FINALISATION
The third and final set of Multisensory Storytelling Development Debriefs were convened – fittingly – around the issue of finalisation or pushing the work into a shareable/exhibitable/testable format. The conversations took place on the 20th and 21st of April 2026 and featured 7 artists across 2 sessions.
The rationalisation behind this framing was that the final stage of creative development is one where a convergence of technical bottlenecks such as the inter-operability of hardware or the optimisation and shipping of executables might converge.
Immediately, there was a range of views on what finalisation meant in the context of the development of immersive work, where what is delivered varies so widely:
I do feel a bit frustrated that I don’t have a physical or a tangible product, to the point where I almost decide to focus on creating a product just for the sake of having something that I can say, “Hey, this is what I can do, this is what I’ve been doing.”
You need to try something out, figure out what works and then iterate and iterate and iterate, being cautious that you don’t spend endless time trying to make the perfect product
There was a general consensus that the final sprint towards a shareable iteration of immersive work was an extremely crucial one, fraught with technical challenges, but the experiences shared were far from homogenous, nor were the approaches and strategies for managing this phase of the work.
Several artists were generous enough to share how the process of “finalising” a piece of work in order to share it (even as a test or a prototype) was emotionally taxing. Bringing the work into new spaces, was often a challenge.
I was probably a bit overly ambitious in the application with what I thought I could achieve, and that was something that was quite sobering to go through.
Venues consistently represented a point where the working methodologies of the project were subject to intense pressure and change:
We, sort of, thought that it was going to only take maybe a couple of days to assemble. What we should’ve done, going back, was to have assembled it beforehand, checked that everything was working. It was left too much to the last minute because we had to work round other people as well in the exhibition.
Across the group there was a lot of solidarity offered and insights shared on the issue of bringing new work to a venue, especially if that venue was not strictly intended to host immersive art:
But the venue was a challenge. I mean, it was a totally soulless, corporate, heinous environment. The challenge was, how do you make this thing immersive?
And there was a lot of navigating and figuring stuff out and being quite on-the-fly. So, you know, light was paramount, taping down exit signs and all that kind of thing, which sounds small, but it really changes everything. We really needed to figure out how do we make this space dark? How are we going to lead people in? There was a sense of choreography around that. How are we going to have them at the end?
However, even dedicated venues presented challenges. A large institution cancelled a booking for a testing event with only two days notice. Even when the scheduling was straightforward, several other obstacles were discussed.
because it’s a nightmare sometimes to work in traditional venues with technicians who have been trained with specific ways of doing things, and only work with tech that they know.
Across the course of the debrief sessions the range of potential venues for immersive work was discussed, with the modular format of spaces like Undershed and Bocs at the Wales Millenium Centre discussed. But as above, the bottleneck that was repeatedly noted was the one that occurred when the creative momentum of a project in development came up against the standards and processes of an institution and its team:
modularity is a smart way of looking at things. But if you don’t have the human capacity or human willingness, that system around it that is already coming forward, you might as well forget about it. To be totally blunt.
Likewise, when it comes to work as diverse as that contained within the Immersive Arts programme, even a hyper-modular space would have its limits, and the black box model of immersive art exhibition has its own set of internal tropes:
I question the modularity of something. I think that we have such bespoke, unique projects that a modular approach sounds to me almost like an approach to something that, you know, it may or may not completely work for our project, but it would squeeze it into something very much more homogenised and similar to something else, potentially… I don’t like the idea of a future of black boxes, especially as a low-tech living-systems person
Amidst this discussion around venues a distinct disciplinary divide emerged that was interesting to reflect on. Artists with performance backgrounds consistently identified the process of putting the work in front of the audience not as a moment of delivery but as a further opportunity for discovery.
Three projects articulated the potential contained in this moment:
we don’t know what the work is like until there are people joining the work
Yes, we want to show it to the public… but it shouldn’t be a machine, it shouldn’t be this, you know, conveyor belt… if you like.
you literally are starting to have a live dialogue that is completely unpredictable, and you have to accept that you’ve got far less control than you imagined
That said, even with the most radically open practice, there was an acknowledgement that bottlenecks – especially around the dependable performance of networked technologies in new spaces – threatened to curtail the processes of discovery sparked by introducing an audience to the work.
some tech takes so much management that it becomes a monster that shapes everything we make and the experience of us as the creators and the users, the participants, the audience that we invite in, and we forget the other bits that are about dialogue and meeting and fragility.
Significantly, some artists start their creative process by thinking about the challenges that will be inherent to touring it:
when we start to make work, the starting point is about touring. It’s not, “I’ll think about this afterwards.” From the very beginning, it needs to be touring in order to make sense. So, thinking about for touring, so it’s like, how can we be cutting-edge and at the same time find enough venues or a festival which can take us?
But within the context of immersive technologies, the question of how to finalise can lead to constraints on how to develop the work in the first place.
Of course, bottlenecks associated with distribution fold back onto bottlenecks that occur in development, but with the model of sustainability for this work so vulnerable to shocks and pivots from the leading platforms in the sector the technical challenges of distribution can impact creative decision making at every stage in the pipeline.
One artist shared the provocative prospect of Netflix in 3D, adding that immersive exhibition was often shackled to the business models of other formats.
The choices are reducing what is being made, basically, and they are driven by commercial imperatives that have been directly borrowed from all the other industries that have narrowed down things again and again
Lastly, even where immersive work was shared in the spirit of experimentation and in contexts that galvanised conversation and engagement, an under addressed challenge remained – the dominance of English.
it’s only reserved for people who have enough mastery of English to be able to get something out of it, if it’s through words. But even the navigation, the invitation, who onboards you, everything is done in English. And tech is intimidating, it can be intimidating.
Whilst there was a catharsis to be found in sharing frustrations, the discussions were generative and practical as well. A range of strategies emerged for dealing with bottlenecks associated with delivering experimental work into a venue, and finding the right person to help with that delivery process:
Basically, there are a lot of skills a producer needs to have. “Oh, there are line
producers, there are technical producers.” They’ve been dissecting these roles. And
in my head I’m like, “Yeah, if I had all the money in the world, I think I could dissect
that role, but we have to be realistic. That’s a lot of money, to start dissecting roles
like that.”
With so many skillsets in play and with limited resource to work with a diverse team, clarifying the brief around delivery was understood as crucial.
in the future I wouldn’t work in the same way. We would hire someone and specifically explain to them what the brief is, “This is what you need to do, this is what you need to not do,” and be quite precise about that kind of stuff, to time-box it a bit more.
Others however, found the process of finalisation an opportunity to absorb multiple roles and skillsets into their practice, and re-scale their projects appropriately:
it took me from thinking that what I needed to do is to figure out what to tell the stage technicians, how to direct the lighting and how to follow the cues, the theatrical cues within my script to make the show happen the way I want it to happen, and what tech I needed to have these relationships with the audience.
But I then found that I can direct all that from the stage myself. You know, with an Apple, with the right programme, with the right peddles, I can trigger these things to happen. So that was a really useful thing, so it means I can rely more on myself and without having to worry about another person who, if it’s a sound engineer I might’ve just met that day, will I have to rely on them having to follow a script which they’re not familiar with?
But this stacking of roles onto one person represents a bottleneck in itself. And burnout and exhaustion were a commonly reported outcome. Moving away from the lead producer model to a community model was met with enthusiasm:
a community of people like ourselves, we’ve all developed all these different skills, but what if it was a question of like… This is actually a solution that sometimes ADHD people use, where, “Okay, I can’t clean my house but I can clean, so I’d rather go and clean your house and you come and clean my house,” you know?
This encapsulates a feeling that was pervasive across the debriefs, specifically that no matter how challenging the bottlenecks encountered through the process of multisensory storytelling development, the first and most available avenue of support was the creative community. Whilst the Immersive Arts programme is doing a lot to build community spaces for discussion, skill-sharing and knowledge exchange, these spaces sometimes fail to offer a degree of permission and/or security commensurate to the vulnerability entailed in discussing creative challenges.