Qualia Forge

An immersive experience design and production studio. We compose live and installed productions for cultural producers, brands, and artists whose ambitions will not fit inside a screen.

Who We Are

The world arrives at the senses as electrical impulse, and the brain assembles from that impulse the experience we call life. Each piece of that experience is called a qualia.

We design from the inside out. Most experience makers begin with the spectacle: bigger sound, brighter light, more pixels. We begin with the experience the mind will build, then engineer the world outward to produce it.

"We do not decorate reality. We forge it."

What We Do

Seven kinds of work. Each is explained, with real projects, on the What we do page.

• Immersive touring productions. Stage design and image systems for touring musical acts.
• Permanent experiential installations. Site-specific works for nations, institutions, and patrons.
• Concert and festival scenography. Stage and site design for large outdoor audiences.
• Brand experience architecture. Launches, flagships, and activations you can walk through.
• Site-specific sensory environments. Bars, spas, gardens, and private spaces with authored atmosphere.
• Shared reality environments. Domes and chambers a group walks into together, with no headsets.
• Holographic performance and digital doubles. Performers returned to the stage as presences made of light.

Selected Projects

• The Netherlands Pavilion: Low Land, High Energy. A national pavilion at a World Expo, honored at the International Design Awards.

How We Are Organized

Qualia Forge is bigger than its own walls: artists, studios, architecture firms, technologists, fabricators, composers and technology providers across the globe, assembled per commission under one banner. We call it the Forge.

Four Ideas Behind Every Decision

• Perception first. Before we ask what a project looks like, we ask what it feels like to be inside it.
• Craft as reverence. Fine detail is respect: for the audience, the medium, and our collaborators.
• Technology as instrument. We use the most advanced tools available, and we hide them.
• Restraint. We let silence, darkness, and empty space do as much work as any effect.

The Technology We Build

We build the tools our productions demand. The first to be specified on its own is Projection Surfaces: an advanced black projection surface that returns the image and absorbs the room. It holds deep black and true color in spaces that cannot be darkened, and on camera.

Start a Conversation

We take on work at every scale, from a single surface to a full production. Every inquiry is read by a principal, and answered within one calendar week.