I cofounded and formerly directed IMMERSIVE DENVER, a community organization seeking since our first educational summit in 2018 to connect the Colorado experiential creative community, generate new audiences for regional immersive, and advance efforts around performer and participant safety, agency, access and inclusion. It remains the leading regional organization in the United States dedicated to fortifying a local community of immersive artists and designers.
The challenges
Worldbuilding is at the heart of immersive arts and design, placing them at the convergence of a variety of different fields and industries: theatre, interactive art, puzzle/escape rooms, improv, installation design, and more. Because they came from different communities and different creative languages, practitioners in each field were often addressing problems from scratch that another discipline had already solved. At the same time, all of them were exploring new challenges unique to the field on their own, especially questions surrounding audience agency and expectations. How could artists + designers across disciplines share ideas + learnings with one another to address the unique challenges of creating meaningful immersive experience?
As my cofounder David Thomas and I began hosting community events, another major question continually arose in conversation: How can one immersive experience become a gateway to explore others? Local immersive creators struggle to get the word out about their events or explain to audiences what their experience offers. Yet almost everyone has been to a haunted house, and a few large companies regularly sell thousands of tickets to touring immersive productions of famous artists (Van Gogh, Banksy) and pop cultural phenomenon (think Harry Potter).
From the founding through January 2021 I led all events programming, resource development, and graphics/information design, and managed the website and newsletters. David and I collaborated on cultivating local + national partnerships and event planning/logistics.
The solutions
How it started
On a technical level, filling an information gap is one of the easier challenges to solve. We began mapping the local immersive community, quickly recognizing that some immersive experiences are fixed in space and others in time. A monthly newsletter compiles upcoming local shows + temporary events in one place. A community map showcases the permanent and semi-permanent immersive installations, exhibitions, and experiences.
Behind the scenes, we were building institutional support for an event that would bring immersive creators together, create the platform for knowledge-sharing, and celebrate the new shared identity we were creating around regional immersive. The 2018 Denver Immersive Summit was by all accounts a wild success, selling out its day-long run. More importantly, as we built out the program in collaboration with local creators, we began seeing the contours of a network even more robust than expected.
How it’s going
Building a community requires regular moments of coming together. From the 2018 Summit onwards, we sought to host regular social and creative events, including a weekend immersive sprint in collaboration with Denver Startup Week, the Immersive Espresso series of online talks + conversations during the coronavirus lockdown, and a series of in-person monthly networking nights.
We worked together with the Immersive Experience Institute to cohost the global immersive community’s premiere event for 2022, titled the Denver Immersive Gathering and welcoming in hundreds of international leaders + makers from throughout the fields of performing arts, themed entertainment, XR, and gaming. I no longer helmed the organization at this time but designed the event identity including several wayfinding features.