Originally published in Immerse on September 24th, 2021
Here at Co-Creation Studio, we teamed up with MIT Open Documentary Lab’s publication Immerse to commission this videographic essay from trailblazing VRChat documentarian Joe Hunting for Immerse‘s 5th year anniversary series called Making the Metaverse. In this 5 minute piece, Immerse x Venice, Hunting documents a whirlwind meet-up experienced and filmed entirely in the virtual platform VRChat, as Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac, curators of the Venice Film Festival’s VR Expanded program, take us on a world-hop through several Venice VR Expanded worlds. We first pick up bespoke avatars in Venice VR’s avatar gallery, then fly through a music video landscape, jump through portals, and get lost in a mystical mountainous panorama encountering bears, birds, and mythical creatures. Along the way, Rosenthal and Reilhac provide insight (from an audio recording of an interview with Immerse Editor Abby Sun) on the exploding creativity they have discovered in this new frontier of artistic virtual terraforming, world-building, and identity shapeshifting.
— Katerina Cizek, commissioning editor
