DOK Industry Podcast 2026
Bringing Archives to Life Through Immersive Storytelling
How can XR open up new ways of working with archives? Drawing on their creative methodologies, Chloé Lee and Lucy Hammond discuss transforming 2D photographs, documents and other archival traces into spatial experiences, and how these materials shape narrative, space and interaction – as well as the artistic, technical and ethical challenges of bringing archives to life through XR. Their projects, first pitched at the DOK Exchange XR Showcase, have since reached international stages: Lee’s “Inter(mediate) Spaces” premiered at SXSW 2026 (TBC), while Hammond’s “Ôl” (“Haunts”) had its international premiere at Venice Immersive 2026.
Language: English
Length: 01:07:23
Recorded on 15 September 2026
XR creator, immersive narratives curator, and coordinator of the DOK Exchange XR Programme at DOK Leipzig. Co-curator of Embodied Realms, a festival dedicated to performance art and XR in Poland. Mentors XR projects including Climate Challenge XR for the European Space Agency, and writes XR climate games for the Guest XR research project (University of Warsaw), exploring AI agents and social XR harmony. Conducts research on AI in performance art involving XR. In 2021, served as expert for the Committee for Innovative Film Projects at the National Film Institute.
Co-directed and co-wrote the award-winning VR erotic poem “Noccc (Nightsss)”, premiered at Sundance. As a poet, performer, and cultural studies PhD, experiments with interdisciplinary poetry blending artistic practice and technology. Poems published in Romania, Estonia, South Africa, Brazil, and Poland. Sound poem featured in The Liberated Voice – Sound Poetry exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Leads workshops in immersive storytelling and creative writing focused on bodily engagement and expanded narrative experience.
Guests
Lucy is an Immersive Director living in North Yorkshire. Recent projects include ‘Haunts’ (2026) an English and Welsh language queer teenage VR experience about nights out in the middle of nowhere, ‘Monoliths’ (BFI London Film Festival 2022, Sheffield Docfest 2022, Melbourne International Film Festival 2022), celebrating the voices of northern women and the northern landscape and the 2019 VR piece, ‘Traitor’ which combines virtual reality, film and a live actor and premiered in competition at Tribeca Film Festival 2019.
Lucy was shortlisted for Content Creator at the Arts Council England Digital Culture Awards 2023 and for Digital Innovation with Pilot Theatre at the UK Theatre Awards 2023.
DOK Industry Podcast 2026 is realised in partnership with POC2 Programmers of Colour Collective, What’s Up With Docs Podcast, and Talking Shorts.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the MEDIA sub-programme of Creative Europe. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
