For those ready to explore and experience creativity at its intersection with technology, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX), is offering a space full of curiosity: its Inter:Active Exhibition at the Danish capital’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
It features a curated selection of immersive experiences, educational games, VR offerings, and anything else that doesn’t neatly fit into our traditional understanding of film or TV. This year’s title, “Hypervigilance,” feels extra timely and fitting for an age of digital saturation, global unrest, and the rise of authoritarianism, oligarchs and surveillance.
Or as Mark Atkin, the curator of CPH:DOX Inter:Active and head of studies at talent development program CPH:LAB, put it when unveiling this year’s program: “The works expose the collective anxiety of a society on high alert, where we struggle to retain agency over our image, body, and voice. For queer, disabled, and displaced communities, this state of watchfulness is deeply ingrained, a survival instinct in a world built on scrutiny and exclusion. For others, it has become the new norm shaped by 24-hour news cycles, extractive capitalism, authoritarian violence, and the pressure to conform in a world where we’re always being watched.”
In this environment, the artists in Hypervigilance look to expose and take on these pressures, looking to wrest back control through activism and defiance, or sexual expression. The 23rd edition of CPH:DOX runs through Sunday.
Asked what goes into the curation of a broad-based program like this year’s, Atkin tells THR: “The way this exhibition comes about is through seeing lots and lots of work, talking to artists and other curators, and also people submitting ideas to me through different programs, such as CPH:LAB, an incubation program that I run.”
He may come from the more traditional film and TV world, but has focused on immersive works for a long time now. And his approach differs from that of film programmers. “The way the exhibition is curated is a little bit more akin to how you curate an art exhibition rather than most film festivals,” Atkin explains. “We are trying to see what artists are thinking about at the moment, what’s bothering them, and then we draw these threads together, which is why we have the theme of hypervigilance this year.”
Shares the curator: “I’m really quite interested in stories from people from marginalized groups, because they generally have a lot to say, and this is a documentary festival, so it’s probably even more the case here.”
Such groups have long been used to being hypervigilant, but that mindset is something Atkin sees spreading in our time. “We have works made by people from these marginalized groups in the exhibition, but it also seems as though this state is even more widespread in society now,” he explains. “We feel that we’re manipulated by unseen forces that we don’t properly understand, but we know that they’re there. I think the general level of hypervigilance is rising across society. And it proved to be quite prescient as bombs are now raining down in the Middle East. It’s pretty much the state that we’re all in right now, globally.”
What does that mean for the tone of works featured in the Inter:Active exhibition at Copenhagen? “It’s quite dark,” Atkin tells THR. “But also embedded within each of them is a form of resistance or rebellion, and that rebellion comes either through artistic creation or, in some cases, through sexual liberation. Or through activism.”
Concludes the curator: “There’s also the hope that people, through experiencing these works, many of which are multisensory, will feel much closer to the works as more of a participant than a passive viewer. And we hope that this activates activism in the individuals going through the exhibition as well.”
Check out brief descriptions of this year’s Inter:Active works below. Of course, to really feel and understand them, you have to experience them yourself.
Brains in the State of Suspension
Kakia Konstantinaki
This live performance horror film explores disembodied intelligence, domination, and horror as self-aware brains confront the monstrous consequences of their own drive for control.
“What is it like to be a consciousness untethered to any physical thing? A human intelligence in the form of a brain that is dying to dominate a body?” reads an artist statement. “Brains in the State of Suspension is a live-performed CGI short film that interweaves liminality, non-linear narrative structures, human intelligence, and horror theory into a single immersive cinematic experience. At its core, the project explores how human intelligence relies on tools like domination and control in order to exist. What happens when human intelligence, historically framed through reason and logic, is stripped from the body and forced to reckon with its own impulses?”
Coded Black
Maisha Wester
This social justice game explores the “insidious and haunting histories” of systemic racism in the U.S. and U.K., revealing stories of racial injustice and Black resilience.
An artist statement describes Coded Black as “an intensely atmospheric, immersive experience” that also “celebrates the stories of the unsung revolutionaries who provided light in the darkness.” Drawing from primary sources, historical records, and scholarly analysis, Coded Black offers “a journey through past atrocities and moments of triumph,” via two scenes – one set on a plantation and on set in a modern 20th-century city. Both are filled with real historical documents and audio-visual storytelling.
Dark Rooms
Mads Damsbo and Laurits Flensted-Jensen
The intimate exploration across virtual spaces brings to life real stories of sexual awakening, asking us to move beyond shame and prejudice to experience others’ personal liberation.
“In a world where sexuality often lingers in the shadows, Dark Rooms opens a vivid space for unspoken desires and intimate exploration,” explains an artist statement. “You are invited to enter four inner spaces of real protagonists as they navigate moments of sexual awakening, confront societal taboos, and embrace their identities.”
Inside: The Childhood of an Artist
Sacha Wares
Looking for an evocative multisensory biography? Or curious about experiencing the moment that artist Judith Scott’s life changed forever? If so, go Inside!
“For the first seven years of her childhood, Judith Scott shared a bed with the twin sister who adored her. One night, everything changed,” teases a description of the project. The multisensory biography transports us to a sun-kissed 1950s family home in Ohio, placing us at the heart of Scott’s “devastating story of love and separation.”
My Tent Is Not a Shelter
Mohamed Jabaly
Stitched from the artist’s own clothes, a fragile tent becomes a haunting memorial for Gaza, and “a powerful symbol for people who are still living in tents over the rubble of their destroyed homes,” an online description reads.
“A tent, designed as a temporary shelter, becomes a fragile refuge during the genocide in Gaza, offering no protection from the biting winter cold or falling bombs,” Jabaly highlights in an artist’s statement.”
“My Tent Is Not a Shelter reflects this reality, embodying both resilience and fragility.” In addition to the tent made from the artist’s own clothes, and stitched together by hand, the experience also features video screenings of moments from life in Gaza over the last two years.
No Place at Home
Sam Wolson and Lilli Carré
This project focuses on a mother and her trans teen deciding to leave the U.S. after gender-affirming care restrictions.”
“Last January, President Trump signed an executive order restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors,” reads an artists’ statement. “No Place at Home tells the story of a mother, Tina, and her trans teen, J.J., who were living in Maine at the time and, out of concern for J.J.’s well-being, made the difficult decision to leave the United States.” Reported by Wolson over several months and illustrated by Carré, the project blends in-depth interviews with Tina and J.J. as they pack up their home, say goodbye to everything they know, and get ready to move to Mexico.
The Sanctuary of Dreams
Pierre-Christophe Gam
This project invites audiences into “a collective future-dreaming ritual, where imagination becomes a tool to envision new social, spiritual, and cultural realities shaped by shared human desires.”
Intrigued? Here is more from the artist statement: “The Sanctuary of Dreams is a 44-minute immersive film and multi-sensory installation that forms part of the larger Toguna World research project. Blending speculative storytelling, experimental animation, sound design, and mixed-media collage, the work guides visitors through a poetic future-dreaming ritual.”
Celestis Obscura
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm
This work aligns the Gold Rush with today’s space race, examining how corporate power in asteroid and lunar exploitation threatens to replicate Earth’s inequalities across the solar system.
An artist’s statement highlights how it “investigates the hidden power structures shaping asteroid mining and lunar exploration. As private corporations push toward extracting cosmic resources, the work asks: Who owns the resources of space? Which power dynamics determine who is allowed to exploit them?”
In the Current of Being
Cameron Kostopoulos
This one is a haptic VR experience chronicling the harrowing journey of a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy.
The artist’s statement highlights that it tells the true story of Carolyn Mercer, “who survived electroshock treatment as a child; a procedure that attempted to ‘correct’ her gender identity.”
Tales of a Nomadic City
Med Lemine Rajel and Christian Vium
This VR experience, co-created with Nouakchott youth, artists, poets, and scholars, weaves personal stories, archives, and immersive sound to portray the complex history and ongoing urban transformation of Mauritania’s capital.
“Integrating contemporary everyday scenes, rare historical archives and an ambeosonic sound design, the experience reveals the layered and multifaceted history of Nouakchott, providing a remarkable portrait of urban transformation,” the artists explain. experience is developed with local citizens: youth, artists, poets, students, and scholars who bring to life authentic everyday experiences and personal stories through workshops.
The Pledge
Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot
This interactive installation turns encounters with AI bias into “a collective digital monument.”
Explain the artists: “Participants face a camera as an AI analyzes their appearance and generates a personalized statement, a pledge, rooted in the machine’s biases.”
The Lost Golden Lotus
Chisato Minamimura
This installation “reimages China’s foot-binding legacy through multisensory art and Deaf-led performance, connecting historical beauty ideals to today’s exacting body standards.”
Says the artist about the collaboration with Alice Hu Xiaoshu in China: “This collaborative project invites audiences into a world shaped by beauty and pain, where projected film, scent, taste, and tactile soundscapes converge to unearth the hidden histories of the ‘three-inch golden lotus,’ once a symbol of femininity and social status, now a site of reflection, resistance, and cultural contemplation.”
Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede
Joe Bini
Yes, this “live cinema experience” is from THAT Joe Bini, whose career as an editor has includee collaborations with Werner Herzog, Andrea Arnold and many others. But this one is a completely different beast.
One person at a time gets to sit in a room with an iPad, a screen and loudspeakers for an 80-minute surreal experience mixing book, film and your imagination. What is it about? The abstract memoir of Bini’s life as a film editor and storyteller.
The artist statement puts it this way: “Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One – Ganymede is a story told by an author who refuses to be an author, so they try to convince you that you are the author. Which is ridiculous, since clearly you’re the reader. But then it turns into a film and suddenly you’re a viewer. Which is even more ridiculous.”
