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“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”
— ****Toni Cade Bambara
An immersive experience creates or facilitates the perception of being surrounded by, or being part of, a different environment or reality than that of our everyday. We understand the importance of creating spaces in which neighbours and participants can imagine other realities, as we continue to co-design the future in Ladywood in creative, participatory and engaging ways.
Over the past three years, our work has featured a number of immersive experiences brought to life through a range of formats and mediums, often with the support of artists and creative minds from our neighbourhood and beyond. Our Neighbourhood Quests are a primary example of such experiences. These are a playful, immersive, gamified way of exploring the neighbourhood more widely, creating space for those who are local to go beyond the natural patterns, geographies and places that they experience in their everydayness.
We also use immersive experiences to translate the theory of the four lenses framework developed by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab into richer and re-focused perspectives of the neighbourhood. These immersive experiences allow us to look at how air pollution, biological inequity, noise pollution, etc. show up in our neighbourhoods in ways that lift these challenges off the paper and into the direct and proximate reality of participants or neighbours.
“We are dealing not with individuals per se, but with traditions of imagination. In these cases, many people participate in the same imaginary scenario, contributing to it and feeding into it, and, as we will see, this can unleash the power of collective action. Communities of imagination can become galvanised by a vision of the future and seek to institute it, leading to sociogenesis, that is, the development of society itself”
Tania Zittoun & Alex Gillespie, Imagination in human and cultural development