Venice Immersive Gives VR and New Media Artists Space to Grow

Now marking its eighth edition, Venice Immersive remains the greater Biennale family’s perpetual enfant terrible.

That status has little to do with industry esteem — unfurling on its own dedicated island, the new media spotlight has become a can’t miss rendezvous every bit as prestigious as the parent film festival — and everything to do with a protean medium that stays perpetually unfixed.

“[These artists] are creating a totally new language,” said Venice Immersive co-curator Michel Reilhac. “They’re making the invisible now visible, finding a new way to express emotions that isn’t as literal or as limited as in other artforms.”

The immersive form is liable to change on a whim, buoyed by a steady influx of established artists eager for a new challenge, and jolted by an unsteady market that has yet to find a scalable distribution model.

While deep-pocketed patrons like Meta and HTC come and go, leading to boom and bust cycles on a tech-accelerated timeline, Venice Immersive has set down roots, using wider institutional support to foster a stable of creators who return to Venice year after year. What’s more, said promise of safe haven and stability has, in turn, helped the overall artform advance.

“We now see VR entering a more mature stage of development,” said Reilhac. “Works from this year’s selection no longer try to display technological bravery or virtuosity, but truly use the technology to tell incredibly moving stories that really trigger emotional and spiritual connections. Artists are less infatuated with the technology itself and more interested in the potential for empathy.”

Taking into account the 63 projects selected for this year’s edition, co-curators Reilhac and Liz Rosenthal have noticed an uptick in large-scale installations using sets, physical props and live performance, a byproduct of the challenging distribution landscape for projects that veer too far from gameplay within the dominant online marketplaces.

At the same time, that more physical onus has nourished artistic inspiration, with so many creators now using the tools to link body and soul.

Premiering at this year’s Venice Immersive competition, projects like “Impulse: Playing With Reality,” from directors Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla, “Mammary Mountain” from Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille C. Baker and Maf’j Alvarez, and “Ceci Est Mon Coeur” (French for “Here Is My Heart”), pictured, from Stephane Hueber-Blies and Nicolas Blies, all use XR’s capacity for physical embodiment to better explore respective themes of neurodivergence, breast cancer and childhood abuse.

“These are all projects about bodily trauma,” said Reilhac. “But none of them treated a potentially difficult and austere subject with a pedagogical style. Each one used visual and narrative experimentation to lend the subject a poetic dimension. And [this year], we’ve seen immersive tools reach a point where artists can transcend technology to reach poetry.”

“We’re barely a decade into this new artform,” said Rosenthal. “And within a medium that’s evolving so fast, creators must remain curious and brave and driven and passionate, because the unstable market presents a real challenge, with relatively few avenues to distribute this work.”

“This is all built on a material basis,” Rosenthal continued. “Headsets [like Apple’s Vision Pro] are moving fast, and so is the technology, so, in a way, I’m more surprised that the medium hasn’t evolved even further. But that’s what fuels our passion. It takes time for new methods to be codified into policy and recognized as artforms – and that’s what our [Venice Immersive] island is for.

“We there to celebrate the art that comes from technology,” she said. “And to make sure that art sees support.”