Dear Friend,
Yes, I am as well as can be — though now as an expat I walk the streets asking where I am and what my place is. I touched on being new here in my last Dispatch (#1 We Must Make our Ghosts Our Guests) but here in London, everyone seems to be asking the same question: Where are we now? But, you know me — I always go see artists to feel the world — any world — to help me know where I belong.
Did you know that the United Kingdom is spending billions of pounds a year to make public spaces into immersive installations? No, not like Van Gogh floating on a wall, or the flash of The Sphere in Las Vegas, but theaters, museums, warehouses, parks and gardens filled with enormous digital, sonic, haptic, smelling-like-the-image-you-are-walking-into experiences? We do not have immersion well funded in the States, and while I walk around hoping to find myself and my place, I keep finding all of us in the architecture of a bunch of artists and collectives who are making us feel — well — HERE.
In more technical terms, London feels like a lab for immersive work that is moving inward — away from spectacle and into embodiment.
This has got me wondering: why, in a country which most do not think of as “touchy feely” are the most exciting immersive experiences in the world being made? Is it because everyone here has actually been to a play? Because they see dance in theaters and in the streets? Why-oh-why are their Botanical Gardens commissioning installations that look like the structures from Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey to show the magical root systems of trees, or how Oxford Street (a large commercial shopping area) is planning to make itself an immersive artspace to share windows with artists? What is going on here?
Also, I don’t think I need to remind you, my dear, that we are all a hot mess! Our nervous systems are shot. We’re doom-scrolling the world, our necks bent forward and cortisol racing into our bloodstreams. Every time I turn around I hear people talking about regulating their systems — breathe, visualise something positive, breathe again — rinse and repeat. All this while the world is literally alternating being on fire while continuously “waking up” to how it wants to be as a world.
I am starting to wonder: perhaps all this immersion isn’t escapism — maybe it is a new way to approach nature-based therapy.
So, during the past week of the public Frieze exhibits I walked myself over to events to find the creators of these large experiences and asked friends for the WhatsApps of assistants to the humans behind the technology. I have met three deep thinkers, metaphysical sculptors of space and sound, and all-around (refreshingly un-“macho”) Da Vinci-like characters who had less interest in speaking with me about technology, yet were thrilled to address my basic question: Are you making large immersive pieces to help our bodies figure out where the hell we are?
Or, to quote the magical Robin McNicholas, co-founder of the wildly successful artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (I know, amazing name), he said,
“How can we dissolve the human and reveal the interconnectedness of things? We are cherry picking from immersive art, theatre, gaming and film and funnelling techniques into a new multi-modal art form designed for audiences to engage with our work in an embodied way— but most importantly to reveal the invisible.”
Oh baby, I’m all in.
The Coder of Empathy — Max Cooper
Once a computational biologist, now one of London’s leading audio-visual alchemists, Max Cooper runs Mesh, a platform where music, science, and visual art — Mesh. His work fills cathedrals, clubs, and galleries with mathematically precise emotion — from Reflections of Being at the Barbican to sold-out 3D shows at the Royal Albert Hall.
Cooper is an artist who codes empathy through data, and was direct and to the point when I begged for somatic wisdom. He warned me,
“Too much focus on tech can get us sidetracked from what we feel and what we can communicate — that is what I believe Spatial audio can do for us, it opens doors for new expression and communication.”
He continued,
“My ideas often come as visual structures — and they are almost always informed by natural systems that have layers of nested stories where every layer is related to another — I spend a lot of time there finding inspiration to explore the scary and beautiful responses of our world. Although, given that right now we are living in wars, pain and division it’s become more important for me to delve into the human psyche with recent projects, whilst still drawing on natural systems as an unshakable positive amongst the mess — I believe that creating moments of hope, peace and escape from the horrible things we see coming is important. I know that is a privilege, but it is what I can do which has some utility outside of my basic artistic drives.”
And this from a computational scientist! When I pushed Cooper to give me an example of how he heals, he shared a collage of insights; that he has always disliked keeping the audience at a distance, his music is built from binaurally placed close-to-the-body sound sources that draw out continuous harmonies to try to cocoon and protect the listener inside; for his work at The Barbican he’s built an installation to wrap people inside semi-transparent layers and structures with low frequencies that are physically felt when the subject lies on a bench.
Where most might see a bench in a theater as a place to give audiences a “meet cute” moment, Cooper reframes it through sound as a mechanism for connection. Thoughtful, personal, and very sensitive, Cooper knows his sounds create something felt for large groups of people and his quiet commitment is moving to me.
The Architect of Feeling — Satyajit Das (Architecture Social Club)
Satyajit Das is the founder of the award-winning Architecture Social Club; however, he says everything they do is a collective endeavor. The installations they create move, breathe, and shimmer between design precision and rave energy, bridging the world of music, space, and the electric charge of being human, together. Das is quiet, like I imagine architects often are; however, his delivery emits a focus that is deep and at times, arresting. Das intrigued me with,
“I’m not driven to pursue science and technology for their own sake, but by how they can help us create instruments of feeling.”
Trained as both an architect and in medicine, his studio is interested in “how we hack perception.” Describing the studio’s approach to public work, he told me they are making
“..little, concentrated doses of architecture where a lot of the practical rules dictated by urban planning don’t have to apply, so you are free. So how you then compress these experiences into something that feels meaningful, and triggers a nervous system response that is also meaningful — that is our focus.”
Again, nature came up when Das told me how his team thinks about creating spaces for London. They see technology as a tool, not the point. Their intent is to create metaphysical experiences first — sensory spaces that nourish the mind. Das expressed that since COVID the need for connection has only become more crucial. He wants to make places of calm and joy through installations: sound as graffiti, sonic experiences for tunnels, bridges, and small nooks in parks. Light is a tool; movement and rhythm are a natural response to a city built around its parks and nature.
Das explains London’s interconnections are based on the park systems, and how they inherently do not have “pay walls” that keep people apart. The nature of the city, in the context of urban life continues to inspire him:
“Our lived experiences are shaped by our sensory measurements of the world. We create spaces to help build new connections – to ourselves, our surroundings and to each other.”
The Metaphysician of Nature — Robin McNicholas (Marshmallow Laser Feast)
Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) has just come off a smash-hit installation at Kew Gardens, where digital trees intertwine with real ones to reveal the root systems of the living forest — a work that quite literally breathes with the trees themselves. One of the three lead Creative Directors along with Barnaby Steel and Ersin Han Ersin, McNicholas was born into a theater family, keeps his ties to dance and film very close, and has a warm, welcoming approach to exploring the unknown. McNicholas is lively and direct; we first spoke at the MLF Frieze event and later he called from a buzzing train — he seems, like the work, in constant motion and joyful exploration.
He too is focused on how MLF’s work is born from a collective, how they are building immersive mycelium, gut biome, and deep tree narratives while also cutting to the heart of what they care about:
“Our primary interest is the future of storytelling but, mainly, people watching! I think the use of technology in our work is secondary, and that the choreography of people, the multi-model approach is what I am especially interested in… questioning power structures and the fascinating disconnects we have with the natural world.”
When asked what he thinks happens to us when we are brought inside a tree, or a lung, or a synapse through their immersions, what happens to us viewers, physiologically, he shared:
“I think that the plasticity of the mind is extraordinary, and our capacity to imagine (for artists) is our dreamstates. What I find novel about virtual reality or immersive space is that our audiences are constantly processing imagery, aligning themselves to be ‘the other’, embodying other things that take place from the dreamstate… It’s in our DNA.”
In recent years, Robin and the MLF collective have moved deeply into the metaphysics of experience, collaborating with leading scientists and neuroscientists to reveal the hidden stories of nature as they mirror our own human consciousness. Their work suggests that immersion, at its highest level, is not escape — it is return — and that our bodies can be a landscape unto themselves.
With their last piece, Sweet Dreams, commissioned by Factory International and developed and funded by the BFI’s Filmmaking Fund (created in collaboration with award-winning writer and former chef Simon Wroe), the piece is a walk into the fast-food experience — and our body’s experience within it. For Sweet Dreams they wistfully hold a wake for the Chicken and all ponder the body that was — an epic loss of health, one we share (above is the ‘Death of a food mascot’, where visitors pay their respects to Chicky Ricky by throwing sachets of salt onto the casket!) MLF is also developing a project with Dr. James Kinross, the author of Dark Matter: The New Science of the Biome. Here they will take us on a journey into the gut microbiome, revealing how preprocessed eating mirrors how we are treating the world itself — supporting the author with his primary goal to save humanity through a deeper knowledge of our guts.
And, just to bring me deeper into Wonderland, McNicholas describes how they aim to meet the audience in their willingness to explore and escape — to allow us to be “floating consciousness.” If he were the creative director of a classical agency, McNicholas probably would never bring me into the meaning of consciousness; however here he can — and as MLF leads in deep, integrated full-bodied experiences it makes sense to me, and I feel I am in good hands. Why? Because MLF is asking the larger, unpredictable and demanding questions artists must ask so that we humans can feel more deeply.
So, where are we? In a deeper relationship with machines and technology, all towards the purpose of revealing the human within us? It is, ironically, wild.
Now, I notice that London’s trees hum differently — maybe it is the wind, or maybe it is the residue of every installation teaching us to listen. I am walking through the city differently now, looking at how the leaves in the gardens intersect the streets, and how the networks of people born from different countries are the very makeup of the guts and biomes of the city. This is indeed the country that dreamed of Alice’s dive into the rabbit hole, the birth of a living monster in Frankenstein, the edges of Mordor, Hobbits, and Lions in Wardrobes. And now, with the ever-important wisdom about our nervous system regulation, perhaps the immersive community is more prepared than any author or filmmaker to bring us deep into the layers of speculative futures — or simply the experience of being a human body in nature — and then how we (whoever we are) feel the world.
So, my friend, you ask what is happening here? People are making projects where trees talk to each other, benches sing, and walls tell the story of the stomach and the world. And, perhaps it is just because London is a container of cultures coming or going (stolen or escaping) that it choreographs the natural movement, the impact, and the evolution — at a gut level — of performing culture that London immersion leads in the world.
Or, in New York terms, let’s quote my therapist;
“There are only three things in life to remember: we are constantly cycling Order, Disorder, and Reorder. That is what we do and that is what is happening around us.”
So, I suppose London is currently immersing us into the reordering of the world, while holding us close to the vestiges of the magic of the journey. At least, this is what makes me feel I am here.
Ah well.
Tell everyone I send my regards, and to keep an eye out for my next dispatch — and please do remember to look up at the sky — the clouds are leading somewhere.
Fondly,
Sarah
Sarah Kornfeld is a writer, cultural producer, and strategist working at the intersection of memory, radical art, and institutional change. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is the author of The True (Editura Integral, 2021) and What Stella Sees (Cove International Publishers, 2018). She has served as a cultural executive and producer with organizations including The Kitchen, the Institute for the Future, Netflix, and the California Academy of Sciences. She is co—executive producer of Aguda Returns, a global immersive project on Afro-Brazilian cultural memory, and is currently at work on her third novel. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College with training from the Royal Court Theatre in London, she works between London and New York. www.sarahkornfeld.org
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