Immersive experience: heritage, memory and new technology

What an adventure. As part of the Séquences Éphémères project, we continued our collaboration with Charles on his virtual reality immersive experience, which sets out to give Martinique’s heritage its due. The work explores in particular the period of the Occupation and how it was lived here.

For this new stage we organised a double studio session with new participants — artist friends of Charles — as well as the return of our young actor. Another chance to see how motion capture can bring very different people together and offer them a space for creation they had not had before.

This time, though, the adventure did not stop at the studio. We also carried out, for the first time within the creative activity of Séquences Éphémères, a shoot on location. Filming took place in a house in the Balata neighbourhood, the former home of the subject of the immersive experience, restored with funds from the Loto du Patrimoine.

A powerful moment: bringing together a site of historical memory, a restored heritage building, and the creation of new digital heritage through immersive technology. Heritage cubed.

We were wonderfully welcomed by the owners, who later even invited us to share a convivial moment with the location managers of the Netflix production recently shot in Martinique.

For Georges-Emmanuel Arnaud, art director of Anisotropie, it is a dream taking shape: seeing a dynamic emerge, through this work, where heritage and technology meet, where still-nascent markets begin to appear, where fertile encounters follow one another and open new perspectives.

This dynamic feeds our conviction: yes, public funding is necessary and precious, but our project can and must become self-sustaining. By creating services, by giving Martinique and its culture their due, by building a local ecosystem around motion capture and immersive experience, we are laying the foundations for a future in which Anisotropie can stand on its own feet.

One step closer to that vision, and a step that fills us with gratitude and enthusiasm.