Immersive Pipeline 2: Out of the lab and into the wild

The project, Immersive Pipeline 2: Out of the Lab and into the Wild, will build upon previous cutting edge research at Goldsmiths College on surround audiovisual performance environments and bring them to venues outside the university for public performances embedded in the local communities of East London and South East London. The original project took as a premise that, while virtual reality is compelling, the headsets typically used VR are socially isolating. The initial Immersive Pipeline project sought to make fully immersive sound and image in real space, as a shared, social experience. We did so using the advanced facilities of the Sonics Immersive Media Labs (SIML) at Goldsmiths. In Immersive Pipeline 2, we will take SIML off campus and bring it to community venues such as the Albany Theatre in Deptford and the Old Baths in Hackney Wick. We will bring the SIML projection technologies to these venues and work with local organisers to adapt the architecture of their spaces to set up a SIML off-site. We will curate a series of performance events that will present immersive audiovisual works to the broad general public. Having an extended residency with partner Stour Space at the Old Baths will allow time for a commissioned artist to create a new work in a community arts setting. We will also set up a scale model of the SIML, the "SIMLulator", allowing children and young people to play with a mock up. We will conduct workshops on the SIMLulator, enabling school groups and young people from the communities of East London to try their hand at producing surround a/v pieces using music and visuals from their own aesthetic cultures. We will work with a leading creatve studio, Satore Studios, to share our immersive technologies for use in fashion runway shows and large scale stadium shows. We will also partner with the new music charity, Sound & Music in their New Voices programme. This linking of IP2 and New Voices will enable the group, People Like Us, to use SIML at Goldsmiths to prepare a major US premier of a feature length immersive cinematic piece they will bring in late 2019 to the Recombinant Festival in San Francisco. In this way, the Immersive Pipeline 2 project will take research on immersive media out of the lab and into the wild, sharing our knowledge with artists and creative studios, and bring these experiences to new audiences.

The Immersive Pipeline 2 project will enhance the impact of the initial project and add significant value. It will stimulate new routes to impact through local communities, and in doing so point out innovative new opportunities for societal impact not foreseen in the original project. The new forms of impact in this follow-on project will underscore the robustness and sustainability of the previous project.

Impact is fundamental to the nature of the follow-on project. By taking the research from the prior project out of the lab and into real world settings, a key objective of the new project is to create impact. This will take place in the external facing orientation of the project. The confirmed April 2019 performance at The Albany Theatre in Deptford, southeast London, will bring a Goldsmiths curated programme of immersive audiovisual performance, including works by PI Tanaka, RA Regina, and PhD student Peng, to the general public in Lewisham. The SIML residency at the Old Baths in Hackney Wick will permit an extended run where the SIML is not just set up for a single performance, but for an extended period of 3 weeks. This will allow the general public to witness the creative processes behind an audiovisual performance. By having the SIML set up for this period, our project artists will create new work in-situ in open atelier sessions where the public will witness the process of work-in-progress. Finally, by setting up the SIMLulator scale model in one of the smaller studios behind the main baths, RA Regina will be able to conduct workshops on immersive a/v production techniques open to young people from Hackney.

With these activities in Lewisham and Hackney councils, we will not only access new audiences, but create community impact by bringing advanced university research to a local setting. This adds value to the impact envisioned in the original project. It at once fulfils the potential indicated in the first project, at the same time uncovers new routes to impact not imagined in the first bid. This extension of impact from the first project can be seen by revisiting the impact statement from the original bid and seeing how they have been fulfilled or transposed. In the original project, we imagined working with museums like the V&A, while in the new project we have a confirmed date with an established community theatre. In the first project, we pointed out the potential impact in the film industry. Here in the new project, we have forged a partnership with Satore Studios who work in fashion and entertainment. In the initial project, we imagined presentations in venues like the Truman Brewery, and working with the maker community, including the student-run Hacksmiths. This is transposed to our planned presentation at the Old Baths, and working with community organisations commissioned by local authorities to create new creative quarters. These mappings can be summarised as an increased focus on performance and community with respect to what we imagined in the first bid.

Our impact plan also points out the contributions this project will make to the UK creative economy. Satore Studios will gain knowledge in assimilating our immersive technologies into their future commercial projects. Our partnership with Stour Space has led to discussions with the Splice Festival where we may have the chance to bring the SIML and our curated performance programme to a nationally recognised event in the vibrant DJ/VJ arts scene. The partnership with Sound & Music establishes a new relationship between higher education and an arts charity. Through it, the artist Vicki Bennett and her group, People Like Us, will prepare their US premier at Goldsmiths and present a VIP avant-premier to an invited London audience before a world premiere in San Francisco. This strengthens the position of creative cinematic work conceived and produced in the UK and facilitates its international distribution.