Field Notes: SXSW 2025
South by South West Festival (SXSW), Austin, Texas, 8–12 March 2025
After nine years away, I recently found myself back in the land of BBQ, Willie Nelson and options on where to tie up your horse. This time I was visiting SXSW as part of the Future Art and Culture delegation, a programme of events, installations, gigs and creative happening brilliantly produced by British Underground and Arts Council England with partnership support from the British Council.
It was a pleasure to take part in the Future Art and Culture-convened panel ‘From the Ground Up: How the UK is Supporting the XR and Immersive Sector’ with panellists (above L to R) Richard Russell (Arts Council England), me (UWE Bristol & Immersive Arts), Anne Rupert (Blast Theory), Marc Boothe (B3 Media) and Jo Verrent (Unlimited & Immersive Arts)
But that’s not what this story is about! As ever, I am using field notes as a way to download my brain before my memory wobbles off, and as a place to share quick thoughts on the immersive experiences that I managed to catch whilst in town. These are only a fraction of the 2025 treats that were on offer. Full list of the XR Experience programme here.
Ancestors
by Smartphone Orchestra
A playful, sociable and thought-provoking piece that toys with two of the most ubiquitous technologies of the day — smart phones and artificial intelligence. Over the course of 70 mins, 32 of us are ensconced in a side room of the Fairmont hotel and guided through a collective experience that invites us to think about ourselves as an entangled human family. Without giving too much away, it starts by scanning a simple QR code in the room, leading to a browser based interface where we are invited to take a selfie. The selfie is (randomly?) paired with that of a fellow audience member and AI is used to generate an image of the child we now realise we have had together! Our job is to wander the room talking to people until we find the person who is the co-parent to our new human. From here, the timeline extends in all directions and by the end I found myself in something of a emotional cuddle puddle with a room full of stranger who are now, ostensibly my family. It was a genuinely moving and profound piece, anchored by a deceptively simple idea.
Traces: The Grief Processor
by Vali Fugulin
Before entering into virtual reality, audience members are asked to identify a grief. ‘Nothing to big or too recent’, we are advised. Something that we are ok to bring to the surface in a crowded festival, and to take for a walk with others today. We silently decide, upload an image that represents our chosen grief, and then put on our headsets. What follows is a series of calming, natural spaces — a blossoming tree, mountains in the snow and a quiet cave where a soft voice encourages us to think about grief in general, and to attend to our own griefs in particular. There are four of us in this experience, and we are lightly aware of one another as transluscent avatars, but not required to engage with one another in any depth. It has a kind of group therapy vibe, in that it is helpful to remember that other people hurt too, and to have others quietly bear witness to your grief. I have very mixed feelings about using the intimacy and immediacy of VR to engage in quasi-therapeutic practices, but this piece felt fairly well considered, and trod carefully (with the exception of the name) in terms of what it offered or promised to the audience. By the end of it all I was pretty broken tbh, but I am grateful for the chance to spend time with my chosen grief, and to be given permission not to do what we sometimes feel we must. Move on. Move past. Toughen up.
As I left the experience, the artist gave me a smooth, palm-sized pebble to hold in my hand. The tenderness and physicality of the gesture really hit me in the feels. She explained that I could write something on a piece of paper and weigh it down with the pebble for others to read, or (perhaps reading my expression) I could hang onto it if I preferred…that was almost a week ago…I am holding it now.
EchoVision
by Jiabao Li, Botao Amber Hu and Matt McCorkle
A delighting experience in which I was passed a low-poly, 3D printed bat mask with built-in mobile VR capacity. I was guided into a blacked out corridor and invited to ‘make noises’ to find my way around like a bat. Not one to by easily embarrassed, I promptly yipped, hummed, barked and crooned my way through an unseen obstacle course and emerged somewhat pink and pleased with myself having ‘seen’ a raft of objects just by shouting at them and having the reflected sound visualised for me in the bat-headset. If you find yourself in this position in the future I can highly recommend singing ‘Dream a Little Dream’ by the Mamas and Papas as the continuous, undulating notes give you a great ‘view’ of your invisible surroundings!
Note: This piece reminds me very much of some fantastic work undertaken by Eirian Soar, Harry Silverlock and Harrison Willmott in partnership with Royal Opera House and Tom Metcalfe as part of their masters in Virtual Reality back in 2019. The team did some amazing work considering the form factor of headsets and conceived a number of designs closer to Venetian-style masks that can be customised to give a sense of character. These masks could be brought towards and away from the face enigmatically using hand staffs to avoid hair-crushing straps, and the musculoskeletal strain of heavy headsets. They also had some amazing ideas for using VR masks as image markers within mixed reality that are still way ahead of their time. Highly recommend connecting with all three of them for future amazingness!
1906 Atlanta Race Massacre
by Nonny de la Peña, Alton Glass and Retha Hill
A few of us sit quietly in a turn-of-the-(last)-century office with a big mahogany desk, shaded lamps and a well worn rug. I am given an anachronistic tablet and headphones. Using an AR app and tapping on the screen I bring the protagonist, our storyteller and guide, Jesse Max Barber (played by Bryonn Bain), into the room. It is now 1906 and J.Max Barber is a contemporary writer and editor. In a succession of powerful scenes he reveals the stories of four days of hideous violence perpetrated by a white mob — incited by the race-baiting of politicians and local newspapers — against black communities in Atlanta, Georgia.
This is not a story I knew, and the sheer brutality and injustice of it was hard, but important to hear. I appreciate that the audience is given the opportunity to take a moment between each of the scenes. Using our fingers when ready to rub flat a crumpled map of each of the places referenced, starting each scene at our own pace, and giving space for reflection on our own relationship to the stories told.
Proof As If Proof Were Needed
by Ting Tong Chang and Blast Theory
On the floor is a minimal floor plan of a home; squares, oblongs and L-shapes taped on the ground to denote a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom. A small group of us are invited to take off our shoes and enter the space. The hosts are welcoming but intentionally do not explain much further, or tell us what we ‘should do’ in this experience. As we start to mill around the space, a domestic scene begins to play on a large, singular screen, and the tightly located sound of the inhabitants deftly calls our attention to specific points all around the space. In avoidance of spoilers, I will simply say that the joy of this piece resides in the quiet dynamics of figuring things out with your fellow audiences members. What is our relationship to what is shown on the screen? What happens if we work with, or against one another? What is our connection to the house that we shuffle through in our socks, unseen but hawkishly observing? What do we know of the story that we encountered? What about everything we do not know?
Congratulations to the team for winning the SXSW Special Jury Award in the XR Experience Competition.
Uncanny Alley: A New Day
by Ferryman Collective
A heady combination of immersive theatre, live action role play (LARP), gaming and social VR. For an hour I was swept away into the cyberpunk world of Gh0st, an optimistic hacker who breaks me and my fellow ‘protesters’ (three fellow audience members) out of jail and on a whirlwind sequence of adventures through back alleys, shady joints and down a network of secret toilet tunnels!
The live performers, Ona Zimhart and Brendan Bradley were amazing and managed to guide us nimbly through the story, keeping things fun and moving forwards at pace, even as we fail to remember crucial plot points or spend far too much time working out which robot skin we’d like to wear. In the background, the production team do a heroic job of stage managing the whole encounter, cueing the action and allowing us to lose ourselves in this epic adventure.
This was one of the only pieces I experienced at SXSW that held space for the existential crises facing us as global citizens right now. Uncanny Alley, like so much great sci-fi before if constructs a world that is simultaneously completely alien and achingly familiar, asking us to look at the world around us and make a choice. Will we stay and fight the political and technocratic forces that seek to oppress us, or will we cut and run, shedding attachment to the past to build society anew?
If you have access to a headset you can check out some of Ferryman Collective’s other live VR shows here.
Small sidebar: I do a lot of VR and have developed some pretty high tolerances over the years, however an hour of rushing around whilst sitting still was enough to give me the XR collywobbles. Recommend deep breaths and long blinks, fellow travellers.
NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)
by Andrew Schneider
An hour’s walk from the Austin Convention Centre is the Ralph and Ruth McCullough Theatre (yes reader, in the midday Texas sun I walked for an hour like an absolute eejit) and inside I found something sublime. In a fully blacked out theatre space, strings of tiny lights are suspended from the rafters, creating a 3D array of some 3960 individually addressable bulbs, or ‘stars’ that swing gently as the audience moves through the space. The lights form volumetric forms as they sweep across the space — swarming, swelling and dwindling like a murmuration of starlings, or the lengthening shadows of the day filmed in time-lapse. If you have seen Submergence by Squid Soup, Pixel Forest by Pipilotti Rist or Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, you may already have a good sense of how these sorts of spaces can feel; otherworldly, magical, boundless. What I wasn’t expecting was the strong sense of narrative introduced through the 496-channel sound design. At key points in the piece, the artist’s voice speaks to me, and to a room full of mesmerised strangers, encouraging us to consider ourselves in relation to time and space, reckoning with our own mortality, and all of the ‘last times’ something happened without us realising that it would never happen again.
Call it the sun-stroke if you will, but for me, this was soul-quenchingly b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l.
Special mention to In The Current of Being by Cameron Kostopoulos which won the SXSW Agog Immersive Impact Award. I didn’t get to see this one in Texas but was lucky enough to experience a near complete version at Venice Immersive last year and it is a very special piece. Clothed in a haptic vest, sleeves, and gloves I heard (and felt) the story of Carolyn Mercer, a British woman who survived NHS-sanctioned electroshock conversion therapy in the 1960s aimed at ‘correcting’ her gender identity. The haptics enhance the intimacy, connection and sense of horror, but it is the potent storytelling, and palpable sense of injustice and compassion that shines through. A worthy winner.
