IN SEARCH OF US: The 2025 Tribeca Festival Immersive program

 

By KELCEY EDWARDS July 18, 2025

The 2025 Tribeca Festival Immersive program, In Search of Us, consists of an impressive 11 groundbreaking projects by multidisciplinary, international artists working at the cutting edge of immersive storytelling.

From the program:

In times of uncertainty and global change, creative expression becomes a vital avenue for exploration. In Search of Us celebrates the immersive field as a space to ask questions, uncover hidden truths, and create shared space through storytelling.

Reflecting on Tribeca Immersive's 14-year legacy, this show continues the festival's commitment to the diversity of perspectives that shape who we are. There is no "us vs. them"; there is only the search for us.

I consider that phrase, In Search of Us, as I gaze into the brightly lit, window-lined space filled with projections on looms, massive digital screens, QR codes, AR and VR headsets, interactive ipads on podiums, semi-public gaming consoles and what appears to be an AI guided selfie-video booth, and wonder who the “us” is. I am reminded of a line from Russell Edson’s poem “A Chair”: 

What it remembers of the forest it forgets, and dreams of a room where it waits — Of the cup and the ceiling — Of the Animate One.

—A Chair, Edson

And so I enter the exhibit considering the historical memory of objects.

 The Power Loom and The Founder's Pillars

The Power Loom is one part of a two-part installation. The other is a site-specific Augmented Reality (AR) experience that uses African textile patterns and visualizations to transform the columns of the New York Stock Exchange into a memorial to enslaved peoples. The onsite artist  Meghna explains in a gentle voice that The Founders Pillars was inspired, in part, by the realization that the name on the building propped up by the pillars belonged to a former slave-owner. The installation, she elaborates, is about “reclaiming space and history.”

On display is an impressive South African floor loom. Meghna tells me that she transported the loom herself in pieces, the longest ones shipped as “oversized baggage,” and later reassembled. The multimedia installation digitally weaves African textile patterns and projects them from a ceiling-mounted projector onto the floor loom. In selecting their patterns, the artists collaborated with a textile historian to identify the patterns tied most closely to the slave trade in the region. She recommends viewing it while listening to a soundscape of digital weaving sounds playing through a row of headphones hanging from the wall.

 

The Power Loom By Lesiba Mabitsela, Meghna Singh, and Simon Wood

Photos by Kelcey Edwards

 

Scent 

by Alan Kwan

I continue to make my way through the group exhibition, and wait patiently to “play” the next installation: Alan Kwan’s Scent, a self-described “cinematic game” in which the player takes on the form of a dog roaming a war-torn city. Despite being surrounded by—and bearing painful witness to—mass atrocities, the player’s mission is simple: perform the quiet task of “guiding human souls toward reincarnation.”

The players are clearly enjoying the experience, but the line is long and I am uncertain that I am qualified to guide a human soul anywhere, as dog or otherwise. I move on.

What it remembers of the forest it forgets.

—A Chair, Edson

 

Boreal Dreams

Next I am greeting by Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Boreal Dreams, an unchaperoned, dynamic simulation that considers the relationship between climate and consciousness, exploring specifically how climate change impacts “how we think, sleep and dream.”  The exhibit invites its audience to move through Canada’s Boreal zone—the largest land-based biome on earth—via a realistic virtual rendering of the world (present and imagined potential futures) based on fieldwork, data collection, and real-time technology.

 Photo by Kelcey Edwards

I find myself simultaneously lulled and transfixed by the colorful display of data-driven patterns, spooling outward from a forest floor (where one might sleep, I think, tired suddenly, yawning and overstimulated). The kaleidoscopic dream of a dying forest. 

As a young child, I asked my mother about the meaning of dreams. She explained that in our dreams, everyone we meet represents ourselves.

 

AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego

Part of a series titled “AI & Me”, The Confessional and AI Ego teases the dynamics between humans and artificial intelligence. After walking past a cluster of podiums with vintage television monitors displaying loops of video portraits superimposed over dystopian backdrops, we are instructed to enter an open-walled booth, sit down and “see what AI thinks of you”—an experience that promises to be “funny, raw, and completely unapologetic.” 

The artist Daniela warmly greets us as we approach. Smiling broadly, she warns that the AI will only pick certain faces to add to the public-facing loops. “If it likes you,” she explains, adding nervously that “it can be very…unfiltered.”

 

My curiosity is piqued, so I approach the chair, and—as instructed—I sit.

Through shadow and fly buzz and the floating dust it has waited such a long time to be with its person.

—A Chair, Edson

 

 

AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego By mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot).

Photo by Magnus Gertten

I discovered the poem A Chair, in The Tunnel, an anthology of Edson’s poetry published in 1994. I learned only recently that the original poem was published more than 30 years earlier, in a book titled Appearances, Fables & Drawings. Does it matter when a poem is born, I wonder, and that I have been wrong about its age for all of these years I have loved it, information drawn from the faulty archive of my human mind?

The AI, it turns out, likes me.

Through on screen text, it begins by telling me that I am anonymous to the machine. It tells me it will make assumptions about how I look. It guesses that I am a white woman (true), and that I am 33 (false). It says I have a happy face. 

“The machine is now dreaming of you,” it tells me.

“The machine finds you pleasant.”

The machine did not tell my friend that he was pleasant.

The machine tells me I have a rebellious gaze, that I am a classic overthinker, and that I have an unexpected talent for charades (all true). 

I consider the fact that the machine seems to both know me better than (and perhaps even like me better than) I know and like myself. 

 

New Maqam City

My friend is drawn into New Maqam City, an installation by the artist collective MIPSTERZ that invites spectators to remix music well-known in Muslim communities. Blending Gnawa music, synthpop, hundreds of drum patterns, and more, the interactive installation aspires to draw participants into a transcendental state inspired by Sufi mysticism.

A Father’s Lullaby

Meanwhile, I am having my own musical experience down the hall in a black-walled room, listening to formerly incarcerated fathers sing lullabies in Rashin Fahande’s  A Father's Lullaby.

The accompanied AR, Lullabies Through Time, is described as “a site-responsive experience designed to trace the enduring legacies of racialized systems of control and confinement”, serving as a bridge from the past into the present and future in order to “reclaim public spaces as sites of healing, reconnection, and future-building.”

Like the first exhibit I saw, The Power Loom, this exhibit is tagged as “Expressions of Black Freedom,” and I am reminded of Tribeca’s curatorial promise that its immersive installation will “approach some of our era's most urgent questions with depth and nuance” as artists use new technology to “tell important stories,” whether they are calls to action or invitations to contemplate or connect.

 

The lullaby brings tears to my eyes, a mournful voice that leaves me wondering about the themes of freedom, longing, regret, and forgiveness. 

It has waited such a long time to be with its person.

—A Chair, Edson

I referenced Edson’s poem A Chair once before for an exhibit I curated in Watermill, NY. It was a group exhibition titled A Rose is A Rose is A Rose (a title I stole from Gertrude Stein). I searched the internet for my original curatorial essay and was informed by Wix that the domain was no longer active (a website once tied to my ex-husband's credit card—a post-divorce casualty—and now the words are lost). Again, I find myself searching my brainfog to find the memory of an idea, and—turning to technology for assistance—discover, instead, a ghost.

 

A Father’s Lullaby by Rashin Fahande

Photo by Kelcey Edwards

Uncharted VR

Outside of the theater, I meet Kidus, the artist behind Uncharted VR.

The labor behind the projected work, he explains, involved mapping 6,500 languages rooted in African and diasporic writing systems. His eyes gleam as he describes how the installation blends ancestral knowledge and AI data, creating a virtual wave.  

Again, I find myself mesmerized, as much by the bright-eyed Ethiopian artist Kidus Hailesilassie as by the large-scale, projected virtual wave that his language-mapping exercise has come to embody. Dancing human bodies are superimposed over the wave, and I muse on the storytelling of griots and shamans—the literal human embodiment of narrative and history, passed down in cultures through oral traditions, and dance. I consider the fleeting and faulty memory of mortals—the little knowledge we each leave behind, like dust in the cosmos, or drops in the digital ocean. As the cultural richness of the exhibit washes over me, Kidus motions me into the space. “Feel free to meditate,” he encourages. I feel an anchoring in my own body—sensations of tired feet, and a vague sense of hunger—and I feel suddenly, and acutely, aware of my American-ness.

 

Uncharted VR by Kidus Hailesilassie

Photo by Kelcey Edwards

***

The friend I am sitting with as I write this paper interrupts my writing to inform me that Swedes are the most negative towards the US, according to a Pew Research Center survey he is reading on his iPhone. My friend is Swedish—visiting New York from Malmö—and he finds this information fascinating. He follows this announcement with a list of other countries with high disapproval of the US: a list that includes Canada, Mexico, and Australia. I mumble something about countries with oppressive governments being filled with dissidents and activists, and then remind him that I need to finish my essay. “It has to do with the impact of the U.S. on the world,” he continues, and I can’t stop thinking about the idea of nations and borders, and the defunding of scientists and artists under the current administration. 

“Israel has the highest approval of the US” he tells me. “83%.”

***

The website for Tribeca’s Immersive Exhibit advertises creative experiments that provide “a close look at bias,” among other things, such as reflections on climate futures, untold stories,, and cultural celebrations. Through eleven dynamic installations, "In Search of Us" embraces immersion as a means to venture into the unknown together.

So this is what it feels like to venture into the unknown together, I think. To what end are we venturing? I ask myself. 

What it remembers of the forest, it forgets. 

—A Chair, Edson

 

Fragile Home 

Ondřej Moravec and Victoria Lopukhina’s Fragile Home is a mixed reality experience that transforms its surroundings into a Ukrainian home. Experienced through AR/VR headsets, the minimally furnished domestic space is filled with relics, voices, and music. The multisensory experience embeds its audience in a before-and-after story of displacement—an exercise in memory and resilience.

The last exhibit I encounter is The Innocence of Unknowing (there are two more upstairs—There Goes Nikki (an AR ode to poet Nikki Giovanni) and In The Current of Being (described as a “haptic VR experience” that tells the true story of Carolyn Mercer, a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy)—but hunger gets the best of me and we leave without making it to the final level of the exhibition space. 

Fragile Home by Kidus Hailesilassie

Photo by Kelcey Edwards

 

The Innocence of Unkowing

Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwan’s The Innocence of Unknowing is an AI archival project examining news coverage of mass shootings in the U.S. since the 1960s through film, live performance, and an interactive memorial where attendees are encouraged to bring flowers and contribute.

Incubated at the MIT Open Documentary Lab along with some of he other selected exhibitions, The Innocence of Unknowing features a series of live performance-conversation between the artists and Aurora, an AI trained to "think" like a humanities scholar that—through the study of the archival materials and pattern analysis—investigates the impact of media portrayals of public violence on contemporary culture.

The installation features the aforementioned projections, walls lined with flowers and other personal contributions to the collective memorial, and several rows of empty chairs.

…and dreams of a room where it waits — Of the cup and the ceiling — Of the Animate One.

—A Chair, Edson

 

The Innocence of Unkowing by Ryat Yezbick and Milo Talwan

Photo by Kelcey Edwards

I wonder if the empty chairs are intended for the victims of violence, or for the audience who must bear witness so that their stories can be shared. And for all of the elaborate stagings connected to the immersive exhibits, it is the artists I remember most vividly—Maghna, Daniela, Kidus. The Animate Ones. 

On the back cover of Edson’s poetry collection, The Very Thing That Happens, is a description of his work as “ontological probings into the nature of things: objects, animals, people." Denise Levertov describes his poetry as a unique outgrowth of an eccentric imagination, the “convoluted shell of the mind’s hyper-sensitive, clairvoyant snail.” 

With a dizzying sense of ontological probings and clairvoyant snail minds, I make my way out of the building, back into the grey, rainy summer day, in search of shelter, food, and a place to sit.

 

Author’s headshot, as reimagined by AI & Me: The Confessional and AI Ego by mots

Photo by Kelcey Edwards