Creative Smart City Symposium 2026

Speakers and Sessions

Barnaby Steel, Marshmallow Laser Feast

Barnaby Steel is an artist and creative director of London-based experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast. Barnaby’s art practice centres on the senses; enticing audiences into states of expanded perception, a space where the boundaries between bodies blur. His work is deeply rooted in scientific observation as a window that allows us to look through and beyond our own experience, to understand the complexities of things hidden from the naked eye. His work steps outside the human-centred worldview, exploring the threads that weave us into relationship with the more than human world.

Session Description

Barnaby’s session will cover Marshmallow Laser Feast, creative practice and immersive worlds.constructed and how stories can be distilled through sensory systems.

Patrick Moran, Barbican Immersive

Patrick leads organisations that create and scale ambitious creative ventures at the intersection of culture, technology, and place. Developing internationally recognised experiences, new business models, and strategic partnerships including collaborations with Epic Games, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the BFI. He specialises in building routes to commercial sustainability and international growth for innovative cultural projects worldwide.

Sonia Joao, Oxy Insight

Sonia has 30 years experience bringing rich insight from across sectors: from Arts & Culture (Barbican, V&A), Entertainment (Paramount, Disney, Turner), Toys (Mattel, Hasbro) to Food and Drink. Her work unearths insights that connect creative vision, strategic goals and audience drivers to fuel production and comms, programme or brand development, audience strategy and experience. Her focus is research that respects the artistic vision, works within budgets and delivers real impact and inspiration.

Session Description

Patrick and Sonia will share findings from UK-wide immersive audience research, highlighting how audiences are evolving and the trends shaping emerging demand. The presentation will also explore how venues and producers across the sector are responding by investing in and developing new programming to meet this demand.

Harriet Lumby, Director and Lead Artist; This Is Loop

This is Loop is the collaborative artistic partnership of artists Harriet Lumby and Alan Hayes. Based in Somerset, England, This is Loop have built an international reputation for delivering ambitious, large-scale experiential installations that merge art, technology, and architecture.

Session Description
Harriet will talk about the studio’s background, current and future public artworks. She will explore themes around the intersection of art, tech and science, touring large scale work and her experience of temporary art initiatives in cities worldwide from the perspective of the artist.

Brian Fox, Media Pollution

Brian Fox is a Chicago born, LA based DIY jack of all things electronic and mechanical. A self-taught technician and one of the founders of Homeboy Electronics Recycling. He’s spent most of the past 25 years focused on discovering and creating value in people as well as electronics. These days he spends his time leading the Media Pollution team into an immersive electronic battle, constructing artwork and experience from electronics and misc materials.

Session Description

A brief history and status quo of electronics recycling/reuse and the inspirational opportunity for art inside of it all. We’ll explore the pros and pitfalls of electronics reuse/recycling, the works of folks using overlooked materials to make arts installations that inspire intergenerational wonder, and touching on how you can get into sustainable video art and design and inspire others to do the same.

Kelman Greig-Kicks, Neon8

Kelman is the founder and Creative Director of Neon8, a Scottish-based immersive media production company specialising in VR180 filmmaking and spatial video. With over 25 years’ experience spanning publishing, music production and multimedia technology (MSc, Edinburgh Napier University), Kelman’s practice is rooted in the idea that it’s passive film which creates the most compelling empathic presence in VR.

Hana Omori, Keiken (経験)

Keiken meaning experience in Japanese, is an artist collective led by Hana Omori, pioneering a collaborative approach to creating immersive worlds through embodied storytelling, empathetic technologies, and deep world-building. Their work moves fluidly between games, films, installations, and performance, crafting experiences that prototype speculative futures. Keiken create deeply interconnected experiences that invite audiences to feel, connect, and transform.

Session Description

Keiken’s research explores how perception creates reality across different species, bodies and sensory systems. We look at human sensory difference, including research and collaboration with DeafBlind people, alongside animal perception, alien intelligence and other possible forms of consciousness. Through games, world-building and embodied technologies, we ask how radically different beings might construct different realities – and how communication and connection might become possible between them, including beyond verbal language.

Morphogenic Angels is the evolving game-world where this research becomes experiential: players encounter beings with radically different bodies and ways of sensing, and have to learn how to perceive and communicate across those differences.

Attendees will be invited to explore different perceptions of worldbuilding; how these worlds are constructed and how stories can be distilled through sensory systems.