Climate Through a New Lens: Expanding the Changemaker’s Toolkit with XR
The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time, but let’s face it: many of us humans just don’t get it. Abstract data and dire headlines have not been enough to inspire the urgent action needed. To truly change course, we need more than facts and logic—we need stories that move us.
Extended reality (XR) offers that possibility. By immersing audiences in visceral, awe-inspiring experiences, XR can help people feel the stakes of the climate crisis and experience potential solutions, shifting perspectives and inspiring action in ways traditional media cannot.
Join Agog cofounder and climate journalist Chip Giller, along with visionary creators at the forefront of immersive storytelling, idris brewster (Kinfolk Tech), Nancy Baker Cahill (4th Wall AR app), Yasmin Elayat (Studio Elayat), for a conversation about how XR can expand the changemaker’s toolkit—connecting communities, catalyzing action, and sparking imagination for a more just and sustainable future.
Feature Speakers:
idris brewster, Kinfolk Tech, Founder & Executive Director
idris brewster is a Brooklyn-born artist and creative technologist that disrupts traditional narratives through spatial experiences. idris’s work explores the liminal space between the historical archive, public space, and technology. idris is the executive director of Kinfolk Foundation, an augmented reality archive that puts the power of monument making and historical preservation into the hands of Black and Brown communities. Download the free Kinfolk AR Monuments app and start exploring!
Nancy Baker Cahill, 4th Wall App, Transdisciplinary Artist
Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose work examines complex systems, with an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Systems thinking plays an important role in her poetics; she is especially concerned with power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms. Download the free public art AR app, 4th Wall and explore!
Yasmin Elayat, Studio Elayat, Founder
Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy Award–winning immersive director whose work has premiered at Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes, and the World Economic Forum. Her projects include Zero Days VR, Changing Same, and Blackout, and she is currently directing When Brooklyn Was Queer. A co-founder of Scatter and former Senior Staff Editor of Immersive Graphics at The New York Times, Elayat also serves on the inaugural Peabody Awards Interactive Board of Jurors.
Chip Giller, Agog, Co-Founder and Executive Director (Moderator)
Chip Giller is co-founder and executive director of Agog, which helps people use immersive media to imagine and build a better world. He has been active in the climate space and media field for 30 years, and founded one of the first digital news organizations and first nonprofit newsrooms, Grist, to engage the next generation on climate change and other environmental issues. Among other honors, Chip has received a Heinz Award and been named a TIME “Hero of the Environment.”
Session sponsored by Agog: The Immersive Media Institute.
Ready to explore XR ... in the wild? Check out Agog in the Wild for a digital field guide to must-see immersive experiences around NYC!
This event has limited capacity. Admission will be first come, first served — we encourage early arrival to guarantee your spot.
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