The Great Orator — VR Trailer Reveal
No two visits to the Preserved House are the same in this ambitious Venice Immersive debut from director Daniel Ernst
Promising to never be the same experience twice, director Daniel Ernst’s The Great Orator makes its debut at Venice Immersive this week, before the immersive VR experience heads to Steam wishlists — like ours — hopefully rather soon.
The premise intrigues:
Once a famous TV Preacher, The Great Orator died at the height of her fame. Now, her consciousness lives on as an AI, allowing her influence to grow ceaselessly. Her followers can join her again, feeding her presence and creating a spiritual singularity. Always changing, shaped by the shared memories of her followers, and therefore unsure of who she truly is.
And that trailer is so very unsettling in all the right ways.
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Creator Daniel Ernst’s approach, which puts an emphasis on placemaking as part of the storytelling, really gets us going.
“I’ve been experimenting with VR since 2012, creating a series of experimental dioramas that evolved with each new headset,” writes Ernst. “The Great Orator allowed me to explore AI within a simulated storyworld, pushing my work into a space between film and games where I think of audiences not as players or viewers, but as visitors. Having this work showcased at Venice means a great deal, not only for me as an artist but also for presenting a different approach to interactive storytelling: one that embraces non-linearity and treats interaction as a choice, because sometimes simply being somewhere else is enough.”
We’d already put this one in our FOMO Guide to Venice Immersive 2025, and now that the trailer has dropped, we might just need to duct tape it onto our Most Anticipated for whatever season it makes its way to Steam.
The Great Orator debuts at Venice Immersive this week, and we hope to have more soon from the festival.
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