It’s all coming together for next year’s Immersive Arts Bootcamp schedule and we’re here to keep you up to date with how it’s shaping up, and also, frankly, because we’re all pretty excited about it.
We’ve now divided our bootcamp into two separate projects: Open Worlds, a week of workshops and talks about immersive arts, and the Immersive Arts Bootcamp, a deeper dive over three weeks into the technology of immersion. Open Worlds is open to all and costs £30. The Immersive Arts Bootcamp is aimed at participants who are neurodivergent or live in one of the West Midlands’ priority places, want to learn specific skills to flex their digital creativity and boost their career opportunities in a new and rapidly expanding industry. The course for these participants will be free of charge, but subject to application
Let’s take a closer look at the Open Worlds, where we’ll be exploring a different area of immersive arts each day.
We start on Monday 13th February with THE IDEA OF IMMERSION. Futurist and thinker Amelia Kallman opens proceedings with a look at the potential future of extended reality (XR), and considers how lives and projects may both be enhanced and impacted by these new technologies. We will be having breakout sessions as part of her presentation, where participants will get to play with immersive products from innovative companies such as MyndPlay & PlayLa.bZ
The afternoon will be all about how we direct and adapt our creative ideas towards a realisable immersive project. Participants will be introduced to ideation strategies appropriate to immersive forms; designing for broad accessibility; co-design for immersion; and novel ways of engaging stories and themes suggested by the forms of immersion. Participants will be encouraged to develop their own ideas that they can develop over the rest of the week.
Tuesday sees us leave the real world behind as we learn about, and experience how IMMERSIVE WORLDS are created. Our workshop leaders help you dive into the mechanics of producing other worlds digitally with a practical introduction to 3D creation of forms using Blender & Sketchfab, then a second session on environment building with Unity (these workshops will be guided to suit the skills level you arrive with.)
Inspiration comes in the form of visiting artist Mirabelle Jones, who discusses her work creating fabulous immersive environments for her own projects and clients, such as the ever innovative Meow Wolf.
On Wednesday we’ll be exploring THE SOUND OF IMMERSION. It’s tempting to understand immersion simply as a visual medium, but some of the most evocative and powerful experiences can be created using the other senses. In these sessions we will be exploring the new technologies of sound, such as binaural and spacialised audio, with immersive sound artist Christian Duka, and hearing from sound artist and musician Duncan Speakman who creates sound walks and other audio based work.
The spotlight falls on PERFORMING IMMERSION on Thursday. Find out how contemporary live performance is expanding into the use of immersive technologies and evolving newly imagined hybrid models of enquiry, education and entertainment. Performance within immersive experience brings considerable opportunities, but also ethical challenges. The day kicks off with an overview of the recent history and an overview of the current state of the technology from PlayLa. We then guide workshop participants through a range of capture technologies: virtual production on a shoestring with PlayLa’s GenieMo system, volumetric motion capture with the Rokoko suit courtesy of Taran 3D and environment scanning using freely available tools such as RealityScan. The artists talk will be by Joumana Mourad, Artistic Director of IJAD Dance Company, who combine choreography, science and technology to develop new insights into the body and movement, in hybrid real/virtual environments.
We round off week one by looking at IMMERSION IRL, those aspects of visual immersion that lie outside of full virtualisation. A workshop on augmented reality (AR), led by Studio Above & Below looks at the positioning of three dimensional artefacts in the physical world, via AR headsets and mobile phone cameras. After lunch, participants will be given advice on how to fund immersive work. Including the option to develop pitches for your own projects at the pitch clinic. This will support you in pursuing opportunities and to continue working on your ideas long after the Open Worlds is over.
Signups for both Open Worlds and the Immersive Arts Bootcamp are now open
If you need more information on the accessibility or location of BOM before clearing your diary, some of your queries might be covered here. We can also answer your specific access requests – get in touch with learning@bom.org.uk
