Perhaps not everyone knows that, in conjunction with the world-famous International Film Festival (now in its 82nd edition and scheduled from August 27 to September 6, 2025), on the tiny island of Lazzaretto Vecchio (connected to the Lido di Venezia by a shuttle located in front of Riva di Corinto) a sophisticated exhibition-competition dedicated to immersive arts and media takes place, halfway between research showcase and specialized industry fair. We’re talking about Venice Immersive, the first and most significant international competition for virtual reality works, born in 2017 as the Extended Reality (XR) section of the Cinema Biennale, which every year offers an extensive survey of internationally produced novelties using all means of XR creative expression: immersive videos, virtual and mixed reality, virtual worlds and XR installations. This year’s offering comprises a selection of 69 projects made in twenty-seven countries, distributed as follows: 30 in the Competition section and 34 in Best of Immersive, including the best works already distributed or presented at other events after the last edition of the Festival (11 in Best of Experiences, 23 in Best of Worlds and 5 in the Biennale College Cinema – Immersive section). The jury, composed of writer and director Eliza McNitt, pioneer in immersive storytelling, director and producer Gwenael François and artist and animation film director Boris Labbé, will award three prizes: the Venice Immersive Grand Prize, the Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize and the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize.
Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, ingresso di “Venice Immersive”, photo by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
In the long sleeves of the 15th-century former hospital, previously a shelter for pilgrims built by the Hermit Fathers, the dense rows of minimal white cubes where the experiences take place are aligned, each of which is configured as a hybrid space between monastic cell and space-time capsule. Immersion into virtuality, experimental terrain where the boundaries between cinema, gaming, performance and new visual media still appear blurred, takes place in an intimate dimension, reserved for individuals or small groups and inaccessible from outside. One of the constitutive aspects of these digital products (with a still immature conceptual apparatus despite their technological sophistication), is precisely their ability to evoke multitudes of infinite “prêt-à-porter” in very small physical spaces, in total coincidence of the user with the work. The viewer is no longer an interlocutor, but is absorbed into an anarchic hyperreality, conceived as a hyperbolic mirror of our society of paroxysm and its existential anxieties. If thirty years ago Jean Baudrillard in Le complot de l’art (1996) already decreed the death of image and imagination in the excess of virtuosity of high definition that, pursuing perfect illusion, led to dis-imagination, now more than ever these virtual works make true the oxymoron of materializing the ultimate illusion: that of an image that can no longer transcend, transfigure, dream (and therefore, imagine) reality because it has replaced it.
“Blur” by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg (Canada, Taipei, Greece), 50′, installation, mixed reality, live performance, photo by You-Wei Chen, courtesy the artists and La Biennale di Venezia
There is no longer threshold or separation, except that slight vertigo that sometimes makes you startle when you realize you can exist in a parallel world or when an infinitesimal pixel shift momentarily exposes the infrastructure of digital coding. Virtual environments generally evoke boundless mental wastelands: whether configured as sky, galaxy, sea, metropolis, labyrinth, cellular tissue or abstract landscape, these habitats emphasize the incommensurability of an impossible immanence dilated in a muffled becoming, where the slowness of movements, necessary not to disturb the most delicate software mechanisms that allow their existence, acquires a ritual value, celebratory of a mysterious secular sacredness devoid of object of worship. The viewer is a wanderer to be integrated and perpetually amazed, while the storyboard most often explodes to adhere to a perpetually uncertain existential condition. Regression to childhood, escape into dream or nightmare, journey into the future or history: whatever the matrix of the elsewhere evoked and beyond the special effects implemented, what almost always emerges is nostalgia for a spatial and temporal infinite that, the more convincing it seems from a sensory point of view, the more ambiguous and unreachable it appears.
“Dark Rooms” by Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted Jensen and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup (Denmark, Germany, Taipei, 35′, installation, virtual reality, photo courtesy the artists and La Biennale di Venezia
The most engaging works are those in mixed reality, where the integration of illusion with live performances or through the co-presence of multiple real users anonymized by digital transfiguration makes the boundary between digital and physical seem closer to dissolution. As it occurs, for example, in Blur by Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg (Canada, Taipei, Greece / 50′ / installation, mixed reality, live performance), which leads a group of spectators on a surprising journey of magical-scientific initiation thriugh a poignant life cloning laboratory, where real performers interact with users to the point of breaking the limits of touch and smell. Here it’s not so much the reflections (quite conventional, moreover) proposed that are interesting, but the effectiveness of the synesthetic architecture devised by the authors in giving an empirical character to the liminal state between reality and fiction evoked. Not to be missed also Dark Rooms by Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted Jensen and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup (Denmark, Germany, Taipei / 35′ / installation, virtual reality) dystopian fable about reclaiming sexuality free from judgments and standards told by four protagonists with different stories of marginalization or conflict related to their sexual identity. Two visitors at a time are invited to explore four distinct situations from different points of view, in a hyperbolic succession of underground exoticisms. Despite the explicit sexual scenes, what ignites voyeurism more is the possibility of actively inhabiting the proposed scenarios, opening gym locker room lockers, wearing fetish masks or examining the dirt marks of a swingers club. La magie opéra by Jonathan Astruc (France, Taipei / 25′ / installation, virtual reality) belongs to the same typology, in which a group of spectators is called to wear the stage costumes of the Opéra Garnier chorus to accompany a young opera singer anxious about her imminent stage debut in a acrobatic excursus through the highlight scenes of the most iconic melodramas with female protagonists. Here the virtual visit among the theater halls and stage furnishings is very suggestive, but the dreamlike behavior of objects ready to levitate gratuitously and the Disney-esque moral of the story, namely passion’s ability to transform tension into strength, trivializes the collision (very interesting in potential) between opera and new media.
“Empathy creatures” by Mélodie Mousset (Switzerland), 10′, installation, virtual reality, photo courtesy the artist and La Biennale di Venezia
Other kind of works function as catalysts for social experiences, such as Collective body by Sarah Silverblatt-Buser (France, USA, Greece / 20′ / installation, virtual reality). In a generically cosmic scenario, some spectators, anonymized by a digital “disguise” that pulverizes their features assimilating them to primary elements like ice, water, fire or cloud, are called to explore the capillary repercussions of sound in their instinctive movement and then join others in a collective astral dance. More laborious are the interactive modalities of Ancestors by Steye Hallema (Netherlands / 70′ / immersive installation) very politically correct social game in which artificial intelligence, reworking the selfies that all participants are called to take before starting the experience, assembles their features to elaborate the image of a hypothetical common descendant. If the idea is intriguing, the overall experience is not equally so, guided by synchronized inputs transmitted to the audience’s smartphones that have little immersive quality and even the reflection on collaboration as a prerequisite for building a better world appears developed naively. Empathy creatures by Mélodie Mousset (Switzerland / 10′ / installation, virtual reality) is also based on interaction, this time with a virtual creature. It is a sensitive VR animation in which users are individually called to care for a digital bird in various ways within a colorful world made with children’s illustration style. The project, conceived as a virtual room for stress detox and empathy predisposition, reflects on the delicate balances of emotional interdependence and emerges as an original corporate welfare proposal.
“Mirage” by Naima Karim and Aleena Hanif (Saudi Arabia, Netherlands), 8′, virtual reality, tactile, photo courtesy the artists and La Biennale di Venezia
Among the most interesting “passive” experiences we first point out La fille qui explose VR (The exploding girl VR) by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (France, Greece / 20′ / virtual reality) dystopian immersive animation in which the protagonist’s uncontrollable explosions of rage cause her cyclic dismemberment, in a bloody floating of organs, tissues and viscera. The violence of these deflagrations is configured as an extreme and powerless reaction to a ferocious and coercive world, devoted to self-destruction. In Mirage by Naima Karim and Aleena Hanif (Saudi Arabia, Netherlands / 8′ / virtual reality, tactile) spectators are instead led to identify, thanks to virtual reality and a vest that transmits vibrations, with the perceptions of a girl fighting against depression and anxiety, represented as an anthropomorphic clump of black brushstrokes. In its graphic simplicity, the work is effective in returning the altered perceptions characteristic of a pathological state, demonstrating how new media could prove useful in favoring empirical understanding of it. Engaging, even if less pregnant in meaning, The time before by Leo Metcalf and Michael Golembewski (United Kingdom / 15′ / virtual reality), an immersion in childhood traumas alternating essential graphics and suggestive underwater shots. The two registers, respectively corresponding to memory and dream, manage to integrate harmoniously despite apparent stylistic irreconcilability. To conclude the excursus, Avventura: ice dive by Anthony Geffen, Charlotte Mikkelborg for Apple and Atlantic Studios (USA, Iceland / 15′ / immersive film) is certainly worth mentioning, dedicated to diver Ant Williams’ attempt to break the world record for the longest distance swum in apnea under ice. The images, of stunning verisimilitude and sharpness, alternate shots where the viewer seems able to take part in the situation with exciting panoramic views of the Arctic landscape.
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Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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