Immersive Art and Emotional Connections

The Polyphonic Spree band founder Tim Delaughter was looking for innovative ways to get people to listen to the entirety of his latest album called Salvage Enterprise. He was driving around a lot of speakers in his van and setting up pop-up listening parties around his home town when he thought there should be a better way to coax people into listening to his entire album, which is something that's a lot more rare in today's fragmented media ecosystem. He worked with Scott Berman as his long-time collaborator on visuals to recruit a number of different animators and filmmakers to create a dome version featuring his entire album called RESOLUTION: A CINEPHONIC RHAPSODY FOR THE SOUL. It's the first time SXSW has been able to curate a dome experience (which showed on the main showroom floor), and it was one of the experiences that was able to quickly fill up their 20 available slots per hour across their six showings a day. It ended up taking home the Audience Award for the XR Experience Spotlight, and was one of the hotter tickets of the exhibition with people rushing to sign up as soon as the doors opened. I had a chance to speak with Director Scott Berman, Polyphonic Spree Founder Tim Delaughter, and Producer Ryan Hartsell about the process of putting this dome experience together. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality