Four Worlds, One Night: Inside WMC’s Annwn Prize Immersive Experiences
Yesterday, we stepped through the doors of the Wales Millennium Centre and straight into four radically different universes — each one shortlisted for the Annwn Prize, the Centre’s new global celebration of immersive storytelling. What’s remarkable isn’t just the scale of the work, but how boldly each piece reimagines what “immersive” can mean: political, poetic, historical, cosmic, and deeply human.
We’ve put together a full video walkthrough over on our social channels right now — go have a look, then get yourself to the WMC before these worlds vanish on 26 June.
Colored (Noire): The Unsung Life of Claudette Colvin
The first experience drops you into Montgomery, Alabama, 1955, where 15‑year‑old Claudette Colvin refused to surrender her bus seat — nine months before Rosa Parks. Using augmented reality, Colored (Noire) resurrects the ghosts of the segregated South, placing you inside a meticulously recreated environment where scenes from Colvin’s life unfold around you.
It’s history made intimate: you’re not watching a story, you’re standing inside it. The piece’s theatrical precision and emotional clarity earned it the Best Immersive Work Award at the 77th Festival de Cannes, and it’s easy to see why. This is XR used not as spectacle, but as witness.
Consensus Gentium
Karen Palmer’s Consensus Gentium is a sharp pivot into the near‑future — and a chilling one. This interactive film uses facial detection and AI to read your reactions as you navigate a government‑controlled “Global Citizen App” while trying to visit your sick nana.
Every micro‑expression shifts the narrative. Every hesitation is logged. Every choice is judged.
It’s a provocative, unsettling look at digital citizenship and surveillance culture — a story that literally watches you back. Expect to leave talking about it long after you’ve handed back the iPhone.
Constantinopoliad
From data dystopia, we move into something tender, tactile, and quietly erotic. Constantinopoliad, created by sister sylvester, is an expanded‑cinema, collective‑reading experience inspired by the teenage journals of poet Constantine Cavafy.
You sit at a table with a handmade book. Light, sound, and projected imagery animate the pages as you turn them. The piece explores queer archives, lost histories, and the ghosts that linger between torn‑out pages. One audience member described it as “making love to a stranger through a book” — and honestly, that’s not far off.
It’s intimate, sensory, and beautifully crafted.
NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)
Finally, Andrew Schneider’s NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars) plunges you into total darkness before slowly revealing a constellation of nearly 4,000 reactive LED lights and a 496‑channel soundscape. Guided by an unseen narrator, you drift through a meditation on grief, time, and the strange miracle of being alive in this exact moment.
It’s part‑installation, part‑cosmic therapy session — a rare piece that feels both vast and personal. You emerge blinking, grounded, and a little rearranged.
Why You Should Go — Now
These four works aren’t just “immersive experiences.” They’re arguments for what storytelling can become when artists are given space to experiment with technology, form, and emotion. Together, they make the WMC feel like a portal — one that Wales deserves to be proud of.
And with the Annwn Prize winner announced this Sunday, now is the perfect time to experience all four.
We’ve posted a full video preview on our social media — go watch it, share it, and then head down to the Centre to step inside these extraordinary worlds yourself.
