Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has doubled down on a gambit that was bold even before a pandemic hit: that artists, not algorithms, should determine what constitutes innovative ways to make live performance together in 2021 and beyond. Its Collider Fellowship is back with a second class of six multidisciplinary creators who are investigating how tools like AI, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), and spatial audio can enlarge the stage, deepen storytelling, and grow audiences.
The program comes as arts organizations grapple with swiftly changing audience behaviors and a rapidly changing technology stack. It matters nationally at scale where and how creative work is created and experienced. Arts and culture contribute more than $1 trillion to U.S. GDP, per the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and National Endowment for the Arts. Collider puts the practitioners right inside of those conversations, with enough resources and leeway to experiment, learn and iterate.
Inside the Collider Fellowship’s structure and support
Chosen through a nomination-driven process, the new Fellows receive nine months of support: dedicated studio time divided between Lincoln Center and Onassis ONX Studio, as well as a stipend and direct access to technical and producing resources. Most importantly, there is no need to deliver an end performance or commission. The design is deliberately non-transactional, so that artists can create prototypes, run audience labs or just go very deep on research without having a premiere date in the mix.
That flexibility proved successful among the first cohort, with some Fellows cycling through numerous proofs-of-concept, while others used the runway to map out new dramaturgies for immersive media. Leaders at Lincoln Center frame this as infrastructure for creative R&D — similar to a residency in a science lab — one that can seed projects for the institution’s stages, or for partners outside.
Tools on the table: AI, VR and spatial audio
The six-artist group covers categories like AI-assisted composition and choreography to worldbuilding in VR and the 4DSound System, an innovative spatial audio environment that allows creators to sculpt moving, volumetric sound as a narrative component. Instead of a quest for novelty, the Fellows are exploring use case applications that augment liveness: adaptive scores based on performers’ biometrics, audience-dependent points-of-view in mixed reality and scenography reacting to movement data in real time.
It’s an approach exemplified by Lincoln Center’s recent commission for Dream Machine, the project that Nona Hendryx is to perform. Mixing AI, VR and AR in an Afrofuturist framework, the installation encouraged viewers (especially Black and Brown spectators often left out of tech publicly) to envision themselves reflected in speculative futures. The takeaway for Collider: Tech can be used to increase your options and identity, not just make shit flashy.
Similar experiments have been spreading throughout the industry. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream, a new play developed with partners in gaming and immersive arts using real-time motion capture technology to translate live performance into game engine scenes and back again, demonstrated how game engines can underpin live dramaturgy. In Europe and North America, orchestras have tested spatial audio to experiment with new seating arrangements and change the way listeners interact in a concert space. Collider bundles these lessons into its model of organized, artist-led framework.
Access, equity, and new audiences in immersive arts
Tech alone doesn’t guarantee reach. Data from WolfBrown’s Audience Outlook Monitor, combined with research funded by the Knight Foundation, show that younger consumers value interactivity, choice and the ability to connect socially — all of which are aspects a well-designed immersive production can amplify. The Fellows are investigating models that combine locally based work with light-touch digital extensions (like browser-native AR or streamed behind-the-scenes labs) in ways to find audiences without watering down the live core.
There’s a strong equity lens, too. By including creators who themselves center historically marginalized communities, the fellowship treats representation as integral to its technical brief. That can involve training AI on artist-owned datasets to minimize bias, creating installations with sensory-friendly modes or organizing projects around consent-forward data practices — realms in which arts organizations can lead in ethics as well as aesthetics.
From prototypes to practice across stages and labs
Anticipate a variety of outputs from the current group: playable demos, open-source tools, repeatable audience-testing protocols and, once or twice, show-ready pieces. A composer could put out a spatial audio template for 4DSound that small venues modify; a choreographer might publish a methodology to train movement models on her own repertoire, and generate variations she can tweak in rehearsal.
Officials at Lincoln Center have shown an appetite for location-based experiences, but they are keeping the door open to widespread distribution off their campus. Hybrid reach is more than a marketing tactic. The pandemic hastened digital fluency among arts audiences, and while in-person attendance has rebounded unevenly by genre, many institutions are seeing persistent demand for post-show talks, experiments and process shares that come to homes via a stream.
Why this matters now for artists and audiences alike
At a time when automation is such an existential question, Collider is refreshingly pragmatic: AI and immersive tech are tools, just like that lighting console or paintbrush — the value of those tools depends on the questions artists ask.
By resourcing creators to ask those questions — and by providing time, space and technical partners to chase answers — Lincoln Center is constructing a pipeline from speculative ideas to stage-ready practice.
Since arts and culture represent a sizable portion of the economy and civic life, investment in artist-led R&D is not some kind of side project. It’s a model for relevance, inclusion and sustainability — one prototype, one audience lab, and one boundary-pushing rehearsal at a time.