Steye Hallema: AIR 2024/25

How can the audience become the centre of the story? 

Son of a magician, Dutch artist Steye Hallema has dedicated his own career to seeking answers to this question through the magic of immersive media. In his practice and across his many projects, he has been developing methods to study player experience and audience interaction using advanced technologies to challenge traditional ways of storytelling. 

For his residency here – at the only Dutch Academy with a full Bachelor’s programme dedicated to artistic immersive media – Steye’s extensive experience and innovation in the realm of new media comes into contact with our own expanding community of immersive storytellers to exchange and expand this ever-growing medium. He wants to dive deeper into his research through collaborations with students, his own experiments that bridge theory and practice and the development of a treatment for a documentary that gathers together unseens insights into the craft of immersive media. 

Gathering and studying audience feedback is key to his process. Across masterclasses revolving around his projects Ancestors (part of The Smartphone Orchestra which uses the mobile phones of the audience to create an interactive performance) and The Imaginary Friend, Steye measures immersion, agency and emotional responses using a questionnaire. His work develops new methodologies surrounding the more extreme forms of audience autonomy (audience agency), the balance between story and interaction, and emotionally engaging the audience. 

This research feeds into a treatment for a documentary about his work and immersive media, in addition to a series of interviews. Bringing together all of his knowledge, projects and theories about immersive storytelling – as well as diverse perspectives from his network of internationally acclaimed creators and companies – the documentary will make tangible Steye’s contributions to the field for the first time. Through the form of a documentary, important new knowledge surrounding immersive media will become a shareable resource with a wide audience – both enriching the AHK’s own educational pathways and beyond. 

Steye Hallema, son of a magician, has built a career around creating magic through advanced media and technology. His work centralises the audience and enables them to co-create experiences rather than passively consuming them. Steye studied music and visual arts at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and has had a successful career as an Immersive Director. His VR works Ashes to Ashes and The Imaginary Friend were both nominated for a Golden Calf and won multiple awards worldwide. Currently, Steye is the artistic director of The Smartphone Orchestra, with which he plays international tours, and he works as a permanent director at 4DR Studios, the only full volumetric video studio in the Netherlands.

You can read more about Steye’s work here

Year

2024