Stage 15 at Culver Studios has hosted some of the most iconic films ever made. Gone with the Wind was shot here. The Wizard of Oz. Last week it hosted AI on the Lot — nearly 2,500 attendees across two days, 70+ speakers, 50+ panels, workshops, and screenings. Founders, filmmakers, studio executives, technologists figuring out what film and storytelling becomes next. A conference that started three years ago as a half-day gathering of 600 people during the WGA strike. Amazon MGM as title sponsor — they built the infrastructure around the event and showed up fully.

Stage 15, Amazon MGM Studios, Culver City.built in 1940, reinvented in 2022 as LA’s largest virtual production stage, and last week the gathering place for the people reimagining what storytelling becomes next.

Mark Chavez and I were there, part of the panel, and bringing with us the work of the Media Art Nexus and the Quantum Travelers, built out of Singapore over the past decade. We come from fine art and public space – not from Hollywood production. That is a different kind of credential. Large-scale immersive media. Work shown on 170-metre LED façades in China. Collaborations with quantum physicists. Audiences measured in millions of people walking past a screen in Hangzhou, not clicking play in an app. We were welcomed into that conversation. That told us something important about where things are right now.

The Panel

Echoes, Whispers and Memories premier at the Ars Electronica Festival “Panic Yes/No” immersive Deep Space 8k, 2025, by Conradi Chavez photo by Wolfgang Simlinger

The session was called Experience is the Interface. With Gino Bautista and Alton Glass, CEO of GRX Immersive. The premise: AI is not just changing what gets made. It is changing where stories live and what audiences do inside them. Not passive consumption. Participation. The screen becomes a space. The viewer becomes part of the system. Most of the conference was asking what and how AI generates. We were asking what it makes possible that wasn’t possible before. Alton brought that question to life from a deeply human place. His work at GRX Immersive recreates historical moments as lived experience — the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, not as archive but as presence. Recognised through the Oculus Launch Pad and Unreal Engine Virtual Production Fellowship, and shown at Tribeca Film Festival, his practice is rooted in the same instinct driving ours: that the most important thing AI can do for storytelling is not speed up production, but deepen encounter.

The Room

Immersive Bosch at AI on the Lot 2026 by FLORA installation By Brandon Levy— Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights reimagined at scale. The audience inside the painting, not in front of it.

The energy at AI on the Lot was not fear or grief for what is ending. It was people who have already decided to move. Paul Schrader on stage asking what AI means for the director who still has something to say. Conversations about agentic filmmaking, real-time production, the economics of synthetic characters pulling millions of followers. Amazon MGM announcing incentives and infrastructure, not checks, infrastructure, for AI-native original IP. The biggest studios and the biggest cloud platforms were not there to observe. They were there to build. Mark and I were there representing a decade of work built out of Singapore. Work shown at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH Asia, MEET Milan, LACDA. It did not need translating. It fit.

What We Took Away

t AI on the Lot, the most interesting practitioners were not asking “which tool should I use?” They were asking “what does this make possible that wasn’t possible before?” That shift in question is everything. Our panel argued that when AI moves from screens into physical space ..floors that ripple around your feet, façades that wrap a city block, the interface becomes the human body itself. The audience is no longer outside the system. They are part of it. That is not a metaphor. It is a design decision that has to be made by a human being who understands what is at stake in that encounter. Echoes, Whispers and Memories , the work in the Hangzhou image below, is built around entropy. In physics, entropy measures disorder: the tendency of systems to move from order toward chaos. We made it the subject rather than the enemy. What struck us at AI on the Lot is that AI itself is an entropic force in the best sense, it is destabilising old certainties, dissolving fixed roles, pushing the industry from a closed ordered system toward something more open and unpredictable. The practitioners thriving in that space are not fighting that tendency. They are working with it.

Echoes, Whispers and Memories · Chavez Conradi, West Lake Canopy Hangzhou · City Digital Skin Art Festival 2024 · one million people pass this screen daily

A practitioner who types a prompt and accepts the first output isn’t creating within an AI-driven system, they are being carried by one. The practitioner who iterates, argues back, applies their own judgement at every stage, and understands the cultural implications of what they are producing, that person is directing the system. That distinction matters whether you are a filmmaker in Hollywood or an artist building work for a public screen in Hangzhou…

The shift is real.

Thank you to Todd Terrazas 🔜 APOS Live 🛥️ Cannes Lions and Mike Gioia for building something this alive — and for making space for voices that don’t come from the traditional Hollywood pipeline. And to Singapore — this is what it looks like when research-creation travels.

#AIontheLot #ImmersiveMedia #GenerativeAI #MediaArtNexus #QuantumTravelers #AIFilm #ArtScience #NTUSingapore #NTUADM #CDSA