Artificial Rome & Miiqo Studios

Founded in 2016, Artificial Rome has fully committed to the latest augmented and virtual reality technologies, using them to create surprising new cosmoses in the depths of the metaverse and Web3. Miiqo Studios, on the other hand, is passionate about creating narrative and immersive experiences at the intersection of storytelling, digital technologies, art and science. In their joint project Myriad, the expertise of both studios coalesced to give us a poetic and immersive insight into the migration of animals in the Anthropocene.

Interview with Artificial Rome & Miiqo Studios

Red Dot: Is film the best medium to explain complex contexts as you did with Myriad?
Artificial Rome & Miiqo Studios: The Myriad VR experience is a linear story, although we wouldn’t call it a film in any classical sense. It is an immersive experience. Viewers travel with the migrating animals and end up being positioned within the Earth’s evolutionary system as humans. The decision to choose a linear form of storytelling in space was therefore the right one.

How are you able to give high-tech productions such emotional charge?
The story has to be moored in a believable world and a sensitive design. We also use the content-related quality of technology and its creative potential for this purpose, for example, in animations of particles or analogue drawings in digital space. With Myriad, the VR experience aims in an unusual way to sensitise young people to the topic of animal migration in particular and, more generally, to the relationship between humans and nature at large. Here, emotion is the key to convey science-based information.

Dirk Hoffmann studied art in Hamburg and is co-founder of Artificial Rome. He was co-producer of the Myriad VR experience and shares his views on what makes this project stand out. “Classic design generally consists of research and order. With Myriad, however, this inquisitive and searching observation of the landscape and animals, in other words the creative design, was not rooted in realism. Instead, we made carbon the heart of visual communication.”

As managing and creative director of the Berlin-based Miiqo Studios, established 2012, Sebastian Baurmann produces projects at the interface of digital technologies and interactive user experiences. He enjoys using his expertise to meet the challenge of bringing together cross-media projects to create a holistic experience, as in the case of Myriad. “Here, we have managed to give the topic and materiality of carbon a special design and form of expression which conveys in an artistic and communicative way scientific facts and the complexity of the networked system that is Earth.”

Myriad was a project that was close to the heart of Professor Lena Thiele, who works as a creative director at Miiqo Studios and author of socially relevant, immersive media formats. Her approach to the connection between storytelling, digital technologies and artistic expression is interdisciplinary and systemic so as to be able to offer new emotional solutions in dealing with complex subjects. “Myriad uses the power of narration and immersion to encourage a change of mind and mental perspective among viewers and thus aims to motivate them to work towards an alternative future.”