From the MIT Media Lab x WORLDING 2025: “We want to learn from you”

WORLDING 2025 is an experimental incubator empowering a select cohort of creators and XR productions, a deeper look into the Co-Creation model.

Earlier this month, I was invited to sit in on an incubator created under a model of Co-Creation called WORLDING. With only a brief exposure, I share here with XRMust readers some insights about this initiative. This is a research and experimental incubator that acknowledges Indigenous ways of knowing as vital to motivating the co-creation of a collective, just and thriving climate future.

This program has been active since 2021, supporting interdisciplinary teams working on early-stage projects with a shared conceptual foundation. This year was the first fully in-person collaboration. The incubator focuses on co-creation of climate future stories that lead to real-world impact. Katerina Cizek is the MIT lead in making this come to life in 2021, building upon the book Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice that she and William Uricchio wrote along with 12 co-authors. Kat has been working on this model for a long while, previously with the NFB, you can check out her work on the project High Rise, an interactive documentary that explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world.

The event took place over five days in its space, designed by Co-Creation Studin in partnership with Indigenous Screen Office (ISO), MIT Media Lab and funded by Agog, Just Films at the Ford Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation. The ISO specifically supported the participation of four individuals as part of a delegation, and you can check out more about this delegation and the ISO work here! You can also check out the full Co-Creation team and what their role is here.

This was a space and time for modeling and experimentation to help teams and individuals develop their ideas, fostering sustainability in creative and research-driven practices. At its core, WORLDING disrupts dominant narratives—reshaping not just what stories are told, but how, by whom, and through what structures. One of the first participants I had the pleasure to speak with was Kalena Lee-Agcaoili, a participant from Hilo, Hawai’i, who works as the Pae Moananuiākea Hub Coordinator for the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Sciences, collaborating with Nohopapa Hawai’i as a Cultural Research Specialist. Her work focuses on watershed restoration, oral histories, and repatriation. On the first night of the incubator, she told me she was curious about “tying in tech” and “elevating the work we are already doing.”

A heartwarming moment unfolded when Kalena met XR creator Emilia Sánchez Chiquetti, another selected participant. From their first coffee together at 9 AM, they spoke nonstop until 2 PM, thrilled by their immediate alignment in curiosities, concerns, and motivations. Emilia introduced Kalena to VR by sharing Origen, a project she created and premiered as part of the 2023 Venice Biennale College. Emilia shared that her current curiosity is about how to access data from the ocean. She emphasized the incubator’s rare opportunity to connect people from different disciplines, accelerating future ambitions. 

Later that evening we shared a moment of togetherness, an experimental sound project in the conference room. This was thanks to Jamie Perera, a practicing artist (musician and Climate Data Sonificator), the creative behind the much awarded immersive sound experience, Anthropocene in C Major. He tested his most recent sound experiment to the crowd from a residency he completed. Data for Jamie has been a useful source of inspiration at making meaning of the state of the world. He told me later that evening, one of his inspirations comes from the realization through data that what we consider to be normal is actually a screaming trajectory away from nature,” and through sonification, we can understand “it’s actually chaos.” 

The timing of this incubator was interesting because the last day of the bustling MIT Reality Hack unfolded on a different part of campus on the first day of Worlding. And these two events, though both aimed at innovation and problem solving using immersive technologies, are pretty differently structured. Worlding is an intimate hands-on exchange centering Indigenous creators and human focused technology. The creation process is intended to be intentionally non-competitive, as this is a moment focused on redefining roles and removing hierarchies. Virtual Hack is full of students and professionals, and per usual Hackathon model, very competitive and results driven. Amy Seidenwurm and Chip Giller were on campus, as Agog helped sponsor both initiatives. Amy, a lover of human connection through technology, said it was great to see the creativity, especially the way that some of the Hackathon teams were focusing energies on problem solving related to the LA fires. Amy said it was so different from Worlding, at the Hack, teams are awake for a day and a half competing with a kernel of an idea, pouring themselves into creating something on the spot. With a warm smile and a wink, she said the space was “stinky.” Clearly Agog endorses a variety of models that support work being done using technology for the betterment of society.

“We want to learn from you” is the invitation from Dava Newman, the head of the MIT Media Lab on the opening night before giving the selected cohort a tour of the lab. The architecture of the media lab is made so that for the majority of the floors, at any angle you can see through to any spot of the building. From the 6th floor on, there are walls, but from the 1st and up, everything is glass. Working here encourages exploration of the infinite, the endless.. Blue skying. And blue skying is a lot of what seemed to unfold on the 6th floor the first day I was there as well. This incubator is only a few years old and still is run by much of the founding team, like Srushti Kamat who started at the end of her studies. They’ve really seen the evolution of the program and talking with Srushti, she says, “it’s been amazing to see these projects go from idea and early development to production a few years later.” Speaking with Akmyrat Tuyliyev, a producer of the incubator and immersive storyteller himself, he said the best part is really being able to bring different practices and people that wouldn’t have had this exposure. 

According to Isabelle Ruiz from the Canadian Based ISO, being able to gather in person and having a dedicated creative time to workshop projects is a game changer. It’s challenging and rare to be able to have time dedicated to do this creative process, and coupled with people outside of the project coming in with a bit of context, resource dumping, this data set, these people — rare to have all of this in one space, it really helps these projects get footing. 

It’s more than just footing, it’s also validating other frameworks. Keynote speaker Eli Nelson said on the opening night, “Part of what we can do here at the media lab is to remind people that the difference is the worldview, the framing.” SCIENCE is a tricky word, historically Western science comes with “politics and religion, as well as dominion over the land, exclusive truth, [and] proselytizing.” Eli went on to share that, “VR for Indigenous knowledge and science [can be] about addressing diaspora…our love of land…[and] love can be messy. The land has been abused, like us. Moving away from fetishizing land, virtual space gives us a way of thinking through that.”

I was only at the first day of WORLDING and I felt invigorated to bear witness to some of these discussions and ways of framing. Anyone who is interested to really understand the breadth of visionary work being done by these artists should check out the full listing of the projects and people of Worlding 2025 here.  The first on this list is the team made up of Dr. Tasha Hubbard and Jason Ryle with Emma Hamilton, working on a site specific installation called Waves of Buffalo. This team was part of previous editions of Worlding and was using the incubator as a chance to really dive in and build off of bricks previously laid. I had brief exchanges with the brilliant Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Lisa Jackson, artists that carry wisdom and an energy that made me want to reach out and speak with them one on one. In fact, much of the exchanges I had with the artists of Worlding felt like they deserved further inquiry, that a few lines in this overview wouldn’t be enough! So if you’ve read this far, go and click around, research their work and if you are in a place where you can support it, see if it’s welcome. 

I was only there the first day, but what I noticed was inquiries into the state of the world and how to address major inequities and power structures that are harmful. For instance, artist Em Joseph asked during that first day of WORLDING, given “tech is highly invasive, uses a lot of resources like water and infrastructure, how can it be addressed through storytelling, placed in dialogue?” Indigenous thinkers and creators have long engaged with imposed systems—remaking, repurposing, and resisting them to create new possibilities. As Isabelle Ruiz puts it, Indigenous practices have always involved “taking all kinds of systems and making them our own,” speaking back to power imbalances that are deeply embedded in technology and storytelling alike. 

And in some ways, that’s the larger goal, to support the counter narrative to how intense, fast paced, disconnected other ways of production can be. For a lot of work supported via the Indigenous Screen Office, filmmakers want to connect the community, and not just focus on the big festivals, but bringing it back to those really implicated. The ISO supports community screenings as a very legitimate and important part of the distribution strategy and according to Isabelle Ruiz, this is something that people don’t speak about because it might not have the prestige and or financial results.

By embedding storytelling in land-based knowledge systems, non-extractive methodologies, and collaborative authorship, it challenges the assumptions baked into VR’s dominant frameworks. Instead of reinforcing a singular, centralized perspective, it asks: What happens when multiple, intersecting worldviews shape digital spaces? How does storytelling shift when the goal is not ownership, but relation? This is where Worlding’s intervention is most potent. It operates within an institution, leveraging resources that might otherwise serve the status quo, and redirects them toward new paradigms of storytelling. 

And this is what the founders of WORLDING really want to stress, the model. It’s not about one artist or concept or team, but rather about Co-Creation being “as ancient as culture itself.” Think about “collectively written texts, petroglyphs, [and you can see that we’ve been working] “collectively a lot longer than” [we’ve been working] authored.”  This model insists on interrogating who does what and addressing inequities in media making. Kat urges us to “interrogate the technologies you are working with, to think about how you can connect the technologies, the stories, and communities to the fabric of movements that are trying to protect equity and justice for a future that is thriving?”.

Cover: (from left to right) MIT-Boeing Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Alvin Harvey (Diné) in conversation with Director of the MIT Media Lab Dava Newman, and well-known filmmaker Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe). Photo by Noé Sardet.