Editorial⎜Five Reasons Why I Keep Falling for CPH:DOX Inter:Active

CPH:DOX Inter:Active 2025: a declaration of love in five points to a festival with a big heart.

Cover: CONSTANTINOLOLIAD by Sister Sylvester & Nadah El Shazly

I’ve been writing about CPH:DOX for years now on XRMust. I first followed the event from afar when COVID kept me from traveling – and even from home, I fell in love with it. Later, I was lucky enough to experience it in person two years in a row. 

What I discovered was a festival that, despite its smaller scale (I’m referring specifically to the immersive section since as a documentaries festival is actually a very, very big one), is curated with both intelligence and genuine warmth – two qualities that should never be taken for granted in this kind of events. And it’s those very qualities that have made CPH:DOX Inter:Active a beloved and sought-after destination for so many of us working in the immersive space today.

This year, once again, I hopped on a plane to Copenhagen for three days of events, discoveries, and encounters that left me energized for the immersive year ahead (which, as I write this, is already heading into another major stop: NewImages in Paris.

But what is it about CPH:DOX that makes me say, time and again, “I love this event”? This year, I took a bit more time to reflect on that, and I’ve come back to you with five things I especially appreciated in this edition, things that had me returning home with a huge smile on my face (and an ear infection, but that’s another story, more about airplanes than immersive events…).

CPH:LAB between vision and imagination

CPH:LAB is one of my favorite parts of CPH:DOX. Over the years I’ve come across projects developed within this lab that truly looked beyond what our immersive field usually offers. Works that proposed visions I deeply wished to see take shape in the future of XR.

Some of these works (like THE GARDEN SAYS…, which I’ll talk about later) have succeeded in that mission. Others have faded into the background a bit, but discovering each one has always been a pleasure.

This year, I encountered an experience that I had the chance to try in preview during the presentation of the 2024-2025 lab projects, at the CPH:LAB Prototype Pop-Up event. The project, THE PLACE BEYOND, is created by Elena Lyubarskaya and David Steiner, and it begins with a fascinating narrative premise: in a fictional future where humanity overcame death, human beings actually need to experience the Afterlife to have a healthy psychological response to life.

THE PLACE BEYOND is an AI-powered collective immersive experience for digital museums and XR devices […] It invites participants to experience digital dying and Purgatory, in which they explore their ‘souls’ – visual metaphorical representations of their inner selves and life stories, created by AI after interacting with them.

Narratively speaking, it’s a bold idea, one I immediately connected with. But what truly won me over was the prototype itself, which I was able to test during my days in Copenhagen.

In the intimacy of a dark room, blindfolded, I was guided through my “fictional death” by a surprisingly serene AI that asked me a series of personal questions, offering in return some engaging interactions. The goal? To generate a surreal visual representation of my inner world. An image I then had to identify among several created from other participants’ responses.

And, with a fair bit of satisfaction, I’ll admit it, I managed to guess which image represented me. A walk through my own mind that, for a few moments, also allowed me to step into the minds of others. I found myself wondering why their inner worlds looked the way they did, what stories or answers had shaped those visual landscapes…

I won’t go into too much detail here, but this is certainly a project I’m eager to experience in its final form. Of course, like many works that delve into personal themes, much depends on how open the user is willing to be in their answers. But if you let yourself go, I truly believe The Place Beyond can offer a beautiful, intuitive, and psychological window into intimate aspects of the human soul that we rarely allow ourselves to examine in culturally defined spaces like festivals or museums.

Role-playing at the CPH:LAB Creative Coalition Event

Closely tied to CPH:DOX’s talent development programme was the presentation of the nine projects selected for the 2024-2025 edition of CPH:LAB.

This year’s presentation took place during the CPH:LAB Creative Coalition event, in a tightly timed format (literally to-the-minute scheduling that, for an Italian like me, felt like pure magic!).

A new element in this edition’s format stood out: alongside the two main creators of each project, two decision-makers also took the stage, one for each of the 9 projects, to role-play as executive producers. Their role was to ask questions that could help the teams look beyond their current vision and start imagining the project’s actual place in the immersive ecosystem.

The reasoning behind this choice, strongly championed by CPH:LAB’s director Mark Atkin, lies in what Mark himself shared with us in our pre-CPH:DOX Inter:Active interview:

What we will have is a ‘brains trust’ session: each project will have 7 minutes to present, followed by discussions with curators, funding organizations, and festival programmers who will assume the role of executive producers. Together, they’ll talk about next steps and what needs to be done. This format encourages collaboration, offering Lab participants valuable insights and practical advice.

Of course, not everyone on stage was a professional role-player, but in my view, the approach was highly effective. It offered creators a greater awareness of industry dynamics, especially useful for those who are still relatively new to the immersive field and may not yet be fully familiar with the expectations and realities it entails.

Live-shows at CPH:DOX: THE GARDEN SAYS…

In 2023, I was lucky enough to attend ZIZY & ME at CPH:DOX — a drag cabaret show reflecting on deepfakes and the ways we train neural networks.

This year, the main live show connected to CPH:DOX Inter:Active was the musical and visual performance of THE GARDEN SAYS…, a piece we first encountered at the Venice Gap Financing in 2023 as a prototype entitled GARDEN ALCHEMY, then again through CPH:LAB, and finally in a shorter form at Venice Immersive in 2024.

The experience was… ethereal. In the dark, inside a cinema theatre, with the screen glowing softly with the same illustrations that I see when I put on the headset, all accompanied by a gentle musical score. To enjoy the moment, I didn’t even feel the need to join those who took turns on stage with the VR experience: it was enough to observe the graceful rhythm of people swapping in and out, headset after headset; to witness the amazed reactions of those entering this blossoming, colorful world for the first time; and to admire the almost dance-like movements of even the most inexperienced users as they explored the stage.

THE GARDEN SAYS… revealed itself to be a production that welcomes everyone – from the VR-curious to those who have long since sworn off headsets. It connects people and suggests new possibilities for where and how immersive work can be shared and distributed. I smile thinking back to two girls wearing the headset, trying to physically point things out to each other inside the virtual world. They found new ways to do so despite not being able to actually see each other clearly. And on a human level, it was simply beautiful to witness.

A space where lives intersect

I wrote this on social media as well: when I got back home and my family asked me what I liked most about CPH:DOX Inter:Active, my answer wasn’t about the immersive content. 

What stood out to me the most was how CPH:DOX once again gave me the chance to connect with worlds and people I never would have encountered if I hadn’t stepped into the immersive scene.

There are stories out there –  beautiful and heartbreaking, full of hope and pain – that I usually only come across filtered through a television screen, when I’m in the comfort of a couch in my Italian living room.

CPH:DOX is certainly not the only festival to give voice to those stories, but for me, it remains one of the few events that allows me to connect with them in a deeply personal way. It goes beyond the specific immersive experience to offer a kind of human exchange that I value even more.

On that note, I can’t help but mention both Violeta Ayala, with whom I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her work HUK THE JAGUARESS, talking about AI, politics, and possibilities, or YAA, an interdisciplinary artist and consultant for the Danish VR project Dark Rooms, presented during the CPH:DOX conference, in the session Dialogues on interactivity.

DARK ROOMS deals with themes that, personally, I find quite difficult to face in immersive format. But getting to know Yaa’s story, the way it was integrated into the project, and experiencing the depth of her sensitivity toward me as a user, made all the difference in my perception of the work and was very relevant both from a human point of view, too.

A curated selection with a clear spirit

At CPH:DOX Inter:Active, you never find dozens of works. The lineup is compact, but always shaped by a clear curatorial thread – something I personally appreciate, as it helps with context and understanding. This year, the thematic focus was Untamed: Humanity Rewilded, an exploration of the resilience of human, more than human, and environmental nature.

You won’t find mainstream pieces at CPH:DOX Inter:Active, but that doesn’t mean “lighter” works are missing, if by “lighter” we mean works that use gentle, engaging approaches to explore heavy topics, or that moves from difficult themes only to arrive at something that uplifts the spirit. There’s always a variety of media and expressive languages, speaking to different kinds of audiences.

This year, I was deeply captivated by CONSTANTINOLOLIAD by Sister Sylvester & Nadah El Shazly, a piece about a figure I knew nothing about, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.

CONSTANTINOLOLIAD is a handmade book, read collectively by the audience inside of a sound installation. A response to the archive of the poet Constantine Cavafy, the work is inspired by the blank and torn out pages in Constantinopoliad, an epic, the journal the teenage Cavafy began when he and his family fled Alexandria; by lost and missing archives through time; and by the ghosts, both erotic and historical, that visit the older Cavafy in his poems.

The physical aspect of CONSTANTINOLOLIAD – a beautifully crafted diary that you flip through while seated at a table with three other people – combined with the almost metaphysical dimension created by the voice reading the text alongside you, places this work in a hybrid space. Immersion becomes both intangible in the sound, in the atmosphere, and tangible, through the book itself and the elements that compose it.

This blend of the physical and the metaphysical was a recurring theme at CPH:DOX Inter:Active this year. In that sense, I must also mention THE CARING MACHINE, another work that, like CONSTANTINOLOLIAD and THE PLACE BEYOND, narrates through sounds (the visual elements are mostly irrelevant), but uses a physical setting to ground the user more fully in the situation being evoked.

Is it possible to envision a future in which artificial intelligences perform similar tasks related to caretaking within a growing healthcare sector? And is artificial intelligence a comforting presence or a stark reminder of the way technology has infiltrated even our most intimate moments?

Once again: death. And once again, someone guiding you toward it. In this case, the piece reflects on how artificial intelligence might take the place of a caretaker – a role that’s becoming increasingly scarce as populations age – imagining a society that looks for alternative figures to accompany people on their final journey.

Lying on a fake hospital bed, headphones on, I let myself be moved by the sensitivity of certain reflections offered by the authors through AI and conveyed in a calm, soothing voice (with a few surprises along the way…). I certainly don’t have an answer for the question the artist, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, posed… but boy, I’m glad she asked it. 

And so we’ve come to the end of this five-point journey through what I took home from CPH:DOX Inter:Active this year. 

I truly hope to see you all again in 2026 — and even if Copenhagen hasn’t exactly been the luckiest place for me in terms of health (euphemism…) well, I can’t wait to go back!