Access Is a Creative Act: B3 at SXSW 2026
UK House XR Take Over @ Future Art and Culture Connect
Coming back to Austin to find the convention centre flattened for the new megacomplex: this is a city built on motion, always remaking itself, always reaching toward what comes next. I’ve learned to arrive with a loose hand.
SXSW rewards the unscheduled moment — the conversation in a queue, the exhibit you stumbled into, the question from a stranger that reframes something you thought you’d already settled. This was B3’s fourth year working alongside British Underground’s Future Art and Culture Connect programme at SXSW, and the first in which I came not only as a supporter of artists but as a moderator, holding the stage at British Underground’s UK House XR Takeover for a panel on Immersive XR and Access with Sally Golding (CEO, Drake Music), Liza Stevens (composer, Creative Director, BMV Records, Paraorchestra collaborator), and Rosie Chen (FAC Connect artist and creative technologist). The conversation that followed was one of the most honest I’ve heard on this subject at SXSW.
Three panellists, three distinct ways into the work.
Liza: one weekend at Real World Studios, zero to Atmos, an album recorded in 48 hours.
Sally: entirely DIY, building work outside institutional systems until given the space to experiment.
Rosie: a formal route through education and structured programmes.
The room was shared; the journeys into it were not.
When the conversation turned to whether the sector was serious about access or simply performing it, the room shifted. Something had been named. Access, the three of them made clear, is not a door you open once. It is the difference between entry and endurance. Liza spoke about how sustained time changed her practice. Sally described the difference it makes when someone gives you the resources to experiment. Rosie, attending an event like this on outside funding for the first time, said simply that she hoped the week would open connections for the next stage of her work. That sentence stayed with me. It described, without fanfare, exactly what B3 and British Underground exist to do. Liza had broken her leg and was recovering from surgery the day before the panel. She was on stage the next day. The access argument was not theoretical for her.
What I carried into the rest of the week was that sense of momentum. Seeing Karen Palmer debut Ascended Intelligence in the XR Exhibition caught me. I knew that work — where it had come from, what it had taken. Karen was part of one of B3’s earliest immersive storytelling cohorts.
From that room to Consensus Gentium to this: award-winning XR artist, immersive filmmaker, futurist. She calls herself a storyteller from the future.
Watching her here, while Esme, Rosie, and Elijah were somewhere in the same building finding their own footing for the first time, that felt exactly right. You know what that journey costs. Respect.
What struck me most that week wasn’t any single keynote or installation. It was watching Esme, Rosie, and Elijah navigate SXSW on their own terms, testing their work, building connections, finding their footing. Here, in their own words, is what SXSW 2026 gave them and what they are carrying forward.
Artists Reflections
“How does building for a specific minority benefit the majority?”
“Storytelling is now something that harnesses power in analogue and technological worlds.”
“I ended up crying inside the headset by the end.”
Three Works. Three Shifts.
Some works inform. At SXSW 2026, Esme, Rosie, and Elijah found works that transformed.
Esme was drawn into Dark Rooms (Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted-Jensen, and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup), a documentary-style VR work exploring desire, sexuality and self-acceptance. It was the honesty of each interviewee that stayed with her, and the realisation that sensory storytelling, technology and the body could work together to produce something genuinely felt. For a writer whose practice is rooted in poetry and embodied experience, it reframed the question. Not whether technology belongs in her work, but what it makes possible that the page alone cannot.
Rosie was stopped by A Long Goodbye (Kate Voet and Victor Maes), a VR piece following an elderly woman living with dementia, rendered in soft watercolour animation. Moving through her memories via her husband’s storytelling, Rosie found herself entirely inside the emotional logic of the work, moved to tears by the time the experience ended. It sharpened something she had been developing: that the most powerful immersive work doesn’t observe from a distance, it pulls you into someone else’s interiority. The emotional architecture of her own XR projects will not be the same.
Elijah was captivated by Dark Rooms too, but came to it from a different angle, reading it through the lens of album presentation and live performance. The work affirmed ideas he had been developing about new formats for music: how immersive experience design could extend into contemporary art spaces, galleries, and outdoor activations.
What he is carrying back is both a direction and a disposition. In a field that is still growing, room exists to try, to fail, and to find something new. He intends to use it.
Read The Artists’ Full Reflections:
The Real Work Starts Now!
FAC Connect is a beginning, not a destination. For artists ready to push their ideas further, B3’s Creative Catalyst Residency offers what the festival cannot: time, tools, mentorship, and a microstudio in Brixton where early-stage work can be developed into something real.
A hybrid programme spanning in-person sessions and virtual collaboration, it is where concepts become prototypes and prototypes become works.
What that looks like in practice is visible in Marcus Joseph’s trajectory. A TalentLab XR alumnus whose Creative Catalyst residency followed, Marcus took Jazz Maze VR, an autobiographical journey through jazz, spoken word and interactive storytelling, from the programme to the FAC Connect SXSW delegation in 2024. It has just been selected for an Immersive Arts EXPAND award, announced this week.
From the programme room to Austin to an international award. That is what sustained support actually looks like.
Continuing the Journey: Learn more about British Underground’s Future Art and Culture programme at www.britishunderground.net or explore B3 Media’s TalentLab XR and Creative Catalyst Residency.
Join The Next Generation! Could your artistic vision undergo a similar transformation? Our next TalentLab XR intake opens in July 2026, offering emerging diverse artists skills development, funding, mentoring, and a creative community. Visit www.b3media.net/talentlab-xr to register your interest.
