#1322 Beginning of Lance Weiler’s Grieving Journey with “Where There’s Smoke”

In 2019, Lance Weiler premiered Where There’s Smoke at Tribeca Immersive, which has since had four major iterations focusing on different innovations in immersive storytelling. It’s a very personal story where Weiler interviews his father about his life and passion of taking amateur photos of fires while his father was dying from stage four colon cancer. I had a chance to speak about his 17-year journey with this project after his world premiere in 2019, and then the next episode is an update after continually iterating on this project four and a half years later. It’s a piece that asks us to reflect upon our lives, our mortality, the most meaningful objects in our lives and how they often reflect our memories or identities in a unique way. Where There’s Smoke has had elements of a community grieving ritual that has evolved over the years, but the core seeds of that are also contained within the original installation that showed in New York City for Tribeca Immersive in 2019 where this conversation takes place. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality