A visit to Venice Immersive
Our team had a whirlwind visit to Venice Immersive recently. Karen and Clodagh (our founder and games artist) flew to Venice to explore the Film Festival’s Extended Reality section, meeting inspiring curators and creators and experiencing incredible installations.
Venice Immersive is the Extended Reality (XR) section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia, which took place from 2-12 September. At 10 years old, the festival is located on Venice Immersive Island on the historic Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, where its annual programme is packed with XR experiences from Virtual Reality (VR) to Mixed Reality alongside immersive installations and panel discussions.
It’s the perfect location for inspiration, discovering what artists are creating, discovering cutting-edge storytelling and meeting the world’s most inspiring immersive artists. For an organisation like BOM, it’s a really exciting festival, and we were thrilled to be able to attend for two days this year, with Karen, our CEO and Founder, attending with Clodagh Delahunty-Forest, our Games Artist.
We had two packed days of experiencing Immersive Art, as well as some great meetings with Liz Rosenthal, Curator of Venice Immersive and Michele Ziegler, the Executive Director of NewImages Festival in Paris, and her team to discuss some exciting projects that we’re working on.
We also caught up with BOM friend, Blake Kammerdiener who is the Senior Manager, Film and TV, XR programming at South by Southwest, as well as meeting some incredible creators including Rory Mitchell and Nonny Peña who created Out of the Ashes.
We asked our Games Artist, Clodagh to share her highlights and inspiration from the visit:
What were your highlights from Venice Immersive?
Visiting the Venice Immersive Festival was a dream. Not only were we in one of the most magical cities in the world but getting to experience a variety of immersive projects was invaluable.
Works such as ‘Amsterdam 1652: The Hands of the City’ directed by Nienke Huitenga-Broeren and Vincent Slangen to Tung-yen Chou’s ‘Shifting Connections’ were really inspiring as they were artworks which are experienced in a collective, multi-user VR space.
I loved Hongbo Cai’s Ulrica, a short film showcased in handmade bubbles telling the story of a submariner who escapes his vessel and descends into the ocean’s depths. The reflections created from the bubbles were beautiful and I felt truly immersed in the visuals and underwater acoustics.
Other standout experiences were sonic installations including Karim Ben Khelifa’s ‘In 36,000 ways’ and Sophia Bulgakova’s ‘SPOMYNY’ which demonstrate the power of using real voices to convey a strong narrative and emotional response.
How did the visit inspire you?
As a games artist, I was especially inspired by Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes by Lucas Roussell. I’ve played the mobile game and it was interesting seeing how well it translated into VR. It was fantastic being in such a beautiful yet eerie stylised world created by the game studio, Iconik. It gave me a lot to think about, including how lighting, objects and pace all contribute to the narrative and audience experience.
We also took a detour and went to experience Karl Simko’s Vivaldi Immersive, a beautiful VR experience set in Venice that places you directly inside a live baroque performance of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The piece is an 8K Apple Vision Pro (AVP) immersive film, so it was great to see how the AVP used stereoscopic video, camera angles and transitions as an immersive tool. The spatial audio, costumes and locations were breathtaking! It was a real highlight of the trip.
It was a brilliantly inspiring few days and a whistle-stop tour of what Venice Immersive has to offer. We are always struck by the range of projects (there were 68 to experience in total), from the whimsical to harrowing. We left truly inspired by the possibilities of XR storytelling and its creative potential.
