What if your gaze could change your future? Consensus Gentium is the award-winning immersive film that watches you back. Powered by cutting-edge gaze-tracking AI, it responds in real time to your eye movement — and shifts the story accordingly. Every decision, every glance, becomes a fork in the road.
Your choices are being watched. The question is: By whom?
Set inside a near-future smart city, the film invites you to choose between compliance and agency, surveillance and sovereignty. But here’s the twist: the story doesn’t just unfold on screen — it reveals the invisible systems shaping your real life.
⸺ The Trailer
⸺ The Prototype
Awards & Recognition
- SXSW XR Experience Jury Award – Winner
- Digital Dozen Breakthrough Award – Columbia University
- Ars Electronica – Honorary Mention
- \Kaohsiung Film Festival – Special Jury Prize
Themes
- Surveillance, predictive policing, digital colonialism
- Emotional AI and biometric feedback
- Agency vs. compliance in algorithmic systems
- Protopian resistance and radical self-awareness
The film watches you back.Consensus Gentium is a groundbreaking immersive film experience by Karen Palmer — commissioned by the BFI National Lottery and Arts Council England — that explores the future of democracy through the lens of surveillance, AI, and personal agency.
Blending facial recognition and emotion-tracking technology, the film responds in real time to each viewer’s eye movement and emotional state. As you watch, it watches you — shifting the narrative based on how you engage. You are no longer a passive observer, but an unwitting actor inside a branching story that probes the tension between personal freedom and state control.
Premiered as part of an ambitious 11-city UK tour, the project reached audiences across cinemas, museums, and creative hubs — engaging diverse communities in urgent conversations about emerging technology, systemic bias, and civil resistance. It has become a beacon for what’s possible when immersive storytelling meets ethical design.
At the intersection of film, neuroscience, and activism, Consensus Gentium doesn’t just imagine the future. It prototypes it.
⸺ The Toolkit
Lessons in radical accessibility, immersive impact, and democratising the arts through XR.
This practical toolkit captures the insights from the 2024 UK tour of Consensus Gentium — Karen Palmer’s award-winning AI-powered interactive film. Over 11 stops in shopping centres across England, the project reached over 1,400 participants — 70% aged 14–24 and 50% from groups historically excluded from the arts.
Funded by Arts Council England, the tour redefined how and where immersive work can live. By activating everyday public space, Consensus Gentium put emotionally intelligent storytelling directly in the paths of young, global majority, and working-class audiences.
This is cultural distribution reimagined — a future-facing strategy that doesn’t wait for the audience to come to us. We go to them. It’s about democratising the arts, decentralising access, and inviting new publics into the future.
The toolkit offers hands-on guidance for producers, curators, and institutions aiming to:
- Reach younger and more diverse audiences
- Exhibit XR in non-arts venues and public spaces
- Adapt immersive work for different community contexts
- Design emotionally intelligent installations on the move
Explore what worked — and what didn’t — with real-world insights on installation design, location strategy, audience engagement, and ethical storytelling at scale.
⸺ Gallery
