Projects
Carbon Women
Carbon Women
At the edge of a storm-lashed kingdom, a queen’s desperate plea draws audiences into the mythic world of Cassiopeia and her daughter Andromeda, tracing Andromeda’s journey from mortal peril to celestial transformation.
Blending lo-fi hand-crafted visuals with immersive spatial sound, Carbon Women reimagines her ascent into the stars, capturing the moment a human story becomes a constellation. This project is a short prototype immersive experience based on Áine Mallon's opera Carbon Women.
Expand
£50,000
Through the Expand fund, we will develop this into a more fully realised work, deepening the narrative, enhancing audience interaction - building a richer world with sophisticated spatial audio.
Aims of the project
Our process will focus on expanding the artistic and technical scope of the piece: refining the visual language, shaping the dramaturgy, and creating a cohesive immersive environment. We will also design and test audience interaction, ensuring the experience is intuitive, engaging, and accessible to a broad public.
The project will culminate in user testing and presentation to live audiences in a theatrical setting, allowing us to evaluate the work in real-world conditions and prepare it for future touring and distribution.
Meet the artists
Dee Harvey
Director
Dee Harvey is a storyteller interested in how big systems work, the importance of secrets, and the complexity of justice. She works with emerging media and recently possible technologies, looking to speak to audiences in ways that challenge and inspire without baffling. She is a multi-award winning director specialising in immersive media and virtual reality filmmaking. Her film Heartbeat, a verbatim VR documentary about miscarriage, won Best Narrative at Raindance Immersive and the Audience Award at Art*VR in Prague in 2025 and has been in competition at Kaohsiung Film Festival, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Bogoshorts, New Images and Pordenone Docs Fest. In November 2024 she directed Medusa’s Notebook, a dome projection experience exhibited as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. In 2023 she directed Lost in the Luminous City, an augmented reality poetry reading by Moyra Donaldson.
Dafydd Hall Williams
Producer
he/him
Dafydd has worked in producing roles at some of the largest cultural organisations in the UK, including Welsh National Opera and Northern Ireland Opera. He is currently the Artistic Director of Ulster Touring Opera and a co-founder of creative technology SME HoloEdge Digital.
Áine Mallon
Composer
Áine Mallon is an award-winning Irish composer whose work draws on both Irish folk and contemporary classical traditions, with a strong emphasis on storytelling as a central artistic impulse.
Her music has been widely commissioned and performed by ensembles and institutions across Ireland and the UK, establishing her as a sought-after composer working across genres and collaborative contexts.
Áine Gordon
Designer
Áine Gordon is a painter working from Belfast. Primarily a landscape painter, she studied Illustration with Animation in Manchester School of Art and laces this influence throughout her work. She plays with composition and light to echo details in a landscape such as moonlight bouncing off the shore in the distance or a flicker of a light on a hillside.
She enjoys exploring new places and responding with photography, studies and sketches to build up new collections.
Toby Young
Sound Designer
Toby Young is a British composer, producer, and Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama whose work explores the intersection of classical and popular music, technology, and immersive performance.
His projects span opera, theatre, and screen, including collaborations with immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and a major UKRI-funded research initiative developing new approaches to immersive opera.
