Immersive Arts is a three-year national programme of funding and support for creative practitioners which launched in 2024. The organisation held its first conference earlier this month, and chose Bradford – the 2025 UK City of Culture – for the occasion. Over three days and seven venues, delegates listened to talks, participated in workshops, consulted with tech experts, experienced immersive works, and mingled over food and drinks as part of The Big Thing.
Venues were walkable from the main train station and each other, and the combination of the sunshine and the City of Culture decor gave the whole thing a celebratory feel. As someone from Bradford working in immersive – and rarely having the opportunity to mix the two worlds – it was surreal for me to see so many notable sector professionals from all over the UK pinging around the freshly landscaped city centre. Immersive Experience Network members were in attendance and agreed when sharing their post-event thoughts in our Members’ Slack – expressing optimism for bringing more national conversations about immersive to Yorkshire and the North.
A full schedule of Immersive conversations
Day One was an easing into the event with an evening tour around the You:Matter exhibition – a new installation at the National Science and Media Museum by Marshmallow Laser Feast. This was followed by a UKBlackTech party at the very recently revived Bradford Live, with this being one of the first events in the venue in over 25 years.
Day Two saw St George’s Hall theatre host a welcome from The Big Thing and Immersive Arts team, followed by a consecutive series of philosophical talks about immersive storytelling, history, impact and methods. One particular highlight was Getting Messy, about the unpredictable failure of technology. Featuring Myra Appanah from BRiGHTBLACK, artists Baff Akoto and Megan Broadmeadow, Karen Newman from Birmingham Open Minds, and Maitreyi Maheshwari from FACT in Liverpool, it was a fascinating panel and one in which the presentation technology did actually temporarily fail!
In the evening, IT consultants turned comedians Foxdog Studios presented their interactive show Robo Bingo, and live AV show Elsewhere in India headlined the party at Bradford Live, blending archive, CGI, AI and beats to tell a story about Indian heritage and a sci-fi future.
The third and final day was a collision of panels and workshops across multiple venues. Conversations about funding, co-creation, accessibility, equitability and inclusion, touring, distribution, evaluation and spaces sat alongside practical introductions and case studies about audio, motion capture, live networked performance, Blender, Unity and AI.
Insights from key players
Asha Easton from Innovate UK spoke with various guests including Dan Tucker (producer: In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats), while fireside chats brought in Lawrence Bennett from NoGhost – who will be presenting a project later in the year as part of the Bradford 2025 programme – and May Abdalla from Anagram.
Some nice interactive moments came courtesy of Smartphone Orchestra, whose works Emoji and Ancestors encouraged play and conversation through mobile-based group missions. But for newcomers to the immersive sector, such as those who applied for the lower tier Explore fund and had perhaps arrived alone, some structured networking at the beginning of the conference may have been beneficial too.
A common topic of conversation, both formally and informally, was around the nature of immersive and whether technology is necessarily a part of the equation, as well as what kind of technology and what use of that technology constitutes an immersive project in the eyes of artists and funders.
Meet the Technologists session was an open invitation to anyone in Bradford (delegates or otherwise) to meet and chat with Imran Ali and Rob Eagle about tech-specific topics and get one-on-one advice on creative projects. It was incredibly popular, with around 80 creative practitioners asking for time to talk about tech. This reinforced the message that, for many artists, immersive is an element of other art forms rather than a standalone practice.
A bright Immersive future
Two major announcements were made during The Big Thing; the first by the Wales Millennium Centre and Crossover Labs who launched the Annwn Prize, a new global award that celebrates excellence in immersive storytelling.
We also heard about the further funding from Immersive Arts, which will be one more round rather than the anticipated two, albeit with double the number of projects to be funded this time. This final opportunity launches in July and gives artists and organisations until September to apply for the Explore, Experiment or Expand strands of funding.
