In May, on a beach along the Croisette, a jury gave a prize to an immersive work. Not a film, not a short. An experience.

The Immersive Competition is not new: it has had its jury, its prize list and its ceremony since 2024. What has changed is the scale, and the décor. The red carpet, the ceremony, the market-catamaran moored in dock, stars slipped into VR headsets. The immersive is now part of the Official Selection. The same status as the rest. The industry has found us: it has its word, "content", its format, the "session", its horizon, the "deal". It has turned a practice into a market. The immersive has climbed the steps.

We should rejoice. For twenty years, those of us tinkering with devices in poorly heated studios hoped to be taken seriously. Here we are. A market, we are told, growing by more than 23% a year, on its way to nearly 500 billion dollars by 2030. The figure is waved around as good news for everyone. It is trickle-down theory applied to art: let prosperity rise first to the headsets, the platforms and the showcase works, and surely it will flow back down to the artists.

Make no mistake: this is not bitterness. I have already been told that my formats were not "suited to the competition". True. And that is probably why I make them. For many of us, the immersive was never just one more spectacle. It was a way to resist spectacle: to question the authority of images, and of the machines that produce them, to slow the gaze, to make the spectator present rather than captive.

My pieces are too long, too slow, too many people on stage. Hard to calibrate, to time, to distribute. Recognition is not the enemy. But some forms are not made to climb onto a podium.

So that is where, against the current, I keep sailing. Where the industry accelerates, I hit the brakes. Where it promises to augment, I propose to alter. I do not make experiences to consume, but an art of experience: situations to move through, slowly, together. Another idea of immersion. Not the one that climbs the steps. The one that takes the time to walk back down them.