Technical tests
The Woven is a speculative mixed reality world set in a future shaped by ecological ruin. It questions possiblities that exist when humanity no longer positions itself as an external observer of nature, but recognises itself as material within the same circulating system of energy, decay and regeneration.
The philosophical position of The Woven is developed through research into ecological theory, mortuary practice, and ritual studies. This comes to propose a darker, more honest ecocentrism that accepts death, decay and material exchange as fundamental to belonging on the earth.
The world unfolds as a communal, story-led experience. Participants enter a speculative feast taking place in a Mixed Reality world, with the chance of meditation of the story of The Woven. The act of this gathering becomes a sensory encounter with interdependence, that dissolves the illusion of separation between body and earth.
The old location of Smithfield Market becomes a temporal anchor, as a site that has historically mediated human relationships with meat, trade and appetite. In this speculative future, it transforms into a ritual ground.
The narrative voice that comes from this future reflects on what they call “The Severed Age”, a period before their own, defined by humanity’s belief that sustainability could be engineered without confronting deeper philosophical disconnection. The work critiques surface-level ecological solutions and instead asks, what must shift internally for regeneration to occur externally?
Developed in Unreal Engine for Meta Quest 2, the project combines cinematic worldbuilding with interactive prototyping. Sound designers, spatial practitioners, and researchers in psychology and archaeology contributed to shaping its narrative.
“Welcome to the feast.
I speak from a thousand years ahead of you, from a world shaped by your distance from the earth.
You stand at the edge of what we call the Severed Age — an era defined not by hunger, but by forgetting.
We learned that sustainability without intimacy is hollow. That to consume without recognising return is to drain the colour from our own skin.
So we gathered. We marked our bodies as maps of matter. We remembered that we are woven from the same fibres as soil, rain and sun.
To consume became to acknowledge circulation.
To feast became to re-enter the ecosystem.
You are not outside the earth.
You are one of its temporary forms.”
Akanksha Vasishtha - Creative Director, Set Designer, 3D Visualiser, Project Coordinator