Updated: 5 days ago
issue 2
fall 2026
Intro: Our Editors Discuss the Access Illusion
Review editors introduce the articles and the surprising connections between them.
Image Credit: Danielle Giroux
Michael: First I wanted to just talk about the call itself, which you put together. You call it The Access Illusion. And I'm actually going to read what is, to me, one of the most salient sections of the call, and we can discuss it a bit about what you were thinking when you wrote it. It says, "We might call this the access illusion. The story the immersive field has told itself from the beginning. The promise was that XR would be inherently democratizing, that the power of presence would dissolve the barriers between people, places, and experiences. That story endured because it contained a real kernel of truth. Immersive technology can do extraordinary things, but the illusion lies in the leap from can to does, or the assumption that transformative potential translates automatically into equitable access. The history of immersive technology is littered with moments where the democratic promise was invoked to attract funding, generate press, and build excitement while the actual tools remained concentrated in the hands of well-resourced institutions, festivals, and research labs. Understanding how this illusion was constructed and why it has proven so durable is essential to moving past it." I really liked this paragraph. This hint that, like, there's something democratizing about what's being made. But, that promise, as you call it, was invoked to attract funding, generate press, and build excitement. Just feels like it's a field where there's so many promoters? And we do get a lot of submissions. We do get so many that feel like, "Hey, I made this really cool thing. Can I basically promote it in the review?" And I f- I feel like we're constantly trying to say, this thing might be great, but what we really prefer is, are people who can kind of look broader, look out at, like, the field in general, really kind of situate if it's something that they made or something that they're interested in, in a broader spectrum within the history of the media or within the range of immersive experiences that are out there, not to...
Amy: And not create articles that feel so, so promotional. Well, so I would say, first of all, the reason the theme came to mind is I think that immersive technology has reached a moment that we really need to distin- to distinguish its promises from its actual achievements. And as those within the field have been really become very good at demonstrating what the technology can do. But I don't think that we've been equally rigorous about examining who it serves, who gets to shape it, what happens after the initial experience. So, after that experience, what, what happens? What is the impact? And and then to circle back also to what you, you read about, which some might read as me suggesting that XR has, has failed to fulfill its democratic promise. And I don't think that's fully the case. I think the promise of democratic platforms and experiences are, are quite real, and that's what makes it interesting to me. But there are absolutely extraordinary examples of immersive technologies that are opening up new educational, cultural, and even therapeutic, like in, in terms of like med tech, possibilities. But though even if there are some successes, that doesn't automati- automatically make the technology democratic. It's like whether those projects actually translate into sustainable impact that is, is equitable. One thing I, I'm interested in is, like, not who we hear about, but who we don't. So I think I use the my way in was that earworm from the '80s that I always feel like somebody's watching me. And I was thinking about, especially in, in age, I'm not suggesting, well, maybe I am, we're in sort of a, the panopticon and the age of surveillance. But I'm thinking more as that translates to who, who we watch and-- but who doesn't get watched and who, whose projects don't get funded, maybe they don't get distributed. Like, who isn't considered in the, the question? And, and I was thinking about that a lot. Like, we got a, a number of really great submissions even for the, the first call, and I-I'm thinking in particular about, like, immersive projects in the health care space. And I don't know, it just made me think like, there's a lot that are designed to s- to either highlight inequities in the healthcare system or to augment already existing assistive technologies. And I just thought, like, those aren't the, the, the always the splashiest projects that are going to be appropriate for, say, a festival. They're not necessarily going to win awards or be known within the immersive community. And I, yeah, so I'm interested in, in those kinds of things.
Michael: That's, that's actually a really fascinating dynamic. And I just wanna, like, put a pin on it, because I do think we heard from at least three people who've done really well in the festival circuit. You know, done big, mostly VR, but kind of these big festival-lauded projects, in which the creators themselves felt like they were the ones not being watched, or, and/or they were focused on subject matter of people that, again, were the ones not being watched. But at the same time, after kind of getting within the system they feel isolated. I got a couple of feelings from, from a few articles that were written of like, I'm finally kind of in, and I've kind of made it. But I still feel this, like, outsider-ness within the system. So let's just run down what the six articles are, that, that are in this issue.
Amy: Okay. So let me talk about Matthias. Matthias Stadler's article is titled "The User Who Exists on Paper." He's highlighting or drawing attention to the fact that the problem of access may begin long before anyone even is in an audience. And so his central argument is that the communities that XR projects claim to serve sometimes are, are transformed into like administratively convenient categories during the funding process. And so by the time the technology is actually developed. There may be a level of remove from the actual, like, people involved.
Michael: You, you sort of made up a category that doesn't really exist.
Amy: Yep. And so he, he talks about how I, I think one of my takeaways is like that inclusion can become sort of a bureaucratic exercise. And he acknowledges everyone's trying to do something worthwhile. But when we think about institutional requirements of like feasibility, measurable impact, sustainability those things, even though they seem to be good, they can still like reshape the like communities that are central to the project.
Michael: Thank you. Then we have Scarlett Kim who's a producer, a director, has an acting background. She's based in LA, and her article's called From Access to Belonging: The Distribution of Power in Immersive. So it reads kind of as a little autobiographical, but what's so interesting, I think, about this article is how she diagrams the process by which an immersive work goes from initial seed of idea to creation and all of the different entities, be it a theatrical company, a festival c- creative collaborators, all the different types of people that get involved in, you could say, sort of creating and birthing immersive work. And she sees it like a power grid, where electricity kind of moves in a certain direction. And what she ends up, advocating for is what she calls a village model or something that's much more interconnected and iterative in how these different communities shape the work and how different people are constantly informing the work as it moves out to production. And I think it comes from her grassroots approach to immersive creation in the best sense of grassroots is really a belief that bringing people together is the essential part of the creative process. So that's Scarlett Kim's From Access to Belonging: The Distribution of Power in Immersive.
Amy: I thought it was really interesting the Filipino tradition of– I may mangle the pronunciation of this. It's bayanihan which is a Filipino tradition of collective responsibility, and I think it's gye, G-Y-E, which is a Korean practice of like a sort of cooperative aid. And I think that, I, I don't know, I just found that interesting that, that she brought those traditions in, for a new way that the village can be constructed.
Michael: Matthias and Scarlett read together are really interesting because they're almost talking about like who belongs, right? And Matthias is like who, who is, is envisioned as the beneficiary, and then Scarlett is talking about what does belonging actually require, like from institutions, from and how institutional relationships really shape what projects can become.
Amy: Then we have May Abdalla.
Michael: Her title is Don't Make Me Write Anything That Could Go in a Grant Form, this also pairs well with Matthias' article about the user who exists on paper, about the grant writing process. And May's is just a beautifully written, flowing, highly personal story of a specific project that's about ADHD. It's called Impulse. A similar illusion, like to the user that exists on paper, in the sense that she sort of thought it was going to have a predictable impact on audiences' understanding of ADHD, but she found a result that she wasn't expecting. And that sort of surprising result throughout the essay kind of launches her into a much longer backstory of how she got there, how she got to be doing this project, what the stakes were for her as a creative in doing it, and kind of her own journey as, an outsider journalist who never quite fit into the BBC newsroom that I think she worked at for a number of years. And it's just, it's, it's also just, like, quirky and funny and takes you to a lot of very specific places and circumstances in her career. So I really enjoyed it.
Amy: I liked the, the more like narrative, personal narrative elements of this piece. You can hear their voice and yeah, I think they're not flattened.
Michael: Speaking of not flattened, that's kind of a good intro to Timothy Braun's Everyone Is Invited: Some Assembly Required, or The Myth of Total Freedom in the Architecture of Belonging. And I think flattened is good is because Tim had this experience, which I think a lot of people who've been to immersive theater have of like being in a show and there's certain people there that know exactly what to do. They know when the actor's going to pass, they know where the secret door is. So he sort of writes about what he calls the completionists, these people who really understand a work and come back over and over and over again, and recognizes that they are essential to have repeat visitors really can help support a work financially, culturally. They tend to write about it. They spread the word. Like it's, it's all really great, but also they can give people who are not necessarily insiders a feeling that they might be doing something wrong. So he's full of a lot of anecdotes and a lot of history of, how he first encountered the completionists
Michael Epstein & Amy Carleton
A graduate of M.I.T.’s Comparative Media Studies program, Michael Epstein is the Managing Editor of IXA’s Immersive Impact Review. He is also the founding principal of Walking Cinema, an innovative production studio based in San Francisco that specializes in site-specific, non-fiction immersive experiences.
Michael is an active educator and scholar of new media. He spent a decade as an Senior Lecturer at The California College of the Arts where he focused on immersive story design. He is also the founder of the Experiential Journalism Lab in Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Lab focuses on teaching a cohort of journalism students how to create experiential stories tied to rigorous reporting. Over his career, Michael has developed immersive work for PBS, Audible, Adobe, MTV, MIT, the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities and NPR.
Affiliation: Managing Editor, Immersive Impact Review
Amy Carleton, Ph.D. is editor of IXA's Immersive Impact Review. At MIT, she teaches courses at the intersection of media, technology, and culture. Her academic research is focused on the behavioral economics of knowledge sharing platforms (like Wikipedia!) and inclusive technology.
Amy is an educator, scholar, and creative practitioner whose work spans media, music, and public culture. A recognized Wiki Black History Scholar, she designed and led the Community of Soul project, a Wikimedia Foundation-supported initiative writing Black music history into Wikipedia. She is the co-founder of Black Notes Project, a Charlotte-based arts festival and nonprofit celebrating Black American music. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and the LA Review of Books, among other publications.