4 hours ago
15
The first installation one encounters on visiting Venice Immersive, the film festival’s reliably head-spinning showcase for new media, is a chest-high metal box fitted with an eyepiece and two speakers. On peering inside you see a view of yourself from about 20ft above. You see the other guests walking past, a couple of pigeons on the ground. When one of these passersby lingers at your side for just a moment too long, the obvious impulse is to glance up from the eyepiece in order to see what they want. It is at this point that the experience blooms into a Lynchian nightmare.
The passerby is not real – or rather, he’s only real in the box. He wears a blue suit and speaks with a heavy French accent and tells a tale that would sit badly in polite company. He says that I must have too much time on my hands, to stand hunched over this eyepiece for several minutes on end. “Why do people keep looking inside this box?” he demands. “What is it that they hope to see? It is not reality.”
The name of Celine Daemen’s fabulous installation – Nothing to See Here – is immediately belied by the presence of 67 further exhibits (the organisers refer to them as “experiences”) arranged cheek by jowl on a small dedicated island. But the creepy Frenchman’s contention should not be so lightly brushed aside. Venice Immersive’s projects run the gamut from the frivolous to the serious, the escapist to the harrowing. But is the island a backwater or a new-found land? Does it represent reality or different versions of a dream?
Incredibly, Venice’s vision of an immersive, interactive new media future is now 10 years old. In that time it has bloomed from a small sideshow inside the big Mussolini-era casino to a thriving 10-day event out on the lagoon. Attendance figures have shown a year-on-year increase and this is borne out by the external, more visible markers of success. There used to be one boat ferrying punters to the island. This year there are two, crisscrossing and sometimes berthing side by side so that passengers are forced to access one boat via the deck of the other. The bank by the lagoon was once a blighted strip of parched grass. It’s now home to a thriving shantytown of street food vans and stalls. The merchants of Venice, as ever, tend to follow the money.
If Venice Immersive’s story thus far has been one of exponential growth – in visitor numbers, in tech, in the sophistication of the stories being told – there must come a point when growth is arrested or slips back – and maybe this, too, counts as a measure of underlying good health. I’ve gushed at some length about this event in the past. Each successive selection has felt like a giant leap forward. But just as the headline film festival can only be as good as the quality of work it receives, that’s bound to apply to Venice Immersive as well. The programme is strong; much of the work is astounding. But it still feels a notch down on 2025’s golden vintage.
While headsets – once the future – continue to dominate, there’s now a new kid in town in the form of the lightweight XR (extended reality) glasses. These are being showcased on several projects including Nevatars, an interactive kids’ animation co-created by Andy Serkis. The glasses are great and deserve better than Nevatars, which is shrill and simplistic and a little too obviously indebted to Pixar’s Inside Out. It stirs a memory of those rudimentary first years on the island, when the stories tended to lag some way behind the tech.
Space is at a premium on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, which presents a challenge to the makers of the larger installations. The smart ones are those that lean into the difficulty, folding the room like origami and making a bonus of confinement. Misa Haru’s Tomori uses the space brilliantly, opening sly peepholes on the virtual wall that indirectly invite the user to bop their head against the real one. Better still is Yuqi Zhang and Shixin Tao’s The Pigeon Ring, in which a fraught family drama is often glimpsed through half-open doors and closed windows. At one point, kneeling on the floor, we are made to peer into a television screen that shows an alternative parallel living room to the one we are in.
Is this reality? It is at least grappling with it – and usually with more heart and vigour than most of the films in competition. Rory Mitchell and Nonny De La Pena’s Out of the Ashes provides a moving eyewitness account of the 2025 LA wildfires, complete with 3D reconstructions of the homes and neighbourhoods that were lost. Around the corner, Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff and Hugo Arcier’s The White Saboteur dares the viewer to direct their gaze at sections of a degraded polar landscape. Each time one does, the ice proceeds to melt and break down. I try not to look, but it is human nature to do so (just look at Lot’s wife). And this, I come away thinking, is the reason we all may be screwed.
After a visit to Raj’in (We Shall Return) a 360-degree documentary about displaced communities in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, I sit down with its directors, Keren Manor and Faiz Abu Rmeleh. They made their film to bear witness, they explain, and record the on-the-ground realities of widespread settler violence. But the 360-degree footage also helps to digitally preserve a community that is fast being erased. “Since we started filming in the middle of 2023,” they say, “most of these places don’t even exist any more.”
What becomes of these works when they have all left the island? It’s the crashing in-built irony of Venice Immersive: the fact that these inclusive, interactive, often communal experiences remain out of reach to the average punter. That’s finally changing, say the event’s organisers, with an explosion of location-based exhibition spaces that can accommodate scores of people – especially in Asia, where the market is booming. When it comes to the smaller pieces, the XR glasses throw a lifeline. They look like chunky shades but provide full surround sound and vision.
Many of the larger installations already have a berth in museums. That’s the case for Smithsonian Starstruck, a wafting journey through the cosmos. Also for Amsterdam 1652: The Hands of the City, a delightful historical tour of the old streets and docks that is the centrepiece exhibit of the ENTR VR Museum in the Netherlands. Museums may even be an option for Solwata, a portrait of flooded communities in the Solomon Islands that boasts powerful wraparound visuals and a voiceover by Mark Ruffalo.
“To be frank, the exclusivity of the medium does annoy me,” says Felix Gaedtke, who created Solwata alongside Gayatri Parameswaran. “I want to be able to show it to as many people as possible. But with this the challenge is to find the right target audience.” Solwata, Gaedtke explains, is primarily an advocacy tool. It’s already been shown to members of the World Bank in Washington. In November he’ll be taking it to the UN Climate Change Conference in Turkey. “That might be a case of quality over quantity. It’s not showing it to thousands of people but maybe to a hundred who can make a real difference.”
Where will the next decade take us? Nobody knows; they’re still tinkering with the map. How fast will we get there? Again, not a clue. But if one measures the success of a section by the entertainment value of the work, Venice Immersive has proved itself the equal of its cousins in traditional cinema. It’s groundbreaking, sometimes galvanising, playful and enraging. It’s telling fresh stories in new forms and invites the visitor to pitch in. Nothing to see here: just 68 illuminating windows on the world.
