Spotlighting space, culture and more through technology and the arts

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The XRts Immersive Media Fellowship aims to facilitate and help disseminate work by artists whose experiences are commensurate with the challenges that face BIPOC students, early career artists and entrepreneurs in emerging media and extended reality (XR). 

Co-run by the Herberger Institute and ASU Gammage and supported by the New American Council for Arts and Design, the program is currently supporting three fellows who are working on immersive projects that range from personal identity and culture to space and dance. 

Sian Proctor: EarthLight VR Experience

Many astronauts experience a transformative shift in awareness and identity that changes them forever: “The Overview Effect.” They return to Earth as humanitarians and conservationists, said XRts fellow Sian Proctor, reporting an “elevated empathy” and a responsibility to care for our planet and share their perspectives with the rest of the world. Proctor said they have often stated that we should send artists and poets to space to help translate this ineffable, transformative experience.

On Sept. 15, 2021, launching as the mission pilot for Inspiration4, the first all-civilian mission to space, Proctor became the first woman commercial astronaut, and the only African-American female, to pilot a spaceship. She is also the first astronaut who won a seat to space as an artist and poet. While in space, she said, she experienced the beauty, magic and awe of EarthLight.

“Now, my mission is to bring the unique ‘EarthLight’ perspective down to planet Earth through immersive art, poetry, and storytelling,” she said. 

The EarthLight VR Experience transports you to the year 2142, when the JEDI Space Station (Just, Equitable, Diverse and Inclusive Space) is orbiting in low Earth orbit. It is a museum dedicated to sharing the impact of the arts and humanities in human spaceflight and how sending poets and artists to space to experience EarthLight changed the collective consciousness of the world. The EarthLight VR Experience consists of multiple activities on the JEDI Space Station, including the Bridge, where you are introduced to Afrobotica, the Earthlight Historian. You can choose to visit the Seeker Gallery, where you can interact with Afrofuturistic art and poetry, or go to the Cosmic Coliseum to watch a moving EarthLight performance. 

Martha Mendizabal: PachucoXR

PachucoXR, a project of the social enterprise TecnoLatinx, commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots, masterfully intertwining a historic American narrative with state-of-the-art technology.

Debuting May 20, 2023, at the ASU California Center Broadway in the iconic former Herald Examiner building, PachucoXR was not merely a technological showcase, but a cultural milestone. This interactive learning XR experience, spotlighted by the Los Angeles Times, delves into mid 20th-century youth challenges, accentuating their significant societal impact while championing culture and community engagement through tools like VR, AR and more.

In its second year, backed by the XRts Immersive Media Fellowship, PachucoXR broadens horizons. Alongside the TecnoLatinx team and with support from ASU’s XRts project fund, XRts Immersive Media Fellow and TecnoLatinx co-founder Martha Mendizabal aims to craft a documentary in 2024. This film will highlight the indispensable role institutions play in magnifying grassroots movements. ABC7 and Localish spotlighted TecnoLatinx’s mission in August 2023.

The year 2024 also marks PachucoXR’s Arizona debut, with Mendizabal mentoring and fostering innovative collaborations. True to TecnoLatinx’s ethos of community-centricity and community integration, Mendizabal and her team will recruit talent directly from ASU and neighboring communities, emphasizing emerging technology content creation and workforce development. This effort seeks to enrich PachucoXR content through novel collaborative efforts.

Sultan Sharrief: Ancestor Dance

Black (w)Hole SCi* 59 is an iterative, immersive augmented reality experience and Afrofuturist design charette that utilizes AI-driven visuals, volumetric holograms and data visualization combined with live dance and theatrical performance to provide interactive narratives that synthesize ancestral legacy and experiential healing to engage the heart, mind and body through psychosomatic experiments. 

Filmmaker Sharrief takes the information from his DNA test results, which show over 20 countries represented, to explore what it means to honor our collective ancestors seven generations in the past and to plan for seven generations in the future through dance. The piece started as a question of whether it was possible to approach healing multi-generational trauma through somatic practice. Sharrief said that since his DNA is a reflection of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, it represents the blood of the colonizer as well as the colonized, the slave master and the slave, the oppressor and the oppressed. So how could one approach healing and wholeness without addressing it at the internal level? 

Sharrief does this through a choreographed performance where dance traditions and somatic practice from the different countries represented in his DNA are visualized through augmented reality holograms. These are then choreographed with a live performer who unites the movements of the ancestors through dance. The experience is created by first doing volumetric captures of real dancers to create the holograms of the ancestors. These are then put into an augmented reality app so that viewers can see live dancers in addition to the holograms.

Learn more about the XRts Immersive Media Fellowship. 

Sian Proctor photo by Charlie Lieght. Martha Mendizabal image: screenshot from PachucoXR video. Sultan Sharrief photo by  Laura Segall.
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