Venice Immersive at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival redefines cinema through VR and XR, transforming spectatorship into embodied presence. Seven key works reveal how myth, memory, empathy, and interactivity reshape the moving image.
The emergence of extended reality (XR) at major film festivals signals a paradigmatic shift in the ontology of the moving image. What was once an art of projection and spectatorship now becomes an art of presence and traversal. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are not merely technological augmentations of cinema but are instead reconfiguring its semiotic, narrative, and sensory foundations.
At the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Venice Immersive exemplifies this media turn. Located on the Lazzaretto Vecchio, the section presents sixty-nine projects across formats, national contexts, and thematic concerns. The event situates itself not as an appendage to cinema but as its future-oriented laboratory, demonstrating how the “image” expands into a space where narrative, embodiment, and world-building converge.
CREATION OF THE WORLDS: MYTHIC SYNESTHESIA IN IMMERSIVE FORM
Kristina Buožytė and Vitalijus Žukas’s Creation of the Worlds represents a quintessential example of VR as synesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk. Inspired by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, the Lithuanian painter and composer, the work merges over sixty of his paintings with a reimagined musical score, inviting participants into a dreamlike space where they gradually discover themselves not as observers but as “the creator and caretaker of timeless worlds.”
The creators emphasize: “Creation of the Worlds is our homage… an immersive fairy tale exploring the connection between the material and spiritual realms, a metaphor for human maturity and the awakening of creative power.” The project exemplifies VR’s ability to stage myth not as narrative but as environment. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s reflections on aura, Creation of the Worlds produces a new kind of presence — not tied to originality, but to the participant’s embodied role in sustaining the world’s unfolding.
THE CLOUDS ARE TWO THOUSAND METERS UP: MEMORY LANDSCAPES
If Creation of the Worlds engages with mythic origins, Singing Chen’s The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Uparticulates VR’s potential as a mnemonic architecture. Adapted from Wu Ming-Yi’s story, the work follows Guan’s discovery of his late wife’s unfinished novel, where the sacred leopard of the Rukai people intertwines with his mourning.
Here VR materializes grief as spatial navigation. Fog, forests, and ancestral motifs form affective geographies the participant must traverse, each step functioning as a page in a living book. In media-theoretical terms, the piece demonstrates how VR redefines narrativity through topology rather than sequence: memory and myth interlace as landscapes, suggesting that immersion can stage psychological and spiritual processes more effectively than linear storytelling.
BLUR: INDISTINCTION AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE
Craig Quintero and Phoebe Greenberg’s Blur contrasts with both mythic and narrative-driven approaches by staging indistinction as a central aesthetic. Apparitions emerge and dissolve, reality and memory overlap, and speculative questions around cloning, bioengineering, and biological resurrection are raised without resolution.
The creators note: “There are no solutions or truths to uncover, only an invitation to surrender to the fragility of the human and the power of imagination.” Such framing situates Blur within a lineage of poetic cinema while radically decentering representation. The experience illustrates a media-philosophical inversion: VR is not only about hyper-realistic presence but also about sustaining the value of the uncertain.
COLLECTIVE BODY: THE KINESTHETIC COMMONS
Sarah Silverblatt-Buser’s Collective Body foregrounds embodiment as the central locus of VR meaning-making. In this interactive piece, spectators’ gestures are transformed into unique avatars — each linked to natural elements and music — who encounter one another and eventually converge in a choreographed digital ritual.
This is VR as kinesthetic anthropology. By privileging movement over language, the work recalls Brian Massumi’s assertion that affect precedes representation. The storm in New Mexico becomes the backdrop for a rediscovery of primal gestures, communal dance, and pre-verbal recognition. In this sense, Collective Body exemplifies the potential of immersive art to forge “rituals of presence” where identity becomes fluid and collective.
ALIEN PERSPECTIVE: EMPATHY THROUGH OTHERNESS
Jung Ah Suh and Cristina Rambaldi’s Alien Perspective extends immersion into the ethical field of empathy. The piece transforms the legacy of Carlo Rambaldi — famed creator of E.T., Alien, and the worlds of Dune — into navigable sculptural and painterly environments. More than a commemoration, the work enacts a manifesto: “Art is no longer an object to contemplate, but a universe to traverse.”
By asking participants to inhabit “alien” perspectives, the work positions VR as a political medium for practicing difference. In the context of polarized contemporary discourse, the act of seeing through another’s eyes is not metaphor but experiential condition. Echoing Donna Haraway’s posthuman ethics, Alien Perspective destabilizes human-centered vision and turns immersion into a technology of empathy.
ASTEROID: INTERACTIVE SPECTACLE AND AGENCY
Doug Liman’s Asteroid pushes VR into blockbuster territory, merging cinematic spectacle with game mechanics. Participants join a crew aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on a mining mission before the narrative fractures into interactivity: an SOS message recruits them into an urgent rescue.
The shift from viewing to acting illustrates Manovich’s concept of the database narrative, where the unfolding depends not on montage but on user agency. Unlike Blur’s poetic indistinction or Collective Body’s gestural ritual, Asteroidtranslates Hollywood kinetics into embodied urgency. Spectacle here is produced not through editing, but through proprioception — the felt illusion of inhabiting space.
SENSE OF NOWHERE: DRIFT AS IMMERSIVE AESTHETIC
Hsin-Hsuan Yeh’s Sense of Nowhere strips VR to its minimal essence: zoning out, wandering from “no-where” to “now-here.” Influenced by Taoism, Buddhism, and Jungian active imagination, the piece avoids narrative closure in favor of fragments — sonic pulses, flickering images, elusive gestures.
The creators write: “Ideas flicker in and out, like palms slowly opening and closing, present, then gone. Each viewer notices certain things, remembers different feelings. In this difference lies the quiet beauty of thought itself.” By rejecting totalizing coherence, Sense of Nowhere foregrounds subjectivity as the site of immersion. The work exemplifies what Vilém Flusser described as the interpretive openness of technical images, rendering the spectator not just immersed, but implicated in meaning-making.
CONCLUSION: FROM SPECTATORSHIP TO TRAVERSAL
The constellation of works presented at Venice Immersive demonstrates how VR operates as a medium that destabilizes the cinematic paradigm. From the mythopoetic grandeur of Creation of the Worlds to the minimalist drift of Sense of Nowhere, these projects illustrate how immersion functions variously as ritual, empathy, spectacle, or poetry.
The unifying principle is not technological novelty but a redefinition of spectatorship itself. Presence replaces viewing, traversal replaces projection, and narrative becomes spatialized and embodied. To return to the curatorial refrain: “cinema is no longer to be watched, but to be crossed.” In this sense, Venice Immersive does not simply showcase VR art; it stages a theoretical proposition — that the future of the moving image lies in its transformation into a lived, embodied, and co-created experience.
LINK
- Between dust and algorithms. A day with Damiano Tata in his studio - October 24, 2025
- Giuliana Cunéaz: art as an exploration between science and wonder - September 12, 2025
- Beyond the screen: immersion, embodiment, and empathy at Venice Immersive - August 29, 2025
