeca called There Goes Nikki. And I've been dabbling with XR for the last, I was going to say almost 20 years now, in and out. And this is our final project.

[00:04:52.593] Joe Brewster: Is that a final project or your last? I wanted to be clear. I am Joe Brewster. I am a filmmaker, documentary primarily, but I dabble in the XR space. And I think it's a little more than dabble. I'm a storyteller. And I think every medium that I can choose is worthwhile.

[00:05:23.052] idris brewster: I'm Idris. I'm an artist and creative technologist, co-director of There Goes Nikki. When I work in the AR space, I have an organization called Kinfolk Tech. And so this was also a collaboration with Kinfolk Tech and RADA Collaborative, also an extension of the film that Michelle and Joe made, Gone to Mars.

[00:05:44.837] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.

[00:05:50.288] Michèle Stephenson: So, yes, I am a filmmaker. Not my first career, but came to this out of a passion and a real drive that my co-creative partner, Joe Brewster, who I work with on a lot of our projects together, And together we started the RADA Collaborative and RADA Studio where we make not just films but also support makers and work in the creative space. We like to call ourselves sort of platform agnostic. Let the story and the characters sort of lead us where we would like them to be. There was one more thing I wanted to say and I forgot. I will come back to it.

[00:06:33.404] Joe Brewster: Can I help you?

[00:06:34.565] Michèle Stephenson: Oh, go ahead.

[00:06:35.598] Joe Brewster: You were going to talk about your Haitian and Panamanian roots. Oh, yes, I could. You said that you asked the question, her journey. And her journey was what?

[00:06:49.030] Michèle Stephenson: Well, I come to filmmaking via sort of a militant lens, a political lens. I worked in the international development, then went to law and did human rights legal work. And at each stage felt deeply dissatisfied with... where I was positioning myself and what I felt I was contributing to it felt like a bit of a you know the rat in the wheel not really being able to make substantive change and then I met Joe who was changing his career from psychiatry to filmmaking and I kind of caught the bug the passion of storytelling at what narrative can do to change minds to change our state of being to heal and it felt like the right place for me to be and from there I would like to talk a little bit about the origins of the interactive and immersive space that we worked in. It was really Shari Freelo, a black woman who started Sundance New Frontier pretty much on her own. bringing in cutting edge, you know, stuff. And I remember going to Sundance Film Festival and seeking New Frontier as a respite for just being in the spaces of true innovation and pushing envelopes and creativity that were inspiring to me, even if I would go back to filmmaking. But it left this sort of desire to explore what technology could do as well. And from then on, Okay, you want me to stop?

[00:08:26.956] idris brewster: Now what year was that?

[00:08:29.218] Michèle Stephenson: So the first time the New Frontier happened, I want to say... I think it was like 2007-ish.

[00:08:38.248] Kent Bye: I know that if a DocLab and Sundance New Frontier kind of have the same timeline in terms of like DocLab, I think might've been first and then Sundance New Frontier came after. And so DocLab just had their 18th year. So if you look at how long DocLab has been around, it's like Sundance New Frontier, was along the same, although they have stopped doing it for the last two or three years, so yeah.

[00:08:58.673] Michèle Stephenson: Did you engage in XR in 2007? I engaged with it, yes. I engaged with XR in 2007. That's what I'm saying. I engaged with it as a participant. A participant. Joe and Shari go way back, and Shari had this idea. And every year I would go, and it was definitely before our film American Promise came out, and we were going to Sundance to pitch and find money. And the stress of the film festival, it was really a counterpoint to that. And things changed. Things changed. After American Promise came out in 2013, it changed. Even Shari's role changed. It became a big thing. new frontier with these long lines. But what I did do with that too is work with black public media. This is a little bit after American, that was even before American Promise as well. Black public media, Jackie Jones, I don't know if they were in conversation with Shari Arthur, but they were developing immersive spaces for black creatives. It was the same time as What was the name of that website, the interactive stuff that Gary Dauphin was doing? Anyway, there was this hub of black creatives that were experimenting with work. And we were dabbling with interactive stories on websites. But there was always sort of that desire to be more deeply involved. And the opportunity came along much later with The Changing Same.

[00:10:25.992] idris brewster: I thought you didn't know VRAR before me. That was my... I thought I was introducing it to y'all because I started in 2015. But I guess that's not the case. I guess that's not the case.

[00:10:40.925] Kent Bye: We're learning a lot today.

[00:10:44.168] Michèle Stephenson: So Justin, this is a family collaboration. So Idris is our son.

[00:10:51.235] Joe Brewster: So I would say that my journey with Immersive goes back a thousand years. Because people want to put a date stamp on something. But I am saying storytelling is much more important than us trying to own one particular story. These stories are important. It is a primary vehicle for news throughout history, health, healing. And my experience is embodied, but it's also where I grew up in L.A. I grew up in the church. I am what you call an atheist, but I understand. You haven't been listening.

[00:11:44.686] Michèle Stephenson: But what I can say is... Well, the church is a very immersive experience.

[00:11:50.033] Joe Brewster: The elements of that experience really informed almost every aspect of my life. It allows me to go into other environments and take my stories with me, my stories of success, trial and error, failure. And so I want to lift that history up. That being the case... I started as a psychiatrist. I was in college. I was recruited because I was an A student in math, and they were looking for black folks with high SATs, MCATs. But I really was not into the medicine per se. I was into the whole notion of community. So I studied a lot of group work, and I began to see how important community was. I lived above a repertory theater in Montreal. and went to a movie every night after I came home from my internship. And I was spellbound and determined to understand how to tell stories more effectively. So that's my journey. And I'd be happy doing a podcast. I'd be happy doing hand signals on the street corner. But what I do know is that, particularly now, The war against people of color that I see playing out in the news every day really is trying to deprive us of these stories. And what we do is we tell stories with a twist, with information about the history that I think is really important. I want to know how... Now, you're pointing to me. You've been on this microphone for like 30 minutes. She's a director at heart. Because watch out, she'll have your job. But I want to know... How did you, because, you know, we did everything we could to keep Idris off of computers. In fact, I even threw the Xbox out the window one day and then he comes from, Rick comes from college and he's studying artificial intelligence and games. What's up with that?

[00:14:23.118] idris brewster: Well, y'all were wrong. Y'all were wrong. I mean, I was going to say video games were sort of how I got my start. They talked about the lineage. I won't get into that. But I mean, I was big into video games from a young age, from the Game Boy Color to PS1 all the way through the PS5 now. And I was playing a lot of my favorite ones were open world games. I got really into the Assassin's Creed series and I think there was, among others, definitely played a lot of other games and so what was interesting for me was that was my kind of storytelling was like participatory, interactive and immersive and so that was sort of an exciting space and I mean I have glasses now maybe because of the amount of TV I was, video games I was playing. They would always pull me back from the TV. But I think that also became a space of how I learn, how I engage with the world. And when I got to college, I was really into art. I was really into the brain, the mind. And so I majored in cognitive science and computer science. But I was really more interested in the creative aspects of how VR and AR, it melds a lot of different sorts of mediums into one space. And it's able to shift perspectives, shift minds, shift hearts, because it really brings you fully into the story and hits all out of your different senses. I remember I got a grant in 2014, I think it was, to... get the Oculus DK2 and start doing EEG experiments on folks and putting them through VR experiences and seeing how that shifted their emotions. I had to beg my mom to get me a $1,000 computer so that I could run this because I didn't have that money. But you gracefully got it for me. And that was, I think, the start of my exposure to VR. And from there, put it down for a little bit, but went to work at Code Next at Google, which was a space where I was teaching kids of color how to do computer science through the lens of art, through the lens of making. Spent a lot of time in that Google lab playing VR games with the kids. But at that time, there was a movement that was happening in the country and around the globe of the taking down monuments. And a crazy stat is like before 2015, only three monuments have been taken down in the history of America. But since then, 110 monuments have been taken down. And so there was a reckoning with our symbols, our monuments, and the values and the stories that our America is telling and what is missing and what is being intentionally erased. And so there was an opportunity in New York to make a difference when the New York was considering what to do with the Christopher Columbus monument. And so my collective and I, we started making these AR experiences. At the beginning, it was just using image recognition on paintings. We'd bring those paintings to Columbus Circle, to galleries, to meetups, to have people see this medium as something larger than Pokemon Go, larger than entertainment, but is actually a space to immerse folks in the stories and an outlet for us to get our stories out there to the public. and have them take up the space that is not being allowed. And so it started out as a project, and it's become Kinfolk Tech, which is a platform, an archival and place-based platform where you can go out into your city in New York, New Orleans, and spaces across the country in the Bay Area and others to see community imaginations and community visualizations of history come to life through AR. And we actually collaborated with Pokemon Go's team at Niantic to build that backend technology to allow us to activate these spaces with ease. And so it's become a platform that's growing, that's scaling, and it's really become a space of how do we empower folks to get into the AR space. We work with a lot of creators, mostly creators who aren't digitally native, and it's become also a space to get people into AR and get people into the future of media, especially folks who are black and brown and get them exposed to what the future of storytelling is going to be and actually have to play an active role in shaping that. And so it started out as something I was doing myself with my folks and it's became a way to bring others into the fold, especially the 250th anniversary of America's coming up. And there's a story that's gonna be told at large by the powers that be. And so it's a really important time for us to start collecting and sharing out stories, putting them in spaces where it's sanctioned and spaces where it's not so that we can really increase the visibility. And so folks can really understand where we came from and use that as a manual and a model to really shape the systems moving forward. And so we see it as a tool and yeah, it's growing and we're here, still here.

[00:19:10.805] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I first went to Sundance New Frontier back in January 2016, and so I've made consistent trips out to see the frontiers of emerging and immersive storytelling, so I very much appreciated all the context leading up to this point, because you were there from the beginning, and You know, I also saw the Changing Same and had a chance to talk to both of you a number of years ago at Sundance while it was still during the pandemic. And I also had a chance to watch the Going to Mars documentary that actually ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize a couple of years ago at Sundance. So congratulations on that. And this seems like a project, There Goes Nikki, which is perhaps born out of some of the footage that you shot of Nikki Giovanni, a poet. And so maybe you could just give a bit of context to who is Nikki Giovanni and this repository of material that you created for the documentary, which had a lot of like experimental aspects, visually just felt like pushing the edge of what I'm used to seeing in most documentaries. There seemed to be like a experimental film quality. But with this AR piece, you've got, I think of it as like a bit of a community ritual where you have people go through and reflect on a number of different themes around death and mortality and nature. So yeah, just love to hear a bit of context around Nikki and the putting together of this AR project called There Goes Nikki.

[00:20:28.801] Joe Brewster: Well, I first heard Nicki on popular radio in Los Angeles. She was part of this black arts movement. But most importantly, she spoke truth to power in a way that our current president would not accept. But she doesn't give a shit. And so it was empowering to me as a young man to hear her recite her iteration of history and to implore us to think more positively about our experiences as Black Americans. One of the things that she has consistently done with her poetry is to say that no matter how bad the trauma has been, look at the other things you've gained, look at the ways you've resisted, be appreciative of those whose shoulders you stand on. And so when we were looking for a film to make, a character to follow, we naturally gravitated towards her. One thing I would like to say, I don't know if it addresses your question, is that immersive media has impacted everything we do. In other words, we don't think in terms of film alone anymore. There's always an immersive experience that we're designing as we put the film together. So you can see it in our film, elements of it. But with American Promise, which is a 14 year long project that we did looking at Raising our son, Idris, in one of the more rigorous schools in New York City, the Dalton School, we created an immersive experience that was installed in multiple locations. And we continue to do that with every piece that we do. In fact, right now we have a couple pieces that are in production where we're looking at immersive experience behind scenes the main character, the protagonist. And we're using AI to create those experiences. So we're interested in emotion primarily. And we use every tool we can to kind of create an emotional ecosphere that pushes the audience to think complexly.

[00:23:06.093] Michèle Stephenson: One thing I want to say about the documentary, the film, it's really sort of a hybrid going to Mars, the Nikki Giovanni project, is we did Changing Same in VR before. We were making the film going to Mars while we were also making changing same, and I feel that going to Mars benefited from our VR experience on so many levels. We were able to take the storytelling to another level in terms of the immersive. It was 2D, but it was a very immersive experience because we thought about sound differently. We thought about collapsing time with the Nikki Giovanni project, the going to Mars. where it wasn't about a timeline. It was nonlinear. So there were actually elements of VR storytelling we experimented with that ended up in going to Mars that I felt really brought the form to a whole different level. So that was very exciting to see. I don't think if we had not really worked on VR before that, the film might have been different in multiple ways. So I think people come out of that experience feeling like they had been multisensory impacted and somehow it hits them emotionally without them being able to sort of intellectualize it. So and I think it comes from the VR experience we had with There Goes Nikki. We started while we were also making the film, and Idris was in the midst of his monuments work. And we had visited MoMA, the exhibition there, and we were observing the development of his work. And we said, well, you know, Nikki should be monumentalized as well. And what's beautiful about this too is, well, budgetarily speaking, is one element is that Nikki taught at Virginia Tech. and Virginia Tech had cutting-edge technology that they made available to us for free. And so we got together with Idris and went down for a weekend, and we 3D-captured Nikki in her element with DepthKit. And she was very game because she lives with this desire and openness of, well, not so much technology because she doesn't use her iPhone much, but the idea of space. The idea...

[00:25:26.037] Joe Brewster: Because as you're sitting here talking about VR and whatever, what's it like working with your son? What does it feel like working with him? You're not interviewing me. No, no. I do that often.

[00:25:43.857] Michèle Stephenson: I know you do. Well, so what I was saying is we came down and we worked with Idris. We worked on the capture. And initially it was going to be two separate projects. One was going to be just exclusively AR that Idris was going to develop. And we were thinking of doing an AR thing. And I think I was, I mean, going to your question, it was exciting for me to be able to collaborate with my son. Yeah. But it ended up getting.

[00:26:12.360] Joe Brewster: Nugget and storytelling, emotion. And the point is that I know that you were beaming constantly watching your son in the background taking the lead on a project where you had always been the leader. in his life. And so that's an interesting experience to see the next generation take our thoughts and move it to the next level. And I think that's What we're most proud of, I remember him saying when we were talking about American Promise and whether or not he should be in the film or whether or not he had agency. And we were being questioned. And I... and probably politically incorrectly said, I think he had an obligation to share that particular story with the rest of America. I don't know if you agreed with that at the time.

[00:27:17.269] idris brewster: I don't know what you're talking about. What specifically?

[00:27:20.993] Joe Brewster: Whether or not you should be participating in an American promise.

[00:27:24.918] idris brewster: I mean, I didn't agree with it at all, but now I do. I was young. I just wanted to be in my own space and not be filmed, especially towards high school. But it definitely is. I see the importance of it now. And a lot of parenting things I appreciate now that I did not in the moment that I've been reflecting on. So there's more than just that.

[00:27:50.791] Michèle Stephenson: Well, just getting back to There Goes Nikki. So, yeah, it was going to be a VR component that we were going to try to see what kind of installation we do. And Idris was going to develop an AR monument through his kinfotech. And then, I don't know, years kind of went by and everything was sort of on standby. But then when Nikki passed away in December of last year, I think there was a renewed sort of energy on the part of the three of us to figure out, well, maybe we should do something together. It was before she passed, right? Yeah.

[00:28:20.845] idris brewster: we heard she was not doing well and so that was we started working on it again and then she passed it wasn't even like it was we weren't expecting it to happen at that exact moment and so then yeah that's when things started to happen even more yeah yeah

[00:28:42.192] Kent Bye: Just from your perspective, I know that it sounds like you've been in this kind of maybe consensual, non-consensual collaboration with your parents for a long time on all these projects. So it sounds like your parents were working on this Nikki Giovanni project. Maybe from your perspective, talk around coming on board, what was it like to get the pitch to start to apply some of this kinfolk technology and your entry point into working on this specific project of There Goes Nikki.

[00:29:10.677] idris brewster: Yeah, I think it was, I mean, one, I think it was, the work was very powerful of the Nikki Giovanni film and she's a poet that I admire and revere highly. And so I always in the back of my head was like, this would be a dope monument and a dope experience, but. It wasn't something that we pushed on. And when my mom pitched it to me, I was like, all right, let's see if this can happen. And then I think it was Virginia Tech being able to say, hey, we can give you this for free and capture this. That made me like, oh, wow, we can get the content and we can actually start to shape this into an experience that And I think it was exciting that this could be extend the life cycle of the film, which I think is a large use case for AR experiences in general. We've done a few of those. And so it was an exciting opportunity. And also, I just wanted to meet Nikki and hang with Nikki in general. And I think that was I really enjoyed going down there, going at her house, getting fed her food. drinking a lot, I will say, drinking a lot of wine. She can definitely drink. And so her house felt like an immersive experience. The amount of memorabilia, the amount of knickknacks, the amount of photos, books. It was very maximalist. And it was really incredible just to be surrounded in her every day, immersed in that. And so that was already, you got me there. I didn't even make it a piece. I was already in the immersive experience.

[00:30:40.823] Joe Brewster: But let me translate that. I say that to piss off Michelle because she says I'm a mansplainer. But this ultimately became about community. And that's our biggest priority. We have a community that we created, took us nine years with Nikki. And our sons are part of that community too. And we are working on creating a more functional community between the three of us. I think we're succeeding. What do you think?

[00:31:17.155] idris brewster: Yeah, sure. I guess, yeah, we're succeeding. But I guess, what was I saying? Oh, yes. But then time went by. I mean, we didn't really have a deadline. We were looking for event spaces to do. We wanted to do a screening and activate the AR experience. We were thinking about VR, but it was really going to be an AR experience. And Tribeca came around for applications and I was a little hesitant to apply just because of my team had a lot. We were doing a lot of activations around this time. We have two other exhibitions that are launching. a week before and a week after Tribeca. And so we didn't really have the bandwidth, but I was urged by the Agog team to apply and put their hat on the ring. And it was like, all right, well, this does make somewhat sense. We've already have some pieces of this, but essentially it was a full sprint. The team, we built this in a month and a half. from all aspects of the installation to adding the VR component, the 360 component, and brought on a great team of Elliot Mitchell, who was introduced to us, not introduced, but connected us by Yasmeen. Oh, you worked with Elliot on The Changing Same.

[00:32:35.438] Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, we worked with Elliot Mitchell on The Changing Same, yeah.

[00:32:38.263] idris brewster: And then we brought our team of Prashastapan and Pariah Interactive, and that was a beautiful collaboration between Prash and team, and Elliot brought on Asia Evans, who was helping produce this, and Josh Perea, who was our set designer, Saffron, who was the florist. What was beautiful about this was, of course, the collaboration with us, but us three being the directors made it, I feel like, a collaborative experience overall, where we were taking ideas from everybody. Like, y'all said I led, but I didn't feel like that. Like, I felt like it was coming from everywhere and synthesized. And there'd be times that I'd give a note, you'd give a different note, and you'd give a different note. And then people had to translate that and bring in their own ideas. And so it was a lot of synthesis that I thought was beautiful.

[00:33:23.178] Joe Brewster: I also think we have a process, a creative process, even during a sprint, and that is we never take a note without really examining in great detail. There's no immediate no to any suggestion. And I think I learned that from my mom, but Yasmin Al-Alayat is the master of that. He would say, OK, let's have a boat floating in a fire pit. And she'll say, OK, let's go granular into that. And so this is what this team was like. And this is why it felt like family. that there were no wrong answers, but you got about three or four minutes to come up with a solution. So that's exciting. And so it sounds like we're talking about different things because they're going granular into process. And what I am saying is the same thing, but it's a little different. I am saying that you can't create without a healthy community, without a healthy respect for one another and ideas.

[00:34:45.475] idris brewster: We brought our two communities together. We have a team of ten folks that work on our projects. Y'all have your folks and your network that you brought together and I think us being family helped make that synthesis between them really powerful.

[00:34:59.888] Michèle Stephenson: It was a very hardworking but enjoyable collaboration.

[00:35:05.393] Kent Bye: I did want to just mention a few things about my own personal experience, and then we can start to wrap up. So coming in to see this installation of There Goes Nikki, it's probably one of the most impressive installations I've seen, and I've seen a bunch of stuff over the last 11 years now. Just the recreation of an ecosystem, of creating a whole garden that is the center of this AR piece, and then there's a video that I watch onboarding, and She's got a very wry sense of humor where she's speaking in a very candid way, just these turns of phrases or the way that she's thinking around death and reflecting on death and then going into the experience and then there's a little pedestal that then is the trigger point, the anchor for air experience and then I see a volumetrically captured Nikki Giovanni speaking and thinking around these more transcendent aspects of life and these bubbles that have these different objects and we're listening to Nikki speak but you know I feel like the heart of the piece is when I see Nikki and she's on the pedestal and she's giving a little speech and then she kind of transcends up and disperses out into a million different particles and it's like this knowing that she had passed after that you had shot this it just felt like this real honoring of her life and her message and then there's a video that i watch afterwards where again she's speaking and reflecting on these things lots of different clips that are in there that I don't know if they were special effects or if you actually had her with astronauts. You know, just they're like a lot of ways that you are having these. I was like, wait, is this real or did they create this? And but then I wrapped it all up by rereading the Quilted Black Eyed Peas poem, which is featured pretty prominently within the context of going to Mars, where she's making all these comments on how black folks would be perfect to go into space just because of all of the experiences of the black experience, black American experience that would be well suited for people to be taking these different journeys. So there's a lot that is sort of tied into this overall experience with these different stages and Yeah, I'd love to just hear a little bit more around this process. You know, the installation is epic and the through line of telling different bits of the story from both the film parts and then the heart of the piece of this volumetric piece that you really wanted to amplify this message and create this, what felt like, you know, it's a monument, but it's also like it felt like a bit of a funeral. And it's also nature, so it connected to the earth. And it just felt, because it's AR and it's in a public context, then it feels like also this public ritual type of experience. And so there's a lot of these components that are really quite compelling. So I'd love to hear any kind of reflections on your process of creating this.

[00:37:41.566] Joe Brewster: Wow. It's a lot. Yes, it is. That's too much question. So let me just say, when Michelle's lips start turning up like that, that means that she's very excited about what you're saying.

[00:37:51.924] idris brewster: I was excited too.

[00:37:54.488] Joe Brewster: I was excited.

[00:37:54.889] idris brewster: I was there as well.

[00:37:55.730] Joe Brewster: So I would say this, that Nikki is a poet, and everything she says is a double or triple entendre. And so when you go in that experience, And our process is to start with one statement at a time, but there are also kinds of loose connections everywhere so that you can see this project 30 times and you'll see 30 different experiences. It's loosely based on the poem, Quoting a Black Eyed Pea, which specifically says that black women are uniquely suited for space travel because of the transatlantic slave trade. You correcting me?

[00:38:42.453] Michèle Stephenson: Well, specifically the journey of Middle Passage from Africa to here, that black people, black women know what it's like. And she specifically says to go from a known through an unknown into an unknown. And she'll say, and meet aliens on the other side and have to deal with them and bear their children and love those children. So that is a kind of spirit that needs to lead the journey to Mars.

[00:39:12.338] Joe Brewster: So when you see this experience, you'll see globules that have a life cycle as well. And they sort of represent her life cycle, but our life cycle as human beings. You'll see family pictures in some of those globules. You'll see images of nature, the flowers she loved, aquatic life. And where is that going? That's going somewhere in the universe. Our goal is to make people think and give them many journeys to really what we believe is important is that we're the same and equal and should be prized.

[00:39:57.867] Michèle Stephenson: we also wanted to anchor this important philosophy that she espouses with you hear it in the onboarding which is that you know for our own survival we need to do away with our categories that we are really all earthlings whether it's a rat in new york city you know or a human being in washington dc we are part of an ecosystem that makes part of the earth and that we need to acknowledge that in relationship to the rest of the universe so we definitely thought that it was an important way of anchoring it from a poet's perspective without beating people on the head in any way, but really sort of feeling it emotionally. So that was important. We also were inspired by, we definitely did want it to have this feeling of sort of an alter ritualistic experience that you were talking about. And on some of our initial mood boards, we were looking at the Day of the Dead And what are the yellow flowers called again? The marigolds, which are also African as well as South Asian and Mexican that are part of this ritualistic of honoring the dead. When you think about many indigenous cultures also, and Nikki talks about it, that death isn't really death. It's a transition. It's a passage. It's a passage to becoming something else. And so, yeah, yes, it gained this sort of other significance with her passing those words and what we did.

[00:41:24.655] idris brewster: Yeah, I mean, you all covered it. I mean, it's a timely piece, especially with space travel that's currently happening. Jeff Bezos and folks traveling to space. Elon Musk trying to go home to Mars or something like that. So I think what came to me throughout this piece was Gil Scott-Heron's Whitey's on the Moon and how we really need to flip the perspective of space what's at the core of our motivations to do things, especially when it comes to technology. I think if you see any time Kinfolk has an installation opportunity, I think we try to bring nature involved. I think previously at Tribeca we had an altar with dirt, stone, and this one was a way more elaborate one, inspired by Nikki's garden as well in Virginia. And it's also an invitation to slow down. And the pace of technology is moving fast. The pace of erasure is moving fast. We all need to slow down and really understand who is leading and what are we following. And we're also losing our poets. I think there's a reverence for poets that I don't see as much anymore. And so I think it was also important in this modern day to return back to poetry and the ethos of poetry as a guiding light. And I think that is also a statement that I feel like we're trying to make here is... We need to pay attention to who we're following, and I think Nikki Giovanni is one of those people.

[00:42:46.007] Joe Brewster: So one thing I'd like to say before we go is that last week, Nikki won the Robert Frost Award, which is one of America's greatest awards for poets, honors for poets. What did you say?

[00:43:00.451] Michèle Stephenson: No, posthumously they gave her that honor, yeah.

[00:43:04.555] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you each think is sort of the ultimate potential for this type of immersive and interactive storytelling and what it might be able to enable?

[00:43:17.667] idris brewster: I'm interested in, it's also where the industry is going a little bit, but I want the immersive industry to break out of this festival cycle. Sometimes it feels as though we activate a festival to show it to our friends and folks in the industry. And my push is to, how can we get our immersive experiences out to the general public? And I think that that is where the industry needs to go. How do we have more engagement with exhibition spaces, gallery spaces, public spaces? And so I think that's personally where I'm trying to push the work. And I think that's what it needs to go a little bit more mainstream. I haven't seen as much progress in the XR industry as I would like to see. And so I think that that's where a lot of people in this exhibition are also aligned and thinking about. I like that it was less of a booth style, and it was more of a spatial experience. And there's other that you were doing XR in many different ways and really expand the definition of what immersion is. And we really see that in this Tribeca experience. So that's my piece.

[00:44:24.087] Michèle Stephenson: Yeah, to that note, the hope that this immersive work can be more community-based as opposed to individualistic, because it's already, you know, yes, that would be a big hope, and there's potential. The question is, what kind of support can come behind it?

[00:44:42.852] Joe Brewster: No, my son is waiting outside the building, my youngest son, who wants to be a maker as well. So I have to run to let him in the building. But I do want to say that I'm in complete agreement that we need to move out of these spaces and into larger spaces. And I'm proud of my son. He has an exhibition in Brooklyn Bridge Park and parks all over New York City. There is an opportunity, a greater opportunity to share more stories with more people who benefit from those stories.

[00:45:22.643] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, really enjoyed the piece. And it's really quite powerful to see all the things tied together. And I feel like it's also quite interesting as a family story coming together and collaborating in all these various different ways. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.

[00:45:36.293] Michèle Stephenson: Thank you. Thank you. It was great being here.

[00:45:37.837] Joe Brewster: Thank you.

[00:45:39.164] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of 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. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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#1569: Family of Storytellers Creates an AR Memorial of Black Poet Nikki Giovanni with Epic Organic Garden Installation