At 2025 Tribeca Festival, VR, augmented reality and AI showcase immersive storytelling
The 2025 Tribeca Festival continues this week with movie screenings, Q&As, industry panel discussions and public performances across New York City. But one program in this year's festival takes place in virtual worlds.
For more than a decade, Tribeca has been expanding its focus beyond cinema and television to include new avenues of storytelling through the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other nascent technologies, producing some vivid immersive displays. Even if the storytelling aspect of the programs were limited, the artistic expressions could be powerful. This was especially true with past exhibits that enveloped the viewer in massive spaces, in which computer-generated imagery or time-lapse photography placed the viewer in new worlds, from exploding galaxies to swirling blood vessels.
Hosted under the umbrella title "In Search of Us," this year's installation in Lower Manhattan ties 11 projects together under the rubric of impacts on humanity — exploring topics from artificial intelligence to climate change, war, school shootings and transphobia. The exhibits with the most profound effects are those with the strongest and most emotional stories embedded inside them.
Within a simple, delineated space furnished with minimal furniture, "Fragile Home," by Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina, uses mixed reality to recreate a home in Ukraine that comes under bombardment. Wearing goggles, the viewer walks through a comfortable, well-appointed living room, past a dinner table and a purring cat, and looks outside the window to a peaceful vista — all of which, in a flash, is replaced by the home's bombed-out remains, vandalized with Russian forces' "Z" graffiti.
The sense of violation is made so powerful in so simple a setting — and the recognition that such destruction is multiplied millions of times over is heart-wrenching. But the objects that survived — those with personal meaning to just a handful of people – become representations of resilience to many.
"Scent," by Alan Kwan, is a first-person cinematic game in which the player becomes a dog wandering a landscape, who observes people being attacked and killed by malevolent forces. In between avoiding bombs and gunfire, the dog helps guide the souls of those killed to become reincarnated. It's a meditative view of cruel violations impacting humanity and nature.
Armed with a tablet, viewers of the augmented reality "There Goes Nikki" can wander a garden populated by virtual flowers, and a visualization of the late poet Nikki Giovanni reciting her poem, "Quilting the Black-eyed Pea (We're going to Mars)." By Idris Brewster, Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster.
How dangerous is artificial intelligence? How dumb is it? How snarky? "AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego," directed by Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot, provides viewers with an opportunity to become test subjects, as it were, to AI's judgmental streak. Upon sitting in a chair, the participant is captured on camera and analyzed by AI, which conjures up your name, personality traits, and goals. How close are they to reality? Prepare to get snarked. But if the AI program "likes" you? Your AI-altered image will turn up in its pantheon of favored carbon-based units (pictured above, right).
Other exhibits are immersive representations of culture — some self-generated, some created by AI.
"Uncharted" (VR, by Kidus Hailesilassie) combines footage of a dancer with spoken word and visualizations of symbols to become a rapturous demonstration of pan-African language and storytelling.
The interactive "New Maqam City," by MIPSTERZ, allows you to become a DJ, manipulating drum beat patterns recognizable in Muslim communities around the world to create a transcendent vibe.
"The Innocence of Unknowing" is a video essay and AI project studying media coverage of mass shootings, projected within a simulated classroom. (Created by Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwani through the MIT Open Documentary Lab.)
One of the strongest impacts of any installation was made by "In the Current of Being," by Cameron Kostopoulos. Using haptic VR, the viewer is literally strapped into a chair; electrodes are attached to your fingertips, arms, and torso, along with VR goggles. Interesting, you think. Then, the presentation begins, recounting the true story of a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy. (As a teenager, Carolyn Mercer had been "treated" with electrical shocks in an attempt to "cure" her from becoming trans.) As images of female beauty are flashed before you, electrical impulses throb across your body. This is not virtual reality; the extreme discomfort is very real, forcing me out of the presentation less than halfway through. The upshot: aversion therapy works, because I will never allow VR electrodes to be attached to my body ever again.
Beyond the confines of the exhibition space at 161 Water Street, the two-part "The Power Loom and The Founders Pillars" (by Lesiba Mabitsela, Meghna Singh and Simon Wood) includes a site-specific AR experience, visible on a mobile app six blocks away, at the New York Stock Exchange, creating a memorial to enslaved people once sold at the Wall Street Slave Market, established in the 18th century.
While the Tribeca Festival proper concludes on June 15, "In Search of Us," presented in partnership with Onassis ONX and Agog: The Immersive Media Institute, runs through June 29. For more details and ticket info click here.