Listening to War.

A VR experience exploring the psychological and sonic trauma of war through intimate, immersive storytelling.

Listening to War places the viewer inside the fragile domestic space of a Palestinian father trapped in Gaza during the 2014 bombardment. Inspired by The Drone Eats With Me—a diary by Atef Abu Saif—the piece is built entirely around sensory perception: fractured spatial sound, subtle movement, visual abstraction, and the lingering presence of voice.

Rather than depicting spectacle or violence, the work focuses on how war reverberates through the everyday—within homes, breaths, silences, and the sound of distant drones. Using a minimalist yet emotionally charged visual language, Listening to War becomes a deeply embodied experience of fear, memory, and survival.

Premiered at Open City Documentary Festival as part of the Expanded Realities programme, the piece was curated for its powerful rethinking of nonfiction storytelling. It challenges dominant media narratives by amplifying emotional presence and political context through immersive form. The viewer is not a passive observer but a witness, surrounded by proximity, vulnerability, and sonic intensity.

Developed by Isaac Irvine, Belinda Cherrington, Shuya Wang, and Siqi Xie, this collaborative work brings together filmmaking, immersive design, and spatial audio engineering. It invites audiences to consider how war enters the body, the home, and the psyche—and how immersive media can create space for empathy, reflection, and resistance.

Listening to War is part of a wider body of work committed to using XR and spatial storytelling to connect audiences to lived experience across divides.