*Emergence* is a first-person open-world environment and crowd performance by Universal Everything, a collective of video artists, experience designers, and future thinkers. The audio-visual, 360-degree artwork expresses the primal human desire to maintain individual identity whilst being part of a crowd.

As the user navigates a crowd of thousands, shafts of light beckon them closer. As they touch the light, the environment responds in realtime. Its atmosphere, its gravity and the choreography of the crowd transform in powerful ways, continually challenging the user's perception.
Showing 5000+ intelligent human behaviours, *Emergence* offers a powerful, unique experience of a crowd that is only possible with the latest graphics technology.
Universal Everything encodes *Emergence*'s figures with a form of human intelligence, programming each crowd member with behaviours such as avoidance, following, or mimicry. In this way, it allows a collective intelligence to emerge and elaborate patterns of behaviour to be revealed on a huge scale.
The project expands Universal Everything's interest in abstracted human forms and movements. It also builds on their past experiments with software-based improvisation and custom-coded crowd simulations, such as the interactive installation *Disciples*, which humanised users' Twitter followers.
The first version of *Emergence* was an interactive audio-visual experience, in which the user controls their avatar with an X-Box controller or similar. It was released in 2018 at Universal Everything's solo exhibition *Fluid Bodies*, at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. In 2019, the project was updated as a VR experience, immersing the user amongst the crowd.

Links: https://universaleverything.com/projects/emergence

Creative director: Matt Pyke
Developer: Chris Mullany
Sound design: Simon Pyke
Senior producer: Greg Povey

The VR version is presented in collaboration with Within and premiered at Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier showcase. *Emergence* has featured in Colossal, Cool Hunting, Wallpaper Magazine, and Flaunt.

Universal Everything (UK) is a global collective of digital artists, designers, animators, musicians, and developers. UE’s work explores the future of human expression and collaboration, brought to life using emerging display technologies. The studio invents immersive multi-sensory experiences for pioneering brands, illuminates iconic architecture with video artwork, and directs new forms of moving image that are exhibited at leading cultural institutions worldwide. Past collaborators include Apple, Audi, The Barbican, Chanel, Coldplay, Deutsche Bank, Dolby, Google, Hyundai, Intel, La Gaite Lyrique Paris, Microsoft, MOMA NYC, MTV, Nike, Nokia, Radiohead, Science Museum London, Sydney Opera House, V&A Museum London, Vice Media, and Warp Records.