Immergification
On "immersive", REMIX summit and selfies
First, something brilliant that gave me tingles.
Last week I learned about Common Wealth, the Bradford theatre company that defies categorisation. Evie Manning and co gave 20 young people a room each in a condemned building, complete creative freedom and a nice tight brief: combine one part subject matter (not taught in school) and one part creative art form (not taught in school). The project is called “Off the Curriculum”.
The result was beautiful juxtapositions such as Capitalism x Graffiti, Kurdish tradition x Sculpture or LGBTQ+ x Origami. Evie shared stories of young people completely written off by the education system who blossomed into leaders when brought under their wing. It’s almost too obvious to type but Evie is right: when their voices are valued, they become different kids and the troublemaking often fades away.
More from REMIX summit
Here East is buzzing. Things took a nosedive after the high of being Press HQ for the 2012 Olympics: soon after, it was mostly forlorn patrons looking out of freshly decorated restaurants at solitary dog walkers on the canal path.
Now, there are piles of Lime bikes, fizzing food trucks, students, startups, the REMIX Summit and V&A’s forthcoming Storehouse. Opening in 2025, it neatly combines both old and new museum-think. In Victorian times, the entire collection would be displayed in glorious, haphazard fashion, whilst the modern mode is curation and casting visitors as participants. Here’s a glimpse of what’s in store(house).
Immergification
REMIX was an exhausting, stimulating goodbye to January. Here’s a biiiig report from their team on all things “immersive”.
Afterwards, I started thinking about Cory Doctorow’s term ‘enshittification’, or the erosion of user experience in the hunt for profit (Twitter et al). Alongside that we have the homogenisation of…everything (thank you algorithms). So I’m coining ‘immergification’, inspired by the waves of immersive shows crashing ashore with boundary-breaking vigour (Chris Michael’s well-researched article is a good primer on how they might be changing the actual cultural landscape).
Back to REMIX, and merging. We heard about:
Phantom Peak: arcade gaming, branching narrative, theatre and restaurant. 13 actors and 400 participants over 4 hours. Shock stat: 50% of visitors return!
Bristol’s Wake the Tiger, newly doubled in size, has festival DNA, with art gallery and gaming thrown in.
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is rave culture, rendered in VR, with live action archive video and a luminous gallery-hang called the “rave corridor”.
Consensus Gentium, from artist and storyteller Karen Palmer, takes interactive film into the AI era, a sci-fi psychometric test layered onto classical filmmaking.
John McGrath from Factory International reminds us visitors aren’t making the same distinctions between art forms we naval-gazers do. And the shows are starting to catch up.
Aviva Studios is a new-ish jewel in Manchester’s cultural crown, literally one of the most flexible spaces in Britain, morphing from proscenium arch theatre to a Turbine Hall of the North for community events and big name shows like Yayoi Kusama’s balloons. Its first million guests visited via Fortnight, thanks to an early launch on the gaming platform.
When it rains culture up North, it pours.
Immergification isn’t just slamming disciplines together and seeing what happens. The Punchdrunk x Niantic partnership didn’t come to fruition, despite two years of R&D. And unfortunately BBC Earth Experience, which I was entirely generous about in this review, has closed early.
In this mergified world, the business plan, rather than spectacle, is central to success. This sounds disingenuous, but early immersive was all bang and no buck.
Lightroom, however, is a good example of pipeline thinking. Hockney’s run has closed, but they’re doing Space now, with Tom Hanks and the forthcoming slate includes fashion, sport, science and music. Cross pollination and cross publishing has been made possible by their second location in Seoul, with others to follow. With ever more show-locations thinking in this way, it’s no wonder Fever quickly raised over $200m for their ‘AppStore’-style play for the immersive market.
Audio boom
Speaking of content pipelines, Yoto have nailed it. Their Pentagram-designed, beautifully ergonomic and semi-screenless audio player for kids is flying off the shelves. First launched in 2020, it hits the sweet spot between the YouTube rabbit-hole of smartphones and stalker-AI of smart speakers.
Most impressive is the success (6.5 billion streams) of Yoto’s own-brand content to fill the purchase gaps (‘Books’ are bought in NFC card form and they slot satisfyingly into the device). Jessica Tarrant, Yoto content lead, reckons audio is the fastest growing sector in publishing. That only a few big beasts dominate that market (Audible has 60% of the US market) suggests there’s room for more growth.
I won’t be prattling on about conference learnings again until June - MuseumNext is back for an in-person edition!
Doha dear (a female deer)
I visited the National Museum of Qatar during a layover this week. It’s stunning. The building, inspired by Qatar’s famous desert roses (formed from dissolved calcium) must have been excruciatingly difficult to construct.
Inside, the media work and objects sit together in gorgeous harmony. Large-scale films with delicate scores and foley sounds hang as backdrop to physical objects, from sharks and pearls to beautiful rugs.
The gentle rustle of sand and wheat is accompanied by the clinky-ping of a giant pinboard. Every gallery has an accompanying children’s area, all rounded edges, gesture input and physical interfaces. Sadly, most of them were broken. Some Googling led me to Studio Louter and Kiss the Frog. They need to nail an SLA contract!
As one of the last galleries, the giant oil machinery backdropped by kaleidoscopic visuals and dreamy score was really clunky but at least it’s the truth. The black stuff paid for all this, as it did and does in lots of UK museums. I certainly can’t high-horse on the topic but I will keep doing my little bit for climate.
Production notes
I’ve already mentioned CRACT! This shonky “How to play” video will give you the gist. It’s Cards Against Humanity, but for the climate crisis. Give me a shout if you’d like one of the limited edition sets! A few of the first edition left.
We’ve been creating character and environment art for an endless runner set 40 million years ago. The Middle Eocene was a time of climactic change and the learning outcome fits into a single sentence: when the climate changes slowly, animals have time to adapt but when it changes quickly they find it much harder to survive. I love it when partners are brave enough to say it in a single sentence! The game won’t mention the modern pickle we’re in, but it probably doesn’t need to.
And finally, golf has gone all physical-digital (after shuffleboard and mini-golf et al).
Will I be writing more regularly this year? Alas, probably not.
But do keep your eyes peeled for more tech, play, culture and climate!
Please forward this to your friends and colleagues. They will not thank you for it but I will.
B.
PS - Two selfie-based postscripts because we’re all narcissists now. NBA selfie (nice idea) from Visualise and Art Selfie 2 from the Googles (more gen-AI). Make of them what you will.
