Myriam Achard is the Chief of New Media Partnership as well as PR Officer at Montreal's Phi Centre. Part of Achard's job is to travel around the work searching for the best immersive storytelling, art, music at festivals and gatherings around the world. She's on the lookout for new talent to bring to the Phi Centre, but also help make connections for immersive artists who are trying to find a viable pathway from immersive festivals into the broader consumer market via location-based experiences and museum contexts like the ones that Achard has been helping to create. It's a vital bridge from the immersive festival circuit into a more bespoke phase of LBEs and museums before these pieces can be more fully optimized, ported, and marketed to a broader consumer audience in the process that Astrea's Danielle Giroux broke down to me in a previous episode.

Phi Studio was a key collaborator with Felix & Paul in bringing The Infinite location-based experience to audiences in Montreal, Houston, Tacoma/Seattle, and San Francisco as I explored in a conversation with Phi Studio executive producer Julie Tremblay. Achard was also instrumental in bringing Punchdrunk's Believe Your Eyes to an Phi Gallery exhibition in Venice during Venice VR Expanded (now Venice Immersive) in 2019. She said that the pandemic slowed down a number of other location-based experiences they were planning on launching in 2020, and so their LBE has slowed down a little bit, but they continue to travel with The Infinite and continue to travel with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's CARNE y ARENA.

Overall, Archard is one of the leading immersive storytelling curators in the world as the Phi Centre continues to bring some of the most cutting-edge and award winning immersive art to Montreal and increasingly other locations around the world. She is proving that audiences are hungry for and really resonate with these types of immersive stories, immersive art, and immersive experiences outside of the festival context, and I'm really exited to hear more about their plans to expand their physical footprint in 2026 and continue to produce experiences, cultivate emerging talent, and curate the best of from the festival circuit.

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Music: Fatality