PXR2026 Comes to a Close
On the final evening of PXR2026 Conference, people gathered into a Virtual Reality (VR) world where rolling hills were lit by moonlight. We made our way over to sit on a hillside that sloped toward a pond, where a projection screen glowed from across the water.
Throughout the festival, VR had revealed itself not as an escape hatch but as a medium of attunement. Participants shrank to two inches tall, drifted through mycelial networks, leapt through tunnels of an underground rebellion, and stepped into reactive ecosystems shaped by living signals. These works didn’t pull people away from reality; they tuned them more closely to it. They made visible the invisible systems (biological, emotional, social) that shape how we move through the world.
As a newcomer to VR, I found it fascinating to come to terms with the unique transportation method. It was a real shock to experience the merging of private to public space. You begin inside the enclosed walls of your personal surroundings, and then, within seconds, you’re in the midst of a bustling crowd. Heard. Present. This portal-like transition bypasses the routine muscle memory of leaving the house, skipping the subtle armouring that happens when stepping into public spaces. In an unexpected twist of logic, it seems that by transporting you into an instant avatar, VR can trick your mind into socializing without preparing a masked persona. By the time you realize it’s all a bit more real than you prepared for, you’re already discovering the ease that welcomes every mumble and stumble. Before you can worry about how you will show up, you already have.
This quality of presence and joint experience of aliveness became one of the festival’s guiding through-lines. Thinking together IS theatre. Merging imaginations is a kind of group conjuring. The stage is no longer a platform, but a layered field. Intimate new settings emerge, and closeness becomes a matter of shared attention rather than shared air.
The festival’s final talk, the ‘Future Note,’ gifted us the insights of Evo Heyning, a visionary creative technologist, executive producer, and systems designer. Heyning is at the forefront of architecting participatory “protopian” futures—worlds that lean toward betterment through collective imagination and design.
Her ideas—VR as a civic space, worldbuilding as crafting truth, layered reality as the stage— challenged us to consider how our design choices today shape the emotional, ethical, and communal landscapes people will inhabit 20-30 years from now. Hearing of her care and the lasting impact of her projects created a collective nest for the ideas of PXR2026 to gather, growing roots within participants as we consider the strength of their implications.
VR is a powerful playground, one where our individual vulnerability can arise with immediacy. When we step directly from our isolated private spaces directly into a gathered community, we arrive open and with some of our usual instinctual barriers down. This mindset helps alleviate emotional distance and opens us to engage with uninhibited empathy. The impact this can have all depends on how the spaces are built. VR worlds are artfully crafted, and when artists use them responsibly, we experience new formations of culture. The power of these technologies do not remain with the devices, but with the humanity of the hands controlling it.
Across the festival, worldbuilding emerged as ethical work. Every interaction encodes values. Every system shapes behaviour. The invisible structures, ones that guide attention, vulnerability, and agency, those are the ones that sustain the experience. VR worlds exist only when lived, and their ephemerality is not a flaw, but the point. They teach us to value presence, not permanence. They remind us that truth can be momentary and still meaningful.
Heyning spoke of the concept of “one fire, many flames” and as we listened together, her words resonated across our vast physical distances and drew our shared presence into the circle of a fireside gathering.
PXR2026 sparked a sense of shared ignition among artists—a recognition that creativity is not an isolated flame but kindling that grows stronger when it is tended collectively. Stepping into a shared mind‑space allowed us to examine connection in a more concrete way: what conditions allow emotional warmth, trust, and momentum to take root, and what specific elements create a genuine sense of safety and community rather than just the appearance of it.
The many guiding lights of this festival form a vast constellation of possible futures, each one exploring not just what worlds can be built, but what responsibilities come with building them, especially when those worlds hold people at their most vulnerable.
Moving through these VR spaces expanded my understanding of connection. Community isn’t a place you enter, it’s a practice you participate in, and the emotional fuel of that practice isn’t defined by proximity, but by the quality of attention we offer one another—the kind of attention that makes presence feel shared, even across distance.
PXR2026 Conference, hosted by Single Thread Theatre Company, ran from February 20 – March 1, 2026. More information can be found here. Find more information about Evo Heyning here.
