Photo: Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac

Anyone following the immersive and XR scene will have noticed that the Netherlands has emerged as a serious player, with a prolific line-up of immersive works and creative technology shaping the field. Spanning immersive and interactive media—from XR, VR to AR and mixed media forms—Dutch creatives are experimenting with form, technology and audiences in ways that have caught the attention of international festivals. What’s behind this rising influence on the world stage? We speak to Michel Reilhac and Liz Rosenthal, co-curators of Venice Immersive, to explore the forces driving this thriving scene.

The 82nd edition of Venice Immersive—the Venice International Film Festival’s platform for new media—reveals the breadth of Dutch work on display: projects that span collective participation, speculative futures and artificial intelligence, moving fluidly between art, technology and performance. Together, they reflect a playful, critical and deeply cross-disciplinary approach that has come to define Dutch immersive work on the international stage. “We like to be constantly surprised,” says Rosenthal, “and working in a field that is permanently evolving in every way, we are every year.”

The Dutch signature
“There’s such a wide variety of projects coming in, despite the Netherlands being a relatively small country,” notes Rosenthal. “It’s testimony to the talent there, but also to the strong ecosystem of support.” Public funding plays an unmistakable role in creating the space and time needed for artists and creative technologists to do what distinguishes immersive work: innovate. Without structural support to experiment, collaborate, fail and try again, the curators note, there is little opportunity for catalysing new works and experiences.

“From the moment the Netherlands Film Fund and the Creative Industries Fund NL started to support work, you can really see how that helped artists make substantial projects.” Enter the Immerse\Interact Grant Scheme launched in 2019, for the development, realisation and distribution of artistically high-quality, immersive and/or interactive media productions by both independent and established producers. This access to funding is widely acknowledged as the catalyst that spurred the immersive media scene from early experiments to the global stage.

Beyond infrastructure, both curators point to a deeper cultural driver behind the boom in XR and immersive works: a markedly open-minded and interdisciplinary approach. 

Rosenthal highlights projects in the 2025 selection, such as Ancestors by Steye Hallema, produced by The Smartphone Orchestra, which invites smartphone users to establish a shared speculative lineage to reflect on the future, and The Great Orator by creative technologist Daniel Ernst, an immersive VR experience where audiences are invited to tap into an AI-driven collective consciousness, following and interacting with a mirage of a once-famed Dutch television psychic. “You can see a kind of cross-fertilisation across art forms—each project is totally different in form and genre.”

“There’s a very Dutch sensibility in that there is no real prescription of what the work should be,” Reilhac underlines, pointing to a culture typified by flat hierarchies and pragmatism.

“Evaluation is much more focused on feasibility, business model and production context than on telling artists what the work should look like. That gives artists greater freedom of expression. You see that reflected in the incredible diversity of works.” 

Rosenthal contrasts this with other leading markets, where restrictive thinking can stop innovation in its tracks: “Often, everything is closely tied to legacy media. When film funds control innovation through film parameters, work in new media gets judged by the wrong standards.”

Smaller territories often excel in emerging media, precisely because they need to differentiate. “They know that if they’re going to compete internationally, they have to do something unique,” Rosenthal notes. “People are more mobile, more willing to cross silos, everyone knows each other—and that’s crucial when you’re working in innovation.”

Community begets industry
On the ground, the inventive line-up of works is driven by a tight network of creative thinkers exploring parameters together. Reilhac traces this back to collaboration. In 2017, Reilhac was invited by Submarine to help establish an immersive production arm, he encountered a scene already in motion. “There were people like WeMakeVR making pilot projects,” he recalls. “Corine Meijers became my right hand and later founded Studio Biarritz. There was VR Days founded by Benjamin de Wit, there was VRBASE at the Marineterrein initiated by Daniel Kip—artists and studios thinking VR together. There was an incredible sense of people sharing knowledge.”

As Rosenthal observes, this constellation spans far beyond individual projects, encompassing studios such as Monobanda and WeMakeVR, makers including Firat Sezgin and Niki Smit, and long-standing platforms for exhibition and exchange such as IDFA DocLab, IFFR, the Netherlands Film Festival, Eye Filmmuseum and NXT Museum.

That informal network, Reilhac argues, eventually translated into structure. “This ecosystem was instrumental in shaping lobbying efforts and financing strategies for immersive. The wave of makers coming from the Netherlands now is the result of all of this.”

Universities driving the next wave
Tracing the scene’s early kindling, Reilhac observes education as driving the next wave of immersive works in the Netherlands, noting universities as “awakening students to the potential of immersive before the wider community even fully formed.”

“I remember meeting Celine Daemen in Amsterdam two years before she presented Eurydice, A Descent into Infinity,” he recalls. Daemen’s virtual reality opera inspired by the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which premiered at Venice Immersive in 2022 and went on to receive critical acclaim. “She was still in school, experimenting with the concept, using her theatre and opera background. I went to a warehouse in the industrial part of Amsterdam where she had built a mock-up with friends. It was a revelation to see that a whole group of students were already doing this work.”

Rosenthal agrees: “It’s fascinating to see people coming from distinctly different areas of the arts, and how forward-thinking and high the quality is of what comes out of the universities.”

From market to festival
“We’ve had some really exceptional projects come from the Netherlands over the last years,” says Rosenthal. “What comes to mind immediately is Celine Daemen’s work. Following Eurydice, A Descent into Infinity, she returned the following year with another exceptional project, Songs for a Passerby, that won the Grand Jury Prize.”

One of the most distinctive aspects of the Dutch XR presence at Venice is the way projects often move through the festival ecosystem over several years. “We’re seeing projects come through the Venice market, get financed, meet partners, and then come back to the festival,” Rosenthal says. “It becomes a cycle. Celine Daemen is now even a tutor at the Venice Biennale College Immersive. Projects are supported, return in official selection, win awards—and then the makers return as jurors.”

Looking ahead
“Ecosystem is everything,” Reilhac emphasises. “From university to industry, from experimentation to financing, from development to international presentation—that continuity makes all the difference. Without it, artists can’t follow through on their ideas.”

“Don’t lock these works into premature business-model expectations,” Rosenthal urges. “Allow them to blossom. Immersive and spatial media are incredibly potent and rich, but they don’t fit neatly into legacy formats. The beauty of this field is that it sits between disciplines—and that’s also what makes it politically and structurally difficult.”

For now, the Netherlands continues to prove what becomes possible when creative freedom, public support and international curiosity align. As Venice Immersive keeps discovering—and rediscovering—Dutch work year after year, the question is no longer why Dutch XR is thriving, but how far this ecosystem can still evolve.

Find out more about Dutch XR works through the 2026 catalogue.

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Roxy Merrell is a writer, editor and film journalist based in Amsterdam.