Excited to announce that Queerskins: ARK, co-produced by Cloudred and Intel Studios, which I wrote and directed,  will be exhibited at the Venice International Film Festival VR Expanded September 2nd-12th. ARK was created with my long-time artistic partner Cyril Tsiboulski, who is creative head of Cloudred,  a Brooklyn based interactive design studio, in collaboration with choreographer Brandon Powers.  ARK is the second of four planned VR episodes. In this, Mary-Helen, a devout Catholic Missouri mother, reads her estranged gay son’s diary, and allows herself to imagine him alive and in love. It features a transcendent and viscerally sexy and intimate dance between Sebastian, her son, and his lover, Alex.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people will not be able to travel to Venice this year because of travel restrictions. Venice VR Expanded will be exhibited in an entirely virtual format, placing all selected immersive content on VRChat, a social media app accessible, through VR headsets and PC laptops, to VIFF accredited viewers. Working with Beom Jun Kim who leads W.AK Studio, the Brooklyn based architecture and design practice, the Queerskins team will create an interactive “world” within VRChat that functions as an interactive art installation. Here, visitors can interact with objects linked to audio monologues from the interactive online narrative Queerskins: a novel. Wandering through the maze-like domestic space, they piece together the story of Sebastian.