Returning for a third season, [Digital] Transmissions supports Jordanian artists to expand their practices across creative technology and virtual storytelling
Exploring Digital Transmissions: Jordan Delegation Visits UK's Vibrant Art Scene
Returning for a third season, [Digital] Transmissions supports Jordanian artists to expand their practices across creative technology and virtual storytelling
[Digital] Transmissions is an annual artistic development programme commissioned by the British Council in Jordan, hosted by Jordan Gaming Lab, and co-developed with FutureEverything, Maysalward, and the Goethe-Institut Jordan. The programme offers Jordanian artists opportunities to enhance their creative tech expertise, engage in meaningful collaborations, and connect with leading arts and tech professionals locally and in the UK.
For its third edition, [Digital] Transmissions brings together 9/12(?) media artists and creative technologists – from XR creators and game developers to scenographers, performers, and sound artists – to explore immersive digital technologies as a medium for collective worldbuilding.
From December 2025 to April 2026, participants will take part in technical masterclasses – a chance to sharpen their skills in world-building, using tools Unity and blender – alongside creative production sessions at the Jordan Gaming Lab, and mentorship sessions with a global team of experts in the field of immersive worldbuilding, from creative practitioners to exhibition curators. Working collaboratively, they will co-create virtual multi-sensory experiences that respond to this season’s themes, producing work that will blur the lines between regional heritage, ancestral rituals, and emancipatory socialism cultural and political futures.
In this edition of [Digital] Transmissions, artists are challenged to radically reimagine heritage as a living, evolving source for new cultural and artistic production, one that is simultaneously rooted in cultural identity and animated by new and emerging technologies.
Participants have an exciting opportunity to build ancestral-futurist immersive worlds that are culturally situated, technologically innovative, and shaped by their own lived experiences. In doing so, the idea is to celebrate digital art as a tool for cultural agency, storytelling, and the reinterpretation of individual and collective histories.
These new work will be presented at an event and exhibition in Jordan in Summer, 2026 and participating artists will have the opportunity to apply for funding to join a UK study visit hosted by FutureEverything later that year.
The exploration of Decolonialised Nature and Indigenous Futurisms in Isthmus Ancient River resonates strongly with prefigurative politics that the Rehearsing Emancipation theme of DT III entails. Sarah and Helen’s approach to worldbuilding embodies the ideas both conceptually, and also creatively, through how they use the immersive qualities of games engine technologies in ways that echo ancient sacred technologies, and relational place-based knowledge. There are deep connections here with the ideas and approach of FutureEverything’s creative vision building on the Synthetic Sacred and Nature Directed.
Like many of our DT III artists, who are honing or learning new technical and conceptual skills, Sarah has been on a journey expanding her painting practice by creating immersive digital worlds. And brings an acute sensibility and experience of what it is to live in and survive devastating conflict.
Khaldoun Hijazin led this conversation which was intended to give some creative sustenance and inspiration in the midst of the current conflict and cross-fire that our friends in Jordan and countries across the middle east are caught in.
Isthmus Ancient River by Sarah Al-Sarraj
[Digital] Transmissions is commissioned by the British Council in Jordan and co-developed by FutureEverything, hosted by Jordan Gaming Lab, and co-developed with Maysalward, FutureEverything, and the Goethe-Institut Jordan.
