Consensus Gentium shortlisted for the inaugural Annwn Prize for Excellence in Immersive Storytelling
I wasn’t trying to predict the future.
I was trying to help people realize it’s already here — embedded in our choices, interfaces, and blind spots.
Immersive futures aren’t entertainment — they’re warnings in the form of experience.
I am honoured that Consensus Gentium – my interactive AI film exploring digital ID, surveillance and emotional autonomy – has been shortlisted for the Annwn Prize, a new global award recognising visionary immersive storytelling that puts people, not platforms, at the centre.
Presented by Wales Millennium Centre and Crossover Labs, this prize lands at a very specific moment in history. The systems Consensus Gentium was warning about when I first created it are no longer speculative. They are quietly becoming our day to day reality.
Consensus Gentium began as an act of speculative resistance. You step into a near future where your gaze, micro-expressions and emotional state are monitored by an AI driven Global Citizen App. You are simply trying to visit your sick Nana, but every facial twitch is read as a signal of compliance or dissent.
It was satire.
It was a glitch.
It was a mirror.
Now it is no longer a future.
We are living in the timeline the piece was trying to warn about.
That is why this recognition from Annwn matters so much to me. Not just as an accolade, although I am grateful for it, but as confirmation that the work still meets this moment with the urgency, sensitivity and uncomfortable honesty it was built for.
To receive this alongside previous honours – the SXSW XR Jury Award, the Digital Dozen Breakthrough Award, Ars Electronica’s Honorary Mention and a Special Mention from Cao Xing XR – is humbling. It tells me that this story keeps echoing. That the global hum is real. That the work has a pulse.
But for me, this is also about responsibility.
Years ago, at a cold conference in Moscow, an LA professor said something that stayed with me: art does not change the world on its own, it becomes the catalyst for the conversations that do. That sentence has shaped how I work.
I do not create immersive pieces so people can escape reality. I create living systems that pull reality into the room, so we can finally talk about it.
That is why, in the spirit of my live performance at the Roundhouse, I am developing a special live iteration of Consensus Gentium for this next chapter. The world of the app will spill out into the physical space, as if you are standing on the film set of the immersive experience itself. The aim is simple and serious: to move Consensus Gentium from something you watch, into something you stand inside, think inside and argue inside.
As Storyteller from the Future, I carry that role with care. I do not just build immersive art. I build environments that help people recognise their own agency, even when the world insists they do not have any.
At a time when digital systems are tightening their grip, when emotional data is the new currency and when urgency is often buried under spectacle, I choose to create experiences that cut through the noise, bring people back to their bodies and remind them that they are not just data points in someone else’s model.
To have Consensus Gentium recognised by Wales Millennium Centre, a space with deep cultural memory and mythic resonance, is not a small thing. Because what I am building is not just commentary. It is ritual. It is a place to confront what is happening and decide who we want to be inside it.
This shortlisting is a moment of reflection. A signal that this work is doing what it was always meant to do:
not just to be seen,
but to be felt,
to be debated,
and to be lived.
It is not just a film.
It is a future you can experience
before it writes itself into your code.