SXSW PanelPicker Voting Is Now Open
Every year, SXSW invites its global community to share bold, creative, and forward-thinking ideas by submitting proposals for presentations, panels, workshops, book readings, and more.
These proposals span a wide range of topics, reflecting diverse interests and expertise through engaging live conversation.
Simply sign up to the Panelpicker portal, read through British Underground’s Top 20 recommended panels below and click on the panel titles to access the voting portal.
Marc Boothe speaking on the From The Ground Up: How the UK is Supporting the XR and Immersive Sector panel, SXSW 2025. Photo credit: TyneSight Images
AI and Music: Original or Pirated Material?
Originality and authenticity are highly prized in music and artists are continually at the heart of shaping new music styles and ideas. We ask how will AI impact music creation and listening? Music technology has been intrinsic as a tool for artists, but given AI and LLMs are largely trained on what already exists, and lean to giving us more of what we already know and like, what will be the impact on music creation and originality? In an age of peak nostalgia in music and media does originality and authenticity still matter to music audiences?
Beyond the Club: South Asian Stories in XR
This panel explores how mixed reality can unearth and reimagine hidden histories of resistance. Centring on the South Asian British experience in 1980s Bradford, we’ll unpack how immersive technology can deepen storytelling, create space for marginalised narratives, and rewire the politics of memory -- bridging club culture, protest, and community archives in new, embodied ways.
Cultural Technologies in Ecological Stewardship
Technology is simply the application of human knowledge to solve problems – Robin Wall Kimmerer Artists, technologists, Indigenous rights artivist and a biologist question the role of technology in upholding ecological stewardship. What happens when definitions are broadened to support evidence gathering in the face of ecological tipping points? How does technology democratise access to research and when does it marginalise and exclude? Together we will expand definitions and (mis)conceptions through long-form art art-making, deep listening and practices of care and partnership with landscape.
Culture Under Threat: Policy Pioneers in the Age of AI
As AI reshapes creativity, three of the UK’s leading cultural institutions - the BBC, BFI, and Arts Council England - face existential questions. This panel explores how these public bodies are not only adapting internally, but also leading their sectors - TV, film and the arts - with progressive AI policy, setting global benchmarks for ethics, innovation, and cultural stewardship.
Dreaming Otherwise: Queer world-building in VR
How can we design virtual experiences that encourage collective care? Dreaming Otherwise is an immersive virtual world-in-progress being built by South and South East Asian women, queer and non-binary folks. This session invites the audience into the design process. Together, we will explore how immersive spaces can create room to slow down and dream of futures–outside the binary of the patriarchy and heteronormatively. Then we’ll reflect on how we’re bringing community building practices into developing virtual worlds.
Expanding cinematic universes - literally
A decade ago, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Live Cinema UK and Little Cinema set out on the same mission: to celebrate iconic cinema with big screen events including live performers, games, dress-up, and weird venues. A decade later we have both added immersive screens and domes to our multi-sensory arsenal. For Little Cinema this includes working with COSM on The Matrix, while Live Cinema UK supports venues and artists to develop the fulldome art form. We will swap stories about our parallel journeys from small-scale analogue events to adventures in the newest and biggest screens.
Immersive Culture, Real Connection: Future Festival Design
Immersive technology alone does not create meaningful experiences. This panel explores how culturally relevant XR and music programming, intentional digital communication, environmental immersion and ancient storytelling practices are shaping the future of festivals. Featuring leaders from SXSW London, Dialled In, and Glastonbury Festival, we examine how information is reimagined through immersive design and integrated into live environments to connect people in real life. Discover bold strategies that merge technological innovation with human-centred creativity to create global impact.
Tech For All: Unlocking Creativity with Inclusive Innovation, SXSW 2024
Neuroaesthetics in the Future of Design
Neuroaesthetics is the science of how art, design, culture, and technology shape the brain and body, impacting emotion, connection, and behavior. Bringing together leaders in neuroscience, art, and technology this panel unpacks the rising field of neuroaesthetics as a new essential for the future of design. Through research, experiential and digital design work from leaders in the field, we’ll explore how this interdisciplinary field is redefining how we create, collaborate, and care, offering new tools to design for health, meaning, and human experience in an increasingly complex world.
Neurotech & AI: Digital Twins & Future Care for Human Bodies
This panel explores how creative neurotechnologies and AI are reshaping our relationship with the human body through embodied design practices. From digital twins to neurodesign, we examine how emerging AI systems can be designed with care, empathy, and human agency. Our interdisciplinary speakers—spanning neuroscience, immersive tech, and participatory art—will discuss how creative neurotech applications move beyond efficiency toward emotional resonance, exploring embodiment in virtual spaces, biometric intimacy, and AI systems that enhance rather than replace human creativity and wellbeing.
Neurotech AI Experience-Talk:Immersive Flow States & Health
Experience the future of creative health through live neurotechnology performance. Zeitgeist, NeuroCreate's AI-mediated brain-sensing system, visualizes Flow mental states in real-time. Watch as brainwaves transform into immersive visuals, then join the experience through participatory "Social Flow". This isn't just performance—it's accessible mental health tools using creativity to enhance wellbeing & health. Discover neurodesign to create digital twins for brain health, transforming neuroscience research into beautiful, therapeutic experiences that strengthen human connection and resilience.
Ritual For Transforming & togetherness: New Media Communitas
Immersive storytelling is a return to ancient rituals of meaning-making. Where community & culture can be celebrated as our most successful technologies. Artists draw on the past and create a hybrid of archaic & emerging forms that inspire ‘Communitas’: the feeling of intense social solidarity. Demonstrating explicit & subversive rituals, 4 makers share their process of convening audiences to sculpt heartbreak, ward the evil eye or drink a kiss, and ways for the audience to integrate ritual into their practice. Meaning isn’t found, it is made, it’s danced, designed, coded, cooked and shared.
Perceptual Diversity: Art & Neuroscience in Design
How can we design for a world where no two people experience reality the same way? This panel explores the science and power of perceptual diversity, how differences in how we sense, process and interpret shape identity, connection, and emotion. With expert voices from neuroscience, immersive design, and the arts and through the new lens of neuroaesthetics: we’ll explore how expanding perception can create more inclusive, empathetic, and visionary futures across art, health, and technology.
Beatie Wolfe and Ulrich Schrauth (BFI), SXSW 2024
Sensory storytelling - Using XR to Connect to the Body
Touch, breath, viscera, pulsing sound - XR can be much more than a trick of the eye. Meet 4 artists developing revolutionary work supported by the UK’s Immersive Arts scheme. Hear about: The Baby Factory is Closed, a groundbreaking multiplayer experience redefining how menopause is understood Beat Blocks, a haptic multisensory dancefloor with a foundation in inclusion & accessibility Breathscapes, an exhibition exploring breath as a symbiotic force, expanding boundaries of the real & the possible Hermaphrogenesis, a sci-fi work exploring queer, post-human ecologies & lifeforms beyond biology.
Tech Happens Here: Libraries as Innovation Partners
Libraries are books and so much more! We will spotlight how public and national libraries are launchpads for emerging tech, from AI to XR, while staying rooted in community trust and accessibility. Hear from library innovators and creative technologists co-creating inclusive spaces for play, learning, and critical tech discourse. We’ll explore libraries bridging the gap between innovation and equity, and how YOU can partner with them to build meaningful, community-driven projects. Expect a lively conversation that challenges assumptions, shares real-world collaborations, and sparks new ideas.
Technologies of Care: Ritual, Play, & the Future of Wellness
This interactive workshop explores how artist-led, science-backed immersive experiences can foster emotional expression and wellbeing. Award-winning artists behind Explore Deep and Soul Paint, Sarah Ticho (Hatsumi, XR Health Alliance) and Niki Smit (Monobanda) share tools for co-creating rituals of care through creative health design. Participants will explore emotional mapping, embodiment, and cross-sector collaboration to imagine new pathways for impact across health, art, and education.
The AI Debate Is Missing its Most Vital Voice: Children
AI will shape the lives of today’s young people more than any generation before them, yet their voices are largely absent from the conversation. This panel explores why children and young people are excluded from debates on AI’s risks, ethics, and opportunities, and asks what it would take to include them meaningfully. We’ll examine education, creativity, policy, rights, and representation, and make the case for centering youth in shaping the AI-powered world they’ll inherit.
The Lower Senses & New Media; Tools for an Empathy Crisis
Memory Bar is a pop‑up speakeasy where you drink the memories of people in your community. Working with loneliness charities, I record participants’ multi‑sensory memories and with mixologists, perfumers and XR technologists, transform them into interactive cocktails. I’d like to bring some of these sensory compounds for a guided exploration of borrowed memories. Sharing why I believe balancing XR with the “lower senses” can counter the isolating progress of immoral technology. By grounding wonder in warmth, we reclaim empathy in an age of division.
The Struggle for Independent Music Venues
The Windmill Brixton has established itself as Britain’s number one hotspot for new alternative music, launching bands including Black Midi, Fontaines DC and The Last Dinner Party. But with small venues besieged by spiralling costs, and a new block of luxury flats opening on its doorstep, the venue’s future is in jeopardy. Using this as a jumping off point, our panel will explore how, from London to Austin and across the globe, the failure to protect independent venues is ridding major cities of musical innovation, and contributing to a wider assault on their cultural diversity and heritage.
The Systems We Build: Business Models for Meaningful XR
XR is booming… Or is it? How secure are business models in the interactive/immersive sector and how well do they support creators to have social impact? And how do you thrive - not just survive - as a creator, producer, developer of this type of work, right now? Acknowledging challenges and uncertainty but also highlighting opportunities, the panel reflect on their own journeys - including successes, challenges and startings-over - to explore alternative models and offer practical advice for creators and producers to make work that matters: including protecting your IP and your wellbeing.
Visualising Emotion: Real-Time EEG Emotion Technology
What if you could see your brainwaves turned into real-time art that reveals how you feel? EVE (The EEG Visualizer of Emotions) is a live emotional visualisation tool that transforms EEG signals into dynamic, responsive visuals. Blending neurotechnology, AI and art, EVE opens new ways to explore emotional insight, user experience and live experience. It can: • Create Interactive & Personalised Sensory Designs • Drive Immersive Wellbeing Experiences • Measure Mood, Emotion & Real-Time Neural Responses • Map Emotional Learning & Deepen Meaning.
Where's the Creativity in Quantum? Panel, SXSW 2024
Future Art and Culture, our XR programme at SXSW, is produced by British Underground and Arts Council England with partnership support from the British Council.
